Andrew E. Scott – Page 5 – It's all about me, really.

XBMC on Raspberry Pi 2

I got a Raspberry Pi 2 on the first day they were available in Australia. It has twice the memory and is up to six times faster than the old Raspberry Pi, and at some point in the future it will be able to run Windows 10. But in the mean-time, I thought it would be cool to see what sort of media centre appliance I could get going on a $36 computer. This post is for posterity, but also in case it helps others who are trying to get this working.

The default media centre platform is called XBMC, but the first thing I learnt was that it was now called Kodi. According to the Kodi Wiki, there are just two versions that work on the Pi 2. The first one I tried was OSMC, but it is still in Alpha release and not so stable. The other is OpenELEC and v5.0.3 supports the Pi 2.

Following the installation instructions didn’t work for me, perhaps running Windows 7 64-bit caused problems for the Win32 Disk Imager program. So, I tried using WinFLASHTool instead, and it worked for me perfectly.

This got me a media centre on the Pi, but what I really wanted was to be able to control it from the TV remote control – this requires HDMI CEC to work. I have an LG 42LN5710 television, and LG calls their implementation of CEC “Simplink”. There are two ways to turn it on: press the Simplink button on the remote, or press the Input source button on the remote and then the green button on the remote. Neither worked for me.

After a lot of stuffing around, I learned two things that got me on the right track.

Firstly, not every HDMI cable supports CEC. I had a cheap HDMI 1.3 cable that was fine for delivering A/V from the Pi to the TV, but I needed to replace it with a new cable. CEC is implemented in a single wire in the cable, and is apparently mandatory, but not mandatory enough.

Secondly, any HDMI device can communicate with any other HDMI device connected on any HDMI cable using CEC. I had three HDMI devices (including the Pi) plugged into my TV. One of them was misbehaving, and stopping CEC on the Pi from working. I had to unplug the rogue device and reboot the Pi.

After this, I was able to turn on Simplink and the TV identified the Pi as a Simplink device. Excellent!

Mathematical, musical curiosity

I’ve been recently writing an app that uses the autocorrelation approach to detect the pitch of musical notes. This approach basically tries to see if a given musical note is in a digital audio signal by comparing each sample with the next sample in the signal that ought to be the same (since a given note should repeat periodically as per its frequency). In exploring how to best do this in my app, I’ve come across something I found curious.

Before I get to that, I need to explain a couple of things. Firstly, I am doing this pitch detection for a particular instrument: the flute. The flute is ordinarily considered to be able to play notes from B3 (the B immediately below middle C, but only if a flute has a “B foot”, otherwise from middle C) to C7 (the C three octaves above middle C). However, very skilled players might be able to get a few notes higher, to F7. Also, the piccolo flute can go up to C8, but we’ll ignore that more now. Given that the frequency of B3 is 246.9Hz and that of F7 is 2,793.8Hz, the 43 notes are spread across about 2,550Hz of frequencies.

The other thing to explain is that CDs (and many electronic devices) use a sample frequency of 44,100Hz. This is considered to be sufficiently high to record and reproduce audio signals up to 20,000Hz, which is the general limit of human hearing. However, a higher sample frequency, of 48,000Hz, is being increasingly used, such as in DAT tapes or DVDs.

These two things come together in autocorrelation because it requires knowing the period of each note, measured in numbers of samples. For example, the audio signal for a pure B3 tone should repeat every 178.6 samples if sampled at 44.1kHz or every 194.4 samples if sampled at 48kHz. Similarly, F7 should repeat every 15.8 samples at 44.1kHz or every 17.2 samples at 48kHz. Except there’s no such thing as a fraction of a sample, so for my autocorrelation calculations, I would round to the nearest sample.

Rounding introduces error, so using a period of 16 samples (at 44.1kHz) or 17 samples (at 48kHz) for F7 is not ideal. In fact, these periods correspond to different frequencies – 2,756.3Hz and 2,823.5Hz respectively. The intervals between musical notes are measured in cents, and there are 100 evenly-spaced cents to a semitone. The frequency corresponding to a period of 16 samples at 44.1kHz is 23 cents below the real F7, and the frequency of 17 samples at 48kHz version is 18 cents above F7. Higher notes are more error-prone, and the corresponding errors for a low note like B3 are 4 cents below (for 44.1kHz) and 3 cents above (for 48kHz).

