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Another night on the town | Nov 15, 2004 11:14

Warmest congratulations to Bizgirl for taking out the Best Personal Blog category at Friday Night's NetGuide Web Awards. I discovered only a day or so previous that I actually knew Bizgirl, only as a bloke, and was thus on the night in a position to introduce her to the rest of the crew, including her cyber-pal, Damian.

I know a lot of people expected us to win as we did last year, including Bizgirl. But the criteria were fairly heavily weighted towards blog-as-personal-diary, which doesn't necessarily fit us, or a number of other well-known blogs that didn't make the list of finalists. (It didn't fit IdolBlog at all, but they won Best Youth Site instead.)

The appearance of the hitherto unknown Tyler Ryan in the list caused a bit of a flap last week. After all, the guy doesn't post very often, no one links to him (well, not till last week anyway) and his spelling and grammar are not best practice. But take a look at his About Me page: he has quite a story to tell, and one that couldn't be told in any other way but through the miracle of the blogosphere. I trust he'll carry on.

The awards night itself was a lot better than last year, thanks largely to its relocation from the Aotea Centre to the more sympathetic environment of the Hyatt. The indoor fireworks were better than the cheesy laser show last year too (although my first thought echoed that of Jacqui Brown: are they allowed to do that?).

Ralph Norris's turgid speech will have slowed any hearts set racing by the pyrotechnics (for me, brought back unhappy memories of being trapped and forced to listen to this sort of thing when I was an IT writer), but otherwise it was a pretty good evening. We met Regan and Rachel from IdolBlog, who were more glamorous than anyone else there, and possibly more clever. They have a post about the evening too, with picture of the fireworks.

Alan Perrott in the Herald got an expert to weigh up the blog finalists. "Intimidating"? Us? We're pussycats, honest …

The awards did make me resolve to put together a proper blogroll for this page, which I will, in some marvellous week when I don't have much else on …

I had planned (and indeed had a ticket) to go and see the Scavengers afterwards, but the CactusLab crew were heading up to the Odeon Lounge to see Pine. I got a lift with them there to discover we'd just missed Alec Bathgate, and that it was a little too folky for my Friday night, so I grabbed Graham Reid by his old hippie long hair, threw him in a taxi and went to the Scavs after all.

We only missed a little bit of their set, which was actually a lot better than I expected - thanks in great part to Dion from the D4's contribution as bass player and singer of all the songs. He provided such momentum that it seemed Des Hefner was just hanging on behind the drumkit. (With the way the lights fell on Des's extensive forehead I kept getting an odd feeling that I was looking at Don Brash playing drums in a punk rock band …)

The Scavs were only added to the MintChicks' Friday night bill after their original Saturday night reunion show sold out, so it was a younger MintChicks crowd rather than a bunch of tottering forty and fiftysomethings, which was a good thing. The MintChicks were cool, and they whacked out 'Orgasm Addict' and 'Beat on the Brat' like it weren't no thing.

In keeping with my practice of making the most of a night out, I then hooked up with my pals Phil and Renee at the Safari Lounge, where Roots Foundation were playing. It was a little quiet, and I wish the sound at the Safari was better, but it was a nice enough way to spend an hour and a few dollars.

Further interruption to sleeping patterns was occasioned on Sunday morning, when a new-look All Blacks ran all around the Italians. It was a little hard to tell exactly what it meant, but it seemed to be a tolerable performance. Saimone Taumoepeau and Conrad Smith certainly stepped up and Dan Carter is certainly cemented as the new first-five. But what happened to the flat backline?

Microsoft's would-be Google-killer is up in beta, but the critics aren't impressed. It seems fine to me, and I certainly like their results for bill pearson fretful sleepers (our publication of the essay also now tops the Google rankings for the same search string).

I'm still in two minds after hearing the recordings of Iraena Asher's 111 calls on Sunday last night. In retrospect, the police made a terrible error in not sending a police car out to Piha to pick her up on that night, but the call-taker did repeatedly try and determine whether she was in immediate danger, and if Discount Taxis had not had a child dispatching cars, she would probably be safe now. What the call-taker didn't pick up, essentially, is that because of her mental state she was in a very poor position to help herself by, for instance, calling one of her family members.

An American friend has forwarded me an email titled "We Suck", which points to an AP story based on this press release about the 2004 Report Card on World Social Progress, which says that the US has fallen from 18th to 27th because of "cuts in social services and chronic poverty in U.S. cities and rural areas during the 90s."

