MapGuide User Survey

I have posted a short MapGuide user Survey

thoughts about buzz

so google buzz is here and to use common phrase, disruptive.

my thoughts, all in lower case

facebook has replaced most social email, often via facebook messages,
less often by wall post and comments. it's fun, random but rather noisy.

twitter is the high speed, realtime, random world of both your interests
friends, profession, interestes and your idols.

i'd hazzard a guess and say that email these days is mostly used for work,
only made really useful imho for by gmail.

work takes up a big chunk of people lifes, you may spend a lot of time in
the office, at lunch and after work drinks with work mates. often
in the professional world, you get to meet a lot of interesting people,
usually with common interests thru the work you do

the only instant messager i think should be used for work, is google-talk,
because you can save the conversations for later use.

so, then came buzz

i first saw it one my google nexus one, which i love btw, then it appeared
this morning in my gmail. interesting, lot's of "first posts" etc to start
with

i noticed myself enjoying the ability to comment on tweets and status updates,
which i rather liked, also sharing in google reader, which is then buzzed
straight away. it completely left the facebook share bookmark feeling
clunky and so like last decade :)

my audience so far is a more relevant social graph for discussion than
facebook, not because those people aren't also on facebook but i already
or do (occasionally) email them, or more often google talk with them

buzz ain't bad for a first release, google has now completely surpassed
microsoft as the dominant company in it.

between gmail, jira, twitter, facebook and google reader, gmail still has
the nicest interface, perhaps almost the oldest too.

now why can't i save my sms from my nexus one as conversations in gmail huh?

google contacts is perhaps one of the least praised aspects of google's
android extensions. i now have just one email and phone number database,
which i can edit with real tools like a keyboard and mouse, happy!

fingers crossed and lets hope google stays true to their motto

postscript!

my first reaction to buzz was, how good is this for business purposes?

facebook, twitter, sharepoint & notes have just been completely aced
by what buzz brings to google business offering, can they catch up?

Coldfusion Performance Consulting

Apart from writing applications from scratch, which I have been lucky enough to do a lot in my career, I also have done a fair bit of application taming.

Performance tuning is a technical art form and something I really enjoy, there's nothing more frustrating as a business owner as paying for some development and then being given a solution which is frustratingly slow.

Coldfusion is great to get started fast, but often this leads poor database design and other problems which can cripple performance.

A good web based application should be able to do most things under a second, post initial load of course. If your's doesn't, generally speaking, the application isn't complete, if your the client, i suggest with holding payment.

That said, it depends on your focus. Admin functionality might simply take longer to run, it's the core of the application I'm talking about.

For example opening the home page, searching for client records, viewing and editing the main record type in your organisation, these should be quick items. If they aren't, your wasting money on staff watching hour glasses.

Anyone needing some consulting in this area, please contact me, I enjoy diagnosing and fixing these problems!

Stop the cultural genocide - Save the Tote

I was initially suprised when I heard today that one of the last bastions of live rock music in Melbourne, The Tote in Collingwood was to close on Sunday. On reflection, I wasn't suprised.

There has been a lot in the media about alcohol fueled violence in Melbourne, it makes for a good story and Politicians love to be seen to be doing something. Nothing new there.

My Friends and I tend to be rather social and love going to Gigs, Bars, Art Galleries and Dance parties. We always hear about this violence, but we rarely ever see it. I think it's because we enjoy the more cultural aside of things, as compared to the 'delights' of place like the notorious King St in the CBD.

I have been lucky enough to travel around the world a fair bit and honestly some of the dodgy elements in Melbourne do shock me a bit, but honestly, there isn't much of it around.

You don't need to amputate your arm, when amputating a finger will do.

Recently I read about France allowing venues to stay open till 7am, serving alcohol until 5am. In Berlin, clubs often go until most of the punters leave. LA has this wierd 2am shutdown. Melbourne tried this with the dumb 2am lockout a few years back, which fortunately was abandoned as a bad idea.

So, back to the Tote. The first time I went there was to see a friend's band, Money Penny play back in the early 90's. It was the uni days, and this venue gave the chance for them to play. 15 years later, I can proudly say they went on to win JJJ's unearthed for Victoria.

The Tote is a incubator for young musicians in Melbourne.

I did a straw poll of my friends and none of them have ever seen any violence at the Tote, yet, in their infinite wisdom, the venue was declared a high risk venue by the liquor licensing commission. Several appeals later to VCAT, the owner gave up.

