Dear Stephen,

I hope you are well and not finding the communications portfolio too much of a headache. I know you had a bit of a tough time with the Opposition in the Senate yesterday, but try not to let it get you down — they’re just jealous because they’re not in charge any more.

I had the same problem when I took over my school cricket team in year 6. There was this other guy who was the cricket captain in year 5, and he would try and spoil my fun.

I noticed you got a bit hot and bothered yesterday in parliament, but the key is to just ignore them, and they will eventually get interested in something else. Or, one thing that worked for me one day was to throw a cricket ball at the other guy’s head. You could try that too. But just don’t do it when Kevin is around, you know what he’s like.

Anyway, the real reason for my letter is that I wanted to make you aware that you have a rogue bit of JavaScript code on your website that is stopping your “tag cloud” from working properly. I’m not sure if you know about this, so I wanted to write you a letter.

Someone — probably someone in your IT department that is left over from when Helen Coonan was the minister — has put this bit of code that will remove the word “ISP filtering” from your list of most popular tags.

Whoever did it wasn’t too smart though, as the code is available for anybody to see. All you have to do is click “view source” on the page, and search for “ISP Filtering”.

I first heard about this because I hang out on Whirlpool a lot, and there was a guy called “Rupple” there that posted the code. I don’t know what “Rupple” was doing digging through the code on your site, but it looks like a pretty good site, so maybe he was trying to work out how you guys were doing things, so he could use it on his own site.

By the way, I know a lot of people say bad things about Whirlpool. I mean when the recent survey results were released, some people said that Whirlpool was mainly for geeks and didn’t represent the “general population”. But isn’t that kind of the point?

I mean if you had the “general population” hanging out on a forum, then you wouldn’t be able to discuss JavaScript and latency with people who understand these things. And besides, the server would probably get clogged if the whole “general population” tried to access Whirlpool at the same time.

Some guy on Whirlpool called “donkeykong101″ also wrote after Rupple’s post that the JavaScript code was “more open and transparent governance from Labor”. It sounds like he was trying to be sarcastic or ironical. But I don’t know what he was talking about.

I mean the code is there for anyone to see. It’s not like you guys are trying to hide it or anything, even if it was deliberately put on the site, which I don’t think it was, because I know you know that there are a lot of people interested in the ISP filtering thing.

Anyway, all you have to do to fix the problem that “Rupple” highlighted is just to delete it from one of your HTML files somewhere. I don’t know JavaScript that well, but I am pretty sure it won’t be that tough. You could do it yourself. Or maybe you could call someone from Red Hat, as it looks like that is what your site is running.

I’m glad you’re running Red Hat, it’s probably a lot safer than Windows, especially if you have those “Anonymous” guys running around. They’re also trying to spoil your fun, but I wouldn’t worry about them either.

You will definitely want to get the bit of code removed from your site, because everyone knows that there are a lot of people interested in the ISP filtering plan that you are working on. If you don’t have it in your “tag cloud” on your site then there might be people who wouldn’t be able to find information about it, and you wouldn’t want to have that.

Also, you should probably get rid of whoever put the rogue JavaScript code into your website. The best idea would be to replace them with someone friendly to Labor, so that it won’t happen again. Just like how Mike Kaiser came into the NBN Company and there was that other guy in Tasmania also. Otherwise you never know what will happen.

Anyway, thanks for reading this letter, I’ll write you another one if I see another problem that I need to make sure you know about.

Kind regards,

Renai LeMay

Image credit: Office of Stephen Conroy

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4. Full Stephen Conroy Q+A video
5. Groupon buys low-profile Melbourne site

1. CW
   Posted 28/02/2010 at 1:03 am | Permalink | Reply

   I… Liked… This… Very Funny!

   • Renai LeMay
     Posted 03/03/2010 at 12:25 am | Permalink | Reply

     I have gotten quite a lot of positive feedback about these “letters”, so I think they shall continue :)

2. Loquacity
   Posted 26/02/2010 at 11:16 am | Permalink | Reply

   Pure gold!

   L

3. Renai LeMay
   Posted 26/02/2010 at 5:35 pm | Permalink | Reply

   Hehe glad you enjoyed it — I enjoyed writing it :)

4. By Conroy’s Christmas present, Internet censorship #nocleanfeed | Leefe rates the world... on 05/03/2010 at 7:48 pm

   [...] Dear Stephen, your site is broken (Renai LeMay, Delimiter, 26 Feb 2010) [...]