Sea Shepherd prepare for the whaling season
My hero, Captain Paul Watson has landed in Brisbane and will start preparing the Steve Irwin for the 2008/09 whaling season. He has also said that the current Australian government is weaker than the previous on the grounds of whaling in Australian and International waters.
I'm really upset with this government because they have reneged on every single promise they have made to protect the whales
Japan has reduced is whaling target this year by 20 percent and includes 700 southern Minke whales and 50 Fin whales. Apparently thats 'an encouraging sign' to Peter Garrett.
Will the internet work for your business?
The short answer is no. The internet will not do everything for you. It will not work for you.
You will only get out of the internet what you want to and it will be directly related to how much you put into it.
Businesses consistently believe that by simply having a site with products and / or services on it that suddenly their sales will increase and this, for the most part, is simply untrue.
In Australia, the e-boom is taking a lot longer to gain momentum in comparison with America. Australian businesses simply do not consider the internet to be a vital marketing resource and are unwilling to invest into it. This causes a lot of businesses to do more damage to their brand image than good.
If you come across two websites with the same product or service and the first website is professionally designed with a good logo, easy navigation and fully functional, you will likely pick that business over the one that has a site that looks like it was designed by the neighbours 10 year old for his school project. In fewer words, cheap looking sites make the company look unprofessional, also, cheap looking sites do not build confidence with visitors who are being offered products to purchase online.
In addition to this is the lack of time being invested into email correspondence. Whether you like it or not, most communication derived from your website will be email. Its easy, its fast and people can use it in their own time. The problem with this is the amount of businesses that do not treat emails with any sufficient level of priority. Emails go unanswered. A lot. People get frustrated and angry and your brand damage continues to grow. Its not a bad thing to only offer phone details on your site if thats the only method of contact you are willing to accept. Fewer potential customers will contact you, but thats better than more potential customers going unanswered via email.
Small business in Australia need to get out of the mentality that the internet will be everything to them and all they need is a 'presence'. There is a very new feeling the the net these days and as much as I hate using buzz words, its 'web 2.0' and because of 'web 2.0' there is this new surge of competition in both design/development and site owning businesses to outdo each other. Simply, if you cannot devote them time and money required into your 'web 2.0' presence, stay offline. You will do less damage.
Poverty in Sydney – Blog Action Day 2008
While I always knew that there were homeless people in Sydney, I never really thought of that as poverty. When I was thinking about my topic for this Blog Action Day, I thought I would keep it close to home but I couldn't work out if it was considered poverty. Of course it is. Where there are homeless, there is poverty. Where there are low income earners barely covering their costs, there is poverty.
I know that there are a lot of feaux homeless people in Sydney who like to beg (and make a bloody good living doing it) and I think my distrust of these individuals clouds my judgement. I am the first person to offer anything I can to people who legitimately need my help but when these beggars have a fresh pack of cigarettes and arn't that dirty then I'm pretty sure they don't need my help. Maybe this is why I don't see Sydney as having levels of poverty.
Photo By Kate Geraghty
I was surprised last week to see a story about the death of a homeless man grace the pages of our prestigious Sydney Morning Herald. This man, John O'Connor was barely 45 when he died on a street in Kings Cross. It wasn't his death that surprised me, or the fact that the Herald ran the story. It was that he died not 500 metres from where I share a building with ex Prime Ministers and NSW Premiers, on William St.
How is it, that we can have true homeless individuals dying on the streets of one of the wealthiest cities in the world? We have one of the best welfare systems on the planet and we do a lot for our less fortunate, but why were we unable to step up and actually change something? I understand that if somebody does not want to be helped then there is simply nothing you can do, but there are other cases, I'm sure, of individuals like John, who try to reach out and get nothing back.
The problem is that there is too big a gap between our high income earners and our low income earners. For instance, the ex-CEO of the company I work for, Simon Baker, was paid over $800,000 as a 'termination payout' for leaving REA. That is obscene. If that was his termination payout, any guesses about his salary would probably put you about $500,000 and that's before you consider his shares in REA. Tell me, what does anybody need that amount of money for? Apparently people do need that much money. A house in Sydney sold recently for $47 million dollars. And yet, people like John O'Connor in the same city can die, alone on a street.
If you think this might be an isolated occurrence. Think again. And while these facts exist, charities like Mission Beat have to ask for a new van. In a city that has this much money, they still require more funding.
The kicker in this story is that there were about 70 people at Johns funeral. This guy had friends. He may have even had family. He was well known enough to have at least 4 separate stories about him in the Sydney Morning Herald. The system failed him and it continues to fail for every day that people are paid ridiculous money while others die of hunger and disease. And all this in Australia. I haven't even mentioned Africa, South America, Burma and everywhere else where human life is treated so poorly.
Wake up Australia. Stop living for yourself only.
