KeithAhern.com

A tour of the ANSTO nuclear facility in Lucas Heights, NSW

On Saturday 26th of February I joined a motley crew of knowledge management experts on a tour of the ANSTO nuclear facility.  This nuclear facility is for scientific research, it does not produce electricity.  There are no nuclear power stations in Australia.  The facility first went ‘critical’ in 1958 - ‘critical’ is the unfortunate term (before marketing and PR) for when the nuclear chain reaction is sustainable i.e. there is no increase or decrease of power.

As would be expected there was several security checks before and during the tour - and the tour group did not get to enter the actual room with the core - something that I’m not sure I wanted anyway - it might be something I look back on in the same way a cancer patient looks back on their first cigarette.  Also, I was not allowed to carry a mobile phone or camera.

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Optus iPhone availability

The Optus store on Oxford st. just told me Optus are completely out of iPhones for 4 weeks.

QRCode promoting street musicians in Japan

I  found this photo I took nearly 2 years ago in Japan,  Tokyo’s Yoyogi Park to be precise.  It’s pretty neat, the QRCcode links to a mobile page about the band.  Instant gratification.  Telstra is attempting to kick start it in Australia and good luck to them, I really think they should have got together with an industry body like AIMIA and get all the carriers behind it.  I hear they are attempting to push the QRCode app to all their NextG customers.  Eek, would not like to be the person who signed off on that.

Mobile Web Tips Part 1 - Page Efficiency

Page efficiency is very important on mobile phones. I used the term page efficiency rather than page weight because fast loading of new content is more complicated than low page weight.  Some people think that 3G networks negate the need for compression and caching. This is simply not true.  3G networks continue to be the poor equivalent to their wired or even WiFi cousins and have very high latency times.

An efficient page is, where possible:

• Loaded by AJAX
• Compressed using GZIP
• Has a cache expiry of 10 years
• Simple HTML, styled by an external CSS file

It amazing how many mobile sites fail on one or more of the above requirements.  Lets look at them one by one.

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Announcing the best iPhone sites in Australia, news.com.au, truelocal and moshtix

Well its time to reveal what kept me and a bunch of great people at News Digital Media and beyond (Tim & Tom) busy for a the last month or so.

Under an incredibly short development schedule we went from a simple prototype I created for news.com.au to 3 of the best iPhone sites in the world, I truly believe that.

iphone.news.com.au News from Australia and around the world

(iPhone only or Safari on a Mac/PC with Developer Mode/User Agent/iPhone)

iphone.truelocal.com.au Australia’s fastest growing business directory

(iPhone only or Safari on a Mac/PC with Developer Mode/User Agent/iPhone)

iphone.moshtix.com.au Buy tickets for events online and on mobile

(iPhone only or Safari on a Mac/PC with Developer Mode/User Agent/iPhone)

Thanks to Pete for the screenshots

Cleaning up the digital litter - KeithAhern.com is alive!