SMS - It's been great but ...

According to various sources, it's clear that SMS/text messages are very popular: "SMS revenue to ring up $50bn by 2010". I accept that they can be convenient and good value, but every time I send one I'm reminded of how frustrating they can be, especially when compared to e-mail.

Here's a list of some of my grievances:

• Entering the text is a pain on a standard phone. True, T9 (predictive text entry) is cool, but it depends on how good your dictionary is, and sometimes I want to use a different language. I'm sure I can change the appropriate setting, but that takes time. Also, I hate how my mobile uses T9 by default in some places, and multi-tap in others (e.g. phone book search).


• You don't get (free) notifications of receipt/failures.


• They're limited, not so much in length, but in content. E-mail is obviously much richer. And don't even talk to me about MMS! I hope ubiquitous mobile net access finally renders MMS redundant.


• Messages can only be stored on the mobile (either on the SIM card or the phone's memory). So I have to constantly vet the messages to free up space. E-mail messages need not be stored on the device, and messages stored on a server can be accessed by other devices.


• Messages can (ordinarily) only be read on mobile phones. (Yes, I'm aware that you can jump through hoops to use a PC to send/receive messages, but these techniques are not as simple and widely-known as e-mail).


• They cost money. Sure, it's only 25 cents in Australia, but e-mail is free.

Another silly thing with my phone is that it doesn't filter phone numbers to prevent accidentally sending messages to a non-mobile number.

SMS messaging hearkens back to a time when internet access was tied to desktops. It's been a great technology, but I can't wait to see e-mail usurp its role.

[Yet another day of extreme heat in Adelaide. Today's maximum temperature was 43.1 degrees Celsius (110 degrees Fahrenheit)! I hope the above 40C heatwave ends soon, otherwise I'll run out of things to complain about.]

Inefficient Medicare Cheque Payment Process

In Australia we are lucky to have a universal health system. You can go to any doctor and the government will cover the scheduled fee. Many doctors "bulk-bill", that is, they send the bill directly to the government and charge only the scheduled fee. The government will pay the doctor directly. Very cool.

However, sometimes a co-payment is necessary. Ok, this is understandable to cover doctor's admin costs and prevent abuse of the system. But an extra hassle is introduced for the patient. He or she pays the co-payment to the practice, then the practice makes an application for payment to Medicare for the scheduled fee. A few days pass, then the patient (yes the patient), receives a cheque made out in the doctor’s name. So then the patient has to forward the cheque onto the doctor! Why involve the patient again? Also, in the modern era of electronic funds transfer, the use of cheques sounds arcane.

And here's something I just found out while researching this post: if the patient doesn't forward the cheque within 90 days, the doctor can apply to Medicare to get the money owing via EFT! So obviously Medicare is willing and able to use EFT, so why not skip the cheque-handling and 90-day provision?

If you're unfamiliar with Australia's Medicare system, check out this page: "How does Medicare work?"

[Another day of extreme heat in Adelaide. Today's maximum temperature was 43.4 degrees Celsius (110 degrees Fahrenheit)!]

DVD Anti-Piracy Measures = Anti-Consumer

Why do movie studios insist on forcing legitimate viewers to watch those anti-piracy spots after a DVD is loaded? I personally find it a bit insulting that someone would insinuate that I would want to pirate a movie.

The irony, of course, is that people who actually watch pirated DVDs don't even see these ads! Pirates would obviously exclude them from the copies. Anti-piracy? More like anti-consumer.

To rub more salt into the wound, some DVDs now play previews of other films after the anti-piracy ad. Aargh! More precious time wasted! Please, just let me watch the movie I want to watch.

I know, this is not exactly an original complaint, e.g. "Intrusive anti-piracy". But I just wanted to get it out of my system.

Perhaps they could at least make the ads more interesting. For example, make them funny and/or in the style of the content they precede? For example, here's one from the opening of The IT Crowd. Other suggestions have been put forward.

[The extreme heatwave in Adelaide continues. Today it was 45.7 degrees Celsius (114 degrees Fahrenheit)!]

Money as Debt ... as Fact, or Fiction?

"Money as Debt" by Paul Grignon is an interesting documentary about money, banking and debt creation. It points out some facts about money, but unfortunately, it has a few flaws.

Firstly, I want to commend a couple of points where it quite rightly challenges popularly-held views:

1. "Money", as in a currency in our wallets, is not backed by the equivalent amount of gold held by banks or in places like Fort Knox. This is true. (See Wikipedia article: Representative money).

