Blog posts

I consider myself a committed political progressive - apparently somewhat unusually and unexpected from someone in my demographic. Some will consider me 'woke' (I'm happy to be awake to the world around me), and others will say I'm 'Left', even 'Radical Left'. Here's the conundrum: I not only accept my labels, I wear them proudly.

I can't help feeling that we're missing a key movement in our society today. Just about all of our interaction with society and the political sphere is now mediated by digital technologies. The impact of that - and the manipulation of those technologies by vested interests - is profound, and I think, largely unacknowledged.

I was deeply saddened by the departure of Sam Neill. For his fame, he was a remarkably humble, self-effacing man who was kind and really valued the community around him.

This is a celebration of a life and an acknowledgement of shame and dismay. It's early in the morning and I can't sleep, so I've decided to write down the thoughts that are keeping me awake. I need to tell the tale of 3 Leg, the precious matriarch of our garden.

I've been looking for the opportunity to write something like this for a long time... Today, happily for me, the perfect opportunity landed in my lap.

Originally written on 20250228

Originally written on 20250228

Unlike the mainstream social media, the Fediverse - and its array of ActivityPub-supporting web services - doesn't care if you're there. It's a place where the only ones who benefit from your presence are those who want to interact with you. There are no other shareholders.

Flashback: I remember standing in the pick-up department of a hardware vendor I used to frequent back when my business did a lot of system integration (helping Windows-dependent businesses take advantage of the capabilities Linux servers offered them).

Roughly six years ago (2019?) I wrote this response on Quora (before I abandoned it due to the low quality & trolling nature of most questions) to the highly provocative question: "Why do programmers love Linux the most?"

I have long been vocal in my opposition to online voting since 2013, when the spectre was first raised by our local government agency, LGNZ, in 2013. See here, here, here, and here. I think it's a very bad idea for democracy and engagement.

I'm reminded of this thread of thinking as a result of this recent turn of events which places the juxtaposition of the two scenarios in the spotlight.

Enough is enough! This is just me trying to process some thoughts...

Sometimes, when someone is suffering unbearably, we need to take drastic steps to alleviate that suffering. But sometimes rescuing the acute situation has horrible longer term consequences. Sometimes life saving medicine is also a poison.

Multinational corporations are, I suspect, an artefact of a policy environment in which a broad range of loosely aligned policy makers & politicians around the world create capitalist incentives out of self-interest (which they might perceive, in an ill-advised fit of optimism, as general interest).

Nearly every day, my kids come home from school and go on about some new app or game they and their mates are excited about. My younger boy invariably looks at me when he says "and it's free!" hoping that I'll smile back, but I say, "cool. I wouldn't use it". He's crestfallen . "But why!?" And... I have to pause and think and eventually I say, "well, it's kinda hard to explain".

These are the speaking notes to accompany my presentation to Christchurch City Council on the "Westmorland cycle connection" as part of the "Way Safer Streets" consultation at the Council Offices on 21 September 2023.

The following is a list of articles (in roughly reverse date order, most recent at the top) from (primarily) the Aoteoroa New Zealand media concerning public service IT, whether it be in government itself or the health, IT, and other publicly funded sectors. There aren't many positive stories.

I think this stadium concept  - a large, covered, 25-30k seat stadium, within the Central Business District (CBD) is a travesty, and a failure of leadership and good sense.

We need to not build a covered stadium in Christchurch, and we definitely don't want one within the CBD.

Stadia are boom and bust facilities that are

Today, waiting to meet a young friend to cycle to school with my younger boy and me, we watched the morning rush hour traffic on a fairly busy road between us and school. I saw a lot of people surreptitiously looking down at their phones as they drove past, dicing with the cycle commuters and school kids riding on the painted bike path (no physical protection).

I recently ran into an issue upgrading a Ubuntu 18.04-powered server I run. I usually run the following command:

The government of Aotearoa New Zealand has just put out a request for suggstions on shaping the nation's (i.e. the government's) 'digital strategy'.

I'm a parent with two children in public schools in Christchurch, NZ. I'm also a software developer with an interest in education. I'm writing this post to make members of NZ school boards of trustees aware of a significant risks they face, but which I believe few if any school boards in NZ recognise, much less attempt to mitigate.

