A Personal Statement

A few people have asked me of late, why I haven’t been writing as much this year, so I thought it might be time to take a moment to say a few things to clear the air.

So far, 2014 hasn’t been the greatest in my life. By no means has it been an ‘annus horribilis’ but I’ve had worse too. I’ve had some health issues, some personal issues, and some work issues. Thankfully – (and I’m happy to say) – all of these are working themselves out quite nicely.

Late last year I was made redundant from a job I truly loved, so I was a bit blown away for a bit. However, it has turned out to be a blessing in disguise. In January I landed in a new job that has worked out fabulously so far, and has allowed me to improve my work/life balance significantly.

Winning.

My health issues – (while not super significant) – have slowed me down a fair bit while I got things under control. I’m absolutely on the up, and feeling pretty good again.

My personal issues have been exactly that – personal – and I don’t intend to provide details here.

They have almost certainly been a factor in my health issues. A number of you have provided a great level of support, and know what issues I’ve been dealing with, and that I’ve made some big changes in my life to work through them. Your love and support has been deeply appreciated.

Always remember that when the chips are down, you find out who your real friends are. I’ve learnt a lot about myself this year, and I’ve got to say I am pretty proud of how I’ve handled things. Sometimes you just don’t know if you will make the right decisions in a crisis until you’re in that crisis.

So, the bottom line is, I should be able to start writing at my old levels again. Writing about stuff that is important to me isn’t my job, but it is most definitely enjoyable. I always get passionate about stuff, but I guess that’s the point.

Thanks again for your support.

Sunday Nerding: London Crossrail

Like many nerds, I find trains and railways fascinating. I also love a great engineering story. Today I present the first part of a documentary series into London’s new Crossrail project, the first new addition to their underground system in over 30 years.

Sunday Nerding: The Telstar Satellite

Back to one of my favourite topics – space technology – and a documentary on the development and launch of the Telstar series of satellites.

Reducing Government Red Tape…Or Not…

Having recently moved – and changing electorates in the process – I’m going through the usual rigmarole of changing my registered address for just about everything. A pain in the butt, but a necessary evil.

Fortunately, given many government agencies share data, the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) automatically finds out about your move – (in most cases) – and sends you a letter to confirm.

Or is that TWO letters to confirm?

Two letters, dated the same, arriving on the same day, and both seeking to confirm my change of address.

Well done!

Perhaps if we are going to cut red tape – as our current government claim they will do – we should perhaps not send the same thing out twice?

Does this happen for every person who moves?

Each of the two letters is also slightly different in content – which is also a bit bizarre, that two different form letters exist for this purpose.

I guess the most likely explanation is that two different agencies advised a change of address – (note that one says “Michael Wyres”, and the other says “Michael A Wyres”) – but surely in this modern age of computers, we can do some data matching to save some money on postage and administrative effort?

Maybe that’s just too hard.

Poor Taste In Aftermath Of Death Of Robin Williams

The following is provided with no other comment than to say whichever advertiser came up with the following campaign – (I’m looking at you “Coles or IGA”) – in the midst of the death of Robin Williams – (and if you excuse my French) – this is fucking shit:

Click the image for a larger view, and note the sparkly advertising box on the right.

Bloody awful.

UPDATE (17:11 12/08/2014): Both Coles and IGA have distanced themselves from the advertisement with this tweet from Coles and this tweet from IGA. Of course, this advert was placed by someone offering Coles or IGA vouchers, independently of those organisations. It’s great that they have disassociated themselves publicly from the advert, but I do however believe that they could be proactive in investigating who has used their names in such poor taste. Maybe The Age should be looking into it too.

John Oliver On The US Payday Loan Industry

I just caught this week’s episode of Last Week with John Oliver, and I’m finding his new show is getting better and better each week.

Take a look at his analysis of the US Payday Loans industry.

I’m sure it is not quite as almost criminal in Australia, but the business models are largely the same.

This is the way news should be presented to the world – open, raw, and honest.

Sunday Nerding: The Browser Wars

In the early days of the World Wide Web – (as distinct from the internet itself) – there was a war.

