Gav's Blog

An email I sent to the IRD today…

I visited the IRD website this afternoon to use the PAYE 2009 calculator but found that it was not yet obviously* available. After calling the IRD call centre I was informed that the calculator was going to be made available on 1 April. The only solution was to use the pdf 2009 tables or the printed table that the business has already received.

As a business that pays employees monthly in advance, it would be nice to have the calculator made available in advance of 1 April so that I can calculate using the new tables those payments for the month of April that go out on 1 April in late March. The tool is particularly useful in that it can also be used to produce pdf’s that I can email to employees to show them how their monthly salary payments are going to change in the new tax year.

It is useful to be able to use the calculator in March in advance of the changes to payments made on 1 April, and to me it seems a poor decision to leave the roll-out of the PAYE 2009 calculator until the period has actually started. Many organisations need to utilise the tool IN ADVANCE of the new tax period starting.

* Upon further digging, it appears that the PAYE 2009 calculator is available, but it is not obviously linked. One has to select the PAYE 2008 calculator, and then select for the 1 April 2008 – 31 March 2009 period. Unfortunately your call centre staff were not aware of this solution when I called.

Can I suggest that in future that the new years PAYE calculator is clearly rolled out on your website at sometime in the first couple of weeks of March, and linked as the others on this page.

So one can do the calculations, but the tool isn’t clearly and obviously linked on their website. It is a little thing, but it is important to make these tools easily accessible and in a timely manner. It took me 30 minutes by the time I had surfed the website, called the IRD call centre, and eventually found the tool that should have been easily linked in the first place. Their call centre staff should at least have been able to point me to the work-around I found.

As part of the GOVIS Geospatial miniConference, a maps mashup is being held the day before with data sets being provided by LINZ and others. More information will be made available on the barcamp page (for more on what a barcamp is – click here).

A challenge to innovate! A challenge to find open data! Create and present your mash-up with a few data sets provided for the BarCamp! Cool Prizes! Sponsored by Statistics New Zealand, The New Zealand Geospatial Office and the Spatial Sciences Institute. Entry is open to everybody who is enthusiastic about using New Zealand’s core geospatial data in presenting current issues and analysis challenges! MashUp 2008 is an event which brings together New Zealand’s leading technical experts, as well as budding enthusiasts, in combining information sources with mapping boundaries and data in innovative ways. Rules of the competition will be downloadable here as soon as possible.

As part of the GOVIS Geospatial miniConference, a maps mashup is being held the day before with data sets being provided by LINZ and others. More information will be made available on the barcamp page (for more on what a barcamp is – click here).

A challenge to innovate! A challenge to find open data! Create and present your mash-up with a few data sets provided for the BarCamp! Cool Prizes! Sponsored by Statistics New Zealand, The New Zealand Geospatial Office and the Spatial Sciences Institute. Entry is open to everybody who is enthusiastic about using New Zealand’s core geospatial data in presenting current issues and analysis challenges! MashUp 2008 is an event which brings together New Zealand’s leading technical experts, as well as budding enthusiasts, in combining information sources with mapping boundaries and data in innovative ways. Rules of the competition will be downloadable here as soon as possible.

For a while now, I have been wanting to take some photos that are illuminated by moonlight. With the recent full moon at Easter, I had the inclination at last to give it a go.

I spent around 3 hours experimenting with different exposures between midnight and 3am. As it was more of an experimental session, my focus was not so much on finding a good landscape but just to test exposures. Hunting for a landscape for next time will come later.

Where was it taken?
Off the balcony at my mother’s house where I was staying over Easter. It was taken at about 145am.

What settings did you use?
Manual. Focus was set to infinity. ISO was varied between 100 and 1600 – this shot was 400. Image was shot at 10mm and f8. Exposure was 1452 seconds (just over 24 minutes).

What gear did you use?
Canon 20D, Canon EF-S 10-22mm lens, Canon timer remote, and tripod.

Why did you compose the shot as you did?
I wanted to strike a balance between the ground and the night sky. I wanted to give at least the bottom third of the frame to the landscape illuminated by the moon, and use two thirds of the frame for star trails.

What post production work have you done on the shot?
Nothing significant. Removed some sensor dust spots and used luminance noise reduction to reduce the ISO noise.

What were you hoping to achieve with the shot?
To see if it was possible to expose a shot that creates the appearance of daytime, with star trails in the sky. The moon is a better light source than I had anticipated!

What did you do well?
I think I managed to create a reasonably balanced exposure that showed the movement of the stars, yet created the appearance of daylight. Using the relationship between ISO, aperture and shutter speed, I was able to adjust the ISO and aperture to generate a suitable shutter speed to turn stars into star trails

How could you have improved it?
Finding a more attractive landscape. For testing purposes the location worked fine, the trick would be to find better terrain. Interesting geological formations would likely be a good place. In hindsight if longer star trails were required, it might have been possible to use a graduated ND filter to reduce the reflected moonlight from the landscape.

Anything else?
Another point to note is the impact that focal length has on the size of star trails. You need really long exposures to generate significant star trails with a wide angle lens. This is why I needed around 25 minutes at 10mm, but could generate similar length trails at 24mm with far shorter exposures. But the joy of wide angle is that you can take much more in.

This was taken a few days after full, it may be interesting to see how the lighting dynamic changes say around half moon? For example, there will be far less light, and hence it might be possible to use far longer exposures as it won’t overexpose the foreground.

It might also be possible to time shots when there are a few bright planets in the sky – Mars, Jupiter and Saturn – so that their movement is in contrast to the star trails.

