Tech Websites Not Really What They Are?

According to Geek Central, Some "Tech Websites" Are Not What You Think They Are!

An outfit from Malta, yes, Malta, is giving favourable reviews to products from a single corporation - Microsoft of course! Shame on them.
I'll just point you to the article in question. I myself won't be using any products by this Maltese company/companies, thank you very much.

The Fantastic Four in Malta!!!


I just went to watch the Fantastic Four movie in a Valletta cinema. It was a great experience.
The quality of the print was great. Not too many people watched it, so it was disturbance-free..
I liked the story which was both character-based and action-packed. I left feeling satisfied, nothing was left out which needed to be there. The movie was about persons, family (a dysfunctional one too) and friendship. There were negative reviews on the Internet, but thankfully I ignored them. For me this was a comic book movie done right (like X-Men/X-Men 2. I almost wrote Smallville but that isn't a movie).

I enjoyed seeing Stan Lee's cameo in the Baxter Building, the FF's HQ. Stan Lee if you didn't know is the genius behind the 60's Marvel Comics including the X-Men and Fantastic Four. Usually he gets nice little cameos in all the Marvel Comics movies, and this was no exception.

Victor Von Doom (Dr Doom) thought he was God like some of us do sometimes. He was wrong.
Reed Richards took too much time to make life's decisions and this cost him.. But in the end he
made the right choices. I wonder, do we make the right choices ourselves in our lives?

Government Malta Inland Revenue Website Problems


I was using the government's Inland Revenue Website. At least it doesn't use flash so that's more usable for all.
However, the webmasters don't seem to be aware of popular new browsers such as Mozilla Firefox (there's not a reference to it, there's a reference and a photo of Netscape.. oh well) - though it works ok with it.

The online income tax calculator which I had to use because the IRD forgot to send me the income tax form (then they sent it late, but they sent it without the booklet still!) and booklet, well it's got some bugs. It hasn't been tested. Or it hasn't been tested properly.

It allows you to enter ridiculous amounts, even negative figures. One would have imagined that the programmers would know how to do this if they had been at University studying some programming course...
But even though you enter whatever figures you enter, the calculator always says that you owe the department tax! As much as I tried, I could never get it to tell me that they 'owed' me (fictitious) tax ('tax' overpaid).

After the fun, I used it with proper figures and it worked well. But those checks for extreme values are missing. They could be done even by some javascript...
Also there's an online tax declaration form (not the entire one, just the one they send you a month before to declare that you haven't earned much so you won't fill in the real return form) which is a year out of date (they forgot to update it).
Can you update the site folks?

Michele Peresso's Miper

Michele Peresso Ltd has a gift scheme called Miper. It was thrown (spammed) in many households' letter boxes this week.

Funnily enough, it tells you it is copyrighted, it cannot be copied, transferred to a retreival system, or transmitted in any way.

In other words just writing about it might be 'illegal', or even throwing it away might be illegal as it would be a form of transmission to the dustbin. Giving it to someone else is definitely an offence against Michele Peresso. You'd think this would be a work of art with that clause. But it isn't. It's a badly produced small booklet, a fairly ugly model gracing the cover and pathetic artwork that nobody would save, let alone copy!

Who gave Michele Peresso the right to spam via junk mail?

I refuse to accept 'conditions' set by spammers, hence I'm writing about it.
Why does Peresso think that it is something likely to be copied? It's an advert for heaven's sake.
Wouldn't giving the booklet to somebody interested in it likely to help Peresso?
Apparently not.

I almost feel like phoning Peresso for the permission to throw it away or to draw doodles on it.
We do, in this country, get ridiculous sometimes - and this is right up that alley.

Software Patents Law Defeated in EU

This is great news.

If the law had passed, software developers would no longer own what they write and could be sued for selling or distributing their own software. This would not only endanger your job, but the entire European software sector.

Many websites protested against this law, and protests were held in Brussels and Strasburg.
Let's hope now this vote is respected... and that the issue doesn't crop up in future once more.

National Cinema Day! Hooray!

Last Saturday was national cinema day in Malta.
Fantastic! The admission price goes down to Lm 1.30 for that day only, of course.
The cinema becomes very popular on that day. Then the next day it's back to the usual high prices.
But they didn't show Fantastic Four, they kept that for full price...
Then we wonder why cinema is not that popular, I mean it could be more popular but the prices are steep and for a usual visit to the cinema for two persons you could buy the original DVD with all the extras you don't get at the cinema... When will they understand? Why not give something connected to the movie when you go to the cinema? That would attract some people perhaps..

Blogging the day before a holiday..

A very tricky thing to do. I've been busy so I didn't update..
Yet here's an update. Tomorrow is the feast of St Peter and St Paul, Il-Luminarja or the feast of light. Not just that, but it's a public holiday so everyone gets a day off!