Congrats NZ You Got Screwed

This graphs says everything:

Real electricity prices NZ compared to World

Taken from: New Zealand’s failing experiment in electricity reform by Geoff Bertram

Get the PDF here: Chapter 21 Bertram – Electricity Fail

Credit: http://www.geoffbertram.com/

Black Sabbath Pics

From the Auckland show at Vector. April 2013.

I hate Windows 8

Wow. No Start Button.

OMG I had the displeasure of using a brand new laptop with Windows 8 recently. It was not too pleasant to discover the Start menu was missing, and pressing the Windows key brings up a crazy fullscreen menu with a horizontal scrollbar. It actually reminded me of Windows 3.1 and File Manager – because you would get this really plain empty screen every now and then. It seems that The Ribbon is also making more of an appearance, which makes me want to puke.

An Analysis of Google Search Volume

In the graph above you can see correlated rises in user search volume in January 2013 for “how to shutdown”, “hate windows 8″ and “windows 8 downgrade”. I think I can also see a little bump back in 2012 someplace. This shows users around the world are finding it hard to figure out how to shut their machines down and getting on Google. I actually did this myself the very first time I used the machine. Let’s say it again – I myself went on Google to search on how to do a restart. Turns out you hover bottom right corner, choose Settings… and then Shutdown. Why shutting a computer down could be a setting is anybodies guess.

Number of pages with “i hate windows 8″ somewhere in them…

25 March 2013 – I can see 313,000 webpages with the exact phrase ”i hate windows 8″. Lets see how this number increased over time.

1 May 2013 - 342,000 pages an increase of 29,000 pages in about a month.

Number of pages with “i hate windows 8″ in the title…

26 March 2013 – 7,080 pages with this exact phrase in the title.

1 May 2013 - 8,140 an increase of 1,060 and with the publication of this very blog post – yet another page on the web about this.

So my question to Microsoft is this: please put the Start Button back! You can do this with a service pack and give people the choice to use the whacky new aero thing.

The Ribbon – Yuck to the max

This has got to be one of the worst UI designs ever. Surely this has been scientifically proven now? It takes up too much space.

I really prefer pull-down menus to the ribbon. Saves screen space. I’m sure people love clicking on it with the mouse – but to be a fast computer user you need to try as much as possible not to use the mouse for repeated things like copy paste. Look at how big those copy paste buttons are! So with the removal of those little underlines that you used to see that would help you figure out the keyboard shortcut are gone. You have to press and release the alt key to bring up the hints and read from those – arguably not that much different from the old way of pressing Alt-F to see the File menu, but still a wee but slower, and I’m not sure if the cursor keys work.

Aparently they also removed suport for playing DVD movies in MediaPlayer! Couldn’t afford the license fees. You can install other software apparently  but man that is odd.

Did they remove Remote Desktop server?

It seems like MS removed the RDP server. Compare the two windows one from 7 the other from 8:

Further Reading

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04/10/pc_market_win8_bloodbath/

Make Your Own Shutdown / Restart buttons:

Fluoride in Auckland’s Water

I asked the city council about quantity and quality of fluoride in our water. Here is their reply…

Flouridated Water

Fluoride is often added to drinking-water for oral health reasons, prevention of teeth decay. The Ministry of Health recommends fluoride concentration between 0.7-1.0 mg/L as the optimal concentration for that purpose. The maximum acceptable level of fluoride in drinking water is 1.5 mg/L. The addition of fluoride is done at the request of our consumers.
Any change to this position would be directed to Watercare though the Auckland Council.

Treatment chemicals

Fluoride is added to the treated water at the water treatment plants. There are couple of options available for drinking water fluoridation: Hydrofluosilicic acid, Silicofluorides, Sodium Fluorosilicate and Sodium fluoride.

To guarantee the use of the treatment chemicals in their purest form the water treatment companies use reputable suppliers. These suppliers have quality control measures in place to ensure that the supplied chemicals are free of any potential contaminants.
Dose concentration

When fluoride is deliberately added to water, dose control is important to maintain the concentration within the specified allowable limit. The control measures at the treatment plants are:

•     Fluoride is delivered at the dose concentration so there is no risk of dosing a more concentrated solution;
•     Fluoride dosing is flow proportional, its concentration is always in correlation to the volume of water being treated;
•     Treatment plants utilise continuous on-line monitoring for fluoride concentration in the treated water;
•     Alarms are triggered if the fluoride concentration has reached the set level.