2. Most of the money in an economy is not the result of governments printing notes, but rather from the money creation activities of banks and other credit providers. This is also true. (See Wikipedia article: Money supply).

The general public should be made aware of these common misconceptions, so that people can be better informed about how the economy really works. However, I cannot entirely accept the description of the money creation process as depicted in the video. Nor can I accept the suggestion that the money (or debt) is conjured completely out of thin air.

According to the example in the documentary, a bank can have only $1,111.12 in reserves and use that to loan $10,000 to a borrower. Huh? How can the borrower use the credit (an asset for the bank) when there is no corresponding deposit (a liability for the bank). This would violate double-entry accounting. That's Enron-style voodoo accounting. How does the bank account for the $8,888.88 that has been conjured out of thin air, as the documentary asserts? For the bank to be able to lend out $10,000 it would need to have initially raised that amount of money from somewhere, as either startup capital from investors or deposits from the general public.

While it is true that banks create money, the ratio of 90:1 suggested by the documentary is plain wrong. $1,111,12 cannot create $100,000 of money. If the required reserve requirement ratio is 1:9, then the credit creation multiplier is 9:1. The bank would need $10,000 of initial capital, not $1,111,12. For a more accurate example of the money creation process, check out the description of the Fractional reserve system in the Wikipedia article: Money creation.

The second major issue I have is the idea that debt (and therefore money) exists independently of the real assets in the economy. Again, double-entry accounting suggests this is not possible. Somewhere along the line, a mortgage of say $100,000 requires equivalent assets as collateral. Otherwise the bank shouldn't hand over its depositors' funds to the borrower. That would be irresponsible.

While I accept that these days the traditional (and rather conservative) credit system of banks has been usurped by all manner of credit providers. These sources of credit have much looser regulatory requirements, and I would argue that here lies a potential problem for the economy.

Another concession I would make is that the total debt in the economy may actually exceed the real value of the assets acquired with the money borrowed. Any such mismatch can cause real problems for the economy. Bubbles can lead to prices that have lost touch with the real value of assets. Remember the Tech bubble, the sub-prime fiasco, and so on? If the bubble bursts, borrowers could be in the unenviable position of holding assets worth less than the debt owed to acquire them. These borrowers may no longer be able to meet their obligations, and so could be forced to sell the assets if, for example, the bank forecloses on their mortgage. The flow-on effects throughout the economy can be disastrous, as many people are experiencing as part of the sub-prime crisis.

I must admit I stopped watching the video about half-way through. Therefore I don't know where the argument was ultimately leading. Unfortunately, the two flaws I've identified make me question the documentary as a whole. A basic requirement of a logical argument is that it must be built on premises that are not false. False premises render any conclusion inferred by those premises to be unsustainable.

If the documentary maker wanted to prove that most money is created by banks and other credit providers (i.e. not by governments), and that out-of-control debt creation can cause economic problems, then I would have to agree. But unfortunately he has sabotaged his efforts by introducing serious flaws in his argument. One day if I get time I might watch the rest of it to see what the conclusions are. In the meantime, I cannot give it an unqualified recommendation. I would suggest viewers interested in the issues raised by the documentary seek more authoritative sources before accepting any conclusions presented.

May Day = Bizarro Day

A couple of days ago I got the familiar feeling that I'd woken up from the wrong side of the bed, twice.

Firstly, heading off to work I got to the bus stop to find nobody else there. This didn't look good, because that probably meant I'd just missed the bus. I looked up the road to confirm my fears, but I didn't see a bus on that 1.5 km stretch. It must've come very early. Oh well, the next bus should be along in the next 15 minutes or so (according to the timetable). If only. It finally did arrive 30 minutes later , closely followed by another bus! So, the bus I wanted to catch but missed was at least 5 minutes early, the next one was 15 minutes late and the one after that was on time. It would be nice if bus drivers followed the schedule a bit more closely. Perhaps people may have more confidence in public transport and use the system more.

Anyway, I finally got to work a bit later than I'd hoped. I worked through to lunch time quite productively. Then went over to eat my lunch at a nearby snack bar. I ordered lasagna with salad, specifically requesting no chips. Time passed. More time passed. Eventually, I overheard someone say that the chips were ready. Oh no, I thought, I'm going to get chips with my meal. Not only that, but the chips that I specifically did not want were the reason for the delay in getting the lasagna and salad that I did want! And trying to eat those chips used up even more time that I wanted to use on getting my work done. I hate having to throw away food, but there was no way I could eat all the chips without getting sick.

