Nick Coleman

Australia's Fiscal and Monetary Policies: How They Work

Nick — Sat, 19 May 2012 10:21:00 -0700

The Sydney Morning Herald's Ross Gittins has a good article on how monetary policy and fiscal policy as implemented by Australia's Reserve Bank and the Dept of Treasury interact over both short and medium terms to produce low inflation and good economic growth.

Australia has seen both for a few decades, much of it built on the foundations of Treasurer Paul Keating in the 1980s.

The article, which is pretty much a summary of key points made by Secretary of Treasury Dr Martin Parkinson in his annual post-Budget speech, gives a good overall view and is worth a read for a layman's summary of how it all works.

In a nutshell, Australia's fiscal policy includes automatic stabilisers that offset periods of low or high growth, and monetary policy includes the ability to change things in the immediate short term with adjustments that can be small or large if needed.

Both of these things combined have provided stability and continued growth with low inflation.

The key point to understanding what we want is that, "while keeping inflation low may be the target [Ed: and is what the press so often focusses on], the goal is non-inflationary growth—growth that should keep unemployment low."

The result is a sustained period, over 20 years, of low inflationary growth that is the envy of the rest of the world. We have avoided the worst of the busts and have (relatively) few negatives from the booms. This is why you so often see Australia's Treasurer at the time voted as world's best treasurer by Euromoney magazine and others.

A robust Treasury and an independent central bank have played important key roles, but we should also give credit to both sides of politics for keeping to the game plan in their successive budgets.

Casey Stoner Retiring

Nick — Fri, 18 May 2012 09:48:00 -0700

Casey Stoner has announced he will be retiring from MotoGP at the end of this season.

Wow, colour me surprised. It seems like only yesterday when he burst onto the scene and started to provide some real competition to Valentino Rossi. Then Jorge Lorenzo came along and we had some great seasons with three highly talented riders competing and providing some great racing.

Thanks for some great memories and good luck with your future endeavours, Casey.

Escaping Single Quotes in Bash

Nick — Mon, 14 May 2012 16:52:00 -0700

A quick note to myself because I always am forgetting this stuff.

You know that Bash will expand anything within double quotes, and nothing within single quotes. How do you include a single quote within single quotes?

This comes up more often than you would think. I often write a git commit message with a possessive apostrophe, such as:

Update my website's index page

using single quotes because I don't want bash expanding anything.

Many times I want to commit using the command line without dropping into the editor to write the commit message. How do I include the apostrophe within single quotes?

The answer is that you break the string into two strings separated with an escaped single quote, like this:

git commit -a -m 'Update my website'\''s index page'

Notice the two strings with an escaped single quote between them. Bash will pass the strings unmodified to git which will store them as one single string:

Update my website's index page

[ Why do I keep forgetting this? It is because, for some reason, I keep thinking a succession of single quotes will magically resolve into the correct escaped quote, and, when it doesn't work, I think I have the wrong number of successive quotes, so I go back and try again... Etc.

Probably a hangover from early Basic on the Amiga or perhaps some forgotten C editor's quirk. ]

I Moved From Google-chrome To Firefox

Nick — Thu, 10 May 2012 11:49:00 -0700

Several weeks ago, I changed my default browser from Google-chrome to Firefox. Here's why.

I had been using Google-chrome for over a year and had been a pretty happy user. I liked the Google-chrome user interface and Google had clearly put a lot of thought into how a user interacts with their browser. Neat touches were everywhere.

I did have some niggling privacy concerns, after all Google-chrome is created by the biggest data mining company in the world, but I figured Google had too much to lose by ignoring privacy in a browser. That is especially so for a browser whose source code is available to all.

Then I discovered that Google-chrome forbids the Ghostery add-on from blocking the Doubleclick network. Ghostery is a popular add-on that prevents third-party sites from monitoring your browsing, and Doubleclick is a monitoring and advertising network owned by Google.

Apparently, Google has no problem with bending the privacy rules to advantage itself.¹ Time to give Firefox a go.

I hadn't used Firefox seriously for years and was pleasantly surprised. It starts fairly quickly and is not a huge memory pig like Google-chrome. It is a little plain out of the box, but some add-ons soon fixed that.

A few months later, this is what I am running. For privacy:

adblock-plus, to block ads
ghostery, to block third-party cookies and scripts
noscript, to block any javascript
requestpolicy, to block any third-party reference
refcontrol, to control the referer header so that my browsing history doesn't leak to third parties, and
cookiemonster, to control cookies.

Then I wanted to enhance Firefox to give a good user experience like Google-chrome. These plugins did the trick:

add to searchbar, add new search engines to the search toolbar
customizable shortcuts, create your own keystroke shortcuts
duplicate in tab context menu, duplicate a tab
firegestures, similar to vimium but light-weight, uses Vim keystrokes to control the browser,
open link in ..., adds extra options to the right-click context menu, and
sessionmanager, save and load sessions by name, and keeps a history.

I now have the same facilities in Firefox that I had in Google-chrome, plus it uses about a third the memory and addresses all my privacy niggles.

(I've used the exact name of the add-ons above so you can search for them easily.)

