Sorry to all of those RSS subscribers out there.... the recent run on self congratulatory blog posts is becuase I've decided to make the news page on our new look company web site simply a tap off a category on my blog. That way it is harder for me to neglect the all important comapny news... like I have done in the past.

So. Going forward you will get the odd PRish post coming out of this blog too..... should make a nice change from some of the other ranting I do.

The Mobile Devices Division at Microsoft recently published a case study on an applicaton built by Kognition Consulting for Delta Utrilities Limited.

View the case study here.

http://idg.net.nz/news.nsf/UNID/221F2341D3B330A9CC256EFD001E6E5E?OpenDocument

The success of an initial online evening course on ASP.Net, coordinated by Dunedin consultancy Kognition, has laid good ground for the formation of regional .Net user-groups around New Zealand broadcasting their meetings in real-time to developers in the other regions.

http://idg.net.nz/news.nsf/UNID/CA2B98B8ABC54F3CCC256EFC00289B21?OpenDocument

Chris Auld, managing director of mobility software specialist Kognition, spoke to Computerworld earlier this month about Backdoor.Bardor.A, the first Windows CE Trojan. He says it wasn't a serious threat, but was a harbinger of more serious mobile worms and viruses that would come once virus writers started looking "outside the box".

http://idg.net.nz/news.nsf/UNID/B4D0FF30288C4E74CC256EF200263010?OpenDocument

Backdoor.Bardor.A, the first alleged Windows CE backdoor Trojan horse, isn't much of a threat, says Chris Auld, managing director of mobility software specialists Kognition.

I don't think I'm right-wing - I just think my life is mine to live pretty much as I please (provided it doesn't intrude on you) and I'd like you to extend the same courtesy to me, thanks very much.

Amen To That!

The M82 is a beast of a gun.  It fires the same rounds as the .50 cal machine guns that we use.  It's heavy and extremely loud.  You'll see what I mean in the movie below - it literally causes a shockwave that shakes the ground enough to raise a big cloud of dust for like a 4 or 5 foot radius around the gun.  I've used the rifle a lot in computer games like Ghost Recon, so I was eager to see how it handled in real life.  It's got quite a bit of kick, and of course the games don't do the noise or shock of firing it any justice whatsoever.  I'm sure firing it from anything but prone and braced position would knock me on my butt.

Army Steve gets to play with some cool war toys.

OK... so I should have better things to do with my Monday night than read bloody comments on DPFs blog... but... well.... you know.

So anyway... Loony Tune Bigot of the week for me is 'naki-gurl'... with such gems as...

If you got to the Destiny NZ (the political party) website www.destinynz.org.nz there you will see all there awesome policies on how they plan to put a halt to awful things such as abortion, rape, sex before marriage. Even stuff on the treaty, education, health, law enforcement.

Being a Naki Boy of sorts I was curious...

Now the funny thing is that we can find out a bit more about naki-gurl because, although she posted under a pseudonym, she used a variety of extremely non anonymous email addresses.

Now I can hardly start ranting as I NEVER really post anon. But then I'm my own boss so the buck stops with me... But I digress. Let's take a look at Naki Gurl for a bit.

Let's go through some of the email addresses.

• hinenui.bryant@tdhb.org.nz
  Started with a pearler.... nothing like posting with your Govt. employer provided address... hope she wasn't posting on Govt. (read my F%^*&%^ tax dollars) time!
• hlb4@waikato.ac.nz
  By about the 3rd post she had wised up... Wouldn't you know it, she went to Waikato University. Not an institution renowned for it's academic qualities and the literacy of this graduate (one can but assume graduation in this era of bums on seats) is case in point.
• naki@gurl.com
  We get a whole heap of posts under the Waikato Uni address until we finally a more anonymous address. This time an address from a leading online community and content site for teenage girls ... founded in 1996 at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University and is now published by iVillage Inc... NYU!?! Hardly a bastion of conservative thought is it? Don't know how up with womens lib Destiny Church is... maybe it's me that's out of touch but I don't think Pastor Tamaki is super keen on feminists and their ilk.

She soon dropped back to using the Waikato address.

Lurker posited that this was her http://www.findsomeone.co.nz/chat-rooms/personal-ads-41577.htm but a quick check of ethnicity kinda rules that out.

OK.. so time for a bit more digging... public sources only of course :-( Though I could be tempted for a little subterfuge.... more to follow.

Destiny Church invaded DPF.....

