If you love programming, and especially if you love programming languages, there’s an episode of the Software Engineering Radio podcast that has a fantastic interview with Dick Gabriel, titled “Dick Gabriel on Lisp”. If you don’t know who Gabriel is, he’s arguably one of the more important programming language people around, is one of the founding fathers of XEmacs (neé Lucid Emacs), wrote the famous Worse is Better essay (along with a pretty cool book that I’ll personally recommend), and also gave one of the most surreal and brilliant keynotes that I’ve ever heard that received a standing ovation at HoPL III and OOPSLA.

The episode’s about fifty minutes long, and Gabriel talks about a lot more than just Lisp in the interview: among other things, he gives some major insight into the essence of object-oriented message-passing, how functions are objects and objects are functions, what continuations are, metacircularity, and the relationship between XML and S-expressions (and why XML is just a glorified half-assed version of Lisp). There’s also some great stories in the interview for computing historians: how the Common Lisp Object System was initially inspired by Scheme and the original Actor language (yep, “actors” as in “Erlang processes”), what AI research was like in the 1960s and ’70s, and the story of how John McCarthy and his students implemented the first Lisp interpreter in one night.

A wonderful interview, and well worth listening to if programming languages is your shindig.

I found this short article about law and code on builderAU rather interesting. The money quotes are the first and last paragraphs:

Technology has outpaced the legal system’s ability to regulate its use in matters of privacy and fair use rights, said Kirby… “We are moving to a point in the world where more and more law will be expressed in its effective way, not in terms of statutes solidly enacted by the parliament… but in the technology itself—code,” said Kirby.

I think that’s a great quote, and it shows that Justice Kirby has a pretty solid understanding of what code is, how it interacts with law, and that the USA’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)—and Australia’s Digital Agenda Act—are dangerous things. (I do think that the builderAU article emphasis on Google and Yahoo being the two culprits seem odd, although it’s hard to say this without listening to Kirby’s original speech.) I’ve always been a fan of Justice Kirby, and it’s nice to know that somebody-on-high understands that code-as-law is a problem, and it’s a complex one.

I found this short article about law and code on builderAU rather interesting. The money quotes are the first and last paragraphs:

Technology has outpaced the legal system’s ability to regulate its use in matters of privacy and fair use rights, said Kirby… “We are moving to a point in the world where more and more law will be expressed in its effective way, not in terms of statutes solidly enacted by the parliament… but in the technology itself—code,” said Kirby.

I think that’s a great quote, and it shows that Justice Kirby has a pretty solid understanding of what code is, how it interacts with law, and that the USA’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)—and Australia’s Digital Agenda Act—are dangerous things. (I do think that the builderAU article emphasis on Google and Yahoo being the two culprits seem odd, although it’s hard to say this without listening to Kirby’s original speech.) I’ve always been a fan of Justice Kirby, and it’s nice to know that somebody-on-high understands that code-as-law is a problem, and it’s a complex one.

The Foundations of Open Media Software (FOMS) workshop took place last month, from the 24th to 25th of January. FOMS is a rare opportunity for open-source multimedia developers and industry folks to get together all in one place, and the result is two days of intense discussion about issues such as encapsulation formats, codecs, video and audio output APIs, media commons, and metadata—not to mention sharing a common hatred of Flash. The first FOMS was held last year in 2007, and was a great melting pot for people from very different open-source multimedia projects, such as xine, xiph.org, GStreamer and Nokia, to get together. This year’s FOMS proved to be just as successful; this time with folks from Sun, Opera and the BBC joining the fray.

One wonderful thing about this FOMS was that a large number of the xiph.org folks (Monty, Derf, Rillian, Jean-Marc and MikeS) were all there. xiph.org are one of the main providers of freely available multimedia standards, and it’s rare that their members have an opportunity to meet in person. It’s a little strange that they met in Melbourne rather than in the USA where the majority of their members are, but hey, I’m sure they won’t complaining about that!

For me, there was a bit of an ominous atmosphere leading up to FOMS due to the recent outbreaks of “discussion” in December 2007 about the HTML5 recommended video codec. (I use the one “discussion” lightly here, since it was a lot more like hearing one’s angry neighbour trying to break down a brick wall with their head, for about a week.) It seemed obvious that the HTML5 video codec problem would be discussed at length at FOMS, but I hoped that it wouldn’t dominate discussion, since there were a lot better things to do with the combined intellectual might of all the attendees than talk about issues that were mostly political and arguably largely out of their hands to solve.

