Days two and three of our Dunedin adventure were very smooth. I spent some time in the International Student Office filing some paperwork, got our lease signed and paid for, and had a chance to meet with Dan Bendrups to talk about their department and what I’ll be doing for the next six months. After a grand tour of the facilities we got spent an hour talking about my Ph.d. proposal, and the possibility of changing the topic to something more related to my interest – Hawaiian language and its significance to Hawaiian music. While my proposal was to research…
Kia Ora and Aloha From Dunedin!
Greetings to all denizens of the Northern Hemisphere from as close to Antarctica as I ever hope to be! My apologies to everyone for not being in contact sooner. Things were quite hectic as we visited with some friends for our last few hours while in Honolulu on Friday evening. With a very early Saturday morning flight we had no time to read or send emails, and boarded our Auckland-bound flight. We arrived safely in Auckland on Sunday evening (Saturday for you folks on the correct side of the International Date Line) and encountered absolutely no issues with immigration or…
Scobleized Facebook Data Debate
There has been no lack of commentary [ Mulley | Alexia | Nick | Dare ] on Robert Scoble’s use of an unreleased data scraper tool to mine his friends’ personal information from Facebook, and his subsequent explusion from Oz. According to Dave Winer, Robert claims that response has been about 70% in his favor, and 30% siding with Facebook’s response to his actions. My knee-jerk reaction was to side with Robert as I have been acquainted with him since his days at Userland Software and followed him closely through his various ventures since then. I truly believe that he…
Countdown To Liftoff Has Begun
My wife, daughter and I have begun to make final preparations for our trip to Aotearoa. We head to Honolulu on Saturday and from there leave for Auckland on Sunday. Our travel arrangements were finalized over a month ago, and we’re now simply preparing our final checklists and making sure nothing is forgotten. I spent some time this evening going through my computer bag, and found a manila folder full of documents from our aborted trip to Ireland. Contained within it were the refusal letters we were handed after being turned back from the Dublin airport, a faxed copy of…
Boy Killed By Texting Driver
Engadget reports on a driver who not only struck and killed a 13 year old boy, but was so engrossed in his gadget that he was oblivious to what he had done. Thankfully politicians in some places have shown the cajones to put proper laws in place. A few years ago the Hawai‘i legislature meekly discussed the issue of drivers using mobile phones, and was faced by telecommunication industry lobbyists who refuse to acknowledge the dangers of using these devices while driving. In the end the legislature wimped out and there are have been several fatalities due to drivers distracted…
“Why Two Hawaiian Keyboards?”
I frequently get asked the questions, “Why do we need two different Hawaiian keyboards?” and “What is the difference between the Papa Pihi HI and Hawaiian keyboards on the Mac?”. Good questions. There are two different ways to represent the ?okina and kahak? on your computer, and they use two different font technologies. Therefore, we have created two different keyboard layouts. The first keyboard, the Papa Pihi HI uses the “HI” fonts standard developed by Hale Kuamo?o in the early 1990s. Until the development of the Unicode standard and its implementation by software vendors the only way to have the…
Keyboard Switching Problem Fixed in Leopard
I finally got around to installing Leopard on my MacBookPro about a week ago, and am certainly glad I have done so. I really like the “Spaces” (multiple virtual desktops) feature which help reduce monitor clutter when I’m running 20 different applications. I have not come across any progam compatibility issues and speed of launching and running applications seems about the same. I don’t know if the new features justify calling this an “upgrade” and charging for it – it feels more like an incremental update worthy of a 10.4.12 designation. I also have Leopard server, and that does have…
Static Routes On OS X Server
I spent three days at the UH-M?noa campus setting up a new fallback server for Ulukau – a brand new Intel XServe running OS X 10.4 which is identical to the current server. One problem we encountered back when we set up the current Ulukau server back in August was configuring static routes which are required to tie into the Veritas backup system used at the campus’ data center. Mahalo to our friends at Apple for pointing to this post which discusses how to set up static routes on OS X server. The instructions we followed were in a post…
More Immigration Lunacy In Eire
I would not wish upon my worst enemy the experience that my wife, daughter and I had in Ireland. While James Britton’s situation is a bit different than ours, it is no less pathetic. The GNIB wants to deport his 4-year old son! I wish it was possible to sue the country and force them to abandon their “Land of a Thousand Welcomes” motto – it was anything but for us and certainly is not for James. I wish I could offer him some advice, however, as we received no joy by involving the press and politicians (as well meaning…
Hele On to Otago….
The last major question mark for our travel to Aotearoa was answered yesterday when our passports were returned with the proper visas – I as a student and my wife and daughter as visitors. My daughter is enrolled in Logan Park High School which is only a short walk from the flat we have arranged near the university, which is equally close. Our tickets are purchased, and the adventure begins in Honolulu on January 6. We arrive in Auckland on the evening of January 7, and after a brief overnight stay we will fly straight to Dunedin. We’ll have three…