Greg Luck's Blog

I am reading two books at the moment: The Long Tail and 50 Great E-businesses and the minds behind them.
The Long Tail is by Chris Anderson and was written in 2004. Call me a late adopter. I thought I understood the long tail, but reading the book introduces the idea of the democratization of production, aggregators and findability. I picked it up in a discount bin in a bookstore in Toowoomba, Queensland while looking for something to veg out on before a wedding. Perhaps I should tell Chris he was not a “hit”. There, anyway.
50 Great E-businesses and the minds behind them is a book by a Melbourne couple published in mid 2007. I work for one of the companies mentioned in their book so it caught my interest. But there are so many others that I had: a) not heard of; or b) heard of but nor seriously checked out.
One of the former is Lulu.com. Both books mentioned Lulu.com, which piqued my interest. And they won a Web 2.0 award. Founded by RedHat co-founder Bob Young, it democratizes publishing. Last year I was looking at publishing a book on ehcache. I had 150 pages that I had put a fair bit of work into. I thought it would be a simple matter of finding a technical publisher and then sitting back and getting royalties. NOT. Bob discovered the same thing and decided to do something about it.
I have had my ehcache book self-published up on Lulu.com for a few weeks now. The only real issue I came across was Lulu’s requirement to embed fonts. The best answer I have come up with is to use Save As PDFX-3 from Preview, which embeds fonts while retaining clear previews. Lulu is great: I get to publish my book and people get to buy it. And the middleman is reasonable.
See http://www.lulu.com/content/1538666 to see the result.
And maybe I am three years late to the ideas introduced in the Long Tail, but I think there is, to use a much abused term, a paradigm shift underway. In Australia it is going to take low cost high speed broadband for the digital media long tail to really work.
BTW, one job I have to do is to upgrade Movable Type to fix the spam problem I have with this blog. Perhaps a job for the Xmas break. If anyone wants to comment, please just email me and I will post it.

I am building a house in Northern New South Wales near the Queensland border in a mountainous area known as the Granite Belt. It is a wonderful area of Australia. As the local towns go it is in the middle of nowhere. I am building the house on the Maryland river adjacent to a gorge. It is surrounded by large beef properties and National Parks. It is at 800 metres, but is surrounded by mountain ridges.
The result is a wonderfully quiet and peaceful environment. The downside is that I am out of reach of the GSM phone system and ADSL.
As it turns out a Telstra copper cable runs through the property on its way to connecting a remote farm. I always thought I would just get that connected, but now it comes to it, the thought of sipping on a modem, or expecting guests to, leaves me wanting more.
I also thought that the privatisation of Telstra involved some concessions for people like me using the “Universal Access” principle that has long informed telecommunications policy in Australia. This currently manifests itself as the Australian Broadband Guarantee, where the government subsidises high speed Internet access to rates comparable to those in urban areas. (See http://www.dcita.gov.au/communications_for_business/news_and_events/australian_broadband_guarantee). Sadly no one from Telstra, even the local Telstra agency in Stanthorpe knew anything about it. I spent around an hour at two stores with the clerks madly searching. When I checked with Telstra I was looking at $500 per month for a Telstra satellite connection. There are some other players who are addressing this market such as activ8me (See http://www.activ8me.net.au/default.asp?contentID=527).
There is a new plan from the OPEL consortium, involving Singapore’s (I think government controlled) Singtel and Elders, an “agri-business” company. It will be interesting to see what that brings up. The contract was just awarded so I will be waiting a while. The network promises to cover 639,000 square kilometres. Australia has a surface area of 7686850, so this “rural” network will cover 8% of Australia. It will use WiMax. Sadly it will not reach my property due to its limited range of 8km and 16km (line of sight) (http://www.wimax.com/education/faq/faq31).
There is also HaleNet, a local telecommunications company founded by an ex-Telstra engineer. He is doing good business. He uses some wireless technology from Israel which has a range of 25 km but it relies on line of site. Due to the geography sadly this solution will not work.
A satellite service such as the one from active8me sounds ok, but satellite brings big latencies (240-290ms) due to the speed of light to the satellite in geostationary orbit (2 * 35,786km). I often ssh and use skype for voice calls, so this is far from good.
Somewhere in this investigation someone mentioned Next G as a potential solution. Because I do not get GSM, and because Telstra has had outrageous pricing for their mobile phone based data services, I had never considered it. Telstra has been filling TV screens and newspapers with all sorts of silly ads about their silly named “Next G” meaning to indicate that it was a 3.5 G or something network. A little like the Web 2.0, 3.0 fun and games. Anyway the ads show people uploading photos in a combi van, and personalities such as John McEnroe and Bob Geldof having telecommunication problems in their native countries and exclaiming “It would not happen in Australia”. From this very informative advertising everyone is of course supposed to realise that this product is a new remote access data solution, amongst other things. That realisation only took me a year.
Next G is actually an HSPDA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSDPA) network built for Telstra by Ericsson (See http://www.ericsson.com/ericsson/press/releases/20061006-1079707.shtml). The interesting bit for me is that it operates at 850Mhz. The effect of the lower frequency is that it has a much larger coverage footprint than GSM and does not require line of site.
Telstra manage to provide an almost unusable coverage map (See http://www.telstra.com.au/mobile/networks/coverage/maps.cfm). It did not work properly on the Windows computer from the Telstra dealer in Stanthorpe. Strangely it worked better on my Mac in Safari. Unfortunately the map shows very few landmarks such as rivers. By contrast the Google map for the same area shows much more; even my property boundary and the track I have made into the house site! A few hours of map making on my part showed that I had coverage if I used an external antenna. I also later found out that a fencing contractor has a Next G phone and it worked in parts of the property.
So, what sort of antenna? Cutting this rather long blog post somewhat shorter the usual Internet research showed people get good results from a Yagi antenna. I have ordered one from Comnet Solutions (See http://store.comnet.com.au/details/821268.html). It has to be pointed in the direction of the antenna, or maybe in my case the best echo.
Now what about Telstra and their outrageous pricing? The Telstra MobileNet pricing is still outrageous. In a byzantine twist if you use the ModMax modem (See http://www.maxon.com.au/products_modmax_overview.php) and no other, and if you get your data plan from BigPond, Telstra’s ISP subsidiary, then you can get something that though still terrible, is at least doable. You can get 200MB download for $39.95. or 1Gb for $49.95. (See http://bigpond.broadbandguide.com.au/wireless/high-speed/plans) Doable compared with $500 per month for satellite from Telstra, which is what the Newmarket Telstra shop brought up for me. Interestingly this pricing matches that from active8me for the same data amounts. So maybe Telstra are signed up to the Broadband Guarantee, even though no one at Telstra outside of one person in product knows it.
For anyone who has read this far, are you beginning to feel like a system integrator? Me too. Makes me wish that Australia had a government-owned telecommunications provider that could provide low latency Internet services outside our major cities.