It's actually a little misleading, because the US also ranked 27th in the last such audit, in 1998. But wasn't all that marvelous welfare reform supposed to have improved things by now? All of the top 10 countries bar Iceland are in Europe.

In 1998, New Zealand ranked 19th, alongside Spain and Japan, but with the same score as the UK and Spain who were ninth equal. The new tables don't appear to have been published yet, but it will be interesting to see whether we've advanced - and to speculate on how much the social agenda outlined yesterday at the Labour Party conference might push things along. But I'd better read today's paper before pronouncing on all that …

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Still on the wires | Nov 12, 2004 09:40

A little more comment on yesterday's broadband post: although I felt that the view advanced in Telecom's keynote presentation at the Tuanz conference - it's not the network, it's the content - ran way too close to saying "it's all your fault, you ninnies", I was at the same time impressed by what Telecom's rural sector people had to say, and by the farm applications they're promoting. The agriculture group paid a little visit to the cultural-sector group I was scribing for and it was a useful interlude.

Also, Otago University's Neil James got in touch in his capacity as Chair of NGI-NZ, the non-profit society promoting the next-generation Internet, and largely concurred with yesterday's post, but had a couple of observations. He noted that the "infamous" $250 million figure put on the project was speculative and would depend wholly on how far the network would extend, but of more note:

The "cobbling together" [of fibre networks] is not just or even primarily because of necessity - it is in part to ensure the advanced network is not captured by a single supplier. This is what is behind the open, neutral gigapop-based approach to the design.

You say that Telecom will not make dark fibre available and we will end up with managed services. I must say I am not so pessimistic. It is vital that a significant portion - as much as possible - of the network trunk is dark fibre or at the very least wavelength-based. Both Bill St Arnaud of Canarie and Kees Neggers of SurfNet have said to me that dark fibre is a "must have", and any influence I have will be used to get fibre access.

I wish him luck. Also, I now understand the hisser mentioned yesterday was not from a university but another organisation and is now fairly contrite about his unseemly behaviour.

And just so it's not all flowing one way, I understand there's been all manner of fun this week now that TelstraClear has begun to act on its stupid plan to cancel open peering at the Wellington and Auckland Internet exchanges. De-peering - in favour of making other providers pay to deliver traffic to TelstraClear customers - breaks the Internet and hurts TelstraClear customers. And I hear that each time a de-peering order has been sent down to account level to action, it is being sent back with a query as to its wisdom. Heh.

Staying with pointy-headedness for a bit, the sensible opinion on the claims of vote-stealing (electronic and otherwise) in the US elections seems to be going the way I thought it would: that many of the apparent anomalies have explanations, that there is presently no evidence of concerted fraud - but that the system nonetheless broke in ways that must be seriously investigated.

Farhad Manjoo has a useful roundup on Salon. Meanwhile, a new blog, Something's rotten in the state of Denmark, is taking a fairly level-headed approach to the issue, and is currently noting a report from four Berkley political science graduates on strange events in Florida's Broward County. Put is this way: my current view that there is no firm evidence of concerted fraud does not rest on a belief in the probity of Florida's state authorities.

Jolisa pointed me to what appears to be the definitive page of red-blue US voting maps, which is really interesting, and also to another survey, which shows that, while they may be getting more than their share of federal largesse, red-state voters easily trump the dirty Dems when it comes to giving to charity.

Last week I saw this state-by-state table - which appears to show a negative correlation between average IQ and voting for Bush - but didn't run it, because I wasn't sure that it was robust and not a hoax.

Good call as it turns out: this blog has done a truly excellent job of determining that the table is based on a longtime Internet hoax (one that even took in The Economist) and has lots of other information. Meanwhile, someone else has had a good-faith attempt at putting together a better table, based on the states' respective academic test scores. It still has blue states at the top and (mostly) red at the bottom, but offers a more nuanced picture.

As I was driving home from the airport on Friday I listened to an Australian ABC report in which American military analyst Dr Steven Metz breezily explained the rationale behind the present assault on Fallujah. Its aim, he said, was not strictly military - in that there was no serious expectation of capturing leaders of the Iraqi insurgency, or of killing or capturing a significant number of insurgents - but psychological. Bloodshed in Fallujah would, he said, deter "less committed part time insurgents."

