Surf Life Saveing Queensland

Surf Life Saving in Australia came about through the efforts of people who defied the law! To explain, up to the start of this century, people had the idea that the human form in a bathing costume was indecent. Hence the law stipulated that bathing was prohibited during the daylight. Also, the sexes were segregated.

The origins of Surf Life Saving can be traced back to the actions of Mr William Gocher, at Manly Beach in September 1902. Similar actions by other people who defied the laws by bathing during the prohibited time (daylight hours) forced the laws to be changed – thus the now very popular recreational and sporting pastime, surfing, began to grow into what it is today – part of the Australian way of life.

As surf bathing grew rapidly in popularity, its dangers just as rapidly became apparent. Therefore small groups of experienced and regular surfers who were concerned with the rising incident of drownings in the surf, began to form themselves into lifesaving bodies to assist those who required to be rescued from an unfamiliar environment.

As these clubs grew in size and numbers, there was the need for a united front to raise funds, and to improve lifesaving techniques. This resulted in the formation of the New South Wales Surf Bathing Association in 1907. This was later changed to Surf Life Saving Australia.

Surf Life Saving in Queensland began on Coolangatta Beach on 21st February, 1909. From these very humble beginnings of a fragmented voluntary surf rescue service, Surf Life Saving Australia has now achieved world recognition for the outstanding courage and service of its members.

At present in Australia there are 305 Clubs with over 113,000 members who protect the bathing public around the beautiful Australian coastline. In Queensland, there are fifty-nine (59) clubs with in excess of 36 000 members.

Surf Life Saving is again gearing up for its largest annual fundraiser, the Channel Nine Surf Safe Appeal, which will be held in conjunction with the national Boardies Day event (Friday 27 November) and the Annual Doorknock Appeal (15 – 29 November).

The state-based television Appeal, now heading for its sixth year, seeks to highlight the invaluable services provided by Surf Life Saving Queensland and is also used as a vital tool in educating all family members on surf safety in the lead up to summer. 

The Appeal’s main focus however is to raise funds to ensure the appropriate equipment and resources are available to maintain core lifesaving services across the State. So the financial ask is a very serious one, and again Surf Life Saving will be calling on corporate Queensland and many individuals and families to “come to the rescue”.

In 2008, the Queensland community donated in the vicinity of $400,000 to the volunteer lifesavers and the corporate supporters and Queensland Government pledged over $200,000 to help keep our beaches safe last summer.  This year, with the estimated cost to run the services annually being in the vicinity of $25million, they  need public and corporate support more than ever.

To show your support and donate to this year’s appeal call 1800 642 925. 

For more information check out this website www.lifesaving.com.au

Useful sites

FACEBOOK

Users can add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. Additionally, users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region. Also, users are able to find some of their old friends from high school or anywhere that they have fallen out of contact with.

MSN

MSN Messenger is a fantastic free software utility which can be used to chat with friends or family over the internet, FOR FREE! Users can compete in online games of chess, draughts, and other games which can be acquired at further expense. Users can talk in color, make backgrounds for certain contacts, and can even have webcam video calls, providing users have webcams and microphones.

NEWS.COM

This is a very useful website. it has the latest information regarding business, sports. weather, enterteinments, finance and anything you can think off. Also, it is easy to remember rather than searching for news through websites such as channel 7,9 and 10 etc.

RSS

RSS is a format for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites, including major news sites like Wired, news-oriented community sites like Slashdot, and personal weblogs. But it’s not just for news. Pretty much anything that can be broken down into discrete items can be syndicated via RSS.

For example, our blog pages transmit any changes we make to any other users. And as we all know as soon as we post or submit our blogs all the students can view the posts of our blogs.

Google SPDY

Google has now released a new Experimental Protocol that promises to speedup the internet. Google just announced that it is a new protocol that will minimize latency and boost the user web experience by 2x times( 64% faster)  and it is not replacing HTTP, but rather mods it.

What’s new

This protocol incorporates features like multiplexed streams, request prioritization and HTTP header compression. To demonstrate the productivity, Google has already developed a prototype web server and a version of Google Chrome with built-in SPDY support.

Google reminds everyone that SPDY is not a replacement for HTTP. It uses HTTP methods and headers, but it overrides the parts of the protocol that manage connections and data transfer formats. So it sits on HTTP and mods it for good.

