The result of my commit was weird though:

Error: transaction abort! rollback completed abort: decoding near ‘ailbox, we’re not’: ‘ascii’ codec can’t decode byte 0xe2 in position 24: ordinal not in range(128)!

Error message on commit

What had happened? Basically – I copied some content for the commit message from a Skype discussion I was having with someone over exactly the bug fix I was going to commit. What I didn’t realise was that the apostrophe in “we’re” wasn’t an ascii-character compatible apostrophe, but a typographic apostrophe from within Skype. Anyway – it seems that this made the commit fail (It didn’t help that I didn’t read the message properly at first and though that something was wrong with me repo

Special characters in Hg Commit comments is a post from: Blog in Black

You might just know Adobe Connect from using Adobe’s hosted SaaS, but Adobe sells Adobe Connect as a so called licensed version – you buy licenses and can host it yourself within the IT structure of your organisation. Adobe Connect 8 is a Java-based web application that’s bundled with Apache Tomcat.

When users upload content such as slides, videos, documents etc to the Adobe Connect server, Connect will ask the user to provide a server-unique URL – if the user doesn’t, Connect will store the content under a self-created and unique URL.

Essentially, you might end up with something like http://yourserver.whatever/myContent or http://yourserver.whatever/p/6554787856. That’s usually fine because if the requested content item is available, Adobe Connect will return the content and the HTTP response has an HTTP status code of 200 – as it should be.

It gets interesting as soon as the user requests a URL that doesn’t exist. This might happen accidentally (user error or typo) but in some instances it also might happen on purpose. For example: One is loading 3rd-party eLearning courses into Connect that use their own course content launcher – which would as such during the initialisation of the course test the existence of some files on the HTTP server it’s running on. In such a scenario, the course launcher might or might not request a resource that doesn’t exist.

Now – we all know what a good HTTP server would do here, right? Correct – it would return an error page of some kind and the HTTP status code would be 404. This is what HTTP servers do for quite a while now.

Not Adobe Connect though. If one requests a non-existing resource it will return a nicely designed error page, but the HTTP status code of the response is 200 for “OK”. Clearly that’s not the intention of the semantic of the HTTP protocol. I can even see where that thinking is coming from – the Connect web application is returning a pretty page, so from the point of view of the developers it might even be a valid request. Unfortunately this type of thinking fundamentally breaks the web.

By now you have surely figured out that I actually had to deal with exactly this scenario. I had a look into a few options of tweaking both the Tomcat as well as the Adobe Connect configuration but can’t see an easy solution. The best idea I can come up with is writing a ServletFilter that intercepts the HTTP response and modifies the HTTP status code to what I want it to be.

The problem with this solution though is that it’d be an annoying hack and would prob. be broken after the next Adobe Connect 8 Service Pack. The only criteria for me to actually know if the status code has to be changed would be the content of the response payload. If said content looked like an error page (maybe I could grab the page title – but then I’d have to deal with it in multiple locales to do it properly), this would be the indication to change the HTTP status code to 404. I suppose everyone can say why this gets more hacky by the minute…

Obviously we logged a support ticket with Adobe’s Enterprise Support – unfortunately without result. According to Adobe it’s not possible to achieve what I want to do here (simply getting a 404 status code if the resource doesn’t exist). If anyone has another good idea as an alternative to the ServletFilter I mentioned in the paragraph above – please let me know.

Adobe Connect and HTTP status codes is a post from: Blog in Black

The easiest way would obviously be to install the software in a virtual machine and to run just Windows in such a VM with VMWare Fusion or Parallels. That’s what I usually do whenever I need to run a Windows system for development or for a certain client setup. With this flight planning software it’s a bit different as it’s really just a stand-alone software I’d like to run within OS X. So, I thought I’d give Wine a try.

