Stilgherrian » Stilgherrian

How will I cope with the looming Geek Week?

Stilgherrian — Fri, 16 May 2008 02:32:54 +0000

Next week is packed! How can I get the best value out of CeBIT Sydney and the associated Transaction 2.0 conference, as well as Microsoft’s ReMIX 08? What should I record or broadcast? What should I write about?

CeBIT was always on my agenda. Despite being disappointing last year and despite annoying me with a flood of email, it’s still the biggest IT trade show in Australia. It’s worth going just to see who’s confidently spending money on promotion, if nothing else.

I’ll be touring the trade show floor on Wednesday 21 May. If you want to meet up, let me know. Maybe I should even do a Stilgherrian Live Alpha from the bloggers media room? Whaddyathink?

If you still haven’t organised your free pass, you can register online using my promotion code, “stilcs08″.

On Thursday 22 May I’ll be at Transaction 2.0, with an interesting set of speakers. Again, it’s a matter of choosing the priorities. Who should I talk to? Should I pick a fight with Jason Calacanis?

But I kick off the Geek Week on Tuesday 20 May with ReMIX 08, where Microsoft says I’ll “experience all that is new in Silverlight 2, Expression 2, IE8, Live and a host of other great web technologies… You will also see how local Australian innovators are creating the next generation of engaging websites and unprecedented user experiences for the web.”

Provided they build it with Microsoft’s tools, of course.

That’s unfair. Microsoft is changing. It’ll be interesting to hear what they’re up to.

Now my only challenge is working out how all this fits into one week, while still leaving room to do some billable hours for clients.

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Who’d be Twitter today?

Stilgherrian — Fri, 16 May 2008 00:05:30 +0000

Who’d be Twitter today? Down again this morning, apparently for the same reason as yesterday. Once is an accident, twice…

As I told them on their own blog, they need to give timely and accurate information so my message to you, Dear Readers, is that Twitter’s problems will soon be over and you can rely on their service — not that they’re a service ripe for cloning by someone with better engineering.

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Episode 2 wasn’t recorded

Stilgherrian — Thu, 15 May 2008 23:18:27 +0000

Last night’s episode of Stilgherrian Live Alpha wasn’t recorded. I think my overloaded computer took too long to confirm that I’d pressed the “record” button and I pressed it a second time — turning off the recording. Oops. A shame: there was a solid improvement, but still lessons which could be learned from a review. Still, I’ll review the chat logs and other feedback and post something later.

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EFA: money “wasted” on Internet filtering

Stilgherrian — Thu, 15 May 2008 02:34:51 +0000

Internet lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) has expressed “disappointment” at the government’s decision to fund the “clean feed” Internet plan in this week’s budget. They’ve also launched a campaign website at nocleanfeed.com.

“At a time when the Government is cutting services to fight inflation, it’s bewildering that they would decide to spend tens of millions of taxpayer dollars on a filter before feasibility trials are even complete,” said EFA spokesman Colin Jacobs…

“Australians are very uncomfortable with the idea of having the Government decide what’s appropriate for them and their families,” said Jacobs. “In fact, in a survey of 18,000 Internet users, only 13% agreed
with the policy. That’s why we feel it is a shame, when the Government has identified real needs for better education and policing, that their approach to Internet policy is so skewed towards the filter initiative. There are greater risks to Australian children online, and real steps can be taken to mitigate these risks. That’s where the funding should be going.”

Unfortunately EFA made a fundamental mistake which could allow critics to dismiss their arguments. They talk about the Cyber-safety Plan costing $24.3m this financial year and rising to $51.4m next. However only part of this is for Internet filtering. There’s also things which critics could say EFA would support: AFP investigations and plenty of education programs.

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Twitter flattened by China earthquake, indirectly (not)

Stilgherrian — Thu, 15 May 2008 00:17:25 +0000

While I’ve become a heavy user of Twitter, its main problem is that it’s simply failing to cope with its own rapid growth. Today’s Twitter outage is doubtless caused by a sudden rush of interest following mainstream media coverage in the context of China’s earthquake.

