The Naked Flame

Barring aliens abducting Obama, the writing is on the wall and it spells 'Congratulation Obama, President-elect'. Which means now I will just wait and enjoy the remaining polls, and the unfolding of how large his victory will be.

To make this waiting a little more exciting I have decided I'll play a game of Electoral College Bingo. I'll be following the elections on November 5th (yes, we're quite a bit ahead of the US ;)) from my office, with some alcoholic-beverage-substitute, and every correctly predicted state (for either party) I'll take a sip.

'Easy' Obama states:
- Vermont
- Massachusetts
- New York
- Rhode Island
- Connecticut
- Pennsylvania
- New Jersey
- Delaware
- Maryland
- DC
- Michigan
- Illinois
- Iowa
- Oregon
- California
- Hawaii

'Looking easy now' Obama states:
- Maine
- Florida
- Wisconsin
- Colorado
- New Mexico
- Washington

'My additional predictions' Obama states:
- New Hampshire
- Ohio
- Minnesota
- Virginia
- North Carolina
- Nevada

For 10 bonus sips each, 'Who would have thought', Obama states:
- Georgia
- Indiana
- Missouri
- Arkansas(!)
- North Dakota(!)
- Montana(!)

(And the remainder for McCain then obviously).

Ignoring my bonus picks I guess this means I predict a final tally of 353 for Obama (and 403 counting the bonus picks... although I also expect pigs to fly in that case; if he actually makes 403 or more, I'll be forced to down the remainder of whatever bottle I have to hand... good thing it won't be actual alcohol!).

As I was watching the Second US Presidential Debate for 2008 today, only half paying attention to the words half following the commentary in the popular blogs, something occurred to me.

The sad truth is that modern politics is a clear case of the applicability of the Tragedy of the Commons to almost any corner of human endeavour.

Arguably we would all be much better served if politicians all stuck to the high minded ideals of substance over personal attack... accurate facts over populist sound bites. But as The Tragedy tells us, whenever there is a pristine scarce resource (unsullied votes) that multiple people have an interest in cultivating (Obama/McCain/others) and where doing the wrong thing (mudslinging) although worse for the overall outcome disproportionately favours those that go all-out, the worst comes out in human nature.

I cringe for both McCain and Obama whenever they do it. McCain by all accounts actually was a maverick once, worthy of the term reformer... but you'd hardly recognise it this final month of the campaign. Similarly Obama started his campaign on the high-minded 'Hope' and 'Yes we Can', but ultimately was never going to be able to skate through without at least tit-for-tat.

I get it... attacks are easy. You can say whatever you like about your opponent; those that support you regardless will believe whatever you say, those that may research and expose the lie weren't likely to be voting for you, and the undecideds? That's where these tactics try to fight the battle... crafting smears and insinuations that are calculated to pull the heartstrings of the middle whilst not waking them out of their trance with an overt lie. It is all a carefully calculated strategy of small attacks, and I hate it, but I also understand why.

It is all just emergent behaviour from the combined "laws of politics" and "human nature", to expect another outcome would be akin to expecting a metropolis in the desert: not impossible, but definitely not likely.

Thank god it's all but over now... barring a miracle/disaster (depending on your point of view) Obama will be the 44th president of the United States of America, where he will arguably get the most messed up country in the history of humanity and a deadline of 4 years to make the best of it.

Consider it Changing Rooms on the ultimate larger scale; there is no saying how weird, wonderful or cringe-worthy it could be.

It is so easy to get used to the hosting you have that you neglect looking for a potential better fit. Recently I went off on my adventure to compare hosting options and see if a change was in order... turned out it was and we're now on our new 'home' with Host Done.

What better day to get off my ass and actually write about it than Labour Day?

First of all, there was nothing wrong with idologic and I would wholeheartedly recommend them to anyone looking for reliable Linux-only hosting in the US.