So, another community with which I have a long history as a paying member, this one with the mission of "preserving the free and open Internet" in my home country, has decided to adopt Slack as it's single community collaboration and engagement tool. They claim they've done this to "increase diversity and numbers of community members". That is definitely a noble goal, and one which I support.

Ten years after the fact, I decided it was time to write down my experience of the big quake that hit Christchurch city and the broader Canterbury region at 12:51 pm on 22 February 2011. It was the most devastating of more than 10,000 quakes we felt during the period from September 2010 to this day (although, to be fair, the frequency tapered off fairly steeply from about 2013).

Over the past few years, it's gradually occurred to me that we're in the midst of a new Dark Age.

The following is a post I recently made on the SustainOSS Discourse forum. It was in response to this thread and, more specifically, this post.

Many modern "democracies", especially the US Federal Government (& to a large extent, state governments) are effectively run like a public (with public shareholding, and probably listed on an international exchange) corporation, which, strictly speaking, are run via an autocratic top-down model.

On a slightly different tack from most of the content on this site, I've had quite a few requests for my sourdough recipe so I thought I'd put it here...

If it's marketed to you, be confident you don't need it. If you nevertheless want it, know that with a little research you'll find a comparable thing that's both better and cheaper, but isn't being marketed to you.

Here's a secret that many engineers and technologists don't get: marketing works. To me, it's a sad realisation.

I'm not overly familiar with the Zero Carbon Bill, but I'm aware of its general purpose and what's at stake if it's done badly. I've written the following in the online form - submissions close tomorrow. You are all welcome (if you so desire) to copy my words or modify them to make them your own.

As I understand it, there was a time when many places were ruled by The Church. It held sway over all society, and it in turn was controlled by The Clergy. The Clergy was made up of priests who were literate... and those priests who directed them.

I live in Christchurch, New Zealand. As a community, we are no strangers to a bit of trauma (after a couple big earthquakes in 2010-11, more than 150 killed, 80% of our urban buildings needing to be demolished, and 10,000 perceptible aftershocks, some flooding, and a major bush-fire or two)... but nothing could have prepared us for what happened at two mosques on Friday, 15 March 2019.

I've been pondering proprietary software for the past couple decades.

"I realised, right then and there, that it was all wrong, and it all had to change. And that the change... had to start with me."

- Utah Phillips from Korea

These are my notes for a talk prepared for the NZ Fabian Society in Christchurch, 18 October 2018.

The topic is "The state of the digital world, how it got here, and what we can do about it."

Note: this post discusses the NZ government's IT procurement, but these concepts apply equally well to IT procurement in governments of other countries, and in organisations and businesses worldwide...

By now, most of you in the tech sphere will have gotten wind of this: Microsoft s Linux!   Which is, of course, because Microsoft's multi-bi

I grew up with parents who lived through the most recent tangible existential threats to humanity - World War II and the Cold War (in the US and Europe). I have had a close relationship to people who have felt the threat to their freedom in a visceral way. I think many alive today did not have that experience.

Introduction

Hello members of the Committee. I thank you for taking the time to listen to me concerning this vital matter.

I'm a business owner, technologist, entrepreneur, writer, volunteer, advocate, and have a strong commitment to improving the community and nation that welcomed me and allowed me to make it my home 24 years ago.

Here's a tip for all of you talented, would-be tech entrepreneurs. I'm convinced that there's a huge unmet need in the global market right now: companies effectively providing a coordinated collection of digital technology services:

There's a newish (last few years) "team communication" platform called "Slack" that most tech (and many non-tech) people use to communicate in asynchronous text, images, voice, and video in business teams - particularly geographically distributed teams - and increasingly, in various communities of interest, many of which are globally distributed.

NZ is on the verge of joining the CPTPPA - the awkwardly rebranded "Comprehensive and Progressive TPP Agreement", comprising 11 Pacific nations now that the US has pulled out of the original TPPA.

Over the years quite a few folks - representing businesses and organisations - have asked: "give me some reasons why we should be open sourcing our code". In many cases, the person asking the question has the desire to open their code, but they're looking for reasons they can use to convince a decision-maker in their organisation.