For my autocorrelation algorithm, some error in detecting pitch is okay, since as long as the flute is playing in tune, if the algorithm was less than 50 cents out, it would always get the right note. So, I wrote some code to look at what the maximum error in cents was in following this approach, considering a range of sample frequencies from 2,000Hz to 60,000, and got a curious graph:

You might be able to see small red dots at the points for 44.1kHz and 48kHz (or you can click through to see a bigger version of the photo). This graph shows the maximum error in cents across all notes in the range between A3 and F7, and it is less than 40 cents for both 44.1kHz and 48kHz. In fact, the maximum error for 44.1kHz (29.3 cents, relating to the note G#6) is less than 48kHz (37.0 cents, relating to the note D7), and 44.1kHz is close to the minimum for all sample frequencies up until about 57.8kHz.

There is a general trend that the higher rates result in lower errors, although I wasn’t expecting that the sample rate of 44.1kHz would have lower maximum error than 48kHz. I wondered if this was due to the specific range I was examining, so I wrote some more code to examine the impact of maximum errors on these two frequencies if I used ranges of notes starting at A3 and finishing at between C7 and C8. Here’s the resulting graph:

As with before, for a note range going up to F7, 44.1kHz has a lower maximum error in cents than 48kHz. However, if the note range had stopped at C7, 48kHz would have a lower maximum error. Also, if we’d gone above A7, 48kHz would also be more accurate than using 44.1kHz but at that point the error would be above 50 cents, i.e. not accurate enough to be useful.

So, curiously 44.1kHz happens to be well-suited to autocorrelation of notes in the flute range. I’m sure this wasn’t a consideration when that was selected as a common sample frequency for audio recordings, but it happens to benefit me now.

Remembering dozens of passwords

You’ll never forget your password ever again

In recent weeks, there have been claims that username/passwords of Dropbox have been leaked online. While Dropbox has denied that any passwords were leaked, their advice was for “users not to reuse passwords across services”. For people who don’t use second-factor authentication or password manager services, this is good advice.

In fact, I’ve moved away from the approach I described previously of how to choose a strong password. There is no such thing as a strong password once it’s leaked. Sadly, even well regarded sites like Evernote and LinkedIn have had their passwords stolen, and no service can be considered immune to hacks.

Previously, I simply remembered passwords relating to different tiers of service: a password for my most secure service, another for secure but less important services, another for services I use regularly but don’t need to be secure, and another for services that I don’t really use. This way I just needed to remember a handful of passwords across many sites. Unfortunately, this method is not proof against hacks.

However, to remember a different password for every site is infeasible for most people (including me!). Still, there is a way to have a large number of different passwords across different sites but need to remember only two things: a password stub and a password algorithm. When logging in, a user just needs to apply the name of the service and the stub to the algorithm, and out should pop a (relatively) unique password. Different stubs might be used for different accounts, e.g. if the same service is used for both work and personal purposes.

Here’s an example of how this might be used. Take the password stub “pa55word” and the algorithm “insert the second and third letter of the site name in the third position”, then if this user was logging in to “www.dropbox.com”, the second and third letter would be “ro” and the unique password would be “paro55word”. (Let me just say that this is neither a stub that I use nor an algorithm, and now that it’s documented here, not one that you should use either.)

Since there are potentially 676 (26 x 26) combinations of second and third letters, this algorithm can generate hundreds of passwords without needing to remember more than two things. It’s easier than my previous approach where I needed to remember at least four things.

In choosing a stub, it’s helpful to include the sorts of things that password strength tests look for, e.g. some punctuation, a number and both upper and lower case letters. In choosing an algorithm, you want it to be pretty simple so that it will work for many different site names, so don’t go overboard.

So this will let you follow Dropbox’s advice, and avoid you reusing passwords, but when (!) a service has its passwords hacked and you need to change the password, it’s not going to work. So, probably you need to remember a third thing – how many times a given service has been hacked (hopefully there aren’t too many). Then you would have a modification of the algorithm that would incorporate this information as well, e.g. have as the letters inserted for the second iteration of a password on www.dropbox.com to be “rro” instead of “ro”, and the third iteration being “rrro”, etc. This does expose the main weakness of the method, in my opinion, so I’m hopeful of coming across a better approach at some point.

