Just a small hat-tip to my home town basketball team, the Wollongong Hawks, who tonight are playing their last home game for the regular season, 2009/10.

I remember with the sadness and disappointment a crowd of about 6000 people felt when the Hawks played what we all thought was their last ever game in their home town this time last year. It is a credit to Mat Campbell, our captain, who drew together generous sponsors, led by ahm, and established a great off-court team to bring the Hawks back from what was literally the dead. I’m honoured to have been able to play a small part as a Director of the reborn Hawks, and thank Mat sincerely for inviting me to get involved.

As we go into the last round hoping for a playoff birth, we could finish anywhere from 2nd to 5th out of the 8 national league teams. Unlike the international cricket this year, our summer sport has been a very tight, very thrilling competition.

Lets hope the boys can win tonight at home and on the road tomorrow, and come in 2nd to give us home court advantage in the first round of the playoffs! After all, there a $100K bonus riding on it!

Tonight I’m presenting a lightening talk at the ICT Illawarra event, our final event for 2009. Entitled “Plugging into the Startup Scene”, I try to capture in a 5 minute talk some steps that can help Australian technology entrepreneurs to get connected to the thriving and growing community of innovation and entrepreneurship happening in Australia. Presentation embedded below.

The key lessons are:

1. Join the conversation: the single best way is to join the Silicon Beach Australia group; with over 700 members and almost 4000 posts in just over 12 months, this is one thriving community (and one that is very generous with its advice, too)
2. Track events and activities: many who’ve experienced Silicon Valley will tell you it is the face to face, person to person conversations and connections that make the place so successful. There’s a surprising amount happening in Australia, particularly in Sydney. Join the Silicon Beach Drinks weekly, attend one of the many Open Coffee meetups if you’re looking for something more family friendly, and consider joining the Australian Technology Showcase: they do lots of great events.
3. Watch and listen from afar: there is a massive roster of tech events held in the US, and thankfully plummeting streaming costs combined with the egos of event organisers and speakers means you can now watch high quality, expensive and previously inaccessible events from your own desk. Find an event you rate – like the recent Web 2.0 Summit – and check to see if they’ll be streaming it. Also, make sure you subscribe to the Stanford Technology Ventures Program and their Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Series, which you can watch or download a podcast of online.

If you’ve got some suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments.

I’ve been around the Analytics scene for a few years now, and one of the biggest hassles with tracking for really really big sites, or sites where security is a massive deal (online banking, etc), has been the need to tag all the pages (for javascript tracking), or to suffer with the limited info you get from web server logs.

The team from Coradiant, who include on their client list organisations like the FBI, have just pitched their new product, Analytics in a Box (AIB), which involves a box being installed on the inside of the Firewall (next to the web servers or load balancers). It then passively sniffs the network to see real time requests that clients make when loading web pages, submitting forms and the rest.

• No pages need to be tagged with Javascript.
• No access to the main web server logs is required.
• You just drop it into the datacentre, turn it on, and configure the filters.

This solution is bloody incredible. It harnesses the power of Google’s Urchin product to manage the reporting and viewing of reports, but it extends the fields that Urchin can gather and report on, including anything in the headers. This gives them the power to do things like report on the number of visitors who go half way through a download of a white paper but have their download cancel, something that until now is impossible with either Javascript or Log File Analysis.

And so very much more.

One of the most impressive products I’ve seen in the Analytics – specifically the very high end enterprise stuff at US$35K a for the integrated server, Urchin, MySQL licence and the agents that control the whole process – since Woopra.

If you’re looking for an analytics solution with no javascript and more information than you can get out of log files, this could be the solution you’ve been looking. As an Urchin reseller, we’re one of the few ways to get this product around the world: contact me at Internetrix for more info.

The Princes Hwy, the major road from Sydney, down the south coast of Australia’s most populous state, New South Wales, ranges from suburban roads to freeways, and understandably, the speed limit along this road varies according to conditions.

Through most of the suburban sections, this multi-lane road is around 70KM/h, which is quite reasonable. Unfortunately, however, right at the edge of the suburban road system – right where the road transitions to and from 100KM/h – the Roads and Traffic Authority (RTA) has decided to arbitrarily reduce the speed limit of this major road down to that of a side street, limiting the speed to 50Km/h.

This speed reduction – from its previous limit of 70KM/h – was instituted after the tragic death of Tim Deane in July 2006 after he crossed this busy highway against the lights. Suburbs to the north and south, Engadine and Waterfall, each have pedestrian under/over passes (respectively), but Heathcote does not.

Unfortunately, though, the focus of the RTA has been around positioning camera equipped highway patrol cars and collecting a lot of revenue from motorists, who have to halve their speed – coming into the city – in a few hundred metres.

But the thing that angers me the most – and if you drive this road regularly, it should piss you off too – is that the RTA is happy to unjustifiably drop the speed limit and organise some very lucrative enforcement, but they can’t be bothered to put up fences – that physically discourages the kind of J-walking that has caused pedestrian deaths – along the median strip that separates the train station from the park. If our government and its agencies really cared about pedestrian safety, they’d have a fence put along the line shown in red on the map below, instead of just dropping the speed and raking in the money through cameras and fines.

