Navigation
Custom Search
Last night on Radio National's Australia Talks, Paul Barclay hosted Clive Hamilton and Mark Pesce to discuss the Internet censorship proposal from Labor.
The host was pretty clearly pro-censorship, and allowed Hamilton's bogus claims about the effects of pornography to pass without challenge. Anti-censorship callers on this talkback programme seem to have spent the entire programme on hold. My favourite bit, however, is when he cuts off Mark Pesce's description of how the Chinese have admitted it's not technically possible to have effective, mandatory censorship.
Paul Barclay: I suppose we could debate all day whether or not, technologically, it's going to be possible to actually block these sites, but what I'm also interested in here...
Which reminds me of the classic quoted, attributed variously to an academic or French bureaucrat:
That's all very well in practice, but how does it work in theory?
Clearly the only way the pro-censorship guys can win this debate is by completely avoiding head-on debate. That certainly seems to be Conroy's approach!
19 Nov 2008 11:33 [category: /politix] #
Already had a few responses about wireless sensors. Des suggests looking at SquidBee which is an open implementation. Quite interesting.
Rich recommends a book, Making Things Talk: Practical Methods for Connecting Physical Objects, which I've ordered. Looks very interesting. He also suggested Little Bird Electronics' workshops on the Arduino. There's one next weekend and I'm very tempted...
Thanks for the tips guys!
19 Sep 2008 15:05 [category: /geek] #
I've been watching the space of low-power wireless networking for some time, as it has some cool possibilities for sensor networks. ZigBee is one such standard that seems to be gaining support. It's a lot simpler and lower power than other protocols like Bluetooth.
Make magazine had a really interesting article recently about using ZigBee inertial sensors to track the crashes and hits taken by a roller derby team, and use it to trigger "zap", "pow", "boom" sound effects. Very cool, and it all seemed quite simple!
I'd like to use the ZigBee temperature sensors in my garden. The long-term plan is to monitor the weather and supply tank water through an irrigation system only when it's needed.
So has anyone used this ZigBee stuff and know any good resources to start out?
19 Sep 2008 10:14 [category: /geek] #
Geo: -36.978000,147.147763
19 Aug 2008 11:36 [category: /travel] #
As mentioned yesterday, Holly and I managed to get a booking at Oscillate Wildly for last night, our ten year anniversary. I'd attempted to book back in May, but they were already booked out. Fortunately they put me on the waiting list, and it seems someone pulled out.
So how was it? Spectacular! I'm not one of those bloggers who takes photos of every course—I appreciate those who do, but for me it spoils the experience—so I'll just touch on the highlights.
The tomato snow was delightful. Full tomato flavour, but with a shaved granita texture. Essentially it was frozen gazpacho, so it shouldn't be too hard to replicate, and I might give that a go in the summer.
If you're wondering what Tonka is, don't worry, I had to ask too.
My favourite two dishes were the duck and the lamb. Both were beautifully cooked and had intriguing taste combinations. Sassafras with the duck was interesting. A faint hint of root beer or sarsparilla coming through over the duck and cinnamon. I wouldn't have thought of combining either flavourings with duck, but it worked surprisingly well. And I don't particularly like sarsparilla or root beer.
The lamb was definitely the highlight. A few small slices of the most succulent, slightly bloody lamb served over slices of eggplant. The reduction poured on one side of the plate was just amazing, and I wonder how much effort goes into this element alone. The other side of the plate had roasted pistachios and a sweet quince/port sauce which also went nicely. But the reduction almost had me licking my plate.
At $300 once we'd bought wine (though they allow BYO for $3/person) and left a tip, it's not a cheap meal. But then, we don't celebrate a decade together very often, and we're both foodies who love these kinds of taste sensations. I wouldn't recommend it if you're after a meal rather than an experience. This is playful food, messing with your sensing and toying with accepted ideas of flavour.
Maybe for our 20th anniversary we'll get to El Bulli? If I make a booking now, we might just get in.
19 Jul 2008 16:09 [category: /food] #
Politicans seem to have been constantly making a hash of competition policy in Australia. The idea behind such policy is to smooth the way of competition, and allow markets to improve the lot of consumers. It's pretty simple stuff, but in many markets in Australia, there's very little competition.
Take, for example, private health insurance. If you earn more than a certain amount, you're effecively forced to have it. So you want to find out which plan suits your needs, but it's almost impossible to work that out. Health insurers use all kinds of sneaky tricks to exclude certain benefits, restrict you to specific care providers and make it difficult to claim. Sneaky tricks like allowing private doctors to decide, case-by-case, whether they'll work with your insurer or not mean it's impossible to make an informed decision when you're choosing a policy.
It doesn't have to be like this. What's needed is for the government to set a common set of criteria that companies operating in the market must disclose to enable direct comparisons. The former government had a half-hearted stab at this with private health insurance, offering a database of available policies. But because it doesn't cover the sneaky tricks, it's virtually useless.