As I mentioned at the top, second-factor authentication and password manager services are also approaches that can be considered, but have their own downsides. I’m more hopeful that these services will improve in usability and utility over time so that I can make more use of them, before I need to remember the details of too many website hacks.

Lessons from NYT on innovation

Whatever the circumstances that led someone at The New York Times to leak their report on Innovation, I am thankful. Published (internally) in March, it is the fruits of a six month long deep-dive into the business of journalism within a company that has been a leader in that industry for over a century, and provides an intimate and honest study into how an incumbent can be disrupted. It is 97 pages long, and worth reading for anyone who is interested in innovation or the future of media.

The report was leaked in full in May, and I’ve been reading bits of it in my spare time. Just recently I completed it, and felt it was worth summarising some of the lessons that are highlighted by the people at the Times. As it is with such things, my summary is going to be subjective and – by nature – highly selective, so if this piques your interest, I encourage you to read the whole thing.

(My summary ended up being longer than I’d originally intended, so apologies in advance.)

Organisational Division

Because of the principle of editorial independence, the Times has clear boundaries between the journalists in the newsroom and those who operate “the business” part of the newspaper, which has been traditionally about selling advertising. This separation is even known as “church and state” within the organisation, and affects everything from who is allowed to meet with whom (even during brown-bag lunch style meetings) to the language used to communicate concepts. This has worked well in the past, allowing the journalism to be kept at the highest quality, without fear of being compromised by commercial considerations.

However, the part of the organisation that has been developing new software tools and reader applications is within “the business” (not being journalists), and has hence been disconnected from the newsroom. Hence new software is not developed to support the changing style of journalism, and where it is, it is done as one-off projects. Other media organisations are utilising developers more strategically, resulting in better tools for the journalists and a better experience for the readers.

Lesson: Technology capability needs to be at the heart of an innovation organisation, rather than kept at arms-length.

Changing Customers

For a very long time, the main customer of the Times has been advertisers. However, print media is facing a future where advertisers will not pay enough to keep the organisation running. Online advertising pays less than print advertising, and mobile advertising even less again. Coupled with declining circulation due to increased digital readership, the advertising business looks pretty sick. But there’s a new type of customer for the digital editions that is growing in importance: the reader.

While advertising revenues had the potential to severely compromise journalism, it’s not so clear that the same threat exists from reader revenues. In theory there is a good alignment: high quality journalism results in more readers. But if consideration of attracting readers is explicitly kept away from the newsroom as part of the “church and state” division, readers may end up being attracted by other media organisations. In fact, this is what is happening at the Times, with declines in most online reader metrics, and none increasing.

In the print world, it was enough to produce a high quality newspaper and it would attract readers. However, in the digital world this strategy is not currently working. Digital readers don’t select a publication and then read the stories in it, they discover individual articles from a variety of sources and then select whether to read them or not. The authors of articles need to take a bigger role in ensuring those articles are discovered.

Lesson: When customers radically change, the business needs to radically change too (many true-isms may be true no longer).

Experimentation

The rules for success in digital are different from those of traditional print journalism, although no-one really knows what they are yet. That said, the Times newsroom has an ingrained dislike of risk-taking. Again this made sense for a newsroom that didn’t want to print an incorrect story, and so everything had to be checked before it went public. However, this culture inhibits innovation if applied outside of the news itself.

Not only does it a culture of avoiding risks prevent them from experimenting and slow the ability to launch new things, but smart people within the organisation risk getting good at the wrong things. A great quote from the report: “When it takes 20 months to build one thing, your skill set becomes less about innovation and more about navigating bureaucracy.”

Also, the newsroom lacks a dedicated strategy and operations team, so doesn’t know how well readers are responding to experiments, or what is working well for competitors. Given that competitors are no longer only other daily newspapers, it’s not enough to just read the morning’s papers to get insight into the competition. BuzzFeed reformatted stories from the Times and managed to get greater reader numbers than the Times was able to for the same stories.

