Jean-Jacques Halans ‹› Afterhours

-day 4 of our 5 day trip to Tasmania-

Big breakfast at the Lodge, like really big: bacon, beans and eggs, pancakes with fruit, and a croissant with smoked salmon…

No internet reception in Cradle Mountain, so looked on the Lodge’s internet kiosk for Tarraleah comfirmation. At the same time checked out the new Apple iPhone announcement :), and my mail. Noticed that this day Google Wave hackathon registration would be opened at ten, hmm. So between 9 and 10 we did the Enchanted walk right at the beginning of the national park, and then headed back to this internet kiosk to register (#iamageek :).

Next we did the King Billy loop walk at the Lodge, another easy walk, though it was raining a bit, leaving Cradle Mountain at 11:30, when heavy rain started. Backtracking part of the same road back. At Delaware the road started to get interesting again. At Mole Creek lot of rain, when I wished it would snow in stead (as we didn’t have snow yet). We stopped at a lookout where there was nothing to see because of the rain, where it then started to snow! We drove on and a ute was blocking the road. The car had crashed into the road railing, and it’s front wheel had broken. The local (in a t-shirt in 0C weather) managed to get the car of the road and we gave him a lift till past Bearnie, the next village. It turned out people here also don’t have (Telstra) reception, so dropped him off at a phonebooth, near Great Lake.

Snow at this height had stopped and we passed some great views of the Great Lake. The road turned into gravel road, for the next 50 km. We found ourself on the great plateau, the Central Highlands, at about 1000m. Very desolate landscape (reminds me of Iceland don’t know why because I’ve never been there). More lakes and more dirt road. We finally got some asphalt again, and boy the car looked dirty. Had to clean the back window of car as it was covered in dirt.

We drove past vast hydro works and arrived at Tarraleah around 4pm. Tarraleah is a village turned into a holiday village. It used to house the workmen working on the hydro works, but they have long moved on. We stayed at a refurbished school building, which was pretty cool, but also cold this time of the year. We had dinner at the local Highlander tavern (the only place for dinner), having warm smoked trout mouse and a big scotch fillet with mushroom saus. The Inn keeper was trying to scare us saying two days of snow was expected and we would be stuck!

Read on, final day 5.

-day 3 of our 5 day trip to Tasmania-

We had self made breakky in our cabin (eggs + toast). In Ross I happen to get Vodafone GPRS reception, slow but at least it’s something. No Optus what so ever. So I started looking for Tuesday’s accommodation, somewhere in the middle. I picked Tarraleah, and The Scholar House there.

In the morning we walked through Ross (which is really only one main street), and got some local goodies from the bakery (a shortbread wheel). We passed through Evandale, which is another old, colonial town, and snapped some great pics of low hanging clouds. Again, we passed a bunch of lovely lookouts on the way to Cradle Mountain. But arriving at Cradle Mountain, there’s lots of diseased or dead trees, at Middlesex Planes.

Checked in at the Cradle Mountain Lodge (into cabin 73) and visited… the visitor center of Cradle Mountain (another 22$ day pass). At the visitor centre is a short boardwalk through local forest. There’s a bus service departing here to Dove Lake, as a sign tells us parking spots are limited, and there’s a 30 minute waiting time. We thought we’d risk it anyway and driving down to Dove lake. Turned out not even a third was filled up. Dove Lake with Cradle Mountain in the background is lovely. We walked down towards Glacier Rock. While there a rainbow appeared, a great photo opportunity. Up here it was the first time that we really felt the wintery cold, so you’d better dress up.

We didn’t stay too long, as we wanted to do another short stroll along boardwalk (Kenny something walk). That evening we had dinner at the Lodge’s Tavern (tomato soup and oysters, scotch fillet and salmon). While walking down to the tavern, we had a wombat encounter, a mommy with her baby, so cute! After dinner we enjoyed our cabin’s spa bath…

Read on, day 4.

-day 2 of our 5 day trip to Tasmania-

We cancelled the remainder of our stay in the hotel in Hobart. But canceling the hotel also meant we had to book two other hotels, not sure where. The night before I found a little cabin in Ross, though this morning, driving up to Freycinet, it was too early call just yet. We stopped at the Rosny lookout, looking over across Hobart, and an obvious popular make-out spot…

We stopped at a Woollies to stock up on some water and food, and grab a (next door Gloria Jeans) coffee. While driving up to the east coast, it became obvious quickly that Optus does not have any coverage beyond Hobart (about a 30km radius). Now, how are we going to book our accommodation for tonight? Anyway, along the way we stopped at several beautiful beaches and lookouts: Raskin beach, Oyster Bay, Mayfield beach. And we arrived in the early afternoon at coles baytasau-42.1242750148.2920920Coles Bay. First stop Freycinet NP visitor centre, to get a 22$ park day pass, and see if they know of any accommodation in this area. It’s not a tourism information center in itself so we had to call around ourselves for accomodation,… at a Telstra payphone. Boy, do they swallow coins like… I mean, they take a lot of money, and don’t give anything back. All contacts we’d call were booked, so we tried the cabin at Ross, which is 1.5h back inland. And it was still available! Pfeww, settled for today (we didn’t have to sleep in the car).