I’m glad to say that the HTML5 video codec problem was definitely discussed, but with a great focus on finding a solution rather than wailing on about the problem. Ogg Theora and Dirac, represented by xiph.org and the BBC at FOMS, are two of the contenders for the HTML5 baseline video codec recommendation, and it was excellent to see that people were discussing technical aspects that may be hindering their adoption by the W3C, always keeping the bigger picture in mind.

There were also breakout groups that threw down some short-term and long-term goals for the FOMS attendees: I personally took part in a discussion about metadata, text markup of video (subtitling, closed captions, and transcriptions), and video composition and aggregation (“video mashups”). Shane Stephens would present a great talk at Linux.conf.au a few days later about Web 2.0-style community-based video remixing; if you’re interested at all in video mashups and video mixups, be sure to check out his talk!

If you’re interested at all in the open-standards multimedia space, the proceedings of FOMS are available online thanks to the FOMS A/V team, with a big thanks to Michael Dale for bringing his incredible metavid video content management system to the humble FOMS site. (You may also be interested in the W3C Video on the Web Workshop Report that was very recently released.) In an area that’s as complicated as multimedia, FOMS is tremendously valuable as a place for open-source developers to meet. It was a great complement to Linux.conf.au, and here’s hoping it’ll be on again next year!

The Foundations of Open Media Software (FOMS) workshop took place last month, from the 24th to 25th of January. FOMS is a rare opportunity for open-source multimedia developers and industry folks to get together all in one place, and the result is two days of intense discussion about issues such as encapsulation formats, codecs, video and audio output APIs, media commons, and metadata—not to mention sharing a common hatred of Flash. The first FOMS was held last year in 2007, and was a great melting pot for people from very different open-source multimedia projects, such as xine, xiph.org, GStreamer and Nokia, to get together. This year’s FOMS proved to be just as successful; this time with folks from Sun, Opera and the BBC joining the fray.

One wonderful thing about this FOMS was that a large number of the xiph.org folks (Monty, Derf, Rillian, Jean-Marc and MikeS) were all there. xiph.org are one of the main providers of freely available multimedia standards, and it’s rare that their members have an opportunity to meet in person. It’s a little strange that they met in Melbourne rather than in the USA where the majority of their members are, but hey, I’m sure they won’t complaining about that!

For me, there was a bit of an ominous atmosphere leading up to FOMS due to the recent outbreaks of “discussion” in December 2007 about the HTML5 recommended video codec. (I use the one “discussion” lightly here, since it was a lot more like hearing one’s angry neighbour trying to break down a brick wall with their head, for about a week.) It seemed obvious that the HTML5 video codec problem would be discussed at length at FOMS, but I hoped that it wouldn’t dominate discussion, since there were a lot better things to do with the combined intellectual might of all the attendees than talk about issues that were mostly political and arguably largely out of their hands to solve.

I’m glad to say that the HTML5 video codec problem was definitely discussed, but with a great focus on finding a solution rather than wailing on about the problem. Ogg Theora and Dirac, represented by xiph.org and the BBC at FOMS, are two of the contenders for the HTML5 baseline video codec recommendation, and it was excellent to see that people were discussing technical aspects that may be hindering their adoption by the W3C, always keeping the bigger picture in mind.

There were also breakout groups that threw down some short-term and long-term goals for the FOMS attendees: I personally took part in a discussion about metadata, text markup of video (subtitling, closed captions, and transcriptions), and video composition and aggregation (“video mashups”). Shane Stephens would present a great talk at Linux.conf.au a few days later about Web 2.0-style community-based video remixing; if you’re interested at all in video mashups and video mixups, be sure to check out his talk!

If you’re interested at all in the open-standards multimedia space, the proceedings of FOMS are available online thanks to the FOMS A/V team, with a big thanks to Michael Dale for bringing his incredible metavid video content management system to the humble FOMS site. (You may also be interested in the W3C Video on the Web Workshop Report that was very recently released.) In an area that’s as complicated as multimedia, FOMS is tremendously valuable as a place for open-source developers to meet. It was a great complement to Linux.conf.au, and here’s hoping it’ll be on again next year!

