Biblo

Project Management on the Road to Damscus

No this is not an article about the Middle East, though one begs to be written. This is an article about project management and design.
For most of my programming life I have been a DESIGN person. I believed that you design and design and design and then when the design is perfect, or you are bored with designing you begin to code and then you are done. This philosophy is known as BDUP or Big Design Up Front
The Rational Unified Process is the perfect exemplar of BDUF and lots of people see problems with all the design before any of the code. To address this RUP has models where smaller iterations of design and code take place. These ideas came out of some of the late 80s work on Rapid Application Development or RAD. RADs model was to build something cheap, a prototype and then use the prototype to evolve and comment on the design until the BDUF was done. RAD also wanted to turn the waterfall of BDUF into a cascade of waterfalls so that the design and development activities were shared throughout the life of the project.
Agile methodologies on the other hand are focused on the program, they argue. Build something that works, however small and then extend it. The agile methodologies all say No BDUF . Now there is an import caveat here, that is not NO DESIGN its no big design.
There is an old project management joke that goes. How do you eat a elephant made entirely of chocolate? Answer one bite at a time.
BDUF suggest an eating plan, menus, time of for breaks, lots of designning and planning.
Agile says plan a bite take it, plan a bite take it etc.
So having laid out the landscape of the competing methodologies in the scantiest of thumbnail sketches lets proceed to my Road to Damascus moment.
Like I said at the beginning I am a Design person and have long felt that doing a large design and then building is the right way to go. I always argued that this is the most efficient way as once there is a design there is little rework and rework is expensive.
But after working for IBS (nope nothing to do with a bowel syndrome) I got converted to agile methodologies and their insistence on No BDUF.
My reasons for this are complicated and I feel bear some articulation, after all this is my Road to Damascus moment.
Big Design tends to lead to big ideas. What I mean by this is that because you are designing and thinking really hard about a problem you think about all aspects of the problem, they get articulated and teased out and senarioised and so on. By the end of the Big Design even for a simple thing you know an awful lot about the thing. And knowing an awful lot tends to make you want to do an awful lot.
Take a simple example, we need to identify the users of our system, and control what they do based on who they are. In other words a security system. Big Design has lead me into Users having Roles with Roles being represented into groups and so on and so forth. Its all super sexy and complicated; and who knows the system might even need it.
On the other hand Enough Design (ED) and there is a loaded term, if ever there was one; suggests, that we just need a user and a username and password. This might not see us through to the end of the project, hell it might not see us through to the end of the first phase, but its all we need to start.
BDUF advocates say that retrofitting all of the extras is expensive an and that that expense can be ameliorated by doing the design first.
So lets break that down, first that retrofitting is expensive. Well the evidence for that is largely based on older systems that tended to be rather monolithic, not very OO and yes hard to change. More structured and OO systems don’t make it as hard to change, they just don’t have the same change costs.
Expense can be ameliorated by design first. Well it can, but there is also the danger of finding things to build that we don’t need. Things that we don’t need now are bad now. Things that we have to build now for some future requirement are a disaster now. Doing more than we need now leads to...
It leads to bloated complex systems. It leads to a system that is never finished, it leads to systems that are late, overly featured, slow, complex, hard to maintain and so on and so forth.
Designing just enough and then building it lets you go to design the next piece of the system and build that. When you have enough pieces you have a system that works. Now admittedly each of those individual bits might be undercooked, under featured, underdone. But you have a system that works, it could conceivably be released, it could be shipped to customers, it can certainly be shown to them.
It’s a system that can be played with, experimented on, analyzed and hypothesized about. All of those activities, experimentation, analysis, hypothesis forming and conjecturing can then usefully feed into iterations of the system.
When you do this you find something quite interesting. Some of the Big Ideas that seemed so important in the Big Design prove to be wrong, more interesting still ideas that were never seen before there was a working system now seem pretty important. These are the ideas that seldom emerge until you can use the system.
The second key thing about ED is that you are managing risk. The biggest risk is always running out of time, money or capacity to get the system delivered. There might be lots and lots of other risks to manage on a project. Getting it done is always the biggest.
A strategy that lets you get the smallest useful set of things done as early as possible manages the getting it done risk the best. Now that is not to say that you will not have to iterate, add features, redo bits and so on. But all of those activities are extending a working system, a shippable system, an integrated system, something that compiles, runs and can be used.
BDUF leads you to not starting, not starting means you can’t finish. Because a design is not starting. A design is not something you can use. Its only systems that are built that you can you use, And its only when you have built them that you can finish. Start the activity that lets you finish as soon as you can, then finish early and finish often.
ED leads to some contradictory ideas though. You probably have a system, that is fairly complicated and has lots of features. Lets say it lets you do payrolls and you want to pay all sorts of different workers. Shift workers, certified workers, salaried workers and so on. You might want to know who has what certificates, who needs training, who needs a refresher, you might want to manage your liabilities for payroll payroll tax, annual leave and a multitude of things. All these features seem like they are pretty important.
ED suggests that you pick the smallest subset and build it. It seems on our hypothetical system that the smallest useful subset is recoding information about the employee. And here is where ED can really win for us.
In the final system we might need to know scores of facts about an employee. Start Date, Contract Arrangement, Address, Next of Kin, Social Security Number, Company number the list goes on and on and on. But just to start, just to get going, to be able to register employees in the system we might just need Name and Company Number. This might get us a long way before we need to add in some data that we don’t have, and that data can get added when we have a use for it.
Of course you might say, that a system without X whatever that is can’t be launched cause getting Xs later will be too expensive, hard, annoying or whatever. Well then you do pull Xs into cut one or two or whatever. But mostly those reasons are not true when they are analyzed carefully enough.
ED suggests that you will have to go back and rework things. You will have to do redos on parts of the system. Yes you will. And when that happens the redoing needs careful attention so that the reworked system is whole and entire and sound. If each extension is carried out as a patch, then at the end you will end up with a horrible patched together botch of a system. But if each part that is added is added to a whole and the whole is reworked and refactored to make it consistent and complete then you end up with a superior system.
Refactoring and Test Driven Development make lots of the process of extending and adding to the system simpler and less risky than these activities used to be. TDD is one of the cornerstones of making ED and its agile brethren work.
So there it is, my new philosophy.
Do Enough Design, just enough so that you can build a part of the system, when you have built enough parts of the system that it works, then keep iterating through the system.
Each iteration extends the skeleton fleshing it out, adds new features and generally builds the system so that it works better than it did before.
Each build part starts with ED and then adding to the existing system.
This philosophy of ED is not a design philosophy as such, its a project management philosophy. Its about saying that getting finished is more important than having every feature ticked. Its about saying how to eat the chocolate elephant, one designed bite at a time. Its about doing the minimum thing that will let you do the next minimum thing and only adding to the minimum when its needed, not when its thought of.

