Author Archive
Sunday Star Times
Written By: - Date published: 10:28 am, December 14th, 2008 - 30 comments
My niece Rochelle Rees has uncovered some unsavory practices operated by element of the NZ Police directed at peaceful protest groups. You can read them either by buying the paper, or by these links to articles from Nicky Hager. Police anti-terror squad spies on protest groups Who the police were spying on The activist who […]
Back in another life
Written By: - Date published: 2:49 pm, December 13th, 2008 - 14 comments
I’ve actually had time to start reading blogs again. As some people are probably aware (mostly the climate change deniers), my first degree was in science. Now while some people seem to think that business is what makes the world work, this isn’t correct. It is the science and its derived sister, technology, are what […]
On the Mapp defense
Written By: - Date published: 12:30 pm, December 11th, 2008 - 18 comments
Jafapete might be in LA, however that hasn’t stopped him from raising some cogent points on the 90-day bill. His post Nats hurry to strip workers of rights points out some absurdities of the NACT excuses So, no opportunity to make submissions on these proposals. What’s that? I could have last year? But last year […]
Incompetent or just undemocratic or both?
Written By: - Date published: 2:00 pm, December 10th, 2008 - 26 comments
No Right Turn points out in What’s in the urgency motion? exactly how much of shambles the NACT government is. At present they are busy ramming through legislation that has no titles, that hasn’t been drafted or presented to politicians to read, and they don’t even have an order paper. What exactly have this pack […]
Caching Fixes
Written By: - Date published: 10:30 am, December 10th, 2008 - 15 comments
There has been a on-going issue with some readers not getting updates through in a timely fashion in the sidebars when posts and comments are updated. A similar issue has shown with people using the same proxy server winding up sharing their cookies. I’ve checked the back end caching throughly so I’m confident that it […]
Playing with rankings
Written By: - Date published: 2:32 am, December 8th, 2008 - 10 comments
Since the 16th of November, I’ve been running an experiment with the Alexa ranking system to look at the site sensitivity in rankings from what is hopefully a single new person using it. This is one of the factors used by Tumeke and Halfdone‘s rankings. So I was interested in how much it would affect […]
Taking responsibility, a trait of government
Written By: - Date published: 9:52 pm, December 7th, 2008 - 13 comments
I was looking back at posts from last year to get some idea of traffic patterns over the December period. I found this interesting post from Tane titled Personal responsibility. It made me think of the poor performance of the National-led government over the last couple of weeks as a government. Tane’s post was about […]
Act lied and gets away with it
Written By: - Date published: 2:21 pm, November 30th, 2008 - 11 comments
At the Media Law Journal, Wellington based media lawyer Steven Price has been looking at the recent decisions of the Advertising Standards Complaint Board (a self-regulatory body) related to the election. There are a series of them and the decisions are weird. More importantly they are ineffectual in the great tradition of industry self-regulatory bodies. […]
More upgrades
Written By: - Date published: 2:05 am, November 30th, 2008 - 41 comments
I’ve added two front-end features to the site. Automatic comment closing and a WSIWYG comment editor. Comments get automatically closed on posts older than 30 days, unless that the post remains quite active. It displays like The main reason for this update is because a common troll tactic recently has been to drop comments into […]
Another upgrade
Written By: - Date published: 1:15 am, November 27th, 2008 - 7 comments
Another upgrade complete. As per usual let me know if any problems (that I didn’t find in testing) show up. Please let me know here. If I don’t know about them then I can’t fix them. The next upgrade will happen on the weekend. This is a new module designed to make bans more effective […]
Minnows
Written By: - Date published: 9:44 am, November 22nd, 2008 - 21 comments
I always love reading the 100 Word Blog. So few words and such a high degree of clarity. Richard has surpassed himself with this post. All I can say is ouch!, ask to reproduce it, and extend its readership. It is quoted below in full as per usual. Minnow Party post election round up While […]
“NZ Herald Staff” dribble
Written By: - Date published: 3:41 pm, November 20th, 2008 - 26 comments
Bomber over at Tumeke has pointed out a stupid news story about the blogosphere from the Granny Herald. It either shows a selective bias, or someone reporting on something that they don’t understand at more than a superficial level. From the Herald staff… The Blogosphere has made much of the “popular Westie” Paula Bennett’s new […]
More optimization
Written By: - Date published: 1:47 pm, November 16th, 2008 - 14 comments
I’ve just put another round of optimizations into the system. In this case caching the p-code generated by php into shared memory This should usually result in faster page display where content is changing rapidly. Posts with fast growing comments should get the major benefit from this. This should allow the site to run on […]
Peak traffic
Written By: - Date published: 9:31 pm, November 10th, 2008 - 16 comments
Some comments on Sunday about this site performing well induced me to have a look at the traffic over the last week. I was extremely surprised at how much load the system can now take without stalling. From the WordPress blog stats, It turns out that the traffic for the week was 34.6% higher in […]
National Spinners
Written By: - Date published: 3:30 pm, November 9th, 2008 - 91 comments
David Farrar wrote… “Funniest moment was talking to a few of John’s staff, and one of them asked whether their imminent transfer to the 9th floor meant they would get to take over The Standard. It was hilarious as they started fighting over who would be all-your-base and who would be Irish Bill etc” Wow! […]
The distances between parties
Written By: - Date published: 12:53 pm, November 9th, 2008 - 5 comments
