Abort, Rephrase, Ignore?

First impression: decent range, lower prices than iTunes, no DRM.

Beyond that, well, it “just works”. The interface is reasonable, the song-preview stuff uses an embedded Flash applet but is quite usable, the search stuff works, the web site is nicely responsive, and purchasing is easy.

The requirement to use their downloader application for album purchases is slightly annoying but it’s not difficult to understand why they’ve done that. I tried the Windows version and it worked, didn’t give me even the slightest bit of trouble. There’s an OS X version also available, and they say they’ll have a Linux one soon.

The downloaded files are 256kbps VBR MP3 and sound it. Apparently there’s some sort of fingerprinting in them, but whether that’s true or just something they’re saying to discourage piracy, who knows?

You’ll need a US billing address, but otherwise they aren’t checking the issuer of the credit card the way some online stores do so I was able to use my Australian credit card with no hassles.

Overall? This is a pretty good competitor to iTunes and nicely complements eMusic. When a Linux version of the downloader becomes available I can see us buying a reasonable amount of stuff from them.

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There’s been a fair bit in The Age recently about the Lockerbie proposal, revised population growth estimates (now estimating 5 million people in Melbourne by 2030), and what effect this should have on the Government’s Melbourne 2030 plans.

There seems to be an unquestioned assumption that urban sprawl is by definition Bad(TM), but I’d like to suggest that it isn’t urban sprawl itself that is the enemy, it’s urban sprawl without a matching investment in infrastructure, be that schools, hospitals, or public transport. What matters more than distance is travel time and comfort.

However. Assuming we don’t want Melbourne itself to simply keep on growing and eating up all the surrounding farmland, how about investing in high-speed train services to places like Geelong and Bendigo? If you could travel from Bendigo to the Melbourne CBD in 30 minutes, wouldn’t that make Bendigo at least as attractive a place to live as Glen Waverley?

The risk for a city like Geelong is that it becomes a ghost town during business hours, with half the population commuting to Melbourne for work. But we’ve seen what has happened over the longer term in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne: business has started locating facilities there because it’s cheaper and that’s where the staff live. If a bank is looking to build a big datacentre in 2015, many of their employees are commuting from Bendigo, and there’s plenty of telecomms capacity, then Bendigo becomes a viable location.

The downfall to this sort of thing is that public transport still isn’t a very high priority and train services have a very high up-front capital cost. All that land, the tracks, the stations, the rolling stock. And if you want it to be very very fast, you’re probably looking at significant upgrades to the existing lines, which means a fair bit of inconvenience in the meantime. But if you pick a few good locations that are already reasonably attractive places to live, put in the money — borrow if you have to, borrowing for long-term investment is good — and encourage people and business to decentralise, well, there goes that whole “urban sprawl” problem you were so worried about.

And everyone comes out a winner.

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The new gig provided a shiny current-model iMac. I have in the past been something of an OS X advocate, and honestly, if you’ve got the money and don’t have some overwhelming need to be running something else, it’s a pretty good choice. I’d still recommend it to my parents.

But I’m vision-impaired, and ever-increasing display size and resolution has made OS X pretty uncomfortable for me with all the tiny text. I’m sure it all looks just great on a 20″ display at 1680×1050 if you’ve got normal vision, which is presumably where Steve Jobs is coming from, but I either have to use the zoom mode a lot or run in a non-native resolution, and while modern LCDs do handle that a lot better than they did five years ago it’s still not so great.

As a final bonus my particular vision issues make high-contrast light-on-dark much easier to read than dark-on-light, and the low-contrast stuff found throughout the OS X interface makes it just plain unpleasant.

At home we’ve both switched from Windows to Ubuntu, largely because we’d been trialling Vista, decided not to pay up for it, opted to give Ubuntu a go before reinstalling XP, and liked it enough to stick around.

So today I grabbed an old PC (a HP d530, so we’re talking Pentium 4, 512GB RAM, 40GB disk, low-end Intel integrated video) with a 17″ display, and once I got Ubuntu running on it I became far more productive almost right away. A slightly-tweaked version of the “High contrast - inverse” theme makes everything so much easier to deal with.

Ironically, under load this PC with half the memory, half the (slower) cores, and barely a GPU is performing better than the iMac under similar circumstances. And this is with “desktop effects” enabled, including the cube-workspace stuff.

