Just a reminder that the Call for Papers for the Sysadmin Miniconf at Linux.conf.au 2011 will close on Friday the 22nd of October (just 2 days away).
We have accepted 7 proposals so far and have a few more pending but we still have space.
Author: simon
Review: Sweetheart Cafe Gallery
This place is very close to work and I’ve been meaning to give it a try for some time. It’s at 15 Swanson St in the Auckland CBD and is tucked in under the Stamford Hotel. It is pretty small with an outer room with the counter and a few seats and a small main room.
The interesting things is the “Gallery” bit. The café is a offshoot of an artists studio so there are several paintings by the artists on the walls (all for sale) and there is a studio out the back of the main room.
Food is standard coffee range with no surcharge for Soy milk and a selection is biscuits , slices and cakes. Pricing is a little cheaper than average (especially with no surcharge) at around $3.50 for a coffee (which is quite big) and $3 for most cakes and slices.
Service was prompt and fast (although it was pretty quiet when I was there) and felt a little more upmarket than usual. My coffee/cake was bought out on a nice hand-held tray to my table with a spork and knife.
I can’t remember the music so it was either non-existent or quiet (either of which is good) but there reading selection was pretty minimal with just half a dozen give-away magazines (like the Red Bulletin).
Apart from the reading selection I was pretty impressed and I’ll probably try it out as my regular for a while.
Update: I’ve just found their website which I missed previous. Has a better map and pictures than I do here as well as menu.
XKCD vs NZ University Websites
xkcd.com recently did the following cartoon on University Website:
So I thought I’d see how the Websites for New Zealand Universities stacked up:
| University | Things they tend to have | Score | Things people are looking for | Score |
| Auckland University of Technology | Yes: Full Name of school, Alumni in the news, Promotions for Compus events, Statement of School’s Philosophy,
No: Press releases, Letter from the president, Virtual tour |
5/8 | Yes: Full Name of School, List of Facility phone number and Emails, Usable campus map, Campus Address, Application forms, Campus police phone number, Dept/Course lists, Parking information
No: Academic Calendar |
8/9 |
| Lincoln University | Yes: Alumni in the news, Promotions for Campus events, Press Releases, Statement of School’s Philosophy, Full name of school
No: Campus photo slide-show, Letter from the president, Virtual tour |
5/8 | Yes: Full name of school, List of Facility phone number and Emails, Campus Address, Application forms, Academic Calendar, Dept/Course lists, Parking information, Usable campus map
No: Campus police phone number |
8/9 |
| Massey University | Yes: Full name of school, Alumni in the news, Promotions for Campus events, Press Releases, Statement of School’s Philosophy, Letter from the president
No: Campus photo slide-show, Virtual tour |
6/8 | Yes: Full name of school, Campus Address, Application forms, Academic Calendar, Campus police phone number, Parking information, Usable campus map
No: List of Facility phone number and Emails |
8/9 |
| University of Auckland | Yes: Full name of school, Alumni in the news, Promotions for Campus events, Press Releases, Statement of School’s Philosophy, Letter from the president
No: Campus photo slide-show, Virtual tour |
6/8 | Yes: Full name of school, Academic Calendar, Campus police phone number, Dept/Course lists, Parking information, usable campus map
No: List of Facility phone number and Emails, Campus Address, Application forms |
6/9 |
| University of Canterbury | Yes: Full name of school, Alumni in the news, Promotions for Campus events, Press Releases, Statement of School’s Philosophy
No: Campus photo slide-show, Letter from the president, Virtual tour |
5/8 | Yes: Full name of school, List of Facility phone number and Emails, Campus Address, Campus police phone number, Parking information, Usable campus map, Dept/Course lists, Academic Calendar
No: Application forms |
8/9 |
| University of Otago | Yes: Full name of school, Alumni in the news, Promotions for Campus events, Press Releases, Letter from the president, Statement of School’s Philosophy
No: Campus photo slide-show. Virtual tour |
6/8 | Yes: Full name of school, List of Facility phone number and Emails, Campus Address, Application forms, Campus police phone number, Dept/Course lists, Parking information, Usable campus map
No: Academic Calendar |
8/9 |
| University of Waikato | Yes: Full name of school, Campus photo slide-show, Promotions for Campus events, Press Releases, Statement of School’s Philosophy, Letter from the president
No: Alumni in the news, Virtual tour |
6/8 | Yes: Full name of school, List of Facility phone number and Emails, Campus Address, Application forms, Academic Calendar, Academic Calendar, Campus police phone number, Dept/Course lists, Parking information, Usable campus map No: |
9/9 |
| Victoria University of Wellington | Yes: Full name of school, Campus photo slide-show, Alumni in the news, Press Releases, Promotions for Campus events, Letter from the president, Statement of School’s Philosophy
No: Virtual tour |
7/8 | Yes: Full name of school, List of Facility phone number and Emails, Campus Address, Application forms, Academic Calendar, Dept/Course lists, Parking information, Usable campus map
No: Campus police phone number |
8/9 |
In all cases I opened up the site and searched around for up to 30 seconds for each item. I used the links off the front page and the search tools on the site. When possible I tended to be fairly generous with awarding points. So if the University calendar was browsable rather than downloadable it was okay or you could enrol online rather but not download the documents you also got the point.