I’ve finally updated my Mac OS X software list to be Leopard-aware, for those of you new to Apple’s shiny little operating system. Spotting the changes between the older version and newer one is left as an exercise for the reader :-). (Boy I’m glad to have TextExtras working with garbage-collected applications on Leopard!)

I’ve finally updated my Mac OS X software list to be Leopard-aware, for those of you new to Apple’s shiny little operating system. Spotting the changes between the older version and newer one is left as an exercise for the reader :-). (Boy I’m glad to have TextExtras working with garbage-collected applications on Leopard!)

Perhaps the most annoying feature of the iPhone is its recessed headphones jack:

This miserable little design decision has spawned an entire bloody industry of headphones adapters just so that you can use your own preferred set of headphones with the thing (though admittedly some headphones adapters are way cooler than others). Me, I preferred a slightly cheaper hack. And by hack, I mean hacksaw.

Process:

1. G’day, where’s the cheese?Get a kitchen knife.
2. Use kitchen knife obtained from step 1 to cut off the end of the rubber sheath at the end of your headphones plug.

Et voilà! Headphones that fit in rather nicely to that stupid jack. It also seems that a few other people have done this as well, but they applied slightly more rigourous methods than me (i.e. they used one of those “proper knives” rather than, say, a kitchen knife).

It's entirely stupid that we have to do this in the first place, but on the bright side, it does solve one of the only major annoyances I've had with the thing, which elevates the iPhone from being "pretty damn good" to "near perfect" in my eyes. One hopes that Apple won't be repeating this particular design decision for their next iPhone revision.

Perhaps the most annoying feature of the iPhone is its recessed headphones jack:

This miserable little design decision has spawned an entire bloody industry of headphones adapters just so that you can use your own preferred set of headphones with the thing (though admittedly some headphones adapters are way cooler than others). Me, I preferred a slightly cheaper hack. And by hack, I mean hacksaw.

Process:

1. G’day, where’s the cheese?Get a kitchen knife.
2. Use kitchen knife obtained from step 1 to cut off the end of the rubber sheath at the end of your headphones plug.

Et voilà! Headphones that fit in rather nicely to that stupid jack. It also seems that a few other people have done this as well, but they applied slightly more rigourous methods than me (i.e. they used one of those “proper knives” rather than, say, a kitchen knife).

It's entirely stupid that we have to do this in the first place, but on the bright side, it does solve one of the only major annoyances I've had with the thing, which elevates the iPhone from being "pretty damn good" to "near perfect" in my eyes. One hopes that Apple won't be repeating this particular design decision for their next iPhone revision.

On the 19th of January, I left Sydney’s beautiful shores for a holiday in four parts: the Australian Open, the Foundations of Open Media Software (FOMS) conference, Linux.conf.au, and Kiwi Foo Camp. I’m in the middle of writing up about the conferences, so this is the first small blog entry in a series of four.

The Australian Open had upset-after-upset this year, being the first one in a very long time where neither the first nor second seeds made it through to the final. We had a five-day ground pass that we didn’t quite use all five days of, but still managed to catch a couple of fantastic matches on it:

• James Blake vs Marin Cilic: all brawns and no brain. There’s so much to like about two big guys always serving stuff at over 200km/h, and the only tactic is to just hit stronger and harder than the other guy. (“If violence doesn’t solve your problem, you’re not using enough of it.”)

• Hanley & Paes vs Bopanna and Ram: It’s amazing watching the top double seeds’ reaction speed at the net: you realise just how much innate talent these guys have, because no amount of training is going to make you that quick.

• The Woodies vs Pat Cash and John Fitzgerald: I’m glad I got to see Woodbridge and Woodforde play at least once in my life. Now I’d just like to see a mixed legends pair of Agassi and Graf…

• Rafael Nadal vs Jo-Wilfried Tsonga: Ah, our precious semi-finals ticket. I expected this to be a three-set match; I just didn’t think it’d be a three-set match where Nadal lost. (When was the last time Nadal lost in three sets to anybody?) Tsonga was playing quite possibly the best tennis I’ve ever seen in my life. Even The Scud playing in his best form couldn’t have matched Tsonga that night.

