THE CSIRO has won another round in its lengthy battle in the US to collect millions of dollars in royalties for its 1996-patented Wireless LAN technology.

Last Friday, a US federal court granted the science agency’s application for an injunction to stop the Buffalo group of companies from infringing the CSIRO patent in the US.

The injunction prevents the sale of products using CSIRO-patented technology until a license is negotiated.

Hopefully this should see the start of the CSIRO starting to get some royalties for patents used in 802.11a/g based equipment that were researched and developed at CSIRO.

It seems Apple has been lagging behind releasing a general update for Java for OSX Tiger. Rumour has it that Leopard will include java 1.6, however some people need it now. The good news is that it can be installed on Tiger now with the following steps.

1. Go to connect.apple.com, and register/log in. You will need an account to do this.
2. Go to the downloads section and select “Java” on the right hand side menu
3. Download “Java SE 6.0 Release 1 DP6 (Disk Image)”
4. Once downlaod is complete, and launch the installer
5. Complete the steps in the installer
6. Launch Terminal, and issue these commands:

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# cd /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions
# sudo rm CurrentJDK
(enter your password)
# sudo ln -s 1.6 CurrentJDK

This will set Java 1.6 to be your default java installation.

After looking around and not finding any decent script to read the weather for Asterisk, I decided to write my own.

The code is downloadable here. Save the file to /var/lib/asterisk/agi-bin/getweather.agi.

To use this script in Asterisk, copy the following into /etc/asterisk/extensions.conf:

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exten => 997,1,Answer
exten => 997,2,agi,getweather.agi
exten => 997,3,Hangup

Update 6/6: I’ve updated this script to v1.1 now. I’ve fixed up a parsing error and also added more wind directions - the BOM add more than I thought ;)

Every once in a while, you just find something on the Internet that fills you with awe and makes you look goofy staring at the screen with a grin plastered on your face. May I present one such site. Micro Maniac. Click on the items there to watch various things put into a microwave until they either melt down, explode, or do other funky things. Great viewing :)

On the 3rd May, the ACMA launched the Australian do not call register. This register forbids telemarketing calls to registered numbers 30 days after registering them.

In the first 48 hours, the number of registrations whizzed past 250,000 numbers proving without a doubt that people just don’t want to be bothered by telemarketers! I suggest that all Australians who are sick of telemarketers register their number.