Microsoft Expression Studio Web 2
Through my University, I was able to get a bunch of Microsoft development and design software for nothing. This is obviously a vain attempt by Microsoft to lure me to god-awful .Net development or something similar. But, at the end of the day, I am an open source developer and a big fan of the GPL and GNU etc, so I'll stick with my Java and PHP thanksverymuch.
But, while browsing dzone tonight, I happened to notice an interesting article titled "Expression Web 2 for PHP Developers-Simplifying Your PHP Applications".
Well, my first impressions were that it was like a lightweight Dreamweaver. ick. I am a text-editor user. I like IDE's, but when they are IDE's and not pretending-to-be-tech-savvy-drag-and-drop-designers-come-IDE's.
The fact that Web 2 has drag and drop html components. Ergh. Who in their right mind would choose to scroll down a list of available tags and click-and-drag one instead of simply typing '<p></p>'?
Anyway, for an HTML editor, it might be fine. But you dont need anything other than Notepad++ (for syntax highlighting) for coding HTML.
Anyway, I am looking for a new IDE, so I thought I'd give this Expression Web 2 a go (even though the thought of coding PHP in a Microsoft product made me feel a little queezy).
Well, I got as far as this;
1: <?php
2:
3: ?>
And thats it. Wanna know why? Because it wouldnt let save it as a .lib while keeping it registered as a PHP app. Come on, you expect me to consider this a 'serious' development application when I can't register my own extensions? If I select 'php' in the 'save as type' when saving, it either removes the .lib extension and replaces it with .php or it adds .php to the end (ie form.lib.php). And, heres the best part, if I type the php opening and closing tags in and then try to save, it gives me an error saying that because I have php tags, I need to save it as a php file.. ARRRGH!!!!
Searching and viewing the help files gave me nothing. And I'm not going to start giving my libraries a .php extension, sorry Microsoft.
At least now I can try Netbeans 6.5 Beta with PHP support. I hope they dont still force every file you edit to have its own project. So painful. Maybe it's time I wrote my own IDE.
Web services that dont work. My #1 frustration
I can understand when things are in a public beta stage and are still going through testing, that things may not work. But, when a web application has been launched and there is no trace of ‘Beta’ or ‘testing’ anywhere on the site or service then you’d expect things to work ok and in this age of extremely competitive sites and services, it is simply unacceptable when they dont work as required.
Today, I decided that I needed some ‘Bookmark this’ buttons at the bottom of my posts as I have implemented on Skylines Australia.
So, as my blog is with Blogger, I thought there must be a widget or a pre-written piece of code out there to do it for me. I came across Sharethis and Addthis.
Sharethis
I registered at Sharethis and I filled out the form for my blogger button and I followed the prompts to put the widget on my blog and impatiently hit ‘save’, excited about this new addition, I refreshed the blog to be presented with this;
1. A new side widget with nothing in it. 
2. A link underneath my posts that does nothing (because of javascript errors) 
So, that was it for Sharethis. It had already wasted too much of my time.
Addthis
So the next thing to try was Addthis. Their site looked nice and to be honest, the button looked nicer and more functional than the Sharethis equivalent. So, I thought I would give it a go and register. 
This was what I was presented with after registering. No disabling of the form before putting your details in, or even a nice notification page (this is all that was on the page, just some centred text). My registration still went through as gmail was quick to notify me of the successful Addthis registration.
Maybe I just need to stop being lazy. Its not a hard thing to add to the posts and it’d only take me 30mins or so to whip something up. But after these two dismal attempts at attracting me as a user on their sites, I started to think of other sites that constantly irritate me.
Shelfari
This is actually a fairly good site. I do use it and I generally like it. But their search engine is attrocious. What respectful web site in the 21st century has a crap search? None. Searching and indexing has advanced so much in the past 10 years that there is simply no excuse for bad search engines. This site constantly makes me use the advanced search to put everything in to find a book. eg. Searching for ‘A year in tibet’ gives me a crap load of books, mainly about the lord of the rings. But if I go to the advanced search and put in the title and author, I get the book I was searching for which has the exact name I was searching for. Not to mention on this site how you can mark a book as ‘Plan to read’ and then next time you come back, its set to ‘Already read’ and ‘I own this book’… Not sure what happens between visits but I dont read that quickly.
Blackout Rugby
This site is a great online Rugby game. FYI, I love rugby. I bought a team-signed Waratahs jersey on Saturday night. Thats beside the point. This game is great, but lacks the finesse of something with more time under its belt. For example, up until a few months ago, the site used a flash-only navigation. This meant that if I logged in on my 64Bit Fedora machine (with no flash support), I had to try to guess the URL of the pages I wanted, which also lead me to a big fat SQL error (and likely, an injection opportunity which I promptly notified them about). They have now implemented a fall back navigation menu for no flash support. The other area this site falls over is in stability. The site has been down so much over the past month (maybe 5 days at least) due to them moving hosts twice. When you are charging money for a ‘premium’ membership, this is simply not good enough. You cannot expect to grow your user base when you take usability so lightly.
