This is a great day for Australian Internet users. As previously reported on this site, eBay has been trying to force Australian users to use PayPal or Cash on Delevery (CoD) for all transactions completed on eBay. The ACCC has released a Draft Notice regarding eBays application for exemption of the Trade Practices Act.

In a nutshell, the ACCC says “No. No excemption for you!”.

In the final findings, the ACCC says:

For the reasons identified above the ACCC considers that the notified conduct has the purpose, effect or likely effect of substantially lessening competition and the benefits do not outweigh the detriments.
Accordingly, the ACCC proposes to issue a notice to revoke notification N93365 lodged by eBay International A.G. on 11 April 2008.

As this means it would be illegal to force users to use Paypal for all eBay transactions, it is safe to say that eBay will now be re-thinking it’s position on this for the rest of the world.

The following documents are available from the ACCC:

• Draft Notice
• Letter to eBay regarding decision

After doing my first trip (back seat as a passenger unfortunately) - but I made sure I grabbed my camera and took some lovely 1080p video of the flight. Sadly, I can’t put the whole 40Gb of video online (even though it looks amazing!), but here’s a greatly reduced quality version that I can share :)

Airservices have released the new set of DAPs for the current cycle. These are valid from 5-June-2008 until 27-August-2008. As always, these can be downloaded from the Xplane section of my site.

The standard required legal warning applies that these are not to be used for real world aviation as they may be incomplete or and incorrect and you should always get real world information direct from the Airservices web site.

I’ve been meaning to write a page on the configuration of a Linksys SRW2024 switch for quite some time, but just never got around to it. If you’ve read any of my other posts on this switch, you’ll find that I blast the user interface for configuring the device. The web interface only works in Internet Explorer, and the telnet/ssh/console configuration functions are completely useless.

That is however until I discovered a way to get to the REAL command line interface for the device. This CLI is pretty much a customised Cisco IOS when it comes to command set - and for those of us like me with Cisco experience, a doddle to master.

I’ve written up a complete page about it here for those who wish to unlock the awesomeness in the Linksys SRW2024.

It’s been a couple of months since I’ve posted anything on my aviation progress. I’m reaching the first milestone of my flight training. The GFPT (General Flying Progress Test) is booked in for Tuesday (27/05) and I’m already getting a tad nervous about it :)

This will mean I’ll be able to fly the aircraft solo, and also carry passengers between our home airfield and the training area. I hope all ends up well!

EDIT: As always with aviation, bad weather put a delay on my testing. I passed the verbal theory section of the test, now just to wait for the lovely Melbourne weather to clear up.