Why Ruby on Rails is so Fast

OK so I have been working on a Ruby on Rails project for a while. All things in rails can be done in no time at all according to all the fan-boys. This is true. Its completely true. Provided that you take the measurement of no time at all from the right place.
So you read the extensive well written Ruby books. Well that takes no time at all because there are no well written Ruby books. There are books; they are out of date, or just plain weird, or so badly written that going off and reading post-office regulations on the carriage of perishables between outlying islands in Norway is a pleasure So reading the books takes you no time at all.
Then you decide, well, if I cant get value from the books I will read the documentation. If a room full of monkeys with typewriters can write the works of Shakespeare then my cat on crack can write the Rails documentation. You know what; ever since I have been reading the rails docco I have been looking at my cat and wondering where it gets the money for crack from.
Seriously the documentation on Rails is terrible. It is the canonical example of piss poor fan boy generated tosh. So much so that some serious rails guys started to beg the users for money to pay a real writer to develop some documentation.
So there are no good books, there is worthless, incomplete, and wrong documentation so where do you learn. Well you have two choices. Lean Ruby well and read all the source or go to web and hope you find what you want.
So here I am trying to do something or other. I have googled until my fingers bleed, read all the half arsed blogs out there, read the PCP inspired tosh called the Active* documentation and then I have given up and read the source.
Now I have a working test and my code works. Cause I am a good little TDDer and so I run my tests through rake just to make sure everything passes. Eyes bleeding I look at logs that have crapped all over the screen vainly scanning for a little line of dots and some magic words saying my tests have passed.
Of course I would like a good coverage tool, or some tools to measure the code complexity or tools to do automated builds like CruiseControl or AntHill. There are none of these tools, they don’t exist for rails for a variety of reasons. Most of the tools to examine Ruby code don’t work well because the parse trees out of Ruby are in a word ordinary. The automated tools for project management will come in a few years.
Hell who knows in a few years we may stop using edlin for Rails or TextMate and actually have an IDE. Starting I break out of my fantasy and drag myself back to my tests
Anyway I was looking for a little line of dots indicating my tests have passed, I find them. So now after most of the day has been wasted I turn on the timer and point happily to the 10 lines of code I have written. Look iI say rails is really, really fast.
Tomorrow I will do something else in RoR and I will be fast. The day after that we will release our huge application and ....

Behold.

The President is a colossus he bestrides the world, as much an Emperor as Nero or Casear, like them he is the commander of the mightiest army in the world. Unlike them he dodged his military service and hasn't yet successfully expanded his empire.

The US is the worlds only imperial power. It holds for itself the right to go where it want when it wants and its absolutely unconcerned with who or what gets hurt along the way. The US has invaded a multitude of countries in the last 100 years, Argentina, Chile, Hawaii, Nicaragua, China, Puerto Rico, Samoa, Honduras, Dominican Republic, Russia, El Salvador, Iran, Grenada, Libya, Serbia, Bosnia, Mexico, Philippines, Vietnam, Korea, Laos, Cambodia, Haiti, Panama, Iraq, and I leave out any countries touched during the first and second world wars. Along the way its made some special rules up for itself. America is one of the few countries not to acknowledge the International Courts or to see its soldiers prosecuted by them.

Bush along with some vassal states decided to control Middle East Oil. There wasn't in the modern world much stomach for a free sovereign nation invading another free and sovereign nation. No problem; like many potentates before him he and his henchman just made stuff up. WMDs were supposedly parked here there and everywhere in Iraq, except of course they weren't.

Sadam was supposed to be able to launch a bio-terror weapon with 45 minutes notice. Strangely the entire Iraq army barley managed a weapon of any kind in the short brutal and one sided war waged by the Americans and the two vassal Barons Tiny Tony of Britain and Timid Howard of Australia.

Since that short assured victory nothing much has gone right, the Iraqis having put up with the boorish Coalition of the Willing for a while got organised and decided to kick them out.

Who knows it might have been the destruction of Iraq, it might have been the torture, it might be the kidnappings, the secret rendition to 3rd party and country torturers, the rapes, the murders. It could just be that like any country people desire their own destiny and don't like being occupied.

If America is an imperial power, the scurrying camp followers must be vassals. Some like Australia are the ultimate vassal willing going where their lord says to go. Ours is the mendacious role of the bullies sidekick. Not really part of the bulling we hope, but nevertheless there when the unpopular are held down and kicked. We might not be bullies and murders and the rest, but we are right there cheering them on.

So Iraq leaves the generals scratching and the White House changing its tune. It seems its all down to Baron Howard the Man of Steel. He won't cut and run, with him we will stay the course. Stand firm with the torturers, hold fast with murders and rapists, stand by, eyes on the prize while Iraqis die. Its pathetic really that all the vassal Baron can offer is the reheated words of his Emperor, while actually doing nothing.

Where is the morality in that position, we are actively aligned and part of the party that is harming Iraq. The Coalition is the problem that is killing people in their hundreds every day. All our prime minister can offer up is empty sloganering.

We must leave Iraq, now! Today! There is not a moment to loose, and if our allies don't like it, then suggest we don't like torture, We don't like kidnapping. We unlike they realize that law is a good thing and we belatedly will uphold it. And if they don't like a junior partner pointing out the error of their ways, remind them of one of their founding documents. The Declaration of Independence of the United States. Its a good read, and its reprinted here. I have added a little emphasis.