Lesson: If experimentation is being avoided due to risk, then business risks are not being managed effectively.

Acquiring Talent

It turns out that people experienced in traditional journalism don’t automatically have all the skills to meet the requirements of digital readers. However, the Times has a bias for hiring and promoting people in digital roles based on their achievements as journalists. While this likely worked in the past to create a high quality newspaper, it isn’t working in digital. In general, the New York Times appears to be a print newspaper first, and a digital business second. The daily tempo of article submission and review is oriented around a daily publication to be read in the mornings, rather than supporting the release of stories digitally when they are ready to be published. Performance metrics are still oriented around the number of front page stories published – a measure declining in importance as digital readers cease to discover articles via the home page.

The lack of appreciation for the digital world and digital people in general has resulted in the departure of a number of skilled employees, according to the report. Hiring digital talent is also difficult to justify to management given that demand has pushed salaries higher for skilled people even if those people are relatively young. What could be a virtuous circle, with talent attracting talent, is working in the opposite direction with what appears to be a cultural bias against the very talent that would help the Times.

Lesson: An organisation pays for the talent either by paying market rates for capable people or paying the cost in lost opportunities.

Final words

When I first came across the NYT Innovation report, I expected to read about another example of the innovators’ dilemma, where rational business decisions kept them from moving into a new market. Instead, the report is the tale of how the organisation structure, culture and processes that made The New York Times great in the past are actively inhibiting its success in the present. Some of these seem to have become sacred cows and it is difficult for the organisation to get rid of them. It will require courage – and a dedication to innovation – to change the organisation into one that is able to compete effectively.

Hackathon Tips

Last week, I participated in my first Hackathon. It was an internal one for Telstra employees, but there were around 40-50 people involved, and my team ended up winning – which was awesome. However, the experience of being part was a reward in itself, with the collective energy creating a real buzz, and there was a huge amount of satisfaction in being part of something so productive.

Since it was all internal development, I’m not going to share the details of the idea. However, I was one of the two developers on the team (we were also joined by an awesome interface designer and fabulous digital sales person) and I wrote a back-end server in Node.js that had to implement a web server, IMAP to Gmail, and OAuth to Box.com. I’d been doing some serious Node.js development in a previous project, so I didn’t have to learn that, and the IMAP stuff wasn’t too different from a hobby project I’ve discussed before (although that was in Python). Getting OAuth to work was the main hurdle, but the advantage of picking popular frameworks and services is that others are likely to have solved the major problems before me, and Stack Overflow was a good source of solutions.

In any case, I thought it might be worthwhile to share a couple of the things that I think I did well, and which might help others going into their own Hackathons. Putting aside the strength of the idea and the talent possessed by the team – which would have been the principal things that helped us win the top prize – I think there were three things that put us in the best position to pull it off.

1. Networking prior to pitching

The start of the Hackathon was to build a team on the strength of a one-minute pitch, and around half the participants pitched an idea. So, it was a pretty competitive way to start things off, and one minute isn’t much time to sell yourself and your idea. However, before the pitching began, there was about a half hour of social drinks (the Hackathon started after work had finished for the day).

I decided to use the social drinks time to be social, rather than just chatting to people that I already knew. As it turned out, this was a good thing to do, since a natural ice-breaker was to ask if someone was planning to pitch an idea, and to share the idea I was planning to pitch. This meant that I got to speak to several people for longer than one minute about my idea, and one of those people ended up deciding to join my team.

This was a lucky break, since once the one-minute pitches were all done, there were now two of us going around selling the project idea to others. I doubt I would’ve gotten a project team together without this, since I hadn’t pre-arranged a team to work on the idea.

2. Knowing ahead of time how to achieve the idea

Luckily, the idea was one that I’d done some initial work on with others in Telstra. Also, I’d done a bit of research to see how a useful version of it might be implemented in the time available. One of the rules was that we had to use a partner API, like that of Box.com’s, so for example I had a quick look to see that the APIs would do what was needed.

As a result, I was able to explain clearly at the start how I proposed that we would go about building something. Also, I was able to respond to a variety of objections and arguments that were put to us by mentors, peers and judges during the Hackathon.

