Being Mark Cohen

Happy Mother’s Day to all the mums out there, and good luck to all the dads who forgot

The ABS posted some interesting stats in a media release, reproduced and linked below highlighting added by me:

Mothers’ day facts and figures from the ABS (Media Release)
Mothers’ day facts and figures from the ABS

* The median age of mothers who gave birth in 2006 was 30.8, up from 29.2 in 1996.
* Women could expect to have 1.8 children in their lifetime in 2006, the most since 1995.
* Births are up - Australia registered 265,900 births during 2006 - more than in any year during the last three decades.
* More mothers with children aged under 15 years are employed than in the past. Almost two-thirds (63%) of mothers with children aged under 15 years were employed in March 2008, compared with 54% ten years earlier.
* 60% of employed mothers with children aged under 15 years worked part time.
* As employment among mothers has increased, the use of formal child care has also increased. The percentage of children under the age of 12 years attending formal care increased from 14% in 1996 to 23% in 2005.
* In 2006, mothers with children aged under 15 years spent, on average, between 16 hours per week (for those employed full time) to 28 hours per week (for those not employed) caring for children.
* In 2005, 83% of employed mothers with very young children (aged under 2 years) used some form of working arrangement to help balance work and child care responsibilities. The arrangements most commonly used were flexible working hours, used by 44% of employed mothers; permanent part-time work, used by 39%; and working from home, used by 27%.
* 67% of mothers in a couple family with children aged under 15 years, and 61% of lone mothers with children aged under 15 years, reported in 2006 that they ‘always or often felt rushed or pressed for time’

These stats scream out for more online facilities aimed at mothers who are caring for kids. One such site built by two mums is Part Time Online, a job portal aimed squarely at the part time / jobsharing market.

Aother observation: Most mothers feel time-poor and ironically more mothers who have a partner feel time-poor than single mums. That says something really bad about some of us dads….

Ebay today announced that they would be doing a distribution deal with Drive.com.au. This deal will see drive.com.au serving significantly more inventory, taking a big step in an iteration of growing the business which can only do them good in terms of audience growth, site traffic and leads generated.

We’re pleased to announce today a listing distribution deal between eBay Motors and Drive.com.au that will see the integration of eBay Motors listings onto Drive.com.au and vice versa.

This is great news for buyers and sellers alike providing greater choice and larger audiences with no extra cost or hassle!

To ensure you get the most out of this exciting new partnership, we’ve also revamped the eBay Motors site - it has a fresh look and feel as well as some great new features and functions making it easier to find and buy the item you want:

* Enhanced search features allowing you to quickly narrow down your options so only the items that interest you are displayed
* A scrolling live marketplace featuring a selection of some of the best cars on the site
* Easy to navigate category tabs

The new site is only in beta phase at the moment and is not yet replacing the current eBay Motors site…

The new beta eBay site is at cars2.ebay.com.au.

Ebay recently announced in a release to their affiliate network that they would be shutting down their long-standing relationship with Commission Junction and would be launching their own channel, ebay partner network. This new channel offers easy setup and direct deposit payment into Australian bank accounts.

The ebay - Drive distribution deal would be a development carsales.com.au would want to keep a close eye on. It will bulk up ebay’s cars section significantly and will provide some good opportunity for ebay affiliate marketers to make some money, and with their help it could potentially catapult ebay up in the rankings for car sales. The content distribution deal introduces and empowers a whole new dynamic in that classifieds vertical. I’ll be watching with interest.

I thought I would be smart and I’d have a crack at upgrading my macbook hard drive. I bought a 7200 rpm 200 GB HDD on ebay, and was at least smart enough to back everything up before I started. I followed the instructions in this article on ExtremeTech and the hardware change went pretty smoothly. Heads-up: Make sure you have the T-6 Torx screwdriver and some good jewellers’ phillips screwdrivers before you start. You need the narrow profile screwdriver to get to the screws inside the battery bay. I think there were 16 screws to remove. NB: If you try this, the T-6 torx screwdriver is a size smaller than the ones in normal PC toolkits and this job is not one you want to improvise on.

I bought an external eSata enclosure and mounted my new hard drive before I started. I copied whatever I could across to the external hard drive, including partitioning it and copying my windows partition across. I discovered after the drive change-over that the bootcamp beta has expired and I couldn’t get the new hard drive to boot into windows. Doh!!! I do have a full backup and I haven’t given up yet, but this project has turned into a miniseries

I mounted the old drive in the external casing, and as it’s bootable I booted with the old drive as my boot disk. I’ve wiped the new drive, left it with one partition and I’m restoring all the content from the external drive again. Once that’s done I’ll turn the clock back a year and rerun Bootcamp. Then I should finally be able to get Windows back on.

Cracker.com.au was relaunched today using a hugely improved layout and sporting much tidier functionality. Cracker is a freemium classifieds site, strongest in the marketplace for ladies of negotiable moral standards (No that’s not why I am looking at it). Cracker is a few years old and has a well-established audience including across all the general classifieds categories. The house, job and car listings are syndicated from the Fairfax Classified Mastheads Drive, Domain and MyCareer.

