Adobe Flash has to be one of the more polarizing internet technologies out there, people either love it or hate it, but either way, it’s difficult to avoid. It’s used as the default for playing youtube videos, many online browser games, banner adds, “smart” uploaders and a large number of adult websites.

It’s also used for some important systems as well – Air New Zealand make heavy use of it for their Airports membership page (infact it’s not possible to login unless you have flash), which is extremely poor from a large company that should know better, along with a few too many enterprise web applications I’ve come across.

Whilst Flash has had a reputation for poor performance, CPU eating and battery-life killing, these are all implementation faults – the primary issue with Flash has always been that it’s a proprietary application and a proprietary standard.

If Adobe had simply allows Flash to become an open standard and open sourced the flash player, many of the technical issues with it would be resolved by the developer community, and it would become more ubiquitous with ports to other platforms that Adobe might consider “too small” to worth spending developer time with.

Adobe didn’t even release specifications and allow free licensing until 2009 when they kicked off the Open Screen Project and released the specification – but it’s a big catchup game to play for other applications to fully implement the specification needed to support flash applications. And the flash player itself is still fully proprietary, if Adobe doesn’t want to support a platform or a browser, you’re effectively screwed.

Open source projects like Gnash are slowly catching up, when I tried it recently it was good enough to allow me to play Youtube videos and some other flash features, but would fail on more complex applications such as Air New Zealand’s abomination of a website, so depending on your needs, you may still be chained to it.

Flash on Linux has always had a particularly rocky history – historically Adobe made a plugin available but only supported the i386 platform, requiring many years of the use of 32 to 64bit wrapper libraries in order to run Flash on modern 64bit Linux systems, leading to all sorts of wonderful performance, memory and audio issues.

A 64-bit alpha plugin emerged relatively recently and Adobe now supports 64-bit Linux as part of their official downloads, but other platforms such as PPC, MIPS and ARM are still unsupported – an issue which becomes more and more apparent as vendors release ARM based smart-phones and tablets and are unable to install flash player on them.

Adobe has now announced that they will be dropping support for Flash on Linux for anything but Google’s Chrome browser, which has it’s own special build in flash binaries – I suspect this will mean that it won’t extend to supporting the open source build of Chrome (called Chromium) which currently excludes the Flash support.

Of course, for other browser users like myself (eg Firefox), this decision is short sighted and very frustrating – a text book example of the problems with relying on proprietary software and standards.

Thankfully Adobe did at least realise that this decision is going to result in a lot of users sticking with the final 11.2 version on Linux and is promising to support 11.2 with security updates for another 5 years, so at least we won’t have thousands of users running around with vulnerable flash players – Flash Player does have a reputation for security holes after all.

On the positive side, Flash is dying.

Adobe has already announced plans to stop supporting mobile platforms like Android in favor of Adobe Air, although Adobe Air sounds like they’re making the mistakes of Flash all over again, unless they allow fully HTML5 based Air applications to run without need for a browser plugin in future.

Apple has always refused to support Flash on the iOS platform (iphone/ipad) and recently stopped shipping Flash with MacOS on Macbook Air by default. (in a hilariously ironic statement, Apple criticized Flash for being a proprietary locked down platform, whilst happily ruling the iOS platform and App store with an iron fist).

HTML5 along with Javascript is quickly securing it’s place as the web platform of choice for rich UI web application developers and I expect we’ll see more and more tools and frameworks to make working with these technologies easier.

You can even watch Youtube videos in HTML5 if you have a capable browser (recent versions of Chrome or Firefox will work) under their HTML5 trial.

Hopefully projects like Gnash are able to complete their implementation of Flash to a sufficient level to support legacy websites and applications, although by the time this happens, it may be that we won’t need it any more.

If Adobe had just open sourced Flash Player and the standards years ago, maybe this wouldn’t have been the case and we’d all be running stable open Flash implementations already, Adobe only has itself to blame for Flash’s demise.

But they won’t see any tears from me.

mmm latency, delicious delicious latency

I’m living around 8km from the center of Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city, with only 8 mbits down and 0.84 mbits upstream in a very modern building with (presumably) good wiring installed. :’(

The above is what happens to your domestic latency when your server’s cronjobs decide to push 1.8GB of new RPMs up to a public repo, causing the performance to any other hosts to slow to a grinding halt. :-/

On the plus side it did make me aware of a fault in my server setup – one of my VMs was incorrectly set to use my secondary LDAP server as it’s primary authentication source, meaning it called back across the VPN over this DSL connection, so when this performance hit occurred, the server started having weird “hangs” due to processes blocking whilst waiting for authentication attempts to complete.