All o fthings that I have highlighted are happening in Iraq now. The very things that the Americans founded their country, and started a war of independnce over are the exact same things that America is now doing to another subjegated people

Pier to Pub the Saga of the entry system

The Saga

Well it was a simple idea, the shaved one was to check the payment gateway. The payment gateway is the service that we use to make our credit card transactions and for sake of protecting the innocent and blaming the guilty we will call this company Lytchgate because that’s not their name.
Our system works like this
1) The customer enter their details and agree to the legals
2) We dial up Lytchgate using SSH
3) They reply with a URL which we forward the customer to
4) The customer does their credit card transaction and all is well

So the shaved one hadn’t contacted Lytchgate so we did that the night before go live. Sadly Lytchgate had upgraded from SSH1 to SSH2 and our software didn’t speak SSH2. Rewrite time! Of course we had to delay. It would have been nice if in the one year we hadn’t used them they Lutchgate had contacted us, but that is not their way, apparently. It would have been good to know that the entire gateway used a new protocol, port, url and security key. But Lytchgate didn’t tell us. The chumps.

When we had the software in place we found that Lytchgate had some other changes, a new URL simple, and a new port to go to. Why you might ask don’t they use port 22 the standard open SSH port. Who knows, maybe they worry about hackers, or some such. Instead they use the super secret 22022 I know this cause NMAP told me so.

So we had to get our hosts to open up 22022 for us.

Finally all was done, we had a working SSH2 and we could do transactions. We opened the system on Melbourne Cup day and everything went swimmingly (pun intended). We process 1000 entries with no worries at all.

Then terrible Wednesday happened. On terrible Wednesday the system got so overloaded that no-one could log in, the system went to shit, my phone started to ring, and ring, and ring. It was all a bit horrific.

In the logs I could see that the SSH server was hanging up on 40% or more of the SSH2 connections before they even connected. I logged a support call at 9:30am. NOTHING HAPPENED. My phone kept ringing. I logged a support call again at 3:30pm and still nothing happened, Lynchgate didn’t get back to me. I had asked them to call em via SMS or email as I was not answering my phone anymore there being nothing I could tell frustrated and unhappy swimmers. And then around 4:10pm the system came alive, and became responsive.

I tried putting through a transaction and it stopped, at the payment gateway, I wondered what was going on so again I called, emailed and SMS’d Lytchgate to get a response.

Finally at 5:30 I got a response. It seems that Lytchgate had realised that they had an SSH problem, like duh, I told them we had SSH issues at 9:30. They had worked out that we were the cause of the problem. Their solution was to block us at the firewall.

The effect was that our customers could register but not pay. Way to go Lytchgate. Turn an atrocious user experience into a worse one.

In talking with the Lytchgate tech, it turned out we had taken their system off the air, it had kernel paniced and had taken out others of their customers. From this conversation I also learned that Lythcgate had a single box running the gateway and no way of scaling it. Terrific, we had effectively DOSed their box.

I had seen instability like this in the surf clubs system in one previous year and had put in lots of work to find and fix what I had thought was a threading problem on my side. Turns out the problem was Lytchgate and a slow and unscalable box. Yay, what to do.

After some thinking I realised this is what was happening

1) The customer dials in to Lytchgate and its slow, 10-20 seconds minimum.
2) The customer gets annoyed and hits the button again.

But wait its worse than that in step 1 our code has a retry loop, so instead of timing out after 1 attempt it might be after 5. The result the thread started in step 1 might not come back for 40-80 seconds. An impatient customer clicking away could easily use up a number of threads, We have the server set up with 400 and it was obvious we had thread starvation issues. This was why our system became unusable.

What was worse for us, was that Lytchgate could not necessarily dial back into our system, and so it was possible that someone had paid and not been marked off. I need a reconciliation file from Lytchgate ASAP.

So we were DOSing Lytchgate and they were DOSing us. Mutually assured DOSing. Fantastic!

My solution was threefold. Check our new SSH code, which the shaved one did in a few short hours. Make it so that the button could get clicked only once. Remove the retry code. In the end we had a solution where as soon as the button to go to Lytchgate was clicked it disabled itself, it then hid itself and replaced the button block with some dancing baloney and a wait wait wait message.

In the mean time Lytchgate did some stuff and moved us to yet another port, presumably to make us easy to shut down.

So we went back to our hosts and got some more firewalling done

So the system came up again on Saturday and promptly and straightforwardly processed 2,000 transactions over the weekend and another 1,100 on the Monday.

So the lessons learned are
1) Have a better test program to really load the suppliers card processing system.
2) Have a supplier that understands customer service. ie tell you when they change stuff, respond to customer calls etc etc.

Lytchgate’s customer service sucks.
4 days after the Wednesday meltdown and after repeated emails and telephone calls I finally got a reconciliation file from them.

The upshot was that in 8 elapsed days we sold all the tickets we had to sell. It only took 4 actual days to sell, and had our supplier been up to the job it would have gone flawlessly. Next year Lytchgate will be nowhere near our system.

Elections, Macbooks, and whining

So here I am on the couch blogging about the election. I am using my new Mac Book Pro with the Intel Core Duo chip. Its a nice machine, until it gets too hot and then it turns on the vacuum cleaner inside and the emits an annoying high pitched whine. Oddly just as I typed this the fan kicked in and we are now in whine mode. Once in whine mode it never seems to stop unless you close the lid.

Anyway apart from the whining of the Mac Book Pro owner about the whining of the Mac Book Pro the election is progressing. Labour is looking good to take the election, but the first big swing of the night has come in and that favors the Liberals.

Both party mouth-pieces Doyle for the Liberals, and Brumby for Labour, spin each result depending on how the result turns. It reminds me of why I don’t like politicians, they don’t talk straight and they don’t tell it like the rest of us see it.

Then in the midst of spin we see Russell Savage independent for Mildura , two booths counted and he is assuming based on the swings that he has lost the seat and he says so. Nice to see someone so straight talking in politics.

