I'm an Australian, based in the Washington, DC, area of the United States. I spend a lot of time there with Jasmine, Australia's best-known speedsolver of the Rubik's Cube. Prior to the US, Jasmine and I were based in London, UK. We have also lived previously in the United States and Australia.
I have worked for an Australian business rules and compliance company since 1999 in Australia, the US and the UK. I have also lectured in IT and Law related topics at King's College, London, and at The Australian National University.
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- February 2007
- January 2007
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These are a few of my favourite links:
- Jasmine's site
- Jasmine's blog
- Mikal
- Daveydweeb
- Beth
- Lyn
- Doug
- Marissa
- Lisaloha
- David (Greenomics)
- Paul's Ramblings (music)
Hits since 1 Sep 2004
501267
Site design by Jasmine
Mon, 02 Apr 2007 [Australian eastern time]
Michael has reminded me why I disabled comments on this site
My brother, who (like me) uses Blosxom for his website, has reminded me why I gave up on comments on this website. Michael writes:
664 real comments on this site, 18361 I manually said no to, 32111 were blocked based on originating IP, and 5007 contained a bad word. Andrew currently donates 506 mb of disk to hosting just comments.
My experience with comment spam was similar -- and it took more time than it was worth to try to block the spammers. Even now, when I look at my website log, there's a huge amount of traffic from spammers trying to use long-disabled comment links.
Technorati tags for this post: Cyberspace comment+spam
Sun, 01 Apr 2007 [Australian eastern time]
Wikipedia, Citizendium and reality
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia anyone can edit. Citizendium takes the Wikipedia idea, but adds expert oversight in an attempt to become more accountable.
The Go-Go Blog comments (probably fairly) that:
I hope ... that the emergence of Citizendium inspires Wikipedia to take steps towards better highlighting content contributions from verified experts.
Stephen Colbert claims that the Wikipedia model is great because it brings democracy to knowledge: you can make anything true by putting it in Wikipedia and getting people to agree. See the havoc that his call to arms caused!
Technorati tags for this post: Cyberspace Wikipedia Citizendium Stephen+Colbert
As someone who works frequently with Gartner Magic Quadrant documents, I was intrigued today to read an interesting critique of the Magic Quadrant approach in The Register.
The Gartner Magic Quadrant is an elegant idea. Basically, it takes a class of IT products, and compares them on a graph with axes for ability to execute (y-axis) and completeness of vision (x-axis). Companies strive to get as close to the top right (complete vision, strong ability to execute) as possible. The simple view which the graph portrays of the market is backed up by a more detailed prose report.
There are other similar approaches to ranking competitive products, for example in Forrester's Wave reports. Interestingly, the Forrester reports use more than the two axes, by plotting companies as different-sized dots to show further company information. Forrester also releases very detailed analysis, often in vast spreadsheet documents, to back up its conclusions.
The critique in The Register is based on the idea that the very simple Magic Quadrant graphs could display much more information than they do, by adding colours, different-sized dots and arrows to show trends. That is probably true: but perhaps the real problem is that readers are too lazy in their absorption and interpretation of information. People often talk about the Magic Quadrant graph, but how many of them actually read the whole report that accompanies it?
Technorati tags for this post: Cyberspace Gartner Magic+Quadrant Forrester The+Register
Sun, 26 Nov 2006 [Australian eastern time]David's site links to Wikipedia Weekly -- an interesting weekly (audio) discussion of Wikipedia issues.
Technorati tags for this post: Cyberspace Wikipedia Wikipedia+Weekly
Sat, 25 Nov 2006 [Australian eastern time]One of my brothers, David, has recently started a blog in which he muses on all matters Wikipedia.
Technorati tags for this post: Cyberspace David+Still Wikipedia
Sat, 30 Sep 2006 [Australian eastern time]
Wikipedia: A tool for character assassination?
Dave Winer suggests that Wikipedia can be a well adapted tool for character assassination, where articles are used to defame people. He links to a Guardian article by Seth Finkelstein which considers the question: should people be able to have entries about them removed from Wikipedia, or would that be an admission that collective editing by volunteers cannot guarantee fairness or accuracy?
Technorati tags for this post: Cyberspace Wikipedia Dave+Winer Seth+Finkelstein
Tue, 26 Sep 2006 [Australian eastern time]
Is the Wikipedia model broken?
Does Wikipedia really work the way it is meant to? Is it really an amorphous community of people working together to promote knowledge? In the past, there has been plenty of discussion about situations where Wikipedia's information has been compromised, even though the overall standard is very high. (See an earlier post from this blog for some examples.)
Michael Arrington has some interesting comments about cliques and ulterior political motives on the Wikipedia site. Here's an extract:
While wikipedia appears to be open to all, I’ve seen numerous examples of changes getting immediately deleted for what appears to be political reasons rather than the pursuit of pure knowledge. And I’ve also seen people be attacked for making changes that appear to be factual and correct.
Technorati tags for this post: Cyberspace Wikipedia Arrington CrunchNotes
Sun, 20 Aug 2006 [Australian eastern time]Announced in The Register this week: an Oregon crop circle proves that aliens use Firefox as their preferred browser.
Technorati tags for this post: Cyberspace Firefox The+Register
Sun, 30 Jul 2006 [Australian eastern time]
Pollution of online social networks
My brother, Michael, asks: what do you do when people start giving false descriptions of themselves in an online social networking environment? He writes:
LinkedIn is a social network for professionals. It's all about who you know, and who you have worked with. The basic idea seems to be that recording all that information will result in new business opportunities, as well as referrals to jobs et cetera. When someone who claims to have worked for your company joins LinkedIn, you get email asking you if you know them.
So, what do you do when you look in the company address book, and it's quite clear that they don't work for your company? There doesn't seem to be any way in the UI to point out that someone is lying. How annoying.
I can see how this is annoying, but I also don't see how networking with people online is really any different to doing it in the physical world. Online, using tools like LinkedIn, referrals are important: someone you know will often introduce new contacts to you, and these contacts are often more reliable or more receptive than ones you find yourself. The same principle applies in the physical world.
I imagine that often this would temper the effects of false claims on a service like LinkedIn as people who just make everything up are less likely to get good referrals. And imagine what a nightmare it would be for someone to moderate a huge online service like LinkedIn every time someone made a claim about someone else's entry!
In fact, from my limited experience of the service, it appears that LinkedIn mostly works on this basis. You can search other people's networks of people as long as you have connections to the people. However, if you want to connect with someone in another person's list, you normally need to seek a referral from the people between you and your target in the chain of connections. The situation (described in Michael's post) where LinkedIn emails you about other people in your company is not the standard way of linking to people.
Technorati tags for this post: Cyberspace LinkedIn
Mon, 24 Jul 2006 [Australian eastern time]Even though I have a good laptop and all the software I really need, I still find myself using Windows Notepad to take brief notes on some things. Sometimes, I find other people like me.
It seems that Jeff Sanquist is one of these, and he has blogged a cool -- if somewhat nerdy -- Notepad trick. I like it!
Technorati tags for this post: Cyberspace Notepad Tweaks Windows+Secrets Jeff+Sandquist