Planet NZTech

InternetNZ supports Internet Awards

InternetNZ Blog @ July 02, 2009 10:03 PM

InternetNZ is pleased to announce its support for the 2009 Australia and New Zealand Internet Best Practice Awards to be held in October, as well as the 2009 Liz Dengate Thrush Internet Awards to be held in August.

2009 AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND INTERNET BEST PRACTICE AWARDS

The Internet Best Practice Awards are organised by the Australian domain name administrator auDA in full collaboration with InternetNZ. The awards recognise organisations, businesses, groups and individuals that have made significant contributions towards the security, openness, diversity and accessibility of the Internet.

The Awards were launched last week in conjunction with the 35th meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in Sydney. The categories are:

* Security – initiatives that are at the forefront of developing solutions to security threats and building trust and confidence in the online environment.

* Openness – initiatives that enable Internet users to benefit from increased access to online materials, knowledge or information.

* Access – initiatives that aim to combat the digital divide, facilitating access for groups such as the elderly, disabled or socially disadvantaged.

* Diversity – initiatives that encourage expressions of cultural diversity and identity, including the promotion of multilingualism and indigenous cultures online.

* A fifth award will be presented recognising the achievements of young Australians or New Zealanders. Applicants for the Youth Award can be eligible under any one of the four main themes.

Nominations for the Internet Best Practice Awards close on 31 August 2009. Winners will be announced in October and promoted at the next meeting of the United Nations Internet Governance Forum in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt in November.

For further information about the Awards see: www.bestpracticeawards.org.nz

LIZ DENGATE THRUSH INTERNET INDUSTRY AWARDS

The Liz Dengate Thrush Foundation will host its inaugural Internet Awards in August 2009, to acknowledge, reward and encourage Internet entrepreneurship and other positive uses of the Internet in New Zealand. The event is being held at Parliament Buildings and special guests include Dr Vint Cerf, and NZ Minister for ICT, Hon. Steven Joyce.

The Liz Dengate Thrush Foundation was established in memory of Liz Dengate Thrush, a New Zealand Internet identity who died in a car accident in 2006. Liz was a well known member of the global Internet community.

The Award categories encompass much of Liz’s vision and honour her memory by recognising educational, social and business contributions to New Zealand life involving the Internet. The categories are:

* Societal Impact - recognising the development of the application, product or services provided on the Internet likely to have the most beneficial impact on New Zealand society.

* Best Education Product or Service - recognising the application, product or services provided on the Internet likely to have the greatest impact on learning and/or teaching in New Zealand.

* Best Business Application Award - recognising those that transform their methods of doing business, or change our way of doing business with them.

* Internet Entrepreneur of the Year - recognising that rare breed of individual who has put capital and reputation on the line and successfully contributed to  New Zealand’s wealth.

InternetNZ launches .nz awareness campaign

InternetNZ Blog @ July 02, 2009 09:56 PM

InternetNZ is pleased to announce the launch of an online awareness campaign highlighting New Zealand’s domain name space.

The campaign, titled .nz is our home, emphasises the value that .nz domain names can deliver for New Zealanders, and raises awareness of the systems the InternetNZ Group has in place to protect the rights of domain name holders.

An online video series has been created, featuring people associated with a range of second level domains including .co.nz, .ac.nz, .org.nz, .school.nz, .net.nz, geek.nz, .maori.nz, .mil.nz and .govt.nz.

The videos will be advertised on key websites over the next three months.

The .nz is our home campaign was officially launched last night by InternetNZ President Peter Macaulay, who says it stresses the values that underpin InternetNZ.

The InternetNZ Group manages the .nz domain name system through the Domain Name Commission, and owns the .nz domain name registry - .nz Registry Services.

“Although the Domain Name Commission is the public face of .nz, it can’t operate without the technical work of NZ Registry Services,” says Macaulay.

“We work as a group to ensure that those who register for .nz domain names have their rights protected, so they can benefit from and enjoy their unique address.