The sooner we can shift off DSL the better – there’s the possibility that my area might be covered with VDSL, but since I don’t think we’ll be here for too long, I’m not going to go to the effort to look at other access methods.

But I will make sure I carefully consider where UFB is getting laid when I come to buy property….

Makara is a very small rural community near the coastline behind Wellington, only about 30mins drive from the Wellington CBD. Whilst you wouldn’t go there to visit the thriving shopping district or cafe scene (ha!), it is an interesting place for some walks up large hills with amazing views and a slight risk of deadly cliff drops or heart attacks from climbing the steep slopes.

Like most of Wellington, it’s a stony beach so you wouldn’t go there for the soft sand, warm swims and attractive sunbathers, but it does offer a bleakness that is strangely attractive.

No hot sunbathers? Feeling very ripped off.

We took the Maraka Walkway which starts off going steeply uphill through some quite undefined tracks (hint: follow the flattened grass paths), before going up to old WW2 gun emplacements, wandering through the windmills and then back along the coastline.

If one desired, there are longer paths that can be be taken right through the wind farms and into other bays. In theory, if you went far enough along the coast, you would end up going around the southern most point of Wellington and reconnecting to civilization at Red Rocks, or even going up to the Brooklyn wind turbine.

The map doesn't quite give a warning to the steepness, also they weren't kidding with the recommendation for some light walking boots, some of the areas are a bit too muddy and rough for sneakers.

Erect Rocks.

Oh mercieless sea, so strong yet so frail as you fall upon these rocks of land. Ponder thee Tom shall.

Unsure what this building is - it's in the right area on the map for the Pa site that we couldn't see any other trace of, but it's less than 100 yrs old as it's clearly built of cement and steel and not a Pa...

Climbing rapidly...

Looking out from a cliff towards the south island

The path winds along these pretty steep hills, wouldn't want to go for a tumble down one.

Based on the number of these spider nests around, I would *not* want to be doing this walk whenever it is that these things hatch :-/

Unfit Jethro is unfit and generally just a bit hot.

Whilst New Zealand never had enemy troops landing, we did have the odd axis vessel in our waters and a few shipping casualties and flyovers by German and Japanese craft.

During the war a number of gun emplacements were built to fend off invasion and there were American troops stationed in the country, although I don’t know why the Japanese and German forces wasted time/effort with New Zealand, it’s too far away from any action and Australia would be a much better target.

After the war these were mostly dismantled and the guns taken away, although the concrete emplacements were left as-is.

WW2 gun emplacements, sadly the guns are long gone, all that's left are decaying concrete structures, now fenced off due to their unstable nature.

I'm defending the windmills!

Fort Opau Gun Emplacements

Friendly sheep! (Makara Farm is spread over these hills)

The other man-made attraction in this area is the modern Makara windfarm build in 2007-2009 and has 62 turbines producing up to 2.3MW each as Project West Wind (the budget did not extend to original project naming it seems).

I love wind turbines, they look pretty over a countryside, are a clean and effective form of generating power and combined with hydro, could allow New Zealand’s energy production to become completely sustainable.

This particular wind farm had history dating back to 1995 and a number of fights with a group known as the Makara Guardians, made up of a lot of the residents of the area to fight the turbine installation.

This particular selfishness of groups like Makara Guardians really gets to me, New Zealand needs energy and clean renewable sources such as wind and hydro are the best way for us to get them, yet they’re opposed thanks to the “not in our backyard” mentality and quoting invalid pseudoscience to try and justify their arrogance. Would they prefer a coal plant in Makara? Or no power?

Thankfully the environment court ruled in favor of allowing the project to go forwards so the farm was built and from what I see, with minimal impact to the landscape and environment – the sites of each turbine are tidy and minimal and without unpleasant overhead wires between each turbine.

They are also amazingly quiet, it was a light breezy day day, but we couldn’t hear anything until right up close to them and even then they were still far quieter than on-street car noise or other city sounds.

Pretty wind turbines!

