www.nickhodge.com

Honey laded Bee hives are very heavy.

An api­ar­ist, or bee­keeper, places dozens of bee hives, usu­ally clustered on stand­ard ship­ping palettes, near nec­tar laden sources. In Aus­tralia, this tends to be in the bush – near flower­ing Euca­lypts. The res­ult­ing honey has a slightly smoky taste: but is the best in the world. Around 1980, my Dad star­ted a small cash side­line of Bee­keep­ing to sup­ple­ment the wheat/sheep farm­ing that the Eyre Pen­in­sula prop­erty had sus­tained over 4 generations.

Coun­try South Aus­tralia is a per­fect loc­a­tion – espe­cially on the fringes of a large reserve. You can place your hives on private prop­erty (with per­mis­sion) and let the bees tra­verse into the reserve gath­er­ing the nec­tar. I see it as reap­ing from the gov­ern­ment, albeit without dam­age (and in the case of plants, a bene­fit as the bees pol­lin­ate the trees).

The trouble with bush loc­a­tions is that they are remote, unpaved and not access­ible by nor­mal palette lift­ing devices. In ware­houses, weighed down fork­lifts shuttle around isles of con­crete. In the bush, the isles are sandy loam or clay – and the shelves are very very tall nat­ive Aus­tralian trees.

My Dad pur­chased an old fork­lift and used this around the sheds for a time lift­ing and mov­ing the heavy palettes of hives. This fork­lift did not travel well. You could not load or unload it from a truck; and the wheel­base and design were dis­tinctly urban. Indoors. Def­in­itely not for bush use.

Land rovers, on the other hand, were designed for off-road use. Four wheel drive; rugged, simple & when pur­chased second hand – cheap. Another bene­fit of a Land rover is that you can put the thing into neut­ral, attach it to a tow bar and go any­where. Once in the bush – they were in their element.

Land Rovers, as built by Ley­land, did not come with fron­tend palette load­ing equipment.

So, in a flash of bril­liance, my Dad took the lift­ing part of the fork­lift & attached it to the front of a Land Rover. The Land Rover’s engine & radi­ator was slightly reposi­tioned to per­mit the hydraul­ics to fit in the engine com­part­ment. Extra counter-balanced weights were added to the rear of the Land Rover. The pet­rol tank was also moved.

What was born was the Feep. (short of Fork­lift Jeep)

The above is the Feep. As I recall, and this is some 30 years ago now, the first coat of paint (John Deere green) was com­plete by my Dad. The accent­ing (John Deere) yel­low & the name – as you can see on the ver­tical fork­lift say­ing “FEEP” was painted by myself.

To my know­ledge, this is the word’s only Fork­lift Jeep – cre­ated by my Dad to help him lift & load heavy bee hives palettes in bushland.

The genet­ics of innov­a­tion & cre­ation have passed down to another gen­er­a­tion. Maybe not as prac­tical as a Feep, but they are there.

On this topic, more to come in com­ing weeks.

This is merely a post from the Word­Press Win­dows Phone 7 app. GPLv2 licensed.

Liam suc­cess­fully com­pleted his HSC in 2009, with one of his sub­jects being Soft­ware Design

Look­ing over his res­ults cer­ti­fic­ate, it seems that 1726 stu­dents sat the HSC Exam from 1759 enrol­ments. In other words, 2.5% of the NSW HSC pop­u­la­tion took this course.

The cur­riculum for this sub­ject area is repor­ted to be weak.

Maybe it is time for Higher Edu­ca­tion, Industry and the Board of Stud­ies to strengthen the con­tent of this course. For the future of Aus­tralia in the digital world.

@stilgherrian, @kcarruthers and @nickhodge. Yes, we are all on Twit­ter, twit­ter­ing to the Twitterati.

We were wait­ing for Pia Waugh, one of Australia’s lead­ing Linux and Open source experts to show us the Art Deco Theatre.

Excel­lent photo taken in the main street of Yass, New South Wales by @ApostrophePong. More Pho­tos on ‘pongs site.

Dear Inter­net Explorer 6.0 (IE6) Users,

Only 20% of browsers in the world are still using IE6, and 22% of vis­it­ors to this site are still using IE6. IE6 is the work of the evil @basementcat. I strongly sug­gest you upgrade to Inter­net Explorer 7 or 8.

