In the meantime, you might like to enjoy breakfast at Anaura Bay. Have a taste of this:

This was served up by Judy, the owner of the Rangimarie homestay. Judy’s banana bread deserves an entry in the Guinness Book of Records.

Anaura Bay is prime-time beautiful. The bluest of blue seas wash onto a gold sand beach stretching three or four kilometers, and it’s all enclosed in greenness. The hills around are a mix of farmland, wet Eastland forest and some rock-face at the south. As hills go they’re nothing to sneeze at either.

We had a chat with a lady tending her veges as we wandered down the beach one day. Her garden backed onto the sands of Anaura Bay. Her mokopuna went to the school at the end of the bay, and she worked at the school too. She’s very fortunate in some ways, maybe not in all.

Back to the 027 coverage. So after a couple of unconnected days at Anaura Bay we headed up through Tokomaru Bay, Ruatoria, Hicks Bay, Te Kaha for a couple of days, Opotoki, back through the Waioeka Gorge to Gisborne and ultimately home.

The road from Te Araroa to the East Cape lighthouse cost us a tyre. And the resonator crapped out coming down the Waioeka Gorge, so our arrival back in Gisborne on day five was noticeable from about 300m away.

But from Gisborne all the way round the East Cape and back to Gisborne I gave up on cellphone and internet and it was just fabulous.

For five days I got used to checking the time by looking at the timestamp on the last photo in my camera. And close enough was good enough.

I think I want to go back and help that lady with her veges or something.

I know captchas are a pain and cause accessibility issues, but they’re one way of keeping the bots out of places meant for humans.

I came across a March 09 presentation from the guy that invented them, one Luis von Ahn from Carnegie Mellon University, which might cast them in a different light for you. The video (down below) is 12 minutes long if you want to watch it but here’s a nutshell.

Let’s start with the New York Times. Their archive stretches back to 1851 but it wasn’t until 1980 [correction: 1980-something] that they had digital records of their content. Right now they’re part way through digitising all that content and expect to be finished later this year. They make a scanned image of their paper pages and use OCR software to extract the words into a searchable electronic record, no surprise there. But they’re finding that the reliability of OCR for old material that may have yellowed or faded can be as low as 70%. Which leaves a whole lot of work to be done manually, on 129 years worth of NYT. No small task.

Enter Recaptcha. The next time you come across something like the above example from Last.fm’s sign-up screen, here’s what’s happening.

An image of the word that the NYT’s OCR software can’t decipher gets sent across to Recaptcha via a web service. Recaptcha munges up the unknown word a bit more and pairs it up with a known (munged) word that it can verify, then sends the pair out as a two-word captcha to places like Last.fm – or Twitter or Facebook or 100,000 other sites. Along comes Rowan Smith to open a Last.fm account, who enters the two words in the captcha and sends them off for verification. Recaptcha confirms I’m human by matching the known word with what I typed in, and hands me back to Last.fm to complete the account setup.

The other word I typed in was the one that NYT’s OCR software couldn’t recognise. Well, I just decoded it for them. Recaptcha thanks me immensely and sends the human-translated answer back to the NYT. Just like that. Dead simple. Brilliant, actually. And NYT is only one example – other digitisation projects like Google and The Internet Archive can and do use the same web service.

The captcha might be a pain, but I do like the warm fuzzies I get from doing my bit for humanity, in the time it takes to deal with one. I hope the 400,000,000 other people who have contributed so far, at a rate of 35,000,000 newly digitised words per day, do too.

If you can handle watching a computer science type for 11:50, here’s the man himself. Don’t be put off – it’s actually quite good.

They weren’t actually far off with the technology in terms of what it does – end to end transactions and all that. Glad I don’t have to use those big clunkers though, I’d need something the size of an aircraft hangar to do what I want to do now. And I’m quite happy with the humble interface I use to do that stuff already.

They didn’t anticipate the social mores changing underneath them though when they made their pitch, did they? That’s the trouble with geeks.

