Planet NZTech

InternetNZ Blog: InternetNZ supports Internet Awards

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 22:03:57 +0000

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 Blog: InternetNZ launches .nz awareness campaign

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:56:49 +0000

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

Ian Morrish: Demo site for NZ Community SharePoint Conference

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:04:00 +0000

This is the demo site I built during my presentation on the Data View aka Data Form web part presentation at the New Zealand Community SharePoint Conference today. The PowerPoint deck is also on this site.
http://templates.wssdemo.com/sites/community/

Thanks to everyone who gave me feedback and the problem with one of the web parts in my demo was that I had select the wrong parameter value in the connection. That's what happens when you try and cram a 75 minute session into 45 minutes...

Rachel McAlpine / Alice Hearnshaw (Contented): On or in?

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 20:46:11 +0000

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.

Nic Wise: Gettin’ down with the underground

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 20:34:47 +0000

Rob Inskeep: The Big Move: Moving In Part I

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 19:45:25 +0000

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 [...]

Sid Yadav: SimilarSites.com Find, Well, Similar Sites

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 19:15:04 +0000

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 ...

Andrew Butel: Booming in a down economy

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 19:01:42 +0000

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 [...]

Jim Donovan: Where did you get that name?

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 18:28:43 +0000

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.

Nat Torkington (O'Reilly): Four short links: 2 July 2009

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:00:00 +0000

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)
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)
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)
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.

Jack Yan: Has Twitter blocked Mrs Slocombe’s pussy?

noreply@blogger.com (Jack Yan & Associates) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:27:38 +0000

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.

Ivan Porto Carrero: A rant on a talk falling to pieces

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:45:21 +0000

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.

Technorati Tags: IronRuby,IronRuby MVC,caricature,Presentation

Robin Capper: Craig Venter shows Richard Dawkins around The Institute for Genomic Research

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:42:40 +0000

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).

Sandy Mamoli / Brenda L: Bitching about the IRD

sandy.mamoli@gmail.com — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 10:57:00 +0000

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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Mike Riversdale (Enterprise 2.0): NZ SharePoint Conference - my preso for Friday

mike.riversdale@miramarmike.co.nz (Mike Riversdale) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 10:24:06 +0000

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

Bringing In The Cloud

View more documents from Mike Riversdale.

Callum McKenzie: A New Job

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 08:47:04 +0000

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.

Robin Capper: MailWasher, a work in progress update

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 08:09:46 +0000

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!

Tags: mailwasher

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

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 07:00:00 +0000

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."

David Preece: Double precision maths LOL

nospam@example.com (David Preece) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 05:28:28 +0000

This one went OK:

from=60.600000 to=70.600000 =0.093195

This one did not:

from=70.600000 to=-737495126017608292509517345091921867896488574264171590116069337145281651327518213283321156604816235354939177425984239561685676753040519698284898687123456.000000 =-0.000000

Fail.

Jonathan Giles: JavaFX Node Bounds: I don’t get it

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 04:37:38 +0000

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!

Paul Reynolds: Baroque: The First Global Style: online critique

paul.reynolds@mcgovern.co.nz (Paul Reynolds) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 01:15:19 +0000

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

Baroque: The First Global Style - Sacred Spaces - Secular Spaces

"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

Victoria and Albert Museum - Baroque 1620 - 1800
I am currently looking for great examples of collection based web sites, and have found one with this online exhibition - Baroque 1620 - 1800 - from the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The proposition
I'm looking just for fun - but also as a continuation of a research trail to test the proposition that, in terms of generic online practice, museum and gallery web sites are, in comparison to their library counterparts, a bit further down the track in terms of usability - flair and general front end digital literacy?

The Museum and gallery digital literacy
At the heart of this online research trail is of course the easy recognition that museums and galleries make a better job of exhibitions precisely because this is a part of their core business. Moreover, the art and practice of interpretation is also a core aspect of the whole museum and gallery visitor experience.