That’s not to say that I was stubborn or unmoving when it came to the idea (at least, I’d like to think I wasn’t). It’s just that I wasn’t making decisions or coming up with responses from a position of ignorance. We did explore a couple of variants of the idea as we went along and there were additional features that were built that I hadn’t originally thought of. However, we were very focussed, and I think this helped in realising the idea.

3. Progressing through Tuckman’s Stages ASAP

If you haven’t heard of Tuckman’s Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing stages of team development, add it to your to-do list to read up. (Or do it now – I’ll wait here if you want.) I was conscious that the team had only a limited time to complete the project, and a major risk was consuming valuable time in internal team politics. We needed to get to the Performing stage as quickly as possible.

Rather than detail exactly how the team evolved, I’ll just mention a few things that I think helped us progress:

Forming the team in a social setting was a good way to start with some of the barriers broken down.
The pre-work mentioned in point #2 above helped us stay in synch. Also, the first thing I did is answer questions from the team on the idea and its implementation, so we begun heading in the same direction.
The next thing I did was ask everyone for their thoughts and plans on how to begin, so we had a collective plan.
As the idea evolved, we wrote up the specifics on one of the walls of the office we were in so that everyone could see it.
Everyone had largely independent activities, so we weren’t held up waiting on each other.
I was team “captain” but I spent much of my time contributing to the final outputs, i.e. was part of the team rather than the manager of the team.

That said, the team was made up of easy-going people, so it was probably less likely we’d have a big falling-out. However, since I didn’t know any of them in advance, I didn’t know this.

Finally

We also spend a couple of hours prior to the final three-minute presentation going over (and over) the demo and presentation. This was worthwhile, but an obvious thing to do.

So, I think I ended up with a winning team through a combination of good luck and good planning. However, while I can’t help with the luck, I hope the above tips would aid you if you’re entering a Hackathon. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Android on Xperia

One of my handsets is a Sony Xperia E C1504 (code-name Nanhu) which was a low-end-ish Android handset when it launched in early 2013, and was apparently relatively popular in India. One of its claims to fame is that it was also one of the first handsets to have a version of Firefox OS available for it. But why I’m writing about it here is that Sony has been hassling me to upgrade it to the most recent version of firmware (11.3.A.2.23), and recently I gave in, but since I was mucking about with the firmware I thought I’d “root” it as well. And therein lies the tale.

Although, as is often the case with Android when wandering off the well-trod path, it’s more of a cautionary tale.

“Rooting” an Android device means to gain complete control over the operating system through installing a superuser tool in the system partition. When Android is running, the system partition is read-only, so this step has to be done outside of Android itself (unless an “exploit” is used, utilising a bug in an Android implementation to achieve this). The usual process for achieving root is: 1) unlock the bootloader, 2) install a custom recovery partition, 3) copy a superuser tool onto the device’s filesystem, and 4) install the superuser tool into the system partition from within recovery. Oh, if only it was that easy.

Step 0 – Install USB Drivers

Before you can do anything, you need to get the right USB drivers set up on your PC, which is a world of pain itself. Complications come from whether the PC is running a 32-bit or 64-bit operating system, whether the drivers are 32-bit or 64-bit, whether the drivers support ADB, fastboot, or (for Sony) flash modes, and which particular USB port the cable is plugged into (and for which mode). I’m running Windows 8.1 64-bit, which seems to have limited driver support for this sort of thing.

I had to:

Install the Android SDK from Google, so that the fastboot and adb tools were installed on my PC
Install the ClockworkMod universal USB drivers
Before going any further, make sure the drivers are working. Use “adb devices” or “fastboot devices” from the command line to list the devices that can be seen. To put the Sony Xperia E into fastboot mode: turn off the handset, ensure it is not connected to the PC via the USB cable, hold down the volume up button, then connect it to the PC via the USB cable.
When I connected the Xperia E in fastboot mode, the laptop reported it as an unknown device “S1 Boot”. I opened the Device Manager (press Windows-X and select it from the menu, for a quick way to get to that), right-clicked on the unknown device, selected “Update Driver Software”, then “Browse my computer for drive software”, then “List me pick from list” and I chose the Nexus bootloader driver from the ClockworkMod set of drivers.
I used my laptop’s powered USB port for ADB and fastboot modes, but an unpowered USB port for the flash mode.

