This was a project that I completed for the 1st year Advanced Software (SOFT1901) stream at Sydney University in 2002. It is a good example of some of my java capabilites, especially applet work. I will post the full applet online in the near future. Click for the full-size image to see more detail:

I purchased an audiobook today through Audible.com, which incidentally was the first time I have used the site or purchased an ebook. The process was simple enough, but the whole DRM thing annoys me (thankfully Tunebite helped with that).

Getting to the point, the audiobook I purchased was Barack Obama’s “The Audacity of Hope”. Why? Well the main reason for buying the audiobook was that I think he is one of the greatest orators I have heard in a long time. Rupert was right, he does have a level of rock star appeal.

On a more serious level he fascinates me for a number of reasons. The main reason is that he is such a mixture of backgrounds, some say a “a neutral persona on whom people can project their personal histories and aspirations”. This is partially because his background is so diverse that almost anyone can find something in common; a Kenyan father, an American mother, born in Honolulu, grew up in Jakarta, Hussein as a middle name and a first name based on the Hebrew word baruch (blessed).

The more critical factor is that people claim that he just ‘clicks’ with them, and for some reason he clicks with me too. How is it possible to do this across such a wide audience? Will connecting with everyone mean that eventually some people are going to feel betrayed? Quite possibly. I guess he just has to walk the rock star line and keep performing to the people in the hope that he eventually hits number 1.

It is not hard to find doomsday predictions for the Real Estate market. Sites such as Who Crashed the Economy are a collation of tales of pending economic (and particularly housing sector) destruction. There is a trend that indicates mortgage stress and housing price falls are limited to the outer suburbs of Sydney, primarily the west and south-west. Even when you analyse mortgage stress on a nationwide basis these suburbs keep appearing.

So I guess the question is whether this effect will be seen in the more blue label, inner-city suburbs. Most experts seem to think that the next 9 months or so are a good time to buy; if you have some savings tucked away and can ride out high interest rates in the short term. The next official inflation reading comes out on July 23, so a change in rates after this time is entirely possible. Whether the increases end there, or another ones comes in November, is anyones guess. I will be watching these news stories pretty closely, as it seems most of Australia is.

I was prepared to bid at an auction on the weekend, but it sold for $100k (15%) more than the quoted price range, and $50k less than what turned out to be the vendor’s target selling price! Clearly there is still a lot of dodgy underquoting practices from certain agents and turbulent pricing changes are still shaking themselves out in this market. I just have to hang in there and hope (as evil as it is) that a foreclosure can deliver me a reasonably priced dream home.

The NSW Government introduced the First Home Buyer’s Grant Scheme back in the year 2000. The $7000 cash bonus is nice, but it is the stamp duty concession that really helps out. The stamp duty calculator shows that the duty on a $500k home drops from $18,170 to a tiny $180 if you are a first home buyer, a huge saving of $17,990. This saving deteriorates pro-rata however as the price of the home approaches $600k, at which point it becomes unavailable. Means testing by this method is all well and good, as long as the means test is indexed. Back in 2000 property prices were significantly lower than they are today, as shown by the Reserve Bank’s own property price index graph from the May 2008 Regional Economic Performance Report:

This graph clearly shows that property prices have at least doubled in every state in the last 8 years, the same time period the grant scheme has been running. For 8 years of rapid growth the threshold has remained unchanged. NSW is actually the worst state for this, with an Age article citing:

Mortgage repayments account for 29.1% of total first home-buyer income, a one percentage point increase over the December (2007) quarter.

Adding to the cost of housing are taxes and charges, which added $110,000-$115,000 to the typical house and land package in Sydney, Mr Lamont said. In Victoria, that figure is about $57,000.

Surely the NSW Government should be keeping more of a finger on the pulse rather than making huge profits from Stamp Duty. The Federal Government is a little closer with their savings accounts, but $5000 a year is not going to get you a decent deposit anytime soon.