Collection Bushels
Libraries, in contrast, despite having some great exhibition spaces and practice, tend to hide their light inside the collection space - and as we all know big collection spaces make for excellent bushels. In short, having sorted out the backroom - especially around search and discovery tools - they all too often pause for a tea break.

The budget thing
That said, it's also true that, to some extent at least, the museum and gallery sector have more budget for exhibitions, and so, by definition, have more room for innovation and experiment in the online space.

Looking for 'best practice'
So, are there are some really great examples of first class web work which don't seem to have ploughed through a bucket of money? Also, are there good examples of on- screen parsimony which also shows good use of the basics - editorial text with great images and compelling music and video?

The V/A micro site on the Baroque
I think all four of these elements are on view in the V/A, online exhibition to Baroque - The first global style.

The text is open and accessible, and mercifully free of academic art jargon. The images to the objects are just stunning in both quality and presentation, and the music is so good, it's just on the edge of being too much. I mean does the BMR know they are giving mobile phone downloads for free!

The Video[s]
But its the video that really takes the biscuit. They are using Vimeo as the platform. This gives them an instant upload allowance - and immediate access to embed and distribution tools.

Each of them puts the the objects and the art into the life and practice that they were born for - e.g. Latin mass - procession, etc. The featured one above is quite stunning , and a brilliant example of how the Baroque is still a living force in some parts of the world.

Putting it all together - a great example of how to put on a great online show with the budget clearly on screen for all to see!

_____

Postscript: An online history of the V/A?
And just in case I'm accused of being too fluffy and uncritical here - can I also point out - ask - plead - with the Victoria and Albert to put up a better online show on their own history!

The Children's Book- A.S. Byatt
I have just finished reading the Children' s Book by AS Byatt. It's set between 1895 and the 1st World War and the immediate aftermath.

One of the families she invents for the novel live in the Museum courtesy of the fathers job. Part of the plot - much of it based on typical historical Byatt accuracy - concerns the upheaval inside the V/A when it went through some major alterations in the early part of the 20th century. It would be great to have a an online story of the Museum and its ongoing development. Context, in short, is all!

Andrew Dixon: Open Government and Local body data

mrdeee@gmail.com (Mr Dee) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 23:19:41 +0000

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.

Including SPATIAL datasets

Paul Reynolds: Stella Rimington on Being A Spy

paul.reynolds@mcgovern.co.nz (Paul Reynolds) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 23:17:30 +0000

source - fora tv

Stella Rimington
Now a full time novelist, Stella Rimington joined the UK Security Service (MI5) in 1965. During her career its reported, "she worked in all the main fields of the Service's responsibilities - counter-subversion, counter-espionage and counter-terrorism - and became successively Director of all three branches"

She was appointed Director-General of MI5 in 1992. She was the first woman to hold the post and the first Director-General whose name was publicly announced on appointment.

This is her speaking at the Dymocks Literary Lunch, 3/27/09 in association with the ABC, Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

It's a great talk - especially the story of picking up the daughter from school and then taking her to a safe house and telling her to do her homework upstairs while she interviews her source.

Le Carre - Honorable Schoolboy
I know it's the competition - but as well as being a devotee of Spooks, I seem to be on a bit of a UK spy phase - currently listening [courtesy of Auckland City Library] to The Honorable Schoolboy audio book - read by Michael Jayston, WorldCat reference, here.

BBC Radio 4 - The complete Smiley
This year, and next BBC Radio 4 is dramatizing all of the Smiley books. The first episode of The Spy Who Came In From the Cold is playing this coming Sunday, details, here

MI5 web site
Currently the front page is telling people about current risks etc. And yes - you can apply to to be a MI5 spook on the web site, here . They also have lots of IT vacancies, here

Nic Wise: Fire over London City

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 21:38:05 +0000

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

Adam Shand: Songsheet Generator - Easy printing and displaying of song sheets

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 21:28:30 +0000

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.