Pro-tip: If something’s not working, try another USB port. Try all of them.

Step 1 – Unlock the bootloader

Sony provides an official way to unlock the bootloader. Be warned that although it’s “official”, it will still void your warranty, and potentially brick your device. Ensure everything that is valuable on the device has been backed up somewhere else. At the very least, all apps and configuration on the device will be lost anyway.

I followed the unlocking instructions from Sony Developer World. However, my device immediately stopped working afterwards. It would go into a boot loop, showing the Sony logo, then the boot animation, then back to the Sony logo, and so on. The solution was to reflash the operating system.

I download the Flashtool that’s available from Flashtool.net (I used Flashtool64 since I have a 64-bit Windows). It’s the one that’s commonly used in the Sony Android custom ROM community.

I followed the instructions at XDA Developers to flash the 11.3.A.2.23 version of the C1504 firmware onto the device (the newest version currently available). This happened to be an Indian build of the firmware, so I’ve ended up with some links to Shahrukh Khan videos on my device as a result. :)

It was pretty hard to find these instructions. Most Sony Xperia E firmware flashing instructions refer to the C1505 version, which has support for 3G at 900MHz instead of 850MHz. Since Telstra’s 3G network is 850MHz, I need this capability of the C1504, and didn’t trust that C1505 firmware would give me what I wanted.

Now my handset booted again, but aside from the Shak Ruhk Khan videos, I hadn’t gained anything new yet.

Step 2 – Install a custom Recovery partition

The Android fastboot mode gives access to the bootloader. Now that it was unlocked, the bootloader allowed a special partition called the recovery partition to be flashed with new firmware. The recovery partition is an alternate boot partition to the default system partition.

The two most popular Android recovery partitions are from CWM (ClockworkMod) and TWRP (Team Win Recovery Project). I’ve used both in the past, but this time I chose CWM since it seemed to be more widely tested on the Xperia E. Unfortunately, I found that most of the instructions for installing the CWM recovery resulted in Wi-Fi ceasing to work on my device. I also tried to build a new version of CWM for my device, but the CWM build tools didn’t support it.

However, I found someone had built a version of the ZEUS kernel (replacing the default Sony Xperia kernel) that included CWM recovery, and this wouldn’t have the Wi-Fi issue. I followed the instructions at XDA Developers to flash that onto my device.

Step 3 – Superuser tool

Now when I turned on the device, it booted as normal, but a blue light appeared at the base of the device at the beginning when the Sony logo is shown. When the blue light is shown, the device can be diverted to boot into CWM recovery rather than the default Android system by press a volume key. However, I needed to put a superuser tool onto the device’s SD card before this new feature would be useful.

The superuser tool is made up of two files (a system application called “su” and an Android app called “Superuser.apk”), but both are stored within a zip file for easy installation. I got the zip file from the AndroidSU site (the one labelled Superuser-3.1.3-arm-signed.zip).

I installed the zip file onto the sdcard simply by enabling the Developer Options on the device (under Settings) and ticking the USB Debugging option, then attaching the device to my PC via USB, and using the command on my PC:
adb push Superuser-3.1.3-arm-signed.zip /sdcard/

Step 4 – Install the Superuser tool

I disconnected and rebooted the device, and when the Sony logo appeared (and the blue light), pressed a volume key. The device booted into the recovery partition. I followed the instructions at XDA Developers (starting at step 5).

And that’s all (!). Now I can boot my unlocked, rooted Xperia E (C1504). Remember, if you’ve followed along with these instructions, you’ve voided your warranty. But at least now you can install whatever you want on the device, or change any of the configuration settings.

One thing you might want to install straight up is a build.prop editor, such as the mysteriously named Build Prop Editor, to change configurations. For example, tweaking the network settings for the Australian mobile operators seems to improve performance. I haven’t tried these myself yet, but it’s an example of the sort of thing that can be done.

A protest

I joined today’s Palm Sunday Walk (a.k.a. Walk for Justice for Refugees), and I was asked why I bothered, since governments have a long tradition of ignoring protest marches. This post is meant to briefly explain why.

Firstly, while some protests have a long list of vague things that those involved are against, this march at least had a clear message about what it was for: justice for refugees.

