Yes, Labor has won the Australian election. I’ve been told that opinion polls had Howard set to regain control, until around 9am this morning. At that time, people started to read my last article on Curmi the Blog, and the swing started. The rest as they say is history. :-)

In all seriousness, this is a fantastic result. Congratulations Kevin and the team. Now is the time for change. Bring on the return of social justice, and swift action on the environment and global warming.

John Howard gave a stirring farewell speech. He’s a great public speaker. The press will eat it up, and they’ve already started on the “What a great prime minister he was”. But don’t be fooled. Don’t forget the lies. Ever!

John - don’t let the door hit you on the arse on the way out!

Well, today is election day in Australia. A time to really think about the future of this country - and your fellow man. There are only two types of people voting Liberal at this election:

• The stupid
• Those who care about no one other than themselves

Let’s just hope that the Australian public have woken up to the lies and deceipt this time around. It isn’t all about what you can personally get out of the next government people!

To help you with your decision, I thought I’d quote from the genius of Arcadia’s Election Day:

Wild kind of look to the day
Opening eyes impale neon flickers
She moon, she turning away
The city’s her slave but he’s cheating his mistress

She’s moody and grey
She’s mean and she’s restless

(So restless, so restless indeed)

All over you as they say
Rumours or rivals yell at the strike force
Hi guys, by the way
Are you aware you’re being illegal?
It’s making your savior behaviour look evil

‘Scuse my timing but say
How d’you fit in with this flim, flam and judy

Maximum big suprise
Your smile is something new

I pull my shirt off and pray
We’re sacred and bound to suffer the heatwave
Pull my shirt off and pray
We’re coming up on re-election day

Thank you.

Apple has released Leopard 10.5.1 (the update is in your Software Update).

Quite a few bug fixes in the underlying system. And almost nothing fixed in the actual GUI. That means you are still stuck with almost useless Stacks with no icon representing the Stack, Stacks move on you when open if you use the Dock magnify feature, if you click on a subfolder in a Stack you don’t get another Stack view, metadata changes in folders are not reflected in Stacks unless you restart the Dock, and there are no new Stack options to try and fix any of these problems. And the menu bar is still without an option to turn off the transparency. Not to mention the problems with the new Dock have no options.

Apple don’t like to give users too many options, but when a large percentage of your users are crying out for an “option” (not even a “default”), you could occasionally come to the party.

In a previous article I talked a lot about Leopard and Stacks - in particular about how ugly Stacks look, and how confusing they are because of a lack of easy identification as to what they represent. I explained a simple way to try and bring some order to Stacks by using specially named folders to ensure they were always at the top of the Stacks, so you could tell what each Stack represented. Below is an example of using this method.

I also mentioned that, with a bit of Photoshop, some better icons could be created so that the Stacks looked like they were “inside” the folder that represented the Stack. In my article I did a quick and dirty example of this to explain what I was looking for.

Chys, a Japanese artist with a lot more skill in Photoshop than I, has taken that idea one step further, and the results look great.

Sure, this is a hack. But it is the best we can do while we wait for Apple to make Stacks a useful feature. If you are using Leopard, you might want to check them out.