The site does the job. It presents RNZRSA very professionally and if you’re travelling the “Find an RSA” lookup is clunky but it sort of works. It’s a good web site, but still just a web site.

So I was really impressed when I saw the online poppy field and Wall of Remembrance released last week. So were lots of other people, apparently, if the messages and donations so far are anything to go by.

I’m not going to waffle about it other than to say what a slick job online by RNZRSA. Nice one, Stephen.

So with Anzac Day just round the corner, now’s a perfect time to spare a moment and go and have a look for yourself … here it is. And it’s certainly worth a donation.

[And btw, it looks like it's built on a Silverstripe platform so hopefully they might've put it together fairly cheaply. These guys are onto it...]

At $399 all up, it got off to a pretty good start with me from the moment I paid for it. They’re normally $499 but I chanced on a special at Harvey Norman, who do great specials (well at least one) but have an utterly useless web site. Take it down or do it up guys, purleez!

Back to the Eee. ScrEeech (sorry) into the driveway, sprint inside. Rip it out of the box, plug it in and turn it on, and that’s it. No, wait – I had to assign myself a user name and password and timezone, and I had to tell it my network password when it asked me. Too easy. It’s almost disappointing if you like to play round configuring stuff.

It’s the size of an A4 page folded in half and if I chuck it in my backpack in the mornings with my other A4 pages folded in half, it’ll weigh me down by 0.9kg plus the power pack.

Battery life is meant to be around 5 hours – sounds great – but I haven’t found out for myself yet. The flash drive is only 8GB so I won’t be storing my photos on it but it’s big enough to hold the internet as far as I can tell. And it draws 12 watts so my running costs are are a whopping 0.3c per hour.

It’s not entirely without drawbacks. The screen is limited to 800 pixels wide (on the Linux model at least, but maybe not), so you run into a bit of horizontal scrolling on sites hard-coded for bigger screens. But that’s precisely the reason for my occasional but impassioned rants about building fluid web sites. I’ll count that as a cross against web designers, not against the Eee. Sites like this work beautifully.

And the keyboard is pretty cramped so it’s fairly easy to make typos [note-to-self: Use spellchecker]. That’s the only real downside of the Eee in my eyes. I can live with it, I’m not a high-speed typist anyway. I’m typing this post on it and we seem to be getting along OK (in a text file, though – the WordPress editor crumbles at 800 pixels wide. Irony strikes unexpectedly…)

The Linux version’s default Xandros desktop is a class act. It’s so intuitive that I suspect my wife and friends who are maybe more in the mainstream of computer users than I am would use it quite happily. It’s about the nicest Linux desktop I’ve seen so far, for ease of use anyway.

It feels a little too locked down for me though and my other Linux gear is Ubuntu, so Xandros is probably going overboard in favour of Eeebuntu.

But for the sake of four hundred bucks, I’m not arguing. I’ve got myself a cheap, lightweight, very portable and very usable web platform and, increasingly, that’s all I need. And Asus have got a very happy customer. Well done, Asus.

Now that Jonathan Mosen is back in Wellington we took the chance yesterday to catch up and shoot the breeze.

Jonathan’s got this annoying habit of flooring me with his use of technology. He does it every time we meet. I should have known he was going to do it to me again.

And sure enough, after free and frank discussions about the web and accessibility and Flash and Facebook and working for [insert variable] and ARIA and RSS feeds and what we’ve been up to and good ol’ DOS and accessible appliances and people hooking their washing machines up to Twitter etc … he pounced.

He’s got this neat piece of software loaded onto his phone, he told me. It does an OCR scan of the photos he takes with it, and reads out the words it finds in them. Ergo, he can pull two bottles of vino out of his fridge, photograph the labels, and find out which one’s the sauvignon and which one’s the chardonnay.

Brilliant.

I wish I knew how to do that. It would save me the time I spend back-tracking to find where I left my glasses.

