Category: rant’n’rave

Duh! you already pay a carbon tax!!

To the dummies who don’t want a carbon tax… Do you realise that we, the Australian taxpayer, currently PAY the fossil fuel industry $9 billion dollars a year? They are a drain on your pocket to the tune of around $450 per person, per year.

Of course they don’t want you to stop! We are paying them to pollute! It’s insanity, but that’s where bowing to industry based lobby groups will get you!

Personally, I’d be quite happy to dump the idea of a carbon tax if the government would just stop paying these insane subsidies as recommended as far back as 2003 by Christopher Riedy, when he said in his working paper:

Removal of these perverse subsidies can provide a ‘double dividend’ of greenhouse abatement and improved economic performance.

You know it makes sense!

no google, I don’t like that!

In the wake of my previous post, I was checking out some of the photos on Google maps of Sydney Road, one of my photos came up first, which was nice, but then I started navigating around the nearby photos… they were all crappy photos of a shoe store!

I probably missed this addition, but I’d always thought that photos only came from two sources – Panoramio or geotagged Flickr, which meant that there was a reasonably high quality – a natural filter if you like. Now it seems that a business owner or anyone else who adds photos to a Google Place page, gets them added to the maps interface.

Frankly, that’s crap! At least allow the user to filter them out. I often use this feature to explore an area of interest, I don’t want some retailer’s happy snaps of their shop diluting the experience!

Big retail never got it

Gerry Harvey (and @harveynormanau ) has become the visible target of the online shopper recently with his comments regarding GST and a ‘level playing field’. Technically, he’s correct, but his approach and methods work best for a certain demographic on shallow, sensationalist popular television – in the faster moving, better informed blogosphere, he’s experienced a massive ‘suicidal‘ .

I’m not going to add much to the comment that hasn’t already been said better already by others [1, 2, 3]. However, I will try to add a little insight from my own perspective.

About 18 years ago, I worked for a company that prepared film separations for print (crumbs! only 18 years ago – do film houses still exist?). It was highly skilled and exacting work, and the company, Show-Ads, was the acknowledged leader of the industry in Australia. Some of the work we produced was simply superb.

Anyway, we could see the internet was going to have a huge impact. We also had really close ties with the major ad agencies and direct links to the several major retailers (Target, Myer, Coles, Kmart). We produced all the artwork for the catalogues these retailers stuffed in your mailbox, and we held digital image files of all their product (we photographed much of it ourselves). In short, we were really well placed to give these retailers a huge head start into online sales.

So, in 1995, the company spawned a new division called Marketspace. It was going to be soooo cool – it was a virtual shopping mall where a visitor could enter, choose a retailer, browse products, and … well, they could browse products. To be fair, looking back now, it sounds like crap, and it kinda was (frames, animated gifs etc.), but 15 years ago, believe me, it was the shizzle!

MarketSpace logo

Funny thing though, the retailers were dead scared of it. They didn’t want to get involved, they didn’t want the risk, the didn’t think it would work, they didn’t want it to work because that would mean people wouldn’t visit their stores. It was an attitude that, even then, marked them as dinosaurs, trudging reluctantly down the long road to the tarpits of extinction. And here we are today, more then 15 years later, and we’re still hearing the same arguments!

So, Gerry (and your ilk). It’s too late. Not just a few weeks too late, not just a few years, but 15 bloody years too late!

Amusingly, one of the brands I remember from the Marketspace days was Myer’s failed venture into electronics: MegaMart (remember those?), and 15 of those stores were sold off to Harvey Norman! So, Gerry, you really did have your chance 15 years ago! Hilarious that now you can go to harveynorman.com.au and search/browse product, but not buy! Sure, there’s no animated gifs, but it’s still that 1995 mindset.

Put the #wikileaks heat on your bank

Donation payment channels to Wikileaks are being choked off by political pressure. The US State Department have had words with Paypal, Visa and Mastercard and all three have withdrawn their services despite Wikileaks not breaking any laws.

Check out this statement from DataCell, the hosting company that provides the payment gateway to Wikileaks donations.

