Korean Food

Its been a little while since I was in South Korea (and quite a bit has happened since then too) but as I was browsing through my images I came across a few that reminded me that I should put up some more of my experiences there (and perhaps help the tourist trade a little bit). My older pages on my last trip there (where I stayed for 4 months) are here.

One of the things that I loved about Korea was the food, its often a simple case of providing tasty ingredients together in a colourful and tasteful combination.

Fresh vegetables and leaves feature highly as does sea food (especially along the coasts ;-) While we were in Pusan we had a number of very tasty dishes like this one.


which is basically sea squirt served with some vegetables and of course some chilli paste.

Its wise to remember the Chilli for those who are not use to it. Even if you are brave of heart and tongue if you've not spent some time getting used to it then a sudden hit will result in having to deal with more than just the hot mouth for a few minutes. A local toilet seemed to be giving warnings of this (if a little too late)




But if you get the chance to go to South Korea do it by all means! Don't restrict your eating to the fancy western looking places but if you are able to have a go at communicating you'll find some really excellent food there.

And Busan is beautiful by night up on the hill too!


have fun!

Australia day 2009

I was reading today in The Australian, that Mick Dodson (a man I admire for taking leadership and personal interest in Aboriginal issues in Australia) has said that

To many indigenous Australians, in fact most indigenous Australians, it really reflects the day in which our world came crashing down

I think this is a fair comment with quite a ring of truth about it. He goes further to say that

Many of our people call it Invasion Day, but I think Australia is mature enough now to have a conversation about that, and let's get on with it, like we usually do.

So I'd like to participate in that mature conversation and begin by raising with the following points which I think need to be considered as a premise:

• while for much of human history (certainly western recorded history) Australia remained isolated geographically, this situation was not going to remain so forever.
  
• there is some suggestion that there have previously been indigenous human inhabitants in Australia genetically different to the indigenous inhabitants met by Cook and the English explorers.
  
• certainly much of the actions of the early colonists (and colonial government) was reprehensible and distasteful to us today (perhaps even then). However this is perhaps only so from particular religious view points (such as Christian and perhaps Buddhist views), certainly fights over territory are nothing new in human history and the losers of such disputes can face either death, slavery or (if lucky) assimilation.
• choice of words is not accidental, so invasion or colonisation or migration or displacement are all words which could apply but which need to be thought about carefully (unless we're not after intelligent discussion, but rather a screaming match).
• everyone and every culture undergoes change, like it or not we are exposed to other humans eventually
• what would it have been like if the other culture which encountered Australia and spread its influence into there was any other culture (say Chinese, Japanese, or even something like the Assyrian or Roman cultures)

So as well as dealing with what has gone on, lets not loose sight of the fact that at some stage the Indigenous people of Australia were going to meet other humans. Because they had not been developing (and exploring outside of their world) it was likely someone else of greater technical skills was going to be the explorer.

No matter what, their world would be changed forever. But then our world (the entire planet) has been changed several times over, so perhaps we've just had a little more experience in getting used to changes (maybe).

So, indigenous people can remain in the stone age if they choose (and I think there exists room for that, although some leaders Mr Dodson among them hold that they should not) and accept the attendant limitations of that choice (such as access to medical educational and other modern resources). Perhaps we can even provided a sheltered location for them, away from exploitation of our culture or those from their culture who would seek to exploit them.

However if you want to modernize then like it or not you must accept the limitations of our existing culture and join with it. From that point you can attempt to steer it (as does anyone else) through the channels available such as politics, science and academic inputs.

You will however need to persuade people and provide acceptable alternatives.

No matter what, life is never static for long so you may as well get used to change.

do it in house if you can

It seems that organizations are slowly learning (well in the Darwinian way of the dumb die out mostly) of the need to keep business critical elements to themselves.

Why? well because no one will take your business as seriously as you do for one.

