We’ve just turned on a Meraki access point and we’re connected to the Free the Net Aotearoa movement.
no prescrition brand name xenical
So if you’re near in Upper Willis St, then there’s free WiFi to be had.
Big things are happening in Wellington, ubiquitous free WiFi is coming…
More info soon.
I’m giving a free seminar tomorrow (Tuesday 22nd of Jan 12pm) at Rutherford House, Wellington as part of Summer of Code on website optimisation.
I’ll be talking about:
If you’re interested RSVP on the forum.
I have been slowly catching up with my blog reading and I was quite distressed to read Zed Shaw’s ferocious ‘rant’ yesterday – Rails is a Ghetto. Zed was the creator of Mongrel and well respect programmer. Unfortunately, he felt spurned and has vented for all to see. Not only has he taken off the gloves and he’s using piledrivers and bodyslams to make a point.
Its really unfortunate, that he’s chosen this way to deal with it. The internet is forever, he’s burned napalmed a number of relationships in the process. After reading his rant, I can understand his point of view and agree with some of his observations . Unfortunately, the general tone of article is of hate and anger, which negates all the good points he had to say.
This also reminds me that we live in a small world, if you say or do stupid stuff, word gets around and it can come back to bite you. I’ve been on both sides of this type of gossip and its not fun and only shows how petty people can be. We’re all affected by our emotions and it takes more courage to do the right thing.
I have just finished reading Nelson Mandela’s “Long Walk to Freedom”. All this seems pretty trivial when you compare that kid of struggle. But it has some parallels, it highlights how important communication is when trying to get anything major done. As with life you’ve got to be able to make compromises to ensure you can meet the ultimate goal. If you do spend your time in flame wars then no good will come of hit. Someone has to have the balls to make the first move and make things happen.
There’s been a lot of talk (posts by Mike and Bevan) about the Google Maps streetview cars wondering around the country. I was thinking about what other data could Google be collecting with their street maps cars. (Packed with GPS and cameras)
Here’s a quick list of what I can think of :
I wonder what else could they be capturing??
Amazon has expanded their webservices to include a database – SimpleDB. (I’ve been predicting it ever since ec2 arrived) From first glance it looks like a simple spreadsheet where you can lookup values. The API has CREATE, GET, PUT, DELETE, QUERY and you pay for the data being stored and bytes transferred in and out.
Data Transfer
$0.10 per GB – all data transfer in
$0.18 per GB – first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.16 per GB – next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.13 per GB – data transfer out / month over 50 TB
Data transfer “in” and “out” refers to transfer into and out of Amazon SimpleDB. Data transferred between Amazon SimpleDB and other Amazon Web Services is free of charge (i.e., $0.00 per GB).
Structured Data Storage – $1.50 per GB-month
It’s simple system, but would fulfil the needs of basic e-commerce sites. SimpleDB is limted beta, so you’d better sign up now if you want to play.
I wonder if it will it ever be extended to offer full-text search abilities or spatial querying?
Here’s some of buzz about SimpleDB.
Google have announced a new programme to encourage students to get involved in coding – Highly Open Participation contest. They’re offering cash and a trip to the Googleplex for contributions to open source projects. New Zealand’s own Silverstripe are offering projects for the competition.
Kudo’s to Google and Silverstripe more encouraging students into IT. We’re looking after the next step of providing students with substantial work experience.
More info on the Google Highly Open Participation Contest and Silverstripe’s projects – GHOP project page
Today’s Digital Future Summit 2.0 saw the launch of The National Broadband Map, built with ProjectX technology. Its purpose is to help improve access to broadband, especially in the regions, through “demand aggregation”: pooling the demand for telecommunications services in a specific geographic location.
Individual users might find it hard to convince a telco to roll out services in their area, but when those users combine, they can often reach the critical mass required to attract investment in the provision of new services. For instance, if you’re a graphic design business in a small provincial town, you might struggle to convince a provider to extend their infrastructure to reach you; but if there is also a school, medical centre and library down your street, plus several other businesses and private residents who are also interested, then the telcos might sit up and take notice.