Why? Later browsers sup­port more web sites, espe­cially the many that are now writ­ten with Web Stand­ards in mind. Sites designed with Web Stand­ards render quicker as browsers do not have to magic­ally inter­pret bad code.

Also, secur­ity. As Microsoft takes Inter­net secur­ity ser­i­ously, there are strong fea­tures in Inter­net Explorer 8 to stop nasty things happening.

So, please upgrade your browser.

kthxbai

Update, 3:20pm

Just off the phone to the Pub­li­cis. There are two issues here: one is the broken con­fig­ur­a­tion of @pm.ad as the reply-to email address. A mis­con­fig­ur­a­tion error.

Thanks to Pub­li­cis for reach­ing out and being hon­est; and start­ing to resolve the issue.

From earlier today:

1. Poten­tial source of the “fol­low”: I men­tion metamu­cil on twit­ter. No occur­rences of this word on my blog until this par­tic­u­lar post­ing. and oth­ers such have found the same issue with unso­li­cited email from the same sender, with sim­ilar contents.
2. Up until this point, I have been a happy and reg­u­lar user of said fibre sup­ple­ment brand below. Note that this brand is owned by Proc­tor and Gamble. I am not going to link out to said product.
3. The per­son that received this email is men­tioned 5 times on my web site, and there is at least one link from my site to theirs (note: I have “xx”’d the name out below)
4. The owner and pub­lisher of this web site, Nick Hodge, in no way, expli­citly nor impli­citly gave per­mis­sion for any brand: includ­ing Microsoft, to use to my blog as “trusted ref­er­ence sell” nor source of email addresses. Read­ing Microsoft’s policy on Online Pri­vacy, I am pretty sure that doing this style of “email har­vest and ref­er­ence social mar­ket­ing” is highly wrong, and con­tra­ven­tion of this policy is a ser­i­ous offence.
5. “Unsolicited email” is spam. Plain and simple.
6. The con­tent on my site is (cc) Attribution-Non-commerical Share-Australia 2.1, as per the link at the bot­tom of each page. I con­sider this spam­ming is a breach of my Terms and Conditions.
7. Sub­sequently, I am very unhappy with Pub­li­cis Mojo. You do not get social media, you are a spam­mer. Of the worst kind.
8. I am recom­mend­ing the receiver of this email report both Proc­tor and Gamble, and Pub­li­cis Mojo as a Spam­mer as per the Spam Act (2003) and amendments
9. It seems that the domain name “pm.ad” might exist, how­ever fur­ther research by an white-hat secur­ity expert:
   • *.ad is a top-level domain owned by Andorra, the country
   • pm.ad would be a logical place for ‘pub­li­cis­mojo an advert­ising agency’ to register; or may be used for internal sites
   • if you send email to ‘postie@publicismojo.com.au’ the bounce back is from the same mail.publicismojo.com.au IP address as in the below spam example: 134.159.132.130
   • 130.159.132.130 is Pub­li­cis Mojo in Aus­tralia (as per apnic)
   • rob­tex has some inter­est­ing details on this domain range

From: Blog Seeding <BloggerRelations@pm.ad>
Date: 2008/12/9
Subject: For xx
To: xx@xx.xx.au

Hi xx,

Sorry for the unsolicited email.

I was reading your blog and noticed you're particularly influential in the blogosphere.
I even saw your blog reposted on NickHodge.com.

I'm working on behalf of Metamucil on their new Fibresure product and
I was wondering if you would be receptive to us sending you a xmas gift pack?
No obligations, of course!  

Look forward to hearing from you.

Kind regards,

Publicis Mojo

The Register, cer­tainly not the most pro-Microsoft web pub­lic­a­tion (note: sar­casm), today states: “Apple more closed than Microsoft”

Trans­ition­ing to Apple-bashing is a simple journ­al­istic mech­an­ism to attract eye­balls. I am going to ignore the anti-Apple sentiment.

The inter­est­ing state­ments are: “however, the Microsoft of today, while not totally reformed, is a lot more open and well behaved than it was, say, 10 years ago.”

One high­lighted recent ‘negative’ on Microsoft is the OpenXML as an ISO specification.

