Air New Zealand Launches Smartest Travel Card Yet
It seems Air New Zealand have been working on a brilliant top-secret project for a little while. The new Air NZ OneSmart card integrates not only their Airpoints card and the ePass tag (which enables wireless check-in at their domestic kiosks), they’ve also bundled it with a smart debit card on the other side, with the ability to lock in up to four currencies at a time and fix the exchange rate until the money is spent..
This combination makes OneSmart the ultimate of travel cards and really does combine everything into one.
Suicide Awareness
Newstalk ZB had a segment today on the New Zealand suicide rate, and if the government should be doing more to raise awareness to the situation. According to their statistics, suicide takes 520 New Zealanders per year (that’s 10 a week!) whereas the road toll is only 120. Millions of dollars are put into ad campaigns to lower the road toll, yet suicide still remains a subject that you just shouldn’t talk about. Their question was, ‘Should the veil be lifted from suicide and should the government create an anti-suicide campaign similar to those that currently exist for driving and depression?’
There were many calls in support of it, so as a graphics design exercise I have come up with a taste of what a national suicide awareness campaign may look like, in the form of road billboards.
- Encouraging families of depression suffers to look out for the signs that lead up to suicide.
- Helping the reader realise that suicidal tendencies are a medical condition and can be ‘cured’.
- ‘The world will be better without me’ is a common thought trait among people with suicidal tendencies. The phrasing of the above ad is meant to ring true to people who think or have heard it and then cause a double-take as they re-read it.
- ‘I have nothing to lose’ or ‘I have nothing in my life to live for’ are other common thought patterns. However it’s the families who suffer when someone commits the selfish act of suicide.
- The most difficult one to swallow compares suicide to murder and again raises the point of the families being the ones that are affected.
The billboards are designed to be simple and to the point, while at the same time making people feel slightly out of their comfort zone so they actually sit up and remember it. Suicide is hard enough to talk about as it is, but if we introduce reference to other difficult topics such as murder, HIV and the visual reference to overdosing and wrists it achieves the desired ‘short sharp shock’.
What are your thoughts on the situation? Should discussion about suicide remain taboo, or should it receive a nationwide campaign like the above? Do you think common discussion will make it more commonplace and therefore raise the rate, or do you think with careful execution we could do the same as the driving safety and anti-smoking campaigns and change the perception of suicide for the better? I appreciate your comments below.
Setting Up Your Own DNS Server
Today I went through the process of setting up my own DNS server. As I’m hosting websites behind DSL I was getting sick of switching /etc/hosts files every time I was within my own network (only Cable prevents the need for this) and originally intended to set up an internal-only DNS server which would fall back to OpenDNS for any records it didn’t know … this would solve the issue.
There are also a few bragging rights in being able to say you host your own DNS server.
Rather than retracing my steps and placing them all here, follow this tutorial for the internal server. However this tutorial omits an important detail: make sure you also add an ‘@’ A record which points to your IP address, or it won’t resolve.
Once I had this all up and running and I had finally got my head around the way BIND9′s config files worked, I decided to take the next step: opening up the server for external use. I followed this tutorial to modify my existing configuration to allow external requests. And here’s the second note: make sure you move the ‘include “/etc/bind/named.conf.default-zones”‘ directive from ‘/etc/bind/named.conf’ into the end of your ‘internal’ view in ‘/etc/bind/named.conf.local’. Why? Because if you’re using views you can’t define a zone outside of a view, and that’s just what ‘named.conf.default-zones’ will do if it’s included from the main file.
Finally, in the above tutorial it talks about including your external zone file in the internal one to prevent modifying so many files every time you update your DNS records, however that means you’re overloading the records which just doesn’t feel right to me. I’ve taken it one step further to make it nice, simple and clean. My folder structure looks like this:
/etc/bind/
|-zones/
|-base/
|-internal/
|-external/
The philosophy here is to put all of the DNS record declarations in the base files except for anything unique to the view. Therefore, ‘base/example.com.db’ would look similar to this:
1 $TTL 8H 2 @ IN SOA ns1.example.com. admin.example.com. ( 3 2010122005 4 28800 5 3600 6 604800 7 38400 8 ); 9 10 example.com. IN NS ns1.example.com. 11 example.com. IN MX 10 mail 12 13 www IN CNAME @ 14 imap IN CNAME mail 15 pop IN CNAME mail 16 pop3 IN CNAME mail 17 smtp IN CNAME mail
Here we have a very generic definition. Nothing is unique to being internal or external (don’t worry about line 10, this still resolves internally).
