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Random observations

Kerry calls it quits

Today was the last day at the DSTC for one of its icons, Dr. Kerry Raymond (Distinguished Research Leader, Adjunct Prof., ITEE). All the best in the future Kerry!

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Random observations

Congrats Anna and Will!

Anna is getting married to Will! They’ve launched their own version of Wedlog to mark the occasion. Congratulations guys!

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Random observations

What a week!

Sometimes it seems as though months can go past without much happening, and then, all of a sudden, lots of things happen in the space of a few days. The past week has been jam packed with notable events.

It all began last Saturday, when Karen and I looked at nine houses in the Forest Lake area. The last house that we saw was the best of the lot. It was perfect for our needs, and we liked it very much. We visited another house on Sunday morning (which was not too bad, but a lot older and therefore in need of some patching up here and there) and then took our parents to see the one that we liked from the previous day. They liked it too. On Tuesday we made an offer and a price was agreed on Thursday. So, unless something disastrous happens in the next thirty days or so, Karen and I will be the proud owners of a three and a half years old house in Ellen Grove.

On Wednesday, I was offered a position as a research scientist at a new lab in the city. On Thursday I had a meeting with my current boss to inform him of the situation. I was due to travel to Newcastle, Rockhampton and Townsville in the space of three days next week to install our new product (deSide version 2) at various clients’ facilities, and then to Melbourne the following week to attend the Energy Users Association of Australia conference at the Grand Hyatt. Part of the reason for these travels was so I could meet our clients and vice-versa. Luckily there was enough time for Paul (my boss) to rethink who to send on these trips. The meeting I had with Paul was long, but he took the news as well as could be expected. I’ll be sorry to leave global-roam after such a short stay because I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my time there and learned a great deal about what it takes to develop software that people actually use on a daily basis, but happy to be stepping into a job that allows me to work on problems very similar to those I worked on during my Ph.D. candidature. I’m still to negotiate a finishing date with Paul, though I expect I’ll be staying on until sometime near the end of the year.

As if buying a house and having to tell my boss that I was leaving was not stressful enough, today was also the deadline for deSide development and testing. It’s all finished bar maybe ten percent of the installation file, which I’ll have to do tomorrow morning. Also, this week I’ve been setting up a Linux box to act as a gateway between global-roam’s LAN, Roam Consulting’s LAN (Roam Consulting is a sister company of global-roam whom we share office space with), a Cisco 877 ADSL router/modem, a Netgear ADSL router/modem and one other ADSL router/modem. I wrote a failover script so that the Linux box will switch between our primary Internet link (the Cisco modem) and our secondary link (the Netgear modem). For Roam Consulting, it’s the exact opposite. The script also had to take into account the fact that our SMTP server has to change depending upon which link is in use (we don’t have our own internal mail server). I set up a couple of dummy DNS zones and the failover script adjusts the zone files accordingly (i.e. changes the IP address associated with the hostname ‘smtp’ and increments the serial number for the zone). We’re putting each company (global-roam and Roam Consulting) onto its own subnet, separated by the Linux gateway. This means that we have also had to set up a Windows domain controller for our subnet.

So, that was my week. The weekend will be spent finishing the deSide setup file and then hunting for a reputable building and pest inspector. There are a couple I like the look of, and Karen also has some ideas of who to use, so it shouldn’t be too hard to arrange, assuming they’re not all booked out for the next few weeks. Tomorrow evening Karen’s parents are taking us out to dinner for a belated engagement celebration, which I’m really looking forward to. Also, I hope I find the thirty minutes I’ll need to touch up my responses to my thesis examiners’ reports. (Hmm, I suppose I could have been doing that now instead of writing this long blog entry). Finally, I’m looking forward to sleeping a bit. :-)

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Random observations

Melbourne

I’ve just returned from Melbourne where I presented a paper at The 9th International Conference on Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information & Engineering Systems (KES 2005) and visited some relatives. The trip served to reinforce how much I like Melbourne. The conference venue was quite spiffy (Hilton on the Park), though there was lots of audio interference between some of the rooms. Conference attendees who registered as students (like me) didn’t get a copy of the proceedings in hard or soft copy (although I’m glad I didn’t get the hard copy, which came in four LNCS volumes), nor did their fee provide entrance to the cocktail party of conference dinner. This turned out okay because I found the really nice little restaurant that Karen and I went to last time (corner of Little Collins St and Block Place). There was an awesome mariachi band playing. Those guys totally rocked. The food was great too.

I saw the part of the National Gallery of Victoria that Karen and I didn’t get to see last time. There was a temporary exhibition of about 100 pieces from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, but I’d already seen them all with Karen when we visited Holland earlier in the year. There was also an exhibition of some of Albrecht Dürer’s sketches. I was impressed by some of the pieces the gallery has managed to procure for its permanent collection. There were several paintings by Rubens (though Rubens was so prolific that his pieces seem to be everywhere) and Rembrandt as well as a Monet.

All in all a good trip. I didn’t get to meet Rhys because he’s galavanting around South East Asia on business again.

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Random observations

The Ashes: England on the verge

England have very nearly reclaimed the Ashes after a brilliant innings from Kevin Pietersen. It’s a mere formality now, so I’m heading to bed.