I have to accept that the current government was elected fairly under a reasonable democratic system. Also, I have to accept that they are strong believers in a policy of deterrent to reduce the number of refugees arriving here by boat.

However, I cannot accept that any type of deterrent be used in the implementation of this policy. Breaches of human rights, including conditions akin to torture, cross a line. Australia is a civilised nation, we follow the rule of law, and we treat people humanely.

While I wasn’t happy with the policies of either our previous Prime Minster or the current PM, I wouldn’t have marched in protest against those policies. (I rarely march in protest against anything.) However, the recent events of Manus Island, including the circumstances that led to a death of a refugee, are not consistent with how we treat people in this country.

I was there today to be counted. I don’t expect our current government to immediately change anything, but I don’t want to let the current implementation of their policies be silently accepted. They will likely do what they feel they have the power to do, but they shouldn’t think that it’s acceptable to the wider community.

Australian institutions are accountable to the standards of the community that they operate in.

The Amazing Bitcoin

I am impressed with the novelty and cleverness behind the online phenomenon known as Bitcoin. For those who came in late, bitcoins could be described as digital commodities. People can trade them for actual currency and sometimes real goods. However, while it’s true that we’ve been using something called money for this purpose already, and so you may ask why we need it, Bitcoin has a couple of interesting properties:

Trustless: If I engage in a Bitcoin transaction with you, I don’t need to trust you, your bank, your government, or anyone specifically. Once a transaction has completed, it can be verified to have happened as I expected, removing counter-party risk that exists in many markets (for example, a fraudster may pay me in counterfeit bills).
Resilient: There is no central operator of the Bitcoin infrastructure, so everyone’s not worried about a particular company staying solvent, or a particular government staying in power or true to their promises in order for the system to keep working.

Up until Bitcoin, no-one had been able to come up with a system with these properties. Either counter-party risk was removed because there was an operator regulating the market (and the market wasn’t resilient in the face of that operator collapsing) or there were markets without central control that required a lot of trust when dealing with others. If the inventors of Bitcoin had not been hiding their identities, I wouldn’t be surprised if they would be in the running for a future Nobel Prize in Economics. Bitcoin is no less than a completely decentralised technology for financial contracts allowing for value to be transferred over any means – physical or virtual.

However, I’ve found that the way that Bitcoin operates to be a little surprising. It’s not like other systems that I’m used to. Since I haven’t seen these points noted down clearly in the one place, I thought others may be interested as well. (Unless you’re already very familiar with Bitcoin, in which case it’s likely to be old hat.)

1. Miners are both the source of new bitcoins and responsible for documenting all transactions

A miner is just the name for a computing node that works to discover the next block in the Bitcoin blockchain. Every ten minutes (on average), a new block containing all as-yet-undocumented transactions is generated. The first node to generate this block (which requires discovering the solution to a particular computing problem using trial-and-error approaches) also gets 25 bitcoins (BTC) for its trouble. The “winner” here is in part due to luck, and in part due to how much computing power the miner has dedicated to this. The blockchain is the ongoing record of each of these blocks, collectively forming something of a global ledger of all known transactions to date.

In theory, transactions can contain something akin to a tip, representing a fee to the (winning) miner, and these are in addition to the 25 BTC for each ten minutes work (with a single BTC worth something between US$40 and US$1140 over the last year, and currently around US$580). However, such transaction fees are relatively minor at the moment, with miners currently earning less than 20 BTC per day in total. The 25 BTC figure used to be 50 BTC in the early days, and reduces predictably over time with it halving again to 12.5 BTC by about the year 2017.

2. Transactions are not real-time and take around an hour before they are considered certain

Prospective transactions are broadcast around between all the various miners using a peer-to-peer network, who each check them for validity before including them in the current block that’s being worked on. Since a new block comes along every ten minutes (on average), there may be a wait of up to ten minutes for a new transaction to appear in the blockchain, and hence the receiver of BTC can read it and will know that they are going to get some coins.

Except miners may not include your transaction in the next block because there were already too many transactions in it, or perhaps the miner that “won” the block that time decided not to include any transactions at all, so you will need to wait for the next block. And even then it appears that there is a risk that a Bitcoin sender could “double spend” the BTC if two conflicting transactions were sent to different miners, so it’s considered prudent to wait until six blocks have been generated (including the first one with the relevant transaction) to get transaction certainty.

