Entries from April 2007 ↓

On the way home from work I was chatting to a colleague about money, and remembered a phrase I heard a while ago: “Don’t put money in the bank, own the bank!”

While I can’t recall the exact place I heard it (although I’ve found at least one site that looks at the concept), I thought it was at least quickly looking into it. I compared putting money in a ING Direct “Savings Maximiser” account to buying stocks in four major Australian Banks: Commonwealth, Westpac, Suncorp, and Bank of Queensland.

The amount invested was $1000; I’ve taken into account capital growth and dividends; and the time frame of the comparison was 1 year ending today. The current interest rate of the ING Direct account is 6% pa.

It should be noted that in the time period shown, Commonwealth and Westpac paid two dividends whereas Suncorp and Bank of Queensland only paid one.

The comparison shows that even the poorest performing investment, Suncorp-Metway, still earnt $38 more than a cash account - that’s an effective interest rate of 10%!

Now, I’m not a financial adviser, nor am I any sort of economist or analyst, so take what I say with a grain of salt. I also didn’t take into account brokerage fees, nor did I account for the tax benefits of the dividends being fully-franked. Investing is also carries a higher risk, so you could possibly lose every cent you invest.

Nonetheless, What does this mean?

It’s more effective to own the bank!

The Oz Politics Blog has a fascinating post highlighting data gathered by Dr Roger Stimson about the Australian Political Landscape. The bit that interested me was the map showing the voting distribution of Australia.

This is the overall picture:

This is a close-up of Sydney:

What struck me is the similarity between the Australian distribution and the voting distribution of the United States. Both countries have large regions of right-wing voters, with the exceptions of the more densely populated areas that vote left-wing.

The linked post contains these points of analysis by Stimson:

The government Coalition parties have captured most of the settled rural and regional areas, and it is not just the Nationals but also the Liberals that have widespread ‘heartlands’ of political dominance. Within the big cities the, dominance of the Liberal Party is not only across wedges of the higher socio-economic areas of the mostly middle suburbs, but it has also extend across the large belts of the outer suburbs and even more widely across the outer fringe areas to capture many areas in what used to be Labor’s ‘heartland’ as transform them into Liberal ‘heartlands.’

The Labor ‘heartlands’ are predominantly found in the central city and inner suburbs of the big cities, and in suburbia the now more restricted belts of Labor dominance are clearly associated with populations characterised by immigration and multiculturalism as well as the traditional areas of disadvantage.

Interesting stuff.

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: 11 November 2006

Hey all,

I just arrived in San Francisco, and wouldn’t you know it - it’s raining, and it’s forecast rain for the next few days. Oh, and I also got in at around midnight, again. Found the hostel fine, although the guy driving the shuttle bus wasn’t exactly enjoying himself!

But back to New York… Kaneen and I had an awesome time, doing a bit more “touristy” stuff this time around. We went to Times Square, took the free Staten Island Ferry to get a view of the Statue of Liberty, and checked out the view of Manhattan from the top of the Rockefeller Center. We also caught an “off-broadway” show (which is apparently cooler), which was “Evil Dead: The Musical“. I know some of you B-movie fans back home will be jealous

The highlight was probably having drinks at “The View”, the revolving restaurant on top of the Marriott Marquis hotel in Times Square. Expensive (US$10 chardonnay / US$10 gin & tonic), but totally worth it. Fantastic view and a great time all round.

The flight to SF was looooong, about 6.5 hours, and it doesn’t help that I think I’m still on New York time - so midnight here is 3 am in NY. So very tired, but I think I might go and say Hi to some random people in the “ballroom”, which is what they call the common area here at the Green Tortoise.

Here’s hoping for clear skies over the next few days!

Take care,
Craig

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!

The Village Voice has a beautiful (parody) dissertation on why the number one song in the US, “This Is Why I’m Hot” by Mims, is actually hot - complete with Venn diagrams and flowcharts.

Hot Hot Heat: A graphical dissertation on the number one song in America

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: 11 November 2006

Sorry, little Road Trip reference there.