 According to Google, these are the basic improvement of SPDY over HTTP:

1. Multiplexed requests. There is no limit to the number of requests that can be issued concurrently over a single SPDY connection.  Because requests are interleaved on a single channel, the efficiency of TCP is much higher.
2. Prioritized requests. Clients can request certain resources to be delivered first.  This avoids the problem of congesting the network channel with non-critical resources when a high-priority request is pending.
3. Compressed headers.  Clients today send a significant amount of redundant data in the form of HTTP headers.  Because a single web page may require 50 or 100 subrequests, this data is significant. Compressing the headers saves a significant amount of latency and bandwidth compared to HTTP.

A day back it was Open Source programming language GO, and Today new Protocol, What’s next, Google?

Google Social Search

There’s a new Google product called Social Search that is launching in Google Labs.

This is a new feature that allows you to see results for queries from people in your social network. This works by using your Google Profile.

If you fill it out with the other social networks you’re a member of, such as Friend Feed, Google can scan who you are connected to and give your results from those people.

THE BIG KICK OFF

WHAT: Socer match between Bond represented by BUMSA n

Griffith represented by the Saudi Club

WHEN: Friday 20^th November 3:00pm

WHERE: Bond University Soccer grounds

This semester  MSA (Muslim student association) involved the girls, so when the forces combined they come up with the an extraordinary idea of making an event. This event would be like non other before, a soccer match between Bond and Griffith. Bond will be represented by the middle eastern team. Our current middle eastern team won the world cup two semesters in a row so they need a new worthy opponent.

So this Friday the 20^th of November, the match will take place on home grounds. Griffith uni will be represented by the Saudi Club. I did some research and found that Saudia Arabia won the international world cup twice, so the Bond Middle Eastern team finally have some tough competition.

 Good luck to both teams, may the best team win.

 

Twitter’s Revamped Retweets

For the uninitiated, a retweet is a way to rebroadcast another twitter user’s message. Originally, you had to copy the username and message into Twitter’s text entry box and type the letters RT in front of the message. If the retweet took up less than Twitter’s 140-character limit, you could also add your own comments. Now, with the new retweet feature, you can rebroadcast messages in just two clicks.

Retweeting is currently available only on Twitter.com, but third-party developers do have access to the new feature so it should be coming to your favorite Twitter client in the near future.

Like many other features on Twitter, the custom of retweeting started with Twitter’s community of users before the company formally adopted the practice.

But unlike other grassroots Twitter features such as hashtags and @replies, there are things to love about Twitter’s official retweeting function, and things to complain about.

The Good

Less Noise: Sometimes a popular link or comment can be reposted by any number of Twitter users you follow. If you’ve already seen the link, retweets like this can plug up your Twitter stream with a lot of noise and no added value. Now, the same retweet sent by multiple people you follow will only appear once in your Twitter stream. (Click for a closeup of the illustration.)

Granular Controls: You may love to see tweets from your sister, but what if she sends out way too many retweets? Twitter has got you covered by allowing you to turn off all retweets from your sister. You’ll still receive her original posts, but all those annoying RTs will be gone forever (unless she uses the old school RT method, that is).

Context and Discovery: Whenever you see a retweet, Twitter will present you with the original, unedited tweet next to the name and photograph of its author. This means you may see a lot of unfamiliar faces popping up in your Twitter stream from now on.   The advantage of seeing all those new users is that you’re immediately exposed to new users, and you may even choose to start following some of them.

Retweet Sidebar: If you’re worried about missing the latest RTs, just click on the “Retweets” filter in the right-hand sidebar on Twitter.com. This will bring up three different tabs to see recent retweets by other people, your retweets, and who is retweeting your messages.

The Bad

No Added Comments: You may be getting better context by seeing original tweets, but now you can’t add your own comments when rebroadcasting these messages to the world. No more quips like, “this is hilarious!” or “LOL” or “so true, yet heartbreaking.” But don’t worry too much, because this may only be a temporary state of affairs. Williams said editing and commenting on retweets could be integrated into Twitter at a later date.

If you feel you can’t retweet without putting your own stamp on it, you can still use the original copy-and-paste method.

What’s Missing

Follow/Unfollow Button: Now that you’re seeing all these new people in your Twitter stream, it would be nice to have the option to follow them without navigating to a different Web page. Let’s say someone you follow retweets an interesting message from PC World’s Matt Peckham. If you wanted to start following him, you’d have to navigate to Matt’s profile page and then choose to follow him from there. It would be so much easier if you could just choose to follow new users from your Twitter stream instead. Some third-party clients already do this, and it would be a great addition to Twitter.com.