Recently, I needed to tweak the guest user on my Mum’s laptop so that visitors weren’t sharing the account that they use for email and the like. Unfortunately the Guest account that comes with OS X 10.5 is not ideally configured so I needed a way to customise it to make it more friendly for guests. There is a ‘Simple Finder’ option, but it was a bit too simplistic for my needs. Anyway, I found a nice little writeup that shows how to tweak the Guest account’s configuration to make it a bit more guest friendly.

As I write this, my home Mac has just about finished receiving a hard drive upgrade. I had approach the 250GB hard drive’s limit and was needing something far bigger – mainly for photos and movies from my camera.I had read online a few blogs that performed the upgrade by simply making sure that the Time Machine backup was up-to-date, and then removing the old hard drive, installing the new one, booting the OS X installer DVD, formatting the drive and restoring from backup. Sounded like a great option so I thought I’d give it a go to install a nice shiny 1TB hard drive.This blog post noted that the restore process was extremely slow. I had a quick restore with around 230GB being restored in around 2.5 hours. The expected time was a lot slower initially, I think this was because the system files were copied first, and this included a lot more small files that have more overhead associated with reading and writing than say transferring a digital photo or movie – e.g. one 10MB file is faster than transferring 1000 1KB files.It is just booting now, so I’ll know very soon whether it worked or not… stunning it has appeared to work perfectly. Now I just have to wait for Spotlight to re-index everything. But other than that, it was a painless upgrade.It also served an excellent dual purpose of actually testing that the restore process works. Very useful!Now I need to look at setting Time Machine to backup to multiple drives. It sounds like it can be done.

Installed a new fax at work recently and joy of joys our office has started receiving fax spam. In return, I’m going to start listing the fax spammers here with their email addresses as links so that other spammers can pick up their email and add it to their spam database.

Doing a little further digging, it is interesting that both New Zealand and Australia’s anti-spam legislation does not cover faxes.

Both the spammer and their client promoted by the spam will get listed here.

remove@getawaysdownunder.com.au, greg@getawaysdownunder.com.au, info@balishangrila.net, getaways@getawaysdownunder.com.au, queensland@getawaysdownunder.com.au

Update 2009-01-25: Interesting to see a number of people coming to this post when searching for Getaways Downunder and Destinations R Us. I haven’t actually seen any fax spam from them for a while. I called them up directly on the number they promote and asked directly to be removed from their list, and it seems to have worked! Sure, it did cost work a toll call, but I haven’t had faxes for months.

Update 2009-04-02: And the wankers are back. Arrived in to the office this morning to be greeted by another page of fax spam from getawaysdownunder.com.au. So, despite being removed from their fax list a few months ago, I have again been added against my will. I am really not inclined to use the email opt-out option as I’m sure that would just be a bait-and-switch move, e.g. to get off their fax list you have to give them your email address. I’ve just left a message on their voicemail asking for the office fax number to be removed. Again.

Update 2009-07-22: And another fax received today. Gave them another call to be removed. ‘Oh sorry, we had a problem with our database.’ Yeah right. I really don’t see why we don’t have legislation controlling fax advertising, when we do have legislation controlling email advertising. Anyway, she seemed to remove my fax number again, will wait and see if another fax arrives in a few months.

Update 2011-11-28: A mostly positive update for a change! As of the 20th October 2011, fax spam will now be covered under the Unsolicited Commercial Messages Act! Woohoo! There is now a process whereby we can submit faxspam to DIA. As an added bonus, Getaways spammed our office against just a few days ago, so I am now in the process of filing my first faxspam complaint with DIA. Please, register a complaint for every faxspam you receive.

I see that there has been a little recent discussion as to whether the photographer or the equipment is more important.

I don’t think that it is so extreme, and that there is somewhat of a middle ground. Creativity and talent certainly come from the photographer, but I feel that for a photographer to grow – you need to expend some aspects of the equipment you use. There are many creative variables that come into play when composing a photo, but I think you can break them down into two main categories.

1. The scene as it initially stands.
2. The scene as you, the photographer, can modify it to suit your creative needs.

The problem with saying that all creativity is down to the photographer means that you lose all creative control in terms of capture (aperture, shutter speed, ISO) and lighting (artificial lighting a photographer brings to a scene). This is evident when you give a photographer a camera with few creative controls and say take some photos. Sure, the creative photographer will come up with some great shots – but they will be constrained by the limitation of the camera. Now, say give them a second lens, or a flash, and their creative boundaries have been expanded as they can exert additional creative control over the scene by modifying the lighting or selecting appropriate depth-of-field by changing the aperture.

I’ve been in forums where newish DSLR owners come along and ask what lens they should get for their second lens. A very common suggestion is an f1.8 50mm lens. Why? Well it is a fixed focal length lens and it forces the budding photographer to approach composing images in a different manner – mostly because a prime lens forces the photographer to ‘zoom with their feet’. In this manner, expanding you equipment can force you to expand your creative horizon by having to learn and experiment with new techniques.

It is still primarily about the photographer, but by selectively adding equipment to your arsenal, I think it helps you become a better photographer.

I’ve got a busy week ahead, but I just wanted to capture here some media coverage of the exercise whilst I stumble across it. One thing that is interesting – there are two major exercises taking place this week in which our Government is taking part in, with the UKUSA countries running Exercise Cyberstorm II to test their response to virtual attacks towards our critical infrastructure.Anyway, onto the news snippets.

• Herald Blog – Are we prepared for a major disaster? (all comments, newest first)
• Exercise Ruaumoko ends
• Emergency services fired up after ‘eruption’
• Shore could house eruption refugees (20080322)
• Remember Animals When You Prepare For Emergencies! (20080325)
• Civil defence heading in right direction (20080402)
• North at risk from Auckland disaster (20080402)

References

• Exercise Ruaumoko website
• Auckland Volcano Survey