Maybe this is one of the new Web 3.0 services. Twitter is about what you are doing. You voluntary allow yourself to be tracked.
Here is my Twitter link: http://twitter.com/gregrluck.
Or to keep things really simple, you can see my twitter “badge” which shows what I am doing is in the left sidebar on this page.

I have been in San Francico for a few days now. Coming to the US around once a year I always look for things that are new. As William Gibson said “The future is here now. It’s just not evenly distributed.”
With that in mind, what is happening in California, and San Francisco in particularm, tends to turn up in Australia a few years later.
So what I have noticed so far:

1. Diet Coke Plus. Diet Coke with added vitamins. Now I can tell my mother my addiction is healthy!
2. 49 cent Compact Fluro light bulbs. CFCs are the lowest hanging fruit of all to lower carbon emissions. California has jumped in by heavily subsidising them so that they are the same cost as incandescent bulbs. Great idea.
3. I have not seen a McDonalds yet.
4. The food servings remain huge, but with lots of salads.
5. The hot new fast food is Cream Puffs.

I am in New Zealand for the Kiwi Foo Conference and to do the Tongerara track.

The Flight Over As my Air New Zealand flight took off over the Pacific the stewardess announced that they would shortly be turning on the Entertainment System. She warned us not to press the buttons too fast or it would lock up. Interesting. I was dutifully vary careful and pressed the buttons slowly. Then I started to watch a movie. Bored 5 minutes in, I pressed the Menu button. Bang. My screen went black and I got a Windows CE boot up screen. About 10 minutes later it had come back up. By this time amused, I decided to actually hit the buttons at normal speed to find out what would happen. The system went crazy.
It turns out that Windows is also making its way into the cabin. The Airbus A380's non-core avionics systems run Windows and according to someone at Foo Camp, there are photos of crashed Windows systems. Welcome to the future of flight.