Twitter’s newest feature may not be a welcome improvement for everyone, but if you value greater exposure to new voices over adding your commentary then you’re going to love the new style of retweeting

Google Docs

Google Docs is an online application that provides with you with easy access to creating spreadsheets, documents and presentations simple.  Google Docs application is accessible to anyone who has a Gmail account, however if you do not have an account one can easily be made.

 Google Docs offers many great features for users. They offers easy online document creation, you can simultaneously work on documents together with others, you can access Google Docs via mobile and Google Docs offers security so you can control who can see your page and place restrictions on document sharing.  Google Docs supports browsers such as: Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla and Netscape.

 Google Docs is a grand application however it does have a limit in file size, Documents cannot exceed over 500k, images used cannot be larger than 2MB and  spreadsheets cannot support more than 256 columns, 200 000 cells and 99 sheets.

Firefox Turns 5, Will it See 10?

Happy birthday Firefox. Its hard to believe that its been 5 years already. Just surviving 5 years in the tech industry is a fairly significant feat, but Firefox has made its mark as the big fish in the small pond. Being the leading web browser that isn’t Internet Explorer is commendable; however Google may knock Firefox off its pedestal with Chrome.

When Mozilla unleashed the first Firefox web browser, it was welcomed with open arms by a web-browsing population that was bored with the lack of innovation in Internet Explorer 6 and increasingly concerned with the massive security issues that plagued Microsoft’s web browser. With each successive security flaw discovered in Internet Explorer, more experts jumped on the “switch-to-Firefox-for-better-security” bandwagon.

Firefox has been very successful in waking the sleeping giant. With little in the way of competition, Microsoft seemed content to ride the stale Internet Explorer web browser as long as it could. The initial success of Firefox forced Microsoft to get on the ball and create a new version of Internet Explorer that was both more secure and more innovative (if by innovative we mean it borrowed all of the best features from other web browsers so it could catch up with what the competition was doing).

Ultimately, much of what Internet Explorer has become has been driven by the competition with Firefox, and for that we owe Mozilla thanks. But, at 5 years old the Firefox browser may have already seen its best days. Now the tables are turned and it is Firefox that is riddled with security holes and the innovation playing field seems to have leveled out some.

Firefox has enjoyed a dominant share of the web browser market–at least a dominant share of the browser market that isn’t occupied by Internet Explorer. It has certainly led the charge in denting IE’s armor, whittling Microsoft’s share of the web browser market down from ‘all of it’ to about 65 percent. That is impressive, but is it reasonable to think that after f years Mozilla will suddenly come up with something new that will compel the rest of the Internet Explorer faithful to make the switch?

Consider for a moment that at least part of the success of alternate browsers is not a reflection of whether or not they are superior to Internet Explorer, but is actually a commentary on the success of alternate operating systems. Internet Explorer only works in Windows.

According to Net Applications, Windows has just under 93 percent of the operating system market. That means that 7 percent of the systems in the world have no choice but to run an alternate web browser. Ironically, users of operating systems like Mac OS X and variations of Linux are the most vocal and ardent crusaders against Internet Explorer–and they can’t use Internet Explorer if they wanted to.

The new kid on the block is Google’s Chrome. Even Chrome seems to offer little to compel Internet Explorer users. At this point, it seems like the battle between alternate web browsers is relegated to a battle for second place and the browsers are much more likely to poach each other’s market share than to steal much more from Internet Explorer.

Thank you Firefox. Because of you my Internet Explorer 8 is much better than the Internet Explorer 6 you set out to dethrone. Congratulations on reaching the 5 year mark. Let’s meet again in 5 years and see how that first decade turned out

Resurce: ITNEWS

JavaScript and HTML DOM

There are a larg amount of web sites that provides tutorials and/or references for JavaScript and HTML DOM. I have being researshing to find useful web sites and i found three very helpful web sites:

1: Webucator.

In this web site you can discover useful tutorials that explain  JavaScript and

 HTML Document Object Model. Furthermore,  it helpful for beginners because

 it comes with clear instructions and examples.

 

2: JAVASCRIPTKIT.

This web site is easy to use, explain in details how to use JavaScript and  Document

Object Model. It has clear instructions and easy to understand descriptions.

Also, it provides examples to make it easy understandable.

 

3: Developer tutorials.

This web site is for advanced users of JavaScript. However. It is great for beginners

to learn and pick up a few new tricks.