Categories
Random observations

iCal/Exchange Integration in Snow Leopard – Booking Shared Resources

So I’ve been using Snow Leopard for a few weeks now. Not too many changes on the surface. The integration of Exposé into the Dock is probably one of the more visible changes. But being in an organisation where Microsoft Exchange is the chosen communication and, dare I say it, collaboration platform, the Exchange support in Mail, iCal and Address Book is really useful.

However, there was one thing I couldn’t figure out how to do: booking a shared resource, such as a meeting room or a car park. Today, we figured out how to do it, and, in hindsight, it should have been obvious.

To book a shared resource, create a calendar event in iCal as you normally would, making sure the event is created in your Exchange calendar as opposed to your personal (local) one. Then, in the invitees field, add the resource you wish to book. Start typing the name of the resource, and if your Exchange integration is working correctly (and your IT people have set up the resources in Exchange correctly), it should find the resource just as if you were adding a person as an invitee. Once you’ve added the resource, you should see a link that says “Available meeting times…”. Click it. This will show you when the resource is available and when it’s booked, as well as the availability of any other people you’ve added to the invitees field. Once you’ve done that, you’re good to go! Microsoft Outlook users will see that the resource has been booked (if they’ve added the resource as a Shared Calendar to their Outlook console).

Categories
Random observations

The Landing Pilot is the Non-Handling Pilot

The Landing Pilot is the Non-Handling Pilot until the “decision altitude” call, when the Handling Non-Landing Pilot hands the handling to the Non-Handling Landing Pilot, unless the latter calls “go-around”, in which case the Handling Non-Landing Pilot, continues Handling and the Non-Handling Landing Pilot continues non-handling until the next call of “land” or “go-around”, as appropriate.

In view of the recent confusion over these rules, it was deemed necessary to restate them clearly.

— British Airways memorandum, quoted in Pilot Magazine, December 1996 (and in The Pragmatic Programmer, which is where I read it).

Categories
Innovation

Citemine: a new way to do peer review and publishing

As you probably know, I’m a ubicomp researcher by day. However, on the side, NICTA‘s allowed me to allocate some of my time to develop a new way for researchers to review and publish papers. We’ve deployed a very early proof-of-concept of our idea called Citemine. We think Citemine has several nice properties, including a potentially more meaningful measure of research quality than existing indicators such as h index and raw citation counts. You can read all about the underlying mechanism in Citemine here. Until we deploy a feedback mechanism for papers, please leave your comments about Citemine at the official Citemine blog.

Note that we’re experiencing a few difficulties with our Citemine production server environment, which means slow page loads from time to time. And it’s clearly lacking polish, but hopefully it serves its purpose as a proof-of-concept so that you can get a feel for what it’s all about. But please do read the paper. I’ve been told it’s a fun read.

Categories
Innovation

The PACE framework for context-aware computing

A long time ago, in a Cooperative Research Centre far, far away (well, actually, it used to be just across the road from where I’m writing this post, but it sadly met its demise), a small group of researchers worked on a ubiquitous computing project that came to be known as PACE: Pervasive Autonomic Context-aware Environments. This group produced a framework for context-aware computing, which was the subject of many research papers at Pervasive, PerCom, JPMC and elsewhere. For various reasons, the source code for PACE has only just now come out into the open. Yes, you can now download the PACE framework from SourceForge. Unfortunately, there won’t be a lot of support offered along with the code.

Categories
Innovation

Free internet access on the train in Brisbane

Queensland Rail will be offering south-east Queensland commuters free wireless access to the internet from early 2010, according to the Minister for Transport, Rachel Nolan. This access will use spare capacity on the infrastructure used to transmit real-time video footage from surveillance cameras to QR’s control room at Central Station.

One thing from that story that caught my attention was this:

She (Rachel Nolan) said people living near train lines or stations would not be able to tap into the free internet service because it would be “firewalled”.

That would have to be one pretty intelligent firewall! Here are some actual possibilities to guard against free-loaders. One not so attractive way to do it would be to set a limit on daily downloads. The theory is that there’s only so much you could download on the longest possible trip on the QR network in south-east Queensland (say, Gold Coast to Nambour, or something like that). The other more attractive solution, in my opinion, would be to tie usage to go cards. Your internet session starts when you swipe on at the beginning of your journey, and it finishes when you swipe off. There’d be some kind of web-based login procedure like you get at hotels and elsewhere, where you enter your go card number to gain access; or regular users could have the option of registering the MAC address of their wireless card with QR/Translink to skip the login procedure. Given that it still takes ages for a credit card top up to find its way onto my go card, I don’t hold out much hope for QR/Translink being able to implement this particular solution within the already very optimistic time frame of early 2010. But I do think it’s a reasonable long term solution. It might even help Translink in their quest to move more commuters over to the go card from paper tickets.

