The devils in the details.

We finished last-weeks yap rounds with an evening of drinks at the Dupinisia Restaurant and Bar. As I recall, I was soo late that the entrees were already finished, and there wasn't anything after that except liquids.

It's a good thing we had a BBQ going at the house, even if I missed out on that one as well. This isn't looking so good.

Briefing

Subject: National ICT Strategy Development to Augment National Development

The National ICT Strategic Planning workshop brought together stakeholders from Government, Civil Society and the Private Sector. Workshop delegates assessed and initiated various policies, programmes, project proposals which they have committed to refining over the next four months. Likewise, Government is ensuring a minimal number of these projects are fully functional, at the launch of the National ICT direction scheduled for mid 2008.

Government having finalised our National Strategic Plan in 2006, have embedded significant ICT within capacity development, service development, and provisioning. In recognition of the interdependency between ICT and National Development, the Government of Tonga has long sought and accepted assistance for various ICT initiatives including the recent SOPAC sponsored e-Readiness Assessment, and the National ICT Strategic Planning workshops held with the assistance of the Commonwealth Secretariat.

Commitments from the Prime Minister and senior Government officials to workshop delegates have strengthened their resolve to pursue refinements of ICT Strategies for National Development. Although various Ministers continue pushing ICT as a significant enabler of National Development, the statements from the Prime Minister at the workshop was the first public direction to stakeholders

Participants have clearly identified human capacity retention and development as a core requirement for engaging the benefits of ICT. Several options are being investigated within the working groups targeting both long-term policies and short-term projects.

Augmenting the National Strategic Plan through ICT, six Working Groups have been formed from the workshop to refine ICT plans for: Education, e-Government, Homes and Communities, Industry, Legislation, Technology and Infrastructure.

“To ensure greater involvement of Civil Society and the Private Sector, Government must be a catalyst in the ICT arena.” says Alfred Soakai of the Department of Communications. “Government recognises and promotes long term economic growth must be led by Civil Society and the Private Sector, this Workshop is one of the initiatives of Government in the ICT field to move us all forward. We can do more, and bringing together all stake holders is an important beginning.”

The Department of Communications, again with assistance from the Commonwealth Secretariat continue to support and direct discourse.

Where to Now ?

Interested individuals and organisations are invited to participate in online discourse at the following addresses:

http://groups.google.com/group/tg-educ/ Education Working Group
http://groups.google.com/group/tg-egov/ e-Government Working Group
http://groups.google.com/group/tg-home/ Homes and Communities Working Group
http://groups.google.com/group/tg-indus/ Industry Working Group
http://groups.google.com/group/tg-legis/ Legislation Working Group
http://groups.google.com/group/tg-tech/ Technology and Infrastructure Working Group
The discussions are public, including various documents, directions related to each group.

Endnotes:

The Tonga Strategic Development Plan is available online at http://www.tonga-now.to/Article.aspx?ID=600

The Working Groups currently meet online using GoogleGroups.

Came across some news through http://www.tongausatoday.com so I thought it was a good time for a reminder of the Major news sites focused on Tonga, as well as other possible Tonga related news feeds.

Matangi Tonga: http://www.matangitonga.to

Planet Tonga: http://www.planet-tonga.com

Tonga Broadcasting Commission: http://www.tonga-broadcasting.com

Taimi 'o Tonga: http://www.timesoftonga.com

Tonga USA Today: http://www.tongausatoday.com

News Feeds

In general, I follow the news on Tonga using the RSS Feeds I've put together on the frontpage of Nomoa.com as well as a slashed together feeds.

Google News: http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=tonga&ie=UTF-8&scoring=d&output=rss  

Matangi Tonga (via Google): http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&lr=&resnum=1&tab=wn&ie=UTF-8&q=site:www.matangitonga.to&scoring=d&output=rss

Yahoo News:  http://news.search.yahoo.com/news/rss?ei=UTF-8&p=tonga&c=&eo=UTF-8 

Tasilisili: http://groups.google.com/group/tasilisili/feed/rss_v2_0_msgs.xml

Times of Tonga: http://timesoftonga.com//component/option,com_rss/feed,RSS2.0/no_html,1/

Tonga-Now.to:  http://www.tonga-now.to/Media/podcast/rssFeed.aspx?ID=2243&mode=2 

With the above 'feeds' I get the latest news on Tonga delivered to my desktop, by using a program that 'aggregates' collects the feeds. When I want to check the above 6 websites to see whether there are any news updates on Tonga, I don't have to look at all those websites separately (taking a lot of time.) Instead, I just open my News Aggregator (RSSOwl) and it checks the websites for me, and gives me the latest updates.

