the corner office

I saw some noise about this a while ago, and this Washington Post article has an interesting summary of the situation. Basically telecomms companies in the USA are getting a little antsy about the fact that they carry bandwidth for profitable companies like Google, Yahoo and others, and make no extra profit from it themselves. The impetus behind this comes from the expected increase in high-bandwidth services over the Net, such as streaming media - movies, audio, etc. So, the rumblings are underway that the network providers might start charging premiums for traffic, favouring traffic from content providers who pony up, and the counter-rumblings that the US government needs to legislate and enforce the 'network neutrality' that currently exists.

I'm not sure what I think of this. While this is currently playing out in the USA, the Net's global nature means it affects all of us, and precedents in the USA will start filtering out into other countries' carriers as well.

First, the 'premium content' argument seems bogus to me. Currently, if a truck goes through a toll gate on a highway, the toll is for the size/weight of the truck, not for how valuable its cargo is. The toll operators don't get huffy about whether the truck is carrying worthless junk or super-valuable electronics goods.

Current ISPs, despite 'globbing' bandwidth, do at heart have a variable costing structure for bandwidth usage. If you're hosting a website that incurs ridiculously high traffic, you'll get nailed for it. So one could argue that the network carriers should be happy to charge their tolls per byte or megabyte, and be happy with that. It seems to me like they're effectively trying to charge a premium by holding profitable content providers to ransom. The antidote to that should be other competitors stepping in and not premium-charging. Perhaps the fact that there only a few carriers means they expect to be able to establish a cartel to enforce this premium pricing?

Pushing for regulation is appealing, least of all because on the face of it, doing so appears to be in the interests of end-users. Ultimately any extra profits made by network carriers would come from our pockets.

Having said that, I'm deeply suspicous of any attempts to regulate a market, and this is no exception. South Africa's telecomms industry is proof enough of what regulation does. True, the providers are trying to charge a premium on certain traffic, but shouldn't supply and demand for normal and/or premium services drive pricing? Shouldn't telcos have the right to provide data services on their own terms, and shouldn't customers be allowed to decide whether they're willing to accept that or not? What unseen negative effects would come from forcing the telcos to act in certain ways? Or is the US telecomms industry so regulated and distorted already that one can't rely on a market outcome in this particular case?

It'll be interesting to see what happens over the next few months and years.

I'm not sure what to make of this M&G article: Hamas spends $180k on an image makeover. Basically, Hamas needs some image work if they're going to be taken seriously as a political force, so they hired someone to help out.

I mean, a lot of it is common sense, really. Stop the anti-Semitic talk. Stop blowing people up. Portray a softer side:

Hamas is also attempting to soften its image at home with the launch of a television station in Gaza that includes a children's show presented by "Uncle Hazim" and men in furry animal suits. The station, named al-Aqsa Television after Islam's third holiest site, says it intends to put across the group's message "but without getting into the tanks, the guns, the killing and the blood". It will instead focus on religious readings, discussion programmes and a talent show.

Hehehe. Hehe. Um.

It would be easy to be cynical about this, but as I've said before, the South African experience, where 'terrorists' become 'the government', casts a different, marginally optimistic light on this. I don't think one can directly equate Hamas with the ANC, but it raises the question: can an organisation with a blood-spattered history make the change to becoming a legitimate political movement? And no matter how strongly one might feel that they're a bunch of bloodthirsty religious nuts, is it not a good thing if they are able to make the change, and to hope that they do?

Oh no. May as well go back to eggs and bacon. Rice Krispies aren't healthy:

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has ordered SA's largest breakfast cereal producer, Kellogg, to stop claiming its children's cereals are "healthy", following a complaint by rival Bokomo, a division of Pioneer Foods.

The ruling is the latest chapter after a string of complaints the rivals have taken to the ASA over advertising tactics in the R1,2bn "ready to eat" breakfast cereal market. Kellogg and Bokomo dominate the market, with shares of 47% and 43% respectively.

Bokomo has complained about Kellogg's advertisements for high-fibre cereals and cornflakes, while Kellogg has taken issue with Bokomo's advertisements for Pronutro and chocolate-flavoured children's cereal.

The ASA's ruling on Kellogg's Kids Cereals range means it must remove the term "healthy" from its packaging for Coco Pops, Coco Pops Jumbos, Strawberry Pops, Frosties, Froot Loops and Rice Krispies, and cannot make the claim in future advertising.

Interesting article. Didn't realise breakfast could be such a cut-throat industry.

I now have a real craving for Strawberry Pops.

