michaelwyres.com.au | musings of a geek

Bathurst: 20 Years of a Famous Victory

With Bathurst approaching this weekend, there has been much focus on the famous victory in the 1990 Tooheys 1000 by Win Percy and Allan Grice, driving for the then newly formed Holden Racing Team.

The race holds a special place for a lot of people – particularly Holden fans – after a long drought of success during the Group A period of Australian motor racing, Holden returned to the winners circle, against the odds.

I include myself in that, and the race also holds an extra significance for me, as this was the very first race to enter my video collection. The winning car lives on in a private collection:

In celebration of the 20th anniversary of that race, the Holden Racing Team will appear at this years race this weekend in a tribute livery, with the drivers and crew also wearing replicas of the 1990 uniforms worn by the team.

Racing has coming a long way since 1990, and the simpler technologies belied the fact that these were still fast cars. Things are certainly taken a lot more seriously these days – as this shot of the steering wheel of the 1990 car shows, there was more fun back then.

I’m not specifically a Holden Racing Team fan, but given the tribute livery, and the special anniversary, a repeat win this weekend would be kind of fitting.

In The Spirit of Schrödinger

I got a bit of a chuckle out of a poll I stumbled across at the bottom of an article in regards to comments by Carlos Slim in regards to the National Broadband Network.

In the true spirit of Schrödinger’s cat, how exactly do you answer this:

Are you for or against the National Broadband Network as it stands? Yes / No

Bizarre.

More Internet Wrongness

I have a couple of Google Alerts set up to look for content online referring to myself, mainly just to see how people are using my content. I don’t have a problem with people using my content, and believe in the principles of Creative Commons, under which I licence my site. I just like to make sure I’m not being misrepresented somewhere.

In my latest alert email, I found my name mentioned on a page I’ve never seen or heard of before, so curiously I went for a link. It is not uncommon for sites to scrape data out of social media services such as Twitter, but generally attribute back to the original source, such as a tweet.

If you look at the page, it strikes me that it scrapes information from the trending topics on Twitter, constructs a page out of the contents of a link it finds in a tweet, and then includes some tweets as “comments” against the article.

If you look at the “Updates” pane on the right, there are some truly bizarre article titles, such as “Mind Blowing Watching Teen Mom”, “A truly Innovative way to Glee tonight”, and “A Hard Time Halloween Party”. Don’t make a lot of sense, do they?

I certainly didn’t visit this page to “post a comment”, and it doesn’t even seem to be a tweet that I wrote! Sounds to me like the beginning of something with potential nefariousness! Looking through the source code of the page, there doesn’t seem to be anything nasty there yet.

But keep an eye out.

Tell The Truth Fairfax!

Sitting down to lunch this afternoon, I found an email from the “Fairfax Digital Membership Team”, advising me of “an important message about [my] newsletters”. I have signed up for a few newsletters of interest to be delivered, and generally find something interesting to read.

However, it was the nature of this “important message” that I found particularly galling:

And I quote:

We have been updating our records and we noticed that your settings show you as wanting to receive all email from us in text-only format. This means all the email you receive from websites like smh.com.au, theage.com.au, Cuisine, and others, appears just like this one. In other words there is no formatting, colour or images.

Yes, that’s right. I know. Further, after a link to an example of what the email would look like had I not made this “crazy” decision, and suggesting that I might like to change my mind:

“However, you may wish to continue to receive email from us in text-only format. If you do then please click on the link below before 22nd October 2010 and we’ll make sure we don’t change your settings. But if would like to receive your email in HTML then you don’t need to do a thing. We’ll just update your account and you’ll soon start to receive email in HTML.”

Oh really?

Fairfax Digital Membership Team, I chose to receive text only emails from you because in the first instance, HTML emails are a security issue. Cross site scripting for the embedding of malicious code – (not necessarily by yourselves, but others) – is the main online attack vector for fraud related activities. I find it irresponsible that you will arbitrarily change the settings of people in your database, when the majority of these people will not understand.

Of course, I’m not saying you are intending to do anything bad yourselves, but as a popular group of websites Fairfax Digital might well become the target of a coordinated attack sometime in the future, initiated by the “bad guys”. HTML emails are inherently more dangerous than text-only versions of the same content.

