I personally don’t care if Harvey Norman’s or Myer’s profitability is adversely affected but the uneven playing field does affect hundreds of thousands of Small Businesses, and for the families and employees of these, it’s another matter all together.
He seems to have quite a bit of distortion on what an average Australian person believe. Too much a blind faith I’ll say.
Whilst we all like a good, cheap deal, we as a nation are fair people. We won’t wear sports shoes delivered cheaply to us on the back of child labor in Asian sweatshops. Similarly, we shouldn’t be so quick to save a buck when it comes unfairly at the cost of a battling small Australian retailer who is immediately 10% less competitive due to a tax loophole delivered to non-Australian retailers.
Like Gerry Harvey’s case, it would be a trivial problem if the only disparity between Australian goods/services and overseas imported equivalent is 10% in pricing. However the fact that it is not. Larry is in domain and hosting business and he should know. Especially with hosting — overseas vendors are way more than 10% cheaper than Australian providers, and in many cases, arguably more reliable as well.
Such a simple idea! Used to read a blog called lesscode — using less code to get more done. Too bad that blog looks as dead as my old programming blog.
Came across this quote via Paul Graham, and was caused by some frustration at work. Elegance is something that takes time. However in the commercial world, as a lowly slave labour software developer under deadline constraint, you don’t get the needed time to create an elegant solution.
someone who understands how to build technologies and systems to solve problems;
someone who understands the human factors behind those problems, why they exist, what it takes to fix them and how to shape the experience;
someone who understands how to reach, talk to and sell to the people who’s problems are being sold – and keep finding more of them
The ideal startup has two of the three founders, but all three skills are present between them.
I have been looking at “starting something” but realised it is just impossible to have all 3 attributes. I am a proficient developer, struggling designer and hopeless distributor.
Android 2.3 platform was also announced, with SIP stack, Near Field Communications, more sensor support, multiple cameras support, Download Manager, and more. Now just waiting for a build is available for me Nexus One :)
Just received an email about an upcoming meeting. Then I noticed that date of the meeting is… Monday 22nd of November, which was yesterday. So I thought it must have been a typo. It should have been 29th, which is next Monday! Then I looked at the email more carefully, and noted that it was actually sent on the 18th, i.e. last Thursday — 5 days ago! How come it only arrived my email inbox, which has been hosted on Google Apps for almost 2 years.
Using “Show original” on Gmail gives away more clues on why this email is 5 days late. Here’s an excerpt of the email header:
Received: from [124.108.111.128] by nm1.bullet.mail.hk2.yahoo.com with NNFMP; 23 Nov 2010 04:50:34 -0000
Received: from [124.108.111.126] by tm1.bullet.mail.hk2.yahoo.com with NNFMP; 23 Nov 2010 04:50:33 -0000
Received: from [127.0.0.1] by omp1001.mail.hk2.yahoo.com with NNFMP; 18 Nov 2010 11:49:46 -0000
X-Yahoo-Newman-Id: 501708.68722.bm@omp1001.mail.hk2.yahoo.com
Received: (qmail 8748 invoked from network); 18 Nov 2010 11:49:46 -0000
So somehow this email was sitting on a Yahoo mail server for bloody 5 days! The hostname also resolves to [127.0.0.1] which might be the culprit there. Looks like a major fault to me. I only missed a meeting — but imagine missing a much more important message!
Dirty code inhibits the formation of an ownership culture.
If product concepts are not reflected in the code, programmers might implement features in ways that don’t make sense in the product.
Dirty code incentivizes the business to invest in tangential revenue work rather than attacking core business problems.
Even with good automated test coverage, dirty code increases the risk of introducing regressions.
Wide or unclear dependencies reduce the quality of tests.
Dirty code hides real bugs.
Dirty code gets dirtier.
And his final thought:
“Well, what can I do about it?” First, try to pay attention to your code. After you finish writing some, ask yourself “Could I make this clearer?” Then ask your neighbor the same question.
Only if it is as trivial! Currently working on dirty code lingered over the past 10 years, and have no opportunity to fix it, due to the fact that the company has always been pushing for products and features first. Hacks can be fixed later — well they never get fixed when you do not reserve your developers’ time on refactoring.
Teams are messily structured that the management assumes “everyone should be able to work on anything”. That throws any code ownership out of window. That leads to reduced motivation. When I don’t get motivated to make code better — even more dirty code gets produced.
2 days after the election and we still cannot sure who will be Australia’s next Prime Minister. Most exciting election in Australia over the last 50 years? More like most disastrous to me. Although I did vote for that Mid-Night Oil guy (who else is worthy in Kingsford-Smith?) I gotta say that I am really disappointed with the blame game. Not saying the coalition is any better. Anyway. No wonder we have record high informal votes.
Here is a clipping from my Facebook status. Have to find a better way to backup the comments there.
Taiwanese news channel Next Media Animation did have a pretty good take on the election though :)
It makes me feel like everything I’ve posted over the past four years on Twitter, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Plurk, Pownce, and, yes, Google Buzz, has been an immense waste of time. I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves. All this time I’ve been pumping content into the void like some chatterbox Onan.
Thousands of tweets and countless Facebook status updates later, I am also coming to the same conclusion. Updates of life from the last two years have been mostly void. There wasn’t even an easy way to backup my data from Facebook.
We have recently got a new car and are trying to offload my other cars — the white Pulsar is too small now for the family of 4, and Voyoge is too big to drive around the town. I have just put our 11 year old Nissan Pulsar N15 hatchback on Drive.com.au 2 nights ago…
It has a 82kw 1.6l engine, done around 82,000km, 5 speed manual, and drinks regular unlead. Bought it before Vivian and I were married, and has done a few trips to the Gold Coast and Canberra. Drove it on my wedding day. Drove it to bring both Anna and Elsie back from the hospital. Still going strong, and it would be sad to see it go.
Interesting after I placed the ad on Drive.com.au, there has been a few enquiries.
One is asking for significantly less in cash. I was like WTF it is too low (it’s already cheap comparing to others on Drive.com.au, especially with low mileage). And he said, “didn’t it say ‘ono’ on the ad?” Well, apparently on Drive.com.au you can only choose between ‘ono’ or ‘neg’. But even with ‘ono’ it is still “or NEAREST offer” — not asking $1,200 below asking price!
Got an email enquiry this morning, willing to pay $500 above asking price. That immediately raises an alarm. Then he goes on to say that he is currently in US at the moment, will pay with PayPal and will ask his agent to come and pick up the car. Meh, heard that line before. The next thing would probably be asking me to pay his agent some pick up fee. Go away, and have a nice day, I replied.
It’s still on the market. Contact me if you are interested ($3,999 ono, or special discount for poor Moore students or MTS :).
Google’s probably the last update on Google Wave. It’s a bit sad, because Wave is primary a Sydney product, sad I have spent the last Google partners day looking at it. We even used it for one of the collaboration at work. I guess a technically superior product might still not be popular, if no one actually know how to use it.
Hacker News Poll — what is your religion? I actually found the religion-related threads on HN usually quite good comparing to sites like Whirlpool, where people would ridicule first before any discussion. Still, atheism/agnosticism are still the majority in the tech world/startup scene.
This blog is brought to you by WordPress App running on my Nexus one just updated to Android 2.2 “FroYo” FRF91. Everything runs great so far, except Swype needs to be reinstalled.
Released early this morning (AEST time) — 
