commentary

Cloud Camp London:

First talk, good. Last talk, good. Stuff in between… meh.

Highlights of the evening: catching up with Ben. And, after 7 years, finally meeting Alan (the last talk!) in person…

…even if it was only for a few minutes.

Why do Apple laptop upgrades cost 200% more than Dell’s?

Erm… economies of scale might have something to do with it, perhaps?

CNet only manages to touch on that in their conclusion…

So why so pricey, Apple? Less buying power? Greed? Good business sense?

…whereas it perhaps should’ve been the focus.

A quick googleage would’ve uncovered that in the 3rd quarter of 2007, Apple sold 1.1 million Mac units in the US. Dell sold 5 million PC units in that period. I’m going on the assumption the difference is similar on the worldwide scale, but perhaps it’s not. Dell’s worldwide figures might be much larger in comparison.

In any case, if I’m buying 1 million items from you, it seems likely I’m going to get a much larger discount than someone who’s only purchasing around a fifth of that amount. Which might account for at least a percentage of the difference. It might not as well, but surely the possibility invites more than 3 words in a conclusion…?

It appears the only one who’s lost contact with reality is the NZ finance minister…

On one hand:

In particular, households are being squeezed by higher fuel prices since the budget, he said. Gasoline prices have surged 14 percent the past three months

and then on the other:

…workers needed to be aware of the outlook for the economy when they made wage claims… …Wage expectations in the public sector haven’t caught up with the changing economic environment. Some have lost a bit of contact with reality.

The word that jumps to mind starts with T and ends with WIT.

HP + EDS

Two wrongs making a right? Only time will tell.

Haven’t been posting lately because we’ve made a move back to the UK.

Again.

My carbon footprint must be of obscene proportions, given this is now the 5th time I’ve made a move from NZ to the UK.

A couple of immediate impressions after arriving back in the Mother Country:

1. I’d forgotten how dang cold this part of the northern hemisphere is. Even after leaving a rather average start of summer (well it was pretty average in Dec).

2. Getting longer-term accommodation is a nightmare — particularly the referencing process. We’re (hopefully) moving out to Rickmansworth next week (that’s Hertfordshire for the uninitiated), but it hasn’t been straightforward. Touch wood, cross fingers, etc, etc, etc.

3. Mobile phones are so much cheaper than back home. Even prepay. 15p for the first minute and 5p after. That’s about $NZ0.41c per minute followed by 0.14c per min. Plus free mobile phones with an 18 months plan, and in some cases free gifts like Sony PS3s, Nintendo Wiis, iPods, etc. Of course, those are for the crappier models.

4. Dang it’s cold here.

The definition of Instant Gratification?

In Rainbows.

Register.

Decide what I want to pay.

Pay.

Download.

Instant gratification in less than 4 mins. First track sounds good as well.

Interesting story on Close Up tonight, about the lack of interest in local body elections. “Boring” was the general consensus.

I couldn’t agree more. I have no idea about any of the candidates for the Auckland mayoralty, other than the current encumbent and the previous. Neither of whom I have any interest in voting for. Oh yeah, and the guy who started that horrible excuse for gratuitous nudity on Auckland’s Queen street. Skanks-on-bikes, or whatever it’s called.

The other half dozen or more candidates are unknowns. The paragraph on each person in the voting documents, is hardly enough to make a decision on who should be running the city for the next few years.

It seems to me, there’s an easy, web-based answer to fix a lack of interest in local-body elections. How about a simple form which asks a bunch of questions about relevant topics and, based on the answers given, presents the list of candidates who match the recipient’s answers. Questions like:

Would you increase rates to build more parks: Yes/No/Undecided
Do you believe rates are being used properly in [some area]: Yes/No
Which are do you think the council should focus on for the next term: [topic 1], [topic 2], [topic 3], [topic 4]…
Rank these issues in order of importance: [topic 1], [topic 2], [topic 3], [topic 4], [topic 5]…

etc

There could be a 2 minute form (short list of questions), 5 minute and 10 minute form (long list of questions), depending upon how much effort you wanted to put into your selection. The list of candidates at the end would be sorted by the percentage match to the recipient’s answers, and contain links to more information about their candidacy. It’s just a quick jump from there to adding online voting. Tick boxes next to the candidates in your list who you want to vote for.

Doesn’t seem like rocket science, and wouldn’t necessarily have to cost as much money as the Government throws into other projects. And at least there’d be more chance I’ll be choosing the right set of candidates, based on what I think is important. At the moment, I’ve got no idea.

Is it just me, or do ISPs in New Zealand tend to operate on the south-side of the “moral tracks”? At the moment, I’m trying to decide whether it’s worth having an argument with Orcon over the advertising for their “Zero Shock” plan (see “The Yogurt Container Broadband Plan“) — supposedly, this plan is “traffic managed” to keep email and web access fast, and the speed of P2P applications are reduced as a consequence (by accepting this, you get the piece of mind that if you go over your datacap, you won’t get charged extra… as long as you don’t keep going over every month). For me, traffic management actually meant I had the average speed of a 28K modem most evenings for any site out of the country. Of course, if you look at their Terms & Conditions, there’s just enough caveats there to make them liable for nothing. Legally they’re fine. I quibble, however, on the dubious morals that allow a company to sell a “broadband” plan that they know barely meets the definition at the best of times.

To be honest, I really have no argument with Orcon otherwise. It just seems like false advertising to call something “Zero Shock”, when I find myself damn shocked at how slow it is.

