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?

I wanted more info on how provocation partial defence is used in New Zealand - it was used to horrible (and failed) effect on the Clayton Weatherston trial, but is it used appropriately elsewhere?
My initial reaction was that murdering cannot be justified by any sort of provocation, but i didn't know of enough cases where this was used to be sure of my opinion. Perhaps it is used for legitimate reasons.

Here's some research carried out by the NZ Law Commission [pdf]

In order to assess the way in which the defence of provocation is currently operating – that is, how often it is relied on, by whom and in which circumstances - we collected data from all of the homicide files held by the Crown prosecutors in Auckland and Wellington concerning trials that occurred between 2001 and 2005 (inclusive).

There were a total of 87 cases in this sample. 6 were retrials, so the original case was excluded and only the retrial taken into account.

Wellington OLPC "Friends in Testing" group need USB memory sticks to test One Laptop Per Child (Sugar/XO).

If you have some (1GByte+) and are generous and wonderful and would like to donate these, please see this webpage:

http://laptop.org.nz/micro-sponsors

Who are OLPC?

MISSION STATEMENT: 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.

in New Zealand today, the powers that be can do anything they like to our rights, as long as they're doing it to stop child porn.

The Department of Internal Affairs is to begin filtering our internet. It's up to your ISP if they want to opt in, but you individually cannot opt out except by changing ISP. They are doing this to stop access to child pornography.

Over in Australia they trialed their internet filter by subjecting Tasmania to it. They call their filter "Clean Feed". The blacklist of websites was leaked and published on the internet. Amongst this was numerous mistakes, including blacklisting a Dentist's website, and serveral informational websites on abortion. (at least i hope they were mistakes and not malicous). Don't go searching for that leaked blacklist if you're in Australia. There's a 2k fine for view it or linking to it. So, australians aren't legally allowed to know that they're blocking dentists.

Changin ISP isn't trivial for me. I use cable internet, and all providers of cable in Wellington have opted in. I'd have to switch to the more expensive inferior DSL technology, including buying new hardware, to find an ISP that isn't checking all my web access against DIA's list and/or piping my web traffic through DIA's servers for analysis.

The "You can always opt out" argument holds no merit at all - I have no doubt that DIA's endgame is to make the filter mandatory for all internet in New Zealand.

Who: Alastair, Grant, Tom, Tabitha, Brenda, Tim, Martin, Dave, Sigi, Carl

Downloaded Sugar on a Stick Strawberry

Pippy-29 found little problem, can write new but cannot open existing files

Catching up with Martin on school server activity and OLPC

Tim is working on Sahana - emergency management application that can help with finding and linking people together using Sugar/XOs as well as other hardware.

Brenda brought a cool pen called LiveScribe which we all loved playing with

Working on a website for Welly testers to help people find us and what we doing. http://laptop.org.nz - it has pointers to OLPC and Sugar sites, and feeds of our photos and our blogs.

Talked about Software Freedom Day (20 September 2009) and Linux Conference (January 2010). I put in a miniconf proposal for http://www.lca2010.org.nz/ - see it here http://laptop.org.nz/miniconf

Great day!

Wellington testing team

At the Wellington OLPC Friends in testing session yesterday, the beginnings of plotting for a OLPC/Sugar miniconf for LCA2010 began.

Leading the charge is Tabitha Roder, along with from Walter Bender and the Wellington OLPC team. They've called for others in the region to join their bid [olpcfriends.org]

While i was at the testing session I decided to try my hand at a hello world sugar app. (Sugar is the environment running on the OLPC XO laptops)

Someone sent me a link to Sugar installing on FLOSS manuals, which tell that all i need do is:

apt-get install sugar

well, that bit works - but X will crash and die back to GDM after starting. Turns out the Jaunty version doesn't work.

/etc/gdm/Xsession: Beginning session setup...
Setting IM through im-switch for locale=en_NZ.
Start IM through /etc/X11/xinit/xinput.d/all_ALL linked to /etc/X11/xinit/xinput.d/default.
/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/jarabe/desktop/meshbox.py:19: DeprecationWarning: the sha module is deprecated; use the hashlib module instead
import sha

Video of the "Manners Mall Emo Song"

(manners mall is a Wellington pedestrian area, which is soon to be ripped out and replaced by a bus lane. The indigenous population are being forced to relocation - here's a song about it in the native manners mall style: emo).

Last weekend the weekly Wellington Friends in Testing group changed location to the National Library to join in the Digital NZ Hacktest.

Here’s the blurb explaining who DigitalNZ are:

DigitalNZ is a collaborative initiative led by the National Library of New Zealand. We work

with a wide range of contributing institutions and organisations. Without these content providers and their content, DigitalNZ would not be possible.

We did the usual test of the latest build of Sugar, and some general playtime testing contributed applications. Some of us tried out the Digital NZ open data API, and thought creating a OLPC app that queries this API would be great, especially if it caches the data locally somehow, or turns into a collaborative activity.

There was coffee, pizza, lollies and beer. Thanks Digital NZ!

Photos by Jo Eaton: