Holiday Playlist

Before a wrap up of the songs that I've enjoyed most in 2009 I present the songs I've enjoyed most in December:

Swedish rapper Henok Achido singing high on life (when the drugs don't work).



And...A track I heard in the Morgan Freeman movie 10 Items or Less by Kemo The Blaxican named La Raceta.


It may only be two but I have a feeling that they will be songs that continue to be played throughout 2010.

The internet that Australia is missing out on

Australians who have experienced the rest of the world's broadband can often be heard complaining about the slow speeds and low data caps available to us. Whilst I sit here in Sweden with my (girlfriend's) 100mbit connection my friends at home max out an an effective 7mbit. There are numerous technical, environmental and commercial reasons why the speed of our internet has lagged behind but here I would like to examine some of the services that Australia misses out on either partly or entirely due to the speed of our internet.

• Spotify: This is a music service that streams songs, entire albums and playlists written by you or friends on demand. Simply search for a song or artist, play the songs you want and now and then an advertisement will play. If you don't want to hear the ads then pay to subscribe and they're gone. There isn't anything else available in Aus that compares to the functionality and simplicity available with this service. Now why wouldn't it work in Australia: 5 hours of listening to medium quality songs (160kbs) would equal 2.8GBytes of data. That's 10% of my cap at home in less than 1 day of listening to music!!
• BBC/4OD: Both the BBC and Channel 4 in the UK stream all of their programs to UK residents. As with broadcast TV the streams have adds at the start and sometimes during the show, but unlike broadcast TV you can watch what you want, whenever you want.
• Streaming Movies & TV (and some more) in the US. To download a 2 hour movie at the lowest quality (500kbs) would chew through 3.5GBytes of limit and for most people cut a third out of their bandwidth. Leaving anyone who wasn't watching the movie with genuine 2002 speeds.
• And MOG: a music streaming service that is not quite as good as spotify but still worth looking at.

Of course the federal government is attempting to build the National Broadband Network and they are doing their best to convince the public it's what they want but the spruking is in the hands of one of the least respected members of the government so I don't hold much hope.

All I've heard so far is stories of rural tourism firms that want to upload movies and high res pictures. Who is that convincing? The tiny number of people in the country who want fast internet? Innovators should be hearing about the amazing opportunities for new entrepreneurs (Spotify), the large media corporations should be hearing about the way to win back lost viewers (on-demand TV streaming) and the rest of the public should be hearing about the way in which entertainment will once again be enhanced with the new technology.

The problem is listing the services available to others doesn't really help. It's like telling someone the wine they're drinking is horrible, if it's all they've ever had they would have to have great faith in your judgment to change. Just telling people about the services available won't convince them that its necessary, that comes through experiencing the difference.

I have a dream: Great Bike GPS

And someone made it:

 
Garmin Edge 705

I've been reading reviews and it seems to do almost everything that my ideal bike computer would do:

• GPS, elevation, temperature;
• heartrate;
• ghosts of trails or a 'training partner' to compete against;
• inter-device connectivity for sharing data with fellow users; and
  
• online community to share data with.

It's bloody expensive at ~$500US (I think $300 would be a more appropriate pricepoint, but whilst no competitors exist I guess they can charge what they want) but most reviews are very positive about the quality and feature set.

I really want to know more about their 'training partner' as I've always thought that ghost partner to race against was a great idea in a bike computer. I would love (hate actually) to be able to see myself from last weekend gaining on me as I rode up a hill, knowing that I must beat him.

This does bring up a problem though: what if you don't want to race? Once I started timing my 5km runs I also started to skip runs when I wasn't feeling 100%. My logic was why run when I knew I wasn't going to beat my time? Of course this had a double negative effect. If I skipped a run I was inevitably slower next time, even more demoralising as I actually felt good and then didn't perform.

Would this happen if I had a 705? Would I even care about that if I had $500 to spend on a bike accessory? (I don't have that to spend on a bike!). Could I make a better bike GPS? These are today's important questions.

James Bond

I loved Casino Royale.

I didn't even mind the non-stop, no-story action of Quantum of Solace the first time I saw it. I thought Daniel Craig was an interesting Bond, he'd obviously decided he wasn't going to ham it up; just play it straight and tough and I appreciate that in a secret agent.

However, I've been reading Thunderball, the James Bond story that introduces his nemesis Blofeld and all I can say is that the book Bond is an infinitely more interesting and likeable character. He's unashamedly smart, witty, not quite as self assured as movie Bond, and is a much more believable lady killer. I think that I shall research the Bonds of the past and report back on the blog on whom I think is the best match to the book - and then who I like the most.

Off to spend Christmas in The North.

Tomorrow I leave for 5 weeks in Sweden (with a weekend in London). I will make the most of my post uni holiday by spending time in Norrköping, Falköping and Göteborg. I'm looking forward to reading some James Bond on the plane, the cool weather (a chance to use my gloves from Antons) and of course to catch up with special people.

I'm not looking forward to bad airport coffee, running out of laptop batteries at some point during the flight and manky hair.

The song of the weekend is Little Lion Man:

Seven years of robots.

At the completion of seven years of an engineering degree (seven rather than six as I spent 18 months working full time) I guess I should post some form of summary; my thoughts on Computer Science, Robotics, Swinburne, etc. I  don't really have the energy to do that at the moment as I've spent the last few months working flat out on our final year project and a number of assignments, I feel a bit fried. I also think that these thoughts form over time, attempting to tease them out now when everything is so fresh may not lead to anything too valuable.

However, I would like to point out that the best parts of my course were the people that I met. I've worked with people who are infinitely more intelligent than me, much more likeable, and even some with more style. These are people who I would contact straight away if I was about to start a venture, if I needed advice or a question answered, but best of all people who I will always look forward to sharing a drink with.

Lines (and lines and lines and lines...) of Code

I shall post a summary of all of the interesting things I've learned in Software Deployment and Evolution when I'm revising for the exam. In the meantime though this is a good example of why any company that thinks lines-of-code is a good metric compared to 'bits-of-functionality-actually-implemented' is a company to stay away from.

The Daily WTF: The Ultimate State Selector

My professor explained that he was once tasked with investigating a contractor who had recently failed deliver any real functionality - despite an increase in code size and hardware requirements. It turned out that the contractor had created a script to auto generate sutb/empty classes... thousands of them. Of course large, successful companies don't get where they are without precise standards and expectations on deliverables. So just how long did the contractor get away with this? Surely at most a month or two before someone said "Where is feature X? No... 3 years!! The contractor spent 3 years and a million dollars delivering nothing before anyone guessed something was amiss.

There is room for improvement.