Then, if you use any of the above payment services, go to your bank’s contact form and raise a complaint. They’ll have complaint resolution systems that force them to respond. Here’s what I just sent my bank.

I wish to complain about the withdrawal by Visa of payment services to DataCell Hosting Services, who provide the payment gateway used by Wikileaks. Visa’s claim that the service was suspended because of illegal activity, or to protect Visa’s brand name are both false and ridiculous. Wikileaks has not been shown to commit any crime, and it defies logic that Visa prefers to associate its brand with pornographers and gamblers than a legitimate news organisation. This illogical, politically motivated behaviour seems certain to expose Visa to financial risk and ultimately affect the cost and efficiency of the service it provides to me as a customer.

I eagerly await their reply.

Oh, and consider donating to Wikileaks – they’ve still got plenty of friends.

Dear Julian, about #wikileaks…

First, I want to say that you’re a bit of a hero to me. Anyone with enough passion to put their life on the line in pursuit of a cause, deserves respect. When that passion is used to bring powerful people to account for their actions, it earns my deepest admiration.

Now those powerful people are annoyed. Your part in the release of the ‘secret’ cables seems to have tipped off a level of hysteria that maybe even surprised you. After all, the Afghan War Diaries controversy died down pretty quickly after release, with virtually everyone admitting that nothing dangerous or harmful had really been released – embarrassing, certainly, but nothing like we were led to believe by the ‘powerful people’. There wasn’t really any argument that this was information that the public had a right to know.

So, Wikileaks reveals truth. Never was it more so apparent than with the latest release of US diplomatic cables. The truth these documents reveal is often dull, sometimes confirms our suspicions, and very occasionally provides a surprise. What kind of truth is it though? The cables are a mixture of factual reporting and opinion pieces – they are not official government policy, they are ‘true’ in that they are clearly genuine, however, the content is often just background information and surmise on the part of Embassy staff. It shapes decisions, it’s sometimes embarrasing, but it isn’t policy. Because of this, some people are saying it shouldn’t have been revealed, that it gives a false impression, but these people are missing the point. We can’t choose the truth – it just is. We can’t say that we want to know when there’s collateral murder, or atrocities such as Abu Ghraib, but keep the rest. It’s all or nothing. I know which I’d rather have.

The reactions to this truth are amusing too. A stark contrast between Kevin Rudd, upon hearing the release of a far from flattering cable, and the reaction of the Afghan and Pakistani Prime Ministers. Kevin says: “harden up, that’s what diplomacy is”, while the other two use the time honoured tactic of denying the credibility of the source. While I agree that Kevin may have been “an abrasive, impulsive control freak”, I’d rather him than Karzai or Gilani any day!

Now they’ve arrested you. After you surrendered yourself to an arrest warrant on a bizarre charge. Rape? Apparently not, though that is one of the labels that have been used to make it sound more dramatic. Nothing to do with Wikileaks though, however it’s going to conveniently get you sidelined while the world’s leaders try to find other ways of protecting their vested interests. Regardless of whether you believe the conspiracy theories, clearly something took place between you and at least two women. That doesn’t paint you in a very flattering light, and probably represents a rather significant character flaw.

Character flaws don’t make Wikileaks bad though. I am reminded of a larger than life Norm Gallagher, who, as the leader of the now outlawed Builder’s Labourers Federation, graced the television news of my formative years. No-one could say that Norm was a nice guy. He was a bullying, corrupt bastard by all accounts, and there are many people who would have happily seen him, and his Sydney counterpart, Jack Mundey, rot in a jail cell. However, those same people (and their grandchildren) now potter along to the Queen Victoria Market and City Baths in Melbourne, or enjoy the wonderful Rocks and Botanical Gardens in Sydney. These fantastic places may not exist today but for the BLF’s Green Bans. So, even bad people can do very good things. Not that I think you’re bad, just that whatever else you do does not diminish the good of wikileaks.