Nick Lott: MP3 Rev F GERBER Files now available

noreply@blogger.com (Nick) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 22:18:50 +0000

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/

Nat Torkington (O'Reilly): Four short links: 1 July 2009

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 20:18:00 +0000

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.
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)
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!
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)

Pachube Augmented Reality Demo

Jim Donovan: Never mind the steak. Where’s the sizzle?

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 19:46:38 +0000

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?

LibraryTechNZ: Find, Out.

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Kmiec) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 15:33:54 +0000

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

Also, some collaborative project information is there as well:

Matapihi
findNZArticles

We also have the metasearch capability over other National Library digital services and subscription databases.

What Next?
That's the real high-level view of things. As mentioned, this is a beta release. We're aware of several issues that we're working to resolve right now, and I'm know we'll encounter more as we move forward. But, to quote someone in a very different line of work, this is the business we've chosen. I encourage you to give it a try, and let us know what you think. What works? What doesn't? What would you like to see, and where do you want it to go? This is the first step in a continuing journey, and you're invited along. You can use the feedback form on http://find.natlib.govt.nz/, use the comments here, or email find-feedback@natlib.govt.nz.

* 'Find' is very deliberate usage – and name - here. There are those that feel people don't like searching, they like finding. I'm one of them. For instance, which do you prefer – searching for your lost car keys, or finding your lost car keys?

Paul Reynolds: The Future of the Internet: Private Sheriffs in Cyberspace

paul.reynolds@mcgovern.co.nz (Paul Reynolds) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 14:39:43 +0000

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

Download MP4 - Lower resolution (video) [181 MB]

Download MP4 - High resolution (video) [469 MB]

Download MP3 (audio) [42 MB]

Source - Internet Institute

Robin Capper: AutoCAD Architecture AND Revit?

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 13:19:21 +0000

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.

Cabbage Tree Creative: Justice Prevails

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 09:49:18 +0000

The good news is that today NZSki.com sent a message to Twitter regarding yesterdays post. They felt somewhat aggrieved by someone using their name to profit, and rightly so.

Tonight the offenders are gone. How’s that for action! I am amazed. Basically, the perpetrator, Snow Sports Online, contracted out the social media, and appears not to have monitored it. Social media isn't some “set and forget” program and this is a classic example. It needs involvement and engagement. I hear he has now subsequently apologised.

I wonder though what those several thousand people think who were following Mt Hutt and Coronet tweets now that they are “out of business”. Hopefully they now look for the official tweets.

Although to be honest, there is a very good chance that many of the “followers” weren’t really interested in skiing anyway. There is an interesting game on Twitter at present that is all around numbers. The more the better. Of course it’s not though, it’s about people interested in what you have to say, and hopefully your product. Less is sometimes (often?) more.

So, if you do have a problem, the take home message is look for the “Law Enforcement” address on this page. It works.

The bad news of course is that someone will try it again. The good news is however is that you can monitor this. Twitter search is pretty good, but even better are alert services such as http://www.twilert.com or http://tweetbeep.com to keep a watch on your company name, brand names or keywords/subjects you are interested in. They are very effective, and free.

So, all this about Twitter? Is Twitter the centre of the universe?

Categorically NO! However it is flavour of the month currently and a good barometer of trends in social media. It can be very useful. But let’s not ignore what we should be doing on our website, in other social media such as Facebook, blogging, YouTube etc. In reality they are probably far more important and reach far more people.

Twitter however has an attraction once you get it. It feeds you information constantly, it is highly addictive (if you find the right people to follow) ... Download TweetDeck and have a play, and see if it makes sense to you.

I am compiling a guide for our clients at present, but there are loads of resources with a simple Google search.

Miraz Jordan: Do invisible characters mess up your webpage?

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 09:23:53 +0000

Gremlins disrupt the web page display

Help, said my friend, my web page has gone all weird and I just don’t understand why.

I took a look, and could see why she was concerned. The first screenshot here shows the problem. In Safari all the HTML was showing, while Firefox had both the HTML code and weird question mark characters all over the place. ¹

I Viewed Source on the page, but it all looked like a regular web page.

