Posts by John Holley
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Hard News: Time to move on, in reply to Russell Brown,
And as I understand it, the same equipment can be used to launch grenades or flares. It’s been described both ways in reports
By flares they probably mean illumination rounds (“illum” in military parlance) or smoke. These, along with 40mm HE grenades, can be fired from weapons like the M79, M203 etc.
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Hard News: European Horror Stories, in reply to Mr Magoo,
Go to the top right hand corner of the home page and look for "Get John Mauldin’s Newsletter sent directly to your inbox".
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I subscribe to John Mauldin's excellent e-letter. (Hat tip to Bernard Hickey). He provides a lot of insight to the problems we face and, while conservative in outlook, he is a pragmatic person who doesn't like entrenched ideologies.
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Speaker: Properly Public: It's our information, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
When I was at the ARC, and I suggested this for the Auckland Council, I pushed for a records management environment where electronic content was, by default, searchable. That is, unless a staff member flags content as confidential or, by where the document/email sat within the council taxonomy e.g. HR., then material was discoverable by a public interface. This is no pipe dream as systems in use in NZ e.g. HP Trim or Objective, have these capabilities now. It just requires an actual commitment to open government rather than the lip service we tend to see.
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Speaker: Properly Public: It's our information, in reply to Sacha,
Either the DIA or Auckland Council I guess.
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Speaker: Properly Public: It's our information, in reply to nzlemming,
I had that argument with the ATA with the SuperCity where they thought "Draft" meant you didn't have to release it. They never read the OIA legislation or the Ombudsman's guidelines. Mind you, many of the ATA senior staff were from Watercare, and they were use to running behind a screen of anonymity!
I absolutely agree that we seeing a move to more secretive central and local government - contrary to the intent of the OIA and LGOIMA.
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Speaker: Properly Public: It's our information, in reply to nzlemming,
I did this by uploading the PDFs to Google Docs. I have the option set to grab text and OCR scans - so it produces a google doc with the image on one page and the extracted text on the next (repeats for each page). Want me to send you the examples?
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All I do with scanned docs and pdfs that try to control content is upload them to Google Docs and let Google do the work - Tried this the CERA and AG BIMs and Google extracted all the text in both.
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Hard News: Winning the RWC: it's complicated, in reply to Russell Brown,
It does annoy me sometimes when people just declare it to be true that family violence spikes on the night a team loses, when the evidence is unclear.
Snopes summarises where these claims come from back in 1993 around Superbowl.
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I have worked with Macs since 1984 - The Computer Centre at Massey had the 2nd or 3rd Mac in the country, and CompSci had a Lisa.
Steve Jobs has had a big impact on my life. I ended up working for CED (Apple NZ) in the earlier 90s finishing up in 98 as the "Apple Envangelist". (During that time having numerous chats with you at CED)
Steve could be a bit harsh at times - I remember being at WWDC where, when asked by someone about recent layoffs, he basically said those going hadn't really contributed. Some of those folk were my friends and I knew they had given heart and soul for the company - most Apple folk do.
But what he was was a visionary and, luckily for all of us, ruthless as well. This meant he got to execute his vision.
You have to wonder what the world would have been like if "1984 won't be like '1984.'" had not come true :)