GPS and Photography

I've been looking for a decent way to geo-locate my photos for a little while. A clip-on unit for my 400D would be perfect, although the firmware doesn't support such a thing (apparently Nikons do?)

The Sony CS1 GPS seems okay, but the performance looks a little poor (low power consumption, but older GPS tech). It also seems a bit naff, and frankly overpriced.

Today I checked back with the excellent guys at SparkFun and found this new GPS logger.
Nice stuff too. Battery life could be better at only 7.5 hours of full on logging, but it is a nice small unit with an excellent GPS chipset (SiRF III), built in charger, choose-your-own-storage and enough reconfigurability to stretch the battery life when you want to.

Iz wan dis too.

Beaten, well and truly, to the punch on the Neo1973

tonyg has not only bought a FIC Neo1973 but has ported smalltalk to it. Sigh. Well done (again).

Jason is apparently dead set on an iPhone, but I don't think I can rest until I have a phone running my own damn code. With an interface I like. And weird features just for me.

I shall just have to lust a little longer...

A new candidate for Estimating/Quoting/Billing

I encountered a new candidate to add to my previous list in my RSS travels today, and I'll admit to losing track of where, a link to 1place.

Wow. This looks like it could be a pretty good fit. NZ-based aka no I18n issues, GST-aware, decent pricing and fully customisable. Even loads up bank statements.

More news later after I've had time to investigate and go through a estimate, invoice, payment cycle to see how it hangs together.

Idea of the day: Graffiti

I like good graffiti. Watching Rome S1 the other day I was inspired to think about how to encourage good, relevant, hell even entertaining graffiti.

I got to thinking that supplying a visible forum for graffiti-ists might
both limit the amount of destructive tagging, which is complete shit that is only a hair's breadth above carving your initials, and encourage people to actually think about saying something relevant and topical.

So, my idea is this. A company with some $$ to spend on a high visibility social campagin buys a few billboard sites. They then set out an area in a town open space (with good lighting and perhaps some food) with a billboard sized canvas/board and some free paint. The sponsoring company could tack their logo on the bottom (later, ahem, rather than be subject to obliteration)

Let people go wild for a week. Or a weekend. It will take a while to work out what length of time is appropriate, and also for both people to notice and then calm down. Expect some excellent work to be overwritten with crap; respect has to be l/earnt.

At the end of a period, which may be determined by the artistic merits, haul the billboard up to a site. Leave it there for a week, then repeat ad infinitum.

An accompanying website log would of course be required, as would a charity auction for the best pieces. Even side-industries like these bags could spring up, although longevity could be limited.

Anway, it is probably better posted on the halfbakery as it isn't completely formed. Feel free to implement :-)

PS Also to come is a post on satirists and patronage.

NZ Broadband sufficient for videoconferencing already!

Michael Sampson's experience with video-conferencing to the East coast of the USA from NZ.

I'm not going to say it couldn't be better, but I think this kills the "can't do business properly with the current ADSL infrastructure in NZ" argument.

I'm still not sure what Rod wants, but I say:
1. If you want to host some content that is of global focus then don't host it in NZ. You're writing a blank cheque for your bandwidth otherwise, and giving a higher-latency experience to the rest of the world. By all means choose a decent NZ hosting company but they'll host it in other countries for you. I chose these guys.
2. If you want to host something for NZers then still consider hosting it somewhere else. See point 1. Ask yourself what you gain by hosting locally; the latency differences are not going to be noticable for the average Kiwi surfer.
3. If you want to build a business that requires vast amounts of data transfer, go into a major city centre. Don't complain you can't run it from your house in NZ; even in Sweden, Korea, or FTTH territory you would have business continuity concerns doing this.
4. Yes I know not everyone has ADSL. Not everyone has reticulated water or sewerage either. I've compared Internet access to reticulated gas before and I think the analogy still holds; if your business wants it then it can get it put in for a price. Don't expect everyone else to subsidise your business though. If you can't get gas/internet where you are then perhaps the business you want to build needs to relocate -- this is something every business faces.

I do want cheaper bandwidth rates for international traffic, but I also accept that we're quite a long way away from anywhere. Bytes are still cheaper that physical bits (pun intended) to transport, so we're still minimising that aspect of our geo-disadvantage by moving online.

Neo 1973

I'm still hot for this phone and devkit. I've just worked out where the name came from:

First Mobile Phone Call

So I'm younger (just) than the mobile phone. Kewl.

Ordering Hilarity

Companies sometimes make it so hard on themselves. For example, today I want to buy an Apple Mighty Mouse from apple.co.nz

I go to check out and see this:


"WAIT A MINUTE...$15 SHIPPING FOR A MOUSE?" I said to myself..." PLUS GST?"

