Tonight's Australia vs. NZ, Bledisloe/TriNations match was an insight into why the Australian rugby is at then end of it's glory. There are several reasons why I have to say this. The main amongst them is the Stupid Kiwi Coach. Lose him! He's a Kiwi. Enough is enough! Why is it that we need some damned Kiwi to coach a multi World Cup winning team Aussie team. Shame on the ARU for hiring the damned coach.

No relation to the the title of this post, but the referring for this game was a crying shame! I am drunk enough now, so I'll stop whilst I am still ahead.

Not too long ago, our learned interim Attorney General, Mr. Sayed-Khaiyum put Microsoft on notice for use of the word "Fiji" in one of their product names. Microsoft immediately complied and announced that it will stop the use.

Somehow the Exadel Inc. executives completely missed the news and proceeded to name one of their new products, you guessed it,  Exadel Fiji. I hate to think what our learned AG will do about this if anything. Apparently Mr. Sayed-Khaiyum used the words "unreservedly objects" in a letter to Microsoft. That means he may not spare anyone.

In any case, Exadel Fiji as product will not have such a profile as anything from Microsoft. It's not a product which will be directly used by any average user as it's aimed at the developers to use in their software. Maybe the AG won't even hear of it.

My previous post was a rant about the farcical Olympics coverage by NBCOlympics.com. This post isn't a rant, but highlights a similar issue. Anyway...

Today, for some reason I got interested on a piece olympics news on BBC.co.uk about India's first Olympics gold. Upon visiting the site, I found out that it was Bindra who did it for India. Go Bindra( and India).

What really got my attention though was he screenshot below (red rectangle and the arrow is mine - focus on that). The screenshot shows what I call bad design.

Why bad? Several reasons but chief amongst them:

1. The user is let down because he/she is not getting the full story with the media.
2. The icon used to display the bad news seems to suggest at first glance that there might be something wrong with the page. An error perhaps.

I've been designing and developing websites for some years now and the years have taught me a few things good and bad, about design and development of software. Infact BBC's own web development effort  (http://www.scribd.com/doc/903215/The-Glass-Wall) has taught me a thing or two. This somehow doesn't fit into what has been a great effort otherwise of the BBC web developers.

A website is essentially a software application, developed using code written by developers. As such, the code which spits out the "error message" was written by a developer who wrote something to the effect that if the the user is not from the region then display the error message. What's the point? As it is, it serves no purpose. Unless the error message is a hint that I should apply for my UK residency with the UK government, it serves no purpose!

I am only guessing, but it appears they've replaced the media with an image. Brilliant! Why not leave it at that?

Worse still is that most pages show a list of Olympics Video and audio highlights with invitingly placed "Watch" links. Get there and you'll get the "error message" instead.

The point is, if the developer can write code discover what my territory is, the user can write code to handle the access to the media in a friendlier way.

I haven't blogged for a while so I guess a bit of a whine, some bitching and some ranting wouldn't be a bad way to get back into it.

Silverlight
It's piece of technology I can't seem to get excited about at all. Despite having been introduced to it in Teched last year, it failed to generate in me the required level of excitement. I maintained that it was simply Microsoft trying to mimick Flash (Silverlight vs. Flash: The Developer Story). I guess it's a bit more then that, but like most other things, it's the usual Microsoft's late arrival to the party. An arrival none to be thrilled about. Several previous attempts at getting Silverlight to work on both Firefox and IE failed miserably. It just didn't work on my Firefox 3 instance and managed to crash IE and hang my system. To date, the user experience with the Flash plugins have been painless and extremely bad with Silverlight. So it's Flash 1, Silverlight 0.

NBC Olympics
After 11 days have passed (apparently) I finally got excited about the olympics today and decided to bring myself up to date with all the goings on. So I read a bunch of news articles and figured it'd be best to digest them all with some audio visual matter. I discovered the nbcolympics.com thanks to the Microsoft website. Upon visiting the site, I was presented with a pop up to download Silverlight in order to experience the videos. I decided to give in and finally download the 4mb+ Silverlight upgrade package. 4MB! That in itself is a problem. It's HUGE!

