Written By: - Date published: 12:49 pm, June 13th, 2011 - 20 comments
There has been a repeated question over the last few days coming up in comments about auto-moderation. Well there is a battle against spam comments raging on the net. You’re getting caught as collateral damage.
Written By: - Date published: 3:03 pm, June 8th, 2011 - 86 comments
Darren Hughes will not be charged. “After this careful consideration, the allegations do not reach the evidential threshold required to bring charges. As a result, no charges will be brought against Mr Hughes.” “Some media outlets received an anonymous letter about Mr Hughes whilst Police were investigating this complaint. I can confirm those allegations contained …
Written By: - Date published: 1:16 pm, June 2nd, 2011 - 112 comments
In my sleep deprived state I have to confess that I don’t like rugby supporters, especially drunken ones who argue about teams at 2am in the morning on the street. I suspect that will be the enduring memory I will carry away from this years Rugby World Cup. But I do like Dead Cat Bounce’s video about rugby.
Written By: - Date published: 4:26 pm, June 1st, 2011 - 33 comments
Bob Clarkson is back into public politics. This time generously helping the Act Party. Long may this continue!
Written By: - Date published: 2:48 pm, May 27th, 2011 - 17 comments
I have been bemoaning that I’d missed the Operation 8 documentary. But there are more screenings around the country. Catch a showing near you because by the sound of the current state of the court case, this will not be resolved until next year at the earliest. It has been over three and half years …
Written By: - Date published: 12:25 pm, May 21st, 2011 - 7 comments
If like me, you’re are in Auckland today and not at the Labour election year congress in Wellington* – here is something interesting to do. There is a “Festival for the Planet – A Peoples Assembly on Climate Change” at midday – 5pm the Town Hall. Looks interesting apart from having Te Radar as the …
Written By: - Date published: 11:29 am, May 20th, 2011 - 26 comments
I was listening to John Key on Parliament TV last night on the budget and he is bloody lazy when speaking. I had to watch his lips before I could figure out what he was saying. This morning there is a video of his remedial vocal work that illustrates this problem..
Written By: - Date published: 3:35 pm, May 3rd, 2011 - 22 comments
A tornado hit Albany in Auckland City. There has been at least one fatality. Judging by the number of sirens coming over the bridge, there must be a number of injured. Small tornados are not uncommon in Auckland, but previously there has only been a single known fatality.
Written By: - Date published: 12:57 pm, May 1st, 2011 - 64 comments
In an act of pure vanity, David Farrar is whining about the a by-election that will probably be held in July – less than three months before the House dissolves for the election. Farrar even points out the relevant law Parliament can only resolve not to have a by-election if the resignation occurs within six …
Written By: - Date published: 9:30 am, April 28th, 2011 - 6 comments
Morgan Godfery at Maui Street blog is reporting that the police are preparing to raid Te Whanau a Apanui for protesting against the Petrobas geological survey. The police have to be crazy to think that they can do another raid like the one in 2007. What are they looking for this time? More 0.22″ rounds?
Written By: - Date published: 8:15 pm, April 25th, 2011 - 17 comments
Shifting the site to a GeoDNS with fallback capabilities this evening*. This involves changing the domain name server addresses again. Now like last time this is meant to be a seamless shift. However that may or may not be the case. Last time there were some quite ISP’s with interesting ways of interpreting what a …
Written By: - Date published: 2:00 pm, April 20th, 2011 - 39 comments
The Family Court as far as I’m concerned is the only court that tries to act as the gate before the cliff, rather than the grave digger at the bottom. The costs to society both directly and in loss of potential can be astronomical when taken over a persons entire lifetime of not handling the family issues clearly and decisively. So why does Simon Power want to fiddle with it? Apparently to forestall urban myths which does seem to be his sole political ability.
Written By: - Date published: 12:05 pm, April 17th, 2011 - 8 comments
There will be a number of (hopefully) small disruptions over the next few days to upgrade the site servers. The sunday upgrades are underway. Hopefully there will not be too much of a disruption.
Written By: - Date published: 3:41 pm, April 14th, 2011 - 13 comments
You almost have to admire Rodney Hide for his total contempt for political reality. He has managed to annoy aged GoldCard users with his comments on their off-peak free use of public transport. There’s also a horrible irony in Hide opposing publicly funded transport for people who aren’t him or his girlfriend.
Written By: - Date published: 8:04 am, April 13th, 2011 - 3 comments
A classic cover with updated lyrics of the 1980′s classic. Now we have “We have no ambition for New Zealand”. Give a big hand to the artists and start asking the radio stations and TV channels when they will be playing it.
Now we know what John Key was so depressed about in this image?
Written By: - Date published: 2:30 pm, April 5th, 2011 - 27 comments
Even considering putting in a new harbor crossing without heavy rail that hooks into our existing public transport rail system is simply ideological stupidity by National. Well it is good to see that Aucklanders recognize the critical requirement for a new harbor crossing – “Rail crossing wins big backing in poll”. The sample is small but quite clear…
Written By: - Date published: 11:08 am, April 1st, 2011 - 9 comments
We have had some routing problems this morning with several networks used by our provider in San Diego. The problem have been ongoing with the network links appearing and disappearing from the perspective of NZ and aussie (there is less of a issue from overseas networks). They’re working on it. It started just before 7am …
Written By: - Date published: 3:23 pm, March 29th, 2011 - 51 comments
Vernon Small says “Its activists on websites and blogs are openly questioning the party’s direction and Mr Goff’s judgment.” He seems to be looking at our non-Labour activists of the left and the astroturfers and seeing a movement against Goff.