We then drove on to the parking spot for the Wineglass Bay lookout walk, which was medium hike uphill, but certainly worth it. It was a very well laid out and maintained path. After this walk, we drove up to the Lighthousetasau-42.122816148.34282lighthouse, which offered nice views of the coast line.

We then had to drive back inland, past Cambell Town to Ross, where we stayed at the TSpot cabin. We arrived at around 5PM, a bit earlier than we had told them. We took a stroll (in the dark) around Ross, which is a tiny countryside village but with one wide avenue and a particular bridge. At 5:30 we checked in with the lovely English proprietors. They used to have a tearoom in the Hunter Valley, but moved down here since a couple of years. We changed clothes and went for dinner at the local pub (for pumpkin soup, gourmet lamb and rib eye steak). After dinner we watched the Story of Ross on DVD (available in the cabin), and  V for Vendetta in cabin.

Read on for day 3

Last long weekend (we made it a 5 day weekend :), we went down to Tasmania, not sure what to expect exactly. We didn’t have any real plans, only thing we planned was a cabin at the Cradle Mountain Lodge, and four consecutive nights in Hobart (which I booked before the cabin, which meant we were going to forfeit one night there), making Hobart our hub to explore the island.

We got up early Saturday morning (3:30 am) to fly with Virgin Blue to Hobart (passing through Melbourne). We arrived in Hobart around 10:15, and picked up our rental car from EuropCar. There was a queue because their computer system was down (tip ctrl+alt+delete :), so there was a bit of a wait. Not a happy start to our holiday. As expected, it was raining in Hobart, and from the forecast, it looked to be rain for five days.

But spirits were high, and we arrived at our hotel at “somewhere past 11″, too early to check in. But no worries, we could leave our baggage behind and park the car in the hotel’s garage. We went straight to the close-by -42.8863630147.3308110Salamanca markets, which turned out to be the biggest, regular open air market I’ve seen  in Australia (true, haven’t seen that many markets here though). We had lunch at Tricycle (a crunchy BLT and delicious ham and pea soup). Because it was raining a bit, and the rest of the weather outlook, I bought some plastic pants at the local Katmandu, as an insurance policy as it were, just in case. At the Salamanca Square, there’s a salmon store which I couldn’t pass by without tasting some smoked Tasmanian salmon. At the same time, next door at Smolt, we made a reservation for dinner that night.

It was almost 14:00, time to check into the hotel, freshen up a bit in our room. We were staying at on Macquarie Street. The room was small, but modern and decent, especially for the price of $79 a night. We got our rain gear on, and headed to the botanical gardens (something we try to visit in every city we pass), walking through the main Hobart shopping street. The Hobart botanical garden was a nice garden, nothing exceptional. Even in the rain, the Japanese garden looked great. We’d read about a ferry departing at the botanical garden, so we headed down to the water. Well, unfortunately it only goes out a couple of times a day, if it even still does do that, as we couldn’t see any reference to the ferry. Strange. Another thing to keep in mind is that there aren’t that many taxis around in Hobart. Kind of disappointed in this dreadful weather. So we headed back to the hotel on foot. (yes, we could have taken the car too, but then you don’t see that much of a town you’re visiting). Quick jump into the tiny shower, and then dinner at Smolt, which was pretty exceptional I’d say, strongly recommended!

Back in our hotel room, the (single glazed) window didn’t close (like a pinky wide gap). It is winter, and the hotel is on one of the busiest streets in Hobart with a lot of traffic, and it was Saturday night, and it was a long day for us, we weren’t to happy with this. And since it was the Queen’s Birthday long weekend, the hotel was fully booked and unable to give us another room, until the next day. We had to make a decision, stay here (it was cheap, decent rooms except the windows) or cancel. I started to look around for some options, though couldn’t decide yet. Next day we decided to cancel rest of our booking, which we had to do through Wotif. They ended up being very helpful actually!

Read on, day 2.

This is a quick post on a problem I had at work.

At work we got brand new machines with 8gigs of memory on Win XP 64-bit. They have nVidia GeForce 8400 GS graphics card. We developer on IBM Websphere (WID 6.1.2).

I had the following problem when I tried to commit changes: no comment text box?!