It’ll be interesting to see whether Lleyton Hewitt regains a better reputation amongst Australians after this year’s Open, thanks to his marathon five-set win against Marcos Baghdatis that finished at 4:33am. It’s amazing how much the media can distort reality: most people forget that Hewitt was #1 in the world for two years running, before Roger Federer came onto the scene, and is probably Australia’s best player in the past thirty to forty years. Pat Rafter never made it to #1; Pat Cash never made it to #1. Arguably Hewitt created some of the controversies himself, but I’m still amazed that so many Australians hold serious animosity toward him.

Tennis is one of those sports where watching it on TV doesn’t give you any indication of just how fast the balls are flying around, how fast a 200km/h serve really is, how fast the players are moving on the court, and how fast they’re reacting. I’m very glad to say that two friends I went with to the Australian Open had never seen a live tennis match before, and both of them loved it.

As well as plain ol’ tennis, we did of course take in a lot of the Melbourne culture, visiting many of the fine cafés and rustic alleyways in the city, heading north to the Yarra Valley for a day, going to the markets at Southbank, and eating pancakes at Stokers. One highlight was seeing James Morrison and Deni Hines at the Palms in the Crown Casino. I think our little group of four at the Palms were the youngest people in the entire audience… by about a decade. Morrison’s amusing obsession with his new vocoder keyboard and Deni Hines’s majestic voice made for a fantastic night of jazz.

All in all, my little Melbourne holiday proved to be a ton of fun and be incredibly relaxing at the same time. This was all good days indeed, since I needed a ton of energy to survive through the next week…

On the 19th of January, I left Sydney’s beautiful shores for a holiday in four parts: the Australian Open, the Foundations of Open Media Software (FOMS) conference, Linux.conf.au, and Kiwi Foo Camp. I’m in the middle of writing up about the conferences, so this is the first small blog entry in a series of four.

The Australian Open had upset-after-upset this year, being the first one in a very long time where neither the first nor second seeds made it through to the final. We had a five-day ground pass that we didn’t quite use all five days of, but still managed to catch a couple of fantastic matches on it:

• James Blake vs Marin Cilic: all brawns and no brain. There’s so much to like about two big guys always serving stuff at over 200km/h, and the only tactic is to just hit stronger and harder than the other guy. (“If violence doesn’t solve your problem, you’re not using enough of it.”)

• Hanley & Paes vs Bopanna and Ram: It’s amazing watching the top double seeds’ reaction speed at the net: you realise just how much innate talent these guys have, because no amount of training is going to make you that quick.

• The Woodies vs Pat Cash and John Fitzgerald: I’m glad I got to see Woodbridge and Woodforde play at least once in my life. Now I’d just like to see a mixed legends pair of Agassi and Graf…

• Rafael Nadal vs Jo-Wilfried Tsonga: Ah, our precious semi-finals ticket. I expected this to be a three-set match; I just didn’t think it’d be a three-set match where Nadal lost. (When was the last time Nadal lost in three sets to anybody?) Tsonga was playing quite possibly the best tennis I’ve ever seen in my life. Even The Scud playing in his best form couldn’t have matched Tsonga that night.

It’ll be interesting to see whether Lleyton Hewitt regains a better reputation amongst Australians after this year’s Open, thanks to his marathon five-set win against Marcos Baghdatis that finished at 4:33am. It’s amazing how much the media can distort reality: most people forget that Hewitt was #1 in the world for two years running, before Roger Federer came onto the scene, and is probably Australia’s best player in the past thirty to forty years. Pat Rafter never made it to #1; Pat Cash never made it to #1. Arguably Hewitt created some of the controversies himself, but I’m still amazed that so many Australians hold serious animosity toward him.

Tennis is one of those sports where watching it on TV doesn’t give you any indication of just how fast the balls are flying around, how fast a 200km/h serve really is, how fast the players are moving on the court, and how fast they’re reacting. I’m very glad to say that two friends I went with to the Australian Open had never seen a live tennis match before, and both of them loved it.

As well as plain ol’ tennis, we did of course take in a lot of the Melbourne culture, visiting many of the fine cafés and rustic alleyways in the city, heading north to the Yarra Valley for a day, going to the markets at Southbank, and eating pancakes at Stokers. One highlight was seeing James Morrison and Deni Hines at the Palms in the Crown Casino. I think our little group of four at the Palms were the youngest people in the entire audience… by about a decade. Morrison’s amusing obsession with his new vocoder keyboard and Deni Hines’s majestic voice made for a fantastic night of jazz.

