Copyright Extension

An interesting video from Open Rights Group, putting their perspective on the proposed European copyright term extension.

so there i was #rckq2evm1rme

Thursday evening was the first ‘official’ Auckland Map Meetup. A group of about 14 attended, a mix of cartographers, GIS professionals, open street mappers, academics and me.

I took along a 1940 AA Itinerary map, which I found in my grandmother’s collection of maps, which I now curate. She was a map magpie which explains why she kept it despite the three separate warnings about not using the map twice.

“Map routes are definitely OUT OF DATE 3 months after issue”

I’ve placed some ropey scans of it up on Flickr.

Cover
With two disclaimers.

Inside Cover
..another disclaimer.

Example Map
A route map and description in the AA abrev. speak.

I learnt more about how to contribute to Open Street Map from Robin Paulson and have since attempted to add some detail around Grey Lynn, notably adding in footpaths from Cox’s Bay out and around to Grey Lynn Park.

I would love to get a GSP logger and capture some walks out west for this project. Put Google to shame with their paper road view of around Bethells.

...and breathe. exams over

So exams are over. What do I do now? Hoping to do Privacy* Law in summer school. Have a feeling a sanding block will be shoved into my hands shortly. Before I discover the joys of weatherboard some exam related comments.

Could do better.

I can’t believe how bad the University of Auckland web site(s) are. Around now the most important information a student wants is the exact location of their exam. For a course with significant numbers they shard students across many different physical locations. These are all over the varsity and often in places students have never been before. Exam locations are not provided until 5pm the day before. It’s posted physically in a number of places around campus - but for most students the web provides the look up. So…
Is there a big obvious link direct from the home page? No.
Does any search result with perms of exam, schedule & location provide the info? No.
In fact the university have excelled in obscuring the information, as even a site specific google search is ineffective. It takes 5 friggin clicks from the homepage to find it.
Come on, surely the university can do better. The whole site looks like a badly designed intranet for a BDC circa 1997.

What do you call a 28yr old with a loud-hailer?

Last Thursday Clocktower 039 was the location for me. We’re just underway, 20 minutes into applying the Contractual Remedies Act, when the National Party rock up outside with a loud-hailer. I’m not sure if it was the wandering mob of Nikki Kaye’s, couldn’t see them. But we could hear them. So I agree with John Key. There is a real need for greater literacy. At least amongst their campaign workers - who had no idea what all the “Quiet Please. Exams On” signs meant.

* BTW: Nat Torkington is leading a Technology and Privacy Forum for the Privacy Commissioner’s Office in Auckland November 20.

Nat's slides and text of his Web Meets World: Privacy and the Future of the Cloud talk are available from SlideShare. Select fullscreen mode for the text.

planes, books and creative commons

I flew to Brisbane and back last week on Air NZ. Watched a film and some TV eps on the back of seat screen, which I took for granted. Coming back I figure I’ll do the same, had already mentally selected a couple of choices for the film, based on my previous scan of the selection available. Sit down in aircraft seat at Brisbane International to see a sticker advertising seat back entertainment coming soon, along with a photo showing me how it would look. One I was expecting the back of seat screen based on my experiences, flying with other carriers generally and specifically having had it available on the reverse flight but three days ago. So I was kinda gutted to find that this wasn’t the case. But having a facsimile screen sticker taunt my expectations really slapped the salt into the customer experience graze. I see the same stickers are now placed on the back of Auckland bus seats, where they are unreadable unless you bend down to read them. Winning strategy all round Mr and Ms Marketing bods.

So instead of a film on the way back I chewed all too fast through the sixth installment of Australian Labor politician/sleuth Murray Whelan, Sucked In. Whilst those around me were sucking in wind through their teeth as the lightening crackled around us on our descent into Auckland I was attempting to stifle my cackling laughter. Still no sign that John Clarke et al will dramatise anymore of these books beyond the first two novels Stiff and The Brush Off. Something should be done.

The purpose of flying to Brisbane was to attend the Building an Australasian Commons conference held by Creative Commons Australia. The Aussies are well onto it, well funded, well organised and producing projects that are being used throughout the global CC community. Though to be fair they based their version 3.0 set of licences on the NZ licences that were launched last year. I caught up with Louise O’Brien from CC Aotearoa New Zealand who indicated that they are still planning to hold regional CC events, including Auckland, and that they hope to launch a more complete web site in the future.
There needs to be greater publicity of CC in NZ and I hope these efforts raise awareness. I have come across a number of people using CC licences in NZ that were unaware that there were specific NZ licences available.

mens rea :: forgotten knowledge

To be convicted of a crime, generally two coincided elements must be proved:

• Actus reus - the external or physical side of things
• Mens rea - the mental aspect

There are different types of mens rea and these can be found in statute (e.g. Crimes Act 1961) with words such as ‘intended and ‘knew’.

Where knowledge is the mental element it can be argued, in specific circumstances, that although a defendant once knew something at the time of the actus reus they were not aware of the particular fact, therefore no mens rea can be proved.

It may be appropriate that the two cases discussed on forgotten knowledge concern the possession of cannabis. One in the UK where the Court of Appeal didn’t wear the argument. The other in New Zealand where in 1974 Mr Rowles had his conviction for unlawful possession quashed on appeal.

“If in fact the appellant had forgotten the presence of the cannabis in the cabinet, then I think he was not knowingly in possession of the cannabis. The extinction of conscious knowledge, whether caused by mistaken belief or fault of memory, would be in my view fatal to the required concept of factual possession accompanied by guilty knowledge.”