“This campaign is firmly targeted at those who use .nz domain names, helping them maximise the benefits of doing so.”

You can find out more by visiting the campaign website at:

www.dnc.org.nz/content/campaign

Demo site for NZ Community SharePoint Conference

Ian Morrish @ July 02, 2009 09:04 PM

On or in?

Rachel McAlpine / Alice Hearnshaw (Contented) @ July 02, 2009 08:46 PM

Lately I’ve caught myself vacillating between the words on and in when writing. The quandary, tiny though it is, must have used a good 55 seconds of my time over the last couple of weeks.

I say, I read such-and-such in the newspaper, or in the New Scientist. Then I catch myself saying, I read such-and-such on the New York Times.

On the New York Times? Strange picture that produces, isn’t it? As if the article was a message in scrabble tiles scattered all over a newspaper. Or written on a Post-it attached to the newspaper.

Of course it’s because I read some things on paper (like the New Scientist or Elizabeth Knox’s latest novel, The Angel’s Cut). Whatever I read there is firmly, physically inside the covers. But wait a minute. How about paper newspapers? In the Dominion Post, something on (on) the front page is not literally inside a physical object, but on the outside. Oh no, that’s nit-picking.

But the New York Times I read online. I read articles on the NYT web site. I guess that’s what’s happening to my semantic choices.

This silliness is a canary in a coal mine. If I’m momentarily confused, so are thousands of others, no doubt. And one day we might all be saying, I read it on the newspaper.

That will not be hard for people using English as an international language. They won’t mind if they themselves use the wrong preposition. The meaning will still be clear, which is more important.

Gettin’ down with the underground

Nic Wise @ July 02, 2009 08:34 PM

The Big Move: Moving In Part I

Rob Inskeep @ July 02, 2009 07:45 PM

So – we’ve now moved in, the boxes are (mostly) unpacked – I’ve even managed to organise the garage enough to fit the HondaBus into it (who knows, maybe being an internal garage with light, heat and power may see the Carputer get installed finally?). So – with the vitals out of the way (and by [...]

SimilarSites.com Find, Well, Similar Sites

Sid Yadav @ July 02, 2009 07:15 PM

This will be of particular interest to blog and media site owners. Anyone who has either of those kinds of sites will understand that importance of networking with (or keeping track of) sites that are on a similar subject line.

SimilarSites.com (not to be confused with SimilarSites.net, which I find to be useless) lets you search for a domain name and find sites with similar keywords/phrases in their makeup so you can easily find websites that are similar to the one you’re own (or the one you’re using as ...

Booming in a down economy

Andrew Butel @ July 02, 2009 07:01 PM

Thanks Andy for the link to David Greer’s article on 11 strategies that will make your company boom. There are plenty of articles saying the same stuff about surviving a recession, but I really liked some of David’s practical advice.  If it takes a recession to kick-start us into doing these things, then we just have [...]

Where did you get that name?

Jim Donovan @ July 02, 2009 06:28 PM

Here’s a curious thing for you to discuss in the pub after work tonight. Has the Internet shrunk our horizons rather than expanded them?

Last year, in “The Myth of the Telecommuter“, I noted that, despite electronic communication supposedly turning the world into a village, most interactions are between people within walking distance, followed by people within the same city. Prompted by similar findings, a new study of US birth data has looked at the spread of baby names over time.

The Economist reports:

… Dr Goldenberg and Dr Levy speculated that when parents chose a name for a child, they were influenced by their interactions with other new parents, so the spread of the names the babies were given was a proxy for the pattern of those interactions.

… What Dr Goldenberg and Dr Levy found was that the proportion of babies given a certain name in a state where that name was already popular or in a neighbouring state was 20% higher than would otherwise have been expected. This was true from the 1970s to the early 1990s.

