It's been sometime since I last wrote a blog entry. During that much of the past few months Lisa and I have been working on our latest project, Online CPD. Online CPD is an online education tool for professionals organisations whose members are required to keep up to date with professional developments. This is usually referred to as Continuing Professional Development - hence CPD. Here is a quick cut and paste from another section of our website:
This is proving to be a very popular project. They originally set out to raise $10,000 by the 1st of June. So far they have raised over $115,000 and they still have 19 days to go. I expect some very good stuff to come from this project.
Here are the links to a couple of articles on the Diaspora project I contributed financially to:
Diaspora is an Open Source project which aims to develop a "privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed social network". Given my rantings in various places about the lack of privacy associated with Facebook and the way they hide their disregard for you privacy, I thought it was time I put my money where my mouth is. I have made a financial contribution to Disapora as I believe it could be the solution to my issues with social networking - namely the lack of control users have over their own data.
Our hardware supplier had a special on MSI 100+ netbooks last week so we bought a couple of them. Our reasoning was that we are spending more time away from the office and home and they would make for light travelling gear. This is particularly attractive to Lisa as she flies to Timaru on a semi-regular basis and finds it difficult working on the tiny plane she has to fly in.
As of this moment (Sunday 24 Jan 2010) Telecom's XT network has been down for me for over 24 hours. Whenever people in my household try to use it we get a "Network Busy" error. I dion't know how far the outage extends. As I haven't heard anything about it the outage could be quite localised.
You may have heard about Google Wave. It's a new technology being developed by Google. Google describes it as:
A few posts ago I talked about the importance of backups. A recent article brought this to my attention again though it was discussing Disaster Recovery rather than just backups:
I mentioned in the post about our phone system that we can access our phone system when working remotely. In fact, we can access our entire computer system when working remotely. We have full access to our file server, phone system, mail system, printers, and other IT services when away from the office. We use a very good piece of security software called OpenVPN to accomplish this.
Sometime ago I wrote rather disparagingly about Telecom's XT network. Recently while travelling I have found it useful as the data side of it is far faster than the CDMA network. My phone (a Nokia E75) comes with inbuilt GPS. It has its own GPS application but I installed Google Maps and use that instead.