I like the new look and feel, and the site comes across as a way more professional product. The new look and feel might even lead to more success in the broader market. The similar listings shown are relevant and the rating system is nice and tidy – and it works They have also made great use of Ajax components in unobtrusive and helpful ways. There’s no “lightbox fever” but rather well-thought out design. Have a look for yourself.

Realestate.com.au went down again last night. It’s humorous because of the trade comms they put out slagging us off at work when we had issues. For the one of biggest sites in Australia this is not really good form, especially during the early evening. Maybe they should look into converting to more reliable technology. I’m sure Delicate Genius could show them some more reliable stuff

I’ve been on the lookout for a good photoblog package for a while. Tonight I found flogr. Flogr is a very clean implementation of a photoblog “web layer” using the Flickr API. The site is highly configurable, and there are a few canned themes available. This product is awesome. You can see my implementation using it out-the-box; I haven’t changed anything other than configuration options.

One thing to watch out for: The application accesses your photos as an anonymous user - so if you have restricted access to the originals then it can only see the next size up. You’ll know what I’m talking about if your photos look pixellated. To fix this you need to change the photos’ license option to “creative commons” - or probably uploading a bigger original and keeping all rights reserved would also work (didn’t try that yet). Now I’ll have to follow in @NickHodge’s footsteps and go Wordpress theme hunting to find something that matches my swish new photoblog

Google Calendar snuck out a new feature that makes the calendar app a whole lot more awesome. They now offer a nifty little app that sits in your system tray and quietly allows you to synchronize your Outlook and Google Calendars. This is really awesome – it allows a whole new dimension of calendar visibility. My wife can check if I’m available to help out without having to call me and then wait for me to call her back; my calendar will sync according to a cycle that is defined in minutes – meaning that even if my phone is out of sync (I don’t have or want a Crackberry) I can easily check if I’m available at any time without having to say “I’ll call you back to confirm tomorrow”. This is really IMHO a killer feature. And as a double-whammy it’s a two-way sync so I can add appointments from home and know they’ll be in my calendar the next morning.

The Vine was soft-launched by Fairfax Digital yesterday, a news site aimed at the youth market with elements of the New Web Order’s social media shining through. The site is obviously still a little “beta”, but takes leaps forwards compared to its peers, in that it sports what we now take to be basic web features like rss feeds for all the sections, and heaps of video content. I don’t seem to be able to rate a video (or the user feedback isn’t there to confirm) but the feature is there. Look and feel of the site is fairly “low-design” which is a good indicator if the target market is the users of sites like Facebook, Flickr, del.icio.us, and other web 2. 0 successes. The page layouts feels very similar to other Fairfax news sites like the SMH – which is probably an irrelevant observation considering they have different target markets.

The site is squarely aimed at people younger than me so I suggest you check it out for yourself rather than going off some old geyser’s judgement

Seth threw the resuscitated meme my way, it’s come back to life (And who upped it from 5 to 8 things!). It took this meme to make me realise what a boring sod I’ve become. Anyway, here goes…

The meme is basically defined as follows:

The ground rules for the meme are simple. Here they are…

1. Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
2. People who are tagged need to write a post on their own blog (about their eight things) and post these rules.
3. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
4. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

Little known facts about Mark:

1. Nineteen years ago, I had a crush on a beautiful girl I had met at uni. When I tried to act on it she shot me down in flames. Eight years later we started dating. We’ve been married for ten years now
2. I once climbed a cliff with some mates to stand under a waterfall. I sat down on a rock ledge with my wet board-shorts and covered in sunblock. I started sliding uncontrollably down the sloping rocks and still believe the only reason I am here is because my mate’s wife Jo happened to be sitting close enough to catch me as I slid past her.
3. I once backpacked around South America for five months. I went to Salvador in Brazil for Carnaval. I slept in a hammock between the washing lines in the yard of one of the university’s student residence blocks, drank copious amounts of Cachasa and partied like there was no tomorrow. Each morning I woke up wishing there hadn’t been a tomorrow
4. I marched through Johannesburg’s streets behind Mac Maharaj, Walter Sisulu and other famous ANC leaders - and once tagged along with Ken Oosterbroek taking photos. Ken Oosterbroek was later tragically killed when he got caught in crossfire in Tokoza
5. I started off studying mechanical engineering because my father thought a BSc was a waste of time and there was no future in computers. Really, he did I got to third year and then changed over to a BSc majoring in Computer Science and Applied Maths. I was going to major in maths but my professor told me it was a waste of time. He then resigned and went off to become a commercial pilot. Really
6. I’m a closet chef. I like to watch cooking shows, even Jamie Oliver. My wife always curses that I watch them but never seem to make it from the couch to the kitchen to actually do anything.
7. I once started a software consultancy, in South Africa. Two friends and I invested the lofty sum of R1,000 (about $300 each, then) and started up a business. We had two computers, and three of us - so we used to take it in turns to code. When I left South Africa my partners bought me out and they have since sold the business. Of the three original partners, one is in Digital Media in Australia, one is VP, transormation services at Cap Gemini in London and one was IT Manager at a big courier firm in South Africa last I heard (we’re kind-of out of contact now).
8. I am a closet handyman and gardener. I’ve made great gardens in every house I have ever lived in with fishponds and meandering layouts except this one. Financial constraints, the tiny size, and lately the drought put an end to that. It’s not a done deal though - I’ll fix this one up one day too