From 1995 to 2005, however, the effect became even more pronounced. The proportion of newborns with common names in any given state and its immediate neighbours became 30% higher than would have been expected if there were no geographic effect. Dr Goldenberg and Dr Levy ascribe this rise to the internet. It certainly correlates with the emergence of the web, though whether the correlation reflects causation is unproven. But whatever the reason, it is a curious result.

Four short links: 2 July 2009

Nat Torkington (O'Reilly) @ July 02, 2009 03:00 PM

1. UNESCO book: Open Educational Resources -- UNESCO's first openly licensed publication, a collection of papers and reports in the area of Open Educational Resources. (via glynmoody on Twitter)
2. ETSI 2.0 -- Paul Downey ventures into the belly of the telco beast and gives them both barrels. The whole thing is great--his talk was one of the best overviews of "how we think on the Web" I've seen. I can only imagine the sound it made as it bounced off the thick dinosaur hides of the attendees. I was reminded of the old, apocryphal quote from a Kodak executive dismissing digital cameras and their poor quality with "people love photos", when in reality it's the taking of photos that people love. Sometimes it's hard for an incumbent with large sunk costs and a vested interest in business as usual to foresee and embrace change. Indeed for a telco or large commercial software vendor the best way to predict the future is to prevent it. (via benjaminblack on Twitter)
3. Asia Pacific FTTH Market Study -- notable for Hong Kong's discovery with fibre-to-the-home customers: Uplink traffic is 3 times of downlink traffic. That link appears dead, but Google has it cached. (via previous link)
4. Shownar -- tracks blogs and Twitter plus other microblogging services, finds people talking about BBC television and radio, shows trends in appealing ways. Made by Schulze and Webb (and Dopplr's delicious Matt Jones), more detail available that you should read.

Has Twitter blocked Mrs Slocombe’s pussy?

Jack Yan @ July 02, 2009 02:27 PM

Above: When searching for the hashtag #MrsSlocombesPussy, Twitter refuses to give any results.

Ten to one comedienne Mollie Sugden is having a great laugh from Heaven.
   I have just discovered that every other search works on Twitter, just not one for a new hashtag, #MrsSlocombesPussy. The reason, says one Tweeter, is that this hashtag has been blocked.
   If this is true, then shame on Twitter: it is either down to ignorance (they do not know the cultural impact of Are You Being Served?), xenophobia (American admins balking at British culture), disrespect (to the memory of Mollie Sugden) or overreacting political correctness (everyone else outside Twitter HQ knows that this refers to Tiddles, Mrs Slocombe’s pet cat). Yes, we also know the meanings of pussy, but at least in the rest of the English-speaking world, double entendres are acceptable.
   As SensualStories, a fellow Tweeter, pointed out, it seems hypocritical for Twitter to block a mention of Mrs Slocombe’s pussy, yet they have allowed countless spammers to set up accounts continually, for weeks, under the name of Britney F***** Vids.
   Americans scared of the word pussy also balked at Honor Blackman’s character’s name in Goldfinger, Pussy Galore. That was in 1964. Not much has changed since then, even if American TV is fine with violence, gore and sex scenes.
   Just don’t say, ‘Pussy.’ You might annoy some computer geeks sitting at Twitter HQ who think f***ed is a perfectly acceptable word, but pussy is offensive.
   I say we keep Tweeting #MrsSlocombesPussy in Mollie’s memory, and to show the hypocrisy at Twitter and their double standards for our freedom of speech.

PS.: A further check reveals that one can still search for #pussy as a hashtag on Twitter, so this seems targeted unfairly at Ms Sugden by xenophobes.

A rant on a talk falling to pieces

Ivan Porto Carrero @ July 02, 2009 01:45 PM

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of doing a talk for the Belgian .NET user group.  During this talk I ran in to all kinds of problems. I’ve done presentations where I was royally underprepared and to avoid that this time I actually started prepping for this talk on time. I was done on time, was prepared had 5 backups of my presentation and samples. What did I learn from this, if you’re prepared other things will go wrong.
I’ll share the story of stuff that can go wrong.

