Here is a clipping from my Facebook status. Have to find a better way to backup the comments there.

Taiwanese news channel Next Media Animation did have a pretty good take on the election though :)

#!/usr/bin/env python
import re, urllib
r = r'<a  href="/siteinfo/(.*?)"  ><strong>(.*?)</strong>';
for i in range(25):
    u = 'http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries;%d/AU' % i
    for x, m in enumerate(re.findall(r, urllib.urlopen(u).read())):
        print '%d. %s (%s)' % (x + 1 + i * 20, m[1], m[0].strip())

YMMV. Considering how Alexa has been trying to obfuscate their HTML pages to prevent scrapping, I won’t be surprised that this script stops to work tomorrow…

Yeah. A new era.

I went to vote this morning (in Kingsford-Smith). It was an easy pick, and I do like the Midnight Oil :)

Unfortunately some of these spams, most notably the Coles/Woolies/Franklins catalogues, are Vivian’s weekly reading material. How are we supposed to know what to buy, what is on sale, what is cheap, etc when we go to the supermarket, if we don’t have their spams in our hands? So Vivian had to explicitly asked Woolies to post their catalogue to us (yes, they do that kind of service), but that is another story.

So I am sort of used to having very few unsolicited commercial mail in my mailbox, until… I got myself a Post Office Box! I rented a PO Box in Kingsford a few weeks ago as I feel that it is safer to have your financial statements posted there. In some occasions I also do not wish to disclose my residential address so a PO Box is pretty handy. I went for the smallest one, and at $70 per year it is not too bad.

Upon signing up, there was an option whether I wish to receive unaddressed mail. How would a piece of mail with to TO: address landed in my PO Box, if it is not a spam put in there by an Australia Post staff? So I ticked on NO…

But apparently the spam filter at AustPost does not work!

Every morning when I go and pick up mails, there are always catalogues and flyers and pamphlets in my brand new PO Box. Some are trying to sell me mobile phones, or Dell computers, or other business necessities. Quite a few are actually explicitly targeting AustPost customers, as they spelt out their “Exclusive Offer to AustPost”. I am actually getting far more spams in my PO Box than my usual letter box — consider the only way to stuff a mail into a PO Box is from inside the Post Office!

So there we go. AustPost PO Box — it is a $70/year spam box. I read Sydney Morning Herald and Slashdot everyday, and advertisement kept those sites free. Why then am I still charged 70 bucks a year for receiving spams in my PO Box?

Is it affordable? Sure, with huge surplus in federal budget — why not use some of that to buy votes reward the hard working fair dinkum Aussies?! There is no better way to spend the budget surplus on tax cuts! Everyone can feel richer!

Unfortunately “better of” is usually a relative term, and the only thing that seems to keep the inflation low is the cheap imported Chinese-made goods. On the other hand, there are many things that I would love the government to fix — roads, hospitals, schools, etc — and I do hope they have not been taken out from the budget to cater for tax cuts.

We’ll see what Kevin07 has under his sleeves. Probably a “Me too”…

Who will you vote for on November 24?

R = (3 x A + X + T) / 5

R: Overall rank
A: Alexa Australia rank
X: Alexa rank
T: Technorati rank

Sounds fair to me, because this very blog is ranked number 17 on that list! I have no problem with the algorithm either. It is clearly putting more weight on the Australian visitors, but then again Alexa ranking is (1) never an accurate estimate (2) can be easily manipulated.

What I had issue with is, what makes a blog “Australian”? As I have commented on Duncan Riley’s blog, it might not be that trivial to determine. Because it is hosted on servers in Australia? Because it has .au ccTLD? Because it is written by an Australian? Because it is targeting the Australian audiences? It is nice to have a clearly defined formula to calculate the ranks, but I think it would also be nice to have a clear defined guideline on how an “Australian blog” is defined.

For example, I have a few other blogs — are they Australian blogs because they are written by an Aussie (and in one case, written for Australian audiences)? I have also written a small Python script to quickly calculate a blog’s “Australian blog rank”. After all, who is going to visit slow and ads-filled sites such as Alexa and Technorati just to copy and paste the numbers?