A war between two sides – Netscape and Microsoft – over who would control how people used the web. One of those sides won the war, but severely damaged itself in the process. That’s how serious it was.

Enjoy this Discovery documentary on ‘The Browser Wars’.

Sunday Nerding: Impossible Mission

Chances are, if you had a Commodore 64 in the 1980’s, you had the game “Impossible Mission”. I personally spent hours playing this game

For its time, Impossible Mission was remarkably well thought out, combining aspects of the platform, and adventure game genres, as well as getting players to have a good hard think at the end to solve the puzzles with the puzzle pieces collected along the way.

For those who remember the game, enjoy this play-through.

The Internet Has Not Changed – But Malcolm Has!

Oh, how the mighty will flip-flop when the political need arises – right?

The government has released a discussion paper through Communications Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, and Attorney-General George Brandis, with a view towards having internet service providers police the illegal downloading of content.

“The Abbott government has moved to crack down on illegal downloading, saying internet service providers (ISPs) will be forced to take ‘reasonable steps’ to prevent it – including possible sanctions against offending customers.”

The Malcolm Turnbull who jointly released this ‘discussion paper’ is the same Malcolm Turnbull who – (after the so-called ‘iiTrial’ was resolved in favour of the ISP, iiNet) – said this in April 2012:

“It is very, very, very difficult if not impossible for someone that is just selling connectivity, just providing bandwidth to then be monitoring what people are doing.”

So in 2012 this kind of monitoring was “very difficult” or “impossible” – but now it is something Turnbull and Brandis wish to impose upon ISPs, by way of law?

Is it suddenly “less impossible” to do this kind of detection?

BitTorrent – (overwhelmingly the most common way to download illegal content online) – and the internet traffic it generates is not necessarily difficult to detect. There have been tools around to detect it on your network for at least a decade.

So Turnbull was wrong about that in 2012; he would also be wrong about it in 2014 if it was still what he believed.

You see, the problem for anyone seeking to prosecute – (or even just warn or penalise) – someone for obtaining copyrighted material using BitTorrent, is that unless you actually subpoena the hard drive of the user that may contain the material and prove conclusively ownership of that hard drive and demonstrate that the material is actually there, evidence gained from network traffic can be quite circumstantial at best.

In a number of cases around the world, the IP address assigned to a user by their ISP has been found to not conclusively show that traffic associated with that IP address is necessarily associated with the account holder.

That is, just because traffic might have come from the IP address an ISP has assigned to your account, it does not necessarily mean it was you – the account holder – who generated the traffic.

There may be gigabytes of BitTorrent traffic coming through your router – but is it you generating it?

Is your neighbour leaching your wi-fi? Has someone spoofed your IP address to hide themselves from easy detection?

Sounds like reasonable doubt to me.

Some even suggest that you should open your wi-fi up to the public to create even more doubt – because “hey, my wi-fi is open, it could be anyone!”

Even if the government were able to come up with something workable – (I doubt they can) – the serious downloaders will just find another way. The problem will be forced even further underground.

A lot of time, money, effort, and grandstanding will have been wasted.

Further, the costs ISPs would have to bear to police this activity – (and to support proposed data retention activities) – would be passed onto consumers, and has been labelled “an internet tax”.

Kind of goes against Turnbull’s other pet theory of “more affordable internet for consumers”, doesn’t it?

It is interesting to note from the same Delimiter article from 2012, author Renai LeMay makes the following point:

“However, Turnbull’s statements this week don’t really give us any insight into what the Coalition’s actual policy is on this important issue.”

I guess we have that insight now – don’t we?

Most stupidly of all, even if Turnbull was right in 2012 about the difficulties – (read: “almost impossible”) – in policing this activity, why does he suddenly believe differently now?

Turnbull has flipped his stance, for nothing other than political convenience – and the potential and impending signing of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), an agreement feared by many advocates of online freedoms, and which contains many provisions pertaining to copyright.

But you know, I guess we shouldn’t expect anything less from Malcolm by now – right?

Sunday Nerding: Computer For Apollo

Back into space this week, with a discussion of the development by MIT of the navigational computer for the Apollo spacecraft that took man to the moon in the 1960’s.