if you're viewing coffee.geek.nz via rss or planet of cross post, then you might wanna point your browser at the real thing and see my pretty new summer theme on the website.

New Zealand's Ministry of Economic Development have released from documents on the ongoing ACTA negotations.
http://news.business.govt.nz/news/strategic/article/9761

Smarter people than me have read these, and found nothing new revealed.

The last round of negotiations was in Mexico - the next round of talks is right here in New Zealand.

quick recap:

ACTA (anti counterfeiting trade agreement) is a treaty currently being negotiated by the world's weathiest countries, including New Zealand. It is officially about things like stopping the fake prada handbags trade - but there's also been leaked documents showing that big media have been asked for their wishlist such as 3 strikes internet disconnection that we protested so loudly against in NZ's s92a of the Copyright act.

It would be disastrous to have stopped such New Zealand laws that give out punishment (internet termination) without trial or appeal, like the s92a did, only to have it implemented anyway via a treaty that our parliament ratifies. Now is the time to make noise.

This need to stop fake prada is so important, it's been classed as "National Security", so none of us lowly citizens are allowed to know what's actually being negotiated. This also is not standard practice for treaty negotiations to be secret.

All Official information act requests, in several countries, have been unsuccessful in finding out what they're putting into this treaty - cos, you know, national security.

The next talks are in Wellington in April - standby for more info later on citizen action.

Tonight i defend my claim to a sparkly pink tiara at Bloggers Predict 2010
Thursday 28 January 2010
5:30pm - 8:00pm
Where: Wellington Regional Chamber of Commerce, level 28, The Majestic Centre, 100 Willis Street

The 2010 lineup
Brenda Wallace (@br3nda) Current tiara-holder, Brenda was UP Visionary of the year for 2009, can she defend her title in 2010? The Capital City’s geek girl extraordinaire and queen bee of the software community, Brenda is to mobile technology and open source what honey is to brown bread, she makes it taste better! Brenda blogs on Coffee.geek.nz about coffee, gadgets, opensource, wellington, new zealand, music, and above all things: freedom.
Philip Fierlinger (@skyrize) From Silicon Valley to Silicon Welly, Philip’s web design expertise and has been eagerly sought after by online businesses and conference-goers alike. Currently design chief at Xero, blogger at Turntable Media Philip’s passion for web usability also led him to establish his own consultancy.
Mauricio Freitas (@freitasm) Geekzone head honcho and microblogging enthusiast. If there’s a new gadget being launched you can be sure Mauricio has an opinion about it. Been renovating his kitchen for last 6 months and has forgotten how to cook, however is on first name basis with all the (good) cafe owners in town. Possibly Wellington’s most avid “Tweeter”.

I've made a little drupal module that tracks how many followers you have on twitter.

They're shown on this page:
http://coffee.geek.nz/twitterego

It also makes a block you can see on the bottom right of this blog atm.

I'll put the source into github shortly - and maybe i'll put it on drupal.org if there's enough downloads/interest.

Mystic Bloggers Predict the Future | coffee.geek.nzSource: coffee.geek.nzI was part of a panel of bloggers who were asked to make predictions for the coming year. The other bloggers where Miraz Jordon, Philip Fierlinger and Mauricio Freitas    i think this means i'm now supreme blogger in wellington!! (there can be only one, etc. etc.)    

Learning to Learn - Love is a better master than duty | coffee.geek.nzSource: coffee.geek.nzMel Chua and Walter Bender, both contributor/leaders in the OLPC and Sugar Project world, came to visit Wellington yesterday    Walter compared sugar to crumple zones in cars - don't lock down technology to be unbreakable - if you do this then the crumple zone becomes the passengers, or rather, the users - who cannot change the technology they are using.

Instead, unlock the technology and let the user break it as they wish. Sugar created easy recovery methods so children can break their XO software and then easily and trivially recover back to stability.    

are you an internet addict? | coffee.geek.nzSource: coffee.geek.nz in an attempt to illistrate this, I've taken the "test" portion of the article and replaced "online" and "internet " with "reading" and "book" to see how it sounds.