I’m just finishing up here in Boston, and about to head back to New York. I really wish I had more time here, Boston is a really nice place. It has a completely different feel to the other places I’ve been to, but it’s hard to explain. It sorta feels like a city where people live and work, rather than come to visit. It put me in a really good mood walking around yesterday…

Walking seems to be the done thing in Boston, they even have signs up saying it’s America’s most “walkable” city. I think that’s because they don’t have that many subway stations around! Each town calls their subway different things - NY calls it the “subway”, DC calls it the “Metro”, and Boston calls it the “T”. What stations Boston has are kinda cool though, they have these weird automated gate things that do a little bow for you when you stick your card in the slot. Quite cute

There’s so much history in this town, which is not unexpected seeing as it was one of the first places settled by the pilgrims. I had clam chowder in a building that is 250 years old, and has been serving customers as a restaurant for 180. We also walked through the district called “North End“, and it’s just full of old houses where relatively famous people (in terms of the Revolution) lived.

Ajay and I also met up with a friend of his that now studies at MIT. He showed us around campus a little, it’s really quite an amazing place. The computer science work is done in a brand new building that cost $40 million dollars, and was designed by the US’s most famous architect… I don’t think this building has a right angle in the whole place! Even the main lecture hall has the walls slightly off-centre, so that when you stand there you start to think the floor is actually tilted (rather than the walls) and you start getting a little light-headed. Very strange.

(Update: I worked out that this building is called the Stata Center, and was designed by Frank Gehry)

He told us a lot about MIT culture and the workload that is expected. This guy was top of his class at University of Sydney, averaging something like 98% - but at MIT he’s averaging in the 70% range. Just crazy. It’s also very competitive, but they seem to have a “can do” culture - if you can think of it, you can do it. The funny thing is, most of the time people actually do it!

I have to run, got a train to catch back to NY. As always, hope all is well and life’s treating you all well. Just over a week to go now!!

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!

This is the big news of the morning. Apple and EMI have announced that they will be dropping D.R.M. (Copy Protection) on music from it’s catalogue in the Apple iTunes Music Store. The unprotected songs will come at a price premium of roughly 30%, however they will also be encoded as 256 kbps AAC instead of 128 kpbs.

This is long overdue. Apple are in trouble in the EU for the iPod - iTunes lock in, and consumers have been long frustrated by the limits copy protection places on their legitimate purposes. Using the carrot of higher quality is also the right move, I think - entice people to move away from DRM without it being the only reason, as most people won’t care and probably take the cheaper option.

It will be interesting to see if they files are “tagged” or watermarked somehow, so that there is still some accountability if the files end up on the P2P networks. I really hope this is the case, I would hate for piracy to be used as an excuse to stop a bold move such as this.

I wonder how long until this shows up in the Australian iTMS…

Coverage: NY Times, Ars Technica

Accessing WebSphere Variables from inside your J2EE application isn’t as easy as it looks. They’re not environment variables or system properties, but a portion of the WebSphere configuration that is used by the WebSphere Application Server Runtime.

You can access these variables by invoking an operation on “AdminOperations” MBean as follows:

    	try
    	{
    		AdminService adminService = AdminServiceFactory.getAdminService();
    		ObjectName queryName = new ObjectName( "WebSphere:*,type=AdminOperations" );
    		Set objs = adminService.queryNames( queryName, null );
    		if ( !objs.isEmpty() )
    		{
    			ObjectName thisObj = (ObjectName)objs.iterator().next();
    			String opName = "expandVariable";
    			String signature[] = { “java.lang.String” };
    			String params[] = { “${VARIABLE_NAME}” } ;
    			Object retVal = adminService.invoke( thisObj, opName, params, signature );
    			System.out.println( retVal );
    		}
    	} catch (MalformedObjectNameException e) {
		e.printStackTrace();
	} catch (InstanceNotFoundException e) {
		e.printStackTrace();
	} catch (MBeanException e) {
		e.printStackTrace();
	} catch (ReflectionException e) {
		e.printStackTrace();
	}

This code will only work from an application running inside the server.