At this early stage there is a 4 seat swing against labor but the night is yet young. There seems to be some agreement between the pollies on a seat by seat basis. But of course there is the incomparable Anthony Green with his statistics, graphs and analysis cuts through the hype to give an unequivocal statistical analysis.

Its been half an hour and the MacBook is still whining, close the lid and it stops, open the lid and it will stay off whining for a while. 20 minutes one time 15 another, 30 on a third. It seems like the software lets the macbook get quite hot then agressivly cools it for a long time, or the software is broken.

So its looking like the Green shave won the seat of Melbourne. Fantastic, if only they could win a few more. That at this point is not looking likely. They have 10% of the total vote but looks like they get exactly one seat. The upper house is wait and see.

No one is exactly throwing in the towel yet, but it seems that Labor has won the election again, albeit with a smaller majority. It remains to be seen, what happens in the upper house, the polls have predicted a close race.

We wait and wait who knows what we will get as a parliament.

A little later the smoke has cleared, the battle field has been won, and the winner is labor with a swing against it of around 1%. Its a brilliant result for the incumbent, everyone had thought that the liberals would do better than they have, and its a terrible result for Victoria. Governments with huge majorities generally don’t govern for anyone except themselves. a slender majority helps keep them honest.

And the greens, it looks like they might have one one upper house seat, and no lower house seats.

Why Harry Potter is on CSI

So I am watching Harry Potter and I realize what I don’t like about all the movies. Its a computer world, a mechanistic world utter some fake Latin and the baddy is vanquished. Its a ruled world, a world of good that’s Harry and his teachers and bad, all outside the magical sphere of Hogwart’s.

And its such a sad sad world, its ersatz certainties are so unlike the real world. The world where everyone you meet could be good or bad, where teachers are not pure souls full of pedagogical certainly and goodness but may harbor sad desires or darker hearts.

In short its an uncomplicated world albeit one filled with slim magical things, beautifully imaged but sadly drawing on the paucity of J K Rowlings imagination.

And then this vein of thinking gets me to realizing what I don’t like about most television. It wants to have a position, a moral position, a certainly. It always presents us with simple morality tales. The CSI people are all good and their opponents are all bad. Queue 45 minutes of machines that know all and its done. Evil locked up CSI people boasting. And it goes on cop show after cop show. Good wins and evil looses. Thankfully there is sport, where the outcome is uncertain, in spite of the banality of the commentary there is something real, an uncertainty Sport in all the circumscribed glory that is sport is more real than most shows that are on tele. Its sad when Ritchie Buenaud is more real than any actor in any play that is on the box.

What I want is moral ambiguity, uncertainly, imagination and possibility. There are the things that exist in the world, and I want them reflected in my stories. Oh that and humor.

Why imagine the supernatural, or the magical when there is nothing more horrific than the human, nothing more evil or darker. Why do we need dejins or devils when there are Stalins, or Bushes in the world. When people think they can make simple certainties of the broad sweep of the human cloth. Then and only then will the rouges, the power crazed the monsters in our midst show themselves. Then the small and the mean and the dangerous will reveal themselves.

Our leaders not courageous to borrow a line from Peter Garret, are the ones who want to tell us a CSI like story, filled with simple certainties, clear ideas of winners and losers. These tellers of tales are the true evil, they are the cowards; whispering in our ears “its simple believe in me and I will see you safe”.

The worlds not like that, it’s hard and complex and requires us to think, anyone who tells you not to, is up to no good, or a magician and they are always uncertain for us to discern.

Attached to Hydrocarbons floppy tit.

We are all attached to hydrocarbons bitter tit and Howard is our crapulous wet nurse. He consulting the oracles or at least looking at the polls, the PM saw, his power slipping, maybe, the people are unhappy about the price of fuel. So from his ermine robes he dispenses indulgences. You too can upgrade your carriage to run on LPG.
Does this really make any sense beyond the need to responsive to the polls. An average car costs 3-4 thousand to convert which will drop to 1-2 thousand under the plan. The ROI of $2,000 depends largely on the amount that is travelled each year. At 20k per year the ROI is 1.5 years. at 5k per year, typical commuting, the ROI is more like 6 years
Overall this plan represents 1.6 billion cost to the economy spread over 8 years.A lot of money to spend to achieve a rather small transfer from one non-renewable to a different non-renewable
The trouble with this plan is that its backward looking. Back to the old certainties of plentiful oil, low prices and boundless supply. We need to look forward. Forward to a world with less oil and what there is is more expensive. Forward to a world where we cooperate more and are less alone in our consumption of resources.
Investing 1.6 billion to stay good in the polls and keep us addicted to our gas guzzling ways is a timid idea, we are poised at a moment of change. A moment for big ideas and new futures.
Yesterdays certainties are giving way to tomorrows terrors and consummate politician that he is, he’s yesterdays man, with last years ides, last centuries morals and last millenniums truths. A renascence man for the hydrocarbon age.
Wheres the plan Prime Minister. Wheres the vision. Wheres a semblance of a clue. Is there a hint of a plan for the future?

Free as in beer

The Market as we all know from listening to all of the freedom loving market boosters is the only mechanism that can reliably sort things out. The free marketers catch phrase is leave it to the market, lets self regulate, the market knows, the wisdom of crowds etc etc.

So lets assume that market does know, and that the market is the most efficient price setting mechanism that there is.

If that is true then why are a group of ‘equity investors’ trying to buy Qantas. Several scenarios present themselves.

1) The market is right and the people investing 7 billion dollars are wrong.
2) The market is wrong and the investors will make money by buying Qantas, and doing whatever then selling and making a buck.

The argument could possibly be made that under public ownership ie the share market the management of Qantas can’t do what private owners of Qantas could. This might be true if we thought that there were regulatory constraints that don’t exist under private ownership. Its an argument that has some validity for smaller non diversified companies but Qantas is a large diversified company with many parts the public private debate scarcely applies.

So either the money men are making a mistake or the market is in fact not pricing Qantas at its correct value.

Private equity investors or as they used to be called leveraged buyouts are all the rage. McBank almost exists only to do this kind of deal, and this kind alone. McBank involved in the Qantas deal stands to make around 100 million dollars form the deal.