These things are big!

REALLY BIG!

No geek could resist a functional diagram and pictures of construction! :-D

After geeking out at Turbines, we headed down to Ohau Bay and then along the coastline all the way back to Makara.

I will note that whilst the map earlier showed this as a path, it’s really not…. once on the beach, there’s a very minimal pathway that’s mostly covered by rubble from the hills or driftwood from the beach, and in a few places actually runs out entirely and the “path” ends up being climbing over rocks whilst the waves crash around you. I have no idea what happens at high tide, it might not be possible to cross some areas at all.

Whilst I got away with sneakers, it was really a case of barely… I’d highly recommend getting some decent walking/tramping boots if attempting this walk, particularly if there’s a chance that the weather might not be the greatest.

Swampy area

Of course, I walked right though it. :-/

Yo dawg, we heard you liked driftwood, so we put some driftwood on your driftwood!

The coastline "path" :-/

Pretty in a bleak way.

Apparently this counts as a "path" :-/

Wouldn't want to be out here during a storm....

Home stretch!

Over all it was a great trip and certainly a bit more challenging walk than the usual well paved ones found around Wellington. It’s pretty exposed so you want some good weather, but if it’s a bit overcast it helps since there’s little shelter from the sun.

It’s been interesting, not a total success yet, I do use my placeholder account from time-to-time to check out the status of particular friends and I’m aware of the loss of certain regular chats I had with people. :-(

On the other hand, it’s been liberating, I’ve been just relaxing, enjoying life as it occurs, rather than feeling a pressing need to tell everyone all about it on a level that detracts from the actual enjoyment of the event itself. I have freedom from petty people dramas and negative input.

At the moment, I’m using the opportunity to ponder what I want to get out of life, taking the time to figure out what’s important to me, what I want to do and where I want to go next.

I’m also just getting out and doing things I want todo – I went for a swim in the sea at Takapuna beach for the first time since a kid with @splatdevil and @pikelet, it was amazing, something I’ve wanted todo again for ages and will have to do more of again soon. I’m even making plans to do a camping trip, almost getting scared at my newfound enthusiasm for outdoors. :-/

When not staring at a smartphone, one can notice these strange green things dotted around the landscape. I believe they're called trees, but I was unable to consult Twitter to confirm.

I love Takapuna beach - great for a swim, but also for just wandering along and hearing the waves crash, clearing your mind.

But it’s not just being outdoorsy, I’m enjoying some of my older habits more, things like sitting outside in the dark listening to rain, whilst pondering code as packages compile in the background, scrolling text up my LCDs.

Even in work I’m feeling more enthusiastic, I had an enjoyable week of doing a number of tricky Linux server upgrades and adjustment for several customers down in Wellington, although I’ll credit a lot of that excitement to being back in Wellington again, rather than to being off Twitter. ;-)

Standing on the apartment balcony at night listening to the rain.

Getting back to my happy place, focusing on the code with the shining brilliance and purity that is the Linux world.

I’m increasingly aware how much distractions such as Twitter and mental consumption of trashy news content wastes my time and potential, so fighting hard to push past these and produce stuff, although daily life always has a way of ensuring that any free time seems to vanish under the always increasing list of tasks that need performing.

I’m also pondering the value of assets and how much material goods distract us, certainly leaning towards the less is more path again, I want to own less and less items and instead accumulate value in the form of experiences, ideas and relationships; rather than short-lifed material positions.

The downside of my introspective gazing is that my more nihilistic side is coming through, analyzing what has happened, what is happening and what has-not-yet-come-to-pass, in increasing levels of detail, which is always a good way to quickly make one-self more depressive.

I guess this is really my way of saying that I’m unhappy with some aspects of my life and I’m working to improve these of myself, removing myself from the tight grasp of Twitter is just one of the first steps, now it’s onto the next. :-)

I was recently reading the Wikipedia article on Douglas Engelbart an early computing visionary and engineer, which had one particular section that caught my eye: “Doug Engelbart’s career was inspired in 1951 when he got engaged and suddenly realized he had no career goals beyond getting a good education and a decent job.“. After this realization he spent some time to determine his philosophy and came away with several goals to work towards, around a general theme of improving the world.

I think I’m at this stage, needing to figure out what my focus should be, I want to work towards some particular focus and to make an impact doing so.