To this end, the map shows existing state sector locations, as well as allowing businesses and private residences to enter their own locations and describe their level of demand. It also shows existing network infrastructure, and includes all the address search, autocomplete, zooming and panning functionality that is familiar to ZoomIn users.
The system was developed by ProjectX together with the State Services Commission, and involved the collation, geocoding and checking of thousands of state sector locations, and the conversion of network data from all sorts of formats and projections, as well as building on existing ZoomIn Mapping System API functionality. For instance, the ZMS has always had the ability to display vector layers (polylines and polygons) as overlays on the maps, but the size and complexity of the network infrastructures required some hard work from our developers to optimise the performance of these layers, as well as dealing with the inevitable curly cross-browser compatibility issues.
In keeping with the Web 2.0 theme, the Map is labelled “Beta”, and it will evolve over time. Partly that will be due to the growing information base, from user-added places and as we receive more state sector locations and existing network data. There will also be functionality and usability improvements over time, and we encourage user feedback so that we can make this as comprehensive and easy-to-use as possible.
Techcrunch have posted about some of the user numbers behind facebook. Paul Francis compiled a spreadsheet of the numbers.
NZ has 250,760 users – 71,600 male (28.55%) and 179,160 female (71.45%) ! Women outnumber men more than 2 to 1!
Looking at those numbers I would guess that we have a lot of ex-pats still calling NZ home. That’s a lot of people using face book! If what they say is true that more than 50% of facebookers log on once a day. That should put it squarely behind Trade me in terms of visits (althought bebo is more popular in NZ than facebook).
So if you’re looking for a captive NZ audience, then launching a facebook app to that audience is very very appealing. I’m not convinced that people pay any attention to the advertising!
We installed a forum for Summer of Code . Unfortunately, we been receiving a constant stream of fake registration advertising chinese and russian porn sites. 🙁 I would if we’re been hit by beating captcha by using porn.
We’re using phpbb and its been great, I suppose we’re suffering from its popularity. We’ve had to turn more security which mean every registration has to be manually approved. The interface in phpbb is not that to deal with bulk spam.
Is there a better way, or are we going to succumb to 3rd world spammers????
There’s an article in today’s info-tech that the current skills shortage is going to effect the economy.
Gen-i general manager Chris Quin has warned that the shortage of ICT staff in New Zealand has reached the point where it may prevent companies from taking advantage of new technologies and could dent economic growth.
“You can’t solve it just by recruiting harder. This is an industry problem, and it is not a problem that can be solved in New Zealand alone or by one player.”
….
Part of the solution may be making careers in the industry more attractive to “Generation Y” and recruiting from overseas, he says.
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Well, hello! Sorry if I seem a little cyncial to the article. We’ve had a skills shortage for the past 2-3 years. We live in a global market. If you have the right skills there are massive opportunities internationally. Kiwi’s have a fantastic reputation overseas, so its only a matter of time before more raiding occurs. As more people work overseas, they’ll draw a lot of their friends oversea. Its only going to get worse! Unfortunately one of main draw cards is the pay!
We created the Summer of Code as a way to attract the latest students into tech careers. We’re accelerating the learning of the students to help create a more experienced graduate workforce in years to come. There is plenty of amazing tech happening within NZ. Our problem is we’re not so good at letting everyone know! We’ve want to open the eyes to all of our students that there are other opportunites to working in a cubile farm or heading off overseas to find more intersting work.
Like a lot of other companies that I have heard talk about the recruitment shortages, they’re not actually doing a lot about it. Everything they do is is short term. Summer of Code is a long term commitment to accelerate talent and showcase where the real innovation and creativity of the country lies – our start-up and emerging companies. We want to showcase our heroes like Sam Morgan and Rod Drury as example of where NZ is heading.
So my big question to Gen-i is what are they doing about the skills shortage? Recruiting from Britain or investing or our future ? What are you doing for our tomorrow ?
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