Auckland

New Zealand has become very successful at attracting foreign students, mainly chinese speakers. My hotel in Auckland actually turned out to be a foreign student accommodation tower. The front desk did not speak English well at all. My check-in was finally accomplished by handing over my voucher. A China town has formed between Queens St and the freeway to the east – about 6 blocks. It sort of felt like being in Hong Kong, with lots of packed towers and high energy.
I gained some temporary respite by catching a live gig at an Irish pub a bit further down Queen St.

Warkworth

Driving north out of Auckland it is striking, to an Australian, how effortlessly green everything is. The area strongly reminds me of the Tillamook region of Oregon. Rolling green hills and bucholic bliss. Warkworth is a lovely town about an hour north. A freeway from Auckland is steadily making its way north. One day Warkworth may end up being a dormitory suburb for Auckland, but not yet. Warkworth is the home of Nat Torkington, OSCON and Kiwi Foo organiser.

The New Worry

New Zealanders lose people each year to Australia. A lot of them are men. New Zealand now has a sex imbalance and is becoming a bit matriarchal. At the conference the Mahurangi College has taken over the male staff toilet and turned it into a female one. So there are two female toilets side by side. The make toilet is outside across the courtyard in a converted store room.
The new worry though, is that with Australia rapidly drying out due to global warming, Australians might start migrating en mass to New Zealand. New Zealand seems blissfully unaffected by Global warming.

Internet

The Internet is expensive in NZ. Hotels do not offer it free. Hot spots are rare. I will never complain about the Australian Internet again. Fortunately for us we had our own Internet company sponsor. One satellite on the roof later and the conference was humming. Some of the conference topics reflected the frustration. One session was on how to use cooking equipment to create parabolic antennas to extend WIFI range. Another was on a commercial effort to create controlled hot spots using your own personal Internet service and WIFI card.
Apparently Google Maps does not do maps for New Zealand – yet. And google itself has been known to become inaccessible from New Zealand for lengthy periods.

Well I am back in the USA to attend the OSCON2006 Conference.

Observations/Trends

• Atkins is out. Glycemic Index (an Australian invention) is in
• Burger King now has a “BK Stacker”. They go to 4. That is: four beef patties interleaved with four slices of cheese. Yours for USD9.
• At the cinema, a small drink is 600ml, a medium is 1litre. Wow!
• Saw a lot less large SUVs and trucks on the road. I saw a lot of them parked at people’s houses. I saw plenty of Hummers sitting in car yards. Speculation: are people driving their smaller second car as their main car? On the other hand I am in Portland, which is known for being relatively green.
• I was here for record breaking temperatures. 11 of the highest temperature years have been in the last 14. The media seem not to be commenting on this.
• Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” is a hit. I saw the movie at the Lloyd Centre, Portland Oregon. It was almost sold out. The movie makes a great case that Global Warming is both real and bad thing. It covers the same material as Tim Flannery’s “The Weather Makers”. I think between them 2006 will be the turning/tipping point for Global Warming. Interestingly, the movie avoids mention of Diesel cars and Nuclear energy, neither of which are popular in the USA.
• The record heat meant that I was unable to get a room on the coast Saturday night and had to drive all the way back to Portland. It was 40c plus on the west coast.
• Omega 3 has been added to the plant sterol margarines. Also to a healthy peanut paste. I am looking forward to that coming to Australia.
• I checked out HDDVD and BluRay players. Neither was impressive. Perhaps we need to wait for new movies to be made. I thought it was in between DVD and broadcast HD. Interestingly, the HDDVD player kept crashing and had to be rebooted. Which one was M$ supporting again?

Whenever a nasty IE bug comes out I always fantasize about putting that up on my blog. The problem with acting on that desire is that it is probably unlawful here in Australia and in many other jurisdictions. Plus you are potentially harming someone. So I don’t do it.

Over the years I have gotten very annoyed when sites block browsers other than IE running on Windows. It has made me want to block IE back. When I saw Explorer Destroyer I thought “why not?” So if you are reading this you are not using IE.

I tested the page using IE 5.2 for Mac. It works. And it does not harm.

If you want to help create an IE dark web, go to http://www.explorerdestroyer.com/.

The last book I read on climate change was The Skeptical Environmentalist, by Bjorn Lomborg. He is a statistician and argued that the global warming we witnessed up to 2000 could have alternate explanations than greenhouse gases, such as increased sunspot activity. He was lambasted at the time and investigated by the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty. He was cleared of dishonesty in 2004.

The point I talk away from his book was that, at the time of writing, there was not sufficient data to conclusively prove that global warming was caused by greenhouse gases.

