coffee.geek.nz

how bad are the wellington trains? i hear they're bad.

if I get on a train with a baby, pram, and heap of groceries, will I then find myself moved to crowded bus along with baby, pram, and groceries?

will i get stranded? should i even bother trying for the train?

Thoughts on today's "un-conference"

It came outta the blue this conference. The topic is Open Government. There was another Open Government un-conference in Wellington last year. The organisers of today's event seem to have announced their event without any conversation of any kind with the previous organisers, nor with those already working hard on open government in New Zealand.

All was not lost - quite a few of those who give sweat and blood to the open government mission were able to come today.

But I am struck by the contrast between the groups. The biggest filter of who attends is the day of the week. The first open government un-conference in Wellington was on a Saturday and Sunday. Those that came were those who really do give a damn. They were all willing go give up their weekend to attend, which immediately tells you they care beyond a pay check.

The attendees today, may also really care about the subject, but they also need to have the ability to spend a monday at an open government barcamp. It immediately removes those who work in other fields, and/or cannot get permission from employers. It is a different crowd. It attracts those looking for funded work, which is all okay with me, but it excludes many those who build on open government data because they see a problem that needs solving, and not for their own monetary gain.

allow me to look down apon those who see microbloggin as a place to discuss what they had for breakfast...

If that's the best you can think of, and the only thing you expect to see on such places, then I'm afraid it may be wasted on you. Unless you give it a go you'll never know.

in contrast, here's what microbloggin is *actually* used for:

Lobbying - anyone can publish, without massive funding and spare time needed. You can get a message out that otherwise would have never been heard.

Human Rights - as with above, human rights violations are exposed and discussed on twitter, 140chars at a time. You can hear about these if you read major news websites, but they tend to be one story and then gone. Twitter repeats and repeats over and over, that a video has been leaked showing US military personal laughing as they kill civilians.

Fixing things - I didn't realise the front page of http://wellington.geek.nz was broken. I not only found out, but someone sent me a link to a fix on twitter.

Helping each other - I need cardboard boxes to move house. I found a whole heap of them by asking on twitter.

Advice - "My two year old just put nail polish in her eye, what do i do?". "The baby won't sleep, what else can i try?"

Sending good vibes - love a service, send some love via twitter.

I subscribe to a blog called iconic photos. They have a continuous feed of photos that record pivitol moment in history and also some kind of quirk.

Recently they posted a world map of where their photos were taken. There are none from New Zealand, so I had a think of iconic photos from New Zealand.

The very first that quickly came to mind is this photo by Michael Tubberty.

Dame Whina Cooper was a Te Rarawa woman and a mother of the New Zealand nation - Te Whaea o te Motu.

In 1975, at 80 years of age, she lead 5,000 on a walk (hikoi) from the far north to Parliament in Wellington to demonstrate the determination of maori to win back ownership of stolen land. She presented a memorial of rights from 200 Maori elders and a petition supporting the objectives of the march signed by 60,000 people to the prime minister, Bill Rowling. The march was peaceful, a testament to Cooper's leadership.

In her own words: "Let us all remember that the Treaty was signed so that we could all live as one nation in Aotearoa"

Here is a list of things I think are truly awesome:

dinosaurs
velociraptors
robots
super volcanoes
giant mazes
tunnels
Abandoned ruins
bunk bed furniture
home made pie
home made cookies
pants with built in feet
cupcakes
SHORT HAIR
No software patents
Free espresso (at work)
The colour red.
Space Boots
Weekends
Wellington on a Good Day

did i miss out anything important?

Australian is a grand nation, with many great moments in their history, and many shameful moments. Just like New Zealand. We however should stay seperate.

New Zealand has lead the way in many things I am proud of. Our treaty of Waitangi, now considered a founding document, sets us apart from Australia. The relationship between "The Crown" and maori forms of government has grown into somethign healthy and strong. There's work to be done, and there's some awful history still to be acknowledged, but we're doing better than Australia and i'm proud of this.

