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.

“new zealand is a very boring place”

Aucklander Peter Calveley describes his motivation for having a go at Amazon’s one-click patent as basically being bored. Amazon didn’t deliver on a book order, which seems to have got his goat up - and provided him with a line of work to keep him busy. The work of proving that there was substantial prior art concerning one-click transactions on the web. Thanks to Calveley Amazon have proposed changes to the patent which will reduce its scope to one-click transactions involving a shopping cart, after the US Patent Office & Trademark Office had rejected the majority of Amazon’s claims (21 of 26).

Calveley used the technique of having the patent re-examined to be able to use prior art. Ironically he used information provided by Amazon’s Alexa via the Archive.org’s Wayback Machine as the source of information providing him with evidence that one-click transactions were in use on the web prior to Amazon and its patent.

Sydney Morning Herald and a couple of stories from Outlaw provide the background. For Peter’s take check his blog.

Phones & Music

E65 & Python

Ever since Nokia introduced Python for their Series 60 phones I have been planning on acquiring one. The phones have slowly become smaller, less expensive and with more features. Whilst the N95 represents the future of features, with a decent camera, WiFi and integrated GPS, it’s not there in terms of cost, size and battery life. So I have selected the E65, only slightly heavier than my current phone but with lots of S60 goodness, WiFi and VoIP capabilities.

Naturally the first thing I’ve attempted is to install Python. There are a couple of gotchas, one a bug and the other related to increased security measures within the 3rd edition of Series 60.
1. You need to configure the phone to allow self-signed applications to be installed before installing Python.
2. When installing Python you must install the current version to the phone memory rather than the memory card (BTW: the micro-SD cards are tiny), this is a known bug and will be fixed in future releases.

Nokia provide great access to the phone’s features via Python so I’m looking forward to seeing what I can do with it. Here are some initial ideas: send the phone a SMS to take a photo, time lapse photo sequence with auto-upload to flickr and have the phone record locations of open WiFi spots detected (requires the external GPS).

JB HiFi

After buying the E65 I chanced upon JB Hi-Fi on Queen St. opposite Smith & Caughey. The Ockker retailer looks set to stir things up - they have a massive selection of games, music and DVDs with a smattering of consumer electronics. Nice to see some more competition in Auckland. Its not a pretty retail environment with its fluoro sale now look and if you’re looking for decent staff recommendations I would still head down to Marbecks.