Nz on Tony Andrew Meyer

Open source in government is not important

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 21:41:34 +1200

Labour’s “ICT” policy includes a statement on “Open software” in government, part of which is attempting to get two thirds of government agencies to use some sort of open-source software by 2015. This is basically what you expect from politicians when talking about “ICT” (or nearly anything, unfortunately) - they jump on whatever bandwagon/buzzwords are popular without any understanding of what should be done. Firstly, I would be shocked if more than two thirds of government agencies were not already using some form of open-source software already. For a start, it’s nearly impossible to use the Internet without accessing something running Linux or Apache. More importantly, it makes no sense at all to aim for governments to be using more open-source software. They should be using the software most suited to the job at hand, whether closed source or open source. What benefit is there in requiring open source? If they think it’s cheaper, then they should look more closely, because it’s often not. The same applies to being more secure. There are absolutely situations where the best choice is an open-source one - but there are absolutely situations where closed source is better. I don’t want government employees forced to use less than the best tools because of some ideological burden placed on them by someone wanting a cushy job for the next three years. They have a few other requirements: Software developed in-house will be made publicly available. A nice idea, but (a) I’m fairly sure that most of the in-house software is of no use to anyone else, (b) I suspect most of the software you’d assume was in-house was actually developed by non-government contractors, and, most significantly, (c) not all code is ready to be shared. If a government sysadmin writes a quick script to do a job, do we really want to add the pressure that it will be publicly available (and given that it’s the government, it’s reasonable to assume that someone will be looking at everything). As long as the software does the job, that’s good enough (in the “in-house” context). What would be worthwhile is ensuring that government agencies consider whether software should be released to the public - I’m sure that there is some that would be of general interest and where the quality is suitably high.

Wolfskin (Juliet Marillier)

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 10:57:39 +1200

The main reason that I bought Wolfskin was because I noticed that Marillier was a New Zealander (or at least was born here, although she lives in Australia now), and there’s not really very many NZ sci-fi/fantasy authors or books, and I’d like to support the locals as much as possible. (As an aside, my favourite NZ book is Beak of the Moon, by Philip Temple, also of Dunedin). So I wasn’t really expecting that much - it wasn’t quite charity, but I would have been happy with a pretty mediocre story. However, I really loved this book. I’m not sure why so many fantasy authors feel the need to set their stories in/around the UK, but it’s so common that it didn’t really bother me here. The characters in Wolfskin were excellently developed, and a pleasure to get to know. The antagonist was nicely grey - although you really could despise what he did, you could also understand his motivation for the most part. The magic was pleasingly subtle, and the battles sufficiently short. One minor note that bothered me (minor spoiler alert): early in the book, a girl is attacked, and the attacker isn’t identified. The implication is that it’s the antagonist, Somerled. The way the scenes were written, it seemed likely to me that it would turn out to not have been (directly) Somerled at all, but rather the girl’s friend, led to a bad decision by listening to Somerled (so he was at fault, but only indirectly). Even later in the story, when the friend is re-encountered, nothing in the events seemed to contradict this theory. However, the book ends without coming back to it, so I suppose that we’re meant to just believe that it was Somerled who did the attack. I think it would have suited Somerled’s character, and improved the story, if we had discovered that it wasn’t directly his fault. The story ends well, with the story nicely resolved, and although there’s clearly a hook left for a sequel, it’s subtle enough that the ending is satisfying and yet the hook doesn’t seem like the only purpose for that element is the sequel. Overall I highly recommend reading Wolfskin, and intend to keep an eye out for anything else that Marillier produces.

S92A, and other thoughts on the revised Copyright Act

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 18:35:53 +1200

There is quite a furore (e.g. #blackout) at the moment about the eminent arrival of the updated Copyright Act in NZ, pretty much all surrounding section 92A. 92A doesn’t appear in the official online copies (either HTML or PDF) - I don’t know if that is because it only takes effect from the end of the month, or because someone left it out. The Amendment does have the wording:

92A Internet service provider must have policy for terminating accounts of repeat infringers “(1) An Internet service provider must adopt and reasonably implement a policy that provides for termination, in appropriate circumstances, of the account with that Internet service provider of a repeat infringer. “(2) In subsection (1), repeat infringer means a person who repeatedly infringes the copyright in a work by using 1 or more of the Internet services of the Internet service provider to do a restricted act without the consent of the copyright owner.