We have a nuclear free policy, both for power supply and weapons. This is dispite being tiny, and perhaps vulnerable as we don't have much millitary force (or budget). We lose many of our best military staff to Australia, due to our spending. I'm okay with that if it means more money for healthcare or education.

We have a voice sepearate to the USA. In our history we have often told them no, without any military might to enforce it. This includes trivial things like protocols for digital television we've chosen protocols and frequencies that work well in almost any terrain - while AU has followed the USA. Sadly our small purchasing power and mains frequency voltage means we're stuck with whatever AU chooses, but at least it was said. This also includes big things, like telling the USA they cannot being their vessels into our harbours, and that their invasion of Iraq is wrong.

The super-secret ACTA venue that the NZ govt wouldn't tell us is the Hotel Intercontinental.

http://keionline.org/node/809

and now a baby photo

My ISP is Telstra, cable. It's pretty darn good for most everything. Except youtube. The performance of youtube streaming video is really really shit.

There are people complaining about youtube on telstra in Wellington here and here and here and here and here and here and ......

Earlier this year youtube added a neat section where you can see the data speeds from your ISP, compared to others in your city, your country and the world: http://www.youtube.com/my_speed

It shows my ISP, telstra, sitting at between 30% and 70% of the average wellington speed. in other words, telstra with their superior cable network technology is being beaten by people with DSL, and being beaten a LONG way..but only for youtube. Telstra have done something to make youtube perform like shit for their customers.

This is not the Hamilton i remember growing up in:
http://nz.news.yahoo.com/a/-/top-stories/6913352/hit-and-run-robbery-vic...

Passing motorists ignored a hit-and-run robbery victim left lying on the side of a Hamilton road last night, police say.

The 21-year-old man was walking home across Anglesea Street about 11pm when he was hit by a vehicle, near the Caro Street intersection.

The vehicle's occupants, believed to be two men and a woman, demanded the victim's wallet and took his backpack which had been thrown a short distance by the impact of the car.

In fact i'm hoping the journalist has left something out of this account to explain it. I'm gonna be watching for more details.

The area was busier than usual as people made their way home from the international cricket match at Seddon Park, and police hoped someone may recall seeing the incident take place.

I've seen someone fall off a pushbike in central Wellington and be inundated in people trying to help. Hamilton isn't that much different to Wellington.

p.s does Cricket really run as late as 11pm?

and now a baby photo:

Yeahs, i'm a hippy.. both an open source hippy, and a "made locally, with no child labour, and eco friendly please" hippy.

So, when finding clothes for our baby, that outgrows everything every 4 weeks, I'm looking for crafty craft people.

Tomorrow (6th March), is the Martinborough fair. It's about 75 minutes drive from Wellington and it's massive. The whole town is taken over by this ginormous fair. We'll be picking up bebe clothes, but also adult clothes, kitchen things, jams, pickles and who knows what else.
http://www.martinboroughfair.org.nz/

Martinborough Fair, originally uploaded by cristina.gherghe.

070203_017.jpg, originally uploaded by mEyegallery.

Tonight's sunset in Wellington, originally uploaded by Br3nda.

Our mission is to create educational opportunities for the world's poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning. When children have access to this type of tool they get engaged in their own education. They learn, share, create, and collaborate. They become connected to each other, to the world and to a brighter future.

We've now shipped these laptops to EVERY SINGLE CHILD AND TEACHER in Peru and Uruguay.

Wellington OLPC group meets to test software and hardware weekly. No prior experience necessary, just a methodical mind, to go through educational software for all ages, and seek out flaws. The software includes jigsaw puzzles, measuring games, and ebook readers.

We also love to find bilingual and polygot people who can translate, or checking someone else's translation - from popular languages like Spanish to more obscure dialects of Twi from Ghana. We translate things like children's activities and electronic firstaid manuals for the world.