Just before the election They Work For You released some impressive work on the voting distances between parties based on:- There are 110 final bill reading votes included in the analysis. All the votes are from the 48th New Zealand Parliament which was in term between 7 November 2005 and 3 October 2008. The plot […]
Damn close election. Now the coalition fun starts
Written By: - Date published: 2:02 am, November 9th, 2008 - 141 comments
That was incredibly close. National plus Act plus probably Peter Dunne have scraped a small majority. How close is shown in the election results table. 59 (nat) + 5 (act) + 1 (dunne) = 65. Less one for the speaker is 64 in a parliament of 122. That would mean that they have extra seats […]
Contrast the ways of ‘democracy’
Written By: - Date published: 6:56 pm, November 8th, 2008 - 6 comments
I’m happy to say that when I crawled out of my sickbed and voted this morning, it was nothing like the photos on the top and left. I gather that we had queues at some of the major booths later in the day – Edendale primary (my old school) in Mt Albert for instance. However […]
Guest Post: QoT – Mmm, delicious linear time
Written By: - Date published: 10:12 pm, November 4th, 2008 - 28 comments
I loved this post for QoT so much that I asked to reproduce it in full here. It resonated with me after reading the comment stream today. So, from Ideologically Impure, an observation on the patently ridiculous… Lynn This comment over at The Standard cites one of my favourite (or, really, least-favourite) bits of political […]
Polling Biases
Written By: - Date published: 6:47 pm, October 26th, 2008 - 26 comments
This is from the discussion area of the wikipedia page on opinion polls. It is an analysis of biases between the polling companies by trewa. I know how much our own commentators are interested in the biases of different polls, so this will give some kind of basis for comparison. Personally I think that land-line […]
Poll Trends – National is soft
Written By: - Date published: 7:55 am, October 25th, 2008 - 43 comments
Rather than argue about individual polls, it is more interesting to look at the overall trends. A number of people have put an excellent summary of the polls up on wikipedia. What is noticeable to me about this chart is that the National support looks very soft. Coming up towards an election with the less […]
Drinking Liberally – Auckland
Written By: - Date published: 11:22 pm, October 21st, 2008 - 4 comments
WHAT: Drinking Liberally Auckland City WHO: You and any of your left-leaning comrades WHEN: 7.30pm, Wed 22nd October WHERE: London Bar, cnr Wellesley & Queen Sts (opposite Civic). The entrance to the bar is around on Wellesley St, you need to go up the stairs. WITH: Dr Russell Norman – co-leader of the Greens. COST: […]
Maintenance
Written By: - Date published: 12:13 pm, October 16th, 2008 - 9 comments
There will be some scheduled maintenance at the hosting company tonight between 10pm and 6am. During that period the site may be offline for some short periods. So if you cannot get the site for a period, then just try again a little time later. Yet another record breaking day at The Standard yesterday. We […]
Authorised for the Right…..
Written By: - Date published: 4:00 pm, October 12th, 2008 - 7 comments
From the campaign launch, I got this photo, and decided that I’d put it up for the skulkers complaining about the EFA. For some reason they were conspicuous by their absence (didn’t want to tangle with 1600+ activists?). For the EFA fetishists, please note that Mike is authorising himself. I didn’t sneak around to get […]
Labour – too popular
Written By: - Date published: 2:46 pm, October 12th, 2008 - 70 comments
Labour is too damn popular! I’m at the campaign launch and the place is full. There are a couple of hundred of us hanging around in the lounges looking at the televisions – metres away from the hall. The Auckland town hall is overflowing with activists. I’ve been at a large number of these launches […]
Upgrades – Grumpy post area
Written By: - Date published: 5:48 pm, October 11th, 2008 - 77 comments
I’ve brought the site up to date. All the various hacks that I put in this years have now been removed as the software and plugins have now been upgraded. The main area of difference is in the re-edit, which is no longer in-line. I’m still tweaking that in places for look and feel. I’ve […]
We’re popular – but with the wrong people
Written By: - Date published: 2:25 pm, October 5th, 2008 - 10 comments
After a lot of work both by a few e-mails from people here and by the good services of some people on nz.comp (google seems to be a little behind on the messages) I finally found the link to the malware site that was attached itself to the site footer. The material that it was […]
On the standard of proof.
Written By: - Date published: 12:10 am, October 1st, 2008 - 9 comments
On occasion I’ve had my ire raised by Danyl Mclauchlan over at The Dim-Post, usually after he repeats crap from the sewers about this site. Every so often (quite frequently) he manages to do something that is almost perfect satire. Poneke has captured such a comment and put it up as a post “The kind […]
Drinking Liberally – Auckland
Written By: - Date published: 3:42 pm, September 23rd, 2008 - 4 comments
WHAT: Drinking Liberally Auckland City WHO: You and any of your left-leaning comrades WHEN: 7.30pm, Wed 24th September WHERE: London Bar, cnr Wellesley & Queen Sts (opposite Civic). The entrance to the bar is around on Wellesley St, you need to go up the stairs and we will probably be congregating at the far end […]
Why the polls suck.
Written By: - Date published: 6:49 pm, September 20th, 2008 - 34 comments
Newswire have a new poll “Is it a done deal? What the polls don’t tell us” which makes for some interesting reading. It was a limited poll done around Wellington on Monday using a true random polling technique. It also reported all of the figures including the numbers for which there was no answer. As […]
Upgrade time again
Written By: - Date published: 11:49 am, September 20th, 2008 - 33 comments
I’m on ‘holiday’ for the next few weeks to contribute some campaign work. However it will also give me some time to do the next set of upgrades to the site sometime during that period. I will be putting in the acculmulated upgrades for existing packages and testing them. Here is your opportunity to say […]
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