Per­son­ally, I am a pro­ponent of open file formats. Com­pletely open spe­cific­a­tions, no pat­ent encum­brances, for all to imple­ment read/write and change. It is very import­ant that our des­cend­ants are able to read and write the digital files we are cre­at­ing today. By pub­lish­ing the file formats for our bin­ary and XML out of Microsoft Office is an excel­lent start. ISO puts the format in the hands of the world.

Yes­ter­day Microsoft released more toolkits for OpenXML sup­port (includ­ing Java)and an OpenXML/ODF interop kits:

• Open XML Doc­u­ment Viewer
• Open XML/ODF Trans­lator Web site
• POI Java SDK for Open XML

My advice is to not listen to the idle rhet­oric of any vendor: watch the code and see what ships. That is the ulti­mate test.

From Wired 16.12 “Ray Ozzie Wants to Push Microsoft Back Into Star­tup Mode”

“I think we’re going to take a lot of people by sur­prise” – Ray Ozzie, TechReady8

Steven wit­nessed Ray’s present­a­tion at Microsoft’s internal TechReady8 con­fer­ence: a rare treat for an out­side journ­al­ist. What he saw was Ray Ozzie present­ing at his finest.

Before join­ing Microsoft, I spoke to Mike Sey­fang. One of my reas­ons for join­ing was to be a part of the Ray Ozzie smart­ness. In my first year inside the fire­wall, Ray Ozzie’s teams were very stealthy. Quiet.

At PDC late this year, Ray didn’t present quite as pas­sion­ately (maybe not so scare the developer-centric audi­ence) – but he star­ted to pub­lic­ally show his vis­ion for the future of computing.

Microsoft has moved from the “PC” cent­ric model. This shift star­ted with the hir­ing of Dave Cut­ler, one of the Digital archi­tects of VAX/VMS. From his work at Microsoft came Win­dows NT. A server-grade oper­at­ing sys­tem that arrived on mass consumer/business desktops 9 years later with Win­dows XP.

Win­dows NT, and its suc­cessors, did breed a fam­ily of robust server oper­at­ing sys­tems; and applic­a­tions that moved Microsoft into the heart of the enter­prise: the server room. This dra­mat­ic­ally shif­ted Microsoft’s product strategy, and how it engaged with large organ­isa­tions. No longer just the men­acing PC on the desktop to an enter­prise IT archi­tec­ture, from soup to nuts. And the rev­enue followed.

In the midst of this shift from desktop to server room, Microsoft has seemed to ignore the Inter­net. stand­ard­ised pro­to­cols, free­dom of choice, open source, cre­at­ive com­mons licens­ing, dis­rupt­ive busi­ness mod­els, loosely coupled applic­a­tions. Microsoft only noticed when its enterprise-customer defens­ive wall was attacked. Like guer­rilla attacks: the skir­mishes were many, but the barbs were sur­viv­able. Rev­enue still flows.

Wit­ness Viet­nam, Iraq, Afgh­anistan (for the Greeks, Brit­ish, USSR and Coali­tion) and Pictish-lands (for the Romans) : guer­rilla war­ri­ors ulti­mately win.

Ray Ozzie is the nav­ig­ator that is chan­ging Microsoft’s course from within. The fleet of super­tankers that is Microsoft can­not turn quickly: unless facing immin­ent death as Apple did in 1995/6, large organ­isa­tions have a momentum that is dif­fi­cult to unwind.

We are wit­ness­ing the same shift today with a move into the cloud. Simply put: the plat­form is a col­lec­tion of loosely coupled devices con­nec­ted by the inter­net. Not PCs on desks, nor serv­ers in racks in every organ­isa­tion around the world.

The IT com­pany most effected by this change in plat­form is Microsoft.

Ozzie felt that after los­ing its anti­trust case, Microsoft had tempered its bul­ly­ing beha­vior. “This is a dif­fer­ent com­pany,” he now says. “It doesn’t feel evil; it doesn’t feel incon­sist­ent with my core beliefs.”

The fleet is turn­ing. Ozzie has nav­ig­at­ing the dir­ec­tion. We’re off.

Cloud Follow-ups:

 

• The inter­sec­tion of social media and the cloud, Steve Gill­mor, TechCrunchIT

Hi, nickhodge.

The United States (USofA) stopped following you on
Twitter after you posted this tweet:

#eotw shoulda bought and worn my thermal reg grundies

Check out USofA's profile here:

http://twitter.com/USofA

Best,
Qwitter