Case in point: I once worked for a large organization who developed all their IT requirements in house. We worked with Oracle products and using Oracle Forms and other Unix tools (like SCCS for revision controls tied into a forms based software quality control system) and we made almost everything our organization needed ourselves. Not only did they work but as I later traveled the world in different organizations I came to realize were ahead of the pack.

But then the bean counters started to make interesting decisions about "outsourcing" and suddenly what we estimated could be done with a modest expansion of people, was turned over to a contractor and an off-shore provider doing much of the work. The long term people who worked for the organization began leaving and there started a rapid cycle of employing "training vultures" who joined, got trained and left. The sense of team which had existed vanished and worse noone really knew what things were or what their history was.

The cost estimated by the contractor who "won the bid" was several times what our old team had estimated, and funnier still (years later) I heard the project went over budget by some many millions of dollars.

So when I read this mornings paper that a similar organization has made another "cost saving" outsourcing decision I felt that it was sad to see we're still wasting our resources.

Deakin affected by IT scandal

Andrew Trounson | January 21, 2009

Article from: The Australian

THE $1.5 billion fraud scandal at Indian technology giant Satyam Computer Services has paralysed a $75 million project with Victoria's Deakin University to create an information technology development and learning facility in Geelong.

The scandal also puts in doubt lucrative training contracts that were expected to flow to the university.

I'd really like to know when the managers will stop "saving money" for the organizations and realize that its no simple equation to value having your own reactive and responsive IT staff. The answer is that you must invest in your staff and organization and build core competencies in house if you are going to run your own business. If you let other people run your business ... well you get what they want.

I've worked for a multinational software company in Tokyo with a development section in India and even though we were one organization (unlike above when it was an external contracting developer) we still had problems and issues in unifying the development desires of Tokyo with the development realities in Bangalore.

Further IT industry in Australia is suffering due to the "allure" of off shore money saving in developing countries. I think that its great that places like India are taking leaps and bounds in software development, taking their own futures into their own hands. But isn't this this is exactly what we should be doing?

If its worth doing right ... do it yourself, if its business critical, then don't let it out of your sight.

new lightweight cameras

Well I must say that I'm getting excited about the developments in digital cameras. I've been anticipating what the Panasonic G1 micro 4/3rds format can do for my world and after reading the latest post from DPReview about it I'm very keen.

I've made this composite overlay (scaling the cameras to be same dimensions) which I reckon represents the size difference.

I have been pleased with images taken with my 10D, but after using compact cameras for so long I'm tired of heavy lumps. For example (as mentioned in my previous post) the 10D together with my Tokina 12-24 makes 1.3Kg slung off my shoulder, while the Lumix weighs around half at 630g.

With a big sensor and incorporating the improvements that have happened in sensors since the 10D its not surprising that it makes images that outdo the 10D.

Just in case you don't know what I mean about the sizes of sensors, most digital SLR cameras have a sensor which is called APS sized (because there was a film called APS) and when chips were expensive to make the camera makers tried to save money by making is another "format" called Four Thirds (of 4/3'rds). {Note: its perhaps worth mentioning that APS film less died because it was smaller than 35mm and had no significant other advantages}

As you can see from this figure while the 4/3'rds sensor is smaller than the more common APS its still rather larger than the more common sizes presently used to gather the light for your 10MegaPixels. In fact its more than 4 times the light gathering area of the sensor in cameras like the Canon G10.

Signal processing helps the camera makers get the most out of their small sensors, but if you've got a bigger better signal to start with you can make better and cleaner images with your RAW files.

Here's an example. Using RAW processing and some software I can make much more from the files my camera captures and open up new worlds of photography for me (and anyone else who owns one). On this file I was initially disappointed by the conversion (in camera JPG and from RAW in photoshop) as below:





I've recently been finding that I can take my basic RAW file and with little effort in Photoshop and Photomatix get it to look like this:



now that's more like what I saw at the Taj on the early morning we were there.


Roll on future!