The other ISP I have experience with is IHUG, who, if they reduce their prices for some reason, will keep quiet about it… “it’s your responsibility to check our website”. I’ve experienced this and so, more recently, has my father. Seems you should focus on keeping your current customers happy, rather than just attracting new ones.

That’s two of NZ’s larger ISPs, and I know the largest (Xtra) has had problems in the past.

I wonder if the issue is industry wide?

It’s an impressive feat.

When my daughter was about 2 and a half years old, we got a long piece of string, poked it through holes in a pair of yogurt containers, pulled the string tight and used it as a telephone. It was difficult to get the concept across to a 2 year old; of talking into the container, then listening for the response. It was also difficult keep the string taut enough, so that sound waves were transmitted properly.

Somehow, Orcon have managed not only to keep a piece of string tight over thousands of kilometres, they have also managed to connect the yogurt container to the local internet loop. An extremely impressive piece of engineering. Even if it does mean my international traffic is slower than a 28K modem. Just think of the science!

So it’s now almost a month since I first noticed the problem, and over 3 weeks since I reported it — and there is still no resolution in sight. At least a couple of emails have gone unanswered in the last few weeks, although the initial response from their support department (instructions on how to provide all the data their technicians would need) was positive. Last night I finally gave up waiting and decided to sit on hold for 10 minutes or so. Their helpdesk, while nice enough (and local), were unable to shed any light and would need to pass on the details to technicians. But…

“…we have had reports from other customers of similar problems… it may have something to do with the traffic shaping…”

Yes. I’m blimmin’ well aware that it’s traffic shaping. I could’ve told you that a month ago.

“…a quick fix might be to upgrade your plan…”

Where’s the sound of screeching tyres when you want it?

Upgrade my plan?

I must remember that if I ever get a complaint about software I’ve developed…

“I’m sorry you’re having problems sir. Other people have also experienced problems with that version of our software. I invite you to upgrade to a more expensive version, in which we have fixed that issue.”

PS. Unsurprisingly, still no response from technical support.

UPDATE: it helps if you check the menu options properly…

I don’t tend to waste my time investigating all the nooks and crannies of an IDE (Integrated Development Environment, for the non-developer-types). I typically just use the basics. Some might say I’m wasting time by not using those features, but it works for me.

So when the Eclipse & IntelliJ users on the team opened a dialog box and jumped straight to a source file by typing the first few letters of the filename, I just shrugged and went back to navigating through the project tree…. that is, until someone pointed out that Netbeans had the exact same feature — “Go To File” (so obviously a little investigation of menu options wouldn’t have gone astray).

Then, lo and behold, I discovered shortly after, that Netbeans’ “Go To File” function actually did more than Eclipse (and was at least equivalent to Intelli). You could type the capital letters of the class and it would list the matching classes. For two glorious months (or so), I had a feature that was at least as good as my colleagues. The months of enduring taunts, because of my obscure choice in IDEs, faded from memory as I jumped from file to file with a flick of a few (less) fingers… at least, until the latest version of Eclipse arrived with that feature.

Now Netbeans 6 beta 1 has been released. I’ve been burnt in the past by NB early releases — but this is a brand-spanking-new beta. Spit-polished with the glean of months of development effort, since then. Gosling is talking about it. The general consensus elsewhere appears to be that it’s good.

And, after upgrading, it does look good. Not a huge amount of visible difference from NB5. A few burrs here and there have been filed off the sharp edges. There are some things I don’t find attractive, but it’s bearable. Integration with source control doesn’t seem to thrash the CPU, which is a major improvement.

But then… Alt+Shift+O…

My most-used feature.

The only thing I could (until recently) hold above the Eclipse users on the team, and say confidently (and maturely), “Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah”.

One thousand curses on the perpetrator, for violating the perfection of the Alt+Shift+O! Yes, they’ve indeed extended it to search all filenames instead of just classes, but at the same time they’ve rendered it unuseable. Not only is it slower, it is s…l……o………w……………e……………………r.

It is grindingly slow.

If the phrase that immediately pops to mind to describe the fastest thing you’ve ever seen is “blazingly fast”, then a snail would be described as “blazingly fast” by this feature. A tortoise would have the opportunity to perform a full circuit around my desk, and execute a perfect pirouette, before this abysmal piece of code decided that it should return some results.

Slowness I could’ve forgiven if they hadn’t removed the only thing that (until recently — and yes, I know I keep saying that) made me better than the Eclipsers. The feature-in-the-feature that made me as good as the Intellis. Searching, via the capital letters of a class.

MCGF would find MyCrazyGeneratorFactory.java and MyCrazyGeneratorFactoryImpl.java. WDMCHSLN would find WhyDoMyClassesHaveSuchLongNames.java. As it is, I now have to type My (then wait an inordinately long amount of time) to find all files starting with “My”. Carry on typing if I want to narrow the results. With a bit more waiting…

Netbeans 6.

The upgrade that is actually a downgrade.

Now I have to endure the snickers of both the IntelliJ AND the Eclipse users.

Sigh.

Footnote: Welcome back NB5.5.1!

So, apart from the mild amusement value of a radioactive stream of pee on our nearest neighbour, I can’t say I’m particularly amused by the 51kbps, for international traffic, which I’ve been getting for the last 3 days (possibly longer).

It’s nothing to do with my connection, as far as I can tell, since a speedtest within the country reports an acceptable (relatively speaking) 3300kbps.

Word from the responsive (<– sarcasm alert) technical support department of my ISP? Nothing, nada, zip, zilch. Official word on the system status page is “no known issues”.

