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nsw

You are currently browsing articles tagged nsw.

Links for 29 May 2009 through 08 June 2009

08 June 2009 in Daily Links by del.icio.us | No comments

Stilgherrian’s links for 29 May 2009 through 08 June 2009. Yes, another delayed posting which will give you plenty of Queen’s Birthday holiday reading.

  • How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live | TIME: Yes, TIME magazine’s cover story is about Twitter. It starts extremely badly: that clichéd, lazy trope about people tweeting what they had for breakfast. Despite that inexcusable slackness, it’s a useful addition to the cornucopia of Twitter-based articles.
  • 10 Things I would do differently | Still A Newspaperman: Written with the benefit of hindsight, a former newspaper journalist considers how he’d have handled running a metropolitan newspaper. He’s spot on in many ways.
  • Can the EU play Battleships? | Global Dashboard: Is it time for Europe, as a united entity, to develop a naval strategy? The article’s illustration is also a remarkable example of period gender stereotyping.
  • How IT Can Save Africa | SAP Network Blogs: While clunkily-written, this piece outlines why getting decent IT to Africa isn’t a “waste”, but in fact a core element of getting rid of poverty.
  • How Twitter’s Staff Uses Twitter (And Why It Could Cause Problems) | ReadWriteWeb: It turns out that the staff of Twitter don’t use it like “power users” like me use it. Could this affect the tool’s development?
  • The oldest sculpture ever discovered is a 36,000 year old woman with really big breasts. Is anyone surprised? | 3quarksdaily: Dubbed the “Venus of Hohle Fels”, this 6cm tall sculpture us about 36,000 years old. And it has large breasts.
  • Live Streaming Video From Livestream.com: The live video streaming service Mogulus has re-branded as Livestream. That should Hoover them into some generic wordspace, yeah. (Google it!)
  • Spootnik: A tool to automatically synchronise information between 37signals’ Basecamp (which use extensively) and OmniFocus (which intend to use).
  • Tom’splanner: Another software as a service start-up, this time about “creating and sharing project schedules”. Their website’s menu bar is the clichéd list of Home, tour, product Info, Pricing and — of course! — “Buzz”, so it must be good. Sigh.
  • How Journalists Are Using Twitter in Australia | PBS: Julie Posetti’s rather reasonable article which responds to “the views of resistors and detractors” who argue that “Twitter isn’t journalism”. “Sound familiar to veterans of the great blogging vs journalism debate?” she asks. “Of course Twitter isn’t journalism, it’s a platform like radio or TV but with unfettered interactivity. However, the act of tweeting can be as journalistic as the act of headline writing. Similarly, the platform can be used for real-time reporting by professional journalists in a manner as kosher as a broadcast news live report.”
  • Light Rail to Summer Hill | Metro Transport: The other Monday, yet another proposal for a new transport line in Sydney went to NSW state cabinet. This one involves extending the existing light rail line by 3.7km from Lilyfield to Summer Hill by converting the Rozelle freight line. It also has the advantage of running through the state seat of Balmain, where sitting Labour member Verity Firth runs the risk of losing to The Greens in the 2011 election.

Links for 11 March 2009 through 18 March 2009

18 March 2009 in Daily Links by del.icio.us | No comments

Stilgherrian’s links for 11 March 2009 through 18 March 2009, posted after considerable delay in some cases:

Links for 31 January 2009

31 January 2009 in Daily Links by del.icio.us | No comments

Stilgherrian’s links for 31 January 2009, arranged by intensity of floral attitude:

  • Twittering away standards or tweeting the future of journalism? | Reuters Blogs: Reuters News editor David Schlesinger tweets from Davos, beats his own news wires, and then blogs about the experience. If Twitter is changing journalism, his response is “Bring it on!”
  • The LEGO Turing Machine | YouTube: The Turing Machine was a hypothetical computing device created by Alan Turing in 1936 to explain basic theoretical concepts in computing. While very simple, a Turing Machine is mathematically equivalent to any other general purpose computer, if slower. So, these guys have built one using LEGO Mindstorms components. The video has a bonus soundtrack via The A-Team.
  • A radical idea: Charge people for your product | 37signals: The blog post is from November 2008, but the message is current given all the media flutter about Twitter — which has yet to earn a single dollar of revenue. Need income? Um, charge for your product!
  • FORA.tv: “Videos Covering Today’s Top Social, Political, and Tech Issues.” I haven’t checked them out properly yet, so this is really a reminder to self.
  • GoodBarry: These guys provide an integrated “Software as a Service” (SaaS) system for small business, covering eCommerce, content management (CMS), customer relationship management (CRM), email marketing and analytics. All hooked together, and all at good prices. I’m checking them out for a client.
  • Life Matters’ Mandatory Internet Filter Transcript | Off Topic with Ashley: An unofficial transcript of ABC Radio National’s Life Matters program with network engineer Mark Newton and Jim Wallace, Managing Director of the Australian Christian Lobby.
  • Mandatory internet filter | ABC Life Matters: On Thursday, ABC Radio National’s Life Matters interviewed network engineer Mark Newton and Jim Wallace, Managing Director of the Australian Christian Lobby. Audio available for download.
  • The Economy According To Mint | TechCrunch: Mint is an online accounting system for consumers. Tracing their 900,000 customers through 2008 shows how their spending patterns have changed as the Global Financial Crisis worsens.
  • Labor’s “deafening silence” as web censorship trials delayed | theage.com.au:
  • Newspapers Saw the Digital Train A-Coming | Advertising Age: Bradley Johnson points out that the newspapers themselves were exploring digital delivery of news in the 1980s, but failed to do anything about it in terms of reviewing their business models.
  • OpenNet Initiative: “ONI’s mission is to identify and document Internet filtering and surveillance, and to promote and inform wider public dialogs about such practices.”
  • The Unmistakable Smell Of Decay | newmatilda.com: With the NSW Labor zombie army smelling worse all the time, party hacks are considering swapping their front-line cadaver, writes Bob Dumpling.