In conclusion
Web site owners and operators need to realise that if their product does not work, they will lose their users. It is that simple. If something doesn’t work, the user will go elsewhere. If something isn’t accessible, the user will go elsewhere. If something is too complicated, the user will go elsewhere. With the level of competition and new-and-improved up-and-comers in all areas of the internet, its never been more important to ensure that your service works. Even if it means removing functionality to ensure that the core of the system is as bug-free as possible. Or just stamp a ‘Beta’ on it.
Web applications that I could not live without
I thought it was time I post about the web services that I could not live without. Basically, last week I bought a new Nokia E71 so that I could do as much work / organisation from my phone as possible. So, my ongoing drive is to have as much of my web accessible data available on my phone. This list is almost as much for me as it is for you, so I don’t forget things.
I seriously could not live without gmail. I have gmail check all my email accounts so that my mail is accessible from everywhere. It took a while to pry Outlook from my hands, but once I had done it, I never looked back. I am also able to check gmail from my phone with ease.
iGoogle, or google.com/ig is my start page. I have everything on it from all my news from Google News, all my latest RSS updates from Google Reader, all my latest statistics from Google Analytics, plus other things like the weather, a Remember The Milk widget and even a ‘This Day In History’ widget (I love my history). This is the absolute centre of my internet.
Remember the milk is an online task manager which can be as simple or as complex as you like. I am terrible at remembering ideas and todo’s. I originally tried todoist which was good, but I much preferred RTM. I have based my RTM lists on this awesome post on the RTM blog. I can share tasks or even entire lists with anybody else on RTM which makes working with the task manager so much easier as others can update my tasks for me. Also, RTM have a widget for iGoogle and a plugin for gmail (providing you use firefox, which you should) and can add tasks to your Google Calendar. I have definitely become more productive since using this and I continue to try and hone my RTM skills to get more from it. I am also trying to get RTM to sync with google via the iCalendar service and the Remote Calendars plugin for Outlook 2003 but have so far been unsuccessful. Doing this would allow me to put my tasks on my phone.
Google Calendar is a very good online calendar but because I use Outlook via an exchange server at work and we have Outlook on the home machines, I dont get much opportunity to use it for a primary calendar. But, what I do use it for is synchronising my home Outlook with my work Outlook using Google Calendar Sync which runs on my machines and updates my Google calendar with my Outlook appointments (which then gets sync’d to my other machines!).
Twitter is an odd one. People love it, hate it or just don’t get it. There are many sites offering ‘how to use twitter’ advice but its up to you. Basically, it is known as microblogging and you get 140 characters to update your audience with. I use it to post about new blog posts or news and I follow a few web developers, designers and other influential people to see when they have updated their blogs and sites. I use it with TweetDeck which is a desktop client for Twitter and makes Twittering much easier. Me on Twitter.
Flickr is an image hosting service. I started using the service this year as an alternative to Picasa web albums. As I have started dabbling in photography, being able to view images on Flickr based on the camera used is a big bonus for me. I can also upload directly from my mobile using the mobile tools. Me on flickr.
Delicious (formally del.icio.us) is an online bookmark manager. It seamlessly integrates with firefox using the available add-on. As I have crazy amounts of bookmarks with lots of design sites, code references, inspirational sites or even just sites I like, I can tag them and find them easily. Also, as its web based, it doesnt matter where I am, I can always get the link I need. I previously used Google Bookmarks but found Delicious to be better, easier and more intuitive. I can also share bookmarks among my friends (I have 2!). Me on Delicious.
Honourable Mentions
- Zyb – For backing up and managing contacts from many different sources. Great when you go through phones as often as I do. Me on Zyb.
- Plaxo – Another contact manager. This used to be my primary manager but I found that lately it has started adding so many new features that doing simple contact management is getting to be a bit tricky. Keep it simple, Plaxo! It is also great for updating your contacts with any activity on your social networking services. Me on Plaxo.
- Last.fm – The greatest music site ever. Listen to music via the site or the client based on bands that you like. Over time as you listen to more music, your own personal station becomes more tailored to your tastes. This is almost a ‘could not live without’ but I already had too many in that list. Me on Last.fm.
- Shelfari – This site is for book management. I read a lot of books, but I also find that a lot of the time I see or think of a book that I’d like to read at some stage but then I forget it. Not anymore, I just add it to my ‘like to read’ list on Shelfari. I can also add books and reviews. Me on Shelfari.
