Entries from March 2007 ↓

Telstra has, in part, responded to Fairfax CEO David Kirk’s comments yesterday.

 “If David Kirk thinks we have a broadband drought because there is too little competition, he has played too much football without a helmet,” he said.

They’ve also threatened a class action lawsuit if the government forces Telstra to allow access to a new high-speed network by competitors .

Heaven forbid that a monopoly created in part by Australian tax-payer’s money be leveraged to help benefit those Australians!

Continuing on with the Fairfax news, according to an SMH article Fairfax Chief Executive David Kirk doesn’t seem to like Telstra very much. After labeling Australian broadband as “fraudband”, the article goes on to quote:

“All around the world you do see where there is a very incumbent telecommunications provider and not a lot of competition … that broadband take-up is slow, broadband pricing is high,” Mr Kirk said.

“I think it’s usually about market structure and regulation rather than technology or government policy.”

In other words: “Telstra, you’re the incumbent here - stop whinging about regulation and get the job done.”

His metric for if broadband is fast enough is if you can download a movie in less than 24 hours. Sounds like a good “ballpark” metric - x kilobits per second doesn’t really mean much to the average user, but telling someone that this week’s episode of Lost would take 12 hours to download and use a quarter of their monthly downloads on their “broadband” connection might get the message across.

Let’s face it - News Limited newspapers are awful. Which is unfortunate, seeing as The Courier Mail is the only daily paper servicing Queensland*. I personally find the Fairfax papers The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age to be better written and contain less bias.

I’ve been hoping for a Fairfax alternative for Brisbane for a while now (I was even close to writing about it), and it seems like my hopes have been answered.

Brisbane Times

While it’s not a daily paper, it is Fairfax and it does focus on Brisbane. Definitely a step in the right direction.

*Unless you count tabloids like the Gold Coast Bulletin. Which I don’t.

In October and November 2006 I was lucky enough to go to the USA for work, so I took the opportunity to travel around while I was there. My travel emails were well received back home, so I’m posting them here for all to enjoy.

Original Date: 7 November 2006

Hello again,

Got some time to kill while I let my camera battery charge, so here’s an update on the last few days.

For those of you who know what I was up to for work, it went really well. I wasn’t as nervous as I thought I would’ve (should’ve?) been, and the presentation was really good. We had a few small issues with our demo though, but nothing major, and not enough to spoil the three days. I also ended up with a bunch of IBM merch! I like freebies

After upstate NY, I decided to continue with the countryside theme and head up to Niagara Falls. I think this is the most expensive waterfall in the world, for me anyway. I think just getting there and back cost me over US$300! The worst part is you have to fly into Buffalo, and the shuttle bus to the falls, one-way is US$60… a random local I met on the plane saved me the money to get to Niagara though, so thank you Carol, wherever you are.

Niagara Falls is located right on the border between the US and Canada. The Canadian side is much, much nicer so that’s where I stayed for the night. They even welcomed me to the Falls with a fireworks show as I was walking over the Rainbow Bridge, which combined with the Falls themselves being lit up made for quite a spectacular view. The Falls themselves are amazing, but the town is really, really touristy - hence “Mini-vegas”. They have so much gimmicky crap there - for example, they have at least three different Wax Museums within two blocks of each other, a Ripley’s Believe It or Not, random haunted houses, and mountains of other sh*t designed to extract dollars from the tourists.

Canada itself, well the bit I saw anyway, was really nice. The people really do say “Eh?” and all the cliched accents are all true. I had a few beers with locals while I watched the NBA on TV (hell yeah).

However, silly me asked for a schooner at the bar, without realising that a Canadian schooner was about the size of a jug! Don’t ask how big their jugs are…

I only stayed there for a night and a day, then flew to Washington DC. Just getting back across the border into the US for the flight took an hour… the Canadian entry is free flowing though. The flight to DC was a killer, especially the two hour stopover (inc. a one hour delay) in Philadelphia when the Philadelphia to Baltimore leg was about 20 minutes airtime!

