Peter Jones of sometimes Dot Net User Group has launched a new more politically oriented Blog site.

Vent

“Vent is here to help.  Use it to have a random rant.  Blow off some steam and get it out of your system.  Send a warning to others.  Enlist an army to take on the ‘system’.  Let people know where you have had bad service, seen a crappy over-hyped movie, witnessed some road rage… whatever you like.   Things may not change but you’ll feel a lot better for it.”

Looks like it's gonna be a hoot.

Microsoft are starting to make some announcements around WinFS.

J'Fo has the details on Project Orange, what looks to be the next super duper version of Explorer, here.

Sounds an awful lot like some of the ideas from Alex James with his XTend and Base4 projects.

Ever seen a REALLY nasty SQL Injection attack in action.

Check this out.

http://www.rockyh.net/Posts/Post.aspx?postId=7a7542fd-f95b-40c6-b464-c30e560dd90d

Includes a demonstration of how to script an SQL injection attack to do a bitwise determination of any field in the vulnerable database too.

This is MUST WATCH material.

Phil, Tim and I went for a MTB ride @ Makara on Saturday afternoon. Had a blast.

Went up Koru, along Sally Alley, out onto the 4WD track then down the bottom of Ridgeline and Swigg. It was a pretty leisurely pace but we all had a hoot of a time and got filthy muddy.

Here's the profile of the ride- I really have to get myself a watch like Darryl B's... So it can talk to a wheel sensor.

If you're keento come on any of our rises do et us know!. Phil has some photos here.

So the govt. has announced that they will unbundle the local loop. For those non techies among you what this means is that organizations other than Telecom NZ will be able to place equipment in Telecom's phone exchanges and plug the copper wires that run to your house into their own equipment.

The argument for doing this is that it will encourage more investment in broadband in New Zealand- that it will, but, it will be utterly the wrong type of investment.

I really fail to see how having 3rd parties spend millions of dollars putting their own DSLAMs into the exchanges can be considered good use of the limited pool of broadband investment dollars in this country.

The primary issues with Telecom and ADLS at the moment are

1. Backhaul capacity (Easy to regulate a fix)
2. Requirement to have a voice phone line to use ADSL.
   This is really a the primary block to competition in the local lines market. Let people have broadband without a phone line and you'll see heaps of new VOIP based local line providers pop up. (Easy to regulate)
3. Connection service times, price etc.... all easily regulated

It seems REALLY stupid to me that we're going to have what limited capital resources we have in New Zealand being spent on duplicating what is perfectly functional hardware in the exchanges. We should be finding ways to encourage investment in new infrastructure- the stuff that will be replacing copper phone lines. ULL does just the opposite. We want people to invest in laying fiber, deploying wimax etc... not putting more DSLAMs into phone exchanges

[Disclosure]
Most of the rest of the package seems great- things like preventing predatory pricing etc....FWIW: I am not a customer of Telecom NZ and have not been for a long time. I have a TelstraClear Cable Internet connection at home. No phone line and use FX networks to provide VOIP telephones for my Wellington office.
As of yesterday afternoon @ $4.73 my company is a shareholder in Telecom NZ. A 14% odd dividend yield from an NZ Blue Chip is just too good to pass up.

Managed my first sub 100kg weigh in this morning.

Actually a bit surprised as I've had this week off exercise as I'm sick as a dog with some viral cough thing... driving me insane.

So I got onto the scales this morning expecting something ike 102kg and came it @ 99.8. I'm pretty stoked really!

After reviewing the videographic evidence it has been determined that Tim owes me lunch

We'll both be sure to blog pics and a follow up to what I'm sure will be lively lunchtime discussion....

Tim- I suggest we do Japanese- Sakura maybe?

So we had a great couple of lunchtime sessions at CodeCamp last weekend. I ws one of the presenters for both.

On Saturday I was with fellow RD Jeremy Boyd and Microsoft Architect Advisor (aka Evangelist) Mark Carrol. We were discussing the future of software development.

