Stellata

Yes its that time of year again.  The frogs have come out of hiding and starting to get busy.
We have found the first batch of frog spawn too.  I have been trying to get Swan Valley Fish and Lily Farm on to the Frogwatch program contact list for tadpoles, but I can't find an email contact for the maintainer and the musems contact for Frogwatch hasn't returned any of my calls.  I am expecting to have thousands of tadpoles here this season.  So if people want tadpoles and are located close to us, you know where to come ;-)

After much work (especially by Tracy) we just launched our new online store. Your Pond at Swan Valley Fish and Lily Farm. We decided to go with a separate store from the Swan Valley Fish and Lily Farm web site for a couple of reasons

1. We want the online store to offers goods nationally. Swan Valley Fish and Lily Farm is to locally focussed. Outside of Perth no one even knows what/where the Swan Valley is.
2. We won't be offering Water Lilies, Water Plans, Koi and Gold Fish in the online store. We wont ship these items around the country for a number of reasons so we wanted to keep these separate.
3. We found Swan Valley Fish and Lily Farm - as a company name is actually an impediment to effective online advertising. Google Adwords for example has some fairly severe character limits, and half our Ad was taken up with just Swan Valley Fish and Lily Farm. Also none of the terms in the title do a great deal of help. Fish and too generic, as is Lily. We need pond, pump, stuff like that so "Your Pond" seems to be a much better starting point.

So we shall see how we go.

There's a lot written about the Maker movement (and for that matter the hacker) of late. Makers guilds popping up. Heaps of interesting stuff on Make Magazine and hackaday etc.. But what defines a "maker". Is it really only high-tech hardware hacking, 3d printers etc.. I think not, and excellent crafts(men|women) have always been around. Is it really computer geeks who have rediscovered building stuff rather than just programming. Is having a tangible interaction with the physical world becoming important, or is it just stepping out of your comfort zone and having a go.

Case in point me, I have spent the last 26+ years in IT, mainly doing software, but at times as an SE at Sun. But over the last few years have slowly moved away from IT into what is on the face of it a fairly non technical space, Water Lilies and Koi. But its an interesting path, I spend less time on the computer more time driving a bob cat. Technology still pops up along the way as I spend time designing concrete molds and building models of everything in Sketchup before we build, then doing things like digging out python and use some constraint based modelling to work out the most cost effective (and least wasteful) way to cut various lengths of steel for the molds. Then getting physical again cutting and welding the 4 tonne of steel to make the molds and then fabricating more than 1,000 150kg reinforced concrete slabs over 2 years (see the outcome in an earlier photo). Then build 80 ponds carrying over 200,000 liters.

My wife and I did it (with some help from friends and family) but with absolutely no background in any of what we have done (except my IT background). Over 5 years, 80 ponds, and a growing business later, we actually did it ourselves.

Is this is an example that defines the modern DIY maker movement. I don't think its just about quadrocopters or model rockets with telemetry, making your android phone blink some lights on your arduino and beyond just renovating. It seems to be about using the vast and freely available resources online to learn, educate and train yourself, move outside the mainstream, have a vision and "actually execute". The last bit - execute thats always crucial. (don't get me wrong I am seriously getting into arduino at the moment)

The scale doesn't matter, but the physical nature of making things does, the journey does, and learning every step of the seems to be fundamental.

Oh and sharing.

I think the share bit is important. That bit I haven't done too well on. Mind you pop into our place and I will talk your ears off helping people understand how it works, what makes it tick, how others can leverage what we have done, but it is missing that push back into the online world.

I think thats where I have diverged from the modern maker movement. I just haven't shared enough.

We have been evaluating "Cloud based" eCommerce solutions for our online store. I looked at Megento Go, Adobe Business Catalyst, bigcommerce, CoreCommerce , AShop and eCorner (which is based on ePages).

I didn't want to run our own stack, (I don't have the time to set it all up and manage the complete stack myself)

In the end we settled on eCorner (ePages) as it was the only one that even remotely addressed shipping within Australia. It appears eCorner is the only hosted solution that currently provides Temando support (a B2B shipping quoting/booking service for Australia). Magento has a plugin for Temando, but the cloud hosted MegentoGo doesn't offer such a thing.

A few solutions provide basic Australia Post rate calculations. I found none do the Australia Post rate calculation correctly (including ePages) as they do not take girth measurements (aggregate of W+H+L < 140cm) into account for the item to be shipped via Australia Post. None seem to handle aggregating items for postage either via Australia Post.

Shipping for Aus market with larger items seems completely under done in all of the solutions, but I need to get the store up by the end of July.

All of the solutions seem to have some nice features, but none of them allowed us to present our products they way we would really like.

So we will go with eCorner for now, evaluate how we go for the next 6 months, and decide then if I need to write our own store on appengine or run up a full stack like Magento on EC2 myself and customise the solution (fix shipping) - I just can't stand the idea of having to deal with PHP though ;-)

 

What criteria do moderators of "Ask Slashdot" use to accept or reject questions?

I wanted for ask the Slashdot community what they thought would be the next cross platform filesystem that could be adopted for things like still cameras, video cameras, portable players, flash drives etc...

Currently FAT16, and FAT32 are it. But with hard drives being put into video cameras by the likes of JVC, I can see even FAT32 being inaqeuate in the next couple of years. Also there was quite a bit of concern about FAT(16/32) patents earlier this year. So what new filesystem supportable by embedded devices, windows, OSX, *nix's and linux etc, that isn't patent or license encumbered could possibly be used, or will we see a Filesystem standards war. There is currently wide spread support for a single filesystem standard ensuring interoperability, I would hate to see it become fractured with proprietary solutions.

I thought this was actually a very reasonable and topical question, but it was summarily rejected without any indication why. (I am probably not in the "Slashdot in" crowd ;-)

Lichen