For some people, there's a sense of security in fast food restaurants. For the most part, they've got something right: consistency. Even if it's not exceptionally tasty, or very nutritious, even if it produces huge amounts of branded plastic and paper rubbish, and isn't really that low cost, people who eat there have their expectations, low though they might be, met.

I've seen a lot of National voters recently opining that the NZ National Party should partner with the NZ Greens rather than NZ First (and Winston Peters, aka the "Winbot") to form a government - namely the term "Bluegreen" is on some people's lips. Apparently because they'd like their government, in addition to not changing a thing, to be environmentally conscious...

Recently, a crucial bit of NZ national infrastructure - a 150+ kilometer long fuel pipe between Marsden Point Oil Refinery and the Auckland Aiport - failed.

For New Zealand voters who are struggling to make sense of the current voting landscape, I implore you to read the following and act on your conscience: Vote! The following is not my own work, but rather the cleverness of a friend who prefers to remain uncredited, but is very thoughtful, thorough, and we share similar political leanings (posted with permission):

Do as I say, not as I do.

Let's get this out of the way up front: any computer system that is not up-to-date with security patches to known vulnerabilities is a disaster waiting to happen. Two questions in the wake of the first major randsomware exploit, dubbed Wannacry, are:

In 2002, the then-powerhouse IT company Sun Microsystems was considering purchasing Microsoft Office for its 35,000 staff.

It's 2017 in NZ, and our schools aren't producing enough confident, informed digital participants. Sure, they can play games like a boss, but that's just digital consumption. Ask them to do something useful with a computer, and precious few have even a vaguely accurate understanding of what they and their computer are doing.

In a natural (or even man-made) disaster, communication on the ground is crucial for coordinating rescue operations but normal communication technologies like cellphones don't work. That's because a lot of the centralised infrastructure (telco celltowers, power systems) are damaged along with everything else.

As the rain falls outside here in Christchurch, I'm pondering the new President of the United States of America, my homeland... I'm also pondering the implications of the apparent demise of the Main Stream, which I think has much responsibility for his ascension. We've already passed the threshold of personalised information.

A few days ago, the Microsoft Corporation trumpeted the news: it has joined the Linux Foundation. For many this was seen as a "pigs will fly" moment. For others of us, it's just the next step in a pretty predictable plan.

Anyone in business should be familiar with an old truth: if you build your business so that it depends on a single supplier's product, that you can't get anywhere else, you don't actually have a business. Your business is effectively a non-voting subsidiary of your supplier. At the very least, you have a potentially catastrophic dependence. The supplier could choose, at any time, to

For a few years now, I've been advocating a different way to approach digital technology education in schools. I have lots of friends who are teachers, and I run a CodeClub for 9-11 year olds at Opāwā Primary School in south Christchurch (which our sons both attend, although they're still a couple years away from CodeClub) with a couple of teachers there. We talk a fair bit.

A couple months ago, I became aware of the fact that on 9 December 2014, our Minister of Internal Affairs, Conservation, and Health, Hon Peter Dunne, signed the D5 Charter on behalf o

I presented these notes to the Foreign Affairs, Defence, and Trade select committee in the Christchurch City Council chambers from 14:55-15:05 on 31 March 2016.

The Select Committee listening to presentations related to the TPPA is the "Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee". It is currently made up of

The TPPA is not a Free Trade Agreement. That is simply a superficial pretence for foisting upon the citizens of the participating countries a set of clubs with which multinational corporations can beat us.

A decade ago, Microsoft was at the top of their game. They "owned" the desktop, weilding the dual monopoly of MS Windows and MS Office, allowing them to introduce, virtually unopposed, new would be monopolies like MS Sharepoint...

5000ish pages of TPPA text recently made public after years of top secret negotiations, was written by a group of 600ish US-based multinational corporate lobbyists and lawyers for the benefit of their clients. 

In response to my most recent blog post on the TPPA and its flawed underlying principles, my father sent me a fascinating reflection on actual FTAs to which the US is a party (the TPPA isn't an FTA), and the impact they've had...

A few people in the NZ (and worldwide) are getting upset by the increasingly intense grass-roots rejection of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA). They can't see what's wrong in the text of the Agreement (recently made public after 10 years of top-secret negotiation, but only after the NZ government signed it).