Before starting the rant I have some links to share.

• Slides
• IronRubyMvc sample – live demo – source
• Silverlight sample – live demo – source
• IronRubyMVC specs – source
• Sinatra – source
• Metaprogramming – source 

I have a device that I call internet on a stick, which is a vodafone usb 3G modem that I plug in to my system and it gets me on the internet (mistake 1). Since I assumed that that thing would continue to work I made most of my demos internet enabled (mistake 2). For example I have a demo where I go download pics from flickr and then show them with some animations with silverlight.
Before my presentation I changed the fonts, opened all the files I was going to talk about ran all the demos again to make sure they would work and everything went fine.
I unplug the USB device and go into the room to hook up the projector etc. The presentation starts and for the first hour everything went really well (from my perspective at least don’t know about the people attending).
We have a break and I plug the USB device in, at this point the vodafone program hangs (first time ever I swear). What’s more I can’t make it go away at all so I reboot my pc (this is still during the break).

Now I’m getting a little desperate because it still doesn’t work. With rebooting I also lost all my carefully opened files earlier (I’m showing code in about 3 different environments and 2 different OS’es).
So during the presentation I apologise and try to reboot once more while taking questions from the audience and hoping somebody will try to start a discussion with me. After rebooting I got a message saying my date was set to 2001 which I thought was peculiar but clicked it away.  I boot vmware fusion with windows 7 (this took fairly  long and is a little bit funky as the screen resolution changes a lot during this process).
Ok so far so good, by now I’ve already skipped the silverlight demo promising that it will be available as a download on my blog and will be moving on to the ironrubymvc sample. To prove I do actually use visual studio at times I wanted to open my demo project in visual studio. I open visual studio only for it to tell me that my trial has expired and I can either upgrade or close the application. Oooooookay this is completely weird because i get my software through my msdn subscription and I had been using it earlier that day.

Moral of the story: Either go vastly underprepared and wing it. Or don’t rely on the internet and always take at least 2 laptops that have identical configurations but I’m pretty sure those would or explode in my face or something will fall from the ceiling, building collapses or other mishaps.

Instead of having one demo go bad on me now I’m probably facing a reinstall of my mac because it lost a bunch of settings, for which I’m holding the vodafone responsible. At this moment I’m fairly certain that I should go less prepared and just wing it just out of fear for bigger disasters, people may die.

Craig Venter shows Richard Dawkins around The Institute for Genomic Research

Robin Capper @ July 02, 2009 12:42 PM

This isn't CAD or BIM but the hardware, technology and science seen in this tour of The Institute for Genomic Research is amazing. Genome sequencing depends on high end computer technology and the progress being made is astounding. Although 27,000,000² pairwise comparisons were required to analyse the human genome the challenge, having achieved it, is to do it faster & cheaper.

Craig Venter gives Richard Dawkins an informal tour of the facility and talks about the science, technology, history and future potential of this fascinating research.

This footage was shot with the intention of editing for a television program. What you see here is the full extended interview, which includes a lot of rough camera transitions that were edited out of the final program (along with a lot of content).

Bitching about the IRD

Sandy Mamoli / Brenda L @ July 02, 2009 10:57 AM

As I don't have half an hour to wait on the phone to talk to the IRD, and as you have to talk to them on the phone in order to activate the online registration that you need to do in order to email them, I will blog my rage. It's the done thing.

So my current issue is to do with provisional tax.

A few points to describe the situation as I understand it:

- provisional tax is essentially paying your tax throughout the year to avoid a massive bill at the end of the year.

- provisional tax for 2008/09 is based on your earnings in the 2007/08 tax year.

- the theory is, you pay in 3 installments throughout the year (which are calculated by IRD) and at the end of that financial year you either pay more or get a refund.

- you won't know for sure how it all pans out until you've done your tax return sometime after 31 March.

