elucidations

I meant to blog this some months ago but forgot – I’ve been busy! My two year old boy Jack has a universe in which single-ended relationship exist. Or something. He has been discovering how people are related to each other and delighting in working out where he fits. In his world, his mother can be his mummy but he’s not her son. I don’t get much of a look in at all yet – it’s only on good days that I can be his daddy. Related to this is a comment he made today: his great uncle Brian declared that a particular toy car was his favourite but Jack said, “No, it’s not. That’s my favourite!”.

Last Sunday, the two main IE versions reached the 50:50 mark on the Virgin Money Australia servers – both versions responsible for 38% of the day’s traffic. The tyrant that ruins our lives is officially on its way out – and just after its sixth birthday – but don’t expect it to slink off too soon: it has taken about nine months to get this far. The other 50% will take a lot longer to eradicate, I’m sure. BTW weekend traffic for us always has a skew towards less conservative browsers ‘cos it’s people at home who can install what they want. FYI the other main browsers on this historic day recorded as follows: – Firefox 2.0.x: 17% – Safari 2.0.4: 3% – Opera 9.x: 0% – Firefox 1.5.x: 0% Putting this into another perspective, I estimate that “IE6″ time probably cost us an extra $5k on a recent piece of web work. The total cost of the work was $18k. Madness…

Just skimmed through an interesting article in the Good Weekend about Bin Laden. Essentially it was saying that the US has committed a double folly: they’ve let Bin Laden get away (thereby becoming a freedom fighter hero) and they invaded Iraq and set Islam on fire. So they’ve created a hero and then they’ve greatly expanded his worshipper base. Although nicely clarified by history, this is no new thought: millions knew this was the wrong thing to do – we marched against it in our cities – yet a small handful of people then went ahead and did it. So the democracy we’re supposedly taking to Iraq and Afghanistan is not democracy at all.

I tried to do live blogging today but my server went down. Don’t you hate that? You’ve got the laptop, a free Google wireless connection, two world firsts to report and you can’t do it… Ah, well. You’ll have heard it by now but Google officially announced today Google Gears (allows offline AJAX functionality) and Mapplets – applications that live within Google maps, allowing customisation and preferences storage amongst other things. Very exciting. Can’t wait to play with Gears – this changes everything!

Tomorrow is Google Developer Day at the Australian Technology Park – a hothouse of tech companies housed in a former train shed. And how interesting a phenomenon it will be: for me it is the first time I’ve been to such a thing. A day (almost of celebration) sponsored by a leader of the new way to do business – it’s no longer about building it and they will come: it’s about giving away the tools and they will come and build it for you. So we will be talking about open APIs and mashups and all that 2.0 goodness that we already take for granted. But how radically different from anything in the ’90s when everything was proprietary and closed. I still have a book of networking acronyms and abbreviations from the early 90s and it staggers me to remember how all that individual commercial invention gave us such non-interoperable things as DECnet, LAT, AppleTalk, XNET, NetBEUI, yadda, yadda. The list seems endless. The network guys at Optus where I worked then had constant headaches getting this stuff to work together where it needed to. And the battle of Open Standards vs all this closed stuff was only beginning then. Now it is all but won. Pretty visionary, though, hey? Take on the Goliaths by giving stuff away. Perhaps it was the only thing left to try but it’s taken a long time to get where we are now. I wonder where it will go next..?

In August last year I urged Virgin Money Australia to get into Second Life – launch a virtual credit card, use it for promotional purposes, whatever: just get in there. It was on brand, untapped at that point and had potential. Virgin Money chose to do nothing. Second what..? Now, of course, every person and their pet has a presence in SL (except Virgin Money, it seems) and it’s oh, so last year… But is that true? Were we wise not to jump on a bandwagon or foolish not to get first mover advantage? I guess only time will tell but, if you ask me, virtual worlds are hardly going to go away and business opportunities in them are only going to grow…

Talk about ludicrous. These are the stats from my spam filter: Filtered Mail 16,898 Good Messages 23,920 Spam Messages (59%) 158 Spam Messages Per Day SpamSieve Accuracy 19 False Positives 154 False Negatives (89%) 99.6% Correct Rules 1,035 Blocklist Rules 1,351 Whitelist Rules Showing Statistics Since 21/12/06 3:23 PM But SpamSieve is so good I never really see any of this in my inbox. The odd thing gets through and I eyeball the spam message for false positives but that’s all.

This morning my five year old daughter said (while watching Kimba the White Lion), “Daddy, are guns real?”. I replied, “Yes, they are, I’m afraid.” To which she responded, “Well, I’m going to stop them making them!” I could have cried but instead I went over and kissed the top of her head.

I’ve been mulling over whether or not to try out GTD for a while. I’ve discovered (since buying a Booq bag for my MacBook Pro) that – in the physical world – compartments work well for me. Having pre-ordained places to put things keeps me sane, it seems. But now I need to do the same for all the chores in my life – which is pretty multi-stranded at the best of times and tangled at the worst… And, lo! I discover that Actiontastic – one of the better (apparently) GTD products for the Mac has just gone Open Source. So I’ve downloaded it and will try it out over the next few weeks.

Virgin Money Australia now has a Google Maps mashup! Check out this page and you’ll see that Virgin Money now provides brokers who come to visit you. And you find out where they based using a Google map… Cool. [disclaimer: it was my idea and I manage the VM website! ]