To infer that readers might have a better experience with the embedded links and images is probably a fair statement, but the real reason you want me to change is so that you can serve up your advertising and tracking mechanisms to me in your emails.

Firstly, let me assure you that I won’t be clicking on them, text or HTML notwithstanding.

Secondly, I don’t want your embedded tracking images – (or “web beacons”) – to be fired off when I open an email from you.

Fortunately, you give people an option not to join your data warehouse of tracking statistics and advertising revenue, but so many people don’t understand these issues, and you choose not to explain your real reasons. I believe that is dishonest. If you truly want to act responsibly online, explain the technical ramifications of what you are asking people to opt-in to.

And while I have your attention – please give your signed-up members the option to stop the auto-roll of video and audio – (in stories and advertising, inside and outside of the actual content of the page) – on your sites. Many people use wireless dongles with limited bandwidth caps, and find it nothing more than frustrating to have video and audio rammed down their throats to use up their caps.

Sharpen your pencils guys!

Now Mobile Enabled

Just a quick update about some site changes – some minor backend changes that won’t particularly be visible, but importantly, when viewing on smartphones, you should now see a mobile version of the site.

If anyone spots anything unusual with the mobile version, please drop me a line and let me know!

NBN: Why Wireless is Impractical

Broadband in Australia is a hot issue right now. Do we spend $43b on Labor’s National Broadband Network (NBN), $6.5b on the Coalition’s hybrid wireless/satellite/”optimised” xDSL/HFC solution, or do we do nothing at all?

Nothing is not an option – our broadband capacity is a joke – and for me it isn’t even a political argument about Labor vs Coalition policies. It is purely and simply a technology vs cost argument. Both $43b and $6.5b is a lot of money, but either way it is money that is more than worth investing for the future of this country.

Given that the Labor government has been returned, at this time the Coalition plan is effectively dead in the water anyway.

The Labor plan is obviously a mainly optical fibre-based solution, and the Coalition plan didn’t resolve to do much more than “optimise” the existing xDSL network in major centres, so once the limit of xDSL technologies is reached, there is very little scope to do much more with the ancient copper network than to replace it with wireless or fibre.

To analyse how something like that might all come together, let us look at the numbers for one of the major cities in Australia, Melbourne.

Melbourne is made up of a population of approximately 4,000,000 people, covering an area of approximately 8,806 square kilometres. Using some simple mathematics, that means that on average, there are 454 people living in each square kilometre of Melbourne. Based on 2.8 people per household – (from 2001 figures of 1,200,000 households across a population of 3,366,542) – this means that for every square kilometre of Melbourne, there are roughly 162 households.

If you were to deliver a guaranteed baseline of 12Mbps to every single one of these 162 households, you would require approximately 1.95Gbps of backhaul to support those 162 households, for each and every one of those 8,806-square-kilometre sized areas. That is a total of around 17,171Gbps of backhaul into and out of Melbourne, to support a guaranteed 12Mbps for every single one of the approximately 1,435,378 households in Melbourne.

That’s a lot. Lets also remember that 12Mbps is only 1/83rd of 1Gbps – the potential speeds promised under the Labor NBN plan. Multiplying that against 17,171Gbps, you’ll need 1,425,193Gbps of backhaul to guarantee everyone 1Gbps. An astronomically high figure. And this doesn’t cover the large number of business premises within Melbourne, so the numbers blow out even further.

However, nobody is guaranteeing anyone 1Gbps. In fact, most people won’t be seeking to buy a connection anywhere near that wide. Realistically, most people might only seek to get a maximum of 100Mbps on the NBN, which when allowing for reasonable contention ratios, might see people getting around an average of 60 to 70Mbps in practice.

Still plenty fast for most applications, and obviously not requiring 1,425,193Gbps of backhaul. Some homes and businesses will want – (or even need) – 1Gbps, but in the immediate future that will be the exception, rather than the rule.

It is important to acknowledge, that no matter what the average speed per household settles out to be in a completed national network, the amount of backhaul required remains the same, no matter if you build it using wireless or fibre optics. You still have to do the heavy lifting into the core of the network, away from the edge of the solution.

The amount of backhaul required around the nation into any section of the network is nothing more than a simple mathematical equation – you just have to decide and/or model how much bandwidth each user will need to get on average, to scope out the capacity of the various links in the chain.