I had other similar problems trying to set project references, and the likes in other configuration panes…

This bothered me for a couple of days, trying all kinds of things, including reinstalling WID. I also looked at the nVidia drivers, and they were the latest, no fix there.

Then I looked into nVidia’s nView Desktop Manager, which was enabled:

I disabled this and… lo and behold, WID problem fixed: I got my comment box back, as also any other pane which didn’t work before.

Just thought I’d share that. Someone might have the same problem, pulling out his hair about this.

We already had online virusses and worms, now we got paraSites too.

The word ‘parasite’ comes from the Greek ‘parasitos’ (but then in Greek) which means ‘person who eats at the table of another’. In general we use parasite to refer to “an animal or plant that lives in or on a host; it obtains nourishment from the host without benefiting or killing the host”. I first heard of web paraSites on the APWG mailing list, used by Russ McRee from Microsoft (working at Live Messenger looking for malware and phishing sites) to refer to a sites which are:

“service” offerings designed to see who has blocked or deleted your IM alias from their messaging contacts. These sites always have significant disclaimer language, and often disclose that they will send SPIM (SPam over Instant Messenger) to your contacts if you enter your Live ID credentials.

One such example he gives is finecommunity.com which bluntly asks for your Microsoft Live ID and has a very dry Terms Of Use at the bottom of the page, which nobody ever reads, and which ends with:

To unsubscribe from our services you just need to change your Windows Live password.

This is all too familiar on the Twitterverse. Due to the lack of a decent authentication api for Twitter (until recently, they now support oAuth, but the damage has been done), a lot of Twitter related services have popped up asking for your Twitter username and password. But even besides Twitter, other social networking sites would ask for your Gmail or Hotmail credentials to “find your friends” and “invite them”. This isn’t phishing (for your credentials), they just ask them from you so they could “help” you. There have been plenty of instances where these services would add spammy content and links to for example your Twitter stream, or send out emails to your contacts, automatically (because that’s part of the service they offer). Those too are what you could call paraSites, living off of your account.

Even right before I started writing this post I encountered such instance: the HP Touch the Future Now contest, which tells you to twitter about the future (or rather answer some weekly questions on Twitter) in order to win and asks for your Twitter username and password. The T&C doesn’t say anything about spamming your Twitter account. It does say if you don’t provide the required details, you’re disqualified. And that it may pass your personal information to related bodies corporate and agencies assisting with the contest. But why would they need your Twitter username and password? Just tell people to tweet and reply to @hp_<whatever>. Would you trust HP with your Twitter username and password? Didn’t people get bitten before by one of those other “services” wanting your credentials? This might well be a lack of understanding of social media on the part of HP and their marketing team, and they actually mean no harm (as in they won’t spam your Twitter stream). Or at one point in time they might just suck the life out of your Twitter account!

Have been playing with Yahoo!’s YQL this weekend, querying the Sydney Ferries website. Pretty amazing what it allows you to do, though the Sydney Ferries site wasn’t the best site to start playing with I guess. I did have a need to have the ferry timetable on my iPhone (especially the Neutral Bay service), so that’s why I put together Next Sydney Ferry this weekend.

The premise is pretty simple: when does the next ferry depart from Circular Quay? I had this wild idea to do cool stuff with it, but inspired by the simplicity of Next Manly Ferry, I thought I’d start out pretty simple too. And it certainly still is a work in progress with plenty of bugs.

NextSydneyFerry.com parses the timetables of the SydneyFerries.info site using YQL. No luck with any API, so it’s pretty fragile reading in the HTML table data. Wish they made an effort marking up the data a bit more helpful (as in markup-as-an-api). One of the URLs even has a typo (”weekemd”).

Things on the to-do list: testing/debugging, exceptions to the timetable (like, euh Sunday – got it figured out already, just need to implement it), a neat logo (and touch icon), webkit database caching, cool-ification, scrolling though all times, scrolling through all ferry stops,… There seems to be a problem with iPhone 3 (beta 5) too, which I don’t have on my iPod touch with iPhone 2 OS (nor on the desktop). Hope it’s the Mobile Safari beta, but that makes it currently useless on my iPhone, ha…

[Yet another website that will never get finished, and used...]

Just the other week I experienced two occurrences where Twitter was used by business for product support, which I’d like to share, for those who still doubt the power of social media. These are web businesses (UserVoice and Google) but that shouldn’t make any difference. Any business should monitor the Internet for their brand and reputation. I wasn’t necessarily looking for answers from them, but they did answer.