Here is the script, which is tested under Python 2.4. Do note that you need to have both Technorati API key (free access) and sign up to Amazon AWIS ($0.15 per 1,000 requests) to get the ranks. Here is an example when I run through my blogs:

$ python ozblogrank.py scott.yang.id.au fucoder.com hostingfu.com www.ozbargainblog.com
  43801: scott.yang.id.au
  27237: fucoder.com
  54284: hostingfu.com
  84713: www.ozbargainblog.com

Yes, from the result all of my blogs should have been made to top 100, and FuCoder.com would have an even better rank than this blog. Then again if all the Australian blogs are “discovered”, maybe there will be so many at top that none of my blogs will make to the list.

Another interesting fact — my Oz Bargain Blog seems to have the lowest rank at 84,713. However my server log shows it has the most unique visitors every single day. It also generates most of my online revenue (although it is not much). However it is because of the audiences it is targeting (shoppers and bargain hunters) that give it a low Alexa and Technorati rank, which usually grace technology-inclined group.

Anyway. The ranking system is flawed, but I am still happy to be part of it :)

World OLPC be deployed to Australia? I think not — unless we are willing to pay 2x to 3x the price to cover the cost of development and donate the rest so the kids in developing country who really cannot afford it can have one.

Update: Glenn linked to this Australian IT article saying NT government is also planning trailing in schools. They have officially declared that they are a developing country that needs financial assistance to give students computers? In another news, Ars Technica reported that OLPC has no consumer version planned, via Slashdot.

Only a handful of shops returned, and LSL Australia is around $10 cheaper than the big guys, although both are cheaper than the RRP. Who buy things at RRP these days anyway. Except, if you are a student and shopped in Co-op Bookshop, which happened to be the most expensive of them all.

Sounds like LSL is the one to go? However, there’s a Dymocks 50 metres from the building where I work, and it costs $11 for LSL to post the book to my office. D’oh.

I ended up buying the book from the big A, and it will be shipped from the States in 2 weeks. The listed price is less than half of Dymock’s “special price”, and even if you factor in the postage (about half the cost of the book) and plus 10% GST (just for the sake of comparison), it is still a good 7 bucks cheaper than LSL’s listed price without the delivery. Not to mention Amazon’s shopping cart is probably one of the best out there for your Wow experience.

I guess no one can really compete against Amazon for their volumes. Or is that so? Where do you buy your technical books in Australia?

My take is this:

• If a site is geo-targeting Australian audiences and utilising lots of HTTP connections, then Australian host is better.
• Otherwise, choose an US hosting because it is cheaper and provides more space/bandwidth.

We all know that it takes 3 way handshaking to initiate a TCP connection. Therefore to start a HTTP connection, 12ms to Sydney and 180ms to LA round-trip time will be boosted to at least 18ms and 270ms — more if the server is in US East Coast or Europe. So for sites where there are many external links (JS, CSS, images, etc) they do add up, if each request is on different HTTP connections in cases where HTTP Keep Alive has been turned off, and there exists restrictions on the number of simultaneous connections.

It can also be quite noticeable in interacting with those “Ajax” applications where each click might trigger a HTTP connection to be established. Assume that web server takes no time to process that request, feedback might range from “instantaneous” verses “half a second later…”

However, both Australian hosting and US-based hosting can easily saturated a 1500kbps ADSL connection (though you might need a good US shared-host to do that). In this case, 12ms vs. 270ms of TCP initiation time does not really matter, when it takes both 5 minutes to bring down the big AVI file. So for sites that have few large files (video, mp3, etc) then maybe US-based hosting is a cheaper choice. (Hint: DreamHost offers 20Gb storage + 1Tb bandwidth, from USD$8 per month [affiliated link])

So for sites geo-targeting Australia, maybe the best way to do it is to have 2 hosting plans — one in Australia and one in the states. Put all your interactive scripts in the Australian host, and all the large media files overseas.

Make sense?

Actually I believe there are other reasons (which don’t actually apply to me).

• Prefer to support an Australian business.
• Prefer to have support during business hours.

Anything else?

But Australia is not Japan. There are reasons behind the high price of broadband Internet in Australia. Here are my analysis of this issue.

First of all, there are geographical reasons that makes Australia different from the other countries.

• According to Wikipedia, Australia has land size of 7,686,850 km². Large land area certainly makes telecommunication infrastructure building expensive. Especially when you started to lay copper/fibre for subscriber lines, every square metre costs. That brings Australians in big disadvantage in comparison with those in Japan, South Korea or Hong Kong.
• It is around 11,935 km (7,416 miles) from Sydney to San Francisco, the data hub for Australia and United States. There’s Pacific Ocean in between, and laying cable in the sea would probably be much more expensive than laying on the dry land. Guess how much money Australian Internet users would have to pay to utilise the Southern Cross Cable (SXC)? In comparison, Canada pays minimal to exchange data with the states.