What I discovered this week is that even though I have paid all my installments - as calculated by IRD - on time, and I have submitted my 08/09 return before the due date, the IRD are charging me interest on the difference between what I paid and what it turns out I should have paid as my earnings were more than the year they based their assessment on.

Even though I am not overdue with my tax, and even though there is no way I could have known for sure what I would be earning and therefore how much tax I should pay until I did my return. And even though I am not overdue - they charge interest on what I owe - before I even owe it! A Lot of interest.

That really sucks!

Can anyone shed any light on what gives the IRD a mandate to charge this interest? They don't even say what rate it is charged at, or from when exactly. But it's calculated daily - and is way more than any interest I have earned having that money in a savings account.

Fuckers. 

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NZ SharePoint Conference - my preso for Friday

Mike Riversdale (Enterprise 2.0) @ July 02, 2009 10:24 AM

It's really just pictures so you'll have to come along and hear the words.
Having said that I will post the commentary over the next few days.

Um, if you're wondering about the Barbie slides, blame Joel Oleson and Paul Culmsee

---

MiramarMike.co.nz - Connecting people with people via information
(subscribe/RSS)

A New Job

Callum McKenzie @ July 02, 2009 08:47 AM

For those who are wondering: I have started my new job. I am a visions systems engineer in the robotics and automation divison of  Scott Technology. Specifically I’m dealing with the automation of freezing works. This means my job involves:

• X-rays.
• Robots with spinning blades.
• Interfering with sheep.

Two of these are actually mentioned in my job description.

MailWasher, a work in progress update

Robin Capper @ July 02, 2009 08:09 AM

I find MailWasher an essential tool allowing me to see all mail that comes to my accounts but ensure no spam reaches my Inbox. While many ISP's & mail services have their own spam filters MailWasher gives the user control to preview, accept or reject mail before it's downloaded. It removes the risk of spam filters stopping mail you actually do want but has rules to allow the majority of spam to be eliminated without any effort. I also use its preview window to read and process quite a lot of wanted email before it even gets to my Inbox!

MailWasher have released a YouTube showing their current beta in action. Although the new MailWasher looks quite different it works the same way as the current version. If you want to try the current release get it from Firetrust.com MailWasher. I can recommend it as one step toward "Inbox zero" is dealing with stuff before it even gets there!

Links for 2009-07-01 [del.icio.us]

David Petrie @ July 02, 2009 07:00 AM

• Is China Really an ‘East Asian success story’?
  "Most Western commentators focus on the spectacular success of China’s export sector and the emergence of China as the world’s factory. But the greater contributor to Chinese growth is actually domestically funded fixed investment, which constituted over 50% of GDP in 2008 and over 40% of growth in that year. China is way off the charts in this regard. Taiwan, for example, which had an unparalleled growth rate of 8% each year over 50 years never had capital investment spending of more than 30% of GDP.(10) South Korea had a one-off spike in the fixed-investment rate of 40% of GDP in 1990 but averaged around 30% during its growth periods in the 1970s and 1980s. Even Japan only averaged around 30% of GDP in the 1970s."

Double precision maths LOL

David Preece @ July 02, 2009 05:28 AM

from=60.600000 to=70.600000 =0.093195

from=70.600000 to=-737495126017608292509517345091921867896488574264171590116069337145281651327518213283321156604816235354939177425984239561685676753040519698284898687123456.000000 =-0.000000

JavaFX Node Bounds: I don’t get it

Jonathan Giles @ July 02, 2009 04:37 AM

I’m happy to admit it when I don’t get something. The situation with boundsInLocal, layoutBounds, and boundsInParent in JavaFX is one of these situations. I have read a number of articles discussing this topic, and whilst I understand the differences between the three values technically, I don’t think I’ve seen an article that tells me why I need all three values, and when I should choose one over the other.

So, please, can someone out there write a blog post and/or add a comment to this post to explain to me, and to others, why I need to care about these three different values. If you do write a separate blog post, please leave a comment here so that anyone who stumbles upon this blog post in 6 months time can follow through to any other discussions elsewhere.