But...but...don't I get free shipping for orders over $99? Well yes you do, but only if the ex-GST values is greater than $99. Odd for a retail shop, but those are the rules.

So here goes another attempt:


I was lucky enough to find quite a cheap item that rounds me out to just over the $99 threshold, saving me ~$13. Yay. Even better, they don't even physically ship the enabler, it is a download only product. And I'm not going to use it...

These things make me want to run screaming from the room sometimes.

If anyone needs a legit 802.11n enabling license for their just-off-the-bleeding edge Mac, let me know. Preferably someone in NZ. I'm sure I'd read somewhere that Apple was giving these away for free now anyway.

Iz Wants

Thanks to NZOSS for the info. The Neo 1973 can now be ordered. Can haz dev kit?

I want one to play with, Quad band GSM, AGPS, Bluetooth 2.0, colour touchscreen.

Mmmmm. Much better than playing in the constricted java-land. I want a phone I can truly hack on.

I'm sure the battery life will be complete shite (this is a developer release, and first gen) but it'd be worth it. What a difference to the iPhone in philosophy, yet quite similar in overall appearance. We'd best be careful of those Apple gesture patents...

EDIT: No Wifi on Version 1. GTA02 adds this and more, including 3d accelerometers (WiiPhone!)
See Side by Side comparison of GTA01 and GTA02

IEEE article with the details of the Greece GSM compromise

Wow. It is nice to see more of the background into the recently-publicised compromisation of an entire network in Greece, courtesy of the IEEE.

I've only seen the details provided by The Register before, so this will be good to digest.

Also thanks to Bruce Schneier -> Matt Blaze -> Security PR Bingo, I might try that one at work.

Online accounts, estimates and invoices. A NZ-based review as at August 2007

Okay, this one is a long one and has taken me a while to write. I'm happy to correct this and/or revisit this at a later date based on feedback; but these are my views of the various sites (I know I'm criticising people's babies).

I have been looking for a nice, self-contained, at-least-invoicing setup for Latam Design (free plug for my wife). I can't face MYOB or QuickBooks or anything of that genre. Every time I look at (non-SaaS) accounting software I cry internally "I could do better than that with my eyes closed, lets code one up in Erlang/Yaws and take-over the world". The reality is that:
a) I'd get dead-bored before I finished a proto-DB schema, let alone the core or the interface.
b) It is pretty nasty hard-core work that requires more than my cobweb-laden understanding of accounting.
c) It is boring. Oh I mentioned that. I like real-time millions-of-customers "you're down and you're dead" systems.
d) I don't need to be supporting this kind of stuff in my spare time.

So off I go, inspired by Rod's Xero Marketing (heh) to see what's on offer. While I was on holiday in Peru I discovered Cashboard. If you haven't tried any of these, I'd suggest you register for at least a couple to get the idea of what you can do.

Cashboard

Cashboard is pretty funky. All Web2.0'n'everything. It does estimates, invoicing and timetracking, and it can accept payments as well* . The MacOSX (grrr, StuDlyCaPs) widget for logging time is a nice touch, esp. given that side only uses Macs.

It didn't initially do NZD, which was a problem, but the owner added that pretty much instantaneously for me and gave me a double-your-grace period coupon. Great response, but it was the tip of the i18n iceberg...

You can create estimates very easily, although if you want to base them on effort but not disclose your hourly rate it becomes more tricky. If you have a paid account you can customise the format of estimates/invoices and send them as PDFs or links to the site. Nice. You can then turn the estimates into invoices, adjusted as appropriate, and auto-email the client (if you want).

It all works swimmingly from my two brief attempts. Adding new clients while in the invoicing process works just as you'd hope -- you can add them in situ without breaking your workflow.

Cashboard give you a .cashboardapp.com domain when you create your account. A nice touch and great for your customers should you provide them access.

The real problems come around the i18n side.

• US date formats everywhere, and I can't see myself sending invoices to clients (or showing them to the IRD) when 1/6/2007 means January not June. Confusion is not something I want to cause when I'm asking people for money.
  
• NZD is supported, although it helpfully says NZD everywhere. I just know someone is going to look unkindly on that...
  
• The only way to get my GST number onto an invoice is via the "notes" feature. This is the recommended way of doing it...
• I need TAX INVOICE on my Tax Invoices. This also has to go into the notes field.
• At the time it didn't do Timezones. It does now, which is helpful since auto-emailing clients with yesterday's dates wasn't appealling.
  

I know that Cashboard is developing quickly and has taken my/NZ i18n requirements on board, but the frustrating thing is that it is not usable for New Zealand until they get around to implementing most of them. I was quite prepared to pay for it, their rates are extremely good for what you get, and the ability to up/downgrade based on your success is fantastic.