My pondering of wandering the length of NZ still holds some appeal, maybe I should do it end of 2012 and use it for some solid introspective and philosophy determining time. :-)

3 years, 77,135 tweets, 1,437 followers, 1 fiancee #jethrotwitterstats

Twitter has been the scene for many moments of awesome moments, finding love, making friends, whilst at the same time being a place for frustrating debates, loss of privacy and extreme information addiction.

In the week that I’ve been off Twitter on my self-imposed “holiday”, I’ve been more productive and more relaxed than I have been for years, I’m finding time to write blog posts, read more detailed articles and content, hack code and just relax and enjoy living life as it comes.  I’m essentially getting a gift of large amounts of time and I intent to invest this time wisely in pursuit of better goals than I have in the past.

There’s many reasons to terminate my account, some I have touched on previously in much older postings ie The value of a tweet?, others I covered more recently in Infodrugs, however a good summary is:

• Twitter being a centralized, proprietary network controlled by a single company, offering not only a single point of failure, but also a single target for government censorship, regulation and data mining.
• Loss of privacy. The irony here is, we cause ourselves to lose our own privacy by publishing excessive information and then complain when it’s used against us. There is an excellent article about a journalist talking with Eben Moglen about the problem of social networking privacy, where he accuses the journalist of causing the exact problem he is trying to understand. And he’s right.
• Mainstreaming. Twitter is a victim of it’s own success, with increased popularity it’s highly likely that customers, employers, recruiters, ex-lovers and random creepy people will end up following every word you say. Whilst Twitter has always been somewhat open, historically one felt part of a smaller private community. This has been replaced with the equivalent of walking around the main street in town with a megaphone, telling everyone anything and everything.
• Commercialism. So sick of companies trying to use me in their social media strategy, automatically searching for tweets and responding with unhelpful incorrect messages when all I want todo is share frustrations with friends, not justify myself to some marketdroid.
• Unpleasant People. Life is too short to spend any more time reading anything from certain people, in some ways, one advantage of Twiter is the fact that it helps one learn who the crazy unstable individuals are much more quickly than IRL. Pity more people don’t call them on their shit instead of staying silent. I guess that’s my mistake, which leads me to the next point -
• Arguments, oh I’ve started my fair share at times, but I am *so* tired of them. Everything is an argument with some people. Maybe I’d just like to enjoy my fucking coffee whilst complaining about some bigoted conservative political party without you telling me how I went to a crap coffee place and voted wrong.
• Addiction. Twitter is so, so addictive, I was checking for new tweets if I woke up in the middle of the night, everytime I was walking somewhere constantly, through dinners and social events and more. I need to stop and enjoy life more.

Despite these issues, I will be sad to leave – After all, there is of course are reasons that brought me to Twitter in the first place and it will be hard to go without them.

• Twitter is fantastic when single. Just saying. ;-)
• Meeting some amazing people around the world and becoming good friends with a number of them. I even met my (currently) fiancee on Twitter and started our relationship up online.
• Getting great tips and news from the community, rather than mainstream sources – Twitter is *fantastic* as an almost-instant live report on any issues taking place.
• Detailed technical computing discussions with people from a range of areas of the industry I wouldn’t normally talk with, hell even Microsoft employees.

Overall I’m positive that this is the right move and I’m looking forwards to new goals and objectives, but there’s always going to be that bit of sadness too.

I’ll miss a lot of my Twitter friends, but at the same time this doesn’t need to be the end – email me and add me to IM/XMPP to keep in touch, and of course, add this blog to your RSS reader!

I will be maintaining the @jethrocarr account with a new placeholder to keep my name reserved and I may end up setting up an automated feed from my blog there, although RSS is always the best way to get updates.

This is actually the second Sea Shepherd ship I’ve seen IRL, in early 2010 they had the MY Steve Irwin in Wellington and I managed to get some pictures of that then too.

Sea Shepherd is an interesting organization with a background showing that they aren’t afraid to take more extreme actions than just protesting, with past history including ramming whaling ships and contributing towards the sinking of several - reading the fleet history gives a good idea of some of their past exploits.

I can’t stand whalers, they’re ignorantly and blatently killing  extremely intelligent creatures and in the case of Japan, they don’t even have the courage to call the hunt and slaughter what it is, instead calling it “research” and miss-using loopholes in multinational treaties.