DC is really, really nice. Polar opposite to NY, though. NY is like the brains of the US - lots of different parts, each doing their own thing, but all vital to the whole of the city (and country). DC is the penis of the US - it’s where all the decisions actually get made. They even have a massive phallus - the Washington Monument!

Seriously though, DC is super clean and super organised. The subway stations are modern and really cool, the streets are clean, everything is signed and easy to get around, and the lawns are well manicured. Massive security presence, as expected, but it hasn’t felt overbearing like I thought it would. What’s overbearing is the patriotism though, there are American flags everwhere - you could never forget where you are…

I really haven’t seen too much of the city yet, but I did manage to see the White House (what little you can actually see), the Washington Monument (massive), the WW2 memorial (moving), and the reflection lake
and Lincoln Memorial (absolutely breathtaking).

I’ll be here until the 8th, then I’m off to Boston with a work friend to see MIT (he’s got friends up there), then back to NY with Kaneen. I’ll send updates when I can, and maybe photos!!

For a lot more photos from the trip, have a look at my Flickr set. I’ve geotagged them, so the map is pretty interesting too!

Like any self-respecting geek, I run Linux on my box at work. We have an internal Fedora mirror, so Fedora Core 6 is used by quite a few of us. (A few of the others use an internal deployment of IBM’s OpenClient, which was recently announced).

I recently noticed that after a regular “yum update”, the network on my work system was running slow. Not just a little slow, REALLY slow. As in 3 kB/s slow. Initially I wrote it off as network congestion, but after chatting with colleagues I realised that the slow speeds were limited to only some of the Linux machines in the lab.

Googling found nothing, so I had to grin and bear it until the sysadmin found a fix. After a while, he came across this solution (from here).

echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_window_scaling

Apparently kernel 2.6.17 and later has some changed window scaling parameters which were messing with an upstream router somewhere. Unfortunately, we had no way of finding out which router it was as it’s beyond our boundary firewall. Setting the scaling to 0 seems to have fixed the problem though.

Thanks Nathan!

UPDATE 2007-04-04: Looks like Microsoft Windows Vista is having this problem as well. According to this article on Ars Technica the problem is caused by upstream routers or packet filters not being aware of RFC 1323, which introduced the TCP window scaling parameter, and incorrectly dropping otherwise valid packets.

Seeing as I’m one of the more technically-inclined folk (read: nerdier) folks amongst my circle of friends, I thought I’d share something that I get got a big kick out of when I discovered. I know most of us are fans of Lost, Heroes, Prison Break and so on - so much so that many of us resort to the wonders of BitTorrent to get our fix. However, watching it on the computer can be a pain in the ass - especially if you all have to crowd into someone’s room to watch it.

So, what options exist for watching our beloved .avi’s on the television in the lounge room?

There are a few, and a lot of them can be expensive, but luckily I’m also a bit tight with my cash as well as nerdy. With that in mind, I’d like to introduce on the most impressive open-source applications I’ve seen:

X-Box Media Centre

That’s X-Box as in the normal, now somewhat old-school, X-Box. Combine one of those, which you can easily pick up (with DVD remote) for under $200, with completely free software and a network cable and you can be watching all the episodes of Lost you want from your couch!

In days of old, to run software like XBMC (that’s a nerdy acronym, everything in IT has one) you had to install a modchip. Well, those days are long behind us - you can mod your X-Box without even opening it’s case! It’s not even hard to do - plug an X-Box controller to USB converter into your PC, copy a hacked save game over to the X-Box, then load that save game. It then gives you a menu where you can install any software you like. Seriously, this is genius.

As a side bonus, you can also install play your (probably not) legally acquired backup X-Box games, emulators (Galaga, bitches!) and listen to music over the network.

In a later post, I’ll link to a few tutorials that I found useful when working how to set this all up.

Amon was asking me how to rip DVD’s a couple of weeks ago, so why not share with the rest of you the link I gave him:

How to rip a DVD: A Tutorial by Elliott Back

I’ve been using this method for ripping DVD’s for a couple of months now with no hassles.