Categories
Innovation

Social Radar: Twitter on top

There are many ways to measure brand awareness. As in most analyses, you shouldn’t rely on any single metric to determine which brands have most mindshare. Having said that, the Social Radar Top 50 Social Brands ranking is interesting. It measures conversations and web chatter. According to the ranking, Twitter comes out on top. Google comes in second, and Facebook makes it into fifth place. One of Twitter’s major competitors, FriendFeed, doesn’t even make it into the top 50 by this particular measure (did Scoble back the wrong horse and Kawasaki the right one?). But this ranking didn’t just include “social networking” brands. Rather, it was a survey of how frequently any brand was mentioned in a collection of blog posts, news feeds, forums, social networks and Twitter posts. Interestingly, such well known brands as Coke and McDonald’s fell outside the top 50. I imagine this is because these brands no longer have novelty value. They are ingrained in our culture. Really the only time we could be bothered blogging about these sorts of brands is when controversy strikes, or when someone makes a provocative movie like Super Size Me.

So what does this mean? It means that right now Twitter is hot. People are talking about it, and that’s the best that Biz Stone and company could hope for. The big question for Twitter is how to convert all the talk into more users, and ultimately revenue. If they do manage to do this, it would be nice to know how they did it!

Categories
Random observations

Fleet Foxes – White Winter Hymnal

Heard this song on the radio a while ago and couldn’t track it down. But today I caught it on ABC Local Radio, would you believe.

Categories
Innovation

Jeffrey Ullman on the National Benefit

Once a year, NICTA’s external advisory boards, called ISAG/IBAG (International {Scientific, Business} Advisory Group), hold a meeting. There are some well known people on this panel, including Jeffrey D. Ullman, who is one of, if not the, most cited computer scientists. At the most recent ISAG/IBAG, the NICTA executive sought some advice on the potential for conflict between the objectives of national benefit and commercialisation. Ullman’s answer was succinct, cutting and delivered with a dry wit that I have come to appreciate over the years since I’ve been at NICTA:

National benefit versus private benefit… Hey, that’s what capitalism is designed to do, is to guarantee that there is no contradiction.

The line got a delayed laugh, because it took the audience a few moments to realise that was all Professor Ullman had to say on the topic, and that he’d moved on to the next topic. People laughed, but he was serious, and more right than many would be willing to accept.

Categories
Eco-philo-pol

How do you like your coffee?

While enjoying a fantastic cup of coffee courtesy of the Kuranda Coffee Republic up near Cairns, I remembered that I wanted to write something about the various “socially responsible” trade organisations, specifically those that have a strong association to the coffee trade. Of late, there are two main socially responsible trade systems vying for your conscience and your dollar: Fair Trade and Rainforest Alliance.

Fair Trade is really a movement consisting of a number of principal organisations: Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International (FLO), World Fair Trade Organization, Network of European Worldshops and European Fair Trade Association. While Fair Trade refers to the overall movement, Fairtrade refers to the certification given by FLO. In the rest of this article, I refer to Fairtrade, because when you’re in the supermarket shopping for coffee, that’s the label you will see. One of the defining features of Fairtrade is that it guarantees the coffee grower (or whatever the product happens to be; we’ll just be dealing with coffee in this article) a predetermined minimum price for his/her coffee.

You can look at Fairtrade as being just like free trade, except that the coffee being sold has been sprinkled with a range of “socially responsible enhancements”. As mentioned, chief among these enhancements is the knowledge that the farmer who grows the coffee beans that end up in your mug gets at least an agreed minimum price for the coffee, and his/her farm workers are similarly guaranteed a minimum wage. The idea is that the consumer is paying a premium for a superior product, because the coffee has been produced in a way that yields greater benefits for the farmers who grow the coffee. So, in this respect, the price of Fairtrade coffee is set by supply and demand, just like non Fairtrade coffee. There is an ethical dilemma here, however. An important criticism of Fairtrade, and one that I believe is completely valid, is that Fairtrade artificially inflates the price of coffee, encouraging more people to grow coffee, thereby increasing supply and, in the long run, placing downward pressure on coffee prices (non-Fairtrade coffee). This, of course, results in farmers receiving less and less for the coffee they grow. The ethical dilemma is that Fairtrade coffee is marketed as being socially responsible and fair, but the question must be asked “fair to whom?” Certainly not to the farmer who sees the price of his coffee going down because all his mates have decided to try to get a piece of the action. The already oversupplied coffee market becomes even further oversupplied. Consumers with a social conscience, I believe, ought to think twice about Fairtrade – it might not be as fair or as socially responsible as you think. Besides, I wonder just how many consumers of Fairtrade coffee take the time to find out what this minimum wage is, and what this minimum wage could buy in the given farmer’s country.