All in all, my little Melbourne holiday proved to be a ton of fun and be incredibly relaxing at the same time. This was all good days indeed, since I needed a ton of energy to survive through the next week…

So now that I’m back from my f*ck-off-awesome trips to Melbourne and New Zealand (more on that later when I get a chance to blaerg about it), I am greeted with the following lovely selection of books from amazon.com:



I guess I’ll be doing some bedtime reading for the next few weeks. (Note that I’m not actually a games programmer by trade—nor really a C++ programmer these days—but games coding tends to have interesting constraints such as high performance and memory management, which encourages a much better understanding of lower-level problems.) I’m a little of the way through Refactoring to Patterns, and it’s great so far.

In other news, I think these three books in a row fit the definition of Alanic rather well:



Seriously, I didn’t move ‘em next to each other or anything. I especially love it how Java in a Nutshell looks like it’s about 1,000 pages. Nutshell my arse.

So now that I’m back from my f*ck-off-awesome trips to Melbourne and New Zealand (more on that later when I get a chance to blaerg about it), I am greeted with the following lovely selection of books from amazon.com:



I guess I’ll be doing some bedtime reading for the next few weeks. (Note that I’m not actually a games programmer by trade—nor really a C++ programmer these days—but games coding tends to have interesting constraints such as high performance and memory management, which encourages a much better understanding of lower-level problems.) I’m a little of the way through Refactoring to Patterns, and it’s great so far.

In other news, I think these three books in a row fit the definition of Alanic rather well:



Seriously, I didn’t move ‘em next to each other or anything. I especially love it how Java in a Nutshell looks like it’s about 1,000 pages. Nutshell my arse.

I’m going to be doing a small bit of cityhopping in the next few weeks:

• 19th to 23rd of January: in Melbourne for the Australian Open,
• 24th to 25th of January: in Melbourne for FOMS (Foundations of Open Media Software),
• 26th to 28th of January: more Australian Open in Melbourne,
• 29th to 31st of January: in Melbourne for Linux.conf.au,
• 1st to 3rd of February: in Warkworth, New Zealand for Kiwi Foo Camp.

If you’re reading this and will be in Melbourne or Warkworth on those dates, drop me an email and let’s go drinking be civilised!

I’m going to be doing a small bit of cityhopping in the next few weeks:

• 19th to 23rd of January: in Melbourne for the Australian Open,
• 24th to 25th of January: in Melbourne for FOMS (Foundations of Open Media Software),
• 26th to 28th of January: more Australian Open in Melbourne,
• 29th to 31st of January: in Melbourne for Linux.conf.au,
• 1st to 3rd of February: in Warkworth, New Zealand for Kiwi Foo Camp.

If you’re reading this and will be in Melbourne or Warkworth on those dates, drop me an email and let’s go drinking be civilised!

This is a Public Service Announcement for Australians: if you’re looking for mobile broadband access for your laptop (and what geek isn’t?), Vodafone are doing a pretty spectacular deal at the moment for ‘net access via their 3G/HSDPA network.

For $39/month, you get 5GB of data; no time limits; no speed caps; and fallback from 3G to GPRS in regional areas where HSDPA isn’t available yet. It’s a fantastic deal for people who live in metropolitan areas and work on the road a lot.

The main catch is that it’s a 24-month contract, so is a somewhat long time to be locked in to a plan. However, I have a feeling that no other mobile Internet offering is going to be competitive with 5GB for $40/month within the next two years. (Hell, $39/month for decent mobile Internet access is competitive with even some fixed-line ADSL2 providers.) One other small catch is that you also can’t use multiple devices on the plan: it’s tied to the single SIM card that you purchase with the plan. So, all you cool kids with 3G/GPRS-capable mobile phones, you can’t include that device on part of the bundle (looks sadly at iPhone). Other than that, it’s really a pretty bloody good deal.

To compare this with other plans:

• Vodafone themselves offer a craptacular 100MB for $29/month, which is barely enough to just check email these days. (And that doesn’t include the modem, which is another $200). A mere 1GB of data is $59/month, or $99 per month with no contract!

• Telstra are even worse (this is my surprised face): $59 for 200MB. I’ll say that again: $59 per month for 200MB. 1GB is $89.