Next, the ‘internal/example.com.db’ file:
1 $include "/etc/bind/zones/base/example.com.db" 2 3 mail IN A 192.168.0.43 4 ns1 IN A 192.168.0.43 5 @ IN A 192.168.0.43
Now this is beautiful in its simplicity. We are importing the base definition and then adding on the A records pointing to the web server’s IP so that when you’re within the network you can resolve correctly.
Finally, the ‘external/example.com.db’ file:
1 $include "/etc/bind/zones/base/example.com.db" 2 3 example.com. IN NS ns0.xname.org. 4 5 mail IN A 123.123.123.123 6 ns1 IN A 123.123.123.123 7 @ IN A 123.123.123.123
Again, extremely simple. Identical in fact, apart from the extra nameserver declarations which aren’t necessary internally. Externally you need a fallback and Xname is as good as any (as referenced in the above tutorial).
So how do you use all of these files? Very simply. All you do is include the ‘file “/etc/bind/zones/internal/example.com.db”‘ declaration (with the obvious modification for the external view) within ‘/etc/bind/named.conf.local’, and those simple files will import the base declaration for you. If you ever need to open up a new subdomain or change an MX record, all you need to do is edit the base declaration (remembering to update the serial number at the top) and the changes will take effect both internally and externally.
See what I mean by Beauty in Simplicity?
HipTweet Brings a Gorgeous Twitter Experience to Symbian
If you’re a Nokia user, you’ll know that there are numerous ways and methods to get your Twitter fix on the go. Whether you prefer the mobile site, applications like Socially, Tweet60 or Gravity, or even the built-in Social client on new Symbian, the choices are many.
And then along comes HipTweet. Created by application developers HipLogic (perhaps best known for their UI replacement *Spark) this client has just been released on the Ovi Store, and my first impression was: wow. As a graphic designer and application developer myself, my motto is that if an application doesn’t look good it doesn’t matter how functional it is — I probably won’t give it the time of day. And while the various other offerings certainly have their share of good looks, HipTweet steps it up a notch and really seperates itself from the competition from square one.
This interface is gorgeous. The motto here clearly is bold and simple. Softkeys are replaced with circular icons which are so sure of their awesomeness that they nonchalantly hang off the side of the screen so as to give you more room to see. The toolbar at the top is just as functional as it is simple, and again it consists of a few circles and drop down boxes on top of a semi-transparent gradient leaving the rest of the window to display your timeline, retweets, mentions, favourites, lists, or whatever … this app supports the lot.
And it doesn’t only look good. This app also does nearly everything a Twitter user could want. You can upload photos using a custom file browser complete with image previews and filenames. You can do true Twitter retweets without the annoying RT tag on the beginning. And if you forget the username of the person you’re trying to tag, no fear! Simply tap the contacts icon when writing a tweet to view a list of the people you follow, complete with profile pictures.
Not to say that this app is perfect … scrolling could be improved, as this is a bit unwieldly. I’d like to see a Back or Cancel button when writing a tweet or message, because I don’t want to have to retrace my steps if I decide not to write that very amusing reply after all. And I’d also like to be able to tap on a tag and do an automatic search without having to remember it and retype it in the search box.
But when you look at the big picture, I think that for a first release this is the nearest to perfection I’ve seen in a Twitter-only client. And it’s free, so how can you complain? Download it now from the Ovi Store on Nokia touch devices.
Forum Nokia Developer Conference
The Forum Nokia Developer Breakfast will be a fantastic place to get a feel for the Nokia application development scene.
Are you a software developer? Are you interested in getting into development for mobile phones, or thinking of broadening your horizons from the operating system you currently code for? Then check out the Forum Nokia Developers Breakfast on its way next month, November 4th at the Rendezvous Hotel in Auckland.
This will be a unique opportunity to learn about Nokia’s new software strategy, hear about future-proof development for Nokia devices including Qt development, and learn about the breadth of the Ovi Store, how it spans the largest volume of potential devices in the world and how to make it work for you. There is also time dedicated to networking between developers and the companies that require applications made.
Pre-registration is required, so if you’re interested in coming along check out the official invite page here.
About Nik Rolls
My Projects
Mail Divination
A web app I made to detect your IMAP/POP/SMTP server settings on the fly, saving you mucking around trying to find them yourself.
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