However, since that time there has been a lot more science done, spurred on I suspect by Lomborg’s and President Bush’s doubts. A great summary of where things stood mid 2005 is provided by The Weather Makers, by Tim Flannery. Tim is a conservationist from way back. He is famous for The Future Eaters. His new book promises to be the Silent Spring of climate change.

Where things stand does not look good. Carbon Dioxide has risen from 2 parts per 10000 to 3 parts per 10000. The role of Carbon Dioxide in retaining the Sun’s rays has been understood since the 1800s. The evidence now strongly suggests that the warming is due to increased Carbon Dioxide and to a lesser extent Methane.

To figure out exactly what will happen, scientists model the climate. This is complicated and frequently revised as new data comes in and there is new understanding of the interactions between the many things that make up the climate. Some things that a likely to happen are:

• Rising of the sea level due to thermal expansion and melting of ice which is on land.
• Destruction of the Great Barrier Reef, due to coral bleaching due to warmer water due to warmer air. 82% destruction for a 1 degree rise; total destruction for 3%. Total destruction is looking likely.
• Mass extinction
• A Semi-permanent El Nino affecting Eastern Australia.
• Permanent strong hurricane seasons for the Western Atlantic.

Anecdotally, where I live in Brisbane we are in our worst drought ever and 2005 was the hottest ever year. The hurricane season in the US was the worst ever. The Great Barrier Reef is bleaching again.

So what to do? The latest number we need is 70% reduction of 1990 levels of greenhouse gas emissions.

Kyoto is the international effort. But Australia, the US and the developing world are not signed up, and its goals are too modest. Still, there has been a previous international success with CFCs and the Montreal Protocol. It started with only part sign up but then gathered steam. The depletion of atmospheric ozone has now stopped and we can hope for return of our sunscreen.

Tim Flannery points out that each individual can fairly easily get to 70%. Here’s how:

• Tick the renewables box on your electricity bill.
• If you have a petrol car, change to a diesel or hybrid one, or to a smaller one
• Use gas if you are on town supply. (1 atom of carbon compared with 4 four coal)
• Use a solar hot water system if it makes sense where you live

In my own situation, I drive a diesel, use town gas for water heating and am going to tick the renewables box.

Some other things to expect that should happen:

• Startups trying to solve parts of this problem.
• Gas rules supreme
• Nuclear regains its past popularity
• Wind, tidal, solar, geothermal and others get more popular
• perhaps a worldwide carbon pricing and trading scheme

Australians per capita are the worst carbon polluters in the world. This is becase we use a lot of energy and we use 90% coal to produce that energy. Expect Australia to end up an international pariah before action gets taken here.

Some things you can do to get involved:

• Read the book.
• Get two other people to tick the renewables box on their electricity bill

Updated 14 October

H5N1, also known as bird or avian flu, is a new influenza variant that first infected humans in HongKong in 1997 from chickens.

Since then it has become endemic in wild birds in South East Asia.

Based on everything we know about flu, H5N1 needs to make a few changes to spread readily from humans to humans, and then to kill much less than the current 52% so that it becomes an efficient propagator. The smart money is that this is a matter of time.

I have been monitoring events in Asia daily since US President Bush mentioned the start of US Tamiflu stockpiling in mid September.

In September I obtained Tamiflu for myself, my wife and my family. According to our pharmacy, his supplier has now run out of Tamiflu. Some worrying signs have emerged in the past few weeks that some of the H5N1 samples are Oseltamivir resistant. Consequently I have also obtained Relenza, which seems to work for the Tamiflu resistant strains and an older antiviral Amantadine. If we get this thing we will hit it with a cocktail of all three anti-virals at once.

Experience with recent disasters shows that you need to act early. Once everyone becomes aware of the threat a panic starts. That has already happened in New Zealand and Australia where people are hyper ware of the threat and have been stockpiling Tamiflu. I have been monitoring contacts in other parts of the world. There seems to be no level of public knowledge in some parts of the world. In the US, there is growing public knowledge. The US has of course been distracted by hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

There are other efforts underway right now for H5N1. Test kits and vaccines are being developed.

One problem right now is that there is up to a two year wait for the Tamiflu manufacturere to fill backorders. Supplies available to the public are, or soon will be, exhausted. Tamiflu is under patent, so no other drug companies can manufacture it.

I think the best thing that could happen now is a worldwide panic. That would then accelerate vaccine efforts and create pressure to waive the Tamiflu patent. This post is an effort to start that panic. If the panic does not start until we get human to human transmission it will probably be too late. In 1918 about 50 million people died of “Spanish flu”, actually H1N1 influenza. This time it might be an order of magnitude higher.