Announcement: Linux Conference coming to Wellington next. | coffee.geek.nzSource: coffee.geek.nzHere's the worst kept best secret in Wellington - Linux.conf.au is heading to wellington for 2010. This was finally officially announced at the 2009 conference final dinner in Hobart last night.    LINUX CONFERENCE HEADING FOR WELLINGTON.
    

coffee.geek.nz | Whoever dies with the most toys wins.Source: coffee.geek.nzWhile i didn't win, i loved the loud cheer for my blog in the reading of the finalists :-) thanks folks. And thanks to those who voted for me.

coffee.geek.nz | Whoever dies with the most toys wins.Source: coffee.geek.nzIf you listened to recording industry lobbyists, you could be fooled into thinking the artistic and creative citizens of New Zealand are united in wanting Guilt apon Accusation in New Zealand law, and ...

the zeroth of the zeroth. | coffee.geek.nzSource: coffee.geek.nz17:53 '0000-00-00 00:00:00' is a valid date17:53 in mysql...17:53 Shiny: what's invalid about it?17:54 < davidc> Should at least be '0000-01-01 00:00:00'17:54 ...

Drupal south - morning christchurch! | coffee.geek.nzSource: coffee.geek.nzSome things we'd like to see are:* More New Zealand focused drupal modules -e.g. Payment gatewaysi'd like to find time to make a Zoomin maps API CCK field.* Maori language translations* More NZ Drupal association membership* More rescuing sites from other CMSes

Ministers call for end to fear mongering over copyright changes | coffee.geek.nzSource: coffee.geek.nzAssociate Minister of commerce, Judith Tizard, in an official press release says there is no truth in th

New Zealand Political Parties and their ACTA position | coffee.geek.nzSource: coffee.geek.nzMark Harris sent an email to all NZ political parties registered for the 2008 general election.

Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being | coffee.geek.nzSource: www.coffee.geek.nzCopyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works.

Reports from round 3 of the ACTA treaty negotiations | coffee.geek.nzSource: www.coffee.geek.nzOur Ministry of Economic Development (MED) reports on ACTA Negotiations: Report on Round Three, 8

It's always my birthday on facebook. | coffee.geek.nzSource: coffee.geek.nzi've been conducting a small experiment on my facebook "friends". It's been my birthday on the 1st of the month - for the last 4 months. I started this in July, then through August, September, and now October, i've been altering my birthday each month.

Shared with Flock - The Social Web Browser
http://flock.com

• Why does Russell Brown look so very very unhappy on the webstock.org.nz photo?
• twittering too much.. this happens when they make me work on solaris.
• New post: Software freedom day in Wellington --- register before it's too late!! http://coffee.geek.nz/node/22146
• what is the perl equiv of ceil()?? /me forgot perl
• yay! happily using google in Te Reo.
• my October is looking crazy busy
• just made a matrix sheet of my todolist items...
• New post: The most successful geek event in wellington is... http://coffee.geek.nz/node/22156
• i kinda wanted a black hole to start destroying the world... but it's not too late i guess

HP giveaways | coffee.geek.nzSource: coffee.geek.nzThis was given out to every single attendee at Microsoft Tech Ed- it contains nothing but info on how to enter a prize draw to win a real game console

Drupal 5 Theme
built from template by DemusDesign

license:

"I release this to the public, I just kindly ask
that you keep the credit and link in the footer."

Drupal theme release under same licence as the original template.

Latest edition also available from darcs:

darcs get http://darcs.coffee.geek.nz drupal/themes/bipolar


after some confusion - i managed to set up a darcs repo on darcs.coffee.geek.nzI've imported all my drupal config in there (i'm using trust, so there's no passwords to bother protecting)Also pushing drupal modules there, so i'll have darcs + CVS side by side and see how that goesWTF is darcs?Darcs is a free, open source source code management system.i found a great usage guide @ http://www.darcs.net/manual/node4.html

i'm think i'll replace http://coffee.geek.nz with a giant aggregator osf things posted elsewhere.

@import url(http://coffee.geek.nz/css/image.css);
Well - less than 24 hours after we ordered the headphones, they arrived on my desk at work.

They are the Plantronics Pulsar 590A Bluetooth Headset

It's doing bluetooth 2.0, which means many things, but most importantly it copes well in a room that's already full of wifi.

@import url(http://coffee.geek.nz/css/image.css);

hover mouse over image to zoom
work on Te Aro bypass