So, now to a trial. I don’t know what the game is. I can’t believe that you haven’t got a pretty solid plan in place, you strike me as the sort of person who leaves very little to chance. Journalists the world over are going to be writing about the nature of Justice, all of them knowing that theirs is a profession that relies on uncovering truth. You are, after all, just a publisher. You didn’t steal or write the documents, you simply prepared them for publication.

I hope you frustrate the authorities just a little longer – it’s great to see them wringing their hands and furiously putting spin on their embarrassment. After all, most of these governments came to power on a promise of openness and transparency. What they forgot to say was that they meant it to only apply to others!

google maps announce an update

Wow! so much to post about all of a sudden. Google have just announced an update to their streetmap data, adding new streets in the rapidly expanding areas of our cities. Yay! I mean it is exciting, in fact, I think it’s the first update to the map data since they released it! Well, at least you can no longer say that Open Street Map is more up to date than Google, now that they’ve got all that shiny new data – lets go and have a look!

We can use the wonderful MapCompare to see how the new Google Data compares to Open Street Map in some of the new, outlying suburbs, like: Caroline Springs, oh darn that’s not such a good example – how about Sydenham – that’s better, I’m sure Google will add the cycle paths soon. Let’s try Lalor, oops! What about we try somewhere out east? like Pakenham.

Oh damn it!

Seriously though, I did have to carefully select locations where OSM was clearly better than the new improved Google Maps. They’ve done a great job updating it. Just goes to show though, that a huge company like Google takes years to get around to posting data that in many ways is not as detailed as that sourced from volunteers and offered up for free reuse. I think I’ll go and stick all those shiny new OSM streets on my Garmin GPS – because I definitely can’t do that with Google’s!

blackberry playbook ‘sneak peek’

OK, a second post about #MoMoMelb. I’ve already had a bit of a moan about Monday’s event so you might think I’m dead against them. No, wouldn’t want to give that impression – consider this constructive criticism 😉

One of the generous sponsors of MoMoMelb is Blackberry, all these events have their sponsors – it just wouldn’t work without them. And the sponsors have to feel like they’re getting value for their dollars. All I can say is that they might need to adjust their message a little…

We were to be treated to a ‘sneak peek’ of the new Blackberry tablet, the Playbook. Since Apple’s release of the iPad, there’s been a steady stream of press predicting a range of usurpers… so far the predictions have failed to come to much. Anyway, Blackberry is a pretty solid player – a much more worthy adversary in this space than a bunch of OEM hardware makers cranking out cheap tablets and slapping Android onto them, and given the audience, we’ve all heard the reports and speculation, so there’s a fair bit of anticipation in the room.

So, with this captive, tech-savvy audience, what do they do? They play the promo video that accompanied the launch more than two months ago and talk through some specifications which were also released at the same time… that’s it! That’s the Sneak Peek! What a missed opportunity! To be fair the hapless company rep probably had no more information than that – the device isn’t scheduled to ship here for at least another 5 months – if they meet their targets!

Anyway – I had a little laugh to myself about the optimistic predictions they have for battery life, on a device that runs flash, probably in the background! Ha ha! seems I wasn’t the only one who didn’t swallow everything at face value.

Anyway, I don’t know about tablet computing – it’s one of those things that you’ll either find a space for in your life or you won’t. I’ve used an iPad a fair bit, and I love it for a few things; news browsing in particular, over breakfast! But you’re not going to carry one in your pocket. I certainly won’t be buying one. iPads are the darlings of the senior staff around our place, so I suppose there’s going to be a healthy take up of PlayBooks amongst people who don’t pay for their own hardware.

Actually, on that subject there was another hilarious moment when someone asked who had a Windows 7 phone – a surprising number of hands went up. The question was followed with “who bought it themselves”, ummm no-one! After all, IE7, what were they thinking?

a lack of location awareness

Went along to #MoMoMelb yesterday, the local chapter of a pretty active mobile industry group. Their focus is usually a bit on the carrier/commercial side of the industry, so I rarely find anything that really interests me, but this one was about Location Based Services, so naturally, I couldn’t resist.