 

Source: Correspondence Agent

www.watercare.co.nz

Using their intranet URL http://wsldctmos1:8080/sites/KnowledgeBase/resources/Pages/ProcessDetail.aspx

List of placenames in New Zealand for SEO

Sometimes during my work as an online marketer I need a list of NZ placenames. Usually this is so I can scan the clients analytics account to see how much activity there is – or how much traffic they are receiving – around search traffic that contains a placename. Trouble is it is quite tricky as there can be many placenames, and it requires a strong regular expression to search the account.

List of Main Cities in New Zealand

Regex:

Auckland|Birkenhead|Christchurch|Dunedin|East Coast Bays|Gisborne|Hamilton|Hastings|Invercargill|Lower Hutt|Manukau|Mt Albert|Napier|Nelson|New Plymouth|North Island|Palmerston North|Papakura|Papatoetoe|Porirua|Rotorua|South Island|Takapuna|Tamaki|Tauranga|Timaru|Upper Hutt|Waitemata|Wanganui|Wellington|Whanganui|Whangarei

Full List of All Placenames in New Zealand

 Regex:

US Healthcare Compared To Other Countries

Hmmm perhaps the “free market economy” approach to health care not such a great idea? Didn’t seem to work so well for USA…

health spend per capita by life expectancy

Kim Dotcom is a hero

He is hero because he has the balls (and money) to take the pesky out of control NZ government to court and challenge their unlawful / unethical extradition attempt to the US for nothing more than providing an internet service for the transfer of files – a victimless info crime even if found guilty, which might not happen. Under this same treaty* even a doctor could probably be extradited for providing an abortion! So why aren’t we extraditing all the doctors off to face trial in the US for providing abortion in NZ? Why is that word even mentioned in article 2.6 of the treaty? I’m not to call a conspiracy but that’s a fucking conspiracy right there and our government should stop it! It also looks like prostitution is also extraditable – yet is legal in this country.

It might sound sound like an overstatement to say it’s a conspiracy between the NZ and US governments, and I hate conspiracy theories – I prefer scientific explanations! Some evidence: John Key gave Warner Brothers a $34M tax break concession for The Hobbitt film. OK it will be great for our economy is the strong counter argument and I agree, but you should agree it’s true that we are trying to play nice with Hollywood in both the Kim Dotcom and The Hobbit cases. Hollywood is the major driver of old (DMCA) and new (SOPA) legislation to protect it’s copyrights on the net. In the meantime our privacy is being eroded. Funny how Megaupload is supposed to be protected under the safe harbour provisions of the DMCA.

More evidence: Look at the way our security forces bent over backwards to help the CIA raid Kim Dotcoms mansion, breaking a whole bunch of rules around not using international spy network on our own citizens and residents, through to the way they assaulted him when the arrest him with cops putting handcuffs on him and so forth. This must be a pretty terrifying experience for the guy who thought he had the best legal advice and was doing it by the books. The cops even mistakenly deleted his security camera systems footage that they illegally removed which wasn’t part of the search warrant! This might be able to prove if the cops assaulted Kim during the arrest.

Rumour has it US federal investigators claimed somehow gain access to the five years worth of online conversations between Dotcom and his colleagues but Skype doesn’t maintain records for more than 30 days so the government must have used spyware to get at it.

What’s worse – abortion or illegal file copying a victimless crime?

This question is a trick question by the way, most people should think abortion is worse because it sounds like an ethical /moral question. I’m pro-abortion and I don’t think our doctors should be extradited for abortion… but it’s “worse” morality wise why extradite a someone for such a small crime of unproven copyright violation: remember at this time (25 November 2012) the US has still not provided any evidence of copyright violation says Business Insider (6 July).

Copyright violation is a victimless crime similar to J walking, not wearing a seatbelt, certain types of sex acts in the USA, and smoking a naturally dried flower. Another point for the conspiracy theory that our government and weird connections with Hollywood: many other file transfer services (ISPs) also exist like RapidShare, StreamFile, RapidSend, MediaFire etc but these appear to have been left untouched.

In fact you could also consider in breach YouTube and Google for serving results to copyright protected content: Both MegaUpload, YouTube, and Google all have file take-down services, Google even allows you to see all the take-downs done on their transparency report website. I heard reports in the media that Megaupload would limit takedowns to 5,000 per day for some reason or another, which does sound a bit dodgy if they are an honest company that should have honored the takedown requests as fast as possible like Google/YouTube do when they get a complaint from a media company about copyright violations.

Remember this assumes that the ISP in question trusts the what the copyright owner says is true.

As an ISP how exactly are you supposed to police the content in the wires? Doesn’t doing deep packet inspection kinda compromise the privacy of the people sending the files through the ISP? Perhaps an ISP would not be able to see the traffic due to encryption then how could inspect the traffic to check what the copyright owners say is their property in the takedown notices?

