Umamiblog

Tom over at WellUrban has been posting some interest articles on statistics from the recently released 2006 Census. As you would expect, his focus has been on Wellington and his last post was on the age structure of our city and the 4 other cities that make up the Wellington region.

Wellington itself seems to be exactly opposite the other regional cities as well as the NZ average in terms of age structure. Put bluntly, we have few very young or very old persons, and a great proportion of 20 to 40 year olds. As usual the easiest way to see and understand this is to visualise in the form of graph as Tom has done – the lime green is Wellington City (click through and read the full article):

Webstock mini

There were two web related events on in Wellington last week. Wednesday night saw Webstock mini at the Town Hall. Ingrid has blogged it much better than I could’ve so if you’re interested in the speakers and what they had to say, follow the link.

Something that was announced at the event was that the next full Webstock conference probably won’t be until early 2008. To me that’s rather disappointing and feels like an opportunity lost for WSNZ and Wellington as well. I won’t be surprised if something starts to happen in Auckland in 2007 and some of the momentum from down here is lost. However there may very well be some valid reasons for the wait – we’ll just have to wait and see.

Microsoft’s Expand Your Portfolio

Microsoft, under the super organisational skills of Nigel Parker, lead a tour around NZ to show off their new Expressions toolset. As a MS Gold Partner we’ve been aware of Expressions for quite some time now but hadn’t yet understood what MS was trying to achieve taking on Macrodobia. The message we got was that we “wouldn’t be replacing those tools anytime soon”.

That notwithstanding, the demonstration did show some promise especially around the areas of the WPF/E and XAML stuff. My general feeling around creating new formats, a.k.a. Sony, is that you’re generally being an asshat. But there may be valid reasons for a new approach to the interactive web that Microsoft is exploring – they’ll just need to communicate them clearly. One positive tick for WPF/E is that it is cross-platform compatible from the get-go. Well, almost…

Where almost everyone agrees this will make the most impact and has the f…ing cool stamp is the how the next generation of .NET applications will be designed in Expression Studio and then have that almost seemlessly applied to the application/development. That is a mega oversimplification but go have a look for yourself and you’ll see what I’m getting at.

I was reading the NZ Herald yesterday and came across an article titled Cows , not cars, top threat to environment, says UN report.

Some key takeways:

Livestock are responsible for 18 per cent of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming, more than cars, planes and all other forms of transport put together.

[Growing meat and everything it entails] produces 9 per cent of all emissions of carbon dioxide

their wind and manure emit more than one third of emissions of another, methane, which warms the world 20 times faster than carbon dioxide.

It makes for interesting (and possibly shocking) reading for those of you who, like me, are starting to become more aware of environmental issues from a personal level. The big question for me that comes directly from the article is Will I create a more positive impact on the environment if I choose not to eat beef or drink cow’s milk than if I sold my car?

There seems to be a focus on transport as the main culprit and the key to solving climate change. Whether that is an accurate reflection of the work, research, and literature on climate change, I don’t know. But I definitely feel it from the (sensationalist) media and the general public.

It also makes me wonder about opponents to the colloquially known “Fart Tax” and whether facts like these were included in the debate – I somehow doubt it. As a nation of 10 million cows we need to get real about the actual cost of producing and consuming our bovine friends.

I don’t for a second believe that the answer is to kill all cows or any suggestion like that. As Al Gore said rather eloquently towards the end of An Inconvenient Truth, the answer lies in making savings and efficiencies in everything across the board rather than searching for that one single silver bullet. If we can reduce the effect cows are having on our environment through smarter and more realistic consumption then we will find ourselves much closer to the goal of reducing emmissions to pre-gluttonous levels.

And hey, we might find people have a few less heart attacks as a result. We definitely need to see more debate on this.

Update: Catching up on RSS feeds I see the Celsias blog has already talked about cows

It was announced this morning that the iTunes Music Store was being released here in NZ. Fantastic! I remember watching a webcast of Steve Jobs announcing the iTMS for the first time. I had only just started sipping the Apple koolaid having bought my first Mac (a shiny iBook G3). I remember thinking “OMG, that is so freaking cool! 250,000 songs!? That’s huge! I wonder how long it’ll be before it gets to NZ”.

After double checking Wikipedia, iTMS was first launched in April, 2003… That was three and half years ago! In that time we’ve seen video iPods, G5s come and go, and hell freeze over with the Mac plaform switching to Intel chips. It’s a bit of a joke we’ve had to wait this long, apparently we are the last English-speaking developed country to receive the store.

However, all of that is now past us and I’ve already signed up and bought my first few songs. My first legally (of the paid variety) downloaded song was Evermore’s Light Surrounding You, sweet! And at a $1.79 per song…

How does $1.79 compare to the rest of the world? Well I’m glad you asked that question, here is a table of currency converted (using Apple Calculator, of course) prices for the US, UK, EU, Aussie, and ourselves, ordered by price.

Interestingly, and even after GST, we’re cheaper than all 4 stores bar the American one. Not bad at all.

Have you joined the iTMS already? What was your first song?

Today, and it feels great to say it, one of the biggest projects I have ever worked on went live. The Department of Conservation started their public website project many many months ago and set themselves an enormous task, which included reducing the amount of content pages on the site from a 5 digit number down to 4.