So is the fact that I appear to be attached to the rest of the world via a small yogurt container and a piece of string, an “unknown issue”?

Good lord, but Cullen is an idiot. Caught a brief glimpse of him on the news tonight commenting about the suggestion to drop GST on “healthy foods” to make them cheaper, and help improve the overall health of the population. His comment? “It would be too hard to enforce” (disclaimer: as far as I recall).

Erm… sorry?

How about fresh fruit and vegetables? Anything preprocessed misses out, but I would’ve thought fresh fruit and vege was a no brainer. Doesn’t seem too hard to “enforce” to me.

Idiocy.

Never before have I felt quite so intense a need to pick holes in an article, but Computerworld’s recently published opinion piece, written by the managing director of Intergen Wellington, has provided just such an incentive.

The article has been written with just the right amount of skew to the facts, that it comes across as the worst kind of turf protectionism. And since it is somewhat broadly aimed in my direction, I feel qualified to make a few comments.

To provide a bit of background, for the click-lazy, the basic premise is that contractors are -not- the answer to an IT skills shortage. On the hypothesis, I make no immediate comment. But I disagree with the evidence Stewart uses to arrive at his conclusion:

Why can’t I employ someone for less than $X an hour? The answer to that one is that demand has created contractors and contractors have created soaring rates that then elevate hourly rates in the IT sector across the board.

Demand may have created contractors, but it’s a bit rich to blame the freelance industry for soaring rates. Particularly without a good deal of statistical evidence to back it up.

In the past, I’ve worked as a permanent employee of an IT services/development company. I now work as a contractor for an IT services/development company. My external rate as a permie was about 50% higher than my current external rate as a contractor (the former company had vastly inflated ideas about the value of its services). This is one, albeit anecdotal, example that contracting has not unnecessarily driven up rates — in fact, from the client’s perspective, my being a contractor has arguably had little impact on the overall dollar figure for the project, if you compare the cost of doing business with the other company.

When an IT worker steps out on their own and becomes a contractor, they are stepping out of the mainstream and out of the fold where, more often than not, their learning curve diminishes to a horizontal path since they are generally no longer in a realm where they experience ongoing training, mentoring and the opportunity to learn.

This is trite to the point of being insulting. The idea that the mainstream, permanently employed “fold” holds some mystical ability to aid in the career path and ongoing education of the worker is nothing short of hyperbole. My personal experience as both a permie and a contractor (in both NZ and the UK) holds that there is -no- difference between permanent employment and freelance positions offering the opportunity to learn. In fact, I think I may have learned more in contract positions than I have elsewhere.

As a contractor, you are expected to be a self-starter, able to jump straight in and be immediately productive. In-depth knowledge of every aspect of software development is impossible (I defy anyone to cover the entire Java API set, all the external/3rd party libraries and packages that are available, without burning out a good percentage of brain cells in the process) so the dilligent contractor learns what he/she needs to know on the spot, or after hours. Chances are, you’ve done something similar before, so you draw on that knowledge in a new area. Or you burn the midnight oil and figure it out at home.

This is not to mention the long-term ‘tenured’ employees, so rooted in their knowledge that they’ll spend years without learning something new, and the legacy support tasks given to junior employees, whom are left with little opportunity for personal growth.
There are plenty of other examples on both the contract and permanent sides of the fence.

It’s these very people that we have invested time and resources into in the hope that they will be around to mentor the next generation of IT workers moving through the ranks. It’s for this reason that we invest so heavily and believe so strongly in a graduate programme. But without a pool of experienced mentors to take the graduates under their wings, the value of such programmes is devalued and the quality of training is diluted.

This, of course, assumes that a contractor, jealous of his/her skills, and resentful of those in permanent employ, will thus hoard said knowledge, perform only the task at hand, and reject communication with the ‘unworthy’. Quite the opposite is true in reality. Contractors are just as suitable a mentor from a technical perspective. I can think of a number of cases in my career where mentoring has come from both permanent and contract sources. But perhaps Stewart is justifiably worried that one of the lessons the naive employee may learn from an evil contractor, is that freelancing is a good career choice.

Some vendors have endeavoured to combat the skill shortage by jumping on the contractor bandwagon themselves and employing contractors, or even outsourcing overseas. While this is a financially practical solution in the here and now, it does nothing to invest in the ICT sector in New Zealand or help pave the way for a robust and leading edge pool of IT talent in the future.

I agree that outsourcing overseas does little to invest in the ICT sector in NZ. But to use that flimsy argument to cover his contractor angst is a bit of a stretch. The assumption, once again, is that the nasty contractor clasps their hard-won knowledge to their bosom like Gollum with the One Ring, and thus contributes nothing to the overall pool of IT talent.

Finally, Stewart lists a number of pros and cons comparing vendor delivery with, I assume, a project staffed entirely by contractors (which is, in itself, contrary to every project I’ve worked on where there has been a modicum of freelance involvement). He chooses this point to descend into almost complete fantasy.

The first benefit of a vendor sourced solution over contractors, is that with one you get a team “with one unified purpose and clearly delineated roles working towards agreed objectives and timeframes“, and the other, “a collection of individuals with no common purpose“.

We’re all milling around like a headless chickens, I suppose?

I couldn’t disagree more. Commonality of purpose for a contractor team who, by his own admission, are more senior in experience (and thus, less likely to be milling around in purposeless confusion) is that of product delivery. Purpose is driven by strong leadership and stronger vision, which can be found both in permanent and freelance staff.