Earlier last week Google introduces a new version of their Profiles. I had set mine up, and using it I had a concern:

It was a rather generalized question I put out there for the twitterverse. I wasn’t expecting a response at all. Less than two hours later I did get a response:

Google obviously cares about their reputation and seem keen to keep track of whatever’s being said about them. Unfortunatly they didn’t include a link to their report abuse system, which would have been nice if I had a problem (which I didn’t). They could have pointed to a particular blogpost addressing these concerns, or they could create one based on these concerns found around Twitter or the blogosphere in general.

Then last Thursday at a workshop I was demoing a couple of my little web apps where I noticed that one was crashing Firefox and the other had a weird Firefox rendering issue (in effect duplicating the content, though view source only showed the content once). I quickly dugg around and uncommented the UserVoice script loading in those page, which seem to resolve the issues. I posted my concerns on Twitter, to see if anyone else had the same problem.

Two minutes later someone (who I think/hope is involved in UserVoice which wasn’t obvious) replied:

Since I had the UserVoice code removed and was at a workshop (and it’s not really critical to me), I told him I had fixed it for now, and would look at it again later, to which he let me know that I could contact him if I needed any more help. I did not have to go to a UserVoice forum to get help (I wasn’t looking for help actually) , as it could well be an issue with one of the Firefox plugins I have installed. But UserVoice cares enough about their reputation that they try to keep all customers (even little old me, even free customers) happy.

Twitter has been useful for me before in resolving (or sharing) problems. For example, when all my sites hosted on (MediaTemple) were down a couple of weeks ago, I obviously tweeted about this, and got responses back from other people having the same problems. Some of them then pointed me to the MediaTemple Twitter account which was giving out status updates on the cluster problems they were having, to which I then subscribed and got into the loop of how and when things got resolved.

Twitter is an open micro messaging platform which allows people to use it in any way they see fit (within the 140 character constraints). It’s a diary, a bulletin board, a self-help system, a publishing platform,… enabling real time search for events, brands, people… and we haven’t seen the end of it yet.

Just watched this cool bullet-time-like movie (you know, the Matrix) on the Philips site as a demo for their 21:9 cinemascope tv set due out this month. Great if you’re a movie buff watching lots of DVD or Blueray, and I love the ambient light feature. But one other feature their new sets offer is so called “Net TV”.

Net TV looks to be a proprietary service through Philips (you need them to get onto their Net TV platform), which is based on CE-HTML (Consumer Electronics), a subset of XHTML, CSS TV Profile 1.0, ecmascript, DOM,… intended to improve the experience to browse the internet on a tv. But why do we need another standard? Why are manufacturers trying to set up new walled gardens? Did they not learn? My mobile smart phone is perfectly capable of displaying full featured webpages, why wouldn’t a tv set? It might have been true five years ago, when we were all still on low resolution CRT tv sets, but with the lcd/plasma revolution we had last couple of years, resolution has improved greatly and tv set sizes have grown.

Browsing the web on tv has been around for ages, but never took off, with for example now defunkt Microsoft WebTV. I myself worked on a TV banking platform back in ‘99-2000 for a Dutch bank and cabeltv company accessing internet banking over a settop box (”t-commerce”), which if I remember correctly was also using a version of CE-HTML, but there was certainly no JavaScript involved. And if you have a Nintendo Wii, you can browse the full internet on your tv using a version of Opera (a 5$US upgrade). But unfortunatly Wii isn’t an HD device, and isn’t an optimal browsing experience even on new full HD tv sets (native resolution seems to be 608×456, with pages being zoomed in and out). Playstation 3 (and I guess XBox 360) has a full featured browser too, and again people complain about text being too small.

But why would Philips not get on board with Opera (or Mozilla, or use WebKit), in stead of using CE-HTML? And it’s not a single manufacturer getting on board the internet-on-tv train, it’s also Samsung, Sony,… getting on board though with different solutions. And yesterday Adobe introduced its Flash Platform for the Digital Home
with Intel at NAB, but the tv makers seem to be reluctant to join them. While browsing on tv might never take off, one thing I am looking forward to are tv widgets, using web standard XHTML and Javascript, where Samsung and Yahoo! are leading the way (sets already available at Bing Lee).With these widgets you could keep track of Twitter while watching tv (without having a laptop on your lap, or an iPod/iPhone in your hand), and we might see new ways of interaction with tv programs through backchannels displayed at the bottom of the tv, as already happening on Twitter (#newinventors instigated every week by @mpesce). What I am looking for is actually some kind of Chumby for tv, something that injects widgets onto the screen (without me buying a new set), though better integrated (form, transparency, bottom or sidebar positioned) like the Yahoo! widgets.

In stead of a new browser war on television, we’ll get a widget war, between Flash, Yahoo!, Google (imagine the advertising potential) and all the other widget makers out there, trying to get their hands on whatever little time you still spend watching tv. Hmmm, come to think of it, Google Calendar as an EPG on your tv…