• Bigpond (who are different from Telstra¹) offer vaguely competitive plans if you’re OK with a 10-hour-per-month time limit: that goes for $35/month. (This translates to around 30 minutes per business day, which may be OK if you just hop online occasionally to check email.) The $35 plan is the only timed plan, though: other than that, it’s $55 for 200MB (puke), or $85 for 1GB.

• I can’t even find out whether Optus have mobile broadband plans available. Comments?

• Virgin Mobile Broadband used to be pretty spectacular at $10/month for 1GB, and is still somewhat OK at $80/month for the same 1GB if it’s bundled with a phone plan. Considering that Vodafone’s $39/month for 5GB, you can still pair their deal with a phone plan of your choice and have 5GB instead of 1GB, though.

• Three (or 3, or whatever) just launched the next best alternative with their new X-Series plans. Their Gold plan is $30/month for 1GB, and their Platinum plan is $40/month for 2GB. Interestingly, the X-Series plans give you a ton of free Skype minutes (2000 minutes on the 1GB plan and 4000 minutes on the 2GB plan), so if you’re a really heavy Skype person and chat about 130 hours per month, the Three deal may be better than Vodafone’s.

The 3G modem they use is a Huawei E220, which looks like it’s the same modem used by Virgin and Three. There appears to be Linux support for it, and I can confirm that Mac supports works fine on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) thanks to an alternative driver.

So, if you’re interested, visit the Vodafone 5GB webpage. You can sign up through the Internet on the spot. However, you can also sign up over the phone, and if you do, you have a 30-day “cooling off” period where you can opt out of your contract if you’re not happy with the service. (Stupidly enough, you can’t get the 30-day cooling off period if you pop into a Vodafone store, because phone service has different conditions to face-to-face service. Ja, whatever man.) Hurry though: the deal expires on December 31, 2007. Get it as a late Christmas present for yourself, I guess!

¹ Telstra Mobility Broadband is a completely separate service from Bigpond Broadband, and Telstra and Bigpond are separate entities. I found this out the hard way, when I was on a 10-hour-per-month CDMA/EVDO plan with Telstra, and couldn’t upgrade to the 10-hour-per-month 3G plan with Bigpond, because Telstra and Bigpond are separate things. Ahuh. (I couldn’t upgrade to a 10h plan on Telstra, because Telstra doesn’t even offer hourly plans anymore.) Way to go for rewarding all your mobile Internet early adopters that braved EVDO, you frigtards.

This is a Public Service Announcement for Australians: if you’re looking for mobile broadband access for your laptop (and what geek isn’t?), Vodafone are doing a pretty spectacular deal at the moment for ‘net access via their 3G/HSDPA network.

For $39/month, you get 5GB of data; no time limits; no speed caps; and fallback from 3G to GPRS in regional areas where HSDPA isn’t available yet. It’s a fantastic deal for people who live in metropolitan areas and work on the road a lot.

The main catch is that it’s a 24-month contract, so is a somewhat long time to be locked in to a plan. However, I have a feeling that no other mobile Internet offering is going to be competitive with 5GB for $40/month within the next two years. (Hell, $39/month for decent mobile Internet access is competitive with even some fixed-line ADSL2 providers.) One other small catch is that you also can’t use multiple devices on the plan: it’s tied to the single SIM card that you purchase with the plan. So, all you cool kids with 3G/GPRS-capable mobile phones, you can’t include that device on part of the bundle (looks sadly at iPhone). Other than that, it’s really a pretty bloody good deal.

To compare this with other plans:

• Vodafone themselves offer a craptacular 100MB for $29/month, which is barely enough to just check email these days. (And that doesn’t include the modem, which is another $200). A mere 1GB of data is $59/month, or $99 per month with no contract!

• Telstra are even worse (this is my surprised face): $59 for 200MB. I’ll say that again: $59 per month for 200MB. 1GB is $89.

• Bigpond (who are different from Telstra¹) offer vaguely competitive plans if you’re OK with a 10-hour-per-month time limit: that goes for $35/month. (This translates to around 30 minutes per business day, which may be OK if you just hop online occasionally to check email.) The $35 plan is the only timed plan, though: other than that, it’s $55 for 200MB (puke), or $85 for 1GB.

• I can’t even find out whether Optus have mobile broadband plans available. Comments?