* at least for USA'ns. The cascading requirement is that you must be able to accept CC's via a CC processor, which means you need a US bank account, which means a US address. This all ends up meaning "no, non-Americans can't". It just takes longer to work this out.

Xero

I would be remiss if I didn't mention Xero. I might disagree with Rod about what is holding back NZ from being the next Finland/Ireland/China^D^D^D^DHong Kong but I can't fault their product even at this early stage.

Xero aim to provide a complete MYOB/QuickBooks replacement. They're certainly well on their way to providing this although there are some rough edges. I was, for example, surprised to see that we tagged their emails to clients -- free advertising for them but it shrieks of Hotmail. To their credit they are looking at fixing this. The accounting side seems to be a little rough too, sure everything can be done by posting amounts around manually but remind me why we have computers again?

Xero have just reframed their pricing slightly but is still both expensive for small businesses at $50 a month ($600+GST a year for the math challenged), and probably too cheap for larger businesses as the same $50 a month. I'm struggling with the rationale behind this plan; either they don't want the micro-businesses (why not?) or they figure they have something compelling enough for these enterprises to spend more than they do today on accounting software/services.

The integration with local accountants is a clever strategy. The system is admittedly great for accountants that know it (and who will presumably recommend it because of this) as they can easily see the current state of their clients' businesses without leaving their desk. Less boring work for everyone is always good.

If Xero was cheaper then I'd take it by default as it is launching with the NZ-focus and NZ-bank integration. Yes I only care about i18n when it impacts me. Colour me selfish.

Freshbooks

Freshbooks looks like a direct competitor to Cashboard. I only recently discovered it (last week) but it has excellent i18n support and has been around a while . I feel these two things are related...

Freshbooks provides much the same estimating, invoicing and time-tracking capability as Cashboard. It can accept payments, using a wide variety of payment processors, but as far as I can see I'm limited to using Paypal as that's the only one I can get a non-US account from. I'm not asking my customers to use Paypal...

Freshbooks also give you a custom (.freshbooks.com) domain when you create your account. A nice touch and great for your customers should you provide them access, and Freshbooks also allow you to logo-ise this interface. Nice touch.

Freshbooks have an innovative option to send physical mail using an external provider. The cost and delivery time of this option for a non-North American business would appear to make this of little utility. Significantly they do not offer PDF, although you can format for printing (locally) or have them email your customers with an access link so they can see/ad

I really liked that your customers can comment on estimates and dispute invoices sent to them. I'm not so sure I like the focus on doing this all on-line, a number of our customers really need paper copies and I'd rather send them one and have it processed than have our automatic email lost/forgotten and not be paid since "we hadn't send an invoice".

Freshbooks does have a "free" option, eriely similar when compared to the equivalent Cashboard free plan but it appears to ramp up to become significantly more expensive at the high end.

Saasu

The Australians have arrived. It really looks like a traditional accounting package with a web interface. These guys have apparently been doing SaaS since before there was an acronym for what they were doing (1999!). Stability in your provider can only be a good thing...

Saasu NetAccounts is a fully featured accounting package, as a SaaS offering. They also have, listed separately but somehow part of the same system, NetInvoiceIt which is the invoicing only part. This seems to be placed as a bit of a teaser to compete with the other invoicing-only solutions above and also as an easy entry to the whole-of-business system they have.

Non-Australians are allowed to use this now although we are warned that NZ is only in Beta. While the NZ currency and stuff are there there are still an awful lot of country specific (and I mean Australian-specific) things in there too. At least they use G.S.T., but there are many exceptions and rates in Australia and these are reflected in the interface.

Two NZ banks are supported. The rest may be addable, I'll admit to not trying their BSB, but certainly were not in the dropdown lists. Still, two NZ banks are supported. This is far more encouraging than 0. No I'm not going to type Zero, or Xero.

I'm still trying to work out the pricing scheme. It's free unless you want to use it too much, although "too much" has some sort of point system based on the number of things you're doing. 5 invoices with payments, or 10 invoices by itself per month max based on my reading.

The sorta-flat-rate plan is A$228. It's not clear to me if it is a one-off payment or yearly (either way still cheaper than Xero). Ah, I see now (in the browser title); it is annual. Still, fairly good given the broad coverage. It would appear to my non-accountant eyes that this is a complete replacement for MYOB, but it is almost as ugly in places. Not much Web2.0 going on here.

Conclusion

None of these fit the bill at the moment. I was dead keen on Cashboard, and we may return to that if they can just redo all the date handing. They've only been live for 4 months so I'm being understanding.

In the meantime we're evolving our requirements for Latam Design. I think that the more we see of Xero and Saasu, the more we realise that perhaps we do need a little more than Estimates and Invoicing.