The reason I have been looking around is that I really wanted to see if there were affordable hosts in Australia yet that did reseller packages, preferably including a mixed Linux/Windows hosting option. I wouldn't consider using Windows for my existing sites which are all a much more natural fit for LAMP than anything else... but I have recently started looking into ASP.NET due to an existing code-base at work, and I thought it'd be nice to be able to experiment on some personal space too.

In the end I constructed a very large lists of hosts that were well reviewed or sounded interesting after trawling a variety of review and comparison sites, and the results of my research can be found below the fold... may it save someone somewhere some time. (Note: no warranties, this information was accurate when observed from Sydney around the end of September 2008).

A few quick notes on methodology; hosting plans vary wildly from provider to provider, so I have tried to pick plans that are somewhat comparable in price bracket. The Ping and Average Speed were gotten by accessing the host website. Note that this is not entirely unbiased, but they form a good best-case scenario. I am not sure if hosts typically bias their routing to their own site, or if they just run within the same framework as the sites they sell. Anyway...

And finally a few comments on the contents:

• All hosts had reasonable reviews on some or all of the sites; note that "user comments" are easy to falsify though
• Some plans just sound too good to be true; I cannot believe that the 1TB of transfer per month promised by ServMatix is not severely oversold; I doubt it will actually be attainable in reality
• The plans on Australian servers (AUD prices) obviously stand out because they have fewer hops to travel... good pings and speed, but typically more expensive than US hosting, sometimes a lot more
• I personally discarded any plans that did not reach at least 60KB/s on the hosts own site from consideration; I was looking for more speed, and most US hosts do not actually provide it sufficiently
• If www.cove.com.au had actually had Windows hosting as part of their plan I would have wholeheartedly put them as the prime recommendation for Australians, with www.serversaustralia.com.au as a very close second

In the end I settled on www.hostdone.com as a good compromise between the value-for-money of US hosts and the speed of AU hosts. I do not know how they manage, but their round-trip latency significantly beat all other US hosts, and I re-tried the measurement several times to make sure I was not making a mistake. For some reason their hop-count was proportionally lower as well, so they somehow find themselves on just the right spot of the backbones to be an Australian contender.

Make of this what you will... it definitely is not a universal recommendation to follow the path I have chosen, but it may save you some legwork.

My site is being protected from comment spam by the Mollom system. I like that it starts from a position of trust and only uses captcha's when it is not certain you are a human, giving you a second chance to prove your comment is worthy.

I had a look at the statistics page of Mollom and noticed the weird notched pattern in the graph. Upon closer inspection it appears the "Ham" curve has a dip around every Sunday. I assume that is a result of people being less likely to spend their Sundays browsing sites and commenting; probably something to do with religion.

I think it is kinda funny to look at it from the other angle though... on Sundays comments are more likely to be spam.

Today my brain is not happy... think bad... hurt. I am trying to get my head around all the intricacies of ASP.NET at work, because I have been nominated to abstract away some of the mess that seems to happen in most of our web applications.

This is after I have for the last two or three years tried to resist installing ASP.NET onto my workstation because I was busy enough already, and the first time I tried it with Visual Studio 2003 it seemed a bit... flaky.

Now the time has come to catch up, so I thought I'd try to absorb as much of the lessons on the ASP.NET website as possible to get a broad feel for how it all works, and what the benefits and drawbacks of the new MVC system are.

Where I went wrong was in trying to save some time in the learning. Windows Media Player has this wonderful feature where you can speed up the playback of media without turning the voices into chipmunks (I guess it does some fancy FFT footwork to get that going, but I'm not curious enough to discover the details). By default it supports a 1.4x-speed mode that is remarkably easy to follow for the typical podcast or screencast.

I was in a much bigger hurry though, and I think I watched about 10 hours of material at 2x speed, and now it feels like my brain is oozing out of my ears. It isn't so much that the material was too tough to follow at double-speed, but it is remarkably tough to keep up with a speaker at twice normal speed.

I think I'll lay down now and have a rest... another 10 hours to come tomorrow.

I like the idea of Linux... honestly, I do. And I think Open Source is the greatest thing that has ever happened to software... ever.