Wine is a software that emulates a Windows environment via X11. It’s available for various *nix platforms and also via Macports for OS X. The installation is quite simple if you have Macports already installed (if not, follow this great tutorial from David Baumgold on how to setup Wine with Macports from scratch):

sudo port install wine

That’ll give you a working installation of Wine and you should be able to run/install Windows software (note: not every software might work easily within Wine) with:

wine whatever.exe

All that went good and well. The only issue was that I wasn’t able to print from the flight planning software. For obvious reasons I wanted to be able to print the flight plans/maps I’ve created to take them on the plane. I did some investigation and some people suggested installing CUPS-pdf. CUPS-pdf is basically a “Print to PDF”-feature for CUPS-based printing systems (as OS X is). It’s actually quite cool as it also allows one to print to PDF from the command line. CUPS-pdf is part of Macports as well and can installed by the same mechanism via port install.

Unfortunately that didn’t solve the issue. There’s a bug report on issues with Wine and OSX printing with the resolution of it being an issue in the Wine bundle within Macports not being configured for CUPS. I uninstalled Wine and installed Wine-devel instead (which is supposed to be on a version where the bundling is fixed). Still no solution for printing.

At this stage (and because I found a few more reports from people having issues with the particular combination of Macports and Wine) I resorted back to using Wineskin. Wineskin is a tool that essentially creates a Mac application wrapper around your Windows application by using an embedded version of Wine. It’s actually quite cool because it makes the experience of running a Windows application even more integrated with your Mac.

The welcome surprise – within Wineskin, I automatically had access to the pdf printer installed by CUPS-pdf and happy flight planning is on the way

Printing from Wine on OS X is a post from: Blog in Black

Let me briefly explain: D2WC is a conference about and for designers, developers, hybrid and the famous designer-developer workflow. It will go into its third iteration in 2012 and after Dee Sadler was originally trying to get me involved with the event already in 2010, I finally went in 2011 and had a great time over there (you can find my 2011 talk on Slideshare).

Apart from the fact that D2WC was an excellent conference where I met a lot of inspirational and fun people (including – but not limited to - Dave, Val and Seb) Kansas City was also a very pleasant surprise as a place to hold it and stay for a few days. The city is really interesting and has an very cool mix of beautiful old buildings and new, modern skyscrapers. Besides that I went flying – and even got some proper IFR done while I was there – went to two really good museum and discovered the area around KC a little bit.

Anyway – D2WC is back in 2012 and if you’re looking at the list of speakers on the website you might be impressed. If you’re in the US and involved with design and (web) development or work in hybrid teams, it’s a conference you should seriously consider. Even if you’re overseas, it’ll be a really worthwhile event to attend – trust me and the 7938 miles I have to travel (in a direct line) to get there.

My talk at D2WC 2012 will be about AngularJS – a very, very awesome Javascript framework:

AngularJS for developers and designers

AngularJS is a Javascript framework that comes with the subtitle “What HTML would have been had it been designed for web apps”. This talk introduces AngularJS briefly and will then show why it’s one of the best application frameworks based on the HTML5/JS/CSS-stack out there. AngularJS’ templating system and data binding mechanism usually lead to well defined responsibilities for both designers and developers. While going through the workflow of building an AngularJS app we will have a look at the different interaction points between design and development and you’ll learn how the framework helps both roles to build a well working application as well as how to create clean and maintainable front end markup and code.

I will also offer a 1/2-day hands-on workshop on May 16 (the day before the conference-proper), also on AngularJS:

A better way to build apps with JavaScript: AngularJS

AngularJS is a Javascript framework that comes with the subtitle “What HTML would have been had it been designed for web apps”. With HTML5 currently being overhyped and both Adobe as well as Microsoft turning the back to their former plugin-based poster children Flash/Flex and Silverlight, a lot of web developers ask themselves: “Now what?”. The technology stack of HTML5/JS and CSS will obviously play a more and more important role in the future; the frameworks, libraries and tools we have at hand do not quite compare to what the aforementioned plugin environments can provide though.

This becomes clear in particular when we’re trying to build complex but still well structured applications in HTML and Javascript. Even the use of frameworks such as jQuery, ExtJS etc will in many cases lead to an unfavourable architectural structure. AngularJS tried to overcome those issues and provide developers with an MVC-based architecture, Dependency Injection and Data Binding. The best is – it still works fine in combination with the JS libraries of your choice, there’s no need to drop tools like jQuery.