‘Twitters’ beat media in reporting China earthquake, said AFP, and the story ran everywhere. I guess there might be two or three dozen people wanting to know what’s happening in China, maybe even more. Twitter fall down go boom.

Now scaling-up a service like Twitter isn’t easy, I guess. However they compound the problem by failing to provide meaningful information about their outages. People use Twitter for moment-by-moment personal communication — and many of them are the global digerati! When something goes wrong, updates need to happen frequently, and need to contain meaningful information. Perhaps you could use that Internet thing we keep hearing about?

Twitter, you face a grave danger. Someone could replicate your service but with better engineering. You must recover from this outage much better than all previous ones.

[Update 11.10am: Twitter says today's outage doesn't have an interesting explanation. "Part of our caching service required an unscheduled restart. That means a slow rebuilding of data." If so, then their systems architecture needs serious work, I reckon.]

[Credit: Cartoon Twitter-bird courtesy of Hugh MacLeod. Like all of Hugh's cartoons published online, it's free to use.]

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Episode 2 is recorded live tonight

Stilgherrian — Wed, 14 May 2008 23:50:23 +0000

Episode 2 of Stilgherrian Live Alpha is being “recorded live” tonight at 9.30pm Sydney time, though do feel free to arrive early. My good friend and colleague Zern Liew will be joining me from Singapore to talk about his recent visit to China’s three largest cities, amongst other things. I’ve also spoken to Ustream technical support and I think we’ve solved the talkback / co-host problem… fingers crossed!

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Rudd government delivers yesterday’s broadband

Stilgherrian — Wed, 14 May 2008 16:08:30 +0000

One of the Rudd government’s election promises was a national fibre-to-the-node (FttN) broadband network, putting at least 12Mb/sec download speeds within reach of 98% of the Australian population. Tuesday night’s Federal Budget kept that promise. I think.

Here’s how I wrote about it for Crikey yesterday:

Of $4.7b promised for the National Broadband Network, only 0.16% has been committed: $2.1m this financial year and $5.2m next for “establishment and implementation”. The remaining 99.84% — you know, actually building the thing — is all “nfp”. Not for publication. We’ll get back to you.

Spending is now “up to” the pre-election $4.7b figure. Broadband is competing with run-down roads, railways and ports for a share of the $20b Building Australia Fund, where “disbursements… will be subject to budget consideration, and will be spent responsibly, in line with prevailing macroeconomic conditions.”

Whatever the final budget, Australia will still be rolling out a 12Mb/sec network in 2012. Other countries are rolling out 100Mb/sec networks now.

It really is building yesterday’s network, isn’t it.

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Tax changes work against innovation

Stilgherrian — Wed, 14 May 2008 16:07:58 +0000

Two tax changes announced in Tuesday’s Federal Budget actually work against business innovation. Businesses must now depreciate their computer software over 4 years, not 2.5. This pulls in $1.3b in tax but discourages upgrading. (However it might be good news for vendors of software as a service and proponents of open source software.) Similarly, Fringe Benefits Tax rules for laptops and PDAs given to employees have been tightened, discouraging a more flexible, mobile workforce. I thought we were meant to be building for the future…

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Budget explains Internet censorship plan, a bit

Stilgherrian — Wed, 14 May 2008 00:05:19 +0000

The vagueness of the Labor government’s planned kid-friendly “clean feed” Internet become a tiny bit less vague last night. The Federal Budget dumped Howard’s NetAlert scheme and replaced it with a $125.8 million Cyber-safety Plan.

Budget Paper No. 2 says there’ll be “a range of initiatives to combat online threats and protect children from inappropriate material on the internet.” There will be ISP-level filtering of “an expanded Australian Communications and Media Authority blacklist” — which presumably means the already-illegal material such as child pornography — plus an “examination of options to allow families to exclude other unwanted content”.