I also disagree that somehow a vendor “ensures you are getting the best, most suitable and up-to-date technology for your solution“. This may be true of some vendors — but not all. In the past, I’ve had the misfortune to see technology solutions promoted because of the most base financial reasons, and out of political (in the business sense) expediency. Stewart provides no evidence that there is any difference between vendors and a team of contractors, in this regard. Oh yes, we can read between the lines here, but his intent is so blatant, it seems churlish to point it out.

I also find myself disagreeing with a number of the “cons” he lists for the use of a contract team. That they somehow “strip the ICT sector of mentors for graduates and juniors” — which I’ve mentioned earlier has never been the case in my experience — and that the “hourly rate often means that there is no urgency for deadline“. As to deadlines, I personally have never felt any less pressure to meet a deadline as a contractor. Agile methodologies may have helped, but much as I’d prefer a contract to continue longer, I certainly don’t drag my feet to ensure that longevity.

His poorly thought out missive aside, I agree with the fundamental premise. Contractors are not the answer to a skills shortage. They are but one of the answers. A healthy market requires a variety of different sources: vendors, contract, internal IT departments with graduates moving through the ranks, etc.

The problem is that Stewart draws a picture villifying the freelance IT worker as both cause and effect. Some kind of vicious circle that must be broken free of for the greater good of the industry. He paints for us a stereotypical contractor that is more caricature than portait… and tars companies that use contract staff (be they IT service vendors, or otherwise) with the same brush, as he does so.

Conveniently forgetting the fact that some contractors use the freedom this career choice offers, to start their own businesses, some band together into partnerships, and many put just as much effort into a project as might the permanent employee of an IT vendor.

In many different ways, contract staff can contribute just as much to the ICT sector as a whole.

All kudos to Michael Rakuskin of Tower Books in Australia for the most exceptional response to a blackmail letter.

You should take the time to read his response to Angus & Robertson’s blatant extortion attempt. It truly is the literary equivalent of flaying them alive.

(Source: Boing Boing and Making Light’s excellent detailed breakdown)

The worst thing about Python is that when you spend a lot of time working with other languages (in my case, Java), and you come back to work on a Python app, occasionally you forget that there’s usually a better way to do something. Case in point: creating a rather simplistic framework for initialising an application (db connections, messaging, etc), only to realise a few days later that none of your dynamic loading of initialisation scripts is necessary in the slightest, when a module’s __init__ provides as much of that capability as might be needed.

Sigh.

On a completely unrelated note, a special thanks to the various people who’ve recently linked to this site (specifically to the YAK page). I was never that bothered by an abysmally low technorati ranking, but now find myself absurdly pleased when I’ve climbed up by about half-a-million.

Well… I’m still in the 500,000s anyway, it’s an improvement. A-list? Can you say Z-list?

At work we were googling for the answer to (yet) another obscure JSF/Facelets issue and came across this <sarcasm-alert>gem</sarcasm-alert>, posted in May last year (2006).

The interesting sentence from our point of view was the beginning of paragraph 5, in which I believe the writer has (quite by accident) left out a large chunk of the text…

Just to be helpful (of course), I’ve completed the missing text — the original wording is italicised, so you can see the minor additions I’ve made:

After a battle of epic proportions, the dust has finally settled. It takes a few moments for the smoke to clear, but gradually a scene of the most grotesque nature appears. The dismembered bodies of developers lie strewn across the ground, many so mutilated it is no longer possible to recognise individual body parts. A precious few still twitch and groan, in a feeble attempt to regain their feet… to fight the good fight. But those still alive recognise the futility of their efforts, and despair. Yes, the carnage is over… and the demon has triumphed — JSF has emerged the winner.

Who else wants to see a movie made about Dr Grordbort’s Infallible Aether Oscillators…?

Greg Broadmore rocks… and possibly needs to get out more.

…or at least I hope it’s a hiccup.

I downloaded the lastest daily of Netbeans 6, after a couple of exceptions in the m9 release I had been using began to get annoying. Not only is it extremely buggy compared to prior version (unusual for a Netbeans daily, in my experience), but it appears they have replaced the quite functional file dialog with an absolutely abysmal, in my honest opinion completely unuseable, dual mode dialog box.

Whatever possessed the development team to allow that abomination into the main trunk, let’s hope it is a temporary aberration and by the time NB6 goes final, saner minds have prevailed.

Just been watching Animal Crazy on Sunday (about the Animal Liberation Front, and Open Rescue in NZ).

I wonder… if we employed a chimpanzee as our agricultural minister, how much more effective than Anderton would he be…?
I wasn’t aware he’d given the poultry industry an exemption for battery farming. Ridiculous, criminal (IMHO), and yet another example of a government that has completely lost touch with reality.

I notice that Richard E Grant is here for the Auckland Writers and Readers festival (an event I had no idea was even on, until I saw it mentioned on TV two minutes ago).

He would have to be one of my favourite British (well, by way of Swaziland) actors. Started when I saw the rather abysmal Hudson Hawk (he was about the only watchable character, I recall), and continued when, a few years later, I finally saw Withnail & I. My impression was well and truly cemented when, back in the mid-to-late 90’s, I was wandering aimlessly down Charing Cross Road, and happened to wander into Borders just when he was giving a talk about a newly released book (can’t remember which one it was, but damn he was funny).

If you have the opportunity to go to “An Hour with Richard E. Grant” (I won’t unfortunately), I’m thinking it’ll be well worth the effort.

First mentioned here, my Feisty instability problems haven’t abated. The frequency has decreased to be replaced with less recoverable issues.