On Sunday it was a discussion on the business of software with Mauricio Freitas from Geekzone and Rod Drury from Aftermail.

Anyway, Tim Haines has blogged about some of what was said I herewith is my reply (Read that post first if you've not already)

I'm am positive that I didn't say anything about Vista/Live specifically... we have it Video'd so we can find out. But I probably did misinterpret Rod supporting the Live/Vista wave of stuff if I said the words Vista and/or Live in my reply to Rod then I'll buy Tim lunch!). That said. I stand by my sentiments I think they are important and I think they are important for reasons that I really reinforced on Sat. Basically success in the software business is easier to achieve (for smaller scale businesses especially) if you build out on top of someone elses platform.

If we think of a quick history of computing.... the real success of the PC and Microsoft came about because of a few things:

1. IBM and Intel provided a ubiquitous and fairly open hardware platform.
2. Windows provided a platform for a whole ecosystem to build up on. ISVs fed of the uiquity of Windows and Windows was successful because everybody needed it to run their chosen applications- from Word to Autocad to Matlab.
3. Some of the ISVs formed Platform type ecologies themselves- think of 3DS Max, Autocad. Think of Aftermail even, it is an application based on top of an application that runs on Windows that runs on IBM Compatible hardware.

Then along came the internet. The internet is a platform. My submission is that in terms of the layers we see above, the internet is far more of an IBM hardware platform than a plugin supporting 3D application.

No one owns the internet, no one dominates the internet to the extent of anything above. But, I don't think that it's stupid to reflect on this historical context a bit when we talk about future possibilities and platform plays.

So for example if you want to play in the e-commerce sandpit then you could build directly on the internet as your platform- say making a turnkey shopping app, or, you could build on top of another persons internet platform, say building tools to support business on eBay or TradeMe.

We're never going to have a Windows equivalent on the internet. No matter how hard Microsoft, Google and Yahoo try it's just not going to happen. The primary reasons being that a) no one vendor has a critical mas of market share and; b) It's too easy to build stuff on the internet without leveraging another platform (try writing stuff to run o Windows PCs without an OS... you need a Windows or a Linux  make it a realistic proposition).

They way I see it there is a fundamental rule for all this 'future' web stuff:

Your application has to be a platform. It has to be a platform for others to build on top of from a business perspective foremost. And to achieve that business platform it's likely that you'll need to have your application setup as a platform in the technological sense to some degree as well. If you can support an ecosystem ontop of your application it will flourish.

Now where does this leave us with the whole discussion around Live.com? Live is a platform play, make no doubt about it- frankly it's about time. Does anyone remember Hailstorm? If that hadn't been sunk by the usual 'big corporate paranoia' that goes on do you thin we'd been all excitied about this Web 2.0 thing now? Or would it have happened a couple of years ago?

I want to be able to build applications that leverage my personal data, I'm less concerned with privay than I am with imersing myself in a decently chunky technological soup that makes my life better. The key problems in my life today are that I have too much information to digest, too many things todo and frnakly too many opinions on too many things to be able to express them, do them and read them in the time I have available. I couldn't give a crap if it's Microsoft or Google or Yahoo or whoever that drives the next platform but someone has to step up to the plate and do it and be able to do it without wails of 'multinational this' and 'big corporate that'.

I'm baffled as to how a shareable web hosted calendar type application (as we would have had with Hailstorm) was wrong when MSFT proposed it in 2001 but is the best thing since tinned beer now that Google have jumped on top of it. I reiterate- no one is going to dominate the internet.

”

SYDNEY (Dow Jones)--Australian Treasurer Peter Costello said the nation will completely

eliminate government net debt Friday, labeling April 21 as "debt free day".

"It is a day we pay off the mortgage," Costello said in a speech to the

Committee for Economic Development of Australia.

“

I am thinking about holding a wee blog sweepstake on how long it will be before the IMF has to bail out the French Welfare state.... any takers?