The Non Smokers' Movement of Australia  
Protecting the rights of the Non-smoking majority from tobacco smoke and from the tobacco industry's propaganda.
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About this Web Site
This web site is maintained by, and the photographs are taken by, volunteer members of the Non Smokers' Movement of Australia. No tobacco products were consumed while making this site.

HTML Editor: This web site was originally programmed mainly using notepad.exe, the world's simplest HTML editor, despite being a Micro$oft product. It is currently maintained using NotePad-Plus, a wonderful, free product which does all the things Notepad forgot.

Scanner: HP 5300 series scanner at 150 DPI from standard photographic prints until July 2008. HP C-6280 All-in-One scanner from August 2008.

Image Processing: Mainly Paint Shop Pro, Version 3, 1995. Also Paint Shop Pro, Version 7 as rquired. Also The Gimp running on Ubuntu Linix 9.04, a truly dreadful replica of Windows, which crashes even more often than Windows, if that is possible.

File Transfer: WS-FTP Lite, version 5.08 until January 2009. Thence Fire-FTP which is a fair-only and very buggy add-in for the Firefox browser.

Page and Link Testing: Nikita the Spider at www.nikitathespider.com until November 2008, also the WWW Consortium's On-Line HTML Validator at www.w3.org.

Spellchecking: Mainly Wordstar, Version 4, April 1987.

Browser: FireFox, Versions 2 and 3 in 2008. Previously Firefox 1.5 but it's full of bugs. Lucky it's free, like, would you pay for a product that crashes out to a black screen and totally locks up your PC. The epitome of the Alice in Wonderland method of software development: Release first, test afterwards. Even Firefox 2 has major printing problems and memory management problems, things they forgot to fix while trying to add more frills. At least Internet Explorer is tested before it's released. They don't make 'em like Netscape 3 any more. Firefox 2.0 is marginally better, but still full of bugs, not to mention a weird, new but un-essential emphasis on eye-candy. In this respect Firefox 3 is even worse, but at least it works properly. The latest automatic updating system means people are getting buggy software and uselless frills even if they don't really want either of these.

Links Database Custom built database of URLs, which imports a bookmarks file, then allows sorting, editing and categorising of links, and finally the database writes the pages of links ready for loading up to the NSMA web site.

Web Hosting: This web site is currently hosted in the United Kingdom. It was previously hosted in the United States on a cheap but particularly hopeless hosting company whose third-world support and pathetic technical staff were quite the opposite from the promises and testamonials appearing on their web site. This website was originally hosted in Australia on an el-cheapo hosting company that bought shame and disgrace to the Australian Hosting Industry.

Australian Web Hosting: The Aussie hosting industry is so pathetic and dismal that it is unable to meet any reasonable standards of price and performance. It should be avoided whenever feasible, especially the cut-price companies that advertise on late night television. The previous Australian host for this website lied to the media (but was caught out), had ongoing poor support, and when everything did eventually crash, showed amazing ego-driven denial and a complete unwillingness to take responsibility. RIP the Australian Web Hosting Industry. If the Call Centre has been moved to India, then surely the web site hosting should be in Texas or near the Tower of London where even murderers pay the fair price.

This Aussie web hosting debacle could have been avoided had our regulator penalised bad companies (as per his authority), or had the industry association quickly expelled the unethical rogues and non-performing no-hopers from membership. Instead shonks and rogues have triumphed. Don't believe the advertisements or the promises from Australian companies. You can't sort the sheep from the goats and neither can I.

    The Non-Smokers' Movement of Australia Inc, Box K860 Haymarket NSW 1240.  
This page was last updated on Tghuesday 15th July, 2010.
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