One of my company student interns, Mengqiu Wang, received a prestigious University of Otago International Scholarship.

Quite chuffed... he and some of the other members of the team have been working on a REALLY kick ass project over the past few months with .NET on an interesting new platform. Can't say much more than that as we're still under NDA.

Well done Mengqiu!

Before I write this article let me say that my libertarian leanings see me fundamentally opposed to any government intervention in what a company may be named...

But wearing my pragmatic hat....

Listening to nat radio this morning about the debate of this Wananga using the name 'The University of New Zealand. University is a controlled word (Education Act I think) as far as naming an institution. The Wananga claim that because University is a direct translation of Wananga that they should be permitted to keep using the word. Here is my argument. Given that a) Maori is an official language of New Zealand and b) University is a direct translation of the Maori word Wananga (e.g. Wananga o Otakou- Otago University)... then Wananga should also be a controlled word under the Education Act also. i.e. Organizations should not be able to call themselves either Wananga OR University without the appropriate approval.

There is much ado about a sheep on a recent postage stamp... Why on earth politicians like Katherine Rich (an otherwise generally intelligent polly) need to get involved I don't know.

But in that vein I've come to the concusion that the sheep stamp is the all but inevitable politically correct by-product of a United Future/Labour Coalition Govt.... it is a chemically castrated solo dad.

Here

He links to Scott Hanslemans great list of addins too.

Nic has blogged again about how much he likes Resharper.

We are a mixture of both here @ Kognition. Some are Resharper addicts I'm personally more of a CodeRush fiend. I love the templating features and code completion. It does piss me off sometimes by being a little too intelligent.

They now have a refactoring plugin that does most of the core Fowler refactorings and then a few more. But it does it in such a cool way....

Check this out... you just cut and paste!

http://www.devexpress.com/Products/NET/Refactor/RefactorEMSPWalkthrough.xml

It's also worth noting that CodeRush and Refactor support VB.Net as well as C#.

So I fell off the blogging wagon for a few months due to too much work. I'm back in action now... watch this space.

http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/01/15.html#a9204

Scoble has been fanning the flames around the copyright nature of blog material. Wearing my techno-legal guy hat for two secs... how about incorporating some sort of license metadata into the RSS standard... that's what XML is for isn't it? It's eXtensible for a reason.

This would allow publishers to indicate to aggregators how their content may be used- it's almost like DRM but without the big stick. Like an advanced form of robots.txt. It could allow things such as a copyright/attribution notice to be appended and so forth.

Jeff Barr has a post about a recent talk by Don Box on web services....

Good ol' New Zealand even gets a mention....

The original title of the was WS-Islands. Hes going to walk through the various standards in the talk, and attempt to explain and justify each one.

...

ws-NewZealand, a lovely place to visit exactly once per lifetime. Here are specs lke that. ws-eventing, strictly speaking it is not needed. But theres a desire to do pub-sub. Microsoft ships a simple version, IBM ships WS-RF, a three volume spec. ws-atomictx, good for the three people building transaction managers. ws-enumeration.

As I was flicking through the US election stuff yesterday afternoon I came upon the exit poll stats... which are quite fascinating in their detail. The one that really caught my eyes was the fact the the most important issue for US voters was 'Moral Issues'... eeek!

I was going to write a big post on it but Russell sums it up very well here.

Of course places like Seattle, NY, LA, Chicago all voted for Mr Kerry... I probably would have too... if only US 'liberals' were a bit more classical.... That said I'd take a socially liberal socialist over a socially conservative capitalist any day of the week. Of course the best thing would be a libertarian... but like that's ever going to happen in the Land of the 'Free'....