In anycase, downloaded, installed and ready for action, I restarted the browser and settled in for some Olympics action I've been missing for 11 days now. I quickly discovered that the only thing Sliverlight was being used for on the site were the videos. I selected a video and it asked me to chose a postcode and a broadcaster near me. I presumed this was just the formality to capture some details about the user. Being in Fiji, I duly selected my postcode to be America's favourite 90210 and some random broadcaster. Clicked ok and what do you get?

"We're Sorry. NBC is required to restrict this video to viewers within the United States. Additional information about the error: We're Sorry. NBC is required to restrict this video to viewers within the United States."

What a lame fucking experience! Why the hell didn't they say that before making me do all that! I guess I should've known, but that's no excuse for telling me at the point when I've done all the hard work. NBCOlympics.com developers must be some of the lamest bunch on earth. If they figured I wasn't from the US at the point just before showing me the video, they could have popped up a message earlier saying I couldn't access the darned olympics videos. Heck they could've just silently dropped all references to viewing the video for non US based visitors to their site. I would've gone somewhere else. It would've saved me time. This is typical Microsoft deception. It's quite clear they were trying to push Silverlight through the site, but deceiving me and leaving me high and dry isn't going to get me any more excited about their copy cat product!

Now that that's out of my system, let me say that I am not the only one unhappy about NBOlympics.com. This post on Techcrunch.com is one of those, but all for different reasons. Reading through some of the comments on that post, the die-hard Microsofties were quick to defend NBC and the Silverlight platform. Other commentators were quick to point out Flash as the better alternative. I whole heartedly agree with them. 

I wish Silverlight all the luck. They will certainly need a lot of work convince the developer in me.

I photographed this bird in Nadi. Can anyone identify it?

UPDATE

The image below is a higher resolution version of the bird above.

My colleague blogging as mayvelous recently got her 1.5hr. US Transit Visa rejected by some uptight, rude, retarded buffoons at the US Embassy in Suva. I started this post as comment on her blog entry about the experience, but figured it was too long so decided to post it here.

Everytime I walk past the American Embassy in Suva, I see a line of people waiting outside the embassy, like beggars. I guess these people are waiting for their interviews or submitting their visa applications.

I guess the Americans couldn't care less if I had or not the desire to visit their country, but the scene outside the embassy has definitely turned me off. The image I have of the country, is that the border control officials are really uptight bastards, the people are generally paranoid, rude and they must have streets of gold which they want to prevent from trampled by us third world peasants. May's experience confirms that perception (except for the streets of gold bit).

As a Fijian, I really don't understand our relationship with the US. We really don't need to have any greater a relationship with them, as we need with say Afghanistan. Yet we have their huge embassy in the middle of Suva, with a whole street closed off for them. How pathetic! We do a lot of business and travel more frequently in and out of NZ, yet they have a tiny office in the Reserve Bank building. I guess the Americans have always needed to parade their wealth, so can't be seen to have a marginal presence compared to the others. Hence their large, useless embassy.

Now they're building an even bigger one in Tamavua. It'll probably turn out to be just as big as the Australian one. Certainly bigger then the Chinese one. I particularly dislike the location of this embassy, because it will be sitting on prime real estate in Suva. The location could have been put to much better use I suppose.

You might think, I am another US hating, right/left wing, extremist. Far from it. I have nothing against the average American. I think they're great individuals (at least those I consider friends). What really irks me, is the US politics and their treatment of visa seeking Fijians (and a Burmese living in Fiji).

I'd love to be able to visit the country provided I don't have line up outside the embassy like a beggar, be treated rudely by their staff and sit for an interview like a third world, peasant prisoner seeking parole. Fat chance!

Last night I attended the launch of eGov collaboration between the Fiji Government, the Chinese Government, Information Technology Center (ITC) and the service providers out of China and Singapore. After long winded speeches from the Interim Finance Minister and other speakers, we saw a quick demo of one of the first applications to have gone live. It's a pity that all the speechmakers saw fit to repeat the cliched thoughts on egov and all that it entails. One presented some statistics and what egov meant to him. Overall it was good to see such an event (even if it's launching towards the end of it's lifecycle). Apparently the collaboration worth US$50m was initiated in 2004 by way of a Chinese government concession loan of some sort. It is set to end in 2009. The result of the loan will be about 8-10 egov applications, an egov master plan and a data center currently under construction in Suva.