Once we have kitted out the backhaul to deliver the capacity we require on a national level, we now have to lay the delivery model across the so-called “last mile” – the connection from the various households and businesses to the concentration points on the backbone. The two options in the debate are wireless and fibre optics. So lets return to the mathematics.

If you need to build out 1.95Gbps per second to every square kilometre of Melbourne using wireless, you might put a wireless tower in each of those one-square-kilometre areas. Wherever you stand, there would be a tower somewhere within a one kilometre radius. If you stand at the base of any single tower, you should be able to see the towers in the adjacent eight square-kilometre-sized areas, and possibly those beyond. That’s a lot of towers, and nobody will want a tower built in their backyard.

If you decided to halve the number of towers, and build two-kilometre-square areas, you’d need to pump 3.9Gbps into each of those towers. However, those towers would need to be taller and emit more powerful radio signals to effectively cover the bigger area by line-of-sight, or risk end customers receiving more reflected and therefore weakened signals. Halve the number of towers again, and build four-square-kilometre areas, and you’ll need to kit that tower out with 7.8Gbps, and make it even taller and more powerful, once again.

You can see the pattern emerging. Do we really want to live within a forest of “internet towers”? Towers that might be quite high initially to keep the numbers down, but might need to be “front filled” around as capacity requirements grow.

Reduce the number of towers, and you increase the number people relying on each tower, creating larger outages in the event of a tower failure, affecting more people and businesses. There would be so much public debate as to exactly where to locate the towers, that jumping through all the red tape when the NIMBYs get into the debate, that construction delays will be significant and costly.

Even if all these obstacles are overcome, what happens when 12Mbps is not enough? The numbers – (and the costs) – get multiplied by orders of magnitude when you have to go back and increase the capacity.

There are several other factors to consider with wireless. Weather conditions DO make a difference, and sometimes a very large difference. Topography is also a stumbling block, as the land mass of Australia, particularly in urban areas, is not flat. While radio signals do get around corners, between buildings, over hills, and into valleys, the power requirements increase to provide a guaranteed minimum amount of signal to the entire cell. This is why your mobile phone drops in and out of signal coverage, sometimes within only a few metres of travel. The physical surroundings and transient/ambient conditions can have a huge effect on the level of service you get.

Or don’t get.

The other thing to remember is that the RF spectrum that would be needed to implement a national wireless network of this magnitude will not become available until the start of 2014 at the earliest, when all of the analogue television broadcasts in Australia cease, and this assumes that the timetable for this cessation does not slip at all.

So even if we decided to build a national wireless broadband network TODAY – it would be 2014 at the very earliest before any really significant progress could be made in its construction.

Now lets look at fibre. Remember, the backhaul requirement per square kilometre doesn’t change.

Fibre will mostly be underground, thanks to the Telstra/NBN Co agreement, so it will get around all of the corners, between all the buildings, over all of the hills, and into all of the valleys that become potential question marks when using a wireless solution.

It will be able to deliver the exact same speed to all customers – whether you are next door to the exchange, or some kilometres from it. With existing xDSL solutions, the further you are away, the slower speeds you get. At home, I can get ADSL2 which can theoretically get up around the 24Mbps mark, but given my distance from the local exchange, my modem only trains up to the DSLAM at around 4Mbps – far below the proposed 12Mbps minimum of the NBN and the Coalition plan.

The fibre being installed – (and this is underway) – is capable of carrying 40Gbps, leaving plenty of room for future growth, without the need to rip it out of the ground and start again. The Coalition plan speaks of $6.5b – but I seriously doubt the need to significantly upgrade the infrastructure far more rapidly is factored into that. Suddenly, the $43b plan of the Labor government doesn’t seem so expensive.

Upgrading wireless capacity would likely require more towers and/or transmission power, new transmission standards – (and therefore new modems for everyone every few years) – new spectrum to be found and subsequently allocated, more arguments about where to put towers, and significantly more cost.

Look at the public stoushes that get underway now when a mobile phone carrier wants to build one single new tower – people want the service, but not the tower. Not in their backyard.

So how do you give people the service – the quality service they will demand for the money – without the tower?

Fibre.

