I’m proud to have the opportunity to take part in the project, and would encourage everyone to check out the site. Maybe this Christmas it is a nice angle for making a charitable donation? Odds are each year you could be using the same dollars to pass on to another Kiva entrepreneur?

If you’re one of those journo types I know, let me know if you’d like to get involved. They require about two hours a week minimum to do some general editing on loan requests before they go live.

FYI, I’m spending a few weeks guest editing Kotaku Australia while they transition from Logan Booker to the as-yet-unnamed next permanent Editor. It’s fun being back into full-on games mode for a while! I’m generally in the middle of a big shift in regular beat, which is actually a nice thing to go through sometimes as it helps keep the brain fresh so my fingers can keep burning up the keyboard. Whoosh!

Want to read my take on games? Head on over and look for the ‘au’ tagged posts.

The illustrious Bletchley Park

If there were a seven wonders of the science world, Bletchley Park would feature on the list. We’re talking about the greatest applied crytographic research the world has ever seen, breaking Enigma in World War II and saving Britain’s, and maybe the world’s, behind! And now it’s apparently under threat due to serious lack of funding. Every geek should dig deep and lend a hand to the effort to help raise £7m to keep the museum alive. Brits can sign an official petition for help from the government too. Actually, if someone could also offer up pro bono web design services, that would probably be a big help too. That site is straight outta 1998.

With better encoding and compression of the Document Index, a high quality web search engine may fit onto a 7GB drive of a new PC.

The Anatomy of a Search Engine.

10 years of Google. Going back to look at some of these early discussion papers is always fun. The quote above feels like Google’s version of the ‘640K outta be enough for anyone’ line (though this time, unlike Gates, Brin & Page actually said it).

Happy Birthday Google! Who knows what shape the web would have taken without you?

It is our great pleasure to finally release Objective-J and Cappuccino to the open source community today.  We’ve been working hard on this, and we’re incredibly excited to get it into people’s hands and start seeing what they can do with it.

Cappuccino Blog » Announcing Cappuccino

I’ve been pretty excited about the whole Objective-J concept. Not that I’ve coded anything since the days of Modula-2 in 1st year Comp Sci. But I see this as the path Apple should have taken instead of Sproutcore — allowing developers to automatically translate Objective-C into Javascript web apps. Smells like a winner to me, and 280 Slides is a very nice proof of concept.

Had a great interview with Justin Rattner which I’m now hoping to spin out into a big story. We’ll see how that goes.

New projects set to kick off in the next few weeks, though things are moving slowly with baby #2 now very close to joining the outside world. But hey! Who needs sleep!

See you tomorrow.

With Nick hitting Auckland to take part in ‘first in the world’ coverage, the guys called me up to step back into the Gizmodo lair to cover the Sydney leg of the iPhone 3G launch action. This was before Optus said they were going at midnight, so at the time I thought it would be an early morning… not the all nighter it turned into.

Anyway, here’s a bunch of links to the resulting set of posts:
Optus queue over 200 strong with 1 hour to go
500 iPhones only at Optus Hunter St store
Brett Howell, #1 iPhone 3G owner in Australia
Meanwhile, outside Telstra…
It’s 2.00am on iPhone Friday and all is…
Any iPhone 3G you like, so long as it’s white
iPhone 3G Sydney queues status update (5.00am)
OFFICIAL Telstra iPhone 3G plans - mix and match, but still poor value
Apple Store selling phones / plans for all carriers
Telstra plays it simple, all business
Vodafone wins the iPhone celebrity appearance game
iPhone, iPhone, iPhone! Aaaand, I’m spent…

Optus did a fantastic job of looking after the hundreds in their line well after the TV cameras and newspaper photographers had gone home. They had endless streams of hot chocolate and coffee being distributed, as well as water and snacks. They were even making cheeseburger runs to McDonald’s, and as morning approached it was wave after wave of bacon and egg rolls from a proper café.

The rest didn’t do anything for their (very small) queues until close to opening, but the real bad example was Telstra. It’s hard to be shocked, I guess, but having been out there all night like the devoted buyers, it was hard to watch three of the four retailers put more than a little effort into distributing some warm drinks and food while our ‘national provider’ failed to even communicate in a friendly fashion with anyone at all. For Telstra it was doors open at the stroke of 6.00am, no fan fare, no nothing. Sure, guys, get the job done. But in the middle of winter this all just looked so heartless.

A commenter at Gizmodo mentioned the Melbourne T[life] store was hooking up queuers with some coffee and snacks. So why on earth was Sydney being so weak?