Assuming you can see the traffic and check the files are the same (using file comparison tool) as what Warner Brother or whomever the fuck else says that are – remember you gotta trust what they say and let them delete any file at will – you just gave automated file delete capability to a media company! That’s kinda a lot of power. If Sony, Warner, . Just for the record, cos this subject kinda pisses me off, here is who controls the music business:

Universal Music Group (USA based) — 31.71%
Sony Music Entertainment (USA based) — 25.61%
Independent labels — 18.13%
Warner Music Group (USA based) — 15%
EMI Group (UK based) — 9.55%
Source: Nielsen SoundScan US music market 2005

Also… what’s with this extradition treaty extradition anyhow? It’s a bit of a worry (understatement! It seems NZ wants to become USA’s biarch), as I see a doctor in NZ could be extradited for performing an abortion: Yes that’s right folks! If you don’t believe download the actual treaty below.

* ExtraditionUSNZ (Funk Blog Mirror copy)

And to prove it’s real the mirror above was downloaded from: http://newzealand.usembassy.gov/uploads/images/o16y8MOyHW2l-jJTxaMpeQ/ExtraditionUSNZ.pdf

Other strange victimless crimes in this treaty:

• Sodomy
• Using a prostitute
• Bigamy
• Narcotics importation, exportation, supply, or possession

And now a stolen image from The Hobbit website to see if they come chasing with cease and desist orders:

The Hobbit

Blue Duck Station Stray Staff Trip

Blue Duck Station is such a wicked place. Just spent two nights down there with the Stray and Spaceships team and my awesome girlfriend Monique.

The view from top of the waterfall:

More videos are at the bottom!

Bottom of the waterfall:

Waterfall Kayak:

Kayaking:

Horse Riding:

Quad Ride:

Sheep Dip:

Serve files to guests phones at your event via Wi-Fi

The problem: you want to give a free MP3 audio file to your guests at your event and would like something more scalable, faster, cheaper and easier than giving out CDs and/or loading USB sticks manually, and would prefer the file to end on their smartphone anyhow where they can listen on headphones quickly.

Proposed solution: Serve the files via locally hosted laptop web server on a private wireless network (WLAN). Users download to their iPhone/Android/laptop from the free wireless network. No internet connection is needed and download is full speed.

Users see’s the following QR Code for http://freetune.funk.co.nz/ to scan:

Visit http://freetune.funk.co.nz/ on your phone for MP3 Download

Plan:

• Laptop (in our case a Mac) running:
• Locally modified hosts file with entry for freetune.funk.co.nz pointing to localhost (say 10.0.0.100)
• Apache setup to serve the file with a local website running on the laptop
• Sharing it’s non-existent “internet” via DHCP over the ethernet port
• Wi-Fi router (I’ll use a WRT54GL linux router) set to:
• Open network no password (or publish password inside event)
• Laptop is connected to as the upstream WLAN ethernet port and is default gateway
• Clients phones and laptops connect to this router
• Hopefully the router can handle ~200 clients connecting to it through the evening
• Business card printouts containing a QR Code for http://freetune.funk.co.nz/
• Instructions for users of iOS and Android to scan the code or visit http://freetune.funk.co.nz/
• Backup real DNS entry
• on live internet for your private LAN IP (say 10.0.0.100 or 192.168.1.1)
• Captive Portal idea:
• Ideally an extra tweak to DNS make every lookup for any domain go to this IP address
• Apache setup to redirect all requests to the private IP

Laptop web-server will be plugged into the "Internet" port, left side

Get rid of live.com load-balanced domains with a regular expression: GA Webmail Referral Traffic Source Rollup Filter

The problem? Nasty load balanced domains in Google Analytics reports like this:

The solution? Clean nicely segmented source lines that “roll up” into one:

To clean these up requires two filters:

• Webmail Source Rollup (search and replace with Webmail (brand])
• Webmail Medium Rollup (swap / referral with / email as medium for further rolling up!)

Both these filters will use the core regex code I’ve figured out that consolidates 99% of the worlds webmail systems without pulling in any false positives in theory.

The Magic Regex Code

Here is the filter regex that I’ve been currently using in my production Google analytics advanced filters since 15 Feb 2012 to cleanup these – or to roll up the load-balanced domains that you often get in referrals:

My starting point:

(messag|courrier|zimbra|imp|mail)(.*)\.(.*)\..{2,4}

This grabs any domain with say “mail” in it, but runs a check on the ending of the domain: it needs to have at least 2 dots after it and a TLD between 2 and 4 chars long. It will miss go.mail.ru and mail.com. It will also miss “Mail Campaign \ email” because this is not a proper domain. So far so good

My improvement with exceptions (This is the one to use!):

(messag|courrier|zimbra|^imp|mail).*\.(.*\..{2,4}|go\.mail\.ru|promail\.co\.nz|service\.mail\.com|3c\.web\.de|outlook\.com)

Domain of webmail platform is in capture group $A2.