Vodafone subsumes ihug: can't handle Internet or phone

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 12:33:49 +1200

Vodafone, who I used to think was an ok company, bought and then subsumed ihug, who once was a good company (but had previously sunk to terrible depths). Ihug did all sorts of nutty side ventures, but generally was a company specialising in Internet access and phone calls. I called Vodafone yesterday, and got a “sorry, we are experiencing high call volume. Please call back” message. And then it hung up! No queue, no way to set up a call from Vodafone back to me to help. Just hanging up on me. Today, I go to the Vodafone website (because it appears that their DNS servers are dead; thank goodness for OpenDNS) and I get: [caption id=“attachment_95” align=“alignnone” width=“300” caption=“Vodafone”][/caption] If an ISP can’t handle serving up their own homepage, are they really a good choice? If you’re a business, would you even consider talking to them at this point?

iPhone works fine on prepay

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 20:20:54 +1200

The Vodafone NZ website clearly states that the iPhone (3G) will not be “available” on Prepay. For various reasons, I swapped the SIMs in my prepay Vodafone phone and our on-contract 3G iPhone last night. The iPhone worked without any problems at all with the Prepay SIM. Phone calls and SMS worked fine, as did (as you would expect) all the non-phone features of the phone. I didn’t sync the phone, so it’s possible it’s disabled there, but that would be easy enough to work around if you had two SIMs as we do (and I doubt it actually is disabled there anyway). I didn’t try getting data (no plans are available for any Prepay customer, but the casual data is available) since we’re in a non-3G area, but I expect that also works. Possibly by “available”, they mean “available to buy” - i.e. unless you have a contact with them they won’t sell you one. However, we bought ours outright and they didn’t even get my phone number IIRC, so they had no idea if I had a contract or not. I guess they want to sell more contracts, but being honest wouldn’t really hurt that much, would it? They might even sell more phones, although maybe they don’t make much from that (I’m much more likely to get one if I can stick with my Prepay access).

Hardly news, but: Vodafone NZ sucks

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 11:54:48 +1200

They finally (hard to believe they waited this long) released their iPhone plans (the website is barely up at the moment - they own the second largest ISP in NZ, and can’t handle a bit of load!). I knew that the data would be expensive here, although I had a little hope when I saw the costs in Australia. This is much worse than I thought it would be, though. Are people really going to pay $250 per month?!? I guess so, but you’re excluding vast numbers of people that would be otherwise interested in this month. My guess is that the cost is indirectly Apple’s fault. At the WWDC keynote, Jobs pointed out that the cost around the world would be as low as (or lower than) the new US price - no doubt Apple enforces this in their contracts with the providers. Vodafone NZ doesn’t want to sell the phone for $199, but has to, so simply raises the contract price until they get what they want out of it anyway. This is twice as expensive as the US or even the complaining Canadians. And we have a reasonably decent 3G network, so the phone would have been useful here. The “250” plan costs $2,619 for 24 months. For that, you get the phone, 120 minutes, 600 txts, and 250MB of data a month. I’d pay that, but 120 minutes isn’t enough (we used about 200 minutes last month), and 600 txts are barely enough (580 last month). It’s the data that breaks the deal - 250MB is about 8MB a day. IOW, barely enough to check email and use the map occasionally. My Zabbix status page is about 3MB. I could check it twice a day. Ridiculous. The “500” plan costs $3719 for 24 months, and gives you the phone, 250 minutes, 600 txts, and 500MB of data a month (16MB a day). Perhaps enough data to use the phone as long as you were really careful and around accessible wifi a lot. But that’s a big jump in price. The “1GB” plan (I can’t believe that’s the largest!) costs a whopping $6349 for 24 months (3 and a third brand new iMacs!). 600 minutes, 600 txts, and 1GB of data (32MB a day). Too many minutes, and still not enough data, although it’d be useable. But $250 per month? There’s no way that I can justify spending that, even as a business expense (I would be using it to check the status of servers while out). A 2GB plan (paying the overage cost) costs $7069 for 24 months. 600 minutes, 600 txts, 2GB for $280 per month. The other option is to stick with our current plan and add a data pack. We currently get 60 minutes, 600 txts and also have three “best mates” (unlimited txts, pxts and calls) for $46/month. With the 200MB data plan added, the cost is $2950.75 for 24 months. That’s only just more expensive than the iPhone 250 plan, and would suit us much better (the best mates make all the difference). The difference between 8MB of data a day and 6.45MB of data a day is the difference between barely using the data and barely using the data. With the 1GB data plan added, the cost is $3430.75 for 24 months. Less than the iPhone 500 plan! Twice the data for less money! What are they thinking? More importantly, what are the suckers that sign up for this thinking? Sure you get 120 minutes with the iPhone plan, but we have three best mates that account for vastly more than 60 minutes of call time. Given that most of the calls and a large proportion of our txts are to those three people, we get better value for exactly the same usage for close to half the price. So: is it worth another $50 per month (and $1129 upfront) to have the iPhone? That’s a large chunk of money. It’s a great device, and we absolutely would use the GPS/mapping/data functionality that our iPod touch lacks. Lots of thinking in the next couple of days! A final note: the iPhone itself is $1129, the iPod Touch is $449. $680 for GPS, calls, txts, and (for lots more money) data while not connected to wifi. Pretty steep.