Do we really care about our kids?

01 December 2008 in Internet, Politics by Stilgherrian | 12 comments

Photograph of Verity Firth

Despite all the rhetoric about “protecting our children” and “children are the future”, our governments seem determined to prevent them preparing for the real future. Take NSW schools minister Verity Firth…

This morning the Sydney Morning Herald tells us the NSW government will receive $285M for new laptops — which will then be blocked from accessing social media and most everything else.

The Minister for Education, Verity Firth [pictured], said the Government would prevent access to the social networking sites, and other sites, even when the laptops were used at home.

“We don’t want these kids to be using these computers for the not-so-wholesome things that can be on the net. And they won’t be able to because essentially the whole server is coming through the Department of Education.”

So kids will be prevented from using their computers to connect with and understand their peers and the real world because of this continuing paranoia about unspecified “not-so-wholesome things” and parents being too lazy to supervise their own children.

Maybe Ms Firth needs to read Mark Pesce’s Those Wacky Kids, or watch the video. As Pesce quite rightly points out, if the classroom is the only part of these kids’ lives which isn’t hyperconnected, then the classroom will be seen as irrelevant.

Rupert Murdoch is right to say we have a 19th Century education system. Our Minister seems intent on keeping it that way.

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Links for 17 November 2008 through 18 November 2008

18 November 2008 in Daily Links by del.icio.us | No comments

Stilgherrian’s links for 17 November 2008 through 18 November 2008, thinned with cheap turpentine:

  • NSW Government in Exile: “NSW is mired in incompetence and corruption. No-one in or near power appears able to come up with a coherent policy or plan. So let’s start.” Aparently I’m minister for infrasructure.
  • HOW TO: Build Community on Twitter | Mashable: “The strength of your community determines overall what you will (or won’t) get out of the microblogging platform. What do you want to use Twitter for?” Sarah Evans offers some good tips.
  • HOW NOT TO: Build Your Twitter Community | Mashable: The flipside to Sarah Evans’ previous post.
  • What the family values folks don't get about family | denialism blog: “The anti-gay marriage folks think that family is all about fear, sex, and violence… These folks who fought for Prop 8 don’t understand the real meaning of family, of love, of comfort. For most of us, it’s not about fulfilling one fringe group’s idea of what God wants. It’s about creating a life with another, sharing a physical and emotional space with someone, rejoicing together when things are good, and holding each other when things are tough. It’s human.”
  • Twitter is Real Life | Aide-mémoire: The ever-thoughtful Kate Carruthers has written an excellent piece countering the “Twitter is dead” meme which seems to surface from time to time. Yes, she says nice things about me (again), but there are good bits too.
  • 30 Hilarious TV Meltdowns, Outbursts & Blunders | ClearlyAV: A collection of 30 videos which are (mostly) people losing their temper on TV.
  • Green ICT Symposium 2008: The presentations for this conference, held in Canberra last Friday 14 November 2008, are now online.
  • SSL Certificate Tester | digicert: While I don’t use digicert to buy my SSL certificates, this handy test page is good for showing the status of SSL certificates installed on your web server.
  • Making money twice | 37signals: A good portion of this industry is still trying to figure out how to make money for the first time (hint: charge people). But for those who’ve mastered that, I want to talk about the next step: making money twice (or three or four times).
  • NYT: Obama saying goodbye to BlackBerry? | msnbc.com: The limitations on the President, both legal and security-based, mean that Barack Obama may have to give up using email. Unable to get unfiltered access to The Real World, he’ll become increasingly dependent on a worldview filtered through his “advisors”.

Why The Greens won’t win Marrickville

08 February 2007 in Enmore, Politics by Stilgherrian | 7 comments

By all rights, The Greens’ candidate for Marrickville in the forthcoming NSW state election should be a shoe-in. This is The Greens heartland, and Fiona Byrne is a local councillor and presumably knows her patch. Labor incumbent Carmel Tebbutt, the Princess of Marrickville (so-called because her husband Anthony Albanese, the Prince of Marrickville, is the Federal ALP member for the equivalent district, Grayndler) has to dissuade us from thoughts that the NSW ALP government is rotten to the core. And environmental issues are at the top of the agenda.

But it won’t happen. And here’s why…

Earlier tonight, my post-gym dinner-and-drinks led me to the Carlisle Castle Hotel. It was a quiet night, and my gym partner and I were almost alone in the front bar until Fiona Byrne and her entourage turned up after a candidates’ forum at the Newtown Community Centre.

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