• Virgin Mobile Broadband used to be pretty spectacular at $10/month for 1GB, and is still somewhat OK at $80/month for the same 1GB if it’s bundled with a phone plan. Considering that Vodafone’s $39/month for 5GB, you can still pair their deal with a phone plan of your choice and have 5GB instead of 1GB, though.

• Three (or 3, or whatever) just launched the next best alternative with their new X-Series plans. Their Gold plan is $30/month for 1GB, and their Platinum plan is $40/month for 2GB. Interestingly, the X-Series plans give you a ton of free Skype minutes (2000 minutes on the 1GB plan and 4000 minutes on the 2GB plan), so if you’re a really heavy Skype person and chat about 130 hours per month, the Three deal may be better than Vodafone’s.

The 3G modem they use is a Huawei E220, which looks like it’s the same modem used by Virgin and Three. There appears to be Linux support for it, and I can confirm that Mac supports works fine on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) thanks to an alternative driver.

So, if you’re interested, visit the Vodafone 5GB webpage. You can sign up through the Internet on the spot. However, you can also sign up over the phone, and if you do, you have a 30-day “cooling off” period where you can opt out of your contract if you’re not happy with the service. (Stupidly enough, you can’t get the 30-day cooling off period if you pop into a Vodafone store, because phone service has different conditions to face-to-face service. Ja, whatever man.) Hurry though: the deal expires on December 31, 2007. Get it as a late Christmas present for yourself, I guess!

¹ Telstra Mobility Broadband is a completely separate service from Bigpond Broadband, and Telstra and Bigpond are separate entities. I found this out the hard way, when I was on a 10-hour-per-month CDMA/EVDO plan with Telstra, and couldn’t upgrade to the 10-hour-per-month 3G plan with Bigpond, because Telstra and Bigpond are separate things. Ahuh. (I couldn’t upgrade to a 10h plan on Telstra, because Telstra doesn’t even offer hourly plans anymore.) Way to go for rewarding all your mobile Internet early adopters that braved EVDO, you frigtards.

Haskell magician Don Stewart echoes my own opinion on lines of code in his Haskell Workshop demo on xmonad:

A couple of nice refactorings happened when we found data structures that fit better, and you dramatically drop down in the number of lines of code. So we use lines of code as a bit of a heuristic for working out when code sucks. If something gets really big, it probably needs to be rewritten.

I’m staring at a 60,000 line code base right now that I’m positive could be under 30,000 lines of code if it had a good rewri… erm, refactoring. Sometimes when you can’t figure out what’s going on in a function that’s a thousand lines long, the best solution is to rewrite the thing in a hundred lines instead. (And that time, I really did mean rewrite, not refactor.)

Update: Steve Yegge writes a good essay about code size, and believes that “the worst thing that can happen to a code base is size”. (If only he applied that principle to his blog posts as well…)

Haskell magician Don Stewart echoes my own opinion on lines of code in his Haskell Workshop demo on xmonad:

A couple of nice refactorings happened when we found data structures that fit better, and you dramatically drop down in the number of lines of code. So we use lines of code as a bit of a heuristic for working out when code sucks. If something gets really big, it probably needs to be rewritten.

I’m staring at a 60,000 line code base right now that I’m positive could be under 30,000 lines of code if it had a good rewri… erm, refactoring. Sometimes when you can’t figure out what’s going on in a function that’s a thousand lines long, the best solution is to rewrite the thing in a hundred lines instead. (And that time, I really did mean rewrite, not refactor.)

Update: Steve Yegge writes a good essay about code size, and believes that “the worst thing that can happen to a code base is size”. (If only he applied that principle to his blog posts as well…)

Reg Braithwaite has said very eloquently something I’ve been meaning to express for a long time:

When someone says something outrageous, like “f*ck compilers and their false sense of security”, it is not important whether I happen to think that programming languages with strong, expressive type systems are valuable (hint: I do). What is important is to look at this statement and ask yourself: Is there just one thing in there, one kernel of wisdom that I can extract and use to be a better programmer?

I wrote about geek culture and criticism earlier, but Braithwaite knocks it up a notch and hammers the point home in a single paragraph. To use an analogy, being a good geek is like being a good partner in a relationship… step one: listen. Step two: empathise. (Step three: profit!)