Today I experienced something that appeared to be suspiciously similar to this problem (missing window frames, which makes things surprisingly unuseable), but couldn’t google a solution. In the end, I removed my .kde directory (and .kderc file), restarted and things started to look a little better. The only negative was the need to reconfigure all my kde settings.

I believe “when hell freezes over” is the term for the next time I’ll bother eating at Subway.

Dumb. Excessively dumb.

Not particularly impressed with Kubuntu Feisty so far.

After one and a half days of use:

• one major - unrecoverable - crash in X (i.e. couldn’t even get to the console using CTRL+ALT+F[n])
• Playing with “Monitor & Display” setup in System Settings resulted in an un-useable X configuration — okay not actually Feisty’s fault, but I’m disappointed it still doesn’t work in this release — thank god for a backed up, working xorg.conf.
• OpenOffice, usplash, skype and a couple of other apps that temporarily escape my memory, have all crashed at one point during the day

So initial experience is indicating stability is significantly worse than Edgy. It’ll be interesting to see if it improves over the next few weeks/months…

Peter Griffin has written a blog entry asking, “What’s holding back the Wii?“.

Personally, I’m not surprised the Wii is faring badly against the PS3 and the XBox, just as I’m also not surprised it’s doing huge business elsewhere. I think he’s hit the nail on the head — the lack of marketing is enough to make it an also-ran here, when it should be the market leader.

It’s bizarre really. This is the first console I’ve owned (and I’ve owned a few) where everyone from my 4 year old daughter to my mother (in her 60’s) want to have a go. And what’s more, actually -can- have a go. Which explains the enormous success elsewhere. It’s just a shame that the rest of the country hasn’t figured that out yet, and would rather spend 3 or 4 times as much on alternatives that arguably aren’t as good value (certainly won’t get the whole family involved).

Here’s a second view of job listing numbers (continuing from my post yesterday). This time, looking at the last 30 days, both permanent and contract positions, in New Zealand:

Jobserve doesn’t support more than 7 days (probably because that would result in massively large sets of data), but I didn’t do a very good job with my searches, so here’s another attempt which looks for ads with exclusively one skillset (i.e. java and not anything else) — with one exception: .Net and C# jobs are not filtering C/C++ jobs out, since many of those positions advertise for those skillsets and it skews the figures if they’re not included. I’ve also changed the search to look for both contract and permanent positions:

Draw your own conclusions about the data, bearing in mind what I’ve heard about the recruitment agency habit of fishing (listing non-existent jobs to get CVs), the fact that many jobs are listed with multiple agencies, and so on.

There is nothing worse than egosurfing your own name, only to discover you’ve missed the top spot in Google by one… because of a spelling mistake:

I’m pretty sure that first link should be “Jon Briggs”.

Damnit.

We’re currently trapped in the nightmare of the interminable house hunt. While doing a bit of research about house auctions, and came across this quote at realestate.co.nz.

A real estate auction is a controlled and fair process which is generally a win-win proposition for everyone involved. For the buyer, the benefits include knowing that you are making a smart investment as you are sure you are purchasing the property at a fair market value.

Here’s the rub: when bids are allowed on the part of the vendor (see the Real Estate Institute of NZ “Code of Practise“, section 3.4), how can the purchase price be a “fair market value”? A fair market value is only possible when only potential purchasers are bidding.

I even came across a brilliant (sarc.) page (unfortunately can’t find the link now) saying something along the lines that “vendor bidding helps you, because it raises the price to a point where the vendor is willing to sell”. Arrant nonsense.

On the positive side, not all real estate agents allow vendor bidding. Barfoots don’t appear to allow the practice — but on the negative side, their process for pre-auction offers seems convoluted and buyer unfriendly… or at least, me-unfriendly.

Here’s another nonsensical real estate statement in relation to auctions:

Make sure all the t’s are crossed: have your solicitor examine the Contract of Sale prior to the auction to ensure everything is in order. Also have any building and/or pest inspections carried out prior to auction day.

It’s the latter part that gets me. A building inspection could run to $500 or $600, and you’ve potentially got only a small chance of winning a property at auction. Assuming you attend a number of auctions without a successful purchase, that’s thousands of dollars literally down the tubes. Perhaps some write that off as a necessary expense of house hunting. I suspect many people don’t bother. Which means one of the largest purchases you can make in a lifetime is made without much knowing whether or not you might have bought a lemon.

Cheerful thoughts, as we try to find a place ourselves.

According to this:

The great marketing coup that REST folks are trying to pull off is that WS-* is complex and REST is simple. That’s just nonsense - if you really try to build the type of systems that people build with WS-* using REST, then you’d end up just as complex.

Who’s talking nonsense? So, you take something that is inherently complex and build a system with it — then you take something that is fundamentally simple and build a similar system with that — and the final results are the same in terms of complexity?

Mais non. I don’t think so.

From Netcraft’s web server survey:

Microsoft-IIS gain 935K sites, continuing an advance that has seen Microsoft steadily chip away at what once seemed an insurmountable lead for Apache. In our Feb. 2006 survey, Apache held 68% market share, giving it lead of 47.5% over Windows (20.5% share). In this month’s survey, Microsoft’s share has improved to 31.0%, narrowing Apache’s advantage to 27.7%.