Lets hear it for the markets, let the free marketers and the boosters of the stock exchange explain it all away.

Nero of the Nuclear Age

Howard' s a cunning bastard.

He sees that the electorate has moved, it believes in global warming and climate change in spite of all Howard’s protestations. So climate change is something the government has to deal with. Howard is of course completely dug in on the view that climate change is not happening and that signing Kyoto is not an option for the government.

Signing Kyoto is an article of faith for the Greens and Labour, and not signing it is an article of faith for the government. Weirdly though the government wants to point out that it is meeting its Kyoto obligations. This is an odd argument, we won’t sign but we will comply.

It’s good though to examine how we comply. Part of the carbon we claim is carbon locked up in the Queensland bush, by stopping clearing of this bush we claim logically that we have reduced emissions by the value of this clearing. But really this is nonsense, we could claim that we are going to set all of the remaining Victorian brown coal fields on fire, and thus claim a benefit for not doing this. Or claim that we are going to build thousands of coal fired stations and claim a benefit for not doing so. Its duplicitous, its a cunning political stunt, and behind the ‘smoke screen’ of the Queensland bush Australia has in fact increased its emissions. In the real carbon into the atmosphere sense we have made the world worse whilst claiming we have reduced emissions.

So back to Howard, he’s dug in and he can’t move. He realizes that the electorate doesn’t believe him anymore on climate change. He has to find a way to move whilst doing sweet fuck all. He rolls out the Nuclear option. Its perfect Howard wedging. Take all the enviro groups that want something done, and give them the option that is the most unpalatable. Whilst the debate about nuclear is going on Howard can sit back and do nothing but occasionally stirring the pot.

In the mean time Australia continues to pollute more and doesn’t move on any of the simple options that could happen right now. Its clever stuff. Howard doesn’t care one whit that no-one in the entire country wants a reactor anywhere near them, cause there are no reactors planned or even planned to be planned anywhere. Certainly not while Howard is anywhere within cooee of Canberra.

But that is not enough, as well as the entirely bogus nuclear option Howard still has to deal with the problem of not signing Kyoto. The answer there is to invent a new Australia brand of environmental called ‘New Kyoto’ which is very clever. Apparently Kyoto is irrelevant, but new Kyoto which is a simple fabrication of the Howard government is the only thing to sign up to. So we can’t sign the existing agreement which 136 countries have already endorsed because we have invented the new and improved agreement. How silly those 136 other countries look, what dupes they should have waited for Australia to invent Kyoto mark II.

If the world and all the developing powerhouses did signup to Kyoto mark II that would indeed be better for the world. But not signing up to the existing agreement obstensively because some major polluters are not part of the agreement is disingenuous. On that logic, I should not save water cause the factory down the road wastes more than I do. If we took that attitude we would do nothing about anything ever. Being a small country we would have to surrender any and all forms of leadership waiting for bigger countries to lead. Its a stupid argument that doesn’t stand up to any sort of analysis. But remember Howard is dug in and he can’t move, so he and his ministers spin out tosh like this.

So on analysis Howard has not changed his climate credentials at all, instead he has engaged in classic politics, floating non options, the nuclear notion, and delaying tactics Kyoto mark II. Its clever, its terrible, and we continue to pollute and bugger the world.

Howard truly the Nero of our times, fiddling whilst the world burns.

No God, no way

Why believe in God, well why. I mean really if God exists then God exists and my belief is irrelevant, my belief won’t make God into existence. And if I don’t believe well God still exists. It’s irrelevant, God and me is an unconnected equation. And if God doesn’t exist, well my not believing doesn’t change things, and if I do believe then God not existing will make my belief an irrelevant stupidity. In short my belief in God and Gods existence are totally totally unconnected. Why should God care anyway,is he insecure.

Now this could be seen as the classic agnostic position, we can’t know can’t be sure. That is not my point at all. What I am saying is my belief is irrelevant. Its a question of science God exists, or does not exist. For the record, I am an atheist. I don’t believe in God, I don’t believe in the possibility of God. And it’s a possibility question, we know that Gods existence is unproved, and so far unprovable, therefore its a question for science, my view is that if there is a God its a low low probability, and I for one would be one of the surprised. I suppose all us atheists would be surprised. Now when I say I don’t believe I really mean that unlike the faithful who know what they know, I am not the opposite but rather unsure of what I know but see no reason that God exists. The question of Gods or any deities existence is unproved and unprovable but its still an open question. The probability is just really really low

Belief in God though doesn’t really mean what it says though, its code. Usually code for a belief in a particular brand of Gods and their intermediaries Priests and Ministers. All the religions are the same, belief in the unknown and give us some cash, we are the intermediaries of the unknown, by the way here are some rules to live by, and oh cash would be good.

And all over the world its true, the godly live in the best paces and have the best stuff. They have rings for us to kiss, bowls for us to fill. Now that doesn’t reject God as such just his acolytes, but hang on these scum, are just like the usual carpet baggers preying on the beliefs of those vulnerable to their snake oil.

In the western tradition we are all supposed to strive to be better, and the religious brotherhood tap into this. Many of us feel that things are hard to explain and therefore there must be something else, something bigger some over arching thing. The boys and girls in the dress up robes tell us this uncertainty is God. And those with an ache that they want to scratch take it in. Believing in cults and rules and weird made up bullshit. And at every step of the way those striving to be better and live better lives are stiffed and stolen from by those in ermine robes.

Want an example, guy fucks his daughter and his wife gets turned into a pillar of salt. Like what? That surly must be code for incest is OK. Yeah yeah I know the story makes no sense and boy am I going to look stupid when a mate glances over his or her shoulder and turns to salt. But as far as I know that doesn’t happen very often. And the Bible and the other holy books are packed with this sort of nonsense from one end to the other. Burning bushes, women having their period being unclean, rules on missing stone or gold tablets.