It is becoming clear to me that once you start using one SaaS provider then you may not be stuck (you can typically extract your data) but you, your users, and your customers will be slightly shaken if you have to start telling them to use the old system for the old invoices and the new one for new invoices. The retraining alone means that choosing a SaaS provider once is easy but changing mid-stream is much more complicated. The more you push the system out beyond the typical boundaries (e.g. to your accountant, to your customers) the more locked-in you get.

Comments and feedback are welcome, as of course are corrections and constructive debate :-)

Hiring things...

I guess this is old news, but HireThings is pretty cool. I'm not sure that I want to do it, as every time I do a pick-up for an online auction purchase (furniture etc) I kinda feel odd trudging around peoples houses, and I've given up letting people pick up from me. They're all lovely people (esp. the last French couple) but while I'm outgoing I'm not that freaking keen on meeting J. Random person even if they have/want the same goods as I do.

Anyway, back on topic. I was hunting for a decent, cheap, monitor colour calibration device. The bees-knees ones appear to be the i1/eyeOne/ from xRite (formerly GretagMacbeth?). Suffice it to say that none of them appear to have been on the local second-hand market in recent times, much like cheap Eizo LCD monitors...

But... this appeared which is pretty cool. $35 a day to hire one, and they're not something you use very often. And the same guy seems to have some nice Canon lenses to rent (oops, "hire") as well, including the funky slidey Canon professional one. I'm still not sure what this lens does, I need a physics lesson and a diagram. Probably why I'm not qualified to hire it :-)

Anyway, it is nice to know that HireThings exists, although much like the rental tools at Bunnings I'm not sure how much I'll use it.

PlanHQ event

I'm thinking about going to this event; it looks like a good opportunity to see how they're making a go of it and attracting the all important (and elusive) international customers. Maybe they should just make it a facebook app? :-)

Anyway, I have RSVP'd so I shall arrange my life so I can turn up.

In other news, Dell dropped their 24" monitor to NZ$1099 without fanfare so I've picked up one. It better not drop in price next week...

TTFN.

Weird popularity of niche sites

I was scanning my server logs the other day and I noticed that I had heaps of requests for one page. Thousands a day, which is far more popular than anything else. I thought it was something dodgy for a while as I've had click-fraud people using a misconfigured Apache to Yaws proxy to do things before. Little rascals.

It turns out a little calculator I built to help explain and clarify a problem for work (CDMA ESN to MEID transition) has become quite popular and has a few users who use it daily. It isn't really that popular in a google page-rank sense, but enough links are there for it to have a steadily increasing readership.

The result of this discovery encouraged me to splatter a few google ads over the page, it now earns about 1 USD a day. I only need to replicate this success 100,000 times and I'll be in the 4-hour week bracket :-) To think I've sabotaged that by giving away the source! (FOSS people, I'm baiting you)

Edit: updated site link

Dell NZ and inconsistent promotions

It has been said that you should never buy anything from Dell at full price, although I can't find the quote. Maybe Dan's Data. In that way I think it is a bit like Briscoes or any other constantly-marketed company, the specials are part of their model and not an old-fashioned response to oversupply or market conditions. It surely is tiresome though.

I currently want one of these monitors which are just released but have been on special(!) in Australia for some time. NZ != Australia and all that, but jeepers, they're even telling us this week that it is on special in NZ...at A$999. Sigh. Obviously a stuff-up (fixed now too, well done) but still frustrating.

So I shall wait another week, hoping the NZ$ doesn't drop too much, and see if the 2407WFP-HC comes onto a proper special. The reviews indicate it is a nice monitor and it even has a card reader and multiple video inputs. Which will be nice for the DVD player.

Right, here we go again...

Livejournal didn't inspire me, and I've moved my own domain to point here. Hurrah. Let's see if I can get some momentum going this time. I'm just recovering from a nasty throat thing, the only good thing is that it's given me a day or two to think about things and get motivated to restart blogging.

I'm currently labouring on w8trk during my spare time, and I also have the somewhat fantastic title of Deputy CTO for my day job. Hurrah, what a title to live up to, I am still working out what it means but it is certainly an exciting opportunity.

As starts to windup, deploying a new GSM and UMTS network for New Zealand, it looks like it might crimp my time for other things.

Anyway, there are other things to cook for the moment. I am long overdue getting back to Jim Donovan for a drink date after winning his first competition, he must think me awfully impolite, I've got a pending order for a Japanese koan calligraphy scroll from YuYu that I must complete, and in general a lot of things to do around the house.

I've been quite inspired since my wee holiday in Peru, there is a lot of local personalities (beyond Juha(1,2), Maurico, Taniwha, Rod, and DPF) that I'd not noticed before, and thanks to Planet NZ (guys, fix your TZ issues though, and get some of the non-tech stuff out of there).

Right, the next post might actually have a theme beyond random linkage and stuff I've gotta do.