Blag o' dkam

I’ve added your favourite bookstore and mine, Readings.

I wanted to find an article on an event I enjoyed while living in Finland – Beer Floating. Unfortunately, the English edition of the largest Finnish newspaper is closed for July which is the summer holidays. That’s just how seriously Finns take their summer – screw you non-Finnish speakers, we’re going on holidays – classic.

What is beer floating you ask? It’s floating down a river in an inflatable ( of any description – including dinghies, rafts, paddling pools and castles ), drinking beer. Have a look at the photos at the official site or click the video button on this page. When I lived in Finland, Markku – a work colleague hassled me constantly until I agreed to take part. Here’s a picture with me in it. I’m the guy in the maroon top looking at the ground – yep that’s me. I think

It was lots of fun. There were rapids – which is quite exciting in a one-child size blow-up dinghy loaded down with a six pack of beer and all your personal belongings wrapped up in plastic ziplock bags. Thoroughly drunk. There were people floating over rapids in blow-up castles. It was great fun.

Telstra’s monopoly over the fixed line copper pairs which come to your house has allowed them to charge monopoly prices for what should be a cheap service. Unlike other countries which have privatised their national telco, Australia, for some reason, didn’t split the telco into retail and infrastructure. Cable aside, Telecommunications and ISP business have to pay the Telstra tax for access to the market – somewhere between $20 and $30 AUD. Well with luck, no more. Wireless ISP services have been growing steadily cheaper, faster with more quota. Mobile carrier Three has mobile internet access via their 3G network – in some cases providing 5 times the quota for the equivalent Telstra fixed line ISP. Virgin is the latest Telco to enter this market – and it looks like they’re serious about it.

Virgin’s products are a little different to other offerings. They’re offering a mobile and a home based ISP service, with regular telephone service via the home based service. The Home service is interesting for it’s novelty in the Australian market. For around $60 per month, you get a regular phone service, with a normal land line number for people to call you on, unlimited, free local, long distance and virgin mobile calls, and a 512kbps, 4GB internet service, all provided via Virgin’s ( Well, Optus’ network really ) 3G network. Calls are made via circuit switched 3G network – not VoIP. This provides what seems to be a very good value phone and internet service, avoiding Telstra’s fixed line tax.

This service appears to be the market working around Telstra’s monopoly – providing services like this via mobile technology must be more expensive than the land line cost to Telstra – but not to the other competitors in the market. Further more, fixed services like this will affect the capacity planning for mobile networks by providing them with a fixed usage + mobile usage, rather than simply mobile usage. This fixed “base load” if you like should allow higher return on the infrastructure investment.

Time to sell your Telstra shares? With luck, we’ll see more of this sort of market “work around” for Telstra’s monopoly.

Some more functional changes to Bookie this weekend. The major change has been that the pricing information is now retrieved once the page has loaded, with a spinning icon to show that work is being done. Should probably find a larger animation, or one that says “Loading Pricing Info…” with some animated dots. Or something. This should provide much better user feed back that something is happening.

I’ve updated the CSS to make it look a little nicer, but it’s still focused on getting the functionality right. Most people who’ve provided feed-back ( thanks Rob & Niall ) want either a consolidation of searching and pricing, or having the search bar available from the pricing info – saving extra clicks. I’ll have to chew over these to figure out a good approach.

Couple of changes to Bookie recently:

• Changed the label for the search from span to label (Thanks Phil)
• Updated the html in the “Recent Searches” to use lists rather than spans – this makes more sense really. (Thanks Phil)
• Updated the price layout html to use a combination of div and span, rather than an html table.
• Fixed a bug where selecting an item after searching in the US Amazon, would then go and lookup the book details from the UK Amazon. If the book didn’t exist in the UK Amazon, the title became the ISBN. Bookie now searches both Amazons for book details.

Great interview with the author of Puppet in Computer World Australia. It’s refreshing to find someone expressing and dealing with issues like this.

The truth is, the state of computing is absolutely pitiful. There are essentially no good tools for sysadmins, and the practice of system administration relies almost entirely on hand-building and hand-maintaining operating systems; those who aren’t doing things by hand are almost exclusively using tools they built themselves and will never publish, including places like Google.

It’s so true, but as with many truths, sometimes it takes someone to say it plainly. We system admins ( at least the ones I work with ) dislike the tedious work – the typing monkey work, but love the challenge of a new problem to solve. When the tedium becomes too strong, we write scripts to do the typing monkey work for us. This can be as enjoyable as solving problems. This is probably the point where non-geeks are scratching their heads saying “Did he just say enjoyable?”.

Some parts of the interview give my sense of humour a wry poke:

sure, you can tell Apache is running, but is it supposed to be running or did someone just start it while testing something six months ago?

Ha. So true. We see this kind of thing all the time – especially with boxes which have been running for a while. ( I was sad to have to update the kernel on some machines a few weeks ago – 522 days of uptime ). “Is apache supposed to be installed on this box??” The more I get to know puppet, the more I think it’s got a place in the toolbox of the sys admin.

…about being able to add video content so easily to a web page now days.

I know that’s a little 1.0, but it used to be very difficult. Now, you just paste in the html directly from the video clip and Bam! You’ve got yourself some sweet video.

But is this too thin? Clearly designed for the US market – how does our plastic money go folding into halves or thirds? However’s it’s cheap enough at ~$36 USD ( Price + Shipping ) to give it a day in court. They do offer “UPS World Wide Express Plus” shipping option for the bargain price of $140.53 USD. How badly could you need a wallet?

The possible uses for this technology are amazing. For some reason, blackmail was one of the first to pop into my head. I wonder if that says something about me?

An enjoyable speech given by Sam Harris can be found here. Sam follows his speech up with short Q&A session. The subject is familiar to those of you who’ve read his latest book, Letter to a Christian Nation. If you find Dawkins too aggressive, you may find Sam Harris to be more your style. It’s difficult to describe the differences in their approaches, you could perhaps sum it up as Dawkins appealing to your intellectual side, whilst Harris is after your understanding.

One of my favourite quotes:

I submit to you that there really is no society, in human history that has ever suffered because it’s population became too reasonable, too relucant to embrace dogma, or too demanding of evidence.