But I digress, its the god bothers and the people who set themselves up as conduits to salvation that worry me. They apparently through contact with God know things you or I don’t. Is that crazy or what. Lets imagine a deist God, why would he not answer my question just as much as he would the Popes, or the Anglican Archbishop or the local Mufti, or any other brand manager. After all this dude God is all powerful and all knowing. I think he could would and should give me the hint. Odd then that no giant finger came and helped me out whilst I was typing this. It seems that I am the famous straying sheep of biblical parable, but still no words from the wise to guide me back to paths of rightness. It’s a stupid test, but its one you can do at home. Ask a question see what the answer is. Really want proof, try this simple experiment. Write 2 questions on paper each ten times, place them in envelopes and give the two sets to each of 10 friends. Get them to pray and tell you what the answers are, without looking at each envelope. See what the correlation is. Chances are it should be zero. If the correlation is non zero then there is a God. Its simple its repeatable.

Even if fails to prove the existence of God it will most certainly prove that prayer is a waste of time.

Disappointed, ask for a miracle to prove me wrong, I would like to wake up taller, cured of arthritis and not such a fat bastard. God could do that in a twinkling. I am waiting your prayers even as I type this entry. Seem stupid, yes I think so. If God was up to stuff he could fix Palestine or Israel or anywhere else that the US has buggered up. But your prayers and Gods action on my physical characteristics would convince me. Pray away.

God and religion are just a shell game invented to keep the priesthood rich and the poor poor. Invented to keep those in power in power and those out of it out of it.

For all these reasons, I am an atheist.

Devils Bargin

George Bush and his allies have traduced the Geneva convention. They decided that the Geneva convention was an inconvenience to their prosecution of their war. So they invented a whole new category of person. An unperson, that they would store in unprisons after secret rendering of the unpersons through countries that would torture and worse.

The logic for this was that they George and we faced a terrible enemy, unpredictable, cruel and merciless. So cruel in fact that they refused to acknowledge the rules of civilisation and resorted to terror. To fight these terrorists we would do what they did. Abandon the law and make up our own rules. No-one not GW Bush or JW Howard stopped to question that is the complete validation of the terrorists modus operandi. If they abandon the rules of civilisation so will we. And we did, we abandoned them wholesale.

To cover themselves GW and JW invented the concept of a military commission. Now mostly GW doesn’t seem to be able to find his arse with his elbow, so he had help. Dick Cheney and his minions of darkness. JW Howard, probably had nothing more to do with it than cheer-leading loudly form the sidelines. And boy did he and his ministers cheer-lead. They had all of the Guantanmo detainees as the ‘Worst of the Worst’ “Depraved” and on and on.

Unfortunately for GW the fig leaf fell off when the Supreme Court rejected the notion of the Military Commissions and the Bushies had to go back and draft a new set of laws. Basically the same stuff, reheated, splashed with Army green and redeployed.

Then the chickens started coming home to roost, John Winston Howard, Honest John to his enemies and the Man of Steel to his friends was in trouble. 5 years had gone by and Australians had realised that indefinite incarceration without trial was not a fair go. Honest John was trying to find a way out of never never land that he had consigned David Hicks to. He needed a way to get him out of Guantanimo, convict him, and shut him up. And then he has an election to win.

And so the fix was in, suddenly a plea bargain was on the table. Plea bargains in a real legal system can be good. A suspect can elect to take a plea, knowing both the likely possible sentence, the offer on the table and the likely hood of conviction. Hicks knew his possible bargain, but no-one not the prosecution, not this government, not the American government could know his possible sentence, nor could Hicks know the evidence against him, or the standards that that evidence would be held to. Some of the evidence was obtained by coercion, a weasel word for torture. The law he was operating under was being made up day by day. The very day his trial started 2 of his three lawyers were struck out of the proceedings for having no standing. Nice minty fresh new law from the Military Commission process.

So the plea bargain that Hicks was offered, was no possible bargain at all. How could he make a rational decision. No he was offered a way out, he was offered a deal with the devil.

Faced with endless dentition and no possible way of weighing up the future likely outcome, Hicks did the sensible thing. He pleaded guilty. Was he, well of course the short answer is yes. But if I were in his situation I would plead guilty too. Who wouldn’t?

In this situation a plea bargain is no bargain at all its is a pact with the Devil, a way out of the endless light of Guatanimo night, a way forward, a possibility of certainty. So is Hicks guilty, or did he lie his way out of prison. Honest John of course will be claiming Guilty Guilty Guilty.

And the fix is in, Hicks will be free, sort of, gagged by the government, just until Honest John has his real moment of truth with the Australian public.

I have a prediction for the future, the Military Commissions and their convictions will be overturned, Guatiniomo will close and the American’s will wake from their long nightmare. they will move slowly back to the great people that they are. How JW Howard will follow or if he will still be around to follow will be harder to tell.

And Hicks, well at least he will be out of the hell of Guatinmo, and always we will wonder, what was he, what is he. But ultimately he will not be guilty any longer.

World class talk feast

Thanks a lot Senator. You got up in the senate yesterday and said “A broadband network for all Australians” and then of course a snide reference to the opposition. Yippie I thought, 40 megabit sounds great, that is going to kick my ADSL 2+ 1.5 megabit in the kester. When will it get delivered. It turns out the answer if like me you live in a city is when hell freezes over. What city people get is a talk feast. That’s right, if you live in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne Adelaide ,Perth, Newcastle, Gold Coast,Canberra, Wollongong, Sunshine Coast, or Hobart in other words if you are one of the 11 largest population centres that between them have 14 million Australians you get a talk feast. So the other 7 million give or take Australians, the Battlers in the Bush will have a billion dollars lavished on them to give them “world class services” whilst the vast majority get bubpkiss.

Lets leave aside for the moment weather Wimax will in fact deliver "world class service"

The talk feast is supposed to figure out which metropolitan options are the best, and how they can be delivered. The panel will have Treasury head honcho Don Henry and ACCC Peter Samuels which seems to be stacking the deck against Telstra from the get go. The likely bidders for any system are Telstra who already have a copper network, the Gang of 9 who want the copper network and to break Telstra’s monopoly and as always MacBank and probably a few other equity players. This has all the hall marks of a great deal of time spent talking then talking through the courts and then finally a whole lot of something been delivered no time soon.