In this half-day hands-on class we’re going to get you started with application development in AngularJS. You should have a good working knowledge of HTML and Javascript, jQuery experience is useful, but not necessary. Topics will be: Templating, the MVC pattern in general and with AngularJS, Data Binding, View Routing and service and external resource integration.

Why would anyone travel from New Zealand to Kansas City, MO? D2WC! is a post from: Blog in Black

Demanded by Terry Ryan, this is a blog post about a terrible Adobe support experience and the solution to a problem that happened to me a few week ago (Well, Terry only asked me to blog the solution – but I think it’s fair to also tell the support story here)

All of a sudden my Creative Suite CS 5.5 license on my Mac didn’t activate anymore. Quite annoying when you’re sort of relying on it as the tools of your trade. I didn’t want to go in depth into the support experience I  had with Adobe’s first level support – let me just say it came quite close to the most useless 3-4 hours of my life (“Is your network switched on?”, “Have you rebooted?” etc). Adobe’s end customer product support is absolutely ridiculous (as many other people have previously talked about).

Anyway – after the problem of non-activating Creative Suites had spread to a few other installations we have and Adobe support wasn’t interested to help at all, I had to resort to actually “work around” the issue – e.g. hacking my way to a solution. Amazing how that solved the problem within ca two minutes for me after Adobe wasn’t able to help. Being me, I created some noise on Twitter, on internal Adobe community mailing lists as well as with the local Adobe NZ office.

The fix:

Finally my issue was escalated high enough that I was put with someone at Adobe support for the activation system who actually knew what he was talking about and interesting/enabled to help. It took him about 5 minutes on the phone with me to identify the issue and guess what – it was an issue with the Adobe activation system and the New Zealand timezone. (GMT+13 at the moment). I pretty much had to delete some old activation files on my hard drive, change my timezone to UK, activate while I was in that timezone and then change it back to NZDT. Easy fix.

Bugs like that can happen, I write software myself and I can absolutely understand. What I don’t understand and tolerate is shitty customer support though. Adobe got me to the point where I had to use technically illegal measures to actually put my software temporarily into a working state. Is that how you should treat your customers? The answer is quite frankly: no.

It’s not even that hard to improve:

- Empower your support reps to make actual decisions and give them the knowledge to do so (as a side note – just I personally know 4-5 more organisations/individuals who ran into this issue and Adobe has over the time of it occurring – ca. 4 weeks – not ever updated the scripts for their first level support).

- Software activation sucks because it’s the most annoying thing ever for your honest customers when it fails (as my case here clearly shows). At the same time, it’s tremendously easy to find a way around it if one needs to (again as my case here clearly shows – and I’m not even a professional hacker/cracker). As a software vendor you don’t gain anything but bad karma, really.

- If your providing “support” via Twitter – make sure you invest into a good & consistent follow-up system if more than one person provide support via Twitter. I can’t count the number of times that @Adobe_Care have asked me the same details of my problem over and over again (different people or people not realizing that I was still talking about the same problem etc).

Is there hope for the quality of Adobe’s support? Well, there’s always hope, isn’t it? Am I dreaming here?

Creative Suite CS 5.5 doesn’t activate? is a post from: Blog in Black

As a lot of people know, webDU (formerly known as MXDU) is a very special conference for Diane and I (first AU trip ever in 2003, got married there in 2004, decided to move to the southern hemisphere in 2005 and many more reasons…) and we’re always again looking very forward to it. For me it’s an absolute no-brainer to attend because it’s an awesome conference and it’s pretty much like coming home to a big family  - I also need to make sure I’m staying part of the shrinking group of people who presented at every single MXDU and webDU since the first one in 2003 – I think we’re down to three people by now *g*.

