I have been going to do a write up on this for a while and having digested all the documents from the Coalitions policy I think now is a good time to do it.

The Coalition has now presented a full policy on how they will handle the NBN if they win the election later this year. This involves moving from a full fibre to the premises (FTTP) rollout, to a Fibre to the node Rollout (FTTN) and using the existing hybrid-fibre Coax networks owned by Optus and Telstra as well as the current wireless and satellite options being rolled out by NBN Co.

Using this mix of technologies the Coalition aims to deliver there version of the NBN by 2019 at a cost of $20.4Bil compared to the $37.4 to deliver FTTP by 2021, resulting in the project being finished 2 years sooner and at 54% of the price (assuming both projects go as currently planed) however the cost for the coalitions plan could vary greatly due to some of the assumptions made in there costing such as that “Cost-effective access [to Telstra copper] will be attainable.”

The next most controversial item of these policies raised by Labour NBN supporters is the cost of upgrading a fibre to the node rollout to FTTP later on down the track. The coalitions policy documents references a report on the BT rollout that states the cost of this will be 109% of the cost of rolling out FTTP in the first place, however in the background document goes on to state that this would be cheaper due to the revenues that would earn if the FTTN is in use for as little as 3 years, however  looking at the numbers presented in this document, the longer that FTTN is in use rather then FTTP it appears that the FTTP would end up cheaper due to the lower operating costs ($60 V’s $90 per year according to the coalitions documents)

While there are other points could continue to compare from these policies much of the remainder of the coalition’s policy documents deal with a number of assumptions in order to make the Labour NBN seem to be costing more, going slower, or otherwise generally worse then the documents being presented by NBN Co, I could do similar things to the Coalitions policy however I think this would be unproductive.

So having considered the few facts presented in the coalitions plan and compared them with the current documents from NBN Co based on the Labour policy it is my opinion that changing the nature of the rollout of this project would not result in a materially cheaper (noting the costs that have not been factored in to the coalition project) or faster (noting the minimal time that has been allocated to complete all the contract renegotiations) completion of the project than that being currently build by the Labour government, and would then require upgrading at a later date as the remaining copper cabling that this policy relies on degrades past the point of acceptability for purpose (as it already is in some areas as presented by anecdotal evidence) so why not continue with the current rollout and get the project completed correctly the first time

Over the last 6 months I have been Participating in the SCA as a heavy fighter, recreating pre 17th century knightly combat. One faction of this I have noticed is a tendency for people to focus on the sport aspects of Heavy fighting rather then the recreation aspects, with many people opting for minimal armor or close to it within our rule set. I find my self rather opposed to these noting that the SCA is dedicated to recreating all aspects of life in pre 17th century.

When asking people why they chose to wear minimal armor you will receive many responses ranging from “It’s to heavy”, to “I don’t get hit there anyway”, my personal opinion is that neither of these,  or the plethora of similar reasons, truly make sense in the context of what we are attempting to achieve. By removing the weight and movement restrictions that wearing armor provides you are no longer attempting to participate in chivalric combat but in a sport that is only loosely based upon combat from this time period, as part of how and why things where done is due to the armor that was being worn by combatants.

On the other side of this argument is people who wear plenty of armor, however use modern substitutes (like zoombang, or plastic)for parts of there armor, with these I find myself being more sympathetic to there reasoning as much of this is based on improving the durability of there armor as they have found (and I have experienced) that some pieces of armor simply does not last, or gets badly damaged from being regularly hit, and replacing our equipment is not a cheap exercise, however there are a number of people who are going for these modern alternatives for reasons such as those above I find difficult to deal with this, particularly noting that a similar effect can be created with period materials.

So with my rant over with what I don’t like to see I would like to see more people wearing more armor, perhaps not to the amount that I am wearing, but to a standard where they are wearing some form of period armor on most valid target target areas what they may be hit.

Well I have been a bit lasy again putting things up here so I thought its about time I uploaded some more photos.

So I have finaly got around to uploading some photos I took at the 20 twenty big bash last weekend.

enjoy.

12►

I came across an interesting concept the other day of a developer of an open source project who was developing the project “behind the scenes” with out any feedback to the community, now this stuck me as odd while first reading there comments about what they were doing.

What had happened in this case was the developer wasn’t happy with being pushed in any particular direction on there project so they had stopped openly advertising what they were doing on the project, with out stopping other people from using there code, this is where i came up with the concept of Open Source Vs Open development.

When most people think of open source the link these two concepts  of not only having the source code available but also being directly involved in the development cycle of the project through bug reports, submitting code patches etc, and most project this is how they are run, however in this case it was no longer occurring as the developer had no wish to implement new features and was more focused on maintaining it and fixing bugs at there own pace.

my question to you is have you come across a case of open source but not open development? do you think there is a place where this makes sense for a project to be developed with this methodology? or should all open source projects also employ open development?

