Matisyahu's Blog

I got up at 9:30am this morning and went for a small walk however I decided to work from home because the trains at the time I logged off at would be replaced with buses – I’d sooner work from home and benefit from having some extra time that I can jump into bed and have a good night sleep. On Thursday there there is the normal train time table so I’ll be popping into the office – the big focus in my personal life is getting back into a good meal routine and today I’ve kept track of my calories.

I think it is one of those things that if you do it on a regular basis it becomes habit forming in much the same way I’m getting up at 9:30am and my body is slowly getting used to that new schedule. The other focus by me is not eating anything after 8pm because I find I have a much better sleep if I go to bed without having a full stomach. I guess it is undoing a life time of bad habits combined with my old job where I would be starting at 4pm and in some cases 10pm to do an overnight shift.

Google released an update to Chrome which bumped the version from 148.0.7778.168 to 148.0.7778.179 (link). I had a look back at last week’s release because at the time the security fixes had been disclosed however it has been updated to include the details (link) and there are many security fixes with quite a few critical and high level security fixes – from what I understand Google is gradually replacing code piece by peace using Rust in much the same way Microsoft is doing which is to replace code where the likelyhood of a security vulnerability is the highest (in Windows 11 the GDI regions was rewritten in Rust as a proof of concept along with a few other components – no announcements made regarding other components of Windows being written in Rust).

The government have announced a downsizing in the public service – reducing it down to 1% of the population size which translates to 8700 full time employees being let go. What is their plan, well, there is no plan other than empty talk about greater utilisation of AI and technology which rings rather hollow given that the first decision the new government did was slash IT investment being done in Health New Zealand. I’m sure that the public could be more efficient just like any large organisation but something tells me that the National led government have no long term plan and something tells me that it’ll end up like an episode of Yes Minister where employees will be laid off and then rehired as a contractors but the head count will be reduced thus giving the impression they had achieved something (even though the use of contractors tends to be more expensive).

I might go into a longer post regarding this because there is potential to improve the governments use of technology but if past experiences are anything to go by I wouldn’t hold out much hope it doesn’t turn into a disaster such as the INCIS project or the Nova Pay debacle. When you have politicians who have no clue about information technology being dependent on consultants who are little more than sales people for what ever vender they’re getting a cut from with each sale then don’t be surprised that what is chosen tends to be what benefits the bottom line for the consultency firm rather than then person paying the bill at the end of the project.