Oooh boy. So after ducking and diving the past week, Deputy Prez Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka has now admitted she was in the wrong with her Great Arabian Holiday Adventure:

With the threat of another probe by the public protector looming, and as details of the controversial R500000 taxpayer-funded trip steadily emerged in the media, Mlambo-Ngcuka said: "The way I have messed things up this week I really don't want to say anything anymore. There's really true meaning to the statement that everything you say will be used against you."

Don't excuse what she did, but part of me respects the fact that she's fessed up to it, and not taken the usual 'up yours minions' approach.

Great PR for the ANC though. Hoof one deputy president for corruption, and replace him with someone whose record, as the Business Day article points out, is a little on the dodgy side too.

Research for Computer Science today, and pfff yawn. Wish I could say that about the rest of the exams coming up!

I'm glad the subject is out of the way, although it did serve its purpose, I guess. It's left me doing some thinking about whether I'd like to study beyond this Honours degree one day... still not sure what the answer to that is. The idea of studying further really appeals to me, but there's another part of me that really just wants to not have studies weighing over my head all the time.

Browsing around and stumbled on this:

My favorite psychology chapter is one that asks why, as we get older, the years seem to go by faster and faster. Carefully designed experiments suggest there is actually an explanation for this annoying impression. As we age, our biological clocks run slower and, since our clocks are running slower, the world seems to speed up. Depressing as this may be for those of us long past the subjective midpoint of our lives (which turns out to be about 20 for someone who lives to be 80), it could be worse. Ingram describes a man with a brain tumor that affected his biological clock who quit driving and watching television because traffic seemed to be rushing at him at an incomprehensible speed and television nattered on faster than he could follow.

(via Matthew Yglesias).

My half-serious theory was always that time seems to go faster as we grow older because each unit of time becomes a smaller percentage of our total life experience. I'm glad to learn the real reason, and somewhat relieved to know that the warp-speed at which years seem to pass by nowadays is not just my imagination.

The book being reviewed, The Velocity of Honey: And More Science Of Everyday Life looks like a really interesting read. I (re)discovered a few old book shop gift vouchers in a chest of drawers the other day; this might be just the thing to spend them on.

There's a lame-ass Coca-Cola advert on at the moment, one of the usual 60-second sickeningly emotive pop-culture monologues in which a hip young dude explains why Coca Cola is the choice of this, past and future generations, referencing nearly every saccharine pop-culture artefact from the past decade and why the world wouldn't be the same without it. Now, you have to believe that most people see through this crap without too much effort. But hey, presumably this helps to sell Cokes, so what do I know.

What really gets me is the final line... "blah blah blah blah (for bloody ever) blah blah blah, like Che, like my Dad." And young fella takes a swig of Coke while the emotive music reaches a crescendo and causes lounge windows to rattle across the country.

And an otherwise boring advert descends to new levels of stupidity. Like Che? At first I thought I'd misheard - but no, this kid invokes the name of that most famous of icons, the hot-liberal-arts-chicks-will-shag-me-now t-shirts, the definitive I'm-an-individualist-and-angry-with-the-world-and-this-t-shirt-that-every-other-brain-dead-wannabe-rebel-wears-proves-it icon of the late 20th century.

Just how many human beings are there who could seriously associate drinking Coke, a product sold across the world by an obscenely successful American corporation, with an anti-American socialist? How ignorant do you have to be, or how ignorant do you have to believe your target market is, to come up with an advert like that?

On second thought, don't answer.

I'm one of the last people to buy into the rah-rah-western-values-and-exported-democracy schtick and I fully understand and support the need to give mainstream society and our otherwise hypocritical western norms the finger when needed, which is just about all the time, but I've alway been in favour of reason and rational thought and respect for humanity and personal freedom and dignity in doing so.

But please. Che Guevara, Mr Firing Squad/Labour Camp himself, an anti-democratic totalitarian, used to sell Coca Cola in an advert hailing 10 years of democracy and freedom in South Africa?

The mind boggles.

IOL has an article about the new theory that the Taung Child was killed by an eagle of sorts (crikey, Wikipedia is already updated with a reference to the eagle attack), and that our ancestors were more at risk from attacks above than from below (less plausible and just some IOL sensationalism, I think). Nonetheless, an interesting read:

Firstly, it means that perhaps Berger has finally proven that it was the life-or-death need to defend themselves from aerial attack that kickstarted the dramatic evolutionary changes in our ape-man ancestors' brain-size and social skills - finally pushing them over the threshold towards humanity.

