Connex really can’t take a trick.

Massive temperatures in Melbourne have caused warping of train lines, train cancellations and now their website’s gone down.

What to do? What to do?

This is great!

He braketh ye olde mandolin. Comedy gold.

In my little post about cloud computing, I talked about the ability to set up a remote server using Amazons’s Elastic Compute Cloud or EC2 for short.

You just pay a small fee per hour. You could link that to their S3 cloud storage. This would give you a remote computer running your software and with a feasibly unlimited storage space. All for, let me find my calculator, um, not much by way of dollars.

Now some bright spark has thought to use this power for evil instead of good. I originally read about this idea on Hackzine and subsequently at the original authors site.

He uses some server side, php based, bittorrent software called TorrentFlux. This allows the server to act as your torrent downloading machine, freeing up your own bandwidth so you don’t get stung by your ISP’s excess usage charges and also prevents your torrent habit ruining your web browsing/VOIP/gaming experience by hogging all the bandwidth. Clever.

For the average user this may take some learnin’ but it could really open up the possibilities of left of centre cloud computer usage. I just can’t think of any at this point in time. Give me a bit and I’ll get back to you.

Cheers.

A friend came around the other day. Not that one, the “other one”. He brought 2 new “toys”.

The first was his brand new baby boy. Not so much a toy as a baby, but I digress. The second one is the one we’re all hanging out to play with. Although the new addition to their family is adorable.

This second “toy” is in fact a super-gadget. An iPhone to be exact. Apart from wanting one immediately I was intrigued by what this little wonder of technology was capable of. It turns out it can weave magic.

With the click of a couple of virtual touch screen buttons this iPhone was transformed into a white noise generator that can simulate the sounds of the rain, fireplaces, the beach and the Amazon, plus others. I didn’t hear the last one but it may be a little scary for the uninitiated if it has monkey screams and snake hisses!

Now to the magic part. Take one restless baby. Place in cot. Turn on sounds of white noise magic. Voila! Sleeping baby.

Just hope the phone doesn’t ring.

Trading in shares has always been a bit of a mystery to me. It’s really hard to spot the difference between putting a bet on a horse versus the buying of shares. It’s all a gamble.

For most of us this stock trading is pie-in-the-sky. For the high rollers. Those with a little cash to splash. I certainly don’t have the cashola to be throwing it at CBA or WBC or WTF! At least without a guaranteed return. That’s just not going to happen.

Enter Stockwatch.

What sounds like a site for keeping an eye on stock prices is actually a stock trading game based around the Australian Securities Exchange.

Starting with AU$50,000, you buy and sell shares. Learning about the stock exchange as you go. You earn points as you trade based upon how diversified your portfolio is, how actively you trade, how much cash you hang on to, how the market indexes are travelling versus you, and how successful you are at the end of the day. Once you have all of these factors under control you’ll not only head up the leaderboard but also learn a lot about the intricacies of share trading success. Just try and beat the un-trained monkey! Yes, you have to beat a monkey, Mr Samuel Monk.

Speaking of success. The game offers a reward to those that are successful. After a certain period of trading the game ends and cash prizes are given. 1st place scores themselves $1000 with another 5 cash prizes of $100. Not to be sneezed at considering you can join up for nothing.

Overall the game has a few kinks to iron out but is becoming more feature rich. Share history is courtesy of Google finance and you can trade in any of the top 500 Australian companies on the ASX.

The only catch is that for each trade you’ll be paying a brokerage fee. Who cares, it’s not even your money. Good luck.