BrainBeat Productions Multimedia Blog

I have just added 2 before and after photos in the Digital Photo Restoration part of my gallery. They are of some African friends family and can be viewed here.

Dear Readers

It seems that this Blog was hacked some time recently and was redirecting to a Viagra website that was not even there. I have now fixed all of the problems (I think) and it should be good from now on (I hope).

I feel now that the coalition has released their “brodband” plan (or lack there of) that it would be appropriate to comment on my views of the plans on the table for the future of Internet in Australia. I am not affiliated with any party but as an Internet based business I feel I have a good understanding of what is the best option for the future of Australia. Blow I have highlighted some of the some of the key points of both plans in order to be fair with my comments.
Labor’s plan

• offers speeds between 12mbps (for wireless) up to 1gigabit (was 100mbps up until the 12/8/2010)
• As the bulk of the roll-out is with optical fibre it is somewhat future proof as if the now 1 gigabit is not fast enough they can always upgrade the hardware in the exchanges and offer 10gigabit or more as the theoretical maximum capacity of a single optical fibre strand is at least 100TBPS (100000 times faster than the current proposed maximum)
• 93% of Australia’s population will be covered by the optical fibre network
• the remainder of Australian homes and businesses will be serviced by a combination of next generation wireless and satellite technologies with a minimum speed of 12Mbps
• cost up to A$43 billion

problems with Labor’s plan

• while not strictly part of Labors NBN plan it is a key related issue and that is the mandatory internet filter which is a good idea in theory there are a lot of major problems with it. It will slow down internet throughput, it is mandatory, what is blocked is secret and could be abused making us like china and other states with similar filters restricting free speech, it is easily bypassed with a proxy server and so is unlikely to stop anyone who wants to get access to the banned content anyway.

Liberals plan

These are direct quotes and paraphrases from  http://www.liberal.org.au/Latest-News/2010/08/10/Real-Action-on-Broadband.aspx

• To offer speeds between 12 to 100mbps
• total cost of $6.315 billion over seven years completed by 2017
• $2.75 billion to build a nation-wide competitive fibre optic ‘backbone’
• $750 million for Fixed Broadband Optimisation to significantly increase the number of households which can receive a DSL service or high speed equivalent.
• Up to $1 billion in grant funding for new fixed wireless networks in rural and remote Australia.
• Up to $1 billion in investment funding for new fixed wireless networks in metropolitan
• $700 million to support the provision of improved satellite delivered broadband services to the last three percent of the population.
• Access prices will be set under the telecommunications access regime administered by the ACCC

Problems I can see with this plan

• Short sighted reusing an old plan from when they were last in power.
• Unlikely to improve internet speeds for people who are stuck on a Telstra rim at least for a while
• Relies on the market to drive build and invest in the networks which they have and would already be doing
• Relies somewhat on 4G mobile technology which at this stage is still in testing and can\’t be fully rolled out until the analogue TV signals to be switched off. This technology is always going to be rolled out by the phone and other companies. In theory 4G wireless internet has a maximum speed of 1gigabit but in reality you would only be able to get about 1 1/10th that much and could well be a lot slower than that if more than 1 person is also downloading from the same tower.
• Wireless internet is more convenient for not being tied to 1 place true but there is a very significant price premium for this option and download capps are still very small compared to fixed line internet.
• The 100mbps fixed speed connections will only be available to Telstra and Optus cable customers and possibly only in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane

To sum up With Labours plan we will get a future proof offering to 93% of housholds at a cost up to A$43 billion and a mandatory internet filter. Or with the Liberals a short-sighted patch job which will not deliver anything new to the majority of Australians and to keep the Telstra monopoly going.

This morning I was awoken somewhere between 2 and 3am by bang of a car exploding into a fireball. I quickly dressed and grabbed my camera and took these photos and some video. The car has been parked almost directly in front of my house and was fully ablaze when I arrived. This dumping and setting alight of the car comes after one which was parked 1 car length behind where this is and was dumped on the previous Monday. Both cars were Toyota Camrys and as I have been told there were 2 more dumped and set ablaze in surrounding suburbs this morning also being Camrys. I have been told by witness of the first car fire that this one was a little smaller and leas intense. The flames were up to 5m above the car with a tall column of black smoke. It took the Fire truck about 5 minutes to arrive after I had gone out to observe the blaze and they extinguished the fire within minutes. As far as I am aware the police do not have any suspects. I hope that we do not get another one dumped here next week.

Hi guys
I have added another 72 photos to my gallery in the photography part spread throughout various albums. The main reason why I have found and been working on these photos is that the company Golden has been running a promotion where if you purchased 3 of their products you could make a 20 page photo book from snapfish. I thought about what to put into the book and decided that why put a whole heap of family photos into a book where I would probably print out those family photos out myself anyway where I have a lot of other random photos I have taken which a book worthy but I may never print out. Go to http://www.brainbeatproductions.com.au/gallery/Photography to check them out and please feel free to leave comments about them. All photos I have in my gallery are released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 Australia License too which means you are free to use them as you want for anything noncommercial.

Dear Readers

I have just added some photos I have taken of a wedding which I was the official photographer to the Wedding Photography part of the gallery. Below are a few examples of where is there and there are many more to be added from this and other weddings.

I am glad to say that most of the problems I had with the website are now fixed. I have been able to recreate the menues and pages from a older version I had. There may still be some bad links and other errors but I will be looking at them tomorrow. I have also started populating the new gallery with photos. Here is one example to take a look at and if you would like to see more you can find them in the gallery.

Hi guys it has been a while since I have posted a message and once again it is to report an error. I have recently had my website moved from my old server to a new one and some where in the moving an error seems to have occured and all but a few pages would not display correctly and the menu was not functional. The error was not picked up for a week or so and I have only been able to work on it today and it. The only was we could see it to be workable was to wipe it out and do a fresh install of Joomla which it is based. This has left me with the website empty of content. I will work on it again tomorrow and it should be all fixed then. My gallery I had been using on the old web server also did not migrate correctly and so that has been wiped out and upgraded to the RC1 of Gallery 3 which means all old links to any photos are not going to work and if the website had been working as it seems they have changed the file name from main.php to index.php. The gallery will be populated tomorrow also with a lot more content that last time including a few thousand photos I took on a recent holiday in New Zealand. This new gallery does not have a theme yet to intergrate into my website but I will be working on that in the coming week or so. I will be posting some photos here when I add them to the gallery.

Shawn Sobey

BrainBeat Productions

Hi guys

I have been experiencing internet problems over the last week which has meanth that we website has been down for up to and hour at a time. I have not as yet found out the reason for this instability but am in the process of inviestigating the problem and wil keep you posted on the cause once it is found

It seems this blog has lately become a record of my server problems but anyway If you tried to access my website during the last 2 days you would not have gotten anything. On Wednesday night we had a power failure and the server and router lost power and it seems that the server changed its IP address and the router kept redirecting the website requests to the old address. I only found this out just now and it is now up and running again and hope I do not have any problems for a while.