barrydahlberg

It does, yes. MS sets the base for the core stuff more so than on other ecosystems though.

Firearms license yes, though transferable from overseas. Permit yes, but just apply online in a few mins. No tags required.

Edit: Oops that was for NZ, not Aus.

The hope is to hold the pests back to a level at which the native species can survive.

Demon thing: http://r.weavesilk.com/?v=4&id=isi105o9vyt

Note we have some offshore islands etc where 100% kill has been achieved. We're not even close to being able to achieve that on the mainland though.

Basically accurate here but "hunters" does cover a pretty diverse group of people with many different motivations. They include many who care very deeply about conservation and unfortunately also those who threaten to poison milk formula. I don't think you'll find many on either side that have any love for rats.

As said above, 1080 is the best choice we have but we should (and do) keep looking for better alternatives. It would be nice if we didn't have to greet visitors to our national parks with this all the time:

http://www.tongarirorivermotel.co.nz/wp-content/gallery/misc...

I live in New Zealand and spend some time in our back country deer stalking, trout fishing and exploring.

NZ uses about 80% of the worlds supply of 1080 poison[1] and our next trip is into one of the areas where it is dropped every few years. 1080 is a horrible thing and I hate what we do with it. It kills animals it wasn't meant for, it makes game unsafe to eat and it's not a pleasant way to go. However I love NZ because of what nature has given us here, and unfortunately the poison is currently the best tool we have to protect the birds that we have left. Trapping and hunting are useful tools but we have so much remote, inaccessible wilderness that it is not feasible on its own.

I would love to see more innovation in tools to control the rats, the possums, the stoats and other small mammals that NZ grew up without and doesn't know how to handle. I'm hoping that new technology coming from start ups like we have here will bring new ideas and techniques. A major challenge will be taking those ideas and adapting them to work reliably in remote and harsh conditions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1080_usage_in_New_Zealand

SPOILER: You need a way to defeat the regex (see other comments here). Then think about what the "foo" actually does (and read the error console).

That's not cool. The last thing we need is more things for people to use as reasons for not using HTTPS at all.

Can you please clarify exactly what you mean by compression? Is this referring to typical gzip compression in HTTP results or something else?

async doesn't really give you anything new you couldn't do before, just nicer syntax for composing it all. As you say you've already found other ways to compose your asynchronous flows for you.

"WCF, AppFabric and ASP.Net" happen to give you an awful lot of that sort of infrastructure for free, I rarely directly use anything async in my web apps either. I do wonder how you're managing responsiveness in the forms apps though?

Where the async syntax really shines is dealing with external services. If you're calling a lot of database, web services, sockets etc it can make your life easier.

.NETs Entity Framework lets you do this using the fantastic LINQ syntax. Commonly you will say which objects to select, then give a projection into a new anonymous type with only the columns you want.

I wonder what the chances of them getting this to us in NZ are...

This looks great and is close to something I've specifically looked for in the past. My only suggestion would be that the pricing is going to be awkward for my use case.

Typically we work with many small clients and one of our issues is managing access to admin sites etc for these clients across our team. We have relatively few 'users', perhaps 5 - 10, but a large amount of shared apps. I currently have around 100 sets of login details on file in 1Password.

I have not looked at this framework in particular sorry, I was only really commenting on JS vs. C# here.

Being able to write C# instead of JS is a pretty big point IMHO.

Yes it's good for testing but if you want a host name and a background task it gets uncheap pretty quickly. Time for some creative engineering perhaps.

Nice to see such a simple and straightforward approach taken. I'm starting to feel better about AppHarbour now that things seem to be rolling out more regularly.

Currently my only complaint is that we want to run many very small prototype sites and the pricing doesn't work out very well for that.

RailsCasts gets recommended to beginners a lot but every time I go there I'm kind of overwhelmed and have no idea where to start. The archives go back to 2007 so starting at the beginning seems likely to cover outdated subjects now. On the front page I see Draper, Spork, Sorcery, Foreman, Pry... none of this means much to me.

Any suggestions on how to attack this for a relative newbie to rails?

I would love to see someone drag it kicking and screaming outside of the US. :(

AppHarbor is an alternative to Azure styled after Heroku. I use both and currently I would summarize the situation as:

- Azure is big and stable and ready for production use but it also comes with the Microsoft way of doing things which can be a bloated and cumbersome at times.

- AppHarbor is fast and agile but hard to take seriously as pricing is still "preliminary" and details around things like support are vague at best.

Chrome 13, Windows 7 - display driver (Intel Integrated) crashed but Windows managed to recover it. Intel graphics related issue maybe?

This is how we use github among other things. AFAIK there isn't standard support for this sort of thing in the browsers though.

Nice that they have add ons and pricing for them but I wish they'd sort out their own preliminary prices first...

http://appharbor.com/page/pricing

Until there is solid pricing and a decent story around support it's very hard to use for anything that matters.

Twilio that works reliably for everyone in places like New Zealand.

Useful if you are composing the function with others which may not be built specifically for strings, e.g. filter, map etc.

It sounds like you want to be at home so that your little girl gets more of your time. Working effectively from home requires getting as much time to yourself as possible. It's going to be a tough conflict.

I'm a dad with a 20 month old son. I've tried working at home and even with Mum looking after him I found it next to impossible. There is nothing quite as distracting as hearing a crash followed by your child screaming. Little boys do this A LOT.

I understand your thoughts on day care though. I hope you find an arrangement that works for you.

Typical plans for our ISPs:

http://www.orcon.net.nz/home/plans/