If you think this situation is just rotten, money grabbing and immoral behaviour from an agency that professes to act in the interests of road safety, yet missing out on some of the lowest impact and high value actions like putting up a fence, tell the RTA what you think by making a complaint. The complaint I made tonight is included below: perhaps if we draw some public attention to this situation, we might stand a chance of getting this immoral situation corrected.

I would like to make a formal complaint about the conduct of the RTA with relation to the speed limit changes introduced some time ago on the only arterial road connecting Wollongong and Sydney, specifically at Heathcote.

After the tragic death of a pedestrian around this intersection some time ago, a knee-jerk decision was made to reduce the speed – 24 hours a day, 7 days a week – down to 50km/h. This is a 4 to 6 lane highway that links Sydney to the entire south coast.

The Police and the RTA have managed to create quite a strong revenue earner by putting regular police and radar patrols, however, it is very clear the RTA is completely disinterested in safety: while inconveniencing hundreds of thousands of motorists a year, the RTA has taken no steps to protect pedestrians, as there is no fence discouraging pedestrians from crossing south of the lights, between the station and the park.

This hypocrisy is an abomination, and is the source of a LOT of frustration, disdain and disrespect for the RTA’s policies, and leads many people to reject the legitimacy & authority of your agency.

Unfortunately, the next month or two are likely to result in some form of legislation passing the Senate that results in all Australia’s having their internet connections filtered using a mandatory, opaque system controlled by an agency of the Federal Government.

Way back in January this year, after some months of extensive online discussion and commentary, I managed to get some time with my local member, Sharon Bird, to talk about the issues surrounding the proposal for a mandatory internet filter.

The Protests

The people of Australia has been talking to the Minister too, trying to convince him that this is a truly, truly terrible idea, and that we don’t want it.

In late March 2009, the ABC’s Q&A featured Senator Conroy, and to welcome him were more than 2000 submissions – many times more than in any previous episode. You can watch the episode here.

The other high priority campaign against this filter – which goes well beyond what the government promised they were going to do during the 2007 election – comes from activist group, GetUp, with their Censordyne commercial.

If this wasn’t enough, the annual Internet Industry Awards held in London named our Minister the “Villian of the Year” for his policy. He shrugged off concerns and criticism by saying that people didn’t understand what he was doing, and trying to paint people who object to the compulsory filtering of the internet as people who support access to “pro-rape sites, bestiality sites, and child pornography promotion sites“.

The Situation

Unfortunately, it appears that one of the more rational and relevant arguments against a compulsory internet filter – that it would slow down the internet at the same time as the Federal Government are planning to spend billions making it faster with the NBN – has been diminished, with the ISPs participating in the pilot – the ones who will comment anyway – saying that the pilot was achieved without noticeably slowing down internet use.

I’ve got some pretty grave doubts about all of this – particularly with internet speeds increasing, making any delay on the pipe due to filtering resulting in a higher percentage slowdown as speeds go up – but even if these technical concerns disappear, there’s still the two really big issues that this filtering scheme is certain to fail on:

1. It won’t protect the children; getting around it will be fairly trivial – via proxies or VPN connections through the firewall – and most of the really scary stuff on the internet is found in the dark underbelly, of P2P networks, newsgroups, and other impossible to police locations. If parents are told this filter will protect their children, they’ll (further) hand over parenting responsibilities for the government, leaving to a much more dangerous situation than exists today.
2. It will put in place infrastructure that the this, or a future government, can use to control the internet in a much more draconian way into the future. Any bleating that the legislation will restrict the filter to controlling some 1300 sites which are already banned by ACMA holds absolutely no water with me: legislation can be changed (that’s why we have parliaments – to make and change laws) and who’s to say some future government on the skids but with a majority in both houses won’t try and use scare tactics or cries of national security to silence dissent.

Our Response

Our politicians – particularly in the Liberal Party – need to know, loud and clear, that this issue will cause thousands of us to change our votes. This is a touchstone issue that goes to the core of pretty fundamental issues of freedom and liberty in Australia, and with the internet still very very early in its history, putting these sorts of systems in place when we know they won’t solve the problem – and in fact could make it worse – is wrong, wrong, wrong.

While many of us thought that the Green’s opposition to this, combined with the Coalition’s increasingly strong stance against the planned filter, would leave this legislation dead and buried: Labor wouldn’t have the numbers to get it passed, even with the support of Senator Fielding.

After recent discussions with Canberra types, I’m now concerned that a deal will get done in the sitting periods remaining this year, and that the Coalition will join with Labor and vote this horrible thing (amended in some way) into law. With nut-job-nanna’s like Dana Vale from the Liberal Party coming out in support of the filter – without having a clue what she’s talking about and foolishly equating the evil found online with the filter as a practical way to combat it (not as a silver bullet, she says, but as one tool, which she supports regardless of the side-effects of this blunt and ineffective tool) – I’m really concerned that the Liberal party and their National colleagues might be ready to do a deal and see this thing installed.

So, what are you going to do to make sure the Opposition know they need to oppose this thing?