VCAT is a oft maligned body (for good reasons) which is well known for over ruling local communities in favor of money hungry developers who want to knock down what's left of the beautiful buildings in Melbourne, just to replace them with modern soulless concrete boxes.

There has been a lot of activity on Facebook about the Tote closing. Alas Lynn "Mkyi" Kosky is the minister for the Arts which means we have about as much hope of seeing anything been done from her as seeing G W Bush doing something positive for the world.

I have personally (haha) written to Peter Garrett (ex Midnight Oil front man) and now the Federal minister for the Arts, to see if he will intervene. Lets see what his staffers make of my email. I won't hold my breath waiting.

Last year we had an amazing benefit gig called Sound Relief at the MCG for the victims of the Black Saturday bushfires. It was a who's who of Aussie rock in the last few decades. These bands learnt their trade playing pub rock, something which is becoming rarer and rarer.

A lot of the modern music doesn't resonate with people the way it used to, because all the bloody pubs have been closed down due to stupid people moving into popular areas and then complaining about the noise.

How many big stadium gigs have we seen in Melbourne in the last decade? Not a lot, most of them which did are very old bands. We are losing this wonderful part of culture.

We need to embrace and protect our pubs which support, foster and nurture our young rock musicians. Otherwise, we are going to loose our cultural identity.

The loss of our cultural identity is what I believe fosters the mundane drinking and violence in our society. If you go to the pub and see a great band with your mates, your far less likely to get agro after, if your euphoric after a good gig ( and i'm not talking about drug induced euphoria, that's another story).

So if what I'm saying resonates, get on Facebook and join the Save the Tote Group, write a letter to your Local and Federal MP's and maybe head down to the last night of the Tote this Sunday and show your support.

If you love Melbourne for what it was, stand up for whats left and make yourself heard.

PS: there's a poll on the age website

#nocleanfeed - what happens when the filter crashes?

Firstly, let me quote my oldest friend on this

Obviously given my views it's #nocleanfeed for me. The government has no business in morality. Kartar

Secondly, policy will always drag behind technology, always.

My big concern here is what happens when it fails, reading around the web, I saw an article which quoted, I think a consultant working for Telstra, which said if a site like youtube was blocked, the net filtering server would crash...

So, all geeks know, it's not that hard to crash a server, whether via a co-ordinated tweet or getting dodgy with DDOS from a bot net.

Put simply, Krudd and Conroy's morale Censorship cursade is a big target for some "heavy systems testing".

It was after all only tested with ADSL1. sigh..

My question is what happens when the filtering server fails/crashes/whatever?

Do we get our entire internet access blocked? or do we get a clean feed?

I'd suggest it goes without question, that these days, you simply can't block the entire internet, therefore, I forsee these servers doing filtering will become the hacker targets of choice, which (e)mail servers of today are.

Look at the Virgin Blue chaos from a single cable cut, that said, why the hell did they have a single point of failure?

Of course that's assuming this actually happens, Krudd was doing pretty well before this re-announcement. Punch drunk policy, like Barnaby Joyce foaming at the mouth whilst filibustering about the ETS / CPRS, is not a good look.

This will be Krudd's Work Choices and it will only benefit the greens, as Abbott, whilst extremely entertaining, is completely unelectable.

There is no point alienating your political base Mr Krudd.

Meanwhile in news to hand, The Melbourne Comedy Festival has announced a new headline act, the Liberal Party's Annual Conference. Lateline will be extended to two hours a night during the conference, as Abbott will be backflipping on gaffs everyday, and the ABC doesn't want to appear biased.

#spill the hashtag which gripped a twitterdom

A truely amazing experience today on twitter, the federal opposition are having a #spill and twitter became the center of attention. Far more than #qanda, twitter was tracking the pulse of national politics and it became a trending topic worldwide.

As people tuned into Lateline and the 7.30 Report, they twittered suprise at Kerry being behind the eight-ball with the latest news. When a story breaks, we turn to the internet, TV is being left behind..

Funny what happens down under in November, The Dismissal, Kevin07 the Spill, it's becoming the Friday the 13 of Australian Politics .

http://twitter.com/zackster/politics is my small selection of interesting people

http://twitter.com/#search?q=#spill is where you can watch the nation tweet in real time

Enjoy! I certainly have been.

Rudd should take 'a holiday' more often

After moving from Modelglue to Coldbox, suddenly it's fun again

After using Model Glue (MG) for a few years, I started about 6 months using Coldbox (CB) and boy has it been a refreshing experience. Both claim to be Model-View-Controller or MVC frameworks, but as I have said in the past, Model Glue is MVCX, that is MVC + XML.

