Plumbing, Plasterers and Traffic Jams

I've been thinking about the internet connectivity problem we have in New Zealand.
I'm not sure actually how bad it is, I know a lot of people are kicking up a fuss and I know personally I've had hours of lost productivity.

I'd be keen to see a simple map (similar to a road map showing SH1 etc and interconnecting routes eg. SH58) of the NZ internet highway. The map should show the speed limits and how many lanes the roads are (i.e. how much traffic throughput the links can stand). I don't really have a clue but expect the make up is a skeleton of fibre that runs the length of the country and links to all the cities off the main back bone. I suspect there are 2 or 3 main backbones owned by Telecom, Telstra and maybe someone else. I'm guessing the fibre goes into all the Telecom owned exchanges and then its copper for the last 0-10 km (for those stuck with ADSL), and those lucky enough to have Telstra Cable get the cable to their front door. I take pity with the rural folk. I know companies like Citylink have fibre that spans the length of the CBD in Wellington and parts of Auckland. Does such a simple map exist? Can someone make one with a simple google map, make it public so people can update it to make sure its accurate.

So on to the current problems..... getting disconnected, getting lag, getting slow download and upload rates. I experienced all of these when I switch back to ADSL last month. Two years ago I quite happily talked on Skype to a friend in Japan while at the same time be remote desktoping into their computer on a 256kb jetstart plan. Getting disconnected 8 times in a day (I had to reconnect using my router control panel) and experiencing massive lag and not being able to talk to someone less than 30km's away on Skype was a bit of an eye opener when I recently had Jetstream turned back on. This is in a house 10 doors up the road from where I used to live, so all the variables had stayed constant. What had changed?

Basic! So we have an overloading problem at the exchanges, its probably easily fixed cause I don't expect the fibre to be overloaded just yet. ADSL2+ is way overdue and their isn't enough equipment in the exchanges. Is this the guts of the problem that would give most of the nation temporary relief? I hope so. Its like deja vu - remember back in 1998 when we all have 20 buck paradise dial up and all of a sudden one day started getting kicked off the net? That was cause of overloading.

How can a startup expect to launch a global business in NZ at the moment with such bad infrastructure? I'd really want to launch a new idea in New Zealand (as the small population would be great for a test market) but my business is flawed without good internet connectivity. How much is this actually costing our economy, just think if the next 700 million dollar gorilla doesn't get off the ground cause it can't be proven in NZ?

To fix the equation there needs to be reliably cheap internet connectivity for the citizens. Online hosted apps make sense but only if we can be guaranteed we can always access those. Its a bit of a frustrating time for web architects, its like being a plumber that creates a master piece in the bathroom but the pipes are leaking everywhere. Just because we can't physically see the water dripping from the T joints with the internet doesn't mean that as a nation we can let this drop. If they can build the bypass through Wellington for a 30 second improvement to get across town then surely they can sort this problem. If the anti smacking bill can get rushed through then surely can't the anti slow internet bill get given some attention?

I'm not into Telecom bashing, they are a commercial operator and their shareholders expect a return on investment. The problem is that the people at Telecom weren't visionary and gutsy enough to lay fibre everywhere. They should have but they didn't. They would have got their return on investment cause there would have been demand. Build a new highway and people will use it, we all know that.

So what to do now? Simple. Get Telecom to tell the nation exactly what the current problem is in simple terms so my mum can understand why she can't talk to me on Skype. I.e is it just a lack of ADSL 2+ exchanges with enough plugs or do we have a problem with fibre links around our nation? Tell the government how much and how long it would take to fix this. The government then decides if it should own the infrastructure or buy a huge chunk of Telecom and invest the funds and let the experts get it sorted in the shortest time period.

I welcome comments, cause I really want to understand the extent of the problem we have. Have I been too simplistic in my thinking? Are there flaws in my assumptions, please let me know.

In case you're wondering about the title, I've covered plumbing and traffic jams. If any knows of any good plasterers then let me know, the cable guy fell through our ceiling when installing cable the other week. Thats right we have a massive whole in our kitchen , living room now. I thought it was pretty funny and sums up the state of the internet in NZ quite nicely at the moment....broken and need of a decent handyman to fix the cracks.