The politicians, companies and people involved in whale hunting do nothing but bring shame and condemnation on their countries and deserve to end up on the bottom of the ocean, the sooner the better.

Due to the nature of the work I’m not sure what evenings I’ll be free, but probably be free for dinner on Monday evening and may have other dates available later in the week.

If you’re around and would like to catch up, chuck me an email or comment and we’ll make a time. :-)

My currently frequent circuit is around Takapuna and along the beach which is always enjoyable and certainly very popular with other walkers, joggers, swimmers and other water sports.

Very tempted to go for a swim in the beach in the near future when there’s a nice hot weekend day, it’s certainly popular for that and with the very gradual beach it looks like it’s quite shallow for some way.

Takapuna beach in the evening. I do love coming down here late at night when the beach is almost pitch black and wandering along the beach with only a few other weirdo night owls walking dogs as company.

At the boat ramp end of the beach there is the Takapuna Beach Cafe which offers brunch options including a number of vegetarian options and seems quite popular with the locals, being packed whenever I go there.

I personally don’t rate their food that highly, I think it’s somewhat average and should be better for the premium they charge, although I can’t fault the location and views from there.

Vege brunch at Takapuna Beach Cafe. Looks promising, but didn't really do anything for me, not a huge tomato fan, the hash cake thing was a bit bland and the toast just a bit plain.

View out over Takapuna Beach. Although TBH I prefer the view of all the fine ladies when walking along the beach. ;-)

On the plus side, the beach cafe *does* offer some excellent gelato and the gelato takeaway portion of the cafe is open till late in the evenings even on weekends. It’s better priced and better tasting than the Movenpick along Hurstmare Rd as well.

Always nice stopping for a gelato on the walk, although that’s probably not helping with the whole getting less fat plan. ;-)

I’ve got a pretty good loop circuit from our apartment block, down the highway to Hauraki, along the full length of Takapuna Beach and then back through Takapuna’s shopping district.

The area near Esmonde Rd has a marshy swamp area that’s always interesting, with a seemingly large population of Pukekos living there and wandering out onto the pedestrian area and sometimes even Akaranga bus terminal to say hello.

Pukekos are lurking....

All up it’s a 5.89km walk that takes about an hour (average walking speed of 6.74 km/h) and is reasonably varied, although lacking of any hills. :-(

You can view this map in full size on Google Maps.

I still sit somewhere on the divide, whilst it makes travel from the Mt Victoria tunnel through to the Wellington Motorway (yes, we only have one ;-) much faster, it also contributed to slowing down and congesting traffic up and down Willis/Victoria Streets. If they had only sunk the road as a trenched motorway like originally proposed it would probably have been perfect.

As part of the bypass work, a number of heritage buildings were moved from their original locations and re-assembled in the upper Cuba St area, with the buildings getting fully refurbished, minus the interiors. The originals were quite rundown, but the refurbishment did wonders and left a number of beautiful buildings.

Sadly they then remained empty for years, from what I can tell there was a lot of processes and bureaucracy to go through to contact former land owners (if they even still exist!), determine if Iwi (Indigenous Maori) have interests/rights on the land and other tasks before they finally got released for use once again.

Depressingly most of the new renovated shops quickly filled up with hair and beauty shops at a rate that would have impressed gold mining boom towns, but 272 Cuba St remained empty for a while longer (There’s some pretty cool pictures and background into the building (which was originally 289 Cuba St) on Transit’s website that are worth a look).

Typically just after I end up leaving Wellington, it opened up as Arthur’s, a new cafe offering a vintage/classic style presentation with a great food menu offering the usual options with their own homely twist.

Upper Cuba St has really been lacking good cafes – there’s the well known Fidel’s, but it’s a victim of it’s own success being always packed and hard to find tables in, which doesn’t suit in the early morning when I want somewhere quiet to have a nice meal, coffee and chat with friends. Then there’s also the Southern Cross which is decent enough food, but doesn’t really have that much atmosphere for brunching.

Being in a 1900s heritage building, Arthurs has a nice style that differentiate it from most other places and they’ve really kept that up on the interior and even the food and coffee presentation.

Looks small from the outside, but don't let that fool you - there's a nice quiet upstairs dining area in several different rooms.

