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Sunday, August 31st, 2008To the casual outsider, it beggars imagination that most of the people responsible for the ungodly political mess of the 1990s still enjoy broad voter support. To many ni-Vanuatu, though, the question doesn’t even bear asking.
Then and Now
Thursday, August 28th, 2008Nobody seems to have anticipated just how widespread and immediate the effects of telecoms liberalisation would be. Some of the expectations outlined in the World Bank report titled ‘Infrastructure Regulatory Review’ appear now to be quite conservative, in some cases landing nearly outside the ballpark.
Filling the Cracks With Gold
Saturday, August 16th, 2008[Originally published in the Vanuatu Daily Post’s Weekender Edition.]
September 2nd promises to be a bloody day, in political terms. In Vanuatu’s 9th general election, at least 334 candidates will battle for one of 52 seats in 17 different constituencies. These candidates represent over 30 political parties, many new, some old. They are opposed by the [...]
Mercenary, Missionary, Manager, Monarch
Sunday, August 10th, 2008In countries the world over, the political scene attracts the same kinds: There’s the Mercenary: charismatic, mercurial, willing to say or do anything as long as the price is right. There’s the single-minded Missionary: often blinded by the brilliance of his own vision. There’s the Manager, who finds herself organising others because if she didn’t nothing would ever get done. There’s the Monarch, for whom power is an end in itself, not a job but a state of being.
All of these are required in order for a government to operate, though each in its measure. Take any one away and things break down. Allow too many of a given kind… and things break down. The chemistry of government relies as much on manoeuvrability and opportunism as it does on organisation and direction.
PACNOG Talk
Monday, June 30th, 2008One of the items in yesterday’s brain dump was a talk I presented to the Pacific Network Operators Group (PACNOG) at the Sebel Hotel. It’s titled ‘Network Effects: Social Significance of Mobile Communications in Vanuatu‘. It explains Network Effects and how they manifest themselves in village life, then looks at some obvious and not-so-obvious implications [...]
Hodge Podge
Sunday, June 29th, 2008Here’s a quick and dirty list of geeky things that I’ve been stewing over recently:
Greg Ross’ delightfully intelligent Futility Closet features a very interesting map. Memorising it should be a pre-requisite for any technology discussion. Understanding it should be a criterion for sainthood.
Jan Chipchase is exploring that map. He’s a poster boy for the the [...]
The Thermocline of Truth
Wednesday, June 18th, 2008I’m going to let someone else do the writing for this one. I like the metaphor a lot. It helps that it’s true, too.
I’ll integrate this into an upcoming column sometime soon.
Trust Works All Ways
Monday, May 19th, 2008Over the weekend, I’ve been thinking about last week’s disclosure concerning Debian’s OpenSSL package, which in effect stated that all keys and certificates generated by this compromised code have been trivially crackable since late 2006.
There’s a pretty good subjective analysis of the nature of the error on Ben Laurie’s blog (thanks, Rich), and of course [...]
Steaming Piles
Tuesday, May 13th, 2008Sometimes you have to destroy the document in order to save it….
Stop Bad Errors
Thursday, May 8th, 2008I recently upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04, which comes with the most recent beta of Firefox 3.0. The new version of Firefox has a number of interesting features, not the least of which is a set of measures to reduce drive-by infection of PCs.
If they wander from the beaten path, people now see a big red [...]