EC2 and S3

Great, the computer industry is famous for its crazy acronyms and now to confuse us all they're chucking numbers in there too.

Thankfully the latest from Amazon, S3 (Simple Storage Service ) and EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) translate to readily understandable names that the rest of us can at first glance get what they're on about.

EC2 has particularly grabbed my attention as it has basically shaken up the hosting market and changed the rules. In the era of Web 2.0 we are now seeing the emergence of sites that are generating high traffic rates straight out of the blocks. This is great, but quite a headache for the two kids that have hijacked their flat or parent's cable plan to run a dedicated server to save costs. The only reason they did this was cause getting a dedicated server was too expensive. Any real geek wants full control of their server so virtual hosting is not an option.

But now with the emergence of EC2 and S3 from Amazon we are seeing that the cost of getting a fully fledged server up and running the way you want it is really cheap.

There are examples floating around on the Net of monthly hosting using EC2 and S3 costing $80US a month for running something pretty decent (lots of traffic), so thats about $NZ105. I think thats pretty awesome, cause a dedicated box in a reliably supported NZ data center is going to set you back at least $500 per month (I said reliably supported).

Founders at Work

Just picked up a pretty cool link from news.ycombinator , with a 40 min video clip of Jessica Livingston from Y Combinator talking about "Founders at Work" at Google.

I've just listened to the first 30 min and can totally relate to the little stories she was highlighting from founders of a heap of startups - those were the days!

Awesome stuff! And for the record, I reckon news.ycombinator has got to be the most interesting news source around. I've been a reader since day 1 and it has the best roundup of stories on the planet.

Its pretty funny, I'm so old school, finally just got hooked on Google Reader - its crazy that I used to trawl the web checking sites for updates. A friend was raving about it a few months ago and I took no notice...ha!

Social lending

I was talking to my new flattie last night and all of a sudden she started talking about web 2.0. Hey wow, that's cool I thought, rather than discussing what was just on Channel E, or the scandals at one of the big 5 multi nationals (which will remain nameless) I might now get a bit of web 2.0 goodness gossip.

Well within 30 seconds she said , "well - what is web 2.0 ?- there is this guy at work that was telling me about it?". Now I was trying to explain what it was when she took over the conversation and said naaa...isn't it about "social stuff" like that social lending site - zopa. Zope what? I said. "Zopa - the UK social lending site". Funny I had never heard of it...sure enough the site is huge and there is a US based take off called Prosper that is backed by decent cash.

The concept is really neat, people lending money to other people and avoiding using banks. Zopa takes a miniscule cut. But say you want to borrow $10,000. Well, there could be 1000 people that pitch in to lend you the money in total - thats kinda cool.

I couldn't believe I hadn't heard of it, and it turned up a blank on the radar which I thought was really odd cause they are the 2.0 originators.

Apparently Zopa have filed for a patent - I'm not sure of the details of what they can actually protect.

Someone should start a similar site here - it has the classic sniff of a "Ebay" type of business that a local hero should and could own. Kiwis are patriotic and with most of our banks being owned by overseas corporations it would be great to see a kiwi flavour to social lending.

I wonder what one would need to do to start such an operation...I'll go and have a look around.

How to start a career

I've been thinking about this alot lately.... what is the best way to start a career for a exceptionally talented and motivated IT student based in New Zealand at the moment?

I've come to the conclusion that there has never been a better time to put "do a startup" at the top of your list. I'm in a good position to comment on this cause I'm 27 and spent the last 5 years of my life doing just that. I jumped into founding a startup straight out of Uni at the ripe age of 22 and have never looked back.

The gap between 20 and 30 for a lot of us is our time of freedom, before we get married and have kids (well thats what my uni teacher told me!). For those of us that get excited by the thought of being an internet pioneer it has never been easier to give it a shot.

The recent house price spiral in NZ means that someone graduating today is going to be light years away from being able to afford a deposit on a house so why not forget about the joys of having a mortgage (if there are any?) and get cracking on that first start-up business.

OK, the odds are stacked against you becoming a millionaire but at least you'll get some runs on the board and learn way more than your peers that take a help desk job.