To me, this implies that families will be in control of their Internet filtering, and it’ll be opt-in. As it should be. Presumably this will become clearer once the “options” are “examined”.

The plan includes other measures “such as”:

an education program for teachers and the community
a Youth Advisory Group to assist the Government to formulate age-appropriate measures to
protect children
an expanded Consultative Working Group focussed on cyber-safety issues,
a dedicated website for children
research projects on cyber-safety issues

ISPs will get a one-off subsidy in 2009-10 to install the filters, with funding in following years only for new providers. The Australian Federal Police and the Director of Public Prosecutions continue to get their funding to combat child sexual exploitation. Again, as they should.

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Wayne Swan’s “Yes Minister” moment

Stilgherrian — Tue, 13 May 2008 23:30:54 +0000

After he’d given the Budget Speech to parliament last night, Treasurer Wayne Swan was interviewed by the ABC’s PM program — where he delivered what I think has to be the best line of the night.

Swan was explaining that unlike his Liberal predecessor Peter Costello’s Future Fund, which was never spent on anything, Labor’s future funds would be spent on “contemporary” infrastructure needs. Journalist Mark Colvin asked how they could still be called future funds.

MARK COLVIN: I mean, if they’re not for the future, what are they for? Why aren’t they just government spending?

WAYNE SWAN: No, no. You’re confusing the name Future Fund with a fund for the future.

Yes, I can see how he’d be confused…

[Update 10.30am: Here's the relevant piece of audio.]

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So where are the Federal Budget papers?

Stilgherrian — Tue, 13 May 2008 12:13:20 +0000

If you want the real information on Australia’s Federal Budget announced tonight, go to www.budget.gov.au. Start with the Budget Overview and then Budget Paper No. 1. If anything there triggers a need for further digging, Budget Paper No. 2 has the financial specifics. There’s bound to be further surprises buried down in the rest of the documents, but they’ll get you going.

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Covering the Federal Budget for Crikey

Stilgherrian — Tue, 13 May 2008 00:43:27 +0000

Joy (I think). I’m part of Crikey’s commentary team for Australia’s 2008 Federal Budget to be announced tonight at 7.30pm Sydney time. It’s the first budget for Chairman Rudd’s Labor government, and the first for treasurer Wayne Swan, so it’s bound to interesting.

My role — at least as I understand it, ‘cos I haven’t actually spoken with my editor yet — is to look at it from a geek perspective. That’ll include, I imagine, issues I’ve previously covered for Crikey: Internet censorship, the ABC’s move into Internet TV, social media, the national broadband network…

But what else should I look out for?

When I asked on the Link mailing list, here’s a partial list of the suggestions I got:

Functional separation of Telstra into wholesale / retail / pay TV entities.
The laptops for schools program — what hardware? networking? training? maintenance?
Copyrights & patents, including government-funded enforcement of music copyrights — something the music industry has been lobbying for.
Assistance for IT startups, both hardware and software.

I’m also wondering just how forward-looking the budget will be. The brain cells are already firing. What can you add to the list?

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Stilgherrian Live Alpha: lessons from episode 1

Stilgherrian — Sat, 10 May 2008 04:31:40 +0000

If you missed the first episode of Stilgherrian Live Alpha, it’s over at Ustream. That’s the program exactly as it was broadcast on Thursday night.

(Yes, I could have embedded the Ustream player in this page, but I didn’t because of point 3 below.)

I’m chuffed that a 26-person audience generally found it “entertaining” and “enjoyable” even though it was screwed up technically and the main feature interview didn’t happen at all. It felt much worse from where I was sitting.

Traditional media runs technical trials behind closed doors. Only when everybody is happy that it “works” does the new technology get used “for real”.

However I chose to make this public. With bleeding edge technology it’s useful to share experiences. It feels like extreme programming: just start building it, knowing that you may change things along the way, and learn everything in parallel.

So even though our program didn’t fly well — heck, it’s a flaming wreck at the end of the runway! — the black box flight recorder tells us many things…

First, though, remember the aims of this 8-week Alpha: it’s to assemble the toolkit of hardware, software, services, procedures and mindsets that can be used after that. What does happen after that may or may not be a 30-minute weekly program.