UPDATE (12:13pm): I’ve had a mathematical error pointed out to me – of course increasing the size of the cells to two-square-kilometres does of course “quarter” the number of cells, and increases the individual cell requirements to 31.2Gbps, and approximately 64,286Gbps across the city. The same sort of scale change is also required for then increasing to four-square-kilometres. I blame the almost week-long headache I’ve had and finally shaken for a small dropping of the ball! Of course, correcting the error further counts against the argument for wireless!

Thanks to @rkjobling for tipping me off to my error – people who know me do know how much I hate to make errors!

AFL Grand Final: Another Newspaper Fail!

Spotted this one in the sport section of the print edition of today’s Age Newspaper in Melbourne:

I’m pretty sure that’s Allan Jeans, not Barry Breen. At least they got close – of course Jeans was the coach of St Kilda in 1966 when they won their one and only premiership, made famous by the wobbly kick from Breen, that scored the behind giving the Saints the lead in the dying moments of the game.

ACL: Hypocritically Filtering Factual Debate

Amidst the entire controversy surrounding the possibility of mandatory internet filtering in Australia, we have all come to know the two main advocates of the policy – Federal Communications Minister Stephen Conroy and the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL).

I have previously commented on their ability to censor the debate to suit their own needs, and it looks like they are at it again – with yet another example of choosing to not approve comments that deliver a point of view that might be devastating to the points they have raised in their article.

In the article in question, the ACL are urging new shadow communications spokesperson, Malcolm Turnbull to apply some “facts” when dismissing the mandatory internet filtering proposal.

Of course, they have every right to express their view, but when they start dismissing “facts” themselves, by not even allowing them to be presented in the comments against the article, I smell burning hypocrisy.

I speak of a comment I submitted in relation to the continual pushing of the “one seventieth of a blink of an eye” argument – where filter supporters claim that any such filter would only slow down the internet by that tiny sliver of time. Here is a screen shot of the comment as I posted it, at around 3:30pm on Sunday, September 19th, 2010:

For the purposes of this comment being indexed, here is what I wrote:

The so-called “1/70th of a blink of an eye” – (a number which I would dispute) – would be referring to a single transaction, a single request for data on the internet.

Do the ACL understand just how many of these “1/70th of a blink of an eye” transactions happen on the internet simultaneously? The number is almost incalculably high.

Add all of these “1/70th of a blink of an eye” transactions together at a contention point – (such as a device used to implement this ridiculous filtering policy) – and I can assure you, you’ve got more latency than a mere “1/70th of a blink of an eye”!

However, given the new parliament has formed without the numbers to pass this non-existent legislation, the point is completely moot anyway.

There you go – no abusive comments, no personal attacks, just a careful presentation of what many people working in the internet community – (myself included) – know to be true. Given the breakdown of numbers in the new parliament, the last line of my comment is also completely accurate.

But it completely decimates their argument – so they’ve apparently chosen not to approve the comment, so exactly who is employing a “fact filter” on the discussion?

How could any reasonable person take an organisation seriously, who arbitrarily chooses to distort the argument by refusing to allow contrary opinions to be made against their argument? This is not the only current example of ridiculousness available on their website.

For example, take this article currently available in their Victorian ACL section – (screen dump in case they pull it down):

And I quote from the first comment they have APPROVED against this article:

“Homosexuality is not a race or religion but a choice. it is a practice proven to shorten life and it was the source of AIDS, the worlds largest STD killer.”

Homosexuality is “proven to shorten life”? I mean, seriously – where the hell did they come up with that one? I would love to see the science behind that thoroughly offensive statement.

That they can “approve” a comment like that – (an effective endorsement of its content) – yet refuse to publish my straight down the line factual comment, proves just how out of touch this organisation is with mainstream Australian thinking. On the basis of the above example alone, I could never attribute any credibility to any comment or content the ACL produces.

Let alone allow their 18th century thinking to apply to any modern 21st century internet technology. Sorry ACL, but as long as you filter the discussion, you are irrelevant.

Conroy: Shut The Hell Up and Get On With It!

In recent days, we have heard Stephen Conroy getting back into sermonising over his plan to filter the internet in Australia, in the best interests of “protecting” Australians online.

Of course, anybody who understands what he is proposing knows that it won’t actually protect anyone from anything, so I don’t need to explain that again – there is plenty of material out there to demonstrate that!