- LinkedIn – Linked in is more of a social networking site for professionals. You create connections between friends, associates and business partners. Its like a big online resume where you can give feedback about people you have worked with or look for jobs. It is a good way of keeping in touch with other professionals and see whats happening in your industry. Me on LinkedIn.
- Skylines Australia – Shameful plug for my own site. The greatest automotive site in the history of the internet.
Thats my list. I’ll create a new list soon of web sites that I cant live without (as opposed to web services or applications).
What can you not live without online? Do you use any of these services? Got any alternatives?
isearch, the people finder
Lifehacker today posted about a site called iSearch which allows its users to search for people online.
I read the post and I thought “great, there are a bunch of people i’d love to contact”. I went to the site and was a bit bummed that it thought that ‘Sydney’ meant ‘Sydney, FL’ and not ‘Sydney, NSW’ but anyway… The site kinda freaked me out a little bit.
Not only did I find myself on there with incorrect details (I was never the treasurer of Skylines Australia, I was president of the club and owner of the site) but when I noticed that it had a list of ‘Associates of Christian Biggins’ and they were people I knew, I felt a little strange. Sure, it called ‘SAU Cotm’ (Skylines Australia Car of the month) an associate of mine, it still listed real people there. This site knew my friends.
If that wasn’t enough, it offered an email address for me.
When you clicked on the link, it tried to sell you an email address for $1.69. Looking at the address and the strategically placed underscores, it does actually look like one of my addresses. Of course, anybody who actually knows me, knows that a simple google search of my name will bring up a helluva lot more info on me that this site.
But, it got me thinking. Where is this leading? What information of mine will be available to complete strangers (for a price?) in the future. I have always been a bit laid back about my online privacy as I am not an overly private guy to start with, but this has definitely got me thinking. Especially when you have contributed to as much of the internet as I have (and most of the time not using an alias).
Anyway. If you want to know anything about me. Just ask. 
In the meantime, I am going to decide whether I respect iSearch or despise it.
Code merging. Its awful without good tools.
No developer likes to merge their code in with other code after finishing a big project. Its a royal pain in the ass. I find myself having to do it at work a lot (we have a largish team) and at home because at home, I somehow find that I have 84 copies of the same thing. So, I need to merge them together occasionally to keep things maintainable.
Merging is by far 10 times easier on Linux than windows. Linux is such a good development environment (apart for .net – but then, who uses .net anyway?). I would recommend getting VirtualBox, Fedora (or Ubuntu) and installing them on a windows machine. Even if you only use it for coding, profiling and merging / deploying. Its worth it and takes bugger all time to set up.
I am using Ubuntu on my VirtualBox. I prefer Fedora, but I found it hard to get higher resolutions with it. Anyway, I’m off topic.
Once you create your two directories or files that you need to merge or create a diff for. You can open one of the three programs;
My personal favourite is Meld. There are others out there. If you use something else, let me know about it.
Using one of these apps takes the hard work out of merging. In meld, you can match custom rules (for example, you can match all files in the ‘cache’ directory) and then ignore them.
Then, once your files / directories are merged, you can use something like KDESvn to commit them (if you are not savvy enough with the command line SVN client).
All done. Merged, Committed and time for a beer.
If you are unlucky to be on a Windows machine. No real biggy, but your choice of free clients becomes slim.
TortoiseSVN is the app of choice for interacting with an SVN repo.
Once you have the directories, you can merge them with WinMerge. I do find this app a little lacking. It doesn’t display the files in a heirarchical view, so diffing 10,000 files (which I did yesterday) just lists them all one by one and not within their directories.
I have heard a lot of good things about Beyond Compare but it is not free.
Let me know what you use for comparing, diffing and merging files.
Google Chrome released
After an impatient wait of ohh, say, 24 hrs (that’s when I initially found out about Chrome), Google has released Chrome as a public beta.
My first impressions are; wow!
In the ten minutes I have used this so far, I am already very impressed. You can see the feature list for chrome here. Or, you can view Lifehackers screenshot tour.
I loaded up my site Skylines Australia in Chrome and it loaded like it was a text document. It was so fast. I also especially like the source viewer and the DOM element inspector. Also, its minimal interface and the start page are also huge bonus’. Hell I could keep going, but all the features that I love are on the sites linked above. I’m looking forward to the first stable release.
Thanks Google (even if it is just another way to collect data about me).
Amazing site
I stumbled upon an amazing web site yesterday and I cant help but share it.
There are a few things that I find amazing about this site, the first is the amazing flash navigation that is quite simple but sufficiently complex to make it interesting at the same time. The second thing I love about this site is the level of intimacy you find yourself in with the dad who is the subject of the site. You can connect with him. The photography is amazing and makes it seem as though you have known this man for a long time.
Beautiful site.
PS. You can put your mouse cursor to the top or bottom of the page and click to go up or down, or to go to an ‘index’ mouse over to the left and click.