I assembled a toolkit with whatever was at hand. This first program has certainly told us which items need replacing! I appreciate the people telling me that the “set” (whatever was behind me in my office), lighting and camera angles need fixing, or the audio needs equalisation. Keep that feedback coming!

With that in mind, here are our many learnings:

Ustream works quite nicely, in general. Good audio quality, and good image quality. (The low frame rate was happening on my old computer, so that can be fixed.)
There’s lots to learn about the audio side. I need a better understanding of how OS X sound routing works, and how Ustream’s “co-host” function works. Time to do some RTFMing.
The “grammar” of this medium is different. For example, a traditional pre-recorded TV program has 2 seconds of black before the program starts, so I did the same, and started recording during that black. However when Ustream generates the thumbnail image for the program website, it takes the first frame of the recording. That’s why the Stilgherrian’s video clips bin has a black rectangle. [I didn't want this page to have a black rectangle either, so I chose a frame grab instead.]
Trying to do everything new all at once is stressful. Even stuff I did know, like hosting a talkback show, I hadn’t done in 15+ years. When the audio screwed up and my guests weren’t available at the right time (not their fault), I was overwhelmed — and that’s why I was sounding so hesitant.
I am on TV, not radio. I must not fiddle with my nose, because people can see me.
I suspect I should resist the temptation to make things look slick. It doesn’t have to be “just like ‘real’ TV”. The aim is for immediate, salient content. That’s why people still found it entertaining when disaster struck: when I needed to fill time, I told stories and jokes. Narrative always wins out over fancy packaging. The time spent making graphics could have been better spent experimenting with audio routing.
Does it need to be at a set time each week? Some level of consistency is needed so people know how to fit the program into their lifestyles, sure. But with modern real-time notification systems people can be told when things are on — and it’s all recorded anyway, even if they can’t participate at the time.
Does it need to be a set duration or structure? Ditto lifestyle. But the program doesn’t need to fit into a slot in a TV channel’s rigid schedule. The Internet has an infinite number of channels! Programs can be broadcast whenever they choose. And if this program is about what’s happening in my world, then maybe the timing and content needs to adapt to that. Somehow.

For now, I’ll stay with the plan to do episode 2 this coming Thursday 15 May at 9.30pm Sydney time.

However the following week I’m at some tech conferences and maybe it’d be more appropriate to fit the timing around them. And then there’s Eurovision on Sunday 25 May…

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Well that was a strange little disaster!

Stilgherrian — Thu, 08 May 2008 16:08:59 +0000

The “live recording” of Stilgherrian Live Alpha Episode 1 didn’t exactly go according to plan. You can see the resulting video now, but I’ll write up some notes during the day.

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Stilgherrian Live Alpha: episode 1 tonight!

Stilgherrian — Wed, 07 May 2008 22:51:35 +0000

I’ve just organised by first guest(s) for tonight’s inaugural episode of Stilgherrian Live Alpha. And, as you can see, we’ve spent half the night playing with graphics too.

I’ll be speaking with Adam Purcell and/or Jared Madden from Emerge.tv about tune-out.com campaign — their counter-campaign to the music industry’s propaganda film, Australian Music In Tune, which I wrote about the other day.

How can the music industry respond to the dramatic changed happening around them? Is it actually too late for them to change? And it’s interesting to note that the film on their website right now isn’t quite the same as the one originally released…

Since it’s the first program, I’ll probably tell you a bit about myself and what’s been on my radar this week. If there’s anything you’ve wanted to ask me, now’s the time.

Stilgherrian Live Alpha is recorded live at stilgherrian.com/live at 9.30pm Sydney time (1130 UTC), and I’ll be talking “talkback” via audio and video.

If you turn up early, you’ll probably see us doing some last-minute technical tests. And once the program is recorded, I’ll turn it in a podcast — details later.