Based on current feedback, I’d say paying a lawyer to talk about software patents at this point would be like setting money on fire.
– Ryan Gordon
I’ve also found this to be true
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Monthly Archives: November 2009
Interview – testing Wordpress
In case anyone’s interested, here’s an interview I did on the Government 2.0 front. Just checking out the ‘embedded’ media player. Let me know if it all works.
Meanwhile in the solar system
For a bit of commentary, explanation and another very different closeup of the crystalline surface, click here. 
An asylum seeker solution?
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With Rudd Labor’s sudden slump in opinion polls this morning, I can’t help saying “I told you so” (in my recent post about asylum seeker policy):
Indonesia is doing all that it can to stem the flow, but with partial success at best. It is unlikely that action by Indonesia alone, even with Australian help, will be enough to slow the continuing increase. Rudd will need to take decisive action, just as the Hawke government did in 1990 and Howard/Ruddock in 2001. Exactly what policies will be needed remains to be seen, but mere tough rhetoric and crossing our fingers that Indonesia will somehow manage the situation are unlikely to suffice. Rudd is fooling himself if he imagines that immigration and refugee questions arent every bit as powerful, divisive and potentially vote-changing issues as in the recent past.
Of course the Newspoll might just be a “rogue”, or the asylum seeker issue might not be the predominant cause of the sudden reverse for Labor. However Rudd’s seemingly ineffectual handling of the Mexican standoff with Sri Lankan Tamils on board the Australian customs vessel Oceanic Viking (and the asylum seeker issue more broadly) is the only obvious evident change in the Australian political landscape over the last few weeks, so it’s a reasonable guess that it’s a key factor.
No doubt many left-leaning pundits will either ignore this uncomfortable fact of public opinion, or dismiss it as the untutored response of the prejudiced Bogan masses, exhibiting the same ignorant lynch mob mentality so charmingly portrayed on last night’s Four Corners in relation to serial paedophile Deniis Ferguson. However, on this occasion popular response and sound policy may just coincide.
Perhaps the Left needs to start grappling seriously with the proposition that John Howard’s infamous “we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come” line was on the money in a policy as well as populist sense. Australia is clearly facing an imminent and ongoing asylum seeker “pipeline” of at least 10,000 irregular boat arrival asylum seekers per year. Moreover, with refugee numbers worldwide estimated at 24 million, we may eventually face the prospect of even larger numbers if the current flow isn’t stemmed.
A small taste of development life
Jon Skeet explains that human complexity is one of the causes of software complexity. Everything you might think is simple — numbers, letters and dates — is actually devilishly tricky.
Fighting juvenile diabetes type 1
Last year I wrote on this blog
Meet Nikita McBride. Shes the daughter of friends of mine Ken McBryde and Stephanie Smith who are the co-founders of the wonderful architecture firm Innovarchi. Nikita has recently been diagnosed with juvenile diabetes type 1. In January 2009 shes participating in the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation Bike Ride to Cure Type 1 Diabetes. I received an email from Stephanie directing me to this website where you can keep an eye on her participation and help out with a donation if youd like.
And January 2010 is coming around. Here’s Nikita and her sister Bianca’s websites for this year and I’ve jumped in and made a donation.
Hello,
My name is Nikita, and I got diagnosed with type 1 diabetes on the 8th October 2008. On 19/10/09 (my b-day!) i will have done at least 1,504 injections (4 per day) and 2,256 finger pricks (6 per day)!!!
Three days after being diagnosed i did the 3km Walk to Cure diabetes out at Olympic Park, and loved it. In January this year I did the 2009 Ride for a Cure. Last time you all helped me to raise $12,500 and I rode a total of 40 kms.
I am really excited that JDRF are funding research that is really close to finding a cure for people. Some of the important research achievements in the last year were:
- Researchers at the Garvan Institute in Sydney found a potential vaccine for type 1 diabetes
- A JDRF industry partner is now commercialising a new drug designed to reverse the autoimmune process that causes type 1 diabetes
- Researchers found that two common cancer drugs can block & reverse type 1 diabetes in mice.
Stupid mice! what ever happened to curing people?!
In January 2010 I’m going to do the ride again with my mum Stephanie and my sister Bianca.
So please help me again and press the donate button at the bottom of the screen, not just to help me, but to help every one of those other five kids that get diagnosed each day.
thanks!!
Love NIKITA :-)
/) /)
( -.- )
c( _ _ )
Please feel free to jump in yourselves. As Jacques commented last year “Donated. A very simple process I must say.”
What do you do?
Gadgets: Kindle 6/10 Livescribe 10/10
I’m usually a proud technology laggard, letting more intrepid people go ahead of me so they can help me out when I get round to the technology, letting systems get better sorted out and bug-fixed, and letting prices fall before I jump in. But, given how cheap they were – each under $300 – I was amongst the first in Australia to have Amazon ship me a Kindle, and just last week bought a Livescribe pen.
My reactions? I’ve found the Kindle quite disappointing. I thought it was a no-brainer that it would have some lighting built in to enable reading in the dark. The reading window is a little small and the interface is, well clunky. I’m surprised it’s such a success. The integration with Amazon’s publishing is great, but so much effort is put into protecting IP, that it makes the user experience pretty heavy weather. After my experience with the iPhone I’m constantly grabbing for the screen to move something around, zoom in on something. No dice I’m afraid.
Also I thought it would be great for surfing the net in an armchair – and then reading it with the convenience of a book (even small laptops aren’t all that pleasant to do that). I knew it was black and white only, but most of my web-surfing is reading text only, so I was looking forward to it. I’ve just spent about 15 minutes trying to figure out how to surf basic-web on the damn thing, but I’m still not there yet. The contrast with an iPhone, where, as with the original Macs and now windows, you just start trying to do things and teach yourself as you go, is striking. I am told the Kindle will read pdfs. So I loaded some into it, but can’t find them :(
Some of these problems may be fixed to some extent on the Kindle DX, but I doubt I’ll be buying it any time soon.
Meanwhile I got a Livescribe pen and pad from Officeworks for $249 and I’ve rarely made a better investment (I think this is a sale price, so hurry on down there before they go back to $329). If you don’t yet know about them, the package consists of an electronic pen which
- writes normally
- records as you write so you can playback the lecture or meeting you’re taking notes in
- time and position stamps the recording so that you can simply point to a note you took and it will replay what was being heard when you wrote it.
Rather than the nightmare of some tablet which you’d have to wipe each time you wanted a new page, you take notes in a notebook that’s normal enough, but if you look closely you can see microdots all over it. This is what tells the system which part of the recording to go to. You can then take your recording/notes and hoist them on the internet for anyone else to share.
Spectacular stuff. Check out a demo here.
Postscript: One thing that I forgot to mention was that in seeking to extract money the web-surfing function seems to be seriously disabled. If you want to charge something like US$25 a month for a NYT subscription, you’d better make sure that people can’t surf their way to the NYT and read the content for free! So the ‘basic web’ function won’t take me to lots of sites, like one of my favourites. How stupid is that. I also hope that Apple is working on a tablet. They’re masters of the closed system too, but if part of their offering is a convenient way to sit in an armchair or a tram and surf the net freely, then I’m an early adopter.