I hate the X in the MVCX, purely because XML isn't a programming language. CFML is, and that is what made programming Coldfusion (with Coldbox) fun again.

You simply can't express complex ideas simply in an XML file, it's a no brainer. The XML files used in Model Glue are highly repeditive and violate the DRY principle.

I am a CF developer since 96 and while i really benefited from using MG, I was continually battling the concept of trying to be 'true' to the framework and working with the XML files, without breaking the basic MVC concept. Anything complex always ended up with what I saw as dirty workarounds.

Alas, in business, you can't just simply switch frameworks on a large project as most often the client isn't going to pay (or understand) why you need to spend a few weeks rewriting something which already works.

So a new project came up and I finally got dirty with CB, which has turned out to be rather fun. CB has such a broad scope of functionality and great documentation, I find myself writing code without having to work around the limitations imposed by MG.

As I have been doing this programming thing for quite a long time now, I have learnt that often when I get that nigglying feeling that I should be doing something different or that an extra bit of work here or there, it pays off.

Of course that can be a complete scope creep trap for some developers, but that's the role of the senior developer / tech lead / solution architect to understand and make such rational calls.

I use the analogy of selling helium balloons at a fun park. If you fill the balloons and seal them properly , you can walk around all day and just focus on selling the balloons. If the balloons leak, your going to be dealing with parents with crying kids coming back all day to complain, plus you'll be making trips back to your van to refill your stock.

When I worked at a SME a few years ago, on a big project for a Telco, I was lucky enough to have my desk in the same area as the support team. That meant I got to over hear problems as they came in and over time, that allowed me to stablised the project with targetted improvements that so drastically reduced the amount of support required that the project as deemed mature and was outsourced to an Indian support team.

What I love about CF is how productive you can be and how amazing the CF community is. Adobe, has rather expensive support, but that has always been less of an issue for most CF developers & shops because of the community, most of us simply have never used Adobe support.

All I'm saying is that if your using Model Glue, let me recommend taking Coldbox for a spin, it will make your programming life much more enjoyable & productive.

Mapguide 2.1 final windows build

Jason Birch announced the release of the Final 2.1 candidate installer for Windows

http://download.osgeo.org/mapguide/releases/2.1.0/MapGuideOpenSource-2.1.0.4283-Final.exe

2.1 Release Notes

This is a really solid release which resolves a lot of issues and should
make the MapGuide experience even better, it's focus was

• Performance, scalability, stability
• Better and more informative error messages

I have been using early builds of this for quite a while in production
and it's much more stable the previous releases.

If your using an earlier release, I would highly recommend trying out this
new release.

Raster support now works out of the box and supports raster reprojection.

Road labelling has had a number of useful improvements as well

The Fusion Map Viewer has had a major rewrite and is much faster and improved

On the Linux side, the build is still somewhat troublesome and we are
looking for help on implementing CMake and supporting Ubuntu.

This release has taken quite a while to get out the door, I blogged about
some of the new features in 2.1 back in Jan.

and don't forget MapGuide Central!

Climate Change Denial Down Under

Last the ABC aired a piece on Four Corners, Malcolm and the Malcontents about the Federal Opposition and it's position on the proposed ETS or CPRS as we call it down here

Now if the issue wasn't as critically serious, this Tragi-comedy would almost be funny. If there was ever an argument for generational change in the Liberal Party, this was it.

I am sick of the right wing's attitude to this issue. Just because your elected to Canberra, it doesn't mean your an expert. If you have studied statistics at a tertiary level, comprehend climate science and are prepared to face your peers, then I'll listen.

The Australian people have already voted for action on this issue and just because half your main supporters are either (and I'm sorry to say this), are either ignorant of the science, or that old they won't even be around in 2020, it's no excuse.

Through all this childish debate, everyone seems to have forgotten that the opposition are the opposition and it only take a few forward thinking senators to cross the floor and the bill will be passed.

It's high time for the Australian Centre Right to stand up on this issue. Whilst this is should be just matter of principle, based on the science, there are more votes in supporting this, than there is in avoiding the issue.

I implore any Coalition voters out there to watch this report, form an opinion and then contact your senators. The CPRS is a bill which can be changed once your party regains power, we just need to start now, send the market the signal, it's common sense.

CORY BERNARDI, BARNABY JOYCE, TONY ABBOTT and NICK MINCHIN stop acting like children

IAN MACFARLANE, I have a lot of new found respect for you!

JULIE BISHOP, MIA as usual

One of my favourite recent photos

From high vibes sept 09