The crux of his belief that he can still pursue the plan seems to be that he thinks that because Labor remain in government, that there is now a “mandate” for the policy, because the policy survived an election.

Wrong.

Conroy needs to remember that the ALP did not accumulate seventy-six seats to gain a majority from which to form government. Not a mandate.

Even if you look at the national two-party preferred vote, as of today – September 17th – the totals for TPP voting see the ALP only just over 30,000 votes ahead. Nationally. Hardly a “convincing mandate”, if it is any kind of mandate at all.

The question I feel needs to be asked is exactly WHY the ALP didn’t win seventy-six seats. Was it Conroy’s filter? The best answer is “maybe”, but lets look at it with some numbers. The following link is an Electoral Commission reference to which seats changed hands across the nation:

Labor lost a LOT of seats in Queensland, and there is a considerable perception that the ousting of former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd – from Queensland – may have seen many people in that state going parochial with their votes. This may or may not be right, but lets ignore Queensland, just in case that is correct.

So, of the remaining seats on the list, curiously enough there are four seats that were previously in Labor hands that swapped to a Coalition-aligned party. Curious, because four is exactly how many more seats Labor needed to win to form government in their own right.

Those seats are Bennelong and Macquarie in New South Wales, Hasluck in Western Australia, and Solomon in the Northern Territory.

In Bennelong, the ALP lost the TPP vote by 5352 out of 98900 registered voters, or 5.41%. Macquarie saw them lose by 2115 out of 97560 registered voters, or 2.17%. In Hasluck, the margin was 948 votes out of 93892, or a mere 1.01%, and in Solomon it was 1786 voters out of 59879, or 2.98%.

Across the 350231 registered voters in those seats, a total of 10201 votes cost them victory in those seats. Pretty close, isn’t it? That means only 2.91% of people across those seats had to vote the other way to deliver the ALP the precious seventy-six seats to form a majority government.

A very slim 2.91%, less than three people out of every one hundred people. Which brings us back to the question of why Labor didn’t win these four seats.

Was opposition to the filter – Stephen Conroy’s pet policy – even as little as 3% across these four seats? Was it as little as 3% across the entire nation?

While the answer to these questions would always be difficult to prove, were there 5352 voters in Bennelong, 2115 in Macquarie, 948 in Hasluck, and 1786 in Solomon who decided their vote, based on their feelings towards the filtering policy?

I would think, given the magnitude of opposition to the plan in the community, that there is a pretty good chance that a lot more than 3% of people in Australia were against it.

Look at the poll displayed in this article where 99% of people out of 88645 respondents “voted” against the filter.

Three percent across Australia? Extremely good chance, and it is therefore not unreasonable to suggest that Labor may have missed out in these four seats because of Conroy and his filtering policy.

Ironically, it was Conroy’s other pet policy – the National Broadband Network – that swayed the key independents towards siding with Labor in forming a minority government.

Did Conroy win or lose the election? In the tradition of Schrödinger’s cat, the answer is “yes”. He should be grateful that his party is still in power.

However Mr Conroy, you do not have a particular mandate – your filtering policy is for all intents and purposes, dead. If the election has delivered you anything, it is support to build the NBN.

So shut the hell up about the filter, and get on with building the NBN! That’s what got you there, not the filter. Concentrate on something that will deliver the country some real value, rather than something that simply will not.

Newspaper Fail Day

I certainly believe that the days of the printed newspaper are numbered. With handheld devices like smartphones, tablet computers, and e-Reader’s becoming more common place, as populations change, and the percentage of tech-savvy consumers increases, paper and ink newspapers face extinction as “quaint” concepts from a bygone day.

One of my pet peeves though is online news – where the death of printed newspapers will lead – is that it is not as thoroughly proofread as the printed newspapers currently are. This is something I sincerely hope changes.

Take for example this spelling of “Gary Ablett” on the Geelong Advertiser website this morning:

For a newspaper campaigning to help keep Ablett at the Geelong Football Club, it would have been nice of them to spell his name right. I note that this has already been corrected – no doubt pointed out by irate Geelong fans!

Or this one from The Age newspaper this morning, in this article about a mural on an apartment block under construction on Melbourne’s CBD fringe:

Maybe the reporter needs to report to the building “sight” – part of RMIT University – and “site” a textbook on the difference between “sight” and “site”?

Lift your game chaps!