This year’s event will have a focus on three big streams: Beyond HTML, Experience and Team. I think Geoff is doing exactly the right thing by moving webDU towards also covering rather “soft” topics such as Experience and Team. The good thing with those topics is that the tracks can easily comprise of both technical and non-technical talks which will create a very nice mix and will ensure that people with a variety of backgrounds get involved and interested. Yay webDU 2011.

cf.Objective(ANZ) 2010 is over – here comes webDU 2011 is a post from: Blog in Black

All in all I think it went great. We moved to a new venue that turned out to be much better re location, conference area and food. The wifi and the internet connection was one of the best wifi networks I’ve ever seen at a conference all over the world – setup and managed by the awesome folks of Nodecity.

I don’t have the final numbers yet, but I think we’ve grown the attendee base slightly compared to 2009, a big thanks to everyone who attended. The whole conference wouldn’t have been possible though without our awesome speakers and sponsors. I feel we’ve managed to put together a very nice mix of locals and international presenters as well as alumni and fresh talent . Offering full-day workshops at this year’s event for the first time, I was a bit unsure how they would be perceived by the target audience and I’m also extremely pleased with the outcome of those. The three workshops attracted 12, 8 and 5 participants each which is much more than I anticipated. Again: Big thumbs up everyone!

I’m sure more people will blog about the Melbourne conference and I’ve seen on Twitter that a few folks already have started to post their presentations on the various slide sharing services. A good starting point might be to search for the cfoanz hashtag

All that being said – cf.Objective(US) 2011 is approaching soon (Mid May 2011 and to be held in Minneapolis). Sean Corfield has passed the torch of content chair to Bob Silverberg (have a look at Bob’s post if you’re interested in presenting or learning more about the process of how cf.Objective(US) is going to work out their agenda) and I’m sure it’s going to be a great event again. Check it out!

cf.Objective(ANZ) 2010 is over – here comes cf.Objective(US) 2011 is a post from: Blog in Black

Read that as: Mac OS X 10.7 won’t have Java (by Apple), maybe we’re lucky and get the 10.6 update 3 thrown into OS X 10.7, but maybe not. To be fair – Apple was never a big and fast supporter of Java on OS X, for them to release Java 6 and 64-bit versions of the runtime was apparently a major drama so that a bunch of Java developers on the Mac at some point in time just switched to SoyLatte, a FreeBSD port of Java 6. That worked and still works fine for a lot of server applications such as Tomcat.

This solution has an issue though when it comes to desktop applications as those would quite often require Java APIs such as Sound/AWT/Swing etc. Through SoyLatte one’d have to use X11 and not the native Mac UI because the problem is that those APIs tie into the underlying operating system APIs and if Apple is not keen/interested in actively supporting a tie of Java into those for OS X, who is?

A lot of chat, gossiping and commenting went on in the java/mac/webdev communities during the last few days and I have to say I’m not thrilled about Apple going down that way. For me it’s another step towards the “there is just solely our way”-attitude that they put to show when it came to Flash on the iPhone, allowing non-Objective C-apps to the app store and on other occasions such as not installing Flash Player with OS X 10.6 on the new MacBook AIR laptops/netbooks (silly game, Apple). A lot of people were recently saying that “Adobe was the new Microsoft”. Well, I might be able to see where some of those people come from, but if that was the case then Apple would be the new Microsoft to at least the same extent – if not worse

But that’s not the point I wanted to make anyway. I had a look at which Java desktop apps I’m actually running on my Mac(s). The most important one is Eclipse in a variety of flavours: Eclipse, ColdFusion Builder, Flash Builder, FDT and some others. If I couldn’t easily run Eclipse in the future that’d be a major issue. Then: IntelliJ IDEA, Aqua Data Studio and a whole bunch of little Java apps for JVM and GC monitoring or tools of a similar category.

This afternoon I got into a Twitter discussion with @BruceHoult about the whole topic. “Unfortunately” he made a point when he said: “their stance that you can install whatever you like but they’re not going to maintain them for you, you mean?”. Yes, why should Apple maintain and support Oracle’s platform? Is Microsoft maintaining the JDK/JRE for Oracle? Probably not (but I don’t know). Side note: This example doesn’t hold for the Flash/iphone situation though as I really can’t install what I want on the iPhone/iPad because Apple would not allow a Flash Player into the app store.