Then, interestingly, when I copied it all and pasted into BBEdit the ‘weird’ part of the code just didn’t come across. The framework page coding all pasted in just fine, but the part of the code displaying problems was just not there. Very weird.

I suspected what the problem was though — I’ve seen this before, though not recently. I had my friend email me a copy of the HTML page she had uploaded to her site.

It’s the gremlins

BBEdit displays the gremlins in HTML

Once I received the original file I opened it in BBEdit and saw exactly what I expected: a whole bunch of upside down red question marks. These are what are known as ‘gremlins’. In fact these particular gremlins are a ‘null’ control character: \x00.

I don’t know how these control characters get themselves into the file, but in the last 10 years or so I’ve seen this a dozen times after a copy and paste.

The cleaned HTML file

I selected the Zap Gremlins… item from the Text menu in BBEdit, selected the Zapped Characters: Delete option and instantly all the red question marks disappeared.

Zap and they’re gone

After saving the file I viewed it again in the web browsers. This time it appeared as I expected.

The web pages now display as expected

If you’d like to take a look at this for yourself, download the Zipped file (4Kb) of 2 HTML files and take a look. But you’ll need BBEdit or another text editor capable of showing these ‘gremlins’. TextEdit.app, for example, won’t do it.

¹ My friend’s actual web pages are behind a password, and for various reasons are not available for public view. The screenshots here are of a mockup I made to demonstrate the problem.

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Adam Shand: Anne Waldman: Hopes & Fears

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 08:59:00 +0000

Hope & fear
            hopes & fears
    you have them

you had them,

hopes & fears you have them

You had them, hopes
    You have them, fears

hopes or fears you had them

you have them

hopes & fears you have them

I won't say no,
            you have them

I will say it plainly you had them
I had them,

hopes & fears I have them

Wake up in the morning:
    fear,
        the clock,
                the day,
                    I had it

Wake up in the afternoon:
    fear,
        the clock,
                quiet,
                    I had it

Fear:
    the night,
            noise,
                the street,
                        I have it

Person beating his body
against a building, I saw it

Fear: he had it
        She has it

Hopes & fears you have them

All the bodies in the morning light:
                        They have it
Wake in the morning:
    fear,
        the clock,
                the day,
                        job.

another person was there,
        he had it

Wake in the afternoon,
    she was gone,
        he had it

This is the most beautiful poem I've stumbled across in years. I've just listened to it being read by Marianne Faithfull in "Gang of Souls" more times then I care to admit.

I'm a little uncertain about the formatting, it's difficult to match exactly how it was presented on the screen, but hopefully I have it fairly close.

Mauricio Freitas: Brand management is important

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 08:53:00 +0000

What happens when your company has the rights to sell a product using a third party's branding, but use this other company's branding innapropriately?

You may ended up not having the product to sell at all...

Brenda Wallace: Education funding cuts has huge impact on Sign Lanuage

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 08:28:03 +0000

The slashing of Adult and Community Education (ACE) funding will have a devastating impact on the ability of people to learn Sign Language in community classes, says Lynne Pillay Labour Spokesperson for Disability Issues.

“The majority of New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) classes are delivered through community education and are used by parents and families of deaf children, teachers, nurses, police, and workmates. They are taught by trained NZSL tutors based on a curriculum especially developed for community classes.

http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/stories/2009/06/26/1245b6a21a74
http://www.guide2.co.nz/politics/news/sign-language-classes-not-affected...
http://www.parliament.nz/en-NZ/PB/Business/QOA/b/9/a/49HansQ_20090625_00...

Other info on this issue:
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PA0906/S00353.htm
http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/news/features/2544933/Dark-times-lo...
etc... just google.

The Government announced in the 2009 Budget that ALL funding for adult education in schools (“evening classes” or “night school”) will end in December 2009. The Government regards the programmes that schools offer as mere “hobby” classes and if schools want to continue, all courses they offer will have to be “self-funded” - this will mean that the fees will increase by 50% or more at some schools and 200% or more at others, if schools decide to continue which is unlikely.