IMG_8447, originally uploaded by Br3nda.

a teeny tiny espresso machine, for use in the middle of nowhere if there is no good coffee to be found (such as the south island, auckland, or any airport other than Wellington)
i recieved this gift at LCA - and i hear it was the very excellent idea of the very excellent Donna Kattekrab. Thank you so very much - i blogged about this very nifty gizmo only a couple month ago.

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.

The prototype XO 1.5 laptops have arrived in Wellington - Some will be heading to Christchurch and Auckland in time for the weekend.

Grant with one of the XO 1.5 laptops

First thing we did - we pulled them apart. Inside in a new processor (faster), as well as a very different looking motherboard. We spotted 1Gbyte of RAM, and a 4GByte microSD card serving as the non-volatile storage.

They arrived with Sugar OS 0.8.4. This isn't a stable release, and the hardware is still being tested by people like us -- so finding a few things not working was to be expected.

We really like the new touchpad -- it's like you'd find on any "normal" laptop, instead of the fancy, kinda expensive one that the original XOs had. Now you'll notice the edge of the usable area if you stray too far.

There are some device drivers missing - such as the video capture - and the screen driver hiccups. But we did manage many hours of playing food force, which usualy crashes on the older hardware. Foodforce needs lotsa CPU and memory.

Some more structured testing will be this saturday's testing.

Auckland Saturday - 11:00 am @ The Windsor Castle 144 Parnell Road, Parnell - they have internet, Tabitha bring one of the XO 1.5 machines

Screw Removal XO-1.5 Display Teardown, originally uploaded by Wayan Vota.

There's a new revision of hardware for the One Laptop Per Child project -- the XO 1.5.

Found on flickr: some photos of disassembling the new latops, showing all the innads.

More Photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/dcmetroblogger/sets/72157594232448993/

OLPC foundation are sending FIVE XO 1.5s to us in Wellington :-D

The following things are making me happy:

Finding I'm volunteering for One Laptop Per Child nearly every day and changing the world, and really enjoying it.

How the OLPC effort in Aotearoa is growing growing growing.

How many people came out to talk about how stupid Mark Shuttleworth's comment was (you know which one). "Girls" are among those that made open source what it is today, whether shuttleworth realises it or not.

Statusnet project going from strength to strength (and starting on the journey to world domination)

How Drupal is no longer this unheard of strange CMS that Brenda keeps pitching -- it's being used everywhere, for years now, in place in NZ that i've never been near. Clients turn up already wanting Drupal.

Public sector remix project gaining steam for being awesome.

How many amazing people are coming to Wellington for LCA2010 - including open source ninjas i've "known" for years and never met.

oh, and the thought that in about 2 months I will be able to see my own feet again.

WellyNZTesters have issued a Call For Papers for the education miniconf we're running at the LCA2010 conference on mid January next year
http://laptop.org.nz/content/miniconf

If you want to come visit us in New Zealand, and can't afford it right now, you may be eligible for funding to pay for the trip http://www.lca2010.org.nz/media/news/89

We're testing the full activity bundle for the upcoming Peru deployment
http://laptop.org.nz/test-request

An Auckland group has started!

Some kind folks in Sydney are rounding up unused dust-gathering XOs from the LCA2007 giveaway, to ship to Wellington.

We've got a school server running.

Editing "core" of an open source project is something that should be avoided.

by editing, i mean forking, making your own unique version of a project.

Still, there are times when you have to - i see a blog post from Katipo, a local web development shop in Wellington that are also open source ninjas.

They've resorted to editing the core of joomla. This leaves them with 3 options

1) starting a new project -- a not-quite-joomla that they now control, maintain, and ensure is secure and increasingly bug free.