My improved regex has a new exception section at the end to allow some special cases (go.mail.ru, 3c.web.de, service.mail.com) to get through the filter using a hard-coded approach that skips the safety net and autonomy provided by the wide open keyword matching paired with a domain name restriction ensuring “two more dots and a TLD”.

Maybe that is excessive use of regex, but at least you can be sure you can now see your word of mouth / word of email traffic nice and tidy!

How does it work?

I’ll break the formula down in sections:

(messag|courrier|zimbra|^imp|mail)

This looks for the really obvious and common keywords in webmail services, the main one being mail. This will match sn124w.snt124.mail.live.com but it will also grab emailchimp.com and a huge number of others that you really don’t want to catch with this filter. If we were looking for live (but we aren’t in this case), then a site like www.answeringoLIVEr.com would get picked up in the crossfire. I use a ^ in front of imp so that domains like dimpost.wordpress.com don’t get caught.

Basically the first part of the domain name (sn124w.snt124.mail) will be getting deleted by this filter so you could stand to lose quite a lot of data with the “mail” and “imp” keywords if this were the only parts of the expression! So the next bit of filter is designed to pass the domain through another difficult test involving the dots and TLDs…

(.*)\.(.*)\..{2,4}

This makes sure that the domain bits after mail or zimbra or whatever always have two dots and a TLD (top level domain extension eg .nz .jp). Which matches the end bit of sn124w.snt124.mail.live.com and  the end of: www.funk.co.nz.

The (.*) part means match anything including nothing, and the \. means there must be a dot, so (.*)\.(.*)\. means there gotta be at least two more dots in this domain name coming up after the live”. Which is how Answering Oliver gets through the test for live. The next part .{2,4} is all about the top level domain or TLD. These can be 2, 3, or 4 letters long like .co, .com. and .mobi. The curly braces specify how many times the previous character . (which means single char you like except nothing) can appear like {min,max}.

Then in the middle is a pipe | which cuts the regex open and allows some really hard to match exceptions through for smaller webmail systems. Only reason you see the web.de one also appear on the left of the central | is because this is such a whacky domain name that it doesn’t match the “mail” which gets most of the webmail systems on the planet. Germans aye?

* (Hi Devon! Thanks for sending traffic to Stray Travel I found you researching this post)

Screenshots

Campaign Source Filter

Advanced filter.

Field A -> Extract A: Campaign Source:

(messag|courrier|zimbra|^imp|mail).*\.(.*\..{2,4}|go\.mail\.ru|promail\.co\.nz|service\.mail\.com|3c\.web\.de|outlook\.com)

Field B -> Extract B: [leave both blank]

Output To -> Constructor: Campaign Source: Webmail ($A2.$A3)

GA Webmail Rollup Filter

Medium Rollup Filter

Advanced filter.

Field A -> Extract A: Campaign Source:

(messag|courrier|zimbra|^imp|mail).*\.(.*\..{2,4}|go\.mail\.ru|promail\.co\.nz|service\.mail\.com|3c\.web\.de|outlook\.com)

Field B -> Extract B: [leave both blank]

Output To -> Constructor: Campaign Medium: email

GA Webmail Rollup Filter

Additional reference domains to check:

The domains below are the really rare webmail clients that are hard to extract:

mail175-236.sinamail.sina.com.cn
go.mail.ru
service.mail.com
promail.co.nz
3d.web.de
ch1prd0310.outlook.com

This is why I needed to grab the full domain with (.*\..{2,4}) versus the first versions (.*)\.(.*)\..{2,4} which would have only grabbed “sinamail”. Now we get  sinamail.sina.com.cn.

These can be checked with: sina\.com\.cn|go\.mail\.ru|mail\.com|promail\.co\.nz|web\.de|outlook\.com

References

Thanks to Olivier Resoneo for the original inspiration (French). His code was:

Grouper tous les webmail francophones sous le nom de domaine principal

Custom filter

Advanced

Champ A : Campaign Source : (messag|courrie|zimbra|ima?p|mail|prd[0-9]+)(.*)\.(.*)\..{2,4}

Champ B : (rien) -

Output To -> Constructor : Campaign Source : Webmail – $A3

Yes

No

Yes

No

On peut aussi décliner pour forcer le medium à ‘email’ quand match sur Campaign Source, ET Campaign à email-non-taggue par exemple, pour avoir le triplet medium/source/campagne