[1] I may be attributing malice to something that is merely a by-product of how Google-chrome handles plug-ins. Google-chrome apparently does not guarantee the order that various plug-ins see the DOM, which means that other plug-ins may have applied their magic before Ghostery, thereby removing any Doubleclick references before Ghostery sees it. Occam's razor probably applies. ↑

Last Transit of Venus In One Month

Nick — Mon, 07 May 2012 11:09:00 -0700

The last chance to see a transit of Venus across the face of the Sun is coming up next month, June 5-6 to be exact. Transits of Venus occur in pairs and happen roughly every hundred years. The last was in 2004 which was the first of this current pair. The next will be in 2117 so this is the last chance to see one for anyone alive today.

Venus transits are historically important to Australians because one of the reasons that Captain Cook was sent to the Pacific was to observe a Venus transit there. In the course of the voyage he visited New Zealand and discovered the east coast of Australia for Western Europeans.

I'll post viewing times for east and west coast Australians a little closer to the actual date.

At Redirect Using the Here String

Nick — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 09:29:00 -0700

This is just a quick note, more for myself than anything. I wrote previously about sound problems when using the at daemon.

In a footnote, I mentioned that you can use a command like echo "some_command" | at now + 5 hours to set up a job without descending into the at shell.

In later versions of bash (3.0 or greater, I think), you can also use the here string, a variant of the here document (i.e. << EOF). You use it like this: at now + 5 hours <<< 'some_command [parameters]' (or use double quotes if you want word expansion).

Debian super speedy security update

Nick — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 11:59:00 -0700

A couple of days ago, April 19 to be exact, Tavis Ormandy of the Google Security Team reported a bug in OpenSSL that could by used to mount an attack.

Naturally, any bug in OpenSSL is taken seriously by everyone since it is a widely used implementation of TLS and SSL.

I heard about it today and immediately logged on to my VPS, which runs Debian 6 (squeeze), to run a system update. It grabbed updated versions of libssl and openssl.

That's pretty impressive, just two days to implement and distribute the fixes.

I previously had switched the VPS from CentOS to Debian and, apart from a small learning curve on "the Debian way", I am happy. It is much more set-n-forget, perfect for a VPS.

Now, if only Slackware was quite so quick. My home laptop is still waiting for the updates. I love Slackware, but c'mon guys, hurry up.

iiNet Wins High Court Appeal by Movie Studios

Nick — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 08:44:00 -0700

In great news for anyone opposed to the heavy handed actions of the movie industry in attempting to prevent piracy, the High Court has ruled that iiNet has no direct power to prevent its users from downloading pirated content.

The music and movie industry had previously sued iiNet for, in effect, "authorising" illegal downloads by not preventing its users from doing so. They lost that case, appealed, and lost the appeal. They then appealed to the High Court. They have lost that and the matter is closed.

Until the government changes the law. Which they will undoubtedly do, since they are about to sign the TPP without any public discussion. The U.S. has previously bullied trade partners into changing their copyright enforcement laws to favour the U.S. movie industry. There is no doubt in my mind that they will do this again in the latest TPP round. The fact that the government is super quiet on the TPP makes me think they already know that they are going to have to sell out Australia's citizens.

The High Court decision does not mean that an ISP is immune, however. One part of the Federal Court appeal's result was that it provided a set process whereby an ISP could be held liable. The movie industry lost the appeal because the process they followed did not lead to iiNet's liability.

Nevertheless, for the moment, we are protected from such silliness as losing our internet connection or being sued for thousands of dollars because our teenager downloaded one stupid song (that we hate because everyone knows no-one has written decent music since the '80s, right?).

The Australian has a good summary of the decision and its history. My previous posts on this topic are here and especially here.

For the record again, my position is the common one:

I don't condone piracy, but the studios have no right to force a third party to give them my personal details. Let's not forget the studios are private corporations. They are not the police. If they want my details, a court order will give it to them. Of course, the burden of proof then falls on them, a complication they do not want to deal with despite any concepts of fairness or due process.

Audi Buys Ducati

Nick — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 08:52:00 -0700

Audi has confirmed it will buy Ducati. The deal appears to be a strategic one for Volkswagen, which owns Audi. Volkswagen views itself as a competitor to BMW and this purchase gives it an upmarket brand in the motorcycle market to act as a direct rival to BMW's machines.

I'm in two minds about the deal. On one hand, Ducati has been owned by investment funds since 1996, which was the start of the rot in my opinion, where marketing overruled the Ducati ethos. My 1997 900SS was the last of the old-style machines and I consider it more authentic than the boy-racer models in subsequent years.

On the other hand, it surely is an insignificant purchase for Audi and especially Volkswagen, so perhaps it is a trophy purchase where Ducati can get back to its true spirit of producing beautiful Italian esoteric machinery.

[Disclaimer: inbuilt bias of rabid Ducati owner.]

Llamedos

Nick — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 16:33:00 -0700

I just realised that Llamedos in Terry Pratchett's Discworld is sod 'em all backwards!

Pratchett is a funny man. Too bad I was a bit late to the party.