Which is all the more amazing considering how bloomin’ awful IIS is — at least as soon as you try to do something complicated with it. Personally, I think it’s awful no matter what you want to do with it, but I concede some view the Apache text-based configuration as a significant barrier of entry and want some obscure GUI buttons to click instead. But woe betide those who want to do something slightly different from normal, in Microsoft’s less-than-wonderful web server world — particularly if it’s something Microsoft hasn’t thought of providing. At least in Apache world we have the glorious abudance of Apache modules, where you can pretty much find something to accomplish any conceivable task. Although I have read that IIS 7 will be modularised as well — which will, no doubt, be viewed as another Microsoft “innovation”.

Dave Winer’s “Dear Ted” post, has me wondering if I’m missing something. I thought for a moment he must be talking about some new proprietary feed technology, but according to feedvalidator, Ted Leonsis‘ feed is valid Atom.

So, not sure how that means he’s going to lose subscribers, nor why a change to Atom is “breaking things that work”?

The countdown is on… only 3 days till we leave Bangkok. Here’s a couple more thoughts about our trip:

1. Anna’s Cafe (near Sala Daeng) has a vastly over-rated reputation. Service: abysmal. Food: average. General decor: dated, and in sore need of a tidy up. Save your money and go to the S&P restaurant on South Sathorn (excellent service, excellent food, reasonably priced). Actually the S&P on Sathorn is my favourite restaurant in Bangkok. A trip here isn’t completely without more than a few visits for lunch.

2. I first went to Shabu shabu (Sukhumvit 33) about 6 years ago. We’d thought it had closed down, since they never answered the phone when we rang. Turns out we should’ve just taken a drive past, since it hasn’t closed down at all — and is as good as it ever was (meaning it’s about a million times better than the aforementioned Shabushi). What I don’t understand is how the excellent Shabu Shabu can only have one restaurant, when the awful Shabushi has multiple outlets.

3. There’s a distressing increase in the number of restaurants which include the service charge in the bill. Large hotels usually do this, but now smaller chains, and single restaurants appear to be doing the same in larger numbers. I say distressing, because the service from waiting staff in some of these places, is absolutely abysmal. Not in all cases (service in hotel restaurants is generally excellent), but 9 out of 10 establishments we’ve visited, which have the charge included, have had terrible service. Two possibilities: either the staff know they’re getting the tip anyway, so feel no incentive to make an effort — or the restaurant is pocketing the money, and the same is true regarding making an effort.
Not sure what the approach is in Thailand regarding an included service charge accompanied by profoundly indifferent service. In the UK, I’d probably pay the food portion of the bill and leave out the service. In NZ, thankfully we don’t have the problem. But here, I’m not sure whether refusing to pay a service charge is acceptable (my wife has been out of the country long enough that she doesn’t know and we keep forgetting to ask friends).

1. If you like Dim Sum (Yum Cha), you can’t do much better than “The Good Earth” restaurant at the Arnoma Hotel. Only 300 baht gets you a large buffet-style (but not choose your own) selection of Dim Sum dishes, plus soup, a noodle dish of some kind (such as Rad Nah), fruit salad desert and unlimited refills of green tea. Just across the road from Central World, so conveniently located.

2. I’ve only eaten at 2 mexican restaurants since I started coming to Bangkok, but we keep going back to Senor Pico each time we come back here. Excellent skewered bbq chicken, good live music (which my daughter loves), and the fajitas aren’t bad either (although I don’t think the fajitas are as good as the Mexican Cafe in Auckland — but that might just be personal preference).

3. There are a huge number of food courts in Bangkok. Most of the Central department stores have a food court attached somewhere — FoodLoft at Central Chit Lom is arguably one of the best of these (very upmarket though). Haven’t been to the MBK food court in years, but last time I went there they had a couple of pretty good vegetarian booths.

4. If you want to have an expensive meal out, a lot of the major hotels have all-you-can-eat buffets with a mixture of International and Thai cuisine. I really like the lunch buffet at the Grand Hyatt Erawan (excellent service), and dinner at the Riverside Terrace at the Marriott (rather expensive for Thailand, but has a show as well, which is good for kids).

5. Non-food-related (surprise): the Ancient City is really worth a visit. Full of replica and relocated temples, buildings, mini villages, etc. I’ve been twice now and still enjoy it. Will probably go back on the next trip, because there’s parts of the 300+ acre park that we haven’t visited yet (plus they’re building more attractions). You will be impressed. By the way, contrary to that article I’ve linked to, entry fees have increased to about 300 baht per person (at least for foreigners).

A couple of observations, so far, from our latest sojourn in Bangkok (Krung Thep, in Thai, which hopefully explains the title):

1. Shabushi restaurant (a mixture of Shabu Shabu and Sushi), is definitely not worth the 219 baht per person. Save your money and go to Coca, or even MK (though MK is pretty average as well). Better yet, go to Daidomon. It’s a bit old, but much better value for money — plus the locals are a (mostly) bored with it, so it’s easier to get a seat. We waited almost an hour to get into Sabushi. What a waste of an hour that was.

2. Today I managed to get across 3 lanes from the exit from a car park building without too much pain — admittedly by following a BMW. Here’s a trick for driving in Bangkok: get behind someone more obnoxious than you are (the bigger the car, the better).

3. The difference between a foreigner (me) driving in Bangkok, and a local (expert) driver: last night the driver of a friend of my wife, drove from a carpark across 5 lanes of traffic. Amazing. It was like Moses parting the Red Sea. If you’ve experienced Bangkok traffic, you’ll know what I mean.

4. “Breakfast included”, is overrated. You can get really sick of eggs on toast, or thai-style omelets, really quickly. A serviced apartment with breakfast included is nice, but not really worth the extra money (unless, of course, your company is paying for it).

