NBN and Net Filter
*edit*
Neil Creek asked to be credited for the thought provoking tweets. I originally left them off cause I just wanted to get out my opinion of the situation but am happy to link to him since it has become a two way discussion
– Original post follows (with linking) –
I seen a tweet come up in my feed that made me want to reply.
The NBN will be a lot of money spent on today’s tech. Speeds form new tech will rapidly overtake and make it redundant.
Technology is cruel. It is so expensive to start with and gets out of date quickly. My response to this tweet was:
Extremes do not work. My first computer was top of the line, $3000. My second was $1000 second hand. Then $4000. Get what fits.
Which was quickly followed by:
A good argument against NBN. Give it to those who need the speeds, not those who don’t. It’s one size fits all.
Which is a perfectly valid response and made me rethink why I feel the way I do about the NBN.
Backfired
I’m for NBN and believe it should reach the many. 8 years is a long time and believe that 100mb/s is a good start.
It is at this point I realised that 140 characters is not enough (but a good start to the conversation).
I feel the Governments role is to redistribute wealth and make sure the country moves forward as a whole. Whilst it is probably fact that the majority of people wanting faster network access are city folk, people in country regions should be able to access the same sort of facilities.
ISPs are going to have a hard time justifying large costs to get the infrastructure out that far and whilst they could pass on the cost to those customers, the service would become so expensive that few would want it. The ISPs could share that cost amongst the city subscribers but then there services would be more expensive than other ISPs that just service city regions.
I feel like it is comparable to the roads. Just because they get used less out in the country, the roads should still be built to the same standards that roads in the city are built.
I’m reminded of a lecture in accounting. Monopoly isn’t a bad word. Sometimes it is the best way to get something done. Power, Water, Government and Public Transport have the monopoly feel. There is basically only one way of getting them.
The only way we are going to get a major step forward in out internet connectivity to catch up with the rest of the world is if the majority of the infrastructure is treated as a monopoly. Otherwise it will be patches of improvements. I’m still waiting to get off 1.5mbs. I can’t watch high def videos on Youtube because it isn’t worth the wait.
Why have I lumped the Net Filter in with this post? The roads analogy. I’m torn between thing that the Net Filter is a coffee shop on the side of the road or whether they are the police that patrol the roads.
I would prefer them to be the coffee shop, because I don’t like coffee, so can happily drive down the road without worry. This gives power to the driver and to the business that want to set up on the side of the road. Give you the options of Coffee, Hot Chocolate, Milkshakes etc.
It seems that the likes of Conroy would like the filter to be like police with an ever watchful eye. Being technically minded I guess I see a huge gap between physical danger and cyber danger. You can protect yourself online but it is hard for you to stop someone that has had too much to drink from driving into you.
Data encapsulation for tools
One of the nice things about java is a the abundance of additional libraries that are available.
I’m currently working on mapping software and thankfully, there is an open source library that handles most of the work.
The first task I’ve been given at my new job is to allow users to upload some files that puts an overlay on the map. Fortunately I just have to provide the glue between the app and the library that does the mapping.
Except…
I don’t have complete control over the tools.
The tool provides an XML parser which has a private member for the handler. It is this handler that is given the contents of the file and passes around some values to construct geometries. Under some circumstances, this handler doesn’t do what I would want it to do.
In the perfect DI world, I would just hand this parser the handler that I want it to use.
Because it is private, I have to use reflection to change the value of the handler in the parser after its construction.
If the member was protected, I could just extend the parser and change the value of the handler and I wouldn’t feel so dirty.
I’m interested in input though, what is the value of “private” in a tool. Should the tool creator limit what can be achieved?
SVN is stupid and so am I
Just want to have a quick rant about subversion. Most places you see the SVN is the replacement to CVS and does things better but I’m not entirely sure.
I was always suspicious when branching and tagging were copying the files around on the file system. If I wanted to make those sorts of copies, I’d just do it myself.
This bit me yesterday when I wanted to change what branch a particular directory was checked out as. I couldn’t just say “This folder, be this branch” I had to say check out this location of SVN to this location on my disk. The first time I tried, I almost checked out the whole alternative branch into the particular folder (not what I wanted).
I know that flexibility = power.
But sometimes I like it when design stops you making mistakes like that.
Time flies… but what was I doing?
Back on the 10th of February, my boss asked me to hang back a little later than usual. I was working 8am-4pm and loving it.
The walk to the other end of the building was interesting and all the other guys were jesting that “I was in trouble now”.
I was made redundant.