Most importantly, keep it simple. I know, that’s more difficult than being complex and detailed, but for the sake of JavaFX clarity the world over, please keep it simple. We want to know, simply, why and when do I care about the three different values?

Thanks in advance!

Baroque: The First Global Style: online critique

Paul Reynolds @ July 02, 2009 01:15 AM

Baroque: Religious Processions from Holy Week in Seville from Victoria and Albert Museum
on Vimeo.

"Baroque was the first style to have a significant worldwide impact. It spread from Italy and France to the rest of Europe. Then it travelled to Africa, Asia, and South and Central America via the colonies, missions and trading posts of the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and other Europeans. The style was disseminated through the worldwide trade in fashionable goods, through prints, and also by travelling craftsmen, artists and architects.

Chinese carvers worked in Indonesia, French silversmiths in Sweden, Italian furniture makers in France. Sculpture was sent from the Philippines to Mexico as well as Spain. London-made chairs went all over Europe and across the Atlantic. The French royal workshops turned out luxury products in the official French style that were both desired and imitated by fashionable society across Europe. But Baroque also changed as it crossed the world, adapting to new needs and local tastes."

extract from opening to online exhibition

Open Government and Local body data

Andrew Dixon @ July 01, 2009 11:19 PM

Open Data Catalogue

Opengovt.org.nz is an open, independent catalogue of Government and Local Body datasets

Looking to download the latest list of Primary Schools? Want to find out the average market rents for Dunedin suburbs and use these in a report? Are you interested in the boundaries of your suburb? If the answer is yes then you may find some of this information hard to come by. Even though this information should be easy to obtain it is sometimes hard to find who to talk to, where to look and worse hidden behind pay-walls and restrictive license agreements. The Open Data Catalogue is an attempt to classify where this information resides, who ‘owns’ it, what license it is distributed under and if it is free or not.

Stella Rimington on Being A Spy

Paul Reynolds @ July 01, 2009 11:17 PM

Fire over London City

Nic Wise @ July 01, 2009 09:38 PM

Sunset from isle of dogs looking toward the gherkin. iPhone, camera bag

Songsheet Generator - Easy printing and displaying of song sheets

Adam Shand @ July 01, 2009 09:28 PM

Songsheet Generator is an application which prints songsheets and songbooks for home, small group, or large group overhead use. The program runs on Microsoft® Windows™ (native .exe), Mac OS X (Java-based native .app), and any platform that supports Java 1.5 (.jar file). Song files must be provided in the ChordPro (Chord Pro) format, a common text format found on the internet (ChordPro files are easy to make yourself, if you can't find the song you're looking for). Also Songsheet Generator will import some basic tab (CRD) files, so you can print a songsheet or songbook from any songs you might already have in that format.

MP3 Rev F GERBER Files now available

Nick Lott @ July 01, 2009 10:18 PM

Just a quick note to say that The GERBER files are now available on server. I have also tidyed up the CVS for PCB files and moved the old Protel files. I've also update the release names for the hardware to match the PCB Revisions.

This should make it easier for those of you out their that just want to build the standard design without custom modifications.
The downloads can be found at https://sourceforge.net/projects/butterflymp3/files/

Four short links: 1 July 2009

Nat Torkington (O'Reilly) @ July 01, 2009 08:18 PM

1. The Onyas -- New Zealand web design awards launch, from the people behind Webstock and Full Code Press. The name comes from "good on ya", the highest praise that traditionally taciturn New Zealanders are allowed by law to give.
2. The Year of Business Metrics: Don't make your users run away! -- wrapup of the Velocity conference. AOL: Users who had a slower experience view far fewer pages. Some interesting notes on performance from a Google-Bing study: Notice that as the delays get longer the Time To Click increases at a more extreme rate (1000ms increases by 1900ms). The theory is that the user gets distracted and unengaged in the page. In other words, they've lost the user's full attention and have to get it back. [...] As much as five weeks later, some users, especially those who saw delays greater than 400MS, were still searching less than before. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
3. Printcasting -- very simple content management system for print magazines that lets anyone start a magazine, add content, sign up contributors, sell ads, and go. Clever!
4. Pachube Augmented Reality Hack -- sexy hack that pushes all my buttons: computer vision, Arduino, sensor network, ubiquitous computing, pervasive alternate reality cyborg villians with chalk designs hellbent on world domination and the enslavement of the human race to use as meatsack AA batteries for their sex toys. Okay, four out of five ain't bad. (via bruces on Twitter)