Its ironic that a government that until a couple of weeks ago was assuring us that we had the best services in the world. Yeah I am on ADSL 2+ 1.5 megabit down. That is a long long way short of 12 megabit, and its not event in the same postcode as 40 megabit. So now we have given ourselves courtesy of the Labor Party a working definition of broadband, minimum 12 megabit and an ideal 40 megabit. These numbers make the ministers claim that Australians have world class services look stupid. I have got the best that is available for a domestic consumer and it is only 12.5 percent of broadband minimum. So maybe what the minister meant to say was that some lucky consumers in ideally equipped exchanges, in major metro areas have 12% of work class. Of course that other alternative is that the minister is operating without a clue.

The government has at last after 11 years in office got its head out of its ideology and started to get services happening, for that it should be applauded. 11 years is a long while to wait whilst it sold Telstra and chanted the haunting mantra ‘the market’, ‘the market’ whilst rocking backwards and forwards like some bunch of new age hippies. But now finally cause they might loose an election they have moved. This is great. Australia absolutely needs a high speed broadband network. Its the next great piece of infrastructure.

Then we find that the ideology is still buggering things up. The Bush part of Howard’s perceived rusted on voters are getting looked after, the rest of us are getting ‘The Market’, “The Market” and more mandarins and their puppet masters rocking backwards and forwards with beatific grins on their faces.

So the Labour party came out with a plan for a national fibre network what was to cover 98% of the country and the government has come out with t plan to talk about a network for 66% of the country and a plan to delivery an unproved wireless technology for the remaining 33%.

Some fairly grand claims are being made for WiMax. WiMax as used in France by Altitude Telecom achieved 10 Mbits over 10kms which fell as the path was obstructed. A typical cell is able to deliver 30 megabits download for 1 person, 2 people downloading simultaneously will get 15 megabit and so on, as all share the available 30 megabits of bandwidth. These numbers don’t even look to be in the 12-40 megabit range. This look like anyone who is within about 8km line of site will get reasonable rates in the 5-10 megabit range which will fall off as the distance increases down to dial up at 20km.

So in summary, the bush get internet lite, the rest of us get more talking.

I might just go and chant the market, the market at my router maybe that twill make it world class.

A little something in my pocket

The last few days I have felt something, I wasn’t sure what it was at first and I put it down to nerves from one too many coffees. I put it from my mind and got on with the business of life. Coming home I checked my mail and was stunned to find a second letter from the Prime Minister.

The first one was a hoot, it was all about drugs, not the dangerous ones like tobacco that kills every time you use it, or alcohol that is the leading killer drug in our society. No this was a be alert but not alarmed type warning to parents about all the drugs the government doesn’t tax. And why was the Prime Minister sending this to me. This was a health message. Was the Heath Minister Tony Abbot on holiday, Why was the Prime Minister writing to me. I was confused, and then there was that funny feeling again. Something was moving in my pocket.

The second letter from the PM was again alerting us to the evils the beset our society and what the Government was doing about it. Apparently not having a communications Minster, perhaps Helen Coonan was on holiday with Tony. Basically the advice was that the internet might come and strangle our kids or something. Once it calmed down a bit the PMs advice wasn’t that bad. Of course it be a lot better if I actually had kids. But I suppose I can be alarmed that kids are being targeted by people on the internet and that some 72% of children had put a photo of themselves online. Oh the horror.

And there was that feeling again, a hand in my pocket rooting around for something. I ignored it there could be no hand in my pocket. So I settled down for a long night in front of the box, and this is what I saw.

• A campaign against violence against women

• Being alert about the net, TV and a letter from the PM

• I learned that the government was doing lots about climate change. Price tag 23 million Of course GetUp has a wonderfully succinct reply to this

• A children not taking drugs campaign, Another letter

• A new citizenship test. Apparently its very important that migrants should know the part the mighty wattle plays in the Australian mythology.

• Changing the name of WorkPlaces to something else Cost 10 million and counting.

• Look out there is a terrorist about Cost 15 million

• Some chick that pretends she cares about my workplace contract. There are a whole department that doesn’t do much except tell us what they are going to do, check my contract and nix it if its no good.

• Helen Coonan letter boxing the bush with her wacky wireless rollout

• More Money for pensioners

• Know where you stand, adds for employers and employees about the new workplace laws

• Adds about Equine Influenza

• Nurses

• Cancer sufferers

• Innovation Australia

• Gardening, weeding out weeds

• God where will it end

And each and every time I felt that feeling again, something in my pocket. At first I thought it was the government rooting round for some more cash for its election campaign advertising. But I realized that that is not what the unseen hand was looking for. It wasn’t cash. The dead hand of the government wanted my vote.

Guess what, trying to steal it using government funded adds is not the way to get it.

When does it stop, the government is blitzing us with adds. Adds that are supposed to inform the public but appear to be nothing more than party political advertising for the Liberal party.

Its not like this is cheap either, the government, under the auspices of the are spending tens, or hundreds of millions of dollars. One estimate is 175 million for this year alone. Thats an appalling amount of dipping into our collective pockets for its own political purposes.

Gifts, and horses mouths

Its the economy stupid

Lets do a little thought experiment.

Say I offered you two choices, in choice one you would be offered good health, safety and personal security. A good education for your kids and when they went into the work force good working conditions. If something bad did happen, like an accident or sickness then you or your family would be looked after.

In choice 2 I give you 10 million dollars and you do what you like.

Most people I know choose from box one.

Or put simply do we have a debate around how Australia will be lead based on the economy and economic outcomes or do we have the debate centred around quality society.

People seem to confuse these tow arms of the debate, certainly economics can talk to and about quality of life. The trouble is that excessive focus on the numbers, on the minutiae of the economic debate obscures the bigger picture. What do we want from our society.

So taking some of my broad points.

Education

We are all better off when everyone is well educated. The more I am surrounded by clever and well educated people the better off we all are. Countless negative outcomes, are most primarily linked to poor education. Health, drug taking, life choices are all good examples. Universal free quality education is or should be the target of all governments. Under the current government we have the weird policy of giving more cash to rich schools on the basis of equality, that is each child should receive the same input from the state. Interesting but if our idea was for a "Universal free quality education" surly we would be allocating funds based on need. Poorly performing students or schools would have more spent on them so as to raise the standards of the whole, rather than to further improve the already well off.