Out of the sites I found Auckland’s the worst in that it was large and confusing (See below) while missing the basics. The other universities were all a lot better to the extent I can’t really pick between them.
Notes:
- I found the University of Auckland’s website very hard to actually use. Pretending I wanted to enrol in 1st year Computer Science I found it very hard to find out what courses were offered, which ones I should take and how I should apply. The process seemed to involved jumping back and forth between half a dozen computer different sections of the website. Very bad for a core function of the website.
- Many of the sites had separate websites for depts and other organisations within the University. I found that it was often the case where a search for “Maps” or “parking” would sometimes show the the dept’s version of that page rather than the campus-wide one.
- I think just about all the sites would benefit from a usability test. Create a list of 10 common things people want to do at the website and pull some people off the street to try and do them. The things in the “What people are looking for” could be a good start.
- Search quality seems to vary a lot between the sites. Those using Google search usually are worst. Having the option to highlight certain pages to ensure they appear at the top of search results is a useful feature.
- In most cases I could easily find the campus security number by searching for “Security”. Good enough in most case but perhaps some improvement needed since people might be in a panic when dialling the number.
- It’s good to see that in most cases the sites were trying to be user-centric. However in many cases the “follow this path to enrol” didn’t interact well with the rest of the sites (eg when it came time to look up course information). Part of this is possibly the high complexity of enrolment and the regulations but the experience could be better.
- Best page I came across on my tour was the Otago University Parking Page , with notes like “All phone calls to the Parking desk are recorded”you can tell that is a fun place to work.
Bcak4 – lightning talks
Lance Wiggs – pacific fibre
- General background on company
- 900 Gb/s current capacity in aus/NZ
- Proposal to double
- Single cable aus-NZ-USA 5.1 Tb/s
- Maybe other landing stations
Day without media project
- Withoutmedia.wordpress.com
- Asked 200 to do without media for 24 hours
- Many students couldn’t finish
- Students used addicts language
- No loyalty to any news source
- Lots of txt and facebook messages
- Strong loyality to iPhones
- Read out interesting quotes
meta programming
- Likes eval()
Seth from Interclue – Browser extension devel
- Hard to know userbase, most don’t know what a browser is
- Hard to market
- What browsers makers will allow
- What browsers to target
- How to make money
Scott Judson – ipad
- Agents filling out forms in field
- Gives list and addresses of jobs
- Different screens for picking up jobs, on site and stock used, post job
- Server side – timesheets, stock codes, etc
Augmented reality
- Cute demos
- Mirror in toyshop you hold up a toybox and shows what is inside
- Zugara YouTube demo shows clothes on you
- Markers ( symbols on sheet that camera spots) or markerless detects face or objects directly
- Facial recognition displays info on person you hold your iPhone up to
- Navigation aids display directs and info over the camera feed
- Tools: artoolkit, flartoolkit, layar
Bcak4 – wikiphobia in schools
Works at Learning skills centre at university of Canterbury
Students have limited general IT skills, can txt or use facebook but does translate into other areas
Academics tend to dislike wikipedia
- unreliable
- non-experts can contribute
- culture clash wikipedia vs academic
- inappropriate
- used as a primary source
- in actual case students tend to actually use wikipedia correctly
- plagiarism very easy to detect
In business if you were asked to research something and just pointed to wikipedia page then you’re done
I missed some of the talk here
Assign wikipedia writing to students
- published in public
- critiqued by strangers
- defend argument
- have citations and sources
- favourable to group work, track individual contributions
See wikiteach.info
Bcak4 – open data
Lots of momentium in last year
MPs expenses
Couple of conferences
Open govt conference – went fairly well
Data.govt.nz
Grabbed Linz data and chatham islands in openstreet maps built using it. Rolling out to mainland next 6+ months
Igovt login being rolled out across government sites
NZ transport has open API – infoconnect
Real time bus infomation often sold to or maintained by 3rd parties
Govt depts tidying up contract to clarify ownership of data
See cat.open.org.nz
NZ book cover images provided by national library
Often councils make very little per year for data they are charging for
Bcak4 – kiwi startups
Mytours – apps for walks and museum tours – 4 people
Workshop enterprises – 1+ person
What is startup?