More to come when I think of them…

The weather in Bangkok is surprisingly mild at the moment. This is my 5th or 6th time here, and without a doubt, experiencing the mildest temperature yet.

Living in a city where jaywalking is the norm (if not encouraged), I read this story with amusement (although with sympathy for the professor’s plight).

Interest in visiting the US… rapidly decreasing.

We’ve just returned from a 5-day stay in Chiang Mai (in the north of Thailand). It’s been 8 years since we were last there, and it seems that very little has changed. The Riverside restaurant is still brilliant, the steps of Doi Suthep are still crammed with a ridiculous number of street sellers, and Tuk Tuks still follow you down the street, hopeful for a fare.

There is, however, a new attraction in the region — the Chiang Mai Night Safari. First impressions are quite simply amazing. The architecture of the main building is consistent with traditional northern Thai styles (and an impressive size), the fountain-light show on the lake is good, and there’s a level of professionalism that you don’t typically see at other Thai tourist attractions.

Visitors travel around the park in an (approx) 40 seater glorified golf cart (basically an open-air bus), and pass through various enclosures to see the animals. The individual habitats seem reasonably sized and the animals look healthy (at least what you can see of them in the lights of the bus)…

…that is, until you reach the very last enclosure, containing the elephants. Where the other animals are free to roam their enclosures, the elephants are chained to the spot. Where the other animals at least seem relatively comfortable, most of the elephants constantly struggle to free themselves… I say most of the elephants, because a couple just stood there rocking backwards and forwards — I’m no animal behaviourist, but it sure looked like psychological problems to me.

The experience is like an ice-cold bucket of water in the face after a hot shower.

Contrast with the Maesa Elephant Camp we went to a couple of days earlier, where the elephant we rode (yes we did the typical touristy stuff) felt free to stop and munch bamboo leaves whenever she wanted (completely ignoring her exasperated handler) and all the elephants looked healthy and interested in what they were doing — without a huge amount of intervention from the handlers (mahout).

The treatment of Thailand’s national animal, is quite simply shameful.

I also wish I’d had internet access to do a bit of research before we went there, because a quick search uncovered the following:

http://www.elephantnaturepark.org/news/0511a.htm
http://www.thailandqa.com/forum/showthread.php?t=10906

What could’ve been an attraction I’d recommend to anyone, instead becomes something I recommend you stay away from. Save your 500 baht and give it to support the animals at Maesa or one of the other elephant camps, where the animals are treated with a bit of respect (in fact the mahout live with the animals).

1. plug new digital camera into usb
2. run gphoto2… get error (something about kernel)
3. try digikam. error connecting
4. try konqueror. nothing detected.
5. unplug camera, repeat process with a vague sense of futility
6. remove SD card from aforementioned camera, try plugging into internal card reader in laptop
7. when nothing happens, spend 45 mins reading about internal card readers only to discover they’re generally not supported well. fail miserably getting anything to happen there
8. give up on SD card, return to camera, plug in usb again and begin search for more info about specific model
9. KDE automatically detects USB mass storage and pops up a dialog… twice. in annoyance, select “do nothing”… twice
10. Somehow Konqueror still opens, displaying the now-mounted usb storage device representing your camera, complete with photos ready and available to be copied.

That, my friends, is the true definition of frustration.

TradeMe might account for NZ’s highest percentage of internet traffic, but in my opinion, Fairfax have no hope in hell of a reasonable return on their investment, if my experience is anything to go by.

My wife has used TradeMe, for a year or two, to sell things we’re not using any more (a lot of baby stuff as my daughter got older). We’ve basically had a lot of positive feedback, and no negative. The experience has, generally, been pretty good, although we have had a couple of bad experiences with less than honest traders.
Anyway, she hadn’t used it for a few months, then sold a couple of larger value items, and our account went into deficit (to the tune of a bit over $20, I think). She forgot to tell me, so we didn’t “charge-up” our balance, and another few months (possibly 3?) rolled by. Went to use the account again, a month or so ago, only to discover our membership is no longer enabled.

Here’s where the problem with the lack of customer service comes into play: there is no info in the online help that tells you what to do in these cases, the only option is to send a message online, or use their $1.99 per minute help line. Despite the fact that it’s our fault, I have no interest in paying 1.99 per minute just to talk with some monkey to explain what happened, that we want to pay and re-enable our account.

So I sent a message using their contact form.

No reply.

So I sent another message.

No reply again.

I’ve even tried dropping a suggestion in their online equivalent of a suggestion box.

No reply.

Which is crazy. Because, here’s the thing: I -want- to pay. I want to give them my money. Not just to get back the positive ‘kharma’ associated with our account, but also because it’s a valid debt and I believe I should pay it.

Is it logical to close the account of a customer who has used your system for a few years (without any problems I can recall), because they screwed up and owe you a small amount of money? Isn’t it more logical to keep the account open, but stop them from trading (bidding or selling) until they pay the balance? That seems like a far more intelligent and customer-centric approach — but what do I know? I haven’t built a company up from scratch and sold it for a few hundred million.

So… TradeMe doesn’t want my money, and I’ve seen enough anecdotal evidence (forum postings and other commentary… albeit a few years old) on the web to indicate other people have also had problems when dealing with them. If that’s anything like debugging software (i.e. the obvious stuff is just the tip of the iceberg), then it doesn’t bode well for TradeMe’s future, and for Fairfax’s investment.