Where does that leave us (or rather me)? Basically I need and want Eclipse to run on future versions of Mac OS X, otherwise the Mac platform would be as dead as it could be for me as a development platform. Luckily, that’s doable with SoyLatte and OpenJDK today as shown here: http://njbartlett.name/2010/10/24/eclipse-soylatte-no-x11.html. This solution might not yet offer the best and greatest performance ever yet, but I’m sure that people will put effort into OpenJDK for OS X re performance and additional functionality. Don’t underestimate the financial & time investments software vendors like Adobe have made into the Eclipse platform. Just alone Flash Builder, ColdFusion Builder and Flash Catalyst are built on top of Eclipse and the amount of Adobe-related development happening on OS X is still very high, even though SJ and Apple have pissed off the Adobe community to a certain extent.

Another very interesting piece to read is shoes[1].drop(); – basically saying, stop whining, the Java-on-desktop API model was flawed anyway and it’s up to Oracle to come up with a proper strategy for Java 7 and 8. This post does have a lot of merit, I still don’t see Java on the desktop on OS X being dead (yet).

Some thoughts on Java, OS X, Eclipse and others is a post from: Blog in Black

Day 12- How you found out about Blogger and why you made one

This doesn’t quite apply, but anyway. This blog started on Moveable Type in 2003, a few months later it was converted to be a mixture of MT code with add-ons written in ColdFusion and nowadays I’m running WordPress. Why did we start this? There was a need for a ColdFusion-blog in German back in 2003

Day 13- A letter to someone who has hurt you recently

Actually, I haven’t been that badly hurt for quite a long time to have the need to write such a letter. Even if I had, not sure if I would post it here.

Day 14- A picture of you and your family

Well, close Here’s a photo of my dad and my mum. I took it (reasonably) recently when I was in Germany in May/June this year.

Day 15- Put your iPod on shuffle: First 10 songs that play

Midnight Lady – Chris Norman
Things Change – Bluetones
Whiskeyclone – Beck
Not that kind – Anastacia
See you in hell – Suicide Commando
Pervert – Descendents
Stand in Line – Midnight Oil
Piano Man – Billy Joel
Mother Night – Brett Anderson
Burger Queen – Placebo

Day 16- Another picture of yourself

Oh, seriously? Don’t have any.

Day 17- Someone you would want to switch lives with for one day and why

Actually – the only person (and it’s not even a real character – sigh) I could remotely come up with would be The Doctor.

Day 18- Plans/dreams/goals you have

1. Make sure that @blauerpunto gets fit and healthy again

From here on in no particular order:

• Make some progress on the flying front, particularly on working towards the Commercial License
• Pay off mortgage
• Get a holiday house/apartment at the Gold Coast and spend 4-5 months per year there and the rest of the time in Wellington
• Re-cofirm our wedding vowels on the 10th anniversary of our wedding somewhere on the equator (to be worked out where
• Travel to South America, in particular Chile, Peru, Argentina and Uruguay
• Go back to Japan for at least two more weeks and finally have a holiday on one of the Pacific Islands

Day 19- Nicknames you have; why do you have them

Koeni (also see koeni.de) – just because

Day 20- Someone you see yourself marrying/being with in the future

Ehh, that’d be Diane (@blauerpunto)

30 days of me – days 12 to 20 is a post from: Blog in Black

30 days of me – day 11 is a post from: Blog in Black

Some from the “Happy” playlist:

“Who’s that girl” – Madonna
“Catch me” – Bandits
“51st state” – New Model Army

There’s also a “Dark” playlist:

“Weak” – Skunk Anansie
“Hate this and I’ll love you” – Muse
“Weeping willow” – The Verve

And also a “Work mood” one, which is based on “Blue Sky Mine” by Midnight Oil and then derived from Genius.