We redesigned the site with a large amount of effort going into rethinking and reimagining how users would access content. We also worked to develop the site putting it into the most excellent EPiServer CMS.

A unique feature of the site is something we’ve called DRDL. Or Dynamic Resolution Dependant Layout. What that actually means is that, using a little bit of Javascript and a lot of CSS, we ‘tweak’ the content depending on the size of your browser window. If you look at the site in a 800×600 screen you’ll see content that fits within your window, if you look at the site in a 1024×768 screen, you’ll also see content that fits nicely within your window. It’s a great way to help maximise screen real estate usage, at the web’s most popular screen resolution size, while not excluding those at lower screen resolutions.

It’s also probably one of the projects I’m most proud of too, and I did a lot of work with Nick who was an absolute superstar. Go have a look at the new and improved DoC website »

Also, as a parting note, apologies for the lack of updates recently. Life seems to be getting in the way. But that is also a very very good thing

Over the weekend I finally got around to installing Akismet on my blog. Akismet is a spam filtering service that works by capturing information about spam caught on all the blogs using it. It them tries to learn from the spam and refine it’s rules to help block future spam.

Spam had been on the rise for me but Movable Type’s anti-spam was doing reasonably fine, until now. In the past I had tightened it so it was a little more ruthless. Sadly, that wasn’t enough anymore.

JD had recommend (and raved about) Akismet to me a while ago. I never looked into that deeply, mainly because I knew Akismet had been developed by the WordPress crew so assumed there wouldn’t be easy integration with MT. I was wrong and I’m a little annoyed at myself that I didn’t install it sooner.

It works brilliantly. My blog has received a few hundred pieces of comment spam since I installed Akismet. So far NONE of them have gone through.

According to Akismet’s “Live Spam Zeitgeist”, 93% of comments are spam. For me that would be closer to 98%. Rather depressing really…

My cousin Aimee shot this today from the front of their house in Alexandra. The South got some snow last night.

Looks cold! The mountain range is known locally as the Old Woman. You can see it here on Google Maps, mountain range to the top and Alexandra to the bottom (might need to scroll down a bit), airport somewhere in the middle.

In a stunningly reassuring vote, Parliament has voted 72-49 against raising the legal drinking age.

I’ve been fearing and stewing on this private members’ bill for the last couple of weeks and I’m very very pleased to see reason and logic prevail.

More on the reasons why I believe this is the better outcome as well as the letter I meant to send to my MP after the jump (unfortunately it’ll probably be the weekend before I get a chance to put it up).

Please feel free to leave your own comments on this bill in the meantime.

…the 5th of November…



Wellington’s Guy Fawke’s Fireworks set »

Farmers, like most of New Zealand’s big retailers puts out a catalogue of specials to the wider public, by letter drop, a couple of times a month. A lot of work goes into producing and designing these catalogues (not including distribution!) and the experience you have as a “user” is one of being able to pick up something very versatile where you can flick through and find the information you need quickly and easily. As well as that you have this very tactile catalogue which can be kept for easy future reference (“how much was that breadmaker again?”).

Catalogues work as a marketing tool for these companies and are useful (even if we don’t always want to admit it) for us as consumers. Ask anyone who has moved into an apartment and no longer receives coupon books or catalogues.

It’s also something the web can help deliver on. While the web isn’t as good as paper for versatility, it does perform better as a reference and can be accessed from multiple points (including at the office :S ).

Traditionally, New Zealand’s companies have been slow to move in taking their marketing catalogues online in a usable form. If you were lucky you’d have access to a 5MB PDF file that excluded almost anyone on dialup and would’ve amounted to 1-3% of early Jetstream plans traffic allowance. Sometimes you’d have access to giant Jpegs that would be almost unusable for most computer users.

So what do you do? Well a little over a week ago, we[Intergen] helped Farmers go live with a Flash-based catalogue for their website that lets users literally flip through the pages of the catalogue. It helps to present the catalogue in a format that users are familiar with as well as using the web’s strengths for a better experience (zooming, one-click page turning, etc).

Go and give it a spin yourself »

Need a comparison? Try Briscoes.

It’s old news now that IE7 has been sprung onto the world, it’s also old news that IE7 will be rolled out as an automatic update.

I had been dreading it’s release. I just needed to think of all the work we’ve had to do in the past to get pixel perfection from IE5, IE5.5, IE6 (compared to our open source browser buddies), and then I imagining that we’d probably need to do that all again with IE7 but without the solid knowledge we now have of IE’s hacks, tweaks and whatnot.

As per usual, our worst fears are seldom realised and I haven’t been scratching my head too much with how IE7 has been performing so far. I’m even impressed slightly (shhhhh, don’t tell anyone). The single most handy piece of advice I’ve needed and used so far is to invoke IE7′s hasLayout “concept” like so:

_height:0; min-height:0; /* IE hasLayout fix */

Note that _height works for IE6 (no surprises there) but not for IE7. It does however include support for min/max-height/width, unlike IE6, and invokes plus fixes it for us.

There are also some good comments on the aptly titled IE7 CSS tweak show and tell at Zeldman’s blog.

Download IE7 » or read my notes from listening to Tony Chor (Group Program Manager, IE) present earlier this year at Webstock.