Secondly, it means our ancestral memory of the terrors of the open veld match those of the dark cave. As Berger put it: "When the shadow of an airplane passes over you and you feel oops! and look up, that's the little Taung child in you talking."

That might explain my mate K's distrust of pigeons.

Every now and then I fire up Eclipse and tweak bits and bobs on my new blog design. I backed and forthed, but eventually decided to keep the world-facing blog as a separate web app from the 'admin' part. There were a couple of reasons, but one of the biggies was getting the app ready to roll while having the freedom to muck about and continue working on the admin tool. As long as the admin tool can create and edit posts, comments and so on, I don't need much more than that.

The new blog is nearly ready to roll, basically. There are some minor things I'm not sure about, though.

First is categorisation. Since the old blog gets imported into the new blog, the old categories were a design starting point. Is it worth having a raft of categories, as I currently do? Is there merit to having a tech, linux, java, notes, and other categories just to cover tech-like stuff? These are pretty much in the same line as tags, which do tend to be quite detailed, too. Would it be better to group everything into three major categories, though? My thoughts are on having a personal diary-like part, a tech category containing geek content only, and a 'blog' blog with links, feeble attempts at punditry and inane waffle. Is it worth having three major groupings and then having sub-categories? Groupings and change to technorati tags? I'm not sure, but I'm keeping things as they were, for now.

Second issue is RSS feeds. I currently provide an 'all' feed, and a feed with only tech stories. Is it worth keeping these? Stats would indicate that of the various people subscribed to my feeds, the tech-only feed isn't used much. Perhaps I needn't bother. If I go with three categories as mentioned above, it ends up with 8 possible groupings for RSS feeds. That sounds like overkill; does anyone really want that much granularity in picking a feed?

Third issue is URLs and context. The blog's 'official' URL is www.thecorneroffice.org but because I didn't have the domain when I started hosting with DDN, a number of people still use colinp.dominodeveloper.net, and even then, both the top-level, world-friendly URLs and the longer members/colinp/blah style URLs are used. The profileration Must End. What I want is only thecorneroffice.org, and I'm moving the blog to a 'blog' context. I could keep the blog at the root, but I don't know if I like that in the long run. Making the move will break some URLs. I'll probably keep the Notes-style blog going for a bit, but for thecorneroffice.org, some kind of mapping which does internal or explicit redirects is likely to be needed.

Fourth issue is finalising the CSS. The layout differs from the current design, but I've noticed some niggles, and it renders like a dog in older versions of IE.

The final issue is hosting. I've hemmed and hawed about this before. I don't want a shared server, I want a VPS. Bytemark has been recommended by a good few people. Others have suggested eapps, which provides more of a control-panelish experience, but does still provide you with a command line for when you need it. A week or two back I saw a MyEclipse newsletter with an ad for RoseHosting.com. They have a year-end special and for 20 dollah a month you get 5 gigs of disk space, 100GB of traffic and most importantly, 256MB of memory. None of the other packages offer these sorts of specs for similar prices. Doing a bit of research, I learned that RoseHosting hosts the MyEclipse servers, and MyEclipse people say they're great. Other reviews point out that it's a shell prompt you're renting, baby, with the bare minimum of control panel or assistance in getting things going. So the trade-off becomes whether to choose a largely pre-bundled, stress-free hosting service with lots of GUI tools (like eapps), or to take responsibility for running your own server and go with someone like RoseHosting. The latter is more time-consuming, but I have to keep reminding myself that I won't have nearly as much of a workload this year as I did last year, and so it might be a worthwhile learning experience to completely run and manage my own server, mail, web, warts and all.

What's for certain, is that I've got to make up my mind and get this sucker finished (as soon as possible after exams, of course).

Wrote Distributed Operating Systems today. Not the best, not the worst. To say that there was a mountain of work to cover was an understatement. "Tanenbaum textbook," - "ah", says the peanut gallery, "say no more."

Fascinating stuff, but a lot of work to get through. My study notes for the subject weighed in pretty close to 100 pages, and they are a model of terseness. The purpose of study notes is to get the facts and concepts into one's head, and on a purely utilitarian level, that's all they're there for. Nonetheless, I feel myself weighed down with a sense of waste, of futility. It's silly, but it's thoroughly soul-destroying seeing that much effort and paper being banged into a file, never to be touched or read again (unless I have to repeat the subject, which hopefully won't be the case.) Sure, the notes will sit on my bookshelf for a while, and then one day I'll have to face up to the fact that they're just taking up space and throw them away.

I still have some study notes from my BComm degree, and they're pushing 15 years old, now.