Pity we didn't see such an event when we started work on the first round of egov apps in 2005. In 2005 two local software houses (one being ours) were given about 6 applications between us. We finished all but one. Most of these systems were non-public facing internal systems. They were however developed on an egov framework developed by Microsoft and Dimension Data out of Australia for the Fiji Government.

As a local IT service provider what I hope to see is the government taking an active role in using local suppliers. This should help develop the IT capacity within the country and allow us to become self sufficient instead of using expensive expatriates or giving whole projects away oversees. On the other hand the high rate of attrition amongts Fiji's IT Professionals to the developed countries in Australia and NZ, sees us lagging way behind in terms of our IT capacity. There's always room however for experienced foreign consultants working in Fiji, but I reckon they should only be helping to develop local expertise. There's no reason why we can't be selling our IT services instead of buying them from elsewhere.

As if my weekend couldn't get any worse, I've just finished wasting my last two hours watching 10,000 BC, the movie. A predictable plot, bad acting, badly made and badly titled movie. If this is what Hollywood produces these days, then it's truly a sad day. This movie surpasses the other badly made blockbuster, I Am Legend.

Earlier, the Dutch were truly terrible against the Russians in the quarter finals of Euro 2008. The superstars were incredibly bad. Disgusting and dissapointing.

Last night the Adelaide Crows lost to Brisbane Lions.

A bad weekend!

Last weekend I had the displeasure of driving to and from Nadi. The road condition for most part was nothing less then shite! So I've decided to refer to it as the Nadi-Suva Shite-way.

It's unbelievable that the authorities in this country aren't able to maintain one of the main highways to a decent standard. The highway is littered countless potholes and sinks. Even where the pot holes are patched, the road is bad. The patches are applied so badly that for most part they're at least an inch higher then the normal road surface. On some parts, the road surface has sunk and the seal has become extremely rough. It's a problem that has been like that for years.

I am not sure if the roads engineers responsible for this abomination are at all driving up and down in a car; because if they did, they'd surely apply some patches. I guess they drive their cushy Land Cruisers or Pajero's, so don't feel the impact of bad road conditions.

Some of the worst parts of the shite-way is just outside and around Nadi. Nadi is one of our main ports of entry. Thousands of tourists pour in and out of Nadi every day and I can't imagine the image they carry of our roads infrastructure. I guess they don't really feel it because they mostly ride around in comfortable tourist coaches or executive limo's with very soft suspensions. It still is inexcusable though, that road conditions especially around Nadi is in such state of neglect.

Let alone the road surface, the signage for most part only include those that indicate humps, speed limit and cattle. In the western division they can't even get the signage for cattle right. It appears more like an ass! Someone blogged about this not to long ago; I just can't find the link right now. Most other standard road signs indicating the type of bend, the steepness of hills, junctions, etc. seems to have disappeared.

The safety of the Nadi-Suva Shite-way is of grave concern. Any road trip on it is nothing less then stressful and it leads to undue fatigue and road rage. People who drive on these roads for a living should consider them OHS non-compliant and take appropriate measures. Unions? Someone's got to do something this. We deserve a lot better.

And it's all thanks to some very bad coaching!

Just finished watching the quarter finals of the Scotland Sevens and watching the Fijians lose to Samoa yet again is heart wrenching. I wonder the kind of mental preparation the team gets before playing the finals stages. The team just never seems to be prepared enough to handle the tougher opponents or the "do or die" situtations. For Nasoni Roko to kick when he knows the support was right behind him is stupefying. For Vunibaka to get held up; what was he thinking!

I often blame bad referring for our losses, but it's time to put the blame sqaurely on the coaching staff. They just don't know what they're doing. We've gone through an entire season without a single IRB Sevens Tournament win. For the current world champions it's an absolute disgrace. There cannot be any more excuses. We need to retain the players and sack the underperforming coaching staff.