Simon Rumble’s blog

After Jean Charles de Menezes was murdered by London police in 2005, you'd think the press would be more skeptical when the Police make claims. But no, when Ian Tomlinson was assaulted and, ultimately, murdered by London Police last week, the press reported "police were bombarded with bricks, bottles and planks of wood" as they assisted him.

The Guardian has video footage of the brutal Police assault that ultimately killed the man. He was walking away from the cops, back turned to them and with his hands in his pockets: not exactly threatening behaviour. A cop whacks him on the back of the legs with a truncheon, then pushed him to the ground where it appears he may have hit his head.

I've seen the brutality of these cops first hand, and seen the ridiculousness of their tactics. In my case they herded protestors into Oxford Circus and then held them there for hours without food, water or toilets. I fortunately was far enough back in the crowd to see what was happening and managed to stay out of the encirclement. I was threatened with arrest for taking photos of coppers who had removed their identification, and for asking for their numbers.

Pricks. Don't expect any justice for Ian Tomlinson, just like Jean Charles.

So we've finally got the non-announcement of the winner of the National Broadband Network tender, and the winner is... everybody loses! Thanks for playing kids.

So instead of awarding the tender to the best bidder, or bidders, they've decided to go it alone and do it themselves. Because the last time we had a government telecommunications monopoly, that worked great. Low prices, great innovation. Why I even recall being told that that government monpopoly wouldn't investigate data faults until they reduced throughput to 300 bits per second. (Though that scenario is eerily close to the privatised government monopoly's treatment of faults that affect anyone except Telstra retail customers.)

You might expect the tenderers, who put enormous effort into scoping and costing their proposals, might be a little pissed off. Particularly given the government set them the pretty well unachievable target of 98% coverage, while they've set themselves the much more sensible 90%, meaning the NBN will cover the cities and large regional centres only.

Worse yet, the person in charge of the whole proposal is someone who has spent the last 1.5 years alienating the entire telecommunications industry. A man so unable to understand his portfolio that he can't even explain his plans to filter the Internet without constantly contradicting his own statements, and reacting to any criticism by claiming his critics are child pornographers. I would have a lot more faith in this project if they put someone competent in charge. Someone of the Lindsay Tanner calibre, rather than talentless backroom numbers hacks.

Next interesting part will be whether or not Conroy releases the expert panel's recommendations. I suppose that depends on whether or not it agrees with the decision he's had made for him.

I've got a very bad feeling about this whole project. Governments have a very bad record in building technical infrastructure, and of managing giant projects in general. Anyone who's been around telecoms in Australia from before the privatisation of Telstra will remember the ISDN fiasco.

Back in 1998, Auckland had a major blackout lasting five weeks. Oh how we mainlanders laughed. The cause, we were all told: privatisation.

Now we've got regular blackouts here in Sydney. Oh how the East Islanders must be laughing. The solution? privatisation.

Now I thought I'd become suitably curmudgeonly with age, what with still using a text-mode email client and grumbling about HTML posts. But it's always good to know there's someone better at something than you. Gives you something to strive for.

Enter Tom Ellard's Soggy The Sailor rant. I bow before the master.

I've had some big hardware failures of late in my computer infrastructure. My previously rather good and quiet IBM Intellistation (dual Xeon) MythTV server's power supply died. The PSU, being IBM, is completely proprietary and so the machine is now essentially defunct. Real shame as it was a nice piece of kit.

I ended up buying a Dell Precision workstation as its replacement. This is another dual Xeon machine, but this one was rather noisy, with two big, loud fans drawing air over the CPUs. I tried replacing these fans (which required me to resolder the proprietary Dell connectors) with two 92mm Zalman fans and a potentiometer. Unfortunately these Zalman fans are absolute crap! The idea with this kind of mod is you can turn the fan speed down and get dramatically less noise while only slightly less airflow. These Zalman fans basically can't have their RPM reduced by anything significant, so they only run at full pelt, producing more noise than the fans they replaced!

Holly got the shits with this situation and authorised me to spend some bucks on the problem. Fortunately Danny had recently done all the research I needed and so I, somewhat cheekily, nabbed much the same setup as him. Only difference with my kit is a different, and cheaper, motherboard and a slower CPU. I also have the hard drives I need.

I'm still waiting on the power supply and passive heatsink, but as soon as they arrive we'll have silence again in the back half of our house. If this is successful, I'm tempted to build myself a similar box as my desktop.

Well it had to happen, I suppose. Julie was talking about using Twitter to find out the buzz around what your company is doing. And so I searched a little and intrigued me enough to sign up.

So you can now read my incoherent and depraved ramblings on Twitter. Yes I know, I'm a little slow, but it just seemed overhyped to me. We'll see how long I last.

Uh-oh, someone just invoked Godwin's law in the internet censorship debate.

Or view it on YouTube directly.

Whoopsie, the inevitable has happened and the ACMA blacklist genie is out of the bottle. Gee we didn't see that coming! We can now all see what Conroy's great firewall of Australia will block, should he get his weird kinky Xtian fantasy of controlling the viewing of all Australians. As the two URLs added in March 19, the list is most certainly not restricted to child porn.

PS ACMA, this link is hosted on my own server outside Australia. If you send me something in writing, I'll remove the link after taking legal advice, though I'd like to test the theory that only a "link" (a href=?) is what's prohibited, not publishing a URL. And what about a photo of a URL?

Please remember people, when a government proposes censorship you should always be suspicious and be suspicious of any explanation they give. You'll get them rolling out all the discredited "studies" showing pornography/video games/hentai/photos of Pauline Hanson cause violence/rape/singlets/Pauline Hanson. These "studies" generally have methodologies of, say, putting someone in a room (with a one-way mirror) and exposing them to extreme pornography for hours on end, then being all surprised when they seem a little distressed by the experience. Unwanted pornography, particularly when it's things you're not into yourself, is distressing. But there's no evidence it causes any harm to people who aren't exposed to it unwillingly.

I'm writing a tutorial for a magazine about web analytics and its use by small businesses. I'd love to include a case study of how people use such tools. I use web analytics every day in my real job, but that's not a small business by any definition.

Anyone willing to have a chat (phone or email, as per your preference) and be quoted about their use of web analytics to help understand your small business's client base, improve your web site and make better marketing decisions? If you're in Sydney, there can be beer involved if you like.

If you're interested, get in touch and let me know a little about what you're doing.

I'm launching a new site for work in a bit over a week that's built in Drupal and with JQuery used extensively. So far I'm pretty impressed with JQuery, especially how you can string things together. So I need to bone up on these two things, especially Drupal which I haven't had a chance to penetrate beyond the user interface bits.

So anyone got any book suggestions? For JQuery I'd want something that's reference-style rather than anything written as a tutorial. Drupal I need something that introduces me to the basic architecture, and then is more a reference. I've found I never really go through tech books that have tutorials and exercises and the like, hence my focus on reference material.

And since I'm asking for book advice, let me give some too. If you ever need to touch JavaScript, go and buy JavaScript: The Good Parts by JavaScript guru Douglas Crockford. It's quite thin (150 pages) and succinctly says what's good, and what's bad, about JavaScript. It's essentially a "work this way and you'll avoid most of the bad stuff about JavaScript" kind of book. Essential reading!