Rob K

The news story aired by Channel 7 recently, showed Senator Xenophon, under parliamentary privilege, reading out unverified allegations and slandering Scientology. This hurts my family and me and degrades us in the eyes of others who know the religion I belong to.  It’s important that people be made aware that there are members of our government who believe that they can persecute Australians of a particular religion.

I’ve been a Scientologist for 20 years. My wife is a Scientologist, and we have 2 small boys who will most likely decide to be Scientologists when they are older. Since applying Scientology, my health and ability to get things done continues to improve. We resolve problems with our kids that otherwise we’d be at a loss to handle, and I’ve personally helped close to 100 people by applying Scientology data. Here are some of the things they’ve told me:

- “I am less worried now. I used to be constantly worried, . .”
- “I won’t feel confused in some values and conditions. . . Now I am really happy.”
- “So before I had fear of communication. Now I have my humour back and myself.”
- “I can now easily recall.”
- “Suddenly my communication became smooth and reaction time shorten and I can free to express my opinions in English.”

In Australia, as a group we:

- send volunteer ministers to help Australian firefighters in emergencies;
- send people to help in local regions overseas like tsunami stricken New Guinea;
- help people get off drugs;
- help kids with literacy;

We help improve conditions in communities and people’s lives, and in Australia are constantly doing this.

I’ve known 5 of the people who appeared for the Channel 7 interview quite well in the past. They haven’t been helping others improve conditions for some long time now, and have also been doing badly in their own lives. That Senator Xenophon attempts to turn Australians against us, and forwards the allegations of bitter people who choose to attack people of goodwill like my family and friends, should be brought to the attention of all people who support basic human rights.

My favourite website for the month – just completed. It’s an absolutely incredible flight simulator.  Some of the scenery shots are so beautiful & realistic, and you can load 20,000 airports to fly too all over the world !

This is the boy’s treehouse going up. The floor is done. Roof and some walls still to go.

[View with PicLens]

Now this is a cool service I’ve never checked before.  Delicious lets you keep an online account to store your bookmarks in.

The power of Delicious is the searching.  Each bookmark has a line of tags associated with it and lined up to the right.  So lets say you see a bookmark about Photoshop.  It will have a tag that says Photoshop.  Click the tag, and all your bookmarks tagged as Photoshop are pulled up.  This gives a completely new dimension to searching bookmarks.

Coupled with the ability to export your bookmarks from your browser and upload them to Delicious, and also have them all online wherever you log into the net, this makes a powerful service. Here are all my bookmarks, mostly about web development and design. I’ve spent a couple of years compiling them, so hope they’re helpful to you.

www.delicious.com/robertsavva

As usual, Apple has created an incredible product.  In it’s developer tools, the Safari Web Inspector provides similar functions to FireBug ( the FireFox browser add-on ) but in earlier versions, it still had a way to go to compete.

I’ve had the recent version of Safari for a while, but have still been using Firebug until yesterday, when I decided to have another look at Safari’s Web Inspector again.  The latest incarnation is incredible.  It takes FireBug, and enhances and adds to it, and FireBug is a great product, so it’s hard to imagine how it could be improved, until you start playing with Apple’s Web Inspector.

Same as FireBug, you can alter CSS properties and see what happens to the web page in real time, and also you can check and uncheck each one to toggle them on and off.  It has a Computed Styles box at the top, that shows the agregate result of styles in the element you’re inspecting.

You can select an element on the web-page by pointing at it to locate the associated code (again same as FireBug) and examine the metrics (called Layout in FireBug).

With Safari’s Web Inspector, it can be docked and undocked for full-page display with a single click.

The Resources panel is extremely cool, listing each requested element with download statistics -start-time, response-time, end-time, duration & latancy  - and element-type color-coding so it’s easy to differentiate between JS, HTML & images.

There’s DOM inspection and JS debugging functions and this product really needs to be checkout out to be believed.  Here’s the link to Apple’s summary: developer.apple.com