- high growth
- not cash-flow positive
- less defined business model
- aggressive targets
- pre-ipo
- high-risk profile
- some industries ( airlines ) startup on completely different scale and timeline
How Auckland different
- in SanFran networking for webapps with diggs etc easier
- in NZ easier to meet retailers and customers
- different reports on how easy to get matching funds from development
- easy to start, hard to scale
- maybe launch globally rather than NZ first and then expand
- lot easier with beta customers you talk meet & talk to in person
- CARE really good source for contacts
Bcak4 – saas & apis for workflow
Second session at barcamp Auckland. Trying to do less and automate stuff . Avoid cut and paste
Examples
- Xero has bank rules which automate creation of invoices
- mail chimp easy mailing lists, free for small groups, pay pretty good too
- CapsuleCRM – list of tasks for customers
- use the capsule API he adds new customers when signed to their own system
- capistrano for automated deploy
- textmate bundles
- gmail labs pre-canned resposes
- hoptoad – monitors logs
- xero – re-occuring in voices
- accounting system checks prod system and looks for unbilled accounts or locks people who don’t pay
- single password systems
- firefox sync, dropbox
- greasemonkey
- insta-paper
- google calendar, trippit
- quicklaunches
- lighthouse, activecolab, atlaysan
- run lint or jslint at commit time
Bcak4 – nzpost redev
First talk at barcamp auckland 4 is Ben from NZ Post
Existing site hard to find stuff, often things listed by product name rather than what people wanted to do.
Around 3000 pages. Huge job to rewrite many of them, many docs written by insiders for insiders.
Key customer profiles for each product , narrowed to 8 customer types. Products matched to some of these types.
New platform is Drupal. Was going to broad RFP but decided to narrow things first. Down to 4 systems Drupal, Plone, Silverstripe, and ruby-on-rails. Lots of alternate vendors for that platform.
Site being built by catalyst. Platform is Ubuntu .
Some product rationalization and presentation changes.
Planned launch in a couple of months
Interesting tech for June 2010
A few things that have caught my eye over the last week or two.
- I’m finally getting around to implementing puppet at work and after a couple of false starts I found example42.com with examples and a huge amount of sample infrastructure to base things on (and in some cases recycle).
- Slides and Video’s from the OReilly Velocity conference ( Web performance and Operations) are being posted. They are still catching up so new talks re being added each day but so far I’ve really liked
- A Day in the Life of Facebook Operations by Tom Cook
- Datacenter Infrastructure Innovation by James Hamilton
- Operations at Twitter – John Adams
- Mobile Web High Performance – Maximiliano Firtman
For the videos it’s usually better to view them directly on youtube as they are a bit bigger and easier to read.
- membase has recently been launched by Northscale . It’s a disk-backed distributed storage that talks memcached protocol. Looks quite nice ( I am playing with Tokyo Tyrant for the same thing). The free release on membase.org needs a bit (well any) documentation to be useful but it looks like something to watch.
- Yahoo! have just released boomerang which looks interesting. It’s gives several options for putting javascript web-bugs on your page that communicate back to you with how long the user takes to load the page, their download speed etc. Have a look at the online version of the documentation.