If you are looking for some motivation then check out the great articles that Paul Graham writes. Paul and a few others started a seed fund for hackers in the US last year called Y Combinator

I'll say it again, I reckon we need a Y Combinator in NZ. The thing I really like about Y Combinator which has been running for a year or so now is that they totally expect some of the ideas to "tank". One of the companies that got squashed, has just had its founders start another business which is now flying and is really cool!

I'd say the big difference between old tech startups and web 2.0 startups is the "time to fly". There seems to be a growing perception that 3 months is enough time to hack something together and go live. I'd agree with this, my first startup took 3 months of hacking in a bedroom with a friend to bring something great to fruition and that was 5 years ago. So that basically means you only need enough money to survive 3 months to get something going. The benefits of being a part of Y combinator is that you get introduced to all sorts of "angels" during that time and should have a decent amount of momentum at the end of that 3 months which can make a difference if you are broke!

So go do it, start a start-up!

Inside story from Xero

Just came across a great post from Kirk Jackson at Xero. He describes the new server and rich client technologies that will be released from Microsoft and how they may be used at Xero.

Xero is a Wellington based start-up looking to do big things in the Accounting 2.0 space, taking on the likes of MYOB. Xero is lead by local tech hero Rod Drury. Rod did a nice presentation about Interaction Design at the recent Mini Web Stock.

If you haven't heard of Xero then you soon will as Hamish Carter is their relationship man(ager)

Webstock video streams

I missed this event but was really cool to see they recorded all the speakers.
Awesome to see the current buzz in the Wellington internet & software community.

Apollo has landed

Adobe has just released the alpha version of Apollo 1.0 which is a cross operating system runtime that lets you easily install web enabled apps on your desktop that take advantage of HTML, CSS, AJAX, FLASH, FLEX and PDFs. The apps can be easily installed (and updated) on PC and Mac (and I'm guessing Linux pretty soon).

This is Macromedia's third attempt to get a runtime working that allows access to the local file system. Macromedia (prior to Adobe) had two versions of Central which never really got much adoption, they basically only allowed flash support.

One of the cool things about Apollo is the ability to allow apps to continue to work in an offline state pretty easily as there is good network state detection in Apollo.

I guess it is up to us now to build some killer desktop apps that take can now take advantage of the full web developer arsenal.

Time will tell if there are enough benefits to build apps based on the Apollo runtime or whether developers will rather build offline apps using the new features being built into Firefox 3. I don't think the fact that Apollo has access to the local filesystem is a big enough benefit on its own as how much data do you need to cache locally now that mobile broadband has become affordable.

Update - just read the Apollo for Flex Pocket Guide - bloody good overview of Apollo. The one thing that stood out is that Apollo is not a replacement (in a lot of cases) but a complement for your web based apps. I think its pretty cool from the few demos I've seen and can quite easily see that 2.0 versions of traditional office apps will take advantage of the ability to install into your startmenu or dock and get updates.

Really cool Flex components

Really cool to see some Flex developers pushing the envelope. Now we can all download and contribute to these as Flexlib is on Google Code. My favourite is the super tab bar -I'd like anyone try and do that as nicely and elegantly using AJAX.

Separation of Duties

So there are quite a few people comparing AJAX & HTML CSS technologies to Flex & Apollo at the moment.

My opinion is that if you are building a web application that contains content that doesn't need to be Google searchable you should seriously consider using Flex, especially if you are lucky enough to have dedicated developers and designers. There is a good article on Adobe.com that discusses this. It just makes sense, you can totally separate the development of your business logic from the presentation. You have the flexibility to get your analysts and designers on the ball while your developers are elsewhere. Or if the most important requirements are known and your designers are busy you can get your developers going on the business logic before the designers attack the interface.

Ok, so your customers will need to have Flash Player 9, so what, they can download it in 20 seconds and chances are they will already have it with adoption rates going through the roof. Flash Player 9 works within all the main browsers on Win, Mac and Linux.

Now on the other hand, if your content needs to be Google searchable, needs to be easily bookmarkable and doesn't contain state then HTML/CSS/AJAX is probably the better way to go. For sure you can wrestle your way to get bookmarks and state working but its not nice.