And now for the tagging:
Anthony Milner
Vicky Lalwani
Josh Anstey
Anubhav Goyal
Dhruv Parashar
Sanson Lowe
Paul Wakeford
Saul Tombuk

Adobe Photoshop Express has been launched by Adobe. I think the best description for it is “social iPhoto”. After taking it for a test drive, I’d recommend you buy Aperture or Photoshop elements instead. Great idea, nice try, but even Paint.net is better

My work laptop reached capacity and I needed to free some space up. I found a nice visual tool called WinDirStat which is very useful for finding what has eaten up all the space on your hard drive. You can very quickly locate the biggest consumers of data, by file type or by folder. This screenshot is after I started my cleanup. I found duplicate copies of SQL databases – over 11 GB worth – and had heaps of old Google Videos that I’d downloaded and brought in to work for training / presentation. Windirstat needs some time to analyse the drive, but it has relatively small resource requirements and so (at least on my middle of the road laptop) it can happily chug along in the background. The two biggest files in green below are my pagefile and hibernate file.The purple is all the crud that has built up in my windows folder – a whole lot of msp files. My Windows directory is sitting at 8.2 GB

Huntsman
Blogged from my mobile

A mate of mine at work (no link-love because I don’t know if he has a blog ) showed me animoto today. This site is really cool. You can upload photos, add or choose music, and it produces what could be used as really cool presentation intro videos. Here’s a sample I made using some photos from Vegas, and music from their library:

The site is in beta, so it is a bit buggy but totally usable. For a nominal fee you can produce bigger and better videos. I rate this concept highly, producing similar videos would cost a fair amount.

Here’s a sample video made using pictures from this property on Domain.com.au (as you can see, this could have some interesting commercial applications):

The rendering process is fairly slow (as you’d expect), but it’s well worth trying out.

Day One is drawing to a close, the die-hard party animals are venturing out onto The Strip, and the weak and feeble old geeks like me are quietly fading into the background and sneaking off to sleep. Today’s sessions were mostly good, highlights for me being:

The presentation of IE 8

• (see previous post)
  • Huge improvements to W3C compliance
• CSS 2.1 Compliant. W3C Certification-tested
  • “Real world interop begins with CSS support”. (uh… yeah, we know that… ;o)
    • IE team are really focused on W3C compliance (couldn’t be more right)
  • IE8 by default will interpret content in the most standards-compliant manner. This is not IE7 mode J
  • IE8 has an IE7 compatibility mode (controlled by page / developer)
• Performance
  • Much better than IE7, still working on it.
  • Still trailing Firefox, Safari from slide shown very briefly.
• HTML 5 Start
  • Ajax back-button support added. End user gets the expected user experience.
  • Connection events: Page can be aware when you go offline. Page can then store data locally and save later when reconnected to web
• Dev tools
  • Big steps taken to improve developers’ lives with an extension like FireBug, but in some respects more feature-complete
• Activities
  • Right-click context menu actions that can be specified using xml. Example was “search for this on eBay”
• WebSlices
  • Possible to monitor slices / aspects of a page and be alerted when it changes. Ie: a “watch”

Ray Ozzie talking the future architecture of Microsoft’s offerings

• Key take-away for me was the move to more loosely coupled services instead of tightly coupled components
• Moving more products into The Cloud, as alternative offerings to Server products. With SQL Data Services being the next offering, as a hosted SQL product in the cloud.
• Ubiquitous digital assets – when we buy media we will be able to access that media on any of our assets, and it will live in the cloud. So if you blow away your Media centre, when you register your new one it will recover your assets.

Frank Arrigo’s panel discussion

Frank Arrigo hosted a panel discussion talking about monetizing web 2.0. His guests pretty much agreed that the two most feasible models were ad-driven revenue and the Freemium model. The panelists had some great discussions about data portability (Chris Saad from the Data Portability project was on the panel), open APIs, and the phenomenon where a successful service like Facebook (Tim Kendall from Facebook was on the panel) has to allow the people using the platform to monetize their apps before the platform itself can monetize. So they in effect provide the VC for their service consumers by providing a free platform. Interesting angle. Hopefully more to come tomorrow J

Microsoft made Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 available today, with the first public display in the Mix Keynote Address. The browser focuses heavily on W3C compliance, has an IE7 compatibility mode (developer-controlled) and boasts significant performance enhancements. Grab it here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/readiness/Install.htm