30 days of me – a delayed day 10 is a post from: Blog in Black

Today’s topic is “Something I’m proud of in the past few days”… Probably the thing that comes to mind was pulling off Flash Platform Camp for the second time now in 2010 about two weeks ago together with Diane and Ross. Other than that in the last few days and weeks – lots of business as usual – as boring as it might sound

30 days of me – day 9 is a post from: Blog in Black

The overall results were pretty poor. Of the three big carriers (all very vocal and active on Twitter as long as it’s about pushing out their messages) one delivered a proper response. Another one sent a tweet saying their marketing department needs to look into that and the last one sent a tweet to a plan that didn’t fit the bill for what the challenge was.

Results (now it’s 8:30 pm) in order of how they arrived:

12:52 pm

2degrees mobile left a comment in the original post. They provided both a prepaid and postpaid (“pay monthly” with in fact a one month term in their terminology) option. Both look very reasonable to me with NZ$ 50 resp. NZ$ 59 and similar offerings. To be fair – the more expensive one actually does offer more voice minutes, more TXT and less hassle re keeping credit in the prepaid account etc – so for me it would be the preferred option. Here’s what 2degrees suggested:

—

Hello Kai (aka Agent K).

This is pretty simple for us (and we don’t like to make things complicated for our customers anyway!)

We’ve given you two options. One for a person who prefers Prepay and one who’d like to pay later (Pay Monthly).

OPTION 1 – Pay Monthly
1)120 minutes to anyone, anytime and anywhere in NZ
2)600 text to any network, anytime in NZ
3)512MB data
TOTAL: $59.00
(Note this is the purchase of a new 2degrees Pay Monthly no contract, no term plan for $39.00 and a 512MB data pack for $20. Two more important things to note, with Pay Monthly you get to carryover any unused minutes you might have at the end of the month, every month for a year and the 512MB data pack is currently being upsized to 1GB and does only work in our mobile broadband zones).

OPTION 2 – Prepay
1) 100 minutes to anyone, anytime and anywhere in NZ
2) 300 text to any network, anytime in NZ
3) 512MB data.
TOTAL: $50.00
(Note this based on pre-pay top up where if you top up your account with $30 you get 300 FREE text. With your $30 top up purchase an Everyone100 Talk Pack for $30 and then a 512MB data pack (as per the details above) for $20.

Thanks!
The team at 2degrees

—

Comparing their suggestion with the framework I’ve set I have to say it works out nicely. It would be nice if there was a bit more data, but I asked for a minimum of 500 MB and 512 MB is what I would get. Fair enough.

1:53 pm

A tweet from @VodafoneNZ: “@agentK Have send your requeset down to our marketing types, but can’t promise a 5:30pm answer (actually, can’t promise an answer) ^ME”

I’ve heard nothing more from them. No further comment and that.is.all.

4:14 pm

Oh look, a tweet from @TelecomNZ: “@agentK Talk and Text 300 baby! 300 off peak mins, 300 texts, 20 peak mins. $344.80 of value for $29.95 : http://cot.ag/aQgZxc ^TS”

Well – short response but who cares if it’s to the point. Unfortunately it isn’t. The package they’d suggested (follow their link for more) hugely favours off-peak talking and just 20 peak minutes. That’s fair enough and I maybe wasn’t specific enough on that in my task. One could also argue that if I’m asking for 60-120 minutes of which 30 are to a particular person certainly a share of those minutes would be in off-peak time. So – I’m not blaming them for that glitch.

Why they failed massively though is that the plan doesn’t contain data. Not at all. So – Dear friends at Telecom – incomplete.

Wrap-up

On a good note – they all responded after I posted the links to the challenge to their Twitter accounts.

3. Vodafone NZ comes last though because they got stuck in their global corporate bureaucracy and didn’t provide a response.

2. Telecom NZ comes second (but pretty close to last) for not really understanding the task.

1. 2degrees mobile wins because they responded fast and appropriately and their offering looks good (at least on paper, this is not a test on network speed, availability, quality of service etc).

I don’t want to speculate on why the responses of Vodafone and Telecom ended up being what they were, they might have had their reasons for not responding to the challenge or delivering a response that didn’t fit the bill. Unfortunately the outcome pretty much confirms my personal expectations.