I remember the first time I held an iPod Touch, loaded up Google Maps and hit the ‘Locate Me’ button. That little shiver of wonder as a device without GPS or Cellular data pinpointed my house to within 20 metres – that was my first brush with Skyhook Wireless. Amazing stuff, and really great to hear from a ‘behind the scenes’ company with a solid business model.

Then there was a bit of a panel discussion, which included one point that just amazed me. Mark White, CEO of Locatrix, a company that does some pretty solid stuff in the mobile location based area, responded to a question that included the words ‘Open Source’ with something like this: “There’s an open source mapping tool somewhere (audience: Open Street Map), yeah, but when I last looked, they only had a couple of roads for the whole of Australia” and he continued to make his point, basically dissing any open source contribution to the mapping/location space. Now, that may not be a perfect quote, but it’s pretty close, so what does it tell us?

Well, I can forgive someone for not being aware of OSM. I can even forgive someone involved in the web for not being aware of it. Someone involved in providing Location Based Services – I’m getting uneasy. A CEO of such a company – a ‘leader in the industry‘, that’s decidedly wonky. Someone who then goes on to dismiss it in a public forum of industry folk – OK, that’s a complete loss of credibility.

I couldn’t help myself of course, I interjected. He then admitted that he hadn’t looked at OSM for some time – no shit! But surely he keeps his ear to the ground, surely he would know that Yahoo/Flickr integrate OSM, and CloudMade offer excellent location based APIs with customisable maps, you’d think he’d know about MapQuest’s recent announcements… surely! and of course, it’s all free, so I can download it to my GPS and use it to find my way if I want.

Maybe there’s just too much information to absorb – maybe he could start by looking up his office location in MapCompare (2), I’m sure that’ll pique his curiosity 😉

I am too cruel – he did say some good stuff and he’s obviously running a great business. It just really gets my goat when people think opensource = crap.

cycling, a battle on many fronts

One of those mornings when I arrive at work a little more stressed than usual because of the stupid behaviour of other road users:

  1. (and a pet hate of mine) as I approach an intersection, I am passed in the last few metres by a black commodore with tinted windows, who immediately cuts in front of me to turn left. Nowhere to go, I let him know what he did, but he is predictably arrogant and stupid and tells me to get a licence… hmm NFI.
  2. trying to enjoy a beautiful morning (and forget indicent 1), when a loud shout comes from close behind. I recognised it as a warning that a faster cyclist was coming, so I didn’t react, but 20 metres further on when we were all at a traffic light, another cyclist tackled the shouter – ‘you frightened the shit out of me’. No apologies from the arrogant one. In context, this is a heavily used on-road bicycle path with cars parked on the left (which you need to give a wide berth!), if faster cyclists find the cycle lane too crowded, there’s usually plenty of room in the car lane to go around – no need to bully commuters for space. Not only that, but in this case we were approaching a red light – how far did he think he was going to get? – just arrogant!
  3. Just a little further down the road I’m gaining speed after an intersection when a cyclist passes me so fast and close that I feel the breeze on my arm. Again, it’s not like there’s any lack of room. I reflected that this was no different – and hardly any less likely to cause injury – than the ute which buzzed me last week. All it would take is a flick of the handlebars and I’d be down.

So, while it’s fashionable to frame conflict on the roads as car vs. bike, the truth is much less defined. Arrogance and impatience can be found in a truck, a car, or on a bike.

In fact, if I had to draw a common factor to all three incidents, it would be the level of obsession with equipment and matching colours! Yep, the vacant blockhead in the doted-on black commodore was not so different from the two carbon mounted, matching lycra clad bike lane speedsters. Take a moment to consider people around you guys!

not another bottleneck!

These days, web developers tend to use a lot of hosted services. It makes sense – you don’t want to have to re-write everything and host it locally. Unfortunately, at the same time you hand off responsibility, you also hand off control. If the remote service goes down or has problems, you have problems! … and there’s nothing you can do about it.

The latest culprit I’ve noticed is typekit.

I wondered why the site I was loading was so unresponsive, page load was 30-40 seconds. A quick look in the status bar told me…
waiting for use.typekit.com...
Frustrating!