Coool!!!

www.Tonga-Broadcasting.com has the broadest news information, and unfortunately they've not got themselves indexed by Google's News service so I can't build an RSS feed from it (yet) but if you really must keep in touch with the pulse in Tonga, it wouldn't hurt you to visit this site at least once a day.

Looking to take a plane ride with your kids ?

There's always advise and precautions offered by many, so you might as well take a look at this link, should you be interested. 

Hose little noses. Most viruses enter our bodies through the nose and respiratory passages. The low humidity of a plane's cabin air can dry out the breathing passages, limiting their self-cleansing abilities. Every hour or two during the flight, spritz a few drops of saltwater into your baby's nose to flush out anything that may have accumulated. You can also use a nasal aspirator to suck out the liquefied secretions.

Observe the above precautions, and you and your baby will likely enjoy a healthy, happy holiday. Babies are a lot tougher than we give them credit for, so be prepared — not paranoid.

Been trying to watch some of Scoble's shows, which is (at its beginnings) only QuickTime *.mov files.

Unfortunately, I've been getting the above error "Error 37: a bad filename or volume name was encountered" and initially couldn't find any information about it and tried all sorts of things which just didn't work.

My disappointment with QuickTime and Scoble lasted until... Amit Agarwal solved the problem for me with his "Limitations With Long File Names on Windows [Must Read for Podcasters]"

Point B: This is relevant to podcasters who produce content in MOV, MP4 or MP3 formats that will be played inside the Apple Quicktime player.
The Windows version of Quicktime player cannot play podcasts with filenames longer than 63 characters and that length limit includes the mandatory period and the file name extension.

If you try to play a file in Quicktime with a lengthy name, it will refuse to play and return an "Error-37: a bad filename or volume name was encountered" [see screenshot] There are currently no workarounds to bypass this limit on Quicktime.
I found this Quicktime limitation just by chance while trying to watch Scoble's shoot with Flock co-founder Geoffrey Arone on The Scoble Show.

Quickly, find those Scoble Show files and rename them to something less in length. Wow!!! it works, and hey this stuff is pretty high quality video (might as well be for all the massive downloads.)

Ok, that's enough, 'cause I've got to get back to paying more attention to Printing for Less - Scoble Show (now renamed to something a lot less than what it was.) And resubscribing to the ScobleShow, now that I can actually view the things. The side note is that there must be a lot of Mac users on the subscription list since the Labnol post is the first mention I've found of fixing my Error 37 problem.

Thanks Amit Agarwal

When in Tonga and downtown or in one of the towns that don't insist on pigs being corralled, then more than likely you will get visitors of the pig kind.

Two standard ways of chasing the pigs out of your compound/grounds is the ol' "Tu tu tu..." or some similar incomprehensible gibberish that through the years has been used by convention as a communications with pigs, dogs, chickens and all range of animals. Of course there is the more common "'Alu, 'Alu!!"

The other method of getting those pigs out of the yard ...

Visit bTonga

It only takes a little longer than long, but now you can get your news updates from shuggySface through RSS.

IF you have an RSS Aggregator, then link to http://www.nomoa.com/forum/rss.php and you will be delivered your fill of the forums directly to your desktop. Of course you can use the email solution to 'watch' a topic, but I hate having more stuff in the mailbox than I already have. So, hopefully this solution will be of use to some of us.

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_Feed

RSS is used to provide items containing short descriptions of web content together with a link to the full version of the content. This information is delivered as an XML file called RSS feed, RSS stream, or RSS channel. An orange rectangle with the letters XML () or RSS is often used as a link to a site's RSS feed.

A program known as a feed reader or aggregator can check RSS-enabled webpages on behalf of a user and display any updated articles that it finds. RSS saves users from having to repeatedly visit favorite websites to check for new content or be notified of updates via email.

For more 'English' information about RSS and how to get your own Aggregator, please visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_Feed or