I think they might have brought most of the contents of an antiques shop.

I naturally had to try the big vegetarian breakfast option and wasn’t disappointed, with particular praises for their roast potatoes – I’d seriously just eat a giant plate of those alone if possible. ;-)

Being a vegetarian who doesn’t really like green vegetables, the cucumber and broccoli was interesting but not to my tastes, however I’m sure to someone with better tastes than I would enjoy it far more.

Noms! Serving food on plates other than plain white can be risky, but in this case the food still looks great and it gives it a bit of a homely feel.

One of the more interesting cups I've seen a flat white served in.... not sure this works for me, just looks a bit wrong IMHO.

Mocha - love their vintage spoons, often with Kiwiana themes.

Somewhat average iced coffee, but I'm bloody ruthless with my iced coffee ratings as I forever lament the loss of my beloved Kaptio iced coffees and nothing comes close for me. :'(

Overall I really enjoyed it and I would see it easily becoming one of my regular brunch location for weekends if I was still in Wellington, so well worth going and checking out.

In doing some research for this post, I also found a post about Arthurs on Foodie Gems of Wellie, that’s worth a read, looks like an interesting blog too.

There’s limited selection of food out where I live in Takapuna – about enough for one of each major food category – and Auckland seems to suffer from quite vegetarian-unfriendly menus, leading to many of my dining options consisting of some basic form of pizza. Or chips. :-/

Worst yet, has been the coffee. I’m beginning to suspect that there is an Auckland city bylaw that forbids good coffee places from opening up and instead mandating nasty Starbucks, Esquires or some other mortal sin.

Such a crime would be unforgivable in Wellington, a city that expects so much of it’s coffee venues that a Starbucks on the major CBD street closed down and was replaced with a local company, Mojo Coffee.

In short, I’ve had to endure horrors that no Wellingtonian should have to face and am forever scared and tormented in response.

However I’ve thankfully discovered Shaky Isles, who have a branch in Britomart near the main bus/train terminal as well as another branch in Kingsland. And they actually make a pretty decent coffee, along with some great food for vegetarians and less enlightened individuals alike. :-)

"Vegge's Have It All". Whilst a nice meal, I did find it a bit too much for me, so would advise leaving this one for when you're really hungry and want a healthier option than a typical eggs/fried breakfast.

The delicious vegetarian "Shaky Hash". It doesn't look huge, but it's damn delicious and I found it just the right size meal for a breakfast/brunch. It's actually probably my favourite item on their menu now.

If you fancy pancakes, Shaky has a number of options labelled as "pikelets" with vegetarian and bacon-lover variaties. In reality, they are somewhere in between pikelets and pancakes...

And of course the most important bit – coffee. :-)

Shaky has a pretty good coffee selection, good brew and consistency and several bean options to choose from, along with recommendations of beans for coffee type matches.

But to make me really happy, they have a delicious Whittakers chocolate mocha, with a Whittakers Sante Bar served in the coffee, quickly melting into the cup before your eyes.

(Yes I realize that a mocha does impact the enjoyment of the coffee itself, but damn if it isn’t delicious. Their other coffees are excellent too. :-)

Delicious melty Whittakers chocolate mocha <3

My only major complaint with Shaky Isles is that their website is a flash-only abomination, but thankfully I can deep link to their food menu (JPG) and their separate coffee/drinks menu (PDF) so all those of you without flash can still see. :-)

Shaky Isles can also be a bit confusing upon entry, with a counter for ordering takeaway coffee or food from the display, as well as a table service for diners. But it’s never quite clear upon entry whether you are supposed to wait to be seated or just go grab a table – these days grabbing some menus and going and finding a table seems to work OK for us, but making it a little clearer for customers could be nice to avoid confused loitering by the counter.

Service is usually pretty good, although I find that their table service makes the mistake of not checking for additional drinks or bringing water, something that is annoyingly common with NZ cafes.  It also surprises me that so many cafes get the drinks thing wrong – drinks are a great money earner, so forgetting to ask diners if they would like additional drinks is probably leading to a lot of lost revenue potential. And having no water on the table can quickly lead to a reduction of meal enjoyment when a bit thirsty and having to ask for it gets annoying fast.

Overall it’s great cafe for food and coffee and I recommend it – I expect I’ll be there often on weekends when visiting the CBD. :-)