Results of the NZ mobile carrier Friday challenge is a post from: Blog in Black

One of the most expensive services in New Zealand (compared to pricing in other countries as well as the average income and cost of living) is using a mobile phone and in particularly data on a mobile phone. At this stage New Zealanders can use three mobile networks, provided by Vodafone NZ, Telecom NZ and 2degrees mobile. There are also a few virtual network operators like Orcon, Compass Communications and others who pretty much re-bundle offerings from one of the three large players under their own brand – I’ll keep them at the side at this stage.

2degrees mobile is the newest competitor and have so far just offered a prepaid service as well as mobile data bundles attached to said prepaid service. Both Vodafone and Telecom offer a full set of services for personal/business purposes, prepaid/postpaid, a variety of plans with lots of (complicated) rules to get in and out of those offerings.

Today 2degrees mobile have launched their really interesting Pay Monthly offering. This morning I had a quick look at it and was tweeting:

@2degreesmobile Pay monthly is charming. 39$ for 120 mins/600txt plus 20$ for 512/1GB data is much cheaper than @vodafoneNZ and @TelecomNZ

I got some interesting responses from both @2degreesmobile as well as @vodafoneNZ which led into an brief pinging back and forth of further tweets. @vodafoneNZ’s main argument was that my tweet is a somewhat distorted view on things because it doesn’t inlcude a whole bunch of package deals they offer, e.g. bestmate, TXT2000 etc. There’s some truth to that and I do acknowledge that different people have different requirements. So – how about a challenge for the three incumbents – here’s a scenario with some realistic and reasonably loose defined parameters, come up with a good as well as cheap solution.

Scenario

Needed is a combination of voice, TXT and data. PXT is nice to have, but not essential. The user has one person on the same network (but said person would be willing to move network with our user) they talk to quite often, about 30 minutes per month. They also regularly send TXTs to each other, about 50 per month. Both pre-paid and post-paid offerings would be fine. No or very short-term (0-3 months) preferred, 12 months doable in case of a decent incentive and a 24 months commitment would have to provide some real big incentives and reasonable break fees (if needed).

Here are some more details:

Voice: 60-120 minutes per month across all networks and landlines in NZ. There’s no need for cheaper or free minutes on weekends or to a specific mobile network. If those are part of a good package deal it’s ok though. The 60-120 minutes already include the 30 minutes to that “special person” from above.

Note: 2degrees has an interesting new concept of “rollover” unused minutes into the next month. That’s fine but shouldn’t play into this, otherwise it’d be an obvious decision for one network.

TXT: Our user normally sends a maximum of 100 TXTs per month across all mobile networks, those include the 50 to the “special person”. In the odd month is might be 150 but many more would be extremely rare.

Data: The user needs a decent amount of mobile data – 500+ MB is considered decent enough. There’s no point in 50/100 MB packages or alike; the user also doesn’t need 2 or 3 GB of data for significant amounts of extra money (if they come part of a package deal that’s otherwise competitive it’s not a show-stopper).

Note: speed is not a concern, e.g. we assume the user doesn’t care about the fact that some mobile networks in NZ might offer better 3G speeds than others.

Task

What I’d like to see from any of the network operators who’re interesting in taking this challenge, is to present me up to three options (I acknowledge that each carrier has their own model of packaging and bundling things – so a bit of flexibility might be needed). Treat this as if I was a customer willing to join your network and potentially leave up to about NZ$1,500-2,000 in your accounts during the next 2 years. If you like, present an option for each no-term, 12 months and 24 months. Or – maybe each of your three offerings is tailored towards voice, txt and data to cater for slightly different user types. Be creative.

Either post into the comments, or ping me an email to kai@(thisdomain) or get in touch with me via Twitter. I look forward to hearing from you. Deadline is close of business today – let’s say 5:30 pm. I’ll write a few more posts about the offered solutions early next week.

A Friday challenge for Vodafone NZ, Telecom NZ and 2degrees Mobile is a post from: Blog in Black

Today topic is three short-term goals for this month. 14 more days…

How about:

- Releasing part of a project/rebuilt I’ve been working on with a client for the last 2 months or so (next week to one site, then roll-out to 30+ sites)

- Finally getting round to get some flying: 2 flights until the end of the month

- Starting to prepare for at least one of the 4 Adobe certification (upgrade) exams I want to do by the end of the year.