I predict we will see a closing of the gap soon as Mozilla starts to play with the donated AVM2 code from Adobe so that apps will be developed in a markup similar to MXML and be compiled at runtime so that content is fully Google searchable.

So its a safe bet investing the time learning to use the Flex platform. To close the door on Flex would be unwise for any software developmement company.

Am I biased? Not at all. I'm currently building websites using HTML+AJAX+JAVA and apps using FLEX+JAVA.

I welcome any comments.

OS becoming irrelevant

People have been predicting for years that operating systems will become irrelevant in the future as most applications go towards being based in a web browser. Finally in 2007, we are starting to see the swing happen ever so slowly.

The french parliament have just announced they are switching to Ubuntu with Open Office.

In my eyes I guess a couple of key things have happened
1) Firefox has given Microsoft a real run for its money. Linux browsers are now just as good
2) Adobe has released Flash Player 9 on Linux.
3)Apple went Intel and VM products like Parallels let you run two os's concurrently.
3) Broadband is becoming more affordable by the day
4)Mobile broadband is becoming faster and more affordable
5)Finally some development companies are starting to make apps work well in browsers

I guess there are a few parts of the equation to go, like running apps offline in your browser. There are a few apps that work ok offline but most break.

Startup 2.0

There is an interesting story in the UK Guardian this morning about startups now seeking smaller amounts of funding because they don't actually need a lot of money to get going. They reckon the activity of new startups in the UK is booming and doesn't look like slowing any time soon.

My favourite startup model is based around the funding given by YCombinator in the US - I reckon we need to get this sort of approach going in New Zealand pronto.

So why not give it a go? I know this is a pretty challenging thought for a Friday but have you considered that doing a startup is a viable first career move.

Skype just created a whole new service industry

Well not quite.... but now I can charge people for calling me over Skype using Skype Prime and it includes video calls. This is awesome and revolutionises how support can be provided for a fee to someone on the otherside of the world....all over the internet. Fantastic! If you think about how you can collaborate over Skype or any other web based tool then you'll see why this is so cool.

In a nut shell, the call is initially free, then the caller decides if they are prepared to pay either the "fixed fee or per minute call out fee" that the person is offering.

You get paid the money via Pay Pal who clip the ticket on the way through with their fees

The real world

It must be pretty exciting being a student in Wellington at the moment as we have a number of internet/software companies doing cool things - definately a lot happening to distract you from actually doing any work.

So how are you going to get noticed by these guys? Well for a start you've got to be good at what you do. There's no better way than just having a crack at something and then tapping a few people on the shoudler. The cool thing about Wellington IT companies is that the people running them are really approachable people. They've all been in your shoes and know what its like at the bottom of the ladder.

So the first company on your list that you should get to know is our local town hero - Trademe. And how are you going to do that? Easy, start reading Rowan Simpson's blog - I've let him know that there's a bunch of 3rd year students at Vic studing ASP.NET that are really keen to push the limits. He's kindly offered to have a go at answering any curly questions we might have.
Trademe is NZ's busiest website and runs on ASP.NET - so completely relevant.

I'll introduce you to some more cool companies each week as we start to ramp things up.

ASP.NET here we come

I'm going to start posting some blog notes on ASP.NET among other things to help you guys (my awesome 3rd year ELCM students at Vic Uni) get familar with the technology really quickly. I'm a firm believer in keeping things simple and we should use this approach when developing web applications.

For those that don't know, Wikipedia is a great way to get a quick (and usually accurate) summary on any word/concept/whatever. So its a great start for getting some knowledge on ASP.NET. ASP was the first server side scripting language I learnt back in 2000. I then switched to the Java camp using JSP and then on to servlets which has done everything I've needed to since. For the last 4 years I've only really built Flash based applications & websites so getting response data in XML format only was the norm. I think using a Service Orientated Architecture is great and separating back end programming from front end development is the way to go..(more on this some other time).

So you'll notice there have been numerous releases of ASP. ASP.NET 2.0 is the current release. I think this course primarily teaches ASP.NET 1.0 using Visual Studio 2003. I'll need to check how we can get you guys using 2.0 ASAP as there is nothing worse that working with outdated technology particularly with server side languages. Those AJAX controls for 2.0 look especially cool. I'll see what I can do.