My colleagues thought I was nuts at first, but my boss understood pretty quickly once I explained it in terms of vision impairment. A nice thing about the place is that nobody is particularly religious about computing platform. We have a mix of Mac, Linux, and Windows desktops and our infrastructure is a mix of Solaris, FreeBSD, and Windows. While there’s the occasional snarky remark about Exchange, that’s as often coming from the Windows guys as anyone else.

This willingness to engage and to see the value in things that aren’t part of your own little niche makes for a refreshing change.

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Today’s project has been to get my head sufficiently around Ruby to be able to write Facter “facts”. We’re working on fitting Puppet to our needs, but the facts Facter knows out of the box aren’t sufficient.

The first mistake was trying to do this in the office. Too noisy. Fortunately my employer is sane enough about these things that I was able to go off and quietly work on this at home.

The second mistake was trying to use the Ruby in 20 Minutes tutorial. I can’t quite put my finger on what it was, but there was both enough stuff missing for me to not get the context I needed and also too much time taken up with fluff at the start.

Fortunately the Learning Ruby material is much better. It took more than 20 minutes, but left me with enough grounding in the language to be able to understand sample Facter recipes where they had previously looked like gibberish.

The key things I think you need to know when starting with Ruby are:

1. Everything is an object. Including literals;
2. Methods can have blocks of code passed to them and frequently do.

These two matter because, if you’re coming from something like Perl, code like:


things=['one', 'two', 'three']
things.each do | n | { puts n }


looks pretty weird, and so does:


m='wibble'.match('/bbl/')


(I’m not sure how idiomatic either of these are, but I’ve seen them in bits of example code and they did indeed seem very odd. Arse-backward, even.)

Anyway.

I feel I’m at a point now where I have some hope of being able to read existing facts and write my own that aren’t simple cargo-cults. I’ve already written some that let us tell what city the host is in based on IP address and will probably be writing more as I go along.

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Andre feels inclined to heckle a bit over my previous post.

He suggests that the real problem is that we won’t look at places that aren’t “cool”, that we want to get it all on a platter right away.

Not quite true.

It’s funny he should mention Boronia, as it’s one of the areas we’ve been looking at. It’s on the fringe of “acceptable commute time”, barely. It’s also on the fringe of “too expensive”.

He points out a house he’s found online. You’ll note that the price is $260k+, but it’s highly unlikely to sell for $260k, it’ll be more like $300k.

But let’s assume it does sell for the advertised price. That works out to be a bit over $2000/month on the loan repayment over 25 years. About 50% of my after-tax income, which is doable so long as my partner is also working.

But, y’know, like much of the country we’re planning to have kids. Which are expensive, not just in outgoings but also in terms of opportunity cost — my partner won’t be working for at least a few years.

$2000/month with only one income and the cost of kids? This is verging on “crushing” territory. The slightest hitch and we’re screwed. This includes any significant upward movement in the interest rate.

And all this assuming it does actually sell for the advertised price. Which is not terribly common in Melbourne right now.

So all this and 80 minutes each way commute. Hell of a lifestyle option, eh? Just because 90% of the population is in the same boat doesn’t make it any less fucked up.

This really isn’t about “cool” places to live. We’re just about at the point where we’re ready to give up on the inner-city as a place to rent let alone buy. I’m sure things are easier if one is militantly anti-child and making well over $100k/pa. Most of the country does not fit this description.

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Housing affordability has become a bit of an issue around here of late. Both sides of politics are talking about it quite a bit, as are commentators of all stripes.

The proposals so far have not been particularly relevant to us as we’re in an “interesting” position. Specifically, neither of us can drive so we absolutely must be near good public transport, and our income is such that we don’t qualify as “low income”. Most proposals are either geared toward making rentals less expensive for low-income earners or for those buying newly-constructed houses, and the latter are almost entirely on the very fringes of our cities where public transport barely exists.

What would make us happy? Well, the ideal would be for the housing market to calm down and prices to drop so we could reasonably afford to buy a two or three bedroom house with a yard within a 45 minute commute by train to the CBD. And when I write “afford” I don’t mean “will a bank lend us an insane amount of money that’ll cripple us?”, I mean “for an amount of money we can repay over 25 years without having to eat cardboard”.

But leaving aside that fantasy-land, what’d be nice would be to make renting less horrible. Leases of five years or more, the right to make cosmetic changes to the place, a cap on just how much rent can be increased each year (indexed, perhaps?), and lease terms that allow pets. If an entire generation is to be locked out of the property market then we ought to at least be able to settle down in a rented house, make it our home, and have some moderate level of security.

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