Or maybe it won't. It seems to me a risky strategy to plan on gaining national assent by brutalising parts of the population. And, already, gunmen have abducted three members of Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's family. Other media have reported on children dying in front of their helpless parents in Fallujah. The BBC's compliant embedded reports from the assault have been supplement by something less uplifting from a local correspondent. One party has withdrawn from the Allawi government in protest and an influential group of Sunni clerics has called for a boycott of the planned January elections. Juan Cole rounds up the political fallout.

Raed Jarrar has many more Fallujah reports - including claims of the use of cluster bombs and white phosphorous munitions (which melt the skin of anyone in the way), street fighting elsewhere, and what appears to be a de facto news blackout. And Riverbend is even more pissed off.

I have a feeling that if the word "Fallujah" comes to be a byword for anything in history, it won't be prudent and effective military strategy …

Meanwhile, that great irony of the media landscape - NBR's Labour-friendly Philips Fox poll - is back for another round, which sees National slipping.

Also in NBR, a useful column by Jeff Gamlin posited that the major danger of a Bush second term is economic. Referring to the troubling US deficits:

President Bush's profligacy is made possible only by the willingness of various Asian countries to buy US bonds and to, in effect, fund the fiscal and trading deficits. Nations such as China take this action to stop the US dollar from sliding so their own exports remain competitive.

Without this support the US dollar would plunge to unheard of depths, with dire consequences for the US consumer and for trading nations such as New Zealand. One local commentator has predicted the value of the New Zealand dollar could climb to 90USc, which would make life intolerable for our exporters.

If there is an area where the re-election of Mr Bush represents a clear and present danger to the US and the world, it can be traced to the possible consequences of his economic policies.

Back home, Brian Fallow in the Herald says not so fast on the tax cut talk in a sober analysis that is really worth reading.

Also in the Herald, Brian Rudman looks at this week's goings-on at the Auckland City Council and seems to confirm my impression that Bruce Hucker needs to behave with a bit more measure if he doesn't want this to be a one-term centre-left council. The silly old voters are under the impression that they elected the other guy as mayor …

And, finally, if you haven't seen sorryeverybody.com, where have you been? I particularly liked the pandas. Feel free to waste your afternoon waiting for the galleries to load (these guys still need more server capacity) and tell me which ones you like best.

For now, I'm going to finish a bunch more work before we all head to the NetGuide Web Awards this evening, and then, perhaps, to the Scavengers …

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It would be madness | Nov 11, 2004 12:03

When a Ministry of Research, Science and Technology discussion paper earlier this year recommended that the government provide at least part of the funding for a gigabit-speed Advanced Network, it seemed hopeful news indeed. More so because MORST plumped for a relatively open model where not only universities and research institutions could stump up to join the gigabit club, but some private sector businesses.

An Advanced Network - aka a research network or next-generation Internet - is not only much faster than the "commodity Internet", it is different in kind. Typically, it will have deployed Internet Protocol Version 6, which offers huge improvements in security and integrity of service. All other OECD countries - not to mention such technology titans as Costa Rica - have such networks at various stages of maturity.

They are rapidly becoming essential for certain kinds of research - notably those involving the transport of very large files and the sharing of computing resources across distance - and, indeed, there is an apparently well-founded fear that unless something is done, certain kinds of research, particularly in the biotech field could become unviable in New Zealand.

Many such networks in other countries have fairly tight acceptable use policies and will not accept straight commercial use. But in those places there is usually a commercial alternative (often right down to consumer level - Verizon in the US has just started selling 30Mbit/s to the home for $34.95 a month). In New Zealand, there is not. So there is a logic in allowing a few private sector organisations to share the load of building and operating this kind of network (whose costs might eventually run to $250 million). Yet by the time a Network Use Policy was published in September, that vision had all but disappeared.

While publicly-funded tertiary institutions and CRIs have an automatic right to join, others in the "innovation sector" will have to depend on a partnership with a member of the non-profit Advanced network Company itself. It is possible that access to the network will be even further confined by the time the current RFI process feeds into a government spending commitment.

To understand why this is happening, you need to grasp that networks like this militate against the traditional telecommunications company model, in which telcos sit in the middle of their networks, managing traffic and access and clipping tickets. The new model is variously referred to as a "stupid network" (because all the intelligence is at the edge, rather than the centre) or "dark fibre". All its participants want is access to the basic commodity of fibreoptic cable, to run their own services in such a way that once a connection fee has been paid, bandwidth is effectively free and limitless.

Can you see why Telecom New Zealand would regard this as the end of the world? And why, as a consequence, Rod Deane and Theresa Gattung have been lobbying senior government ministers to confine access to this thing as tightly as possible? The Screen Council - whose members would love to be able to move around very large files at reasonable cost - is lobbying in the other direction, but there are no prizes for guessing who gets more attention.

Telecom is, on the other hand, offering to provide parts of the Advanced Network - which, out of necessity, will be cobbled together as much as possible from existing fibre - but doing so in a way that is effectively a non-sequitir. It is not offering dark fibre (and it will probably be a cold day in hell before it does), but a 200Mbit/s "managed service". Users will take its network management value-adds even if they choke on them. Which they probably will.

In truth, Telecom would be delighted if this thing just went away. After a few drinks had been consumed at the party for the Tuanz broadband conference this week, a colleague and I sat down to hear someone from a telecommunications equipment supplier and someone, I believe, from Telecom, vilifying the whole idea and the people behind it. A little later, the intensity of the politics around this thing was underlined when a representative of one of the universities started hissing abuse at a member of the Advanced Network steering committee.

In part, this is because all the envisioning has been done. The big geeks went into their two days of sector-group discussion at the conference with five and 10-year plans in hand. As a colleague of mine pointed out, they didn't have anything to do but argue about the politics.

There are valid questions about the Advanced Network proposal, including what it will really cost to build and whether it can really be cobbled together from a scattering of existing fibre installations. But at least one of the challenges is also a crucial opportunity.

A number of research institutions are not very adjacent to the planned network. For Industrial Research Limited, the "last mile" to its base in the Hutt Valley is about 16km, and it faces considerable cost in connecting. But that fibre run will pass schools, municipal buildings and business. Could they also contribute - whilst not being users of the core Advanced network itself? Could IRL be what Canadian Bill St Arnaud described on the conference's opening day as an "anchor tenant" for new community fibre infrastructure?

St Arnaud, who works for Canarie Networks, made a compelling case for all the things we don't do here: most notably the separation of services from infrastructure. He touted the concept of MUSH (Municipal, University, School and Hospital) networks, which are funded or loaned money to become the anchor tenants. Does it? Well, Canada is third in the world for broadband penetration (and that's real broadband), while New Zealand is 25th and falling. Costs there are a third of those here. And they've overcome some very significant geographical issues to get there.

Another thing makes me trust the big geeks: they've been right before. The people behind the Advanced network proposal are largely the same people who brought and built the Internet here in the first place. They had the good sense to clear out and let it be commercialised in 1996 and I'm strongly inclined to let them build the basis of our next network.

I am not a reflexive Telecom-basher. I did not believe, on balance, that full unbundling of Telecom's network was appropriate. This far down the line it would have been a worrying encroachment on Telecom's property rights. But this is different. Right now, Telecom is lobbying to prevent or confine a hugely important service that it is not prepared to provide itself.

The government really needs to show some guts and vision over this. Because the alternative is that the interests of every other business in the country - and especially those in the sectors the government has identified as crucial to New Zealand's economic development - will be sacrificed to those of a single incumbent. It would be madness.

PS: You'll note that Public Address is presenting the second Flying Nun pub quiz on occasion of the release of the Second Season DVD compilation, on Wednesday November 24, at the King's Arms, from 8pm. Details are in the ad on this page (reload if you don't see it). It will be very good fun and you should feel free to join us. You might even win yourself a special festive prize!

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Back in town | Nov 10, 2004 11:56

Clearly, I am not indispensable. I'm away for a couple of days at a conference and the much-anticipated World of Warcraft open beta becomes available. My 10 year-old leaps on it but discovers that the transfer of the leviathan 2.4GB file will be considerably enhanced if a certain port is enabled in the MacOS X firewall.

So he dives into MacOS X Help, finds out how to enable the relevant port and does the job. My obsolescence as technical gatekeeper beckons. Anyway, the download is almost done as I write, and I must say I'm impressed with the custom BitTorrent client that Blizzard has built to deliver the beta.

