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I sure hope Peter Garrett got a good price for his soul because his principles sure haven't amounted to much. He seems to have a Short Memory with his politicans, party lines, don't cross that floor!
There is one thing he's achieved. Any time one of my mates decides to joins the ALP and says you have to be in power to achieve change, my answer can be "oh yeah, like Peter Garrett has then?"
18 Nov 2008 13:36 [category: /politix] #
Geo: -36.988866,147.145640
18 Aug 2008 15:37 [category: /travel] #
Just got a call to offer me a table at Oscillate Wildly tonight. I'd attempted to book months ago for tonight and it was already booked out. Yay! I've wanted to eat at this place for ages.
Review sometime over the weekend.
18 Jul 2008 15:44 [category: /food] #
Ten years ago I snogged a lovely young woman at The Globe nightclub in Newtown (now a backpackers hostel and pizza joint). Ten years on and we've travelled the world, cycled thousands of kilometres together (including across a country), lived in another country, had the odd argument, moved back to Australia, bought a house and settled into life together. Life is good!
Happy anniversary Holly. Let's make it another 100 years eh?
18 Jul 2008 10:36 [category: /me] #
I went to Google Developer Day today and learnt a lot. There's some very clever people doing some very clever stuff.
The sessions I went to in the morning were iGoogle gadgets, which is some very interesting stuff. We're thinking about using some of this kind of stuff for usage indicators and the like. it's remarkably easy to knock up a cool little gadget. Next was the YouTube where I mostly read my emails, as I'm not that fussed.
OpenSocial is very interesting. The open approach definitely appeals -- I was using Friendster, Orkut and the like long before anyone discovered Facebook, and got pretty over the idea pretty quickly. I'm quite interested in the possibilities of some social networking apps, done right. Last.fm is brilliant, and gives me information about music I really care about. LinkedIn is very good for professional contacts, and does that one task well. So the open API really appeals so you could integrate all your social networking stuff. But from the sessions I went to, the OpenSocial stuff Google has is alpha quality at best right now. I'm sure it'll improve quite quickly though.
Mapplets was very interesting. It's much like the Maps API but designed to let the user put your data in as a layer amongst many, which has many possibilities. The presenter seemed very nervous talking in front of the crowd, but he actually did a really good job of explaining it, so hopefully he'll get over the nerves and become an excellent presenter.
One of the items in the morning keynote was GWT, which is a toolkit that allows developers to write Java code that compiles into optimized JavaScript. The integration he was demonstrating with Eclipse was amazing. Almost makes me want to learn the acronym-soup that is Java. But not quite enough.
It was a great day, with as you'd expect from Google excellent catering. Pretty amazing the stuff they turn on for developers, but then I guess they get the opportunity to poach the best and brightest. My only complaint would be the ditchwater coffee. It left a bad taste in my mouth all day! Ugh. It was like the worst business hotel or Amercian diner percolator shite. Maybe I'm just picky?
18 Jun 2008 22:00 [category: /geek] #
Gah. I spent far too much time today trying to work around a weird JavaScript bug in Firefox. I had a form that needed to have different hidden parameters depending on the search type in a select list (ahh, the joys of integrating disparate systems). The rewriting worked just fine the first time, but when the user switched back it'd break in a strange way.
Just for relief I tried doing it the Prototype way. Not only was it more readable, logical and shorter, it magically didn't encounter the same bug.
I think it's become time for Prototype to be available throughout the site I work on. I've used it for a few small, targetted applications, and it's wonderful. Time for it to be used everywhere.
First, however, I need to see if I can lazy load it.
18 Apr 2008 17:14 [category: /geek] #
I recently a rant about not being able to buy an album for a band I'd stumbled upon.. Lucy from the band has evidently been vanity googling, as she found my post and dropped me a note.
Just did a random google and found that you like our tunes. That's nice to know! Understand your frustration at not being able to purchase said tunage... but have patience, our debut album is being released on Stereo Test Kit Records later this year and then you can buy it as many times as you like!
So that's nice to hear, though August seems a long way away. The annoying part, though, is that the album they released last year isn't going to be made more widely available.
We recorded 'six feet above the ground' early last year and it was more of a demo really, we just sold it at a few gigs and stuff. Anyway. A real album is on its way. And we promise there will be a million easy ways to buy it online. All you have to do is wait till August...
This I find annoying. If it's only demo quality, stick it online and label it a demo. Charge money if you like, whatever, but it'll only help. But hey, it's their musical output! I'll just have to wait until August.
Regardless, I'd recommend checking out The Social Services and the tracks they have released. I've really been enjoying it.
BTW, I've recently subscribed to Metacritic's music feed and it's brilliant. The idea is quite simple: they aggregate the best snippets of reviews from all over the place, and score them, so you can see what the rough consensus is. The best part is that they always pull out the snarkiest quotes from the reviews.
The only annoying part about it is their insistence on using American college language when describing album. Nobody puts out a second album, it's always their "sophomore" album. WTF?
18 Apr 2008 14:33 [category: /music] #
Oh how the mighty fall! Who would have thought I'd find myself subscribing to something called Marketing Experiments Journal. I bet the use of the word "Journal" makes the marketers quiver with scientifitude. Sounds much more white coat than "newsletter" doesn't it?
I feel dirty. And not the nice kind.
18 Mar 2008 12:04 [category: /weird] #
I imagine most of you reading this blog already read Joel on Software, but today's post is destined to be a classic. Joel worked at Microsoft on the Excel team from 1991 to 1995, where he clearly learnt a lot about programming in the real world, with real world pragmatism and real world ugly hacks. His writings are always a good antidote to assuming that Microsoft is the evil empire, intent on owning the world. In reality, it's a bumbling megacorp making sensible, rational decisions that end up hurting someone, somewhere no matter which way the decision goes.
Today's post is about the war between the web standards sticklers and the poor saps who have to implement browsers. It's a really hilarious description of why standards aren't the panacea, and why writing useful stuff for the web is hard.
I have a sneaking suspicion that his prediction that IE8 will revert to buggy IE7 mode by default before release is spot on. But at least in the meantime enough web developers will notice that their pages are broken and fix them.
Me? I'm pushing the change to our site tonight that will force IE7 rendering mode, because I don't have time to fix the buggy behaviour just now. Pragmatic, but I hate it. However, you try telling your boss you need to spend a week hunting down tiny little bugs caused by a software upgrade that's a few months away from being out in the real world.
