What is happening with Event Monger?

Back in August I announced that there was a delay in the delivery of Event Monger which was originally intended to one of the deliverables for the By the Community/For the Community program being run by the ASP.NET  team. A recent commenter to that post pulled me up on the fact that there had been no update for a while. Unfortunately I haven’t progressed any further with this mostly due to some other higher priorities.

Through this process I learned that BTC-FTC submissions should be limited in scope because sometimes your day job can impede on whatever plans you have for your evening coding sessions. As a matter of fact there is a mountain of stuff that I’ve wanted to get finished which I simply haven’t had the time to do, which is frustrating to me – but also the people who want the finished product.

I can’t make any promises when Event Monger will surface but I suspect it will be released in pieces in the lead up to Code Camp Oz 2007.

Could widespread availability of broadband become an election issue?

Nicola forwarded me a link to this news article up on the ninemsn site where Kim Beazley downplays the (apparent) success of the T3 float on the stock exchange, instead raising the issue of broadband speeds (and availability?) here in Australia.

The opposition leader is probably walking a fine line here since so many Australians have invested in Telstra but after being without broadband for a little over a month I agree that this is a serious issue. I think that there are actually two tightly related issues here.

• What is broadband? (ISDN, ADSL, ADSL2, Satellite, Cable?)
• Where should broadband be guaranteed available?

At the moment Telstra has to be able to provide ISDN to 64Kbps, but I am starting to think that we need national infrastructure that can gaurantee broadband at a higher rate, say 1500/128 or 1500/256 (up/down). A lot of people are getting the run around when it comes to the provision of broadband and as time goes by it can have an impact on their ability to choose where they want to live and what kind of jobs they can have. For example – you can’t really work from home unless you have some kind of access to broadband.

I really home that the provision of broadband and the erradicaion of broadband blackspots becomes an election issue. How well the government responds might colour how people feel about the sale of Telstra.

The raw thumping power of 128Kbps ISDN.

Yep, thats right, I am now ISDN enabled. I’ve got the Telstra “NT1 Plus II” sitting here and it is routing traffic over my wireless network. I have definately got a speed improvement and the world is looking bright again.

An interesting tidbit is that the technician that came out to install the line actually said that that the loss on our line is only 57db, and ADSL can be supported with loss as high as 61db. However, I know from some of my earlier reading (and the technician confirmed this) that Telstra arbitrarily rule the line at 56db.

The technician was great, he even got up into our roof and ripped out some of the poor cabling that had been done previously (a do it yourself job done by previous tenants presumably). The reason I mention this is that with that kind of dodgy cabling job in the ceiling, it could easily explain away a few db’s of signal loss – so if I could get Telstra to do a line check again (a real check as opposed to looking up a database) then I might qualify for ADSL (which was part of my master plan all along).

Even if I don’t qualiy for ADSL1, I should qualify for the ADSL2 shared spectrum service because it can handle more loss on the line. I’m a happy camper – for now.