We can however do remote procedure calls without using AJAX - here's an easy example

AJAX components

I start tutoring a third year ASP.NET course at Vic Uni this week...In my preparation I have been checking out the ASP.NET AJAX control toolkit of GUI components. I'm pretty impressed at the quality of the components which will help with the user experience in developing kick ass HTML web sites.

A few cool things

I came across Parallels for Mac Desktop a while back. They have just included a new feature called "coherence mode" which allows you to run PC apps in the "dock" without the windows desktop showing (of course the full windows os is running under the virtual machine). This is really cool, I guess these guys will do ok for a while during the transition to web based apps that run on any platform.

Now on to future winners....Adobe is about to launch Apollo which is basically Flash 9 apps with offline functionality. We know that Firefox is going to include offline functionality in the future but my guess is that Apollo will be quite distruptive for a while - it should be launching pretty soon.

Virtual Ubiquity have been lucky enough to get their hands on Apollo and are building a "Word" killer. The word on the street is this is awesome, definately well above the writely/google docs bar.

Done well, flash apps can improve the user experience alot. With the underlying flex presentation layer and simple access to data services a talented developer that gets UI design could easily have fun picking off all the traditional desktop apps one at a time and move them into the future.

Wellington summer sizzles on

We've had some pretty decent weather lately and the last two Sundays we've had the annual Round the Bays run and Bike the bays events.

There was about 11,000 people out last Sunday for the run and Wellington really turned on the good weather. What a cool event, loads of Wellingtonians having a good time and brisk stroll around the bays. I had a bit of energy left at the end so sprinted the last section and managed to peel off heaps of knackered runners down the straight on Kilbirnie Park to finish in the top 550.
Everyone had tags on their shoes so got their time in the newspaper the next day - that was pretty cool.

Yesterday, was the Bike the Bays event that I was roped into doing. A much smaller crowd at this event, despite the free entry fee. I'd say their would have been 1500 people or so. I decided to do just the 13km race around the bays and back rather than the 32km event. I should have gone for the later as I pulled into first place at the turning point by the Evans Bay Marina and the rest was history. Another great Wellington day.. you can't beat Wellington on a good day.

2007 - a different year for me

Well its been a while since my last post so here goes...

2007 is going to be a different one for me and many probably haven't seen my face around at local UP events for a while.

I'm going to start tutoring part-time at Victoria University from March. I'll be amongst the action , tutoring 2nd and 3rd year students in ELCM and INFO.

With the rest of my time I'll be working on improving my fitness (so that includes lots of bike riding, running and plenty of windsurfing).

I'll post again soon. Feel free to touch base with me, tony.rule@gmail.com if you want to pick my brains on anything.

Vista Test Drive

After all the reports that Vista RC1 is stable I decided to give it a test drive.

I swapped out my hard drive in my notebook and put in a spare 30GB drive that I had a previous Vista Beta on. About 40 minutes later I was up and running. First minor problem was my display driver wasn't set right. I am now running at 1400 x 1050 as I can't find a driver for 1600 x 1050..so a bit of empty space. Not the end of the world.

So here's what happened

1) My graphics card isn't good enough. I can't run all the cool Aero stuff. I got a rating of 1.
2) Vista is really snappy. It boots up fast and things just work out of the box
3). I installed Skype, then went after some desktop Gadgets:
Wikipedia search, remote desktop gadget, simple calendar, analogue clock, weather, cpu gauge, USD to NZD convertor and a simple notepad.
4)Next up was Google Desktop. Nothing beats ctrl+ctrl.....well maybe vista does. I can now just press the Windows key and start typing. I'll try both
5)I thought I may as well try the latest version of Open office so downloaded that and installed in lightning time.
6) I installed G Drive...a nifty liitle tool that gives you access to your 2GB space on Gmail...right on your desktop.

Everything is running really sweet.. IE 7 seems to be really snappy on vista.

And I've installed Windows Live Mail...so i can check both work email and gmail on the one screen. Haven't worked out how to check gmail yet...wasn't as easy as I thought :)

First impressions are really good of vista though.