I have no formal training or qualifications in Agile as a development methodology, but it’s something I’ve tried to smuggle into various bits and pieces of work I’ve taken on in the past. Why? Because on the surface it makes so much sense and is in harmony with the way web projects usually work out in practice, in my experience.

The politics of doing this within a traditional waterfall methodology have occasionally gotten mildly interesting.

But that’s OK, because the project outcomes have invariably been well received, and not only by upper management but by other team members as well.

And personally it’s a whole lot more satisfying. It beats the crap out of all that paperwork, meeting time, planning, Gantt charts, reports, rigour and overhead that seems to go with waterfall. It feels like a much better fit for the nimble environment that the web is, where you’re generally expected to go from A to B in something of a hurry.

So Tuesday gave me a whole lot more methods and techniques for – managing? no, guiding – web development projects, and containing or smoothing out some of the issues that invariably arise on the way from go to woah.

It’s given me better structures and tools to work with in the future, and a better case to put for the inclusion of Agile techniques in web projects when traditional waterfall is often the default methodology.

Scuttling back to work on a drop-dead beautiful Wellington evening, I had a chance to think about my two major takeouts from the day.

The first was the intuitive appeal of the Agile approach. It came from a slide that Jackson put up early in the day, which overlaid the natural human thought process over the rigid structure of the waterfall methodology. Here’s my scribbled notes from that slide:

The regular, waterfall shaped line is the unbending, sequential path the waterfall process takes on the way down from identifying the problem through to implementing a solution. The dotted line that jumps (seemingly haphazardly) between the problem, a knee-jerk solution, revisit the problem, other solutions, alternative design options, ways to implement them, back to the problem, and so on all the way through the project is more like how people think about things. I do, for sure.

With waterfall, it’s sooo easy to get blindsided by process that you lose your focus on the original problem. When you’re up to your arse in alligators, etc…

The Agile model accommodates the way people I think far better than the straitjacket of the waterfall methodology. Isn’t it just so much more intuitive? Won’t that result in better thinking and better outcomes? Better usability, and better ROI?

Speaking of ROI, my second takeout came from renewing an acquaintance with Sandy Mamoli who’s an Agile advocate and a certified Scrum practitioner. Here it is, and I invite you to read it. Enjoy.

When the red bus hits … (Agile during a recession)

I’m not in the smartphone market yet but I will be in the next couple or three months. And I’m not too fussy – all I really want is always-on access to the internet.

The iPhone is out there already, and I’ve been watching the arrival of the Palm Pre and the Android-based G1. I’ve played with an iPhone (thanks, Colin) and I really liked the interface. It’s the kind of thing I could get used to pretty much overnight, but the phone itself seemed kind of fragile for the way I treat my stuff. The Palm is interesting because it’s getting such good reviews on the quality of its interface, and it just looks a little more robust and less breakable. And the G1 interests me because it’s built on an open source platform, and it has a slide-out keyboard – some habits die hard. I don’t know what to think about the Blackberry yet, but it just seems a bit corporate to me, whatever that means. I’m not sure I want a permanent keyboard at the expense of screen-space.

But when I decide I’m ready to fork out for a smartphone, they’ll be among my primary choices. I don’t know what my telco will try to push on me but I’d like to have at least a couple of those choices available when it happens.

And to see Apple and Palm thinking about squaring up to a sue-them-out-of-the-market argument is a real piss-off, as a consumer.

Why don’t these guys keep their focus on bringing a good product to the market, and marketing it better than their competitors? Instead of threatening to reduce my choices by trying to kick them off the market with legal arguments? And then making me pay for their fancy footwork by loading their legal overheads onto the price I pay for the phone?

Am I naïve about the dynamics of a competitive market? I don’t think so, I’ve been part of it for long enough. I just hope those two guys stop eyeballing each other, have another slurp and just get on with doing what they do best.

I hope my telco can give me the choices I want. And if they can’t, I hope somebody else can. And I’d like both those guys to be part of the equation, but preferably without their legal costs.