2) maintaining their own set of patches to joomla, that they reapply to the original joomla code after every bug fix or security release from the joomla project

3) getting their patches into upstream (joomla) so everyone now has the same code, and it's no longer a fork.

option 1 sounds like a much bigger undertaking than Katipo would want to do.

option 2 might work in the short term, but eventually will become very time consuming. Security upgrades need to be applied quickly to open source web apps, you can't wait more than maybe a day for code conflict resolution and extensive retesting of functionality. If you do this several times to a code base then it's a complete nightmare to maintain.

option 3 is the best fit. They'll need to make sure their code fits in with joomla's idea of how things should be - making things configurable, and not making changes that would be better done by creating a 3rd party plugin/module to be installed.

The NZ OLPC "Friends in Testing" meets every saturday in Wellington. This saturday will be the first meeting after a very successful Software Freedom Day here.
http://softwarefreedomday.org/teams/wellington

This saturday is also the first ever meeting of the Auckland group.

What's involved is: brunch, coffee, conversation, intro to the green XO laptops, how the OS works, how to install an activity, and then you test your chosen activity, try to find some bugs. If we find bugs we send a test report back to the project.

If we don't find any bugs we also send a report saying how awesome the project is. Those that know python may wish to track down and destroy the bug, but for the most part we don't.

We've been asked to test the list of activities that are being deployed to kids in Peru soon

We're meeting at 10:30am, and tying the two locations together via irc (we're a bit bandwidth constrained in cafes.

Wellington is at the southern Cross http://thecross.co.nz
Auckland group is at Ironique, 448 Mt Eden Rd, Mt Eden.

Please join us - there will be many newcomers at both events.

p.s. People hacking on other projects are also welcome - we like "cross pollination". I know there are some koha, statusnet and drupal hackers coming.
p.p.s. If you have your own laptop, whatever flavour, bring that along too. The "sugar" software project that powers the OLPC laptops should run on most anything, and if it doesn't work on yours, we'd like to know that too.

i'm not a big fan of blog posts that are nothing more than a collection of links -- especially when that was all you posted last time too.

Regardless, here's one:

The UK Prime Minister issued a formal apology to Alan Turing - the brillian computer scientist who was forced to undergo chemical castration after being found guilty of homosexuality
http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page20571

Follower reports on the Digital NZ hackfest in Christchurch
http://words.rancidbacon.com/digitalnz-hackfest-christchurch-2009.html

BLDBLOG have another story on the Maunsell Towers
http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/maunsell-towers.html

10th anniversary of the filming of LOTR to pass unremarked in Wellington on 10th October.
http://nznoldor.blogspot.com/2009/09/lotr-filming-day-one-10th-anniversa...

The Onion reveals that only 13% of wikipedia contributors are women
http://brianna.modernthings.org/article/238/the-onions-vox-pop-on-wikipe...

UNICEF reports a 28 per cent decline in the under-five mortality rate, from 90 deaths per 1000 live births in 1990, to 65 deaths per 1000 live births in 2008
http://www.unicef.org.nz/article/1084/Globalchildmortalitycontinuestodro...

SFD Wellington Poster, originally uploaded by Glynn Foster.

Wellington Perl Monger is next Tuesday. I'll be speaking about Net::DigitalNZ,

also speaking is:
Lenz Gschwendtner - Message driven infrastructures (RabbitMQ, Net::AMQP)
Andy Chilton - HTTP::Engine
Olly Betts - Xapian

http://wellington.pm.org

Last weekend, the Wellington OLPC group went to the Open Govt Barcamp.

Tabitha recorded this interview - Overview of how the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) laptop works:

the goings on in Wellington, that i've heard of recently:

Tim McNarama is rallying a Sahana New Zealand cluster. Their online presence is at Launchpad.net. They've had hackfest and strategic planning meetings - there's been lots of great designs including distributed models (borrowing from laconca) and New Zealand customisations.

Don Christie, and the New Zealand Open Source Society have launched the Public Sector Remix, a desktop operating system specialising in government / public sector.

Tabitha Roder continues to lead a group of OLPC testers who meet every Saturday at the Southern Cross.

Nigel McNie, and the rest of the mahara team released 1.2.0beta1.

Who have i missed out? Who's doing Open Source mighty deeds in Wellington?