Same-sex Marriage

Yesterday I talked about boat people.  Today, I feel compelled to write a short note about another issue that is being hotly debated in Australia.

Boat People

Every year, some thousand people are desperate enough to attempt the dangerous crossing from Indonesia to Australia on rickety boats.  They pay thousands of dollars to the unscrupulous operators who own the boats, in the hope that they will be allowed to remain in Australia as refugees.

The CalcuDoku application for the iPad is ready

I have just uploaded the CalcuDoku application for the iPad to Apple’s application store.  They could still find something I didn’t do right and reject it, but I think (and hope) that everything will go smoothly.  I don’t know how long it will take before it will appear in the AppStore, though...

Unfortunately, I am also not sure that it will be available in the Australian Apple store.  The problem is that I am not registered for GST (for the non-Australians: GST stands for Goods and Services Tax and is Australia’s 10% value-added tax).  It is only compulsory to register for GST if your Australian business revenue exceeds 75 kAUD, and it is such a bureaucracy that you don’t really want to get into it unless you do have such an income and/or incur significant GST-deductible expenses.

It is not clear to me whether Apple will simply not pay me when they sell my application in Australia or (more likely) the Australian residents will be unable to buy the application locally.  In any case, they should still be able to buy it from the US store for USD 0.99 instead AUD 0.99 (actually a cent or two cheaper).  We shall see.

Now that this application is done, I will go back writing fiction.  I confess I am a bit fed up with programming.  As I said in a previous article, Apple’s development environment is great, but not bug-free.  In a couple of occasions, I had to find some workarounds to get done what I needed.

Why a bladder?

I have always had some of my most interesting ideas during the periods of drowsiness that precede and follow sleep.

The CalcuDoku application for the iPad is almost done!

Hopefully, in the next week or two, you will see the application in the Apple Store.  There will be a version with ten puzzles for free and a version with one hundred puzzles for a few dollars.  This is obviously to allow people to try out the game for free, and then, if they like what they see, buy the version with many puzzles to play.

Since the last article on this blog, I added a tool bar and a menu to select the puzzles, as shown in the following snapshot.