Rainforest Alliance has different goals to that of Fairtrade. Its mission is to

…conserve biodiversity and ensure sustainable livelihoods by transforming land-use practices, business practices and consumer behavior.

Rainforest Alliance certification means that goods (coffee in our case) are produced in an environmentally sustainable fashion, in adherence to the Sustainable Agriculture Network standards. These standards set down criteria relating to water pollution, erosion, environmental and human health, wildlife habitat protection, waste, water efficiency, farm management and working conditions. An important distinction from Fairtrade is that there is no artificial minimum price set for the product. As such, there is no artificial incentive introduced for more farmers to produce coffee, and therefore no distortion of production levels and prices. For these reasons, I’d be more comfortable buying Rainforest Alliance Certified coffee than Fairtrade Certified coffee. Rainforest Alliance certification is gaining momentum, with some big corporations, no doubt trying to improve their image, serving up or packaging up Rainforest Alliance Certified coffee. These include McDonald’s and Kraft.

Of course, there are other kinds of certification as well, including UTZ and various organic certifications. There’s also direct trade, whereby a coffee roaster or boutique coffee shop establishes a relationship directly with a coffee grower. This allows the buyer to select a grower who meets their own set of ethical criteria. Because the buyer knows first hand how the coffee is produced, there is no formal certification required. See the Cooperative Coffees site for a good explanation of the most common kinds of certifications.

kuranda-coffeeMeanwhile, back at the Kuranda Coffee Republic, Mike just serves cups of great coffee, which are each works of art and feats of engineering, with an ample helping of banter. His differentiation is that he sells only direct to people, spurning lucrative approaches by corporations. I guess you could call this extreme direct trade, so his coffee requires no further certification. It’s not about capitalism or not capitalism, he claims. It’s that he wants all of the beans he grows to be served with a “Hello, how’s it going” and a “Thanks for coming.” Sell to corporations, he argues, and you can’t be guaranteed that the shop assistant or barista will respect the beans and the experience. And here’s a tip: engage Mike in good conversation, say thanks for your coffee, and for your next cup he might just give you the discount he reserves for locals. Even at the standard price of $3 for a large cup, you’ll be hard pressed to find a better value coffee anywhere in Far North Queensland, or all of Queensland for that matter. Will I be going back to the Kuranda Coffee Republic next time I’m in Cairns? You bet.

Categories
My family and me

Parents go north

My parents chose an “interesting” time to move to Cairns. It was the weekend of January 10-11, and Far North Queensland had been absolutely drenched by the storm systems accompanying Cyclone Charlotte. Cairns was isolated due to flooding, and parts of Cairns itself were underwater. The city, along with many other councils across the Far North region, was declared a disaster area. They set out in their car on the morning of the 11th, and arrived at their new house in Clifton Beach a day later than they were expecting on the 14th. The delay was caused by the flooding of the Seymour River north of Ingham, partly due to the storms and partly due to the massive king tides at the time. Anyway, after spending the night in Ingham, and then waiting for another seven hours the next day in a long convoy of cars on the Bruce Highway for the waters to subside to a safe level, they were finally on their way again. In the end, their removal truck beat them to their house, because trucks were allowed to cross the river many hours before cars were given the go-ahead. Even then, cars were towed through the water three at a time by a tow truck: one on top, one underneath, and one dragged along behind. My parents scored the top deck of the truck, and they remained in the car for the haul across the river. Quite exciting, apparently. When they eventually reached their house, they were happy to find everything in one piece, and not so much as a branch out of place.

We’re going to get the chance to see their new house for ourselves when we visit them in the near future. It will be Xander’s first flight. If it’s anything like his first train trip, he’ll have a ball. Just hope we can avoid the Dengue fever epidemic when we get there.