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Random observations

Staying with cable for now

Mum and Dad have returned from Fiji after being over there for four months. As a birthday/Fathers’ Day/anniversary/welcome home present for Dad, Nigel and I decided to buy a wireless ADSL modem/router. Essentially we wanted to allow Dad to use his laptop from anywhere in the house and possibly across the road in the park, and later to connect to the Internet via ADSL when Nigel and I finally fly the nest. We settled on the ZyXEL P-661HW. Right now we’re still on Bigpond cable paying $69.95. I’m happy to pay that since there are three of us making good use of the Internet connection. But Dad will want a cheaper alternative when he’s the only one using the net and when he has to pay for it. :-) I looked at a couple of ADSL 2 and ADSL 2+ plans today, and it’s possible to save a fair bit if you don’t mind being capped after downloading 500MB or so in a month. I also checked to see what speeds we were currently getting on our cable modem. We seem to get 9.5Mbps from bmods.briscomp.org.au. Bigpond’s website says that you can experience download speeds of up to 5Mb per second, but we’re obviously getting more than this. I remember when we first had the cable installed the technician said that it’s possible we could get 10Mbps uncapped. Of course, this varies at any given moment depending upon how many other people in our area are using cable. Although ADSL 2 can theoretically reach speeds of 12Mbps and ADSL 2+ can reach twice that, you need to be living really close to the exchange to see speeds anything like that. So until I move out, we’re staying on cable. There’ve been hardly any problems with it so far.

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Random observations

Brisbane Strikers = Northstar ???

I just found out that the club I used to play for, Northstar, has merged with the Brisbane Strikers. It just goes to show how out of touch I’ve become with the local football scene.

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Eco-philo-pol

Rhys writes a nice critique of my essay

Rhys has written a long response to my essay about the free market economy, presumably from his room at the Sheraton Imperial in Kuala Lumpur. I think it’s a really great read. He even reveals the names of the "intelligent people" at university I used to have debates with. It seems that Rhys and I are more or less in the same ball court, and playing on the same team for the most part, except that we might argue about what the team’s name is. I’d just like to say a few things in my defence.

First, whilst it’s true that my economic views may have shifted back towards the "right" (the Political Compass certainly suggests this), this does not necessarily equate to a shift in political allegiance from the traditional "left" parties to the Liberals. I think this point is most clearly demonstrated by using British politics as an example. In Britain, the Labour party is traditionally classified as left, but under Tony Blair the party has moved in a decidedly Thatcherite direction. This is more or less what Rhys was getting at when speaking about shades of grey and when he says we’re all in the middle. I don’t think my essay said that the current ALP are advocates of big left government, and Rhys perhaps needn’t have jumped to the ALP’s defence quite so swiftly. Indeed, I’m not even saying that the Liberals are a good exponent of "small" government. Far from it. I totally, one hundred percent agree with Rhys when he questions the Liberals’ commitment to free trade. And yes, it was the Hawke/Keating government that made by far the largest steps in the direction of free trade. It was also the Hawke/Keating government that moved us away from an unruly and uncompetitive system of awards to a much better enterprise bargaining system, though I don’t think that goes quite far enough. The Liberals are set to reform industrial relations even further. So my article was definitely not about Liberal versus Labor, but rather about economic philosophies in general. Anyway Rhys, you can rest assurred that the Liberals have certainly not captured my vote!

Second are the notions of "big" and "small" government. I agree that these terms can sometimes be a bit vague, but I think they are used fairly consistently in the media and literature and have pretty well understood meanings attached to them. I concede that I could have this wrong, and that not everybody understands the same thing by these terms, so here’s what I mean. Big government is one which taxes highly, subsidises heavily, often intervenes and implements generous welfare schemes. Small government is one that taxes minimally, subsidises rarely (if ever), never or only occasionally intervenes, and believes that overly generous welfare schemes serve to harm society in the long term. Rhys and others might argue that I’ve still used relative terms here such as "highly", "heavily" and so forth. That’s true. But at any given time and place, these terms are resolved by comparing the different policies on offer. Other than this, my only recourse here, I fear, is to wave my hands and say it might be more meaningful to look at the reasons for setting taxation rates at a particular level. That is, what will the tax dollars actually be spent on? Maybe some people might have something further to add here (or not).

Finally, like I said in my original post, I’ve decided nothing. One thing is definite, and that is whatever my point of view on economics is, it certainly will not translate into a vote for any particular political party at the next election. Besides, I figure that being a paying member of a certain "far left" party (whose members would probably hate me now if they read my essay) obliges me to vote for them in the next election. I can live quite comfortably with this seeming contradiction for now. Hopefully I’ll have ample time in the future to resolve this issue.

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Random observations

Thesis returned

My thesis has come back to the thesis office. Jaga tells me the review was good and that there are only minor corrections to make.

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Eco-philo-pol

Dr. Friedman or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Market Economy

Upon entering university, I was a staunch economic rationalist. I was as firm in my beliefs about the virtues of the free market as any wet-behind-the-ears eighteen year old could be. I attribute this largely to my year 11 and 12 economics teacher (Mr. Hutchinson). By degrees, partly because of the left-leaning environment I found myself in at university and due to the highly intelligent people who were telling me that my position was the wrong one – you all know who you are ;-) – I was persuaded to see that free markets were not the solution to the world’s problems. I was, and still am to some degree, impressionable, though hopefully I’m a bit more capable of thinking for myself these days. My friends began to refer to me as a "bleeding heart lefty". However, during the course of my postgraduate studies, which introduced me to complex systems theory, I was once again forced to re-evaluate my position, and at this point in time, I’m not sure where I stand. The idea of small government and the free market economy has once again become appealing to me. So much of my reading highlighted the ideas of structure emerging from the bottom up, of the resilience and robustness of systems in which there is no top down or central point of control. Furthermore, I now begin to understand why staunch free market economists such as Milton Friedman argue that the free market is morally unassailable (this is something I hadn’t thought about in my first incarnation as an economic rationalist).