Fortunately, when I got back to work I managed to complete all the tasks I wanted to for the day. As they say, all's well that ends well :)

.docx Considered Stupid

Recently I received an email with a ".docx" file attached. This is the new format for Microsoft Word 2007 documents. I won't even start about how annoying it is to get Word documents attached to emails. Unfortunately it's something you have to put up with.

Being a Mac user and not having the latest and *cough* greatest word processor from Microsoft, I had to figure out how to read this document. I found out the .docx file format is actually a zipped directory tree containing xml files.

Ok, first step was to unzip the .docx file via the command line. This resulted in eleven files in a handful of directories. So far, so good.

Next step was to find which file contains the actual text of the document and not just metadata. Looking through the filenames, I found one called "document.xml" which appeared promising. So I opened it up in my trusty text editor, TextMate. Suddenly my computer began grinding to a crawl as the file was loaded. It turned out that the entire file consists of two lines: the first line containing the xml version, and the second line contained the entire xml markup for the document! No wonder TextMate struggled, since it dutifully created a 70,000+ character line for the document. Why couldn't the xml file have newlines to make it more manageable? Anyway, on to the final step...

My plan was to write a regexp search-and-replace to strip out all the xml markup so I could read the content of the document. But then I discovered that the markup is peppered with <w:proofErr w:type="spellStart"/> tags around almost every single word! I should mention that the contents of the document were in a foreign language, hence all the spelling "errors". For some bizarre reason, Microsoft Word marks up spelling mistakes in docx files, not just on-screen. Why? Shouldn't it be left to the individual application (and platform) loading the document to decide whether or not words are misspelled? I can accept all the other hassles with the docx format: zipped xml files and incredibly long lines, but the encoding of spelling errors is crazy stuff.

After all that I gave up trying cleaning up the xml to read the file. Luckily, I found a web site that offers free conversion of docx files: zamzar.com.

PS: It turns out that Word documents created using MS Office 2007 do not conform with their own OOXML standard!:

OOXML and Office 2007 Conformance: a Smoke Test

Our Precious Gold Medals

Australia loves it's sporting heroes. But I think they sometimes deserve to have their egos pricked every now and then.

With the Tibet and other human rights issues spurring some people to suggest a boycott of the Olympic Games:

Swimming legend to boycott Olympics

some Australian sports "stars" won't have a bar of it:

Hackett dismisses Olympics boycott

It's interesting that these people, who are heavily subsidised by (our) public money to swim up and down a pool all day easily dismiss the political protests of their fellow Australians.

If they financed themselves solely using their own money, then they can do whatever they want. But, according to this report:

Olympic medals or long life: what’s the bottom line?

Australia spent $280 million on its athletes during the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Each medal cost $4.82 million!

The medals are not the only benefits that athletes can receive. They get lucrative sponsorship deals and jump to the head of the line for plum jobs in the sports media.

I'd like to see athletes self-finance their activities more. Maybe they should contribute using schemes such as those that exists for tertiary education in Australia (HECS/HELP)? The money raised could go to helping the underprivileged or into the general health system. Isn't it ironic that at a time when Australia performs so well in international sport, the country is going through an unprecedented obesity epidemic.

Time Out of Joint

We're surrounded by appliances that tell us the time: VCRs, stereos, ovens, clock radios, etc. Unfortunately, the times displayed often get out of touch with reality.

Power outages will leave appliances flashing 12:00 (or 0:00). And switching to/from daylight saving can be a pain twice a year. A third problem is that the timing mechanisms in the devices have varying degrees of accuracy. So from time to time you will have to go around setting the correct time on various appliances.

Battery backups help solve the power outage problem. But batteries eventually go flat and cost money to replace. And they won't help much if you want to totally power down appliances to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

After all these years, and the production of millions of appliances, you'd think manufacturers could have come up with a solution. Why haven't they taken some cues from the computer and telecommunication industries, which make use of time services and protocols (e.g. Network Time Protocol) to allow automatic time synchronisation. Appliance manufacturers could add some simple circuitry to perform a similar function over power lines. The cost of the circuitry would eventually become negligible thanks to economies of scale. In fact, manufacturers could save money by removing batteries and other parts.

Of course, this solution would require power companies to transmit a time signal over the power lines. Surely this couldn't be a huge cost? Telephone companies transmit the time and date as part of Caller ID information.

PS I don't claim to have come up with the phrase "time out of joint". Philip K. Dick used it for the title of a novel, and William Shakespeare used it in Hamlet.