patch monday – Page 21

25 September 201030 October 2011

Weekly Wrap 16

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. Well, the bits I’m going to talk about publicly.

Articles

Wireless on the rise, but fixed broadband still does the work, for Crikey. An attempt to head off misuse of the latest internet activity report from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The “wireless will solve everything” meme is strong.
NBN: too bold for timid Australia? for ABC Unleashed. I’d noticed that amongst the much-needed legitimate criticism of the National Broadband Network there’s also a sense of “We’ll make do” and “No-one else is doing this so why should Australia?” Has Australia lost its nerve? Needless to say, most commenters miss the point I’m making about the bigger picture and just re-bleat their views about the NBN. The party-hack trolls are remarkably obvious.

Podcasts

Patch Monday episode 58, “For efficiency, send your workers home!”. My guest is Jacob Murray-White, general manager of Salmat At Home. They run a virtual call centre with staff scattered across Australia. He gets quite excited. I’d never realised that call centres could be so interesting, although cartoonist First Dog on the Moon used to manage a call centre. That means something.

Geekery

I still spend roughly a third of my time doing random “geek for hire” stuff with a few long-standing clients. I reckon I might as well list any significant moments.

I still provide internet hosting for approximately 110 domains for around 40 clients, including my own activities such as this website. I’m right in the middle of migrating all that to a new server. Indeed, this site is now running on that server. It’s another dedicated Linux box at ServePath in San Francisco, although they seem to be emphasising their GoGrid branding these days. I’m thrilled to discover that just packaging and migrating the data will take 14 hours, and my planned process won’t work. A busy weekend ahead. Sigh.

Elsewhere

Most of my day-to-day observations are on my high-volume Twitter stream, and random photos and other observations turn up on my Posterous stream. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: The view from Beverly Hills Hotel, Sydney, which is a substantially less glamorous view than last week’s photo.]

18 September 201030 October 2011

Weekly Wrap 15

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets.

Articles

Turnbull’s NBN challenge: real analysis, real policies, not rhetoric, for Crikey. A rebuttal of Malcolm Turnbull’s denigration of the National Broadband Network project, which he blogged before the election but which was posted at ABC Unleashed this week.
Myths of the NBN myths, for ABC Unleashed. A rebuttal of an anti-NBN piece by economist Peter J Cox, Top Ten Myths behind Fibre Policy which, ironically, he also wrote about in Crikey. And thus the circle is complete. I find it telling that he describes people favouring optical fibre for data delivery as “zealots”. Name-calling is of course a technique of propaganda rather than analysis.

Podcasts

Patch Monday episode 57, “CCTV surveillance: reality versus myth”. My guest is Professor Brian Lovell from NICTA’s Queensland Research Lab.

[Photo: Circular Quay station at dusk, showing how us Sydney residents tend to take the magnificent views for granted.]

11 September 201030 October 2011

Weekly Wrap 13 and 14

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets, once again done fortnightly because I forgot to do it last weekend. Suffer.

Articles

Nile’s porn excuse doesn’t hold water, for Crikey. Sydney’s Daily Telegraph alleged that various NSW politicians had been using their parliamentary computers to access pornography, and that anti-sex-industry campaigner and Christian Democrats leader Reverend Fred Nile was the worst culprit. He denied it, but as the story stood on 2 September 2010 I didn’t believe him.
NSW Parliamentâ€™s flawed porn hunt, for Crikey. By the following day, it was clear that the “audit” of parliamentary web browsing was deeply flawed.
What the NBN will deliver to Windsorâ€™s mob, for Crikey. Independent MP Tony Windsor said that the National Broadband Network was a major factor in him choosing to support Labor over the Liberal-National Coalition.
ACMA and Nine demonstrate Australia’s institutionalised racism, for ABC Unleashed. Sam Newman’s continued low-brow bigotry on The AFL Footy Show gets “punished” with a slap on the wrist. Again. It took only six comments before someone accused me of political correctness gone mad and compared Australian with North Korea. And another commenter said that I “looked like a potato that had been boiled too far”. The standard of discussion at ABC Online isn’t all that flash.

Podcasts

Patch Monday episode 55, “BYO computers: cloud security risk?”.
Patch Monday episode 56, “Parliament’s poor porn probe exposed”. If ZDNet allowed longer headlines and more robust language in their stories, I’d have entitled this podcast “Pollies’ piss poor Parly porn probe exposed”. Poetry.

Media Appearances

On Thursday 8 September 2010 I did a brief spot on ABC Radio’s Statewide NSW to chat about Stephanie Rice’s Twitterfaggotgate. Alas there is no recording.

Elsewhere

Most of my day-to-day observations are on my high-volume Twitter stream, and random photos and other observations turn up on my Posterous stream. The photos eventually appear on Flickr.

[Photo: Enmore Village on a Spring evening, taken from one of my favourite afternoon working spots at the Warren View Hotel, corner of Stanmore and Enmore Roads. Compare it with the photo in this post, My village really is home.]

