Committing unlawful acts one month, Premier elect the next.

The NSW Government has imploded and is no longer capable of governing this state. It’s time for the Governor of NSW to stand up for the people of NSW. If this is all we have left to run the state then it’s time to sack the government.

It’s that time of year again. Tickets are available now http://www.webblast.com.au/

After reading Pia’s post about opening up government data I went back to a post I made the day the NSW Government announced that it was opening up government data. That was the 4^th September. We were promised that a trial feed was being tested and a full feed would be opened on 21^st Septemer. It’s now 15^th October (nearly a month after the feed should have started) and the one government dataset covering NSW comes  from the Commonwealth Government.

Where’s the data Nathan?

Let’s be honest. The Commonwealth Government has started to open access to data. So have other states. The NSW Government has simply extended it’s policy of making grand announcements with no intention of following through. If there really is data available then put it in your data catalogue so we can find it!?!? I guess they’ll re-announce this every 12 months in between announcing yet another rail line that won’t be built.

Normally I’m highly critical of the NSW Government but they seem to finally be doing something right. According to Builder AU the NSW Government is now starting to open data to developers. They’re even running a competition for developers and have an entire website dedicate to providing public sector information. Sadly the site doesn’t contain anything yet but at least they seem to heading in the right direction.

I just read a post asking if my unit test take too long. In it the author suggests that 5 minutes is long and asks if anyone has solved this problem. This reminded me of a discussion I had with some developers about 12 months ago about unit testing in which my argument was simply that unit tests need to be comprehensive and not necessarily quick.

There are many projects where the unit tests take several hours to run. This shouldn’t matter during development when you’re probably only interested in a few unit tests as most test tools provide a way to filter the tests that are run. You only need to run the entire test suite prior to committing or during continuous integration.

Having said all of that I can recommend using memory tables if your database supports them. The operations are generally a lot faster as the database doesn’t need to write to disk.

I was a big fan of Planet MicroISV. The site aggregated blogs from a number of MicroISV’s around the world. Unforunately it seemed to disappear in late April this year. Today I found the time to launch a new Planet MicroISV with a new URL (http://planet-microisv.com/). Luckily Google Reader allowed me to recover a number of feeds the old site aggregated.

If you want your blog added (or removed) then send me an email rich@buggy.id.au

Congratulations to Stephen Conroy and Australian Government on your most recent award. It’s just a guess but I don’t think they’ll be promoting this at the next election.

I was reading a post on TechNation Australia which contains a quote from the co-founder of a new services market place who describes their point of difference as “not charging”. Free is a great way to get people to try your service but price is never a point of difference. You will always find someone willing to sell a similar product for less. In the end you’ll either lose your point of difference or end up reducing your price until it finally costs you money to make a sale.

While chatting with Nick Hodge about tomorrows panel session at Remix09 he mentioned that he was hosting a series of open source information evenings with Jorke Odolphi later this month. I’m sure many in the open source community are skeptical about any Microsoft involvement in open source but they do seem to be making an effort to get along and even help those who want to bring open source to Windows. Importantly the evening is about two way communication and not just a crafted message. If you’re interested in attending you can register at https://www.microsoft.com.au/events/register/home.aspx?levent=750528&linvitation

I received this yesterday from Rob at Yahoo!7.

For the second of our Yahoo!7 Open Sessions we have Philip Tellis, Sunnyvale  based Yahoo! geek coming to chat about performance.  Philip will explain why performance is everything and give you some hints and tips on how to create “websites on speed”.

Philip has spoken on various topics at several international conferences including Linux Bangalore, FOSS.IN, Freed.in, Ottawa Linux Symposium, Ubuntulive and Yahoo!’s Front end engineering conferences. He has covered topics ranging from opensource applications, education and new technological ideas, to project management and new web development technologies.

Philip is in Sydney for the webdu event http://www.webdu.com.au/ so we’re pleased he can also drop by the Sydney Yahoo!7 office for the Open Session.

The stuff you need to know:
*       Philip Tellis, Performance guru and Yahoo! Geek
*       6pm, Monday 25th May
*       Yahoo!7 offices, Level 2, Pier 8&9, 23 Hickson Road, Millers Point
*       Numbers are limited so registration is a must.

To register go to: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/2570945/

For more information about the Yahoo Developer Network: http://developer.yahoo.com/