Mark Harris lead this session. Was at SSC, MORST, now Independent. When Wikileaks in May released ACTA doc, saw NZ mentioned, began digging.

ACTA is the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. Proposed by Japan and USA, but not limited to them at all. About eight countries, mainly G8 and a few others like us and Morocco. Mainly about IP. Calling it “counterfeit” gets it under the radar.

Also very much about the Internet. While it did talk about physical products, morphed over last four years and now about more. Don’t really know what it is about: unnerving level of secrecy. Can’t find anything official about what it is, other than US trade representatives office official line “it’s about enforcement”, a universal framework of enforcement procedures around the world. All have signed non-disclosure agreements.

I’ll be in Wellington on Saturday, September 20th, for Software Freedom Day. It’s open source’s open day, a chance for the general public who might have been curious about open source to come along and learn more. There’ll be copies of Linux given out and a WellyLUG installfest to provide any help people need installing Linux on their own machines, a SuperHappyDevHouse hack day, and a Bar Camp (which I’m emceeing). It’s going to be a heap of fun, and a chance to make a positive difference to software in this country. If you’ll be in Wellington on Saturday, swing by for the 12pm kickoff and join the fun!

Jenny Morel is raising a $100M NZ VC fund. That’s good news, in that NZ needs smart angels and VCs. I’ve had a number of NZ friends making the rounds of US venture capital firms and angels looking for investors, and the message has always been “not while you’re in NZ”. Of course, it’s rarely stated quite so bluntly (VCs never want to close the door!), but it’s always quite clear that it’s much harder to invest in something that’s on the other side of the world than something you can drop in on regularly.

I see in Rod Drury’s blog that National have released their first real economic policy and it’s to do with funding fibre-to-the-home in NZ. It’s good! Anyone who travels knows how dire the bandwidth situation is here, and it’s worse on the ground.

For me, bandwidth = productivity. I don’t buy Rod Drury’s productivity maths; productivity is the increase in value added by a process, e.g. for manufacturing the value of outputs over the cost of inputs, labour, and land. I could add more value (earn more) if I have faster Internet access to the rest of the world. I’d be able to read more, write more, and create more billable outputs if I wasn’t constantly waiting for web pages to load or Ajax apps to update.

A client made the decision to use Telecom as their web site host. I argued against it because the price differential was so great between Telecom and, well, anyone else. The client’s management decided to go with solid blue chip Telecom. The service we’ve had from them has been such unmitigated shit that I’m astonished Telecom is still in business.

You’d think the premium would get you better customer service or at least efficiency, but it doesn’t. I’ve been on hold for, let’s see, 18 minutes so far (listening to “come together … right now … over me” every 3 minutes) with nary a human in sight. If your choice is between Mad Ken’s Shonky Web Hosting and Telecom’s business packages, turn to Mad Ken every day–you’ll get the same shitty service but at least you won’t be paying through the nose for it.

I took a trip to ETech earlier this month. I initially attempted to book the trip using Travelocity but it turned into a massive clusterfuck of their making. I’ve documented it below in case you, my lovely reader, need any reason to avoid this dribbling shit trickle of a company running down the thighs of modern travel. If you hate people whining about (incredibly incredibly bad) customer service, skip this message now. You have been warned ….

Congrats to Sue Tyler and the Ponoko team, and all the others who were interviewed by Peter Griffin for the Idealog issue focusing on craft. The article (which will be online in a few weeks) has photos of various Ponoko-made goods, including a necklace of sheep which looked awfully familiar—Sue had given us one for our daughter when we were in town for Webstock! I hadn’t realized at the time that it came hot off the presses from the Ponoko team. Good on yez!

There’s a lot of talk about this Fortune article around Microsoft, Linux, and the 235 patents that Microsoft claim Linux infringes upon. Here’s my redux:

Microsoft is extorting patent payments from users of open source software, beginning with the customers who also use Microsoft software.

Microsoft has not identified the patents, neither to the customers nor to the makers of open source software.

Without a list of the patents and where Microsoft thinks they’re being infringed, the claims can’t be verified and so remain unproven baseless allegations.

I just got back from a week in the US for Foo Camp, where I had a great time shopping two ideas around:

• New Zealand can be a hub of innovation, and
• Kids aren’t being turned onto science and technology as careers

Re: the first idea, this interesting CNet news article talks about how the 1980s and 1990s saw Indian and Chinese technologists imported into Silicon Valley to fuel the great tech booms then. Now those technologists are returning home to create startups and build the local version of Silicon Valley. Ben Nolan and John Clegg from ProjectX are examples of this in New Zealand.

NZ Herald reports the government wants at least 47,000 skilled immigrants and will recognize skills in applicants from India and China for the first time. I love that the desired professions include “IT professionals, plumbers, and engineers.”