Well recently I got IPv6 enabled on the VPS that is currently running my mail server, now this I thought would be a great opportunity to start to move into the new generation of IP on my hosting by getting this server enabled. when this was assigned I was interested to note my humble VPS with just 128mb of ran was not allocated a single IP address but a whole subnet that I could use. Now knowing that IPv6 has some 340 trillion trillion trillion unique addresses I wasn’t so surprised by getting more then one address, but my surprise came when I found out how much I was given.

My VPS was assigned 2607:f128:42:d1::2/64 as its IPv6 allocation, now that may not seem to imposing at first glance but a small amount of research and you will see that this allocation contains more IP address space then the ENTIRE ipv4 address space, this makes me wonder why this is the case, and why the MINIMUM allocation any of the regional address providers will give out to an organization is a /32 block, this seems wasteful and unnecessary.

Now I understand that IPv6 has been designed so there are far more addresses then we will ever use but is that a reason to waste them like this so early in its adoption. as was the case with ipv4 where early in its life cycle large blocks were handed out to the point where we now see that things like NAT are required to keep even a portion of the address space available for use.

Would it not be more prudent to give a single server a much smaller allocation of ip addresses (perhaps just 1 even?) rather then taking such a huge chunk out of the address pool we have seen the effect this has had on IPV4 with some organizations being given entire /8 blocks of address space early in its life cycle (although some have since been returned for reallocation).

Now this may never become an issue with the huge address pool available to us through IPv6 but I believe that this should at least be considered before this becomes so wide spread that every IPS and hosting provider in the world is using a /32 and they are running out.

Well I’m sure at the title you are wondering what the hell is that, well muggles read on to find out.

Geocaching is a treasure hunt that anyone can join, all you need is a GPS, a map and some spare time. now your proberly thinking I don’t have maps or a GPS and that sounds expensive to get, but these are much more common than you think, if you have an iPhone or like me an android phone, you already have everything you need. to start hunting for treasure.

In this game you will be hunting for Geocaches, these in the simplest form are a container that has a log in it and usually a writing implement depending on the size (but ill get to that in a moment), these may also contain trade items, that when you discover the cache you can swap for another item of equal or higher value (not putting an item if you take one out in is considered very bad manners) or sometimes track-able items. these come in many varieties but the most common you will come across are Geocoins (a specially minted coin that has a unique tracking code on it to record its movements) and tracking bugs (these are a set of dog tags again with a unique code that can be attached to any item) that are given a mission to achieve by traveling from cache to cache, with its movements logged on each step of the journey

the best part of this is often the locations that you will find while hunting for these caches so its always to have a camera on your to capture your finds 🙂 so if you have the equipment why not give it a go, just go to the website linked at the start of this post and sign up or read more and you could start geocaching now.

Well its been far to long since I put an update on here so just a quick note that I recently bought an Android smart phone, and I must say I am very impressed with it.

I haze also started to tinker wtth the sdk for it and its wonderful easy to you so don’t be surprised I’d you see some little apps appearing on here soon.

Posted from WordPress for Android

well i have let this get a bit neglected over the last couple of months with things happening at home but there hasn’t been many exciting things happen to be honest.

until last week anyway when my wonderful laptop decided it had had enough the died on me leaving me with no PC. so it was time to do some shopping and try to build a computer on a very limited budget that was capable of playing most games, and and upgrade to Win 7 was defiantly in order. and after much searching i ended up going with the following system

AMD athalon x2 255 (3.1ghz)
Asus M4A77TD motherboard
4gb Kingston DDR3 ram
250gb seagate HDD
ECS 1gb nvidia GT240
Acer 23″ LCD monitor

with case power supply and win 7 and so far its been very impressive being able to run the games i have been playing at 1920 x 1080 res fine, particularly for the budget it was build on also allowing a lot of room for upgrades in the future.

In other news I have been doing a bit of game hopping lately after trying WoW (yes I sank that low) I have since started to give Eve online a go and so far I’m finding it much more impressive then wow. with the real time training of your skills and the low requirements to be able to become competitive its easy o get stuck in the the meat of the game after only a few days and while there are some minor grind points to get further in to the game these are in now way required to be successful at any branch of the game. and lastly one my personal favorite points of the game is that your are not stuck to any branch of the game on your character, give enough time you can cover all areas of the game with minimal training or specialize in to a specific area to improve your ability there.

on the home front we have been spending some time starting to get the house ready for when bub arrives.

Its amazing how something so small can have such a huge impact on your life, and now one of theose tiny things is happening in our family with a new addion on the way in october.

for those of you who we haven’t already told Sally and I are expecting a baby in october and already this has begun to cause changes in our lives starting to get the house ready for the bub’s arrival. so things have been a little chaotic as we get use to the idea of being parent’s and make our house ready for bubs arrival, hence the lack of updates that I had planned continuing on the set of posts explaining how I set the site up on my new VPS’s.

would love to keep chatting but i have to get back to getting orginised for the new job and going back to shift work.

Well i have finally finished uploading all of my photos from the trip for you to have a look at.

They can all be seen in the link at the top of the page, i wont link to it here as there was about 6 gallery that i have added to there 🙂

Time to start on something new to put on here 🙂