September 23rd, 2007 — Australia, Music
Surely I’m not alone in thinking that the new Cat Empire song “No Longer There” stinks?
I’m a big Cat Empire fan - I’ve seen them live a couple of times, and their show is fantastic. For the most part, their albums are spot on as well. But this latest song, a slow ode to environmentalism, is a train wreck. It honestly sounds more on par with karaoke at the Lord Stanley than a band that recently toured the US and the UK.
Felix, please leave the singing to Harry.
September 17th, 2007 — Australia, Money
ABC’s Four Corners just aired a fantastic episode on the fallout from the US sub-prime mortgage crisis.
I love this quote from the end:
PROFESSOR ROBERT SHILLER, ECONOMICS, YALE UNIVERSITY: You know some people think that home prices go up 10 per cent a year. Do you know what Amsterdam would be worth today if it went up 10 per cent a year for the last 350 years? And if people know about the power of compound interest it would be worth more than the solar system or something. It can’t happen.
So if you look about long term trends in real estate maybe one per cent a year, tops, over long, over centuries. Otherwise it’s just, it doesn’t fit. It’s just not going to work.
Read the transcript, and watch the video.
August 22nd, 2007 — Australia, Money, Politics
In the comments to my recent post on housing prices, Amon asked if a housing crash is a potential reality.
In my opinion, the answer to this question is a definite yes. In fact, it has happened in a western country before.
August 19th, 2007 — Australia, Interesting, Money
If I ready one more Baby Boomer whinging about how all young people these days are too picky about where they live, and back in their day their first house was a fibro shack in the outer suburbs so “stop whinging” I think I’ll just stop and scream. Too picky, my arse!
The point of this post is, of course, going to be about the “housing crisis” in Australia. It’s about how the Baby Boomer’s have the nerve to insult us for bringing up this point, to tell us that they remember paying 17% interest under Labor and how it was all so very bad back then, so quit your bitching and buy some tiny place in Ipswich that you can afford.
Continue reading →
August 3rd, 2007 — Links
These are my links for July 22nd through August 2nd:
July 17th, 2007 — Links
These are my links for June 19th through July 16th:
July 7th, 2007 — Funny
Slightly Taller Than Average Man finally has his own comic!
Thanks to Mike for pointing this out to me.
July 4th, 2007 — Technology
The dust has settled on the XACML interop event at the Burton Catalyst conference, and by all measures the event was a success. We achieved a full 8×8 success matrix on both use cases; meaning the participants could call each others Policy Decision Servers, as well as import the XACML policy produced by the other products.
Interestingly enough, most of the challenges faced in the preparation for the event lay not with the XACML technology pieces themselves but with the supporting technologies. For example, ensuring that the right SOAP version is used for the SAML message exchanges and things of that nature.
So what did IBM show at the event? What we demonstrated was an internal IBM authorization component that is used by some of our products. This Java-based component, which is designed to save products re-implementing authorization functionality, contains a fully-blown native XACML decision engine.
We were asked many times during the event about product plans for XACML. For example, “When is this going to be in a product?” The answer is that there are a few pieces of the puzzle that have to be filled in before we can reach that point. The primary piece is around the manageability of XACML policy - it’s verbose, and quite honestly non-trivial to author, and the tooling just isn’t there yet.
That’s not to say that using XACML as a policy exchange mechansim isn’t worth chasing, because it definitely is. But this is a chicken and egg problem - you can’t have the policy editing tools without the evaluation engine. The evaluation engine demonstrated at the interop is an important step towards the wider adoption of this technology.
On a personal note, it was fantastic to meet some of the driving forces behind this standard. The spirit of collaboration was alive and well, there was a point when I was helping to debug a problem that Jericho Systems and Redhat were having! This open approach, from all vendors, contributed greatly to the success of the event.
June 30th, 2007 — Technology
It’s hard not to get caught up in the iPhone hype, especially if you’re in a hotel only a few blocks from the Apple Store in downtown San Francisco. The line was already a block and a half long at midday, and it’s only going to get worse from here.
The initial reviews are already in, most notably from David Pogue of the New York Times (link), and there’s a couple of interesting tidbits I’ve picked up that may stand in the way of widespread adoption when this device finally makes it too Australia.
Regardless of the above, I’m looking forward to seeing what this device can do. My Google Reader should be quaking in anticipation of the blog storm that this thing is going to whip up come 6 PM!
June 19th, 2007 — Links
These are my links for June 12th through June 18th: