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Thanks Everyone | Apr 07, 2006 08:52
We won a People's Choice NetGuide Web Award last night: Best Blog. I'm really pleased. Thanks everyone, and big ups to the other finalists, Kiwiblog and IdolBlog. And afterwards, a couple of us went to the Damian Marley show at the St James, which was amazing.
So it was a great day - and today, I am unavailable.
Just not good enough | Apr 05, 2006 10:00
Some more on broadband provisioning and contention rates - because I know y'all like that stuff. A couple of reader reports on DSL entrench the impression that broadband users on regional exchanges currently get a much better deal than those in high-uptake inner Auckland suburbs.
Nigel Caughey reckons he gets 2Mbit/s "90% of the time" in Paihia, while Stephen Moore says the best he can get on his new 3.5Mbit/s Xtra "Broadband Explorer" connection between 8pm and midnight in Morningside is an unacceptable 275Kbit/s.
Another reader, who left a bogus return address, suggests that "your nOOb friend is probably testing Orcons congestion not Telecoms... Telecom provide the UBS circuit and Orcon the international connectivity which they run rather shall we say ...congested."
I think not. Zach Bagnall (NB: not a n00b) was testing speed to his own web server, which is connected via Orcon; so, as he points out, "the traffic never leaves the Auckland Orcon network, let alone the country."
Zach also notes very similar experiences in Mt Eden reported here and here.
I am further led to believe, on a wholly unattributable basis, that two exchanges serve the Mt Eden area, one has only half the backhaul capacity of the other - and it's that one which is flatlining most of the time. Telecom could help by publishing information about the way its exchanges are provisioned, but, um, it doesn't.
If you're curious about the state of your connection, you can try the NZDSL Speedmeter hosted at Orcon. My Wired Country connection is currently showing up at 1.75Mbit/s, which is acceptable to me.
A friend of mine has been trying to get a new DSL connection on. He went to an independent ISP which explained that it wouldn't be able to get Telecom to action the connection inside two weeks. Frustrated, he went to Xtra: two days, sir. Can you say outrageous competitive advantage?
In one last bout of unflattering Telecom news, Juha at Geekzone and Bernard at Sir Humphreys both make note of Barbara Dreaver's excellent scoop about Telecom's behaviour in the Cook Islands, where it owns 60% of the monopoly local telco. Telecom offered a $4m cash bung to the Cooks government (in the form of a dividend; the government owns the other 40% of the company) in an effort to preserve its monopoly hold on the tiny Cooks market. That might seem a lot of money to wave around, but Telecom Cook Islands makes $8 million annual profit from its 12,000 Cooks customers (and, to be fair, however many tourists pay for connectivity during visits).
Oh, and the Cooks get DSL, in the form of 128k and 256k "broadband" services.
Lyndon Hood's in good form, and noticing something that has escaped comment elsewhere: Tariana Turia's major hang-up with psychologists, and, specifically, psychologists in prison rehabilitation. He notes her going off once, and then twice, and not making a whole lot of sense either time. Presumably, it's something personal. Also: is Heather plagiarising Rodney, or is Rodney plagiarising Heather?
Tim Selwyn has a rather good visual funny on the new governor-general.
Rugby nerds may enjoy Tracey Nelson laying down the law on the rather silly McCaw controversy.
American politics can be hard to follow, but a rough rule of thumb tends to be that Democrats are either fools or foolhardy loners, and Republicans are crooks and liars. Having apparently seen the hammer coming down, the most corrupt American politician of his generation - and one of the most powerful - Tom DeLay has announced that he won't be standing for re-election. Sidney Blumenthal and John Nicols consider the legacy.
Meanwhile, if you thought Fox News's coverage of war and politics was screwy, take a look at how they cover serious crime. Unbelievable.
Contempt | Apr 04, 2006 10:15
I'm such a wuss. I had figured that reporting around the present distribution of suppressed information in contempt of court would be highly circumspect. The bar in these matters is set very low: it can be a breach simply to provide information that leads people to discover suppressed information.
But the news media - and even the lawyers of Bob Schollum and Brad Shipton - have readily associated yesterday's pamphlet distribution with the Nicholas trial, they've effectively named names and, in the case of Sean Plunket they've danced delicately around the issue on the radio (such poise for a big man!), at one point asking Schollum's lawyer: "Members of the public might ask what more damage could be done. Why are these suppression orders important given that the Nicholas case is dealt with?"
I thought the media might stop short of saying that the suppressed information has been published on at least two locally-authored blogs, but DPF did that on Breakfast this morning. Trial judge Justice Tony Randerson has already sounded a warning about suppressed material being published on the Internet.
This doesn't mean, as a media person suggested to me yesterday, that there's a particular problem with blogs. Indeed, in past cases, such as the celebrity drug trial - which seems like a load of jolly old hockey sticks compared to this one - the major bloggers were really quite responsible.
The community forums on Trade Me, on the other hand, were contempt-a-go-go. It appears that now that Trade Me is owned by the country's biggest media company, there's a little more policing going on. And another live thread has disappeared in the time I've been writing this paragraph. Welcome to the Internet, Fairfax. Kind of scary, isn't it?
What I find interesting is that the breach has been in both old (the distribution of leaflets in the street is a particularly venerable form of speech) and new media. And that I knew about the content of the leaflets before I knew about the contemptuous blogs.
I wasn't at all surprised that there were no guilty verdicts in the Nicholas case. It became clear as its last week ran out that the prosecution evidence simply wasn't good enough. But the defence account itself is quite enough to give me the creeps. Burly policemen who watch each other having sex with a 17 or 18 year-old girl are not my idea of good cops. I find myself agreeing with the Family First Lobby.
It's not hard to understand the emotion that would drive these women to distribute their information in breach of a judge's orders; or their powerful sense of injustice. The problem is that suprression orders like these are made for a reason, and that their breaching may have perverse and unintended consequences. But if I said any more than that that, I'd be in breach myself ...
It's grim in Mt Eden | Apr 03, 2006 10:51
Last week I accepted an invitation from Telecom to come in and hear their side of the story on what they're doing with the network, and particularly on the thorny issue of contention rates. I'll write it up in more detail at some point, but the gist of it is that they're working on it, but, yes, some areas are better-provisioned for DSL than others.
The person I talked to granted that the best-served exchanges were likely to be regional ones where there were only a handful of broadband users hanging off a single inbound circuit. So the exchanges lacking capacity were more likely to be those in high-demand inner-city suburbs? Couldn't say. But the "average" contention rate - across exchanges, I presume - was not 80 or 100, but 33.
What this means in practice has been demonstrated by the ever-helpful Zach Bagnall, who has had his laptop download "a chunk of pseudo-random data from a webserver" every 10 minutes and calculate the transfer rate on a 2Mbit/s DSL connection in Mt Eden. Zach says:
Ran the test for one week and there's the result.
Midnight-9AM: 1-1.5mbit
M-F 9-5: ~500kbit
Other times: ~300kbitPretty grim.
Quite. Here's the graph.
Having been through several days in which my Wired Country connection has come and gone (with me going to my backup DSL connection to discover that I don't seem to have a DSL line any more), I'm not inclined to make any grand claims for that either, but at least when it's up it actually performs as advertised.
Anyway, I have a bugger of a head cold, so I'm not up to too much analysis today. (I'm really hoping I'm better for Thursday, when the schedule calls for an 8am flight for two meetings in Wellington, then flying back for the NetGuide Awards and the Damian Marley show.) So perhaps you might like to just watch some video on the boss's bandwidth:
Bill Maher on oppressed American Christians.
Jon Stewart on memos and war dates.
A trailer for the imminent new series of Doctor Who. Cybermen! The Beeb is also offering a different trailer amongst a crop of video downloads - allegedly for your mobile phone or Video iPod - which will play just fine in QuickTime and iTunes if you right-click on the MPEG4 link and save it, then remove the .txt file extension.
And, finally, this is basically worksafe, I think. It's an excerpt froman admirably robust Japanese English-teaching tape which forgoes the customary conversational topics in favour of a lesson in how to talk dirty. Or, rather, "sexy". Yeah, cockpit!
I had a little joust with the Sir Humphreys folks.
Well, I picked the Blues to lose against the on Friday night, which of course ensured that they won. I would however like to point out that Nucifora - to considerable beneficial effect - benched the hapless Lavea, played Nacewa at first-five and brought in Brent Ward at fullback at pretty much the juncture I predicted he would: ie, probably too late to save anything from the season.
On the Public Address leader board, Nic Jones had (for him) a rough week, but stays clear of the field. Karl Woodhead and The Hood advanced on the top slot with 45-point results and the Herald's pesky Alan Perrott snuck a point ahead of me in mid-table. Samuel Flynn Scott of the Phoenix Foundation presumably forgot to file any picks. Those muso bums sometimes forget to even get out of bed.
And I'm still waiting for someone at Blogging it Real to stop complaining about cricket selections and congratulate the Warriors …
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