Never mind the steak. Where’s the sizzle?

Jim Donovan @ July 01, 2009 07:46 PM

Many years ago, I met the CEO of a mid-size meat company to discuss how he could improve his business - it had always struggled to make much money.  Having had the guided tour and talked to the CEO, I had seen a very smart operation.  The farmers who supplied the animals were specially selected, as were their breeds, to provide very high quality animals.  The killing process was designed to avoid any animal distress (stress toughens the meat).  The cutting and packing processes produced excellently presented chef-ready portions. Higher input costs were heightened by small volume; however, their gourmet products should attract premium prices from restaurants, hotels and independent supermarkets in wealthier suburbs. But for some reason, their sales and delivery drivers struggled to sell their product for any premium above the bigger players, who competed primarily on price.   They had a good story, so why couldn’t they achieve that higher price?

By pure luck, the small management team - all men - were having dinner together that night, with their wives.  I was staying in the small country town overnight, and I was invited to join them. As we got to the pudding course, one of the executives asked me what thoughts I’d had after my short initial visit. This got the attention of everyone round the table.  I did the classic consultant trick, and asked them what they thought the problem was.

There was much grumbling about competitors who’d sell at “unfair” prices, “unreasonable” customers not appreciating the value of the product, and “poor” sales skills among the driver reps. After a few minutes of this, one of the women, who’d not said much so far, said very tentatively “The delivery trucks are dirty”. This got blank looks, and the sales director asked incredulously “What’s that got to do with it?” She explained. “The trucks are always filthy outside. You never wash them.  You look cheap.  Why would anyone pay you any more?” This got some nods.  Then another of the women asked “How many of the reps know how to cook?”  After some jokes about men and barbecues, she asked rhetorically ” How can you sell a gourmet meat if you don’t know what to do with it?”

You can see where this is going.  One the ball was rolling, everyone started suggesting ideas to not only fix the problem but also increase real value to customers.  Within a year, the business was transformed.  A successful restaurateur joined the board of directors. A consultant chef developed a driver rep training programme, which became compulsory for everyone  who worked in the business (their spouses could attend as well).  He also developed new cuts and recipes. Customer training days were very popular and earned extra income. Achieved prices went up, as did market share.  And the driver reps’ last job every day was to wash their trucks.

They had simplistically accepted their customers’ comments about being “too expensive” without probing deeper. The business was obsessed with product and production, but hadn’t thought to ensure that their sales process was consistent with and enhanced their market offer.

Sound familiar?

Find, Out.

LibraryTechNZ @ July 01, 2009 03:33 PM

Part of the National Library's purpose may best be summed up in three words: Collect, Preserve, Access. Seems fairly straightforward - any items the Library collects, we have to preserve them and provide access to them. The problem occurs when you consider access, and how many collections (and items in those collections) we have here. Published, unpublished, digital, physical, different media types, on-site, off-site, collaborative…if you drew a diagram, you could title it 'Everything, and Then Some'.

We've been fairly heads-down for the past few months with work on the latest National Library discovery service, and it's now available to the public, in beta form:

http://find.natlib.govt.nz/

Why?
There are a lot of drivers for this – one of which is some of our discovery tools are on older technologies that provide results at sub-optimal speeds. The planned move from the Wellington building is another one, where simpler access to Library and collaborative resources online will make things easier for our customers.