The education debate is often framed in the divisions between States and Federal and this is captured in the phrase 'buck parsing between the states and Canberra'. Buck passing though is code, code for an economic view of the problem. In short a focus on who pays, not on outcomes. Restate the problem as an outcome 'Universal free quality education' and the issue of who pays becomes much less interesting. Much more interesting are questions like how do we lift the worse off. How free is education and so on.

Health

Health is a second area where responsibility is shared among different tiers of government. Again the buck parsing argument is used. Again we see the current government finding lots of ways of privatising health. Health is specifically taxed, persuading, or forcing people into buying health insurance, as a tax avoidance measure. This despite there being little evidence that insurance at the individual level is the most efficient way of ensuring good health outcomes for all. If you look at Michael Moores latest film Sicko it strongly argues the exact opposite. Insurance too has its problems as it focuses so much on fixing what is broken rather than preventing breakage in the first place.

Now some of what I am arguing for sounds like a type of socialist nivarna. I don't think this is true. I am arguing form he most selfish and self centred grounds possible.

Health people are better to be around than sick people, healthy societies are better to be in the less healthy. So if everyone is as healthy as they can be then I am better off. Same goes for education. I am better off if they ignorant don't exist. If the general level of education and sophistication of society are as high as they can be.

Security

We all want to be secure, secure in our homes, our jobs, our lives and of those that we hold near and dear. Governments that run off for adventurous probably illegal wars against nebulous enemies don't make us safer. Governments that deny climate change don't make us safer, they expose us to huge upside risk . For this government it seems to be about ideology not science. Governments that make all our jobs subject to complex legal tests don't make us safer. Governments that sell uranium to nuclear capable countries don't make us safer. And arguing that the fissile material is quarantined for civilian purposes is just a silly nonsense. That just allows the bomb makers to use material that would otherwise be used for civilian purposes to be used for war. Governments that introduce internment without trial, preventative detention, who deny people access to the process of the law don't make us safer. Ask Cornellia Rau if you don't believe me.

In all of these things we are told its the market that matters. Well not in my thought experiment it doesn't. Everyone I asked in my highly unscientific sample opted for box one health safety and happiness, none wanted the 10 million.

What the Howard government is offering us in this election is a choice. A little bit of 10 million as a tax cut. A robust economy, a glowing bottom line. They have nothing to say about health, education, safety and happiness. These are budget line items that are missing from the economies balance sheet.

Leadership, oportunity, threat

I have a hopeful dystopian view of the future. My dystopia is all around climate, transport and industry. We have reached peak oil and oil in response has reached or will soon reach $100.00 dollars a barrel. All sorts of explanations are offered for the price rises but the most likely cause is hitting the peak, increased demand and decreasing supply.

Rising oil prices are already starting their first impacts on the way that we live. People are taking to public transport in droves. In Melbourne the numbers have been steadily rising, even though it is difficult to find actual government numbers. The government has recently ordered 8 new trains to increase the existing network. Trains and trams are packed, sparking news reports and passenger complaints.

Add to the rising cost of fuel, climate change. Many of the alternatives to oil like coal are readily available and proven world reserves could power us into the next millennium. The trouble is that coal is a major producer of green house gasses. Partly this explains the emphasis on clean coal. An intriguing idea where the pollution from coal is cleaned and its CO2 captured and stored. Whilst the idea is intriguing it is unproven on any scale other than the lab. That has not stopped our politicians from championing it.

Climate change is going to have a major effect on the way we live. If the world can get its act together and reduce CO2 levels to 1990 levels we may be able to ride out climate change. In my view this is unlikely. Australia under either tweddle dum or tweddle dee of politics has no real plan for climate change. Both are offering soft aspiration goals. Goals set conveniently in the distant political future. 2020 is infinitely far in the future in 2007 political terms. In fact dum, or is it dee doesn’t even believe in climate change. Both are locked into some sort of Mexican crazy stand-off whereby they argue that Australia shouldn’t do anything until some other country does. Trouble is most industrialised countries are using some version of this argument.

It seems unlikely that our leaderless politicians will do anything until its too late and too expensive.

So my gloomy dystopian future involves massive upheaval from every increasing fuel prices. Major impacts from climate change and no political leadership on either issue.

So why am I hopeful?

With big change comes big opportunity. Increasing fuel prices means we will have to change our single person sitting in a car tooling down the freeway ways. There are a myriad of ways that this could be worked on. Telecomuting, car pooling via the internet. Intermediate offices where people move to offices some days a week and telecommute from there. Public transport aided by the internet using a priority booking system. Shared taxis. Improved public transport, better support for bicycles. Hybrid bikes using muscles and electricity. Changes to mass transit with more trains and trams. Improved bus network. There are lot and lots of possibilities

Some like major infrastructure of trains and trams will require political leadership. Others require better infrastructure like decent broadband. Broadband that the useless fools who run the country and the equally contemptible buffoons that run Telstra have failed at miserably.

Climate change has many perils but also multiple opportunities. if the worst happens and it probably will given the way we are lead. The worst may mean mass migration, rising sea levels. Property boundaries redrawn, cities changed. Whilst all these things can lead to great hardship, they also can lead to great opportunity.

Alternate energy hitherto barley touched on in Australia present a myriad f possibilities both in ideas and investments. Victoria has barely been able to build a windmill so vociferous are the rural NIMBs. This is just a simple exampel of the challenges that will face governments and developers. But change we will need to.

Our leaders like big complex and expensive solutions, can anyone say desal plant.. I prefer smaller simple solutions. Recycling water, catching it in rain tanks before it hits the ground. Regaining water from sewerage, separating out the lightly soiled from the heavily soiled early on so that the recycling process can be cheaper. Grey water and so on.

All little things, acting local, whilst thing big thoughts.

All these things will need competent capable leadership, and that surly is the biggest opportunity of all.