This is an approach that could be taken across industries. I work for a telco and see the marketplace swamped with conflicting offers using sneaky fine print to con consumers into thinking they're getting a good deal, when of course they aren't. The offers change constantly, with some providers offering genuinely good deals to build market share, before switching to sneakier deals that aren't anything like as good.
This means that comparison services like Choice really can't offer simple advice. Instead, consumers are left to try and make up their mind without adequate information.
The ACCC should be empowered to act in markets that aren't working. They should be able to direct industries to come up with their own common criteria for comparing products, and force them to disclose the information in a machine-readable form with an open-access license, which will enable the data to sliced and diced to help consumers make informed choices. Even better, industries where online billing is the norm should be forced to allow consumers to extract their bill data in a standard format, so they can upload it to comparison sites and be recommended the best offers based on past usage.
Coming up with common criteria would be hard, there's no doubt, and you can just imagine the cries of "stifle innovative offers" from the industries. That's the cry of people scared of competition. With a decent review mechanism, new pricing models could be easioly incorporated into the standards.
The other are that will improve competition is easing switching between providers. This can be applied in just about every market. Banks are likely to be forced to make switching accounts easier, with direct debits carried across. The big ones are screaming about it, because they like their cosy little lock-in on consumers. If they're screaming, the policy must be doing something right.
Other areas that desperately need work include the telecommunications sector. To switch ADSL1 or ADSL2+ providers can be incredibly complex. To do it smoothly, both providers need to have signed up for the "fast churn" process, and there's a different agreement for ADSL1 and ADSL2+. Telstra, of course, haven't signed up for ADSL2+, which means consumers wishing to transfer from Telstra ADSL2+ can be without their internet connection for weeks when switching providers.
The solution here is simple: force all providers to support a fast churn mechanism. If they don't want to, it's clear they fear competition. What other reason could there be?
19 May 2008 20:35 [category: /politix] #
My LCD monitor has a dead pixel. I've tried running some stuck pixel tools for a few hours at a time in an effort to fix it, without success. Next step is to try the more drastic methods. Unfortunately it's right in my field of vision, so can be quite annoying.
19 May 2008 19:39 [category: /geek] #
I've just had a very bizarre exchange with Rodney Gedda from IDG, a big magazine and book publisher. I used to write for some IDG publications and was, briefly, editor of a micro-magazine they had, Online World which became Webmaster.
Anyway, Rodney opens with: I'm interested in running more technical content on IDG's online network. Please contact me if you are interested in contributing. I presume he'd found my writing on one of the Planets, probably after reading my comments about Joel Spolsky's latest piece.
A little flattered, and always wanting to keep my hand in IT journalism stuff, I followed it up with some questions and proposals. In my dealings with IDG in the past, I've been pretty shocked by what they insist you sign over before paying you, perpetual, universal rights basically. So I brought this up and he suggested IDG own the copy and I get "perpetual publicity and bragging rights". Hmmm.
I came straight out and asked if this was a paying gig. Unfrotunately I don't have a budget for that yet, but you'll get free publicity. Meh.
When I write for a corporation, I want a lot more than publicity. Some help paying the mortgage would be nice. You'd be using my knowledge, experience and work to enrich a giant corporation. Err, no. I don't think Patrick McGovern needs my charity.
Those of you out there also receiving offers like this, be aware that your work is worth something. At the minimum, you might use something like this to get your foot in the door and have some publications you can point to, but you certainly wouldn't be signing away perpetual and universal rights to your work!
For the record, my writing is available, for a fee.
19 Mar 2008 16:57 [category: /geek] #
That's right opposition fucktards, Wayne Swan is inexperienced as Treasurer. He's never been Treasurer of Australia before. Then again, neither has Tony Smith. In fact, Tony Smith has never been a government minister.
Perhaps, if experience is the main criteria, we should bring back the most experienced Treasurer from the Labor Party. He'd certainly have a great line to slap down dickheads like Tony Smith in Question Time.
19 Feb 2008 17:05 [category: /politix] #
The marketing gurus at my work want to redesign our online ordering system. What we ended up with is certainly problematic, but at the time was about as much as we could get into the scope of this huge project. It makes sense, now that the dust has settled, to revisit and massively improve it.
The trouble is, there were a lot of thought that went into the specific flow we finally got. A lot of complex, important decisions were made, and they haven't necessarily been documented.
To help in our design process, I suggested we go straight to proper mockups, skipping the wireframe stage since we're pretty clear on what we want. Now I'm digging around for the best way to do this.
The mockups need to have the majority of the form logic we'll be using, as the form logic is the most important part of our improvements. We need to shake out the dependent questions we'll need to ask, so we can structure it all properly.
So, dear lazyweb, does anyone have any tips for tools or techniques to use in mockups? These need to be more than just "white site" type stuff, though styling isn't anything like as important as the underlying logic.