28 August 201030 October 2011

Weekly Wrap 12

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. Not so much media work this week, but what I did do related to the hung parliament and the importance of broadband to the independent MPs who hold the balance of power.

Articles

Parliament hangs on a broadband fibre for Crikey, which explains the issues as they stood on Monday 23 August 2010.

Podcasts

Patch Monday episode 54, “Broadband election’s harsh come-down”, which explains the issues as they stood on Monday 23 August 2010, plus a repeat of my conversation from earlier this year with Jan Meijer of Norway’s UNINETT explaining why online voting is a lot trickier than might seem.

Media Appearances

None. I was surprised by this. But then again everyone wanted to talk to the “block of three” independent MPs, not me.

Geekery

I still spend roughly a third of my time doing random “geek for hire” stuff with a few long-standing clients. I reckon I might as well list any significant moments.

Cleaned up the home page for Fender Australia. They’ve been a client for a decade now, and the guts of the website includes hundreds of manually-maintained pages which date back to 2001. The red and black design was a quick re-skin back in 2007. This week’s work was simply to tidy up a layout which had become messy since then. Yes, it will become a database-driven website soon. We’ve also been saying that for at least two years.

Elsewhere

I should also mention that most of my day-to-day observations are on my high-volume Twitter stream, and random photos and other observations turn up on my Posterous stream. The photos eventually appear on Flickr.

[Photo: Modern Living in Enmore, a shop window full of wigs on dummies’ heads, Enmore Road.]

21 August 201030 October 2011

Weekly Wrap 10 and 11

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. Well, a fortnightly summary today, because I forgot to do a post like this last week. Sigh.

Actually, a lot of this relates to the federal election here in Australia, so you’d better digest it all now before you vote today. Hurry up!

Articles

The broadband battle: what will they really deliver? for Crikey, explaining the two rather different broadband policies on offer in today’s election from Labor and the Liberal-National Coalition.
Coalition broadband: a wireless tower in every street for Crikey, quoting some material from the Patch Monday podcast about how wireless broadband works and what it would require to deliver fibre-equivalent services via wireless.

Podcasts

Patch Monday episode 52, “Media laws dying for digital update” with guest Peter Black from the Queensland University of Technology.
Patch Monday episode 53, “Understanding the broadband election” with guest Narelle Clark, a network engineering consultant who’s most recent gig was as research director of the CSIRO’s Networking Technologies Laboratory. She’s also vice-president of the Internet Society of Australia and on the board of trustees for the Internet Society globally.
A Series of Tubes episode 115. Host Richard Chirgwin talks with Anup Changaroth of Ciena Networks about gigabit fibre networks, the product life cycle, and the value of Layer 2 carrier networks, and me about broadband policy.

Media Appearances

Talking Twitter and the election on Syn Radio.
Email is dead, what next?, the TechLines webcast in which I’m on-screen for about a minute as I ask a question near the end of the program.

[Photo: Tights are not pants, Enmore Road. Further proof, Ladies, that tights are indeed not pants. Not even if you’re also wearing heels.]

06 August 201030 October 2011

Weekly Wrap 9

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets — and this week there’s been a lot of it!

Articles

Gay marriage an irrelevant sideshow, for ABC Unleashed. I reckon the way “the gay and lesbian community” abused Senator Penny Wong for simply re-stating Labor policy was disgusting. Did they really expect her to break ranks and criticise her party’s policy just because some random punter asked her a question on Q&A?
AFACT didnâ€™t explain notices to iiNet for ZDNet.com.au. On Wednesday I covered day three of the Federal Court appeal by the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft in their case against Australia’s third-largest ISP. This is straight reportage of the morning’s proceedings.
Will AFACTâ€™s appeal solve anything? for ZDNet.com.au. On Thursday, I wrote this op-ed piece, picking up on one of the appeal judge’s comments about this appeal not necessarily solving anything long-term.

Podcasts

Patch Monday episode 51, “Data breaches: it’s criminals again” with guest Brad Arkin, who Mark Goudie, who heads up the forensics practice for Verizon Business Asia-Pacific in Melbourne. We discuss Verizon’s 2010 Data Breach Investigations Report [PDF].
A Series of Tubes episode 114. Host Richard Chirgwin talks with APNIC Chief Scientist Geoff Houston about the impending exhaustion of IPv4 internet addresses, and me about the AFACT v iiNet appeal, the demise of Google Wave, and a few political things.

Media Appearances

Our nod to the federal election campaign and an update on Gov 2.0 initiatives, an episode of ABC Radio National’s Future Tense in which I reiterate some of my Crikey comments the lameness of Australian politicians using social media.

[Photo: The view from Courtroom 1, Federal Court of Australia, Sydney, photographed on 4 August 2010. The brown smudges are not on your screen: the windows need cleaning from the outside.]