If you live in the connected western world, their cloud of brand identities is in your face all the time. They are (most of) the airwaves. They are the chain stores. They produce most things you buy to eat (unless you buy local). Everything you say to someone which isn't directly into that person's ear is probably conveyed by them.

My brother (from the US) left today after a quick visit with our family tacked on to a business trip. He'd brought two laptops with him - a big old near-death workhorse (running Windows 7) and his small, new Asus (running Windows 8.1). My bro didn't know what OSs or versions were on the laptop - unlike me, he's no tech geek, he's a biologist and ornithologist...

So today it occurred to me as I was doing web development on several different Vagrant instances simultaneously on my work laptop, that it'd be very convenient to have a single wildcard domain on my local machine that, for example, resolved all domains of the form "*.localhost" (note, the domain "*.local" is normally associated with "zeroconf" sites, and so it can lead to weird errors if you us

If your educational institution is looking for (as all institutions should be nowadays!) a system for Digital Asset Management (DAM) to complement your Learning Management System (LMS) this is for you.

I don't use a lot of proprietary software, but I know a lot of people who do. I've had to click "I Accept" on more than a few End User License Agreements (EULAs) in my time, on behalf of customers who thought they had no alternative but to use certain proprietary software. I know a lot of other people do so on behalf of people (like school techs on behalf of students in primary school...).

My response to Ian's blog post supporting online voting:

Last week I was able to participate in a "deputation" of concerned citizens (who happen to have a pretty strong set of software development credentials, as well as running bespoke development firms) who presented our case to the Christchurch City Council on why their plan to "trial" online voting in 2016 was a very bad idea.

A democratic society can only function when the actors in that democracy, the citizen/voters, have trust in the mechanisms of that democracy.

Greg James of IRD (NZ's tax department for anyone not from NZ) has chosen to replace the current obsolete, unmaintainable monolithic bespoke software system (that's what, 30 years old?)... with a similarly monolithic COTS (Commercial Off-The-Shelf) system. This fills me with dread.

I am reminded of a story about a chimpanzee who has only ever known a world inside an underground laboratory.

At some stage, the chimpanzee gets a lucky break and is brought out of the lab in her cage, covered to minimise the trauma of transition.

At the recent NetHui conference in Auckland last week (8-10 July 2015), in a session titled "Why Not Open?" that I helped run with Rachel Prosser (DIA) and Nigel Robertson (Waikato University), I made a statement about Openness which appears to have resonated for a couple people...

Yesterday, my local MP, Nicky Wagner, did me the courtesy of returning my phone call to her office the day before asking to speak with her about the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement.

The word "Open" is appearing all over the marketing sphere these days. It's been leapt upon gleefully the same way that "Low fat," "Organic" and "All natural" were latched onto by the processed food industry once the plausible definitions of those terms were sufficiently stretched and distorted to suit proprietary interests...

This is a story about the sort of "open" that matters to me, and how I got to this point. (This entry originally appeared on an earlier blog of mine, written sometime after 2012 and before 2015)

This post is about the apparently mysterious art of indicating (that's "using your blinkers" for any Americans reading this) when driving on New Zealand roads (although this is likely to be relevant in most places people drive, obviously making suitable substitutions for left and right).  After the nipple, the indicator - featured in all motorised vehicles warranted for road use in NZ - is

This post first appeared on my personal blog, published on 15/8/2012.

This article originally appeared on my personal blog, posted on 16/10/2014.

If you want to create lists with legal style numbering, here's a way to do it. It's quick, clean, and tidy. It results in lists that automatically do this sort of thing:

Section

1.1 Clause

   1.1.1 Sub-Clause

     1.1.1.1 Sub-Sub-Clause

And here's some sample HTML Code:

This blog entry originally appeared on my personal blog and was published on 5 June 2011. It provides some background for our struggle to make New Zealand one of the first countries in the world to explicitly remove the ability to patent software. In 2012, we succeeded.

For many years, the software world has been dominated by increasingly powerful multinational corporate vendors. These have all succeeded based on an exploitative business model that exploits:

(originally published on my aged personal blog)