The Best of News Feeds #2

Do you remember where you were?

David on: Remembering 9/11

It’s been seven years since that dreadful moment that New Yorkers and Americans at large came to grips when they heard the news of planes crashing into the World Trade Center and The Pentagon. I recall trying to go to my Math class when I was at college that time and all of my classmates were glued to the live TV when all that unfolded. RIP for those who lost their lives on that tragedy…

A good tip for the the newcomer to blogging…

SiteProNews: TOP Blogging Services For The Beginner Blogger

The biggest challenge the newbie blogger faces when deciding to start a blog is which blogging service to start with. I know this for a fact when I first started out with blogging. It seemed new blogging services were popping out of everywhere leaving me very fustrated as to which one I should use. I did my research as to which ones were the most popular among the online communities on the internet and came up with this list…

Nothing lasts forever (especially it stands in the way of “progress”)…

Tavurvur: PNG’s Disappearing Forest Birds

At the beginning of this year, the journal Biological Conservation revealed troubling facts regarding the serious threat PNG’s forest birds face, particularly those located on the island of New Britain.
The revelations were a result of conservationists analysing satellite images of New Britain – the first time that the use of satellite imagery (‘remote-sensing’) has been used to determine the likely threat status of a complete set of birds present in a given region or locality.
The journal claimed that the total number of threatened or ‘near threatened’ birds on the island will almost double to 21 and that the ‘before-and-after’ high resolution images of New Britain showed that approximately 12% of forest cover was lost between 1989 and 2000, including over 20% of forest under 100 m altitude – with substantial areas cleared for commercial oil palm plantations…

Wordpress continues to improve…

Lester Chan: Confirmed WordPress 2.7 Features

Ryan Boren has posted a list of confirmed features that will appear in WordPress 2.7. Some of this features are still under development and they should be done soon.

* New admin UI based on the crazyhorse experimental UI branch with new menus and navigation
* New edit post page that allows dragging and dropping of meta boxes. Boxes can be expanded and collapsed as before and now also completely hidden.
* Ability to hide columns on the content index pages
* Inline editing of posts and pages on the content index pages
* Comments XMLRPC API (Who wants comment moderation on the iPhone? Me.)
* Reply to comments from the admin
* Keyboard hot keys for managing comments
* Threaded Comments and new wp_list_comments() API
* Sticky Posts
* Automatic plugin install and integrated plugin browser
* Automatic upgrade of WordPress
* HTTPOnly auth cookies
* New HTTP request API
* A new SSH2 filesystem abstraction for updates and installs over sftp

Theme update, install, and browsing may also get done in time for 2.7.

And even the dutch know what’s going on here…

Sjoerd: Problems in PNG

Papua New Guinea always had a lot of people coming over trying to exploit its natural riches. You name it and PNG’s got it. Unfortunately like history has seen so often people just take what they want and don’t mind the locals. In fact they are seen as nuisances. This article is from a Dutch newspaper.
The article does not mention that papua-new-guinean politicians made this happen by inviting them in. A certain amount of money and privileges in the right pockets even exclude these foreign companies from paying taxes. Guess which country benefits from the profits? Guess where the money goes these chinese workmen earn? Guess how much pollution is exuded from a nickel mine? Etc, etc, etc…

Want to do business in PNG then read on…

Tavurvur on: An Analysis on Doing Business in Papua New Guinea

Examples of how hard it is to do business in PNG include:

* 56 days for an entrepreneur to go through eight long procedures before he can start operating
* 217 days for a business to go through 24 procedures to obtain a construction permit, 155 days more than it takes in the Solomon Islands
* 72 days to register a property, compared to four days in military ruled Fiji
* Over 194 days for businesses to make 33 taxation payments compared to 88 days in Solomon Islands
* A tax rate of 41.7 per cent on profit compared to just over 8 per cent for Vanuatu and 18 per cent for Samoa
* 26 days to process an export licence – applicants have to fill seven documents
* 29 days for anyone to wait before they can import anything

Is this necessarily a positive thing?

Malum Nalu: New TV Station for Papua New Guinea

Papua New Guineans will receive a special gift when the country celebrates its independence anniversary on September 16.
They will be able to switch on to a new free to air television service with more local content and programmes—thanks to government.
NTS (National Television Service) will telecast live giving a choice to Papua New Guineans to watch a new TV service, hence provide competition to PNG’s only commercial TV station, EMTV.

Onya Papua New Guinea…

Tavurvur: Papua New Guinea Wins First Paralympic Medal!

Today Francis Kompaon created history for the Independent State of Papua New Guinea.
He won our first ever Paralympic medal in the history of our nation when he finished second behind Australia’s Heath Francis in the 100m final – and on the eve of our 33′rd Independence celebrations too!

There’s also a Linux version available…

Techblissonline: Google Desktop 5.8 for windows – faster, secure and personalized

Google desktop 5.8 for windows is now a lighter and faster desktop search utility, that provides full text search over all your files including music, photos, chats, Gmail, web pages that you’ve viewed, and a lot more.Google Desktop is no more a mere desktop search utility as it also lets you personalize and keep up-to-date information of everything that interests you via gadgets neatly organized in your sidebar.