Mahon J, Police v Rowles - [1974] 2 NZLR 756

On that day in court the Police were represented by our current Governor-General Anand Satyanand.

days in may :: (afc) wimbledon (fc)

Updated: Dons promoted to Conference South!!

Reports
• South London Press: Dramatic comeback seals Dons’ promotion
• The Times: AFC Wimbledon fans provide impetus for upwardly mobile Brown
• AFC Wimbledon Club Match Report
• Phone Cam Experience of Match

20 years ago, on May 14, myself and 37,000 other Wimbledon FC supporters watched one of the biggest upsets in FA Cup history when the Crazy Gang beat the so called Culture Club 1-0 at Wembley.

The team included many names of note, Fash the Bash (a.k.a. John Fashanu), Pyscho (a.k.a. Vinnie Jones), Dennis Wise, Dave Bessant - who saved the penalty and Laurie Sanchez - who scored the goal. Terry Phelan played and is now the player manager for Otago FC.

Here’s a video from the BBC’s build up for the Cup which captures the Crazy Gang spirit.

It didn’t seem long after this high that things went awry, Hillsborough meant all-seater stadiums and the Dons moved from their home of Plough Lane to sharing with Crystal Palace. I never enjoyed Selhurst Park and my defining memory is of tears, the day we were relegated from the Premiership.

Then the whole ugly Franchise FC decision happened and the club’s financial owners moved it from South London to Milton Keynes. There’s a great Guardian article on the franchise issue, which includes a mention of George W. Bush. As a result of this AFC Wimbldeon was born and have been steadily moving up through the league pyramid of English football.

A video overview of the AFC Wimbledon story.

Today they play Staines in the playoffs for promotion to Conference South.

They won promotion!!!

Go you Dons!!!

television graphics, final cut pro, motion and xml

Updated: Code now available

Yesterday I got an email from an engineer at the mothership asking for advice on tweaking a small utility I put together. The utility automates the creation of on-screen menus for TVNZ 6, which are created using Apple’s Final Cut Pro and indirectly use Apple’s Motion.

Today via Creative Workflow Hacks I see that Apple has now documented the Motion XML format, which should make it easier for assembling smooth automated workflows. The FCP XML format is already well documented.

Database + XML + Python + Python libraries + FCP/Motion = rocking solution

I did some weekend based research on FCP’s Apple Event (AE) support whilst investigating the best way to do those menus. With the help of HAS’s appscript AE bridge I put together a first cut of some Python code that could get and send XML to FCP via AE. I didn’t use this approach in the actual solution, instead opting just to have the operator manually import a XML file.

I’ve placed that code onto the Python code snippets site Useless Python, hoping that it err may be useful to some. Why is Useless Python developed in PHP?

It’s not available yet, will link directly to it after it’s been reviewed and approved.

Well, turns out Useless Python is useless, nothing happening there. So I've pasted the code onto Pastie for those that are interested

Filed under: mac  media  python 

stats & startups

I’ve written at least three blog posts on that Act that passed the third reading last week, and I’ve binned them all. I’ve decided that’s too easy to be snarky…

I will however quickly note that in the UK the music biz is fighting a rear guard action on format shifting. They are seeking to impose a iPod tax as compensation.

Instead a quick post on something more positive.

I spent a couple of hours at the Small Business Expo today where my pick of the show would have to be Statistics NZ. There is a huge resource of free market research stats waiting for businesses to tap into. Some is free, some is charged for. The whole focus on business enablement and the savviness I encountered on their stand was impressive. The free stats are in large part due to additional funding they’re received. Good work govt. Let’s have more funding for this department to enable them to free up more of their stats.

IP telephony company Vadacom were also to be seen at the show. They use Python in their products and host the Auckland meetings of the NZ Python Users Group at their K Road base.

erlang, adservers and the iPhone

Recently viewed a great Erlang video from the Jonathan Rentzsch organised C4 conference. Bob Ippolito, who is well known for his work helping to marry the joys of Mac with the joys of Python, gives the talk in which he provides an overview of Erlang and discusses the use of Erlang in powering his companies ad server and traffic monitoring products. The ad server is MochiAds which focuses on the Flash causal games market, embedding preroll and inter level ads into Flash content. If you’ve been to the Auckland Web Meetup in the last year then you may be familiar with it via Shaun Lee’s presentation on his Flash games portal shaunsflights.com or the presentation from Stephen Harris on Ninja Kiwi which inspired Shaun to become a Flash game developer.

The slides and code from Bob’s presentation are also available in addition to the hour long video.

I also dialed into the HD version of the Steve Jobs iPhone SDK keynote video. Having recently swapped out my old PowerBook for a bright shiny new MacBook Pro I was blown away by the ability to watch beautiful crisp HD video streamed. The content of the keynote was pretty impressive as well, though I’m not sure that all other competitors should pack up and go home quite yet;)

"In the space of an hour announcement, Apple has destroyed most of the big mobile players, Nokia, Microsoft, and RIM. I'd expect Google to abandon Android development at this point, it's now just irrelevant (if it weren't already)" - Polar Bear Farm

last two weeks only

Two weeks ago I resigned from TVNZ. I start full time study for a LLB in a fortnight. It’s an exciting prospect and I can’t wait to get stuck in. I will not be around for the launch of TVNZ7, though I will sure to set up the PVR to check out Russell’s show.

The last two weeks at TVNZ will be focused on helping define first draft of business/technical architecture for the content aspects of the enterprise. The next two days, however, I’m going to be in Wellington at Webstock.