Methinks some of them could do with a little tithe to the church of literacy sometime soon...

Lukas is blogging about the new HTC Blue Angel. I played with one of these a couple of months ago in Beijing.... very SEXY... will try and dig out some photos.... pity they didn't stick a nicer processor in it though :-(

Stephen D Taylor (serial Maxim Institute letter writing guy) wins the cunning linguist of the year award from me for using the term Fundaphobia in his letter in the Chch press today.

I think Fundaphobia must be a 'fear of fundamentalist conservative christitan bigots'.... but I could be wrong. Mr Google tells me is means a paranoia of conservative, biblio-centric Christians. What a cool ^*&%ing word. The next time some stupid #*^*%er down the main street asks me to listen to him ranting on about 'Jeezus' I'm gonna say 'sorry mate, I'm a fundaphobe!'

This post is realy quite NZ centric so all you yanks who peruse these pages might like to switch off now. I may come back and give some context as to our voting system later but no time at the moment.

So anyway... while it's the Local Body elections soon I've been giving the general election some thought and have some ideas on vote splitting. I'm the kind of person that will be VERY inclined to split my vote because being a TRUE classical liberal I tend towards the economic policy of the right and the social policy of the left.

We really have two different types of voting in Parliament. Party Votes and Concience Votes. Under the MMP system, the party votes will be most influenced by your list vote in the election.

Concience votes on the other hand really depend on a much broader set of factors. As a classical liberal- and by this I mean you're likely to support a free market economy in prostitution- I think that vote splitting (in most electorates) is going to be essential. basically what you want to be trying to achieve is to have a right leraning party (ACT is the obvious example) doing well in the list vote. This is because economic policy generally (almost exclusivly) falls under the guise of party voting. Then you want to give your candidate vote to the most socially liberal candidate in your electorate who has a realistic chance of winning. It doesn't matter if they are Labour, National, ACT or even Watermelon (Green)... overhangs are VERY unlikely in all but the Maori seats so realistically you want to use your candidate vote to influence the makeup of the party caucuses such that each caucus (whose total numbers will be determined by the list vote) contains as many socially liberal candidates as possible.

So what does this mean in practical terms?

Well for some people it will be bloody easy. Live in Epsom? Two ticks Rodney Hide as he is liberal on both arms. But say you lived in a hypothetical electorate where the Labour candidate is a good liberal who supports prostitution/abortion/homosexual law reform while the National Candidate is a died in the wool Catholic... You would have to have ROCKS IN YOUR HEAD not to split your vote for Labour. Remember, tha party vote will determine how many Labour MPs et into parliament. The candidate vote importantly helps to determine who those candidates actually are.

Just to show how wonderful the Google ranking system... Technology Head Me who gets most of his Google karma from links with technology sites is ranked @ #2 site for the search term Alison Annan

http://www.google.co.nz/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=%22alison+annan%22&btnG=Search&meta

What a crazy world we live in.... I've posted on this before here, but I wonder if, in this age of all over the subject range blogs, Google are doing anything to correlate their ranking system with subject clustering.

I showed off some of this tech during my presentation @ Tech Ed Auckland this year and have had a few questions on it so here are some pointers to get you going. You have a few options for updating your smart client apps.

• ClickOnce
  Not coming until VS2k5.
  Take a look at MSDN TV: Introducing ClickOnce: Web Deployment for Windows Forms ...
  and ClickOnce: Deploy and Update Your Smart Client Projects
• Updater Application Block
  Works with the current technology. Very flexible but hard(ish) to implement.
  Go here patterns & practices: Updater Application Block: Home
• Application Updater Component
  Easy to implement- this is the one I used for my Demo which if you remember took me about 5 minutes! See here.NET Application Updater Component and also TaskVision  for a good example of it in use.
  

Scoble posted on the Spyware problem in Windows.

It's a pretty simple problem to solve- build virus and spyware protection.

So... why hasn't MS done this? Simple! Three letters D O J.

The anti trust implications of MS bundling virus protection are huge. The 'new look' Microsoft (of which Scoble is serious flag bearer) will not stand up against the US Anit Trust laws any more- been there, tried that, got bitten in the ass once already. Result- piss poor Virus protection baked into the OS. Who loses... you guessed it... Joe Public.

Me..? I say %%$&^$ 'em.... bundle it anyway- this has to be the most blatant case of Anti Trust hurting the consuming public that I have ever seen.