Mostly it isn’t from Labour activists. It isn’t real. It is just designed for him and other journos to read.
Written By: - Date published: 12:32 pm, March 27th, 2011 - 45 comments
Steven Joyce and the NZ Transport Authority seem to be living in the 20th century. You know the time, when there was a strong causation and correlation between rising numbers of people and increased use of roads. But neither appear to have caught up with the 21st century where that isn’t happening. Yearning for the 1960′s in planning transport infrastructure doesn’t help Auckland or the rest of NZ
Written By: - Date published: 3:45 pm, March 23rd, 2011 - 18 comments
Rob Carr over at Political Dumpground has provided me with my third glimpse at why twitter can be useful. After you’ve seen your first hundred or so of “killer app like Lotus 123″turn up, flare for a while and then disappear, you learn to be skeptical of investing too much effort into them (especially if they have the word Microsoft associated with them).
Written By: - Date published: 11:30 am, March 4th, 2011 - 21 comments
One of the names that the self-inflated blogs who consider themselves to be the “taste police” give us is the unimaginative juvenile name of The Stranded. Typically this is when they are writing a silly post trying to tell us why we should think like them (I guess everyone is entitled to a unrealistic dream). Anyway I thought I’d give them some real bad taste to moan about in a Friday Fun post (warning – written in the Cactus Kate style).
Written By: - Date published: 11:33 am, February 28th, 2011 - 3 comments
They are doing pretty well on restoring the power. With the exception of some small outlying areas, along the strike line and the CBD most of the city has power again as you can see from this chart. At a guess it will probably take some time on the major remaining areas simply because these are the areas that had the most vertical acceleration during the quake.
Written By: - Date published: 3:17 pm, February 25th, 2011 - 35 comments
It is with a great deal of reluctance that I have to actually support Whaleoil on a post about a rather obnoxious website blaming the Christchurch quake on ‘depravity’. He actually proposes a course of action that has a good chance of getting rid of this offensive site. Of course being Whaleoil some of his other statements are just stomach churning.
Written By: - Date published: 9:51 am, February 24th, 2011 - 34 comments
When I looked at Geonet this morning, I found this image mapping the velocity of the earth movements in the 6.3 magnitude Lyttelton quake. It is astonishing.
With ground accelerations of up to 220% of earths gravity measured near the epicentre and 80% of gravity around the central business district it would have clearly exceeded the design specifications of many buildings.
Written By: - Date published: 3:36 pm, February 11th, 2011 - 33 comments
Archiving websites is a bloody good idea because the public debate and emerging history of NZ society is shifting more and more into these electronic media. So I asked NatLib about one of those political blogs that disappeared from the blogosphere – KiwiBlogBlog. It still exists…
Written By: - Date published: 12:27 pm, February 11th, 2011 - 5 comments
Skeptical Science has posted a very interesting video with Dr. Ove Hoegh-Guldberg running through the current known climate science and associated risks on oceans. Our civilizations have both direct and indirect dependence on oceans. The implications of destroying the ecosystems there is probably going to impact earlier than most of the other effects of our current unrestricted CO2 emissions.
Written By: - Date published: 2:27 am, February 3rd, 2011 - 12 comments
Periodically I run a scan to identify network parasites that are sucking up our bandwidth and processing resources in excess. Of course I leave the benign parasites that provide search facilities alone. But I stomp on the nasties.
Tonight the biggest parasite appears to have been a New Zealand government department – the Department of Internal Affairs.
Written By: - Date published: 1:34 pm, February 2nd, 2011 - 12 comments
Darn, we sneaked past the 7000th post without my noticing at the end of last month. We passed 6000 posts on August 25th last year, so we did that last thousand posts in 160 days. The comment growth is pretty strong as well.
The site is also now iPad friendly. Have a peek at the screenshots.
Written By: - Date published: 11:45 am, January 19th, 2011 - 73 comments
In 1951, New Zealand temporarily became a police state. Civil liberties were curtailed, freedom of speech denied, and the Government used force against its own citizens. This film tells the story of the infamous lockout of waterside workers and the nationwide strike which followed. The film won Best Documentary and John Bates was named Best Director, Documentary, at the 2002 New Zealand Television Awards.
Written By: - Date published: 2:47 pm, January 6th, 2011 - 29 comments
Over recent years the anonymous editorials in the NZ Herald have become increasingly variable. Some have been written by authors who I’d disagree with their ideas, but who clearly have examined the topic in enough depth to be able to argue for and against alternate ideas to arrive at their editorial judgments. Then there are others that have clearly been written by authors with little understanding of the topic and are simply coded dog-whistles unworthy of the editorial page. I have a look at one of the latter.
Written By: - Date published: 1:14 pm, January 2nd, 2011 - 23 comments
Why in the hell should I carry a passport or a birth certificate for the benefit of the state? There is no reason that I can see, but at least one DHB thinks that I should because it makes their life easier. If they want proof of citizenship or resident status then they should be prepared to pay for it themselves rather than throwing the onus to prove status onto us. If the government wants to introduce a requirement to carry identity papers then they should debate this in the political arena rather than trying to sneak it in through the back door.
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