But why is the United States so important? Because they have the content we want. Here’s some demographical reasons behind it.

• The majority of Australians speak and read English. So whenever an Aussie logged onto the web, he/she will most likely download content from a server that provides English content. That means majority of people will exchange packets with an overseas server (most likely in US) over one of few expensive pipes across the Pacific Ocean. That would again drive up the price when these pipes need to be constantly upgraded to cope with ever-increasing traffic. That is why countries in the Eastern Asia are not that worried about their links with the states, because people’s Internet usage are generally localised, be that Chinese, Japanese or Korean. I have actually used my parents’ ADSL connection to access US contents when I was in Taiwan last year, and the speed was quite disappointing. But not many people over there care.
• Australia also has a relatively small population (just a bit over 20 million) for its land size. At the end, telecommunication companies pay a high premium to set up the infrastructure on this big piece of land, but they cannot reap the same amount of reward due to a small population which produces small demand.
• Some people argued that Australia is relatively urbanised – majority of people are living in the major metro cities – therefore the infrastructural cost might not be that huge due to concentrated population. However, it does not mean that there is no one living in the rural side of the state. What would these people say if Telstra decided not to enable their phone exchange with DSL support? Those regional infrastructural building will continue to cost more than reap, but on the other hand they are still necessary.

Talking about the economical reasons, supply and demand – which one usually comes first? Should there be good supply if there isn’t enough demand?

• Broadband in Australia are still considered as an item of luxury than commodity. Most people I know (which are mostly university students) don’t have broadband Internet at home. They simply find no need for it. A dial up is enough for them to do emailing, Internet banking and weather checking. Most people certainly won’t download more than a gigabyte of data in a month, and there is just no demand for a fatter pipe for them. Price stays high when the demand stays low…
• But is broadband that expensive? Considering AUD$39/month 256kbps/64kbps 1GB plan is not that much more expensive than a $20/month “unlimited” dial up account when you factor in call costs (at 17-25 cents per call), blocking the line while dialling in, better speed, etc. After all, $39 pm is what people paid for those “unlimited” dial ups 4-5 years ago anyway. However, the set up cost is another matter. It is something costs virtually nil on dial up plans that would set you back hundreds of dollars on ADSL. You need to pay at least $150 initial cost to get your line connected + a budget DSL modem. That is just one reason why some people I know get scared off ADSL broadband.

There got to be some other reasons – what about the market monopoly? What about the government?

• Yes. Telstra still owns most of the phone exchanges across Australia, and it is the Telstra Wholesale that sets the pricing for down stream ISPs. They are in the monopoly situation – but funny that the “competition” cannot give us more competitive pricing to break down the monopoly. Optus Cable? DSLAM roll out by Internode and iiNet? Other DSL providers like XYZed? Maybe the infrastructural cost is really that high.
• Wouldn’t government stands up and grants telecommunication companies some “fund” to improve the infrastructure? Would you do it if you are John Howard? Would you vote for the party that slams tax payers’ money to telecoms infrastructure? Who would it benefit, from an average tax payer’s point of view, other than enabling his 13 year old son to download the warez at 10x the speed? There are other areas that need funding – health system and education just to name two. Considering our Johnny boy might attempt to lower the income tax rate for the up-coming election. Spending money on telecoms infrastructure? Maybe not.

But at the end, is broadband in Australia really that expensive? Well, yes it is relatively expensive. Affordable? Affirmative – it is still affordable by the general public I think. We do need the public to be aware of the benefit and actually subscribe to it, so hopefully the price will come down gradually when the demand picks up.

Moreover, many broadband ISP in Australia offers extra features to compensate lack of bandwidth, like virus/spam filtering, static IP address, and users are free to host servers/P2P services on their boxes, which I think might be rare on the other side of Pacific.

At the end of day, I would like my broadband access to be cheaper, faster and more reliable. But I do already enjoy what I have got at the moment, and hopefully the future is going to be better.

Update 11 Jan 2004: Slashdot ran a interesting story on broadband pricing across the world, and people in different countries reported how much they have paid for their DSL/Cable access. I reckoned Australia is okay regarding to the cost of access, but expensive comparatively in traffic cost, as most overseas ISPs provide a flatrate pricing.