I think the biggest driver comes in the form of a lack of a unified way to find things at the National Library. Yes, we have several other sites that can provide our customers information, but it is a bit of a divided approach, and it certainly caused me confusion when I arrived. Where is the ideal place to search for the information I want? How do I get there? How are these sources of information connected? What is their context?

The idea of having a cross-collection discovery tool has been in the planning for some time, but it's just been recently that we've had the technology to accomplish it. A lot of thinking went on in those early days as to how best we could do this, and the team used that work as a basis for what's called the 'Discover, Deliver, Interact' programme, mainly because that's its name.

The 'Find'* site is really the first piece of the foundation in the DDI programme. We knew that without some sort of overarching discovery technology, there would be nothing to build on, and we would wind up with the same issues. It makes logical sense, really – if you can't find things, how can you expect to do anything with them?

How?
The underlying software - Ex Libris' Primo - provides us with a few other things we were after as well. The ability for customers to tag and comment on items, thus providing conversation (one-to-one, many-to-many) rather than just broadcasting (one-to-many) is something we're looking forward to leveraging in the future.

We also get the benefit of an application programming interface (API) from the software. This allows us to have flexibility in how we can create and support new digital services. It also means we will be able to extend and adapt the finding of our collections into other places, beyond just a web site. I'm thinking of things like mobile applications, Firefox plug-ins, or Google Gadgets, but there are heaps more things we're now able to do. After we figure out some details around how to implement it, we want to release the API from behind our walls, so that those of you so inclined may use them, perhaps even linking them up with the Digital New Zealand API.

What?
There's quite a bit of our information in Find now, and the plan is to keep adding to it. For now, we've got:

• National Library of New Zealand catalogue
• TAPHUI
• Timeframes
• Publications New Zealand
• Index New Zealand
• Te Puna Web Directory

• Matapihi
• findNZArticles
  

The Future of the Internet: Private Sheriffs in Cyberspace

Paul Reynolds @ July 01, 2009 02:39 PM

Private Sheriffs in Cyberspace
"Professor Jonathan Zittrain, author of 'The Future of the Internet And How to Stop It', discusses the ways in which online life will be regulated largely by people and institutions bearing no badges or government affiliation.

Do private sheriffs help avoid cumbersome and ill-considered government intervention, or do they represent a new form of vigilante justice with none of the protections associated with the rule of law? .."

19th May, 2009

AutoCAD Architecture AND Revit?

Robin Capper @ July 01, 2009 01:19 PM

Guillermo Melantoni's recent post on AutoCAD AND Revit prompted me to share how AutoCAD Architecture (ACA) can help your Revit work-flow. Yes, you read that right, ACA can help with Revit.

I'm not going to steal Guillermo's thunder by merging AutoCAD Mesh models with Revit (below). My example is rather more prosaic but I think it's a convincing reason to consider installing the AutoCAD Architecture, rather than just pain AutoCAD, included in AutoCAD Revit Suite.

AutoCAD AND Revit? yeah! - whatamesh.typepad.com

Imagine a world where everything isn't designed in Revit (yes really) and you need to collaborate with, or re-use old, AutoCAD content. One of the best things you can do is remove as much "AutoCAD overhead" by cleaning up dwg files before linking them to Revit. In my case it was a site layout designed in another AutoCAD'like package which I was using as the background for a Revit Model. I only needed the line work so wanted to clean out hatches, most notes, dimensions and other junk ready for Revit. While you can remove layers from linked dwg's in Revit I find its tools to be a bit too "all or nothing".

The AutoCAD Architecture has a "Select Similar" command which allows you to select object(s) like hatch, text etc then Right Click > Select Similar to instantly find all similar items (type & layer) for deletion. Although AutoCAD has "Quick Select" I find Select Similar much faster and you won't find it in AutoCAD. Even if you only use the AutoCAD portion of your Revit Suite for dealing to legacy content consider installing AutoCAD Architecture. Perhaps it's the best AutoCAD for Revit.