30 days of me – day 8 is a post from: Blog in Black

I actually thought quite a bit about that. Obvious answers would probably have been: My parents (and their way of upbringing me), Diane, my/our friends, my work, our move to the other end of the world and some other things. I think all of those would have been totally valid ideas. I decided to go with someone different for day 7 though.

The person I chose is my maths teacher in years 5 and 6 (which are the first two years in high school in Germany, you’d roughly be 10-12 years old). His name is Stefan Kottwitz and he managed to ignite my interest in maths and logic, in solving puzzles and in solving problems in a logical way at a young age. Even better was that he became my maths teacher again in years 11 to 13 for the advanced maths classes (in the German A-levels system you have to pick two subjects as advanced/major subjects – no one would be surprised to learn that mine were maths and physics, would you?).

I actually think that those three years had even more impact on my decision to undertake my maths degree and due to some very weird and probably lucky circumstances to end up right here and right now in Wellington, doing what I do. Some other memories include an awesome one-week sailing trip with said advances maths course to Holland in year 12, lots of games of the traditional card game “Doppelkopf” in the breaks between the lesson and him being one of the first teachers we were allowed to approach using the informal “Du” instead of “Sie” (the German language and culture is very clear and strict on when and how to use the formal vs. the informal equivalent of the English “you”). The latter was particularly an honour because his teaching style was at the time perceived by some people as quite strict. I actually never felt about it that way. I always thought – and still think – he is absolutely fair to everyone, the marks one got absolutely reflected one’s skills – as it should be. He’s also a magician doing awesome tricks with all sorts of stuff!

And after all the writing, here’s the photo. It shows us in year 5 – first year of high school. I guess it’s quite obvious that he’s the happy, smiling guy on the left side of the photo . This photo was taken in 1985 – maybe in early 1986.

To make things a bit more interesting, here are some tasks for the readers – use the full size photo for it.

- Identify me

- Go back to my day 3 post and identify Katja and Corinna (of the first photo in the day 3 post)

30 days of me – day 7 is a post from: Blog in Black

Why? He’s helpful, rapid and just super. If you want to learn more about him (and also Flash, Flex and the “special” friendship between Breeze and Dreamweaver) watch the following awesome Nectarine animations:

MXDU 2005 (day 1 and 2)

webDU 2006 (day 1)

Flash 8

Flash tenth anniversary

30 days of me – day 6 is a post from: Blog in Black

At the moment, 7 presenters have supplied me with their content, I’ve got another one or two emails in my inbox that need to be processed and we’re adding more content as is comes in. Have a look at the Flash Platform Camp Wellington wiki and get the files you’re interested in.

Flash Platform Camp Wellington presentations is a post from: Blog in Black

The picture is taken in May or June 2010 when I was in Berlin to moderate RIA-Day (and also presented myself at Webinale 2010). The Tempelhof trip was joined by JJ and Justin, a very fun day!

30 days of me – day 5 is a post from: Blog in Black

“Kai’s a smart-ass and thinks he knows more about XYZ (insert a random topic here) than everyone else.”

Unfortunately there’s some truth in that – I might show small tendencies of being a smart-ass sometimes. Not often though. And usually I am right – and that brings us to the second point:

“Kai will very clearly express ‘I told you so’ if you didn’t listen to his advice and he ended up being right”

That IS actually true. If you want to be friends with me or work with me don’t expect me to politely pussyfoot around issues. I’m very direct – on the other hand I can actually handle very direct and open criticism extremely well myself.

I guess that’s at least partly due to my background of coming from a non-PC country like Germany where people will clearly tell you (in a work environment and in private relationships) when you’re doing things the wrong way or produce sub-standard quality etc. I found it tricky to work with some people in NZ in a few instances because they couldn’t handle my direct way of communicating with them. But hey – there are lots of other instances where folks actually appreciated exactly that fact.

30 days of me – day 4 is a post from: Blog in Black