My computer has been busily exchanging bits and pieces of the file with who-knows-how-many other nodes across the Internet. Data in and data out are almost exactly symmetrical, as the BitTorrent protocol dictates - which is also something of a testament to the performance of my Ihug Connect wireless Internet service.

This in turn is germane to the conference I've been at: the Telecommunications Users Association of New Zealand's Broadband Reloaded event, which aimed to envisage a true broadband future for New Zealand and plot some ways to get there. The tendency of Tuanz events to turn into marathons was exaggerated by the fact that the conference venue was the opera house in Hastings, while the hotels were all in Napier. So unless you had private transport, you were on the bus to the venue at 7am sharp, jawing until 6pm, and not getting back from drinks, dinner and networking until 11pm. Tired? I was bloody knackered.

Without wishing to get too deeply into the Napier-Hastings thing, the two towns, both apparently quite prosperous, are remarkably different. While Napier is clustered at its beachfront, Hastings appears to be a town planned with too much space to hand. It is not unattractive, but everything is spread out, and the vast retail spaces operated by K-Mart, Briscoes and Rebel Sport make it seem like a town of silos.

Still, it was a useful affair. The Aucklanders present looked agog at the cluster of officials from the Royal Court of Helengrad, who calculated the respective influence of their acronyms - MCH, MED, NZTE, MORST - and swapped gossip. Telecom was present as joint lead sponsor and unofficial 800lb gorilla, warily eyed up by members of the geek establishment. But two of the most interesting people I met were Maori: Garry Nicholas, the general manager of Toi Maori Aotearoa, who struck me as a man of real vision, and Roimata Rameka, Hone Harawira's livewire PA at Te Hiku o Te Hika, which runs radio stations in the far north. She will presumably be part of the Ngapuhi invasion of Wellington if and when the Maori Party wins a few seats next year.

I'll blog at greater length tomorrow about the big underlying issue at the conference - the ever-so-political Advanced Network proposal - but for now I should acknowledge at least a bit of the intelligence and insightful post-US election comments that have flowed in from readers.

No economists ventured to shed light on the question I asked about the relative economic contributions of the red and blue states, but a physicist did. Richard Easther of Cornell University directed me to this comparison table, which fairly clearly indicates who's paying the bills in America in terms of contribution to the tax base on one hand and federal spending on the other: basically, it's the Kerry-voting blue states around the edges that keep the show on the road. Norm pointed me to a blog by economist Angry Bear, who elaborates on a similar theme.

On the other hand, Michael Beggs sent a lengthy and well-argued email to say that this is not a proper way of looking at things, noting that California's bountiful tech industry was largely (I think you could argue about how much) spawned from federal military spending, and that the heartland manufacturing industries have been badly hurt by the "monetarist shock" and the actions of the edge-state-based financial sector:

I don't mean to suggest it was a case of demonic financiers setting out to gut perfectly healthy industry. American manufacturing was burdened with overcapacity and being out-competed by lower-cost higher-tech European and Japanese manufacturing. But the financiers should not be glorified either. They have not replaced manufacturing decline with anything sustainable. The 1990s boom Democrats like to give Clinton credit for a sucess that was based on a financial bubble. Companies originating in America are doing very well on a world scale, exporting capital around the globe, but the American economy itself is deeply in debt …

Anyway - my point is that it's unfair to credit the wealth of the East and West coasts to their enlightenment and hipness. (Texas is actually an interesting counterpoint - Houston and Dallas emerging as important financial and technology centres - but this is already a long enough rant.) The re-centring of the US economy into finance, insurance and real estate was not the fault of citizens of the red states, though it probably contributed to their resentment of 'East Coast liberals' and Hollywood, etc. Thomas Frank has written insightful stuff on this. The Democrats have not presented any solution to the country's real economic problems - including severe poverty in urban cores as well as the de-industrialised heartland, and a chronic reliance on an unstable pyramid of debt.

I think if I was a New York Democrat I'd still have something along the lines of "no taxation without representation" running around my head.

I do think that, however therapeutic is might be in the short term, the red-versus-blue states meme will have to be set aside, if only because it doesn't allow for the real diversity on the ground. Whatever their fellow citizens do, the good folk of Austin, Texas, will still be Keeping Austin Weird.

Anyway, gotta run. Some stuff on creationism's gathering assault on American public education tomorrow. But for now, yet another map, courtesy Josh Marshall. This one depicts the American electoral map adjusted for population size. It looks kind of funky.

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