This axing of the funding will also mean that schools will no longer be able to pass on funds to local community groups who also provide classes for adults, training for volunteers and support for many of the disadvantaged in our communities. English language programmes for migrants and refugees will also disappear or will have to cost several hundred dollars more.

Night classes make such a tiny portion of the education budget (0.6%) but they are of such benefit to the community.

Refugees and migrants learn to speak English.
Parents, friends and colleagues of the Deaf learn Sign Lanuage.
New Zealanders learn foreign languages, which myself and colleagues use in business.
I learned Te Reo Maori at a night class.
Budgeting classes, something incredibly important right now, will either become far too expensive or disappear completely.

Fees at my local are currently about $80 per 16 week course - They tell me this will increase to $160 or $320 per course. I doubt they will run, as most of the students cannot afford this.

If you are concerned about the impact of these cuts, you can contact, by email or letter:

Your local MP
AnneTolley, the Minister of Education
Bill English, the Minister of Finance
Trevor Mallard or Maryann Street, Opposition Spokespeople for Education

It is FREE to write to any MP. You just have to send it to FREEPOST Parliament, PO Box 18888, Wellington.

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David Petrie: Links for 2009-06-30 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 07:00:00 +0000

Brenda Wallace: Why you shouldn't use C#

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 05:23:30 +0000

Mono is a free/libre/opensource implementation of C#.

C# is a programming language that came out of a closed source software company named Microsoft. - and Microsoft own patents on C#.

Thus there's a threat hanging over any free software that relies on mono/C# - what if Microsoft suddenly decides enforce their patent.

Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation have released a Why free software shouldn't depend on Mono or C#.

The problem is not unique to Mono; any free implementation of C# would raise the same issue. The danger is that Microsoft is probably planning to force all free C# implementations underground some day using software patents. (See http://swpat.org and http://progfree.org.) This is a serious danger, and only fools would ignore it until the day it actually happens. We need to take precautions now to protect ourselves from this future danger.

Let me add my voice to this - don't write programs in C#.

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Adam Shand: Stack - Application for organising your iPhone apps

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 04:57:03 +0000

Looks pretty slick though from the demo I think that I may like the design of the jail broken app "Categories" better (of course Categories is horrendously buggy and broken but the idea is great). I'd love this even more if Apple would let you organise your app desktops in iTunes rather then having to do it on the iPhone where it's *tedious*.

Robert O'Callahan: Progress

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 04:46:33 +0000

I've submitted all of my compositor phase 1 patches for review. The patches are also published here. 111 files changed, 2573 insertions, 1448 deletions, divided into 39 separate patches over multiple Bugzilla bugs. In theory every one of those steps should build and pass tests, although I haven't actually verified that for all the patches. I managed to break things up pretty well --- the largest patch is only 536 insertions and 75 deletions --- so hopefully that will make reviewing easier.

MQ has been working pretty well for me. I get into a routine of applying all the patches, doing some testing, fixing a number of bugs, and then redistributing the changes across the patches that they logically belong to. I'm not 100% sure this is the most efficient way to work --- sometimes I burn quite a bit of time putting all the changes in just the right places --- but at least it's now possible.

Now it's time to start working on something else. My immediate next task is to restructure the media tests so we can generalize tests across file types and backends; for example, right now we have one set of seeking tests for Ogg and another for Wave, but we should just have a single set of tests parametrized by test files of different types.

After that, I plan to do some cleanup that's enabled by compositor phase 1. In particular, we can move scrolling out of the view system and integrate it all directly into the scrollframes in layout.

After that I plan to work on compositor phase 2. Right now in Gecko whenever something needs to be repainted we make platform-level invalidation requests, the platforrm dispatches paint events and we paint. This often leads to over-frequent painting. For example if there's a script changing the DOM 100 times a second, we'll try to paint 100 times a second if we can keep up, which is a waste of time since most screens only refresh at 60Hz or so. Even worse, if you have that script, and an animated image painting 20 times a second, and a video playing at 25 frames per second, we invalidate them all independently and if your computer is fast enough we'll paint 145 times a second. We need to fix this, and I have a plan.