You thought buying a car was complicated! For anyone wanting a checklist (who doesn’t love a checklist) here is basically mine so far:

• Open inspection
• Family inspection / Attempted building inspection
• Check public transport timetables and/or traffic
• Pest inspection
• Building inspection
• Quotes on repairs and alterations
• Check heritage listing
• Check zoning for the area and surrounds
• Council check for previous development applications* (see below)
• Council check for proposed development applications
• Check council codes to see if any planned modifications will have a chance of approval
• Survey inspection and verification (if there is even one post-1881)
• Sewerage and other utility diagrams and connections (and possibly easements)
• Solicitor contract inspection
• Prepare a solicitor/conveyancer to do the conveyancing
• Alteration of contract terms (land tax, mistakes, settlement time)
• Talk to mortgage providers to get pre-approval and negotiate rates
• Understand and compare loan rates, structures, flexibility and features
• Decide whether rates are going up or down over the next 30 years
• Decide whether house prices in the city, suburb and street are going up or down over the next 10 years
• Organising a cheque to pay the deposit on the day of the auction

Exhausting and risk-laden probably sums it up the best. I don’t know how some people move house every year or two!

* On another note Burwood Council (and most impressively most councils) has an online DA system. There is a very simple little hack to get development applications from further back in time. That highly disguised “num_days” parameter can be changed to whatever you like. Maybe 1800 works well?

We recently purchased a Netgear ReadyNAS unit (formerly made by Infrant Technologies). It is a nice compact little unit, 1RU with 4 hard drives across the front. It runs an onboard Debian install with some custom software to support X-RAID, the front panel buttons and a nice web interface.

We have run into some issues lately in relation to the performance of the device over the network. Their general advice is to do a direct connect and check your network drivers, but this hasn’t helped our fault. When logged into the SSH server on the system I can see that the CPU is running at 90%+ pretty consistently during usage. These are smb processes running under the various usernames that have access to the file shares. Even when the desktops are idle they are chewing CPU cycles on the NAS.

After about 24 hours of usage the NAS starts to become unresponsive. In particular the web interface actually crashes the browser (both IE and Firefox). I am trying leaving oplocks turned off at the moment as some people have suggested, but I am not seeing any reduction in CPU usage. Apparently these problems have been fixed in the latest beta, with the next prod version due in ‘a couple of weeks’. It can’t come soon enough as far as I am concerned.

This came up all of a sudden after I decided to test my SEO by googling my name. That took me to this page on Submissions to the National Broadband Expert Panel. Among them is a submission that I emailed in to the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (hell of a title, although I guess at least it isn’t lumped with Arts anymore). A few things surprise me:

• I appreciate the open tender process, but I don’t remember being told my submission would be made public.
• I am surprised just how few submissions were made. I know the window was only about 2 weeks, but seriously given the state of Australian broadband, the $4.7B+ of taxpayers money on the table, decent media coverage and the email submission method I would have thought more people would be interested.
• I got all excited thinking perhaps the use of the phrase “submissions included” meant that only a few high calibre submissions had been listed. I then came across a submission from Karen. We truly have a bright future in Australia!

You will have noticed and will continue to notice a few changes to my blog over the next few weeks. I have moved to friendly URL’s (thanks Binary Fortress and the Wordpress guide), added a few of my favourite feeds to my blogroll, cleaned up some images, added a Feedburner feed, increased the number of posts on my front page to 10 and cleaned up some of my content. I still have plenty of work to do to bring across more of my old content and resources. If there is anything else you can suggest please feel free to comment. I would love to implement everything that Wordpress suggest related to SEO, but it seems blogging has driven SEO to a whole new level. Maybe a topic for another post?

One of the spending cuts in last nights Federal Budget 2008 was the Commercial Ready program. Thankfully the R&D Tax Concession is still available, but this relies on the inventor having the capital upfront. The axing of this program will stifle innovation in Australia, particularly when our venture capital system is so underdeveloped relative to the US and other places. Looking down the Commercial Ready page it is clear what a success the program was. Surely keeping Australian innovations in the hands of Australians should be a priority? Now inventors will be forced to take their goldmines offshore to be exploited elsewhere. I also feel sorry for the many supporting consultants who relied on these grants to help themselves and their clients.