UPDATE: Months after sending the original message on TradeMe’s contact form, we finally heard back. It appears we can pay our bill (only $6 rather than $20 as I originally thought) by just ringing the Wellington office direct and paying by credit card. Which is considerably better than calling an 0900 number. Unfortunately, the email arrived just as we were leaving to go to Thailand on holiday for 5 weeks. Obviously been back a month now, but haven’t yet had a chance to ring. I figure since they took a few months to get back to us, there’s no rush for me to rip out the credit card… but will do asap. Have a couple of things to sell, although Ben’s looks interesting…

Is it just me, or does the soundtrack on the settings screen of the Nintendo Wii, sound a bit like the soundtrack for the movie Solaris? Or is it just the fact that both use bells?

Cory Doctorow (of BoingBoing fame) has posted that NZ is to get a DMCA type amendment to our Copyright Act.

Sure enough, in the text of the amendment:

introduce an offence (carrying a sentence of a fine not exceeding $150,000
or a term of imprisonment of up to 5 years, or both) for commercial
dealing in devices, services, or information designed to circumvent
technological protection measures:

I’m not convinced that Tizard’s amendment is as far reaching as the DMCA (though trying to compare the changes to the Act with the text of the US DMCA requires a perverse sort of masochism I’m not cursed with), but I can see Doctorow’s point:

This has been an unmitigated disaster in the US: not only has it totally failed to keep copyrighted works from being copied without permission (every “copy-protected” work ever released is available on P2P networks within minutes of its release), it has also created an anti-competitive marketplace where companies can sue their competitors for making compatible products

It would be interesting to hear what a lawyer thinks about the NZ equivalent of the DMCA to know if it could have the same “chilling effects“.

Even worse is the following:

It also potentially reduces rates of piracy as a result of clear guidance as to what constitutes infringement. Increased certainty is created by New Zealand’s law being more in line with our major trading partners.

1. Rubbish. There is no way it will “potentially reduce rates of piracy”. Piracy will continue no matter what. Where’s the evidence from European and US markets that these law changes have made any difference?

2. “New Zealand’s law being more in line with our major trading partners” — read that as “we’re being pressured by foreign interests and they’re dangling the free-trade carrot”

UPDATE: Stephen Marshal has written an interesting commentary on his blog (already slashdotted). One of the more salient points he makes is:

Much of the economic damage from music and movie piracy also appears to arise from the production and sale of counterfeit CDs and DVDs, something that is already easy prosecuted under the existing laws and of no relevance to digital copyright whatsoever. Its worrying to see the Government serve up industry propaganda as fact in this way and it suggests a passive acceptance of the position stated by commercial interests rather than a deeper analysis of the facts.

http://www.bbspot.com/News/2006/11/home-theater-regulations.html

In related news, the New York Times has suggested that if you catch someone reading your newspaper over your shoulder on the subway, you should mug them and take $2.50 from their wallet then deliver said funds to the NYT offices on West 43rd, as it represents a significant loss of revenue….

Vodafone seems to be intent on proving that the duopoly that is Telecom+Vodafone != true competition, == bad service, and == overpricing. As evidenced by this article at Computerworld. They might have the design skillz… but that’s the end of it.

From Rod’s pictures (last link above), it looks like Telecom have the l33t tech skillz, but whomever designed the MiniMax device has the design skills of a small badger with one arm, worse than usual eyesight, and a propensity for garish colour schemes.

It’s refreshing to see that NZ is not the only country that can appoint clueless monkeys to ICT government departments:

http://bangkokpost.net/151106_Database/15Nov2006_data001.php

A quote from the article:

On the subject of open source software, he said the current government plan was a case of the blind leading the blind, as neither the people who are in charge nor the people in industry seem to know the dangers of open source software.

“With open source, there is no intellectual property. Anyone can use it and all your ideas become public domain. If nobody can make money from it, there will be no development and open source software quickly becomes outdated,” he said.

Apart from Linux, he claimed that most open source software is often abandoned and not developed, and leads to a lot of low-quality software with lots of bugs.

Hmmm…. “most open source software is often abandoned” apart from Linux?

How about…. Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, JBoss, Netbeans, Eclipse (huge), Jetty, Tomcat, Spread, Azureus, BitTorrent, Audacity, 7-zip, Abiword, etc, etc, etc? Go to SF.net’s statistics page and see the huge number of downloads of some of these projects.

In regard to low-quality software, I seem to recall, from an ACMqueue article a few months back, that there is no correlation between numbers of bugs and open source software. In fact, here’s a relevant quote:

This type of development has both advantages and disadvantages. In various cases OSS seems to have solved many of the problems of traditional software engineering methods, since it has been possible to produce reliable, high quality, and low-cost software in a brief amount of time. The existence of a large pool of testers and developers facilitates debugging and the true peer review of the code results in better code.

In fact, to say this guy is a clueless monkey is a bit of an insult to the clueless monkeys out there. My apologies, clueless monkeys!

Gads!

And if that’s not bad enough:

EGAD:

…no, I’m not out of touch with the level of wealth in my own nation. Have you walked around a so-called “poor” neighborhood lately? I see big screens in almost every home…

1. I somehow doubt he’s been walking around in a -really- poor neighbourhood and,

2. let’s not forget the fact that it’s still possible for people on low incomes to get credit (only to have the items repossessed if they fail to meet the payments). We’ve got a similar problem here with banks extending 100% mortgages and the worry that when the market changes significantly, people with that kind of debt will be in serious financial difficulty… bringing me to,

3. what happens when you have all these debts and your financial circumstances change?

Frankly I can’t believe he’s promoting the idea of personal debt for an overpriced console, for god’s sake. Particularly when there is a (wii bit) cheaper, and potentially more fun, option.