Part of that plan is to create an internal animation API that various Gecko components (animated images, video, smooth scrolling, SMIL, CSS Transitions, etc) can plug into. But we also recognize that declarative animations will never be expressive enough for all use cases, and there's a lot of existing scripted animation libraries out there, so I have an idea for tying in scripted animations as well. Basically, I would expose the following API:

window.mozRequestAnimationFrame(): Signals that an animation is in progress, and requests that the browser schedule a repaint of the window for the next animation frame, if the window is visible.
The browser will fire a mozBeforePaint event at the window before we repaint it. Animation libraries should register an event handler that checks the current time, and updates the DOM/CSS state to show that point in the animation. If the animation has not ended, the event handler should call window.mozRequestAnimationFrame() again to ensure another frame will be scheduled in a timely manner.

That's it! That API gives the browser control over the frame rate, while allowing JS to do anything it wants in each frame.

Colin Jackson: Guest post: Cows are the ideal form of currency

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 04:34:09 +0000

Cows. They’re good for a lot of things. You might not think that money is one of them. But that’s where you’re wrong. Cows are the ideal form of currency and I believe they should replace the New Zealand dollar in the near future.

Firstly, they fulfill all of the criteria required to make good money.

They are durable – cows are very tough.
They are portable – in fact cows transport themselves. Do coins do that?
They are perfectly divisible – you can just lop a bit off.
And finally they are very recognizable

Of course these features alone don’t make perfect money. They have to be accepted by the people who use them. But who wouldn’t want to use cows? Think of the possibilities. Small children would keep them and love them as pets. Gangsters would wear cow themed jewelry. Businessmen would no longer need to go to boring meetings about the latest weekly profit margins, or the monthly cash intake, but instead go to meetings concerning the latest cow deposit rate. And when you retire too a farm as your life winds down, you would never need to stretch your arthritic limbs to go down to the nearest bank to withdraw enough money for the milk, but instead not only will you have all the milk you could use, but your life savings will be conveniently kept outside your house.

Secondly there would be no need to trust the banks with your money in this unsure economic time, just to gain a few cents of interest. In fact your cows would reproduce and gain interest themselves, and after your money has matured over say 4 or 5 years then you could have gained an average of 20% interest per year, much better than the measly 3% some banks will offer you.
Also your money will feed you with a steady supply of milk, and when one dies you will have clothing and meat for a long time to come.

Many will say that this idea is stupid. In fact someone even labeled it “the stupidest system they had ever heard”. But really, is it? With the technological capabilities of genetic engineering almost all negatives can be overcome. The cows can be made immune to pain so they wont even whimper when they are split up to create smaller denominations or when the serial numbers are branded on them. This could save you a lot of pain and embarrassment just incase your cow went on a manic rampage in the middle of the mall because that particular top you wanted so badly was only one cow’s tail. They can be made immune to disease, because mad dollar disease has never been much of a problem, but with cows… well you can see my point. They could even base the official currency around just one cow, cloning that cow repeatedly, making all the cows equal in value.

Some nations around the world are already incorporating cows as the main, accepted, currency. Across east Africa, especially in settlements around south Sudan, the cow is used to buy all kinds of things, from water, to clothes, and even land. The Vikings also used cattle and in fact the English word fee is derived from the Norse word Feoh meaning cattle. Even today cows have become a de facto currency in some parts of Zimbabwe; some schools now demand fees to be paid in cows. If this system works well in these places, who can say it wouldn’t work in New Zealand?

So why not? Its clear that cows have the edge over the dollar in almost every way. So next time you need some extra cash, don’t turn to the pathetic New Zealand dollar. Turn to what we all know to be the better option, and start using some Moo-lah today.

– Jonathan

David Ritchie: Truth in shelving

dritchie@gmail.com (davidr) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 04:26:11 +0000