Being a Wednesday I thought I would just enjoy the long weekend and start looking for a job on Monday but a couple of people had got in touch with me earlier than that (boy does the news travel quickly).
Monday I had a job interview with someone I had previously worked with and the ball got rolling Wednesday.
Working with a mapping system this time. Looking forward to the maths.
FYI: Breathalyzers
I was driving home from Coffs Harbour and got pulled over by the police.
Just a random breath test. He asked me how I was going then count to 5. This confused the hell out of me. The last time I used one of these machines was in primary school when a police officer came in and gave a speech.
Back then you had to blow in a tube for about 5 seconds so I was expecting to do the same.
But you basically just talk over this machine and it picks up your blood-alcohol level.
I don’t know if these machine were just in NSW or if they have been deployed across Australia.
Just thought I’d share.
Google no longer loves me
A search of “pimaster” is no longer showing this blog near the top of the search listing.
I blame myself, I really haven’t had anything to add to the world of the Internet. I’ve gone from updating my blog 4-6 times a month to barely 1 a month.
I blame work. Oh, which I haven’t posted about.
Back in May I started work for Majitek. I joined the Product team and was looking forward to a maintenance/feature improvement sort of development. I was hoping to see how problems that I’ve had come up in the past had been solved in their products.
But it was not to be.
The product I am working on really hasn’t reached a mature level. We are still trying to work out how to solve certain problems.
There are some good days, but some are frustrating.
I’ve started a few little things to tinker with, but haven’t really got around to finishing anything. Which sucks.
I’ve been enjoying the company of friends a lot more than I used to. It’s good in breaking up the weeks, but also takes time away from just sitting in front of a computer.
I’d love to update this clog more, but we’ll see how we go.
I’m still with the TF2 clan I joined back in early 2008, http://mofoclan.forumotion.com/forum.htm
I’ve also been posting a bit on twitter https://twitter.com/the_pimaster if you are into that sort of thing.
CSS awesomeness
I was forwarded a link today at work that I just have to share:
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/css/gallery/slide1.htm
Yeah, it looks that bad in a modern browser.
But at the height of awesome (*chokes*), in IE 3.03, there is some magic-fu.
Finally, a result for the Compact Flash card
Since I had some plans canceled yesterday, I decided I had enough time to re-shuffle my disks around, put the CF card first and install XP onto it and see what would happen.
As expected the install took a lot longer to complete that a standard disk. I wasn’t really expecting 4-5 hours though.
It was when I got into Windows that my heart sank though. Trying to install the drivers for my system was extremely slow. Loading IE (which starts the driver installation) was slow. Trying to check out where the bottle-necks were was slow.
Basically the CF card was being hammered nearly all the time. I managed to move swap onto a real disk and “Program Files”, but couldn’t get my “Documents and Settings” reliably moved to another disk. I don’t think it would have helped enough though.
So I timed a fresh boot from start up to shutdown on the CF card and it took nearly 8 minutes.
I re-installed onto a standard disk and did the same task in a minute.
It isn’t a complete failure though. The animation during Windows XP was noticeably faster on the CF card compared to a standard disk. So there is hope for booting from CF. It was just everything after that that was slow.
My next task is to install *nix to CF and find out if it can be tweaked to boot with all haste.
Compact Flash to SATA
My XP install has become fairly slow and I want to move away from my RAID 1 configuration because it is not offering me anything I actually need.
So I figured the easiest way to transition all of my data is to have a free disk, a disk with all my old content and another disk for my OS.
Solid state disks have been making their rounds and I thought it would be cool if there was a SATA to CF adapter that allowed be to boot of a generic solid state media.
Now I have an 8gb solid state disk for my OS.
I opened up Nero (as it is the only thing I know that has some sort of disk speed test) to find out what the performance was.
15MB/s as apposed to the ~65MB/s I was getting for my other media. I’m fairly sure that is only a read speed (the only thing that is important for buffering before burning to cd), but it is as expected. I’m hoping the speed of CF cards will pick up in the future.
I’m hoping the seek speed comes into play when the OS is finally loaded onto this thing, but it could take a fair amount of time to do the actual install.
I’ve got a game on tomorrow night, so installation will have to wait till at least Thursday.
Slightly excited by Trac installation
Every now and then I pop onto the byteclub twitter feed and was surprised to see that we are edging closer to a SCM being installed.
I’m not sure what we are going to put on there but I take it we are still going for the theory that if we build it, they will come.
In other news that should be announced on a blog, I’ve started work at Majitek. Currently just doing java webapp work which isn’t far off what I was doing at Hyro. New faces, new processes. I feel like the take up is a little slow but I’ll get there.