But as much as it pains me to admit, I just do not have the patience to fight with my OS over the basics like OS updates that break half the stuff on my machine, or sound never quite having worked right. And though some may say the following is a benefit, if I have to reboot to be able to play a game, then I just don't end up playing at all.

The tipping point for me realising it was okay to be okay with Windows came in the form of the Linux Hater's Blog, but to be entirely honest, Vista has always been fine for me.

Being a sample size of 1 means that my results may not be representative, but I built my machine myself, didn't go out of my way to get "Vista approved" parts, and everything just works. I don't know whether having Ultimate x64 has anything to do with it, or that I've pretty much always run SP1, but I've just never had a problem.

Vista has not run in any way noticeably slower than XP used to. Add on top of that the consistent 2-second resume from sleep and fantastic overhauled sound sub-system (per app volume control, who would've thunk it?) I have no intention of going back to anything else.

I don't blame anyone for picking something else if they prefer it, but my choice "just works"-tm for me.

For the past months our winter temperatures had been peaking around 20 degrees (yes, that means it actually ends up cold at night!). Suddenly today out of nowhere it shot up to 29, and I wasn't quite prepared for that yet... it seems we are skipping spring this year.

(Forecasts indicate we can expect to be back into winter by the middle of next week when we drop below 20 again).

Today I found what will be my favourite site for the ongoing US election: "FactCheck". I do not know why I hadn't heard of it before, but it is exactly what I was craving.

This site is fully funded by a non-partisan foundation and is set up as a sort of "consumer protection organisation" aimed at providing factual information about statements made by both sides of the political race.

From what I have read so far they appear to do a very good job of pointing out factual inconsistencies and/or lies by both McCain and Obama. In the process the articles all provide a wealth of links where the facts of the matter can be verified further.

It almost brings a tear to my eye.

I have to profess that ever since watching The West Wing I have been fascinated with the US political process. This is strange in that (1) I am not in the US and (2) where I am I do not get to vote either.

As such, the twists and turns in this 2008 election cycle so far have been interesting and exasperating. The one thing that is universally disheartening is the tone of the discourse on all the blogs that I read in this matter. Not so much the blog posts themselves as the comment threads attached to them. Talk about extremes from both sides of the aisle.

Especially the best place to keep up to date with raw polling data seems to have both sides alternately cheering and booing identically depending on how the numbers fall.

What is particularly funny (to watch) and annoying (from the perspective of an intelligent and mostly impartial observer) is how both sides almost universally try to read the numbers like every change in them has a deep and hidden meaning... talk about reading tea leaves!

In this election as all presidential elections there are very few absolute givens:

• California will go into the Dem column
• Most of the north-west and east coast will also be Dem
• Texas will go into the Rep column
• Most of the heartland will also be Rep

And this doesn't even take polls to divine.

What most seem to forget is that poll numbers only reflect what the people that were called are prepared to admit on the phone to a pollster.

Was a representative sample called? That cannot really be conclusively answered because that depends on the relative turn-out of democratic and republican sympathisers in November.

Did they tell the truth? Well, talking to a person (or for automated polls, which in the moment on some psychological level still feel like talking to a human) and anonymously voting in the privacy of a voting booth are two entirely different things.

On the one hand many professing support for Obama over the phone may very well end up having some latent reservations about a black president in that moment they have to ultimately choose in the booth. You can argue about that being racist, but that doesn't change the fact that people are free to vote on any basis they personally see fit.

On the other hand many professing support for McCain to a pollster could just as easily find themselves in the booth with a sudden doubt about whether the future would really be any different from the past in a way that is meaningful to them.

In the end the polls are just numbers with relatively little meaning that implicitly translates to a national level, and short of either side really polling well outside the margin of a possible opposite outcome I'll just sit back and enjoy the fireworks in the blogs.

For some reason anonymous comments are not working... okay... my fault; too aggressive caching. Will have to look into having some caching without the nasty side-effects later.