While this is fine for some types of transactions, such as a book order, it is not so fine for other types of transactions where goods are delivered immediately such as an app download or when at a Bitcoin ATM dispensing hard currency. Any solutions to this problem will sit outside of the standard Bitcoin infrastructure, e.g. merchant insurance, but in a world where transaction times are getting shorter and shorter, this may limit Bitcoin’s long term use in the general economy.

3. Bitcoins are not held in Bitcoin wallets

A Bitcoin wallet is technically just a public-private key pair (or multiple such pairs). This provides the means of generating a public address (from the public key, for others to send bitcoins to your wallet) and for generating new transactions (using the private key, when sending bitcoins to other people’s wallets). The bitcoins themselves are not held anywhere, but proof of ownership of them can be established from the records in the blockchain.

Given that everyone can see exactly how many bitcoins belong to every Bitcoin wallet, it’s considered good practice to use a different public address (and hence public-private key pair) for each transaction. A single transaction can take bitcoins from multiple wallets and send them out to multiple wallets, making this all a bit easier to manage.

4. Bitcoin transactions can be complex contracts

Since bitcoins themselves are not actually moved around and bitcoin balances are not kept within the Bitcoin infrastructure, each transaction sending some bitcoins refers to previous transactions where those bitcoins were “received”. At a minimum a single sending transaction needs to refer back to a single receiving transaction. As part of validating that this pair of transactions should be allowed, miners actually run a small script embedded within the sending transaction followed by another one embedded in the receiving transaction. The scripting language is pretty extensive.

Also, because Bitcoin transactions are just a series of bytes and can be sent directly to others, e.g. over email, instead of broadcasting them to the miners, complex contracts can be created. You can use Bitcoin to pay someone, but only if a third party also approves the transaction. Or you can use Bitcoin to pay a deposit / bond where the money comes back to you after an agreed period but the other party can’t spend it in the mean-time. Or you can use Bitcoin to contribute towards a transaction that will go ahead only if enough other people contribute towards it for it to reach a specified sum. Some are using Bitcoin to run a provably-fair lottery. Some are even looking to use Bitcoin to allow for electronic voting.

Concluding remarks

Bitcoin is still relatively new for a payment technology, and I would not pretend that using it is risk-free. Regulation of Bitcoin is still nascent and inconsistent between geographies, it operates in a legally grey area with perhaps half of all Bitcoin transactions being made with gambling services, and Bitcoin-based marketplaces seem to be regularly collapsing.

Even if Bitcoin itself is replaced by one of the other newer “cryptocurrencies” such as LiteCoin, Ripple or dogecoin, I suspect that its invention has opened the door for amazing new ways to transact online.

New Knowledge

I still have the book that tracked my infant development after I was born. It’s a little time-capsule of medical opinion from a different age.

At the three months mark, my mum was advised to provide me with fresh fruit juice. These days, the Australian government offers a different medical recommendation:

exclusive breastfeeding for 6 months is the optimal way of feeding infants.

Although, perhaps things will change again soon. The Australian Society of Clinical Immunology and Allergy publishes a fact sheet on infant feeding with a different view again:

Based on the currently available evidence, many experts across Europe, Australia and North America recommend introducing complementary solid foods from around 4-6 months.

Similarly, I was told by a colleague that when they were a parent some decades ago, the sleeping recommendation was to place babies on their stomach (I guess to minimise any inadvertent shaping of their heads while they are still soft?). However, the Australian government offers different guidance these days:

Put your baby to sleep on its back and use light cotton blankets.

Well, aside from being confusing when parents get differing advice from their own parents compared with the government, this is actually a good thing: when the medical facts change, the medical community changes its collective mind. And while there’s a good chance that the recommendations aren’t perfect and may change again, at least the new recommendations are better than the old recommendations.

Of course, this is old hat for anyone familiar with scientific method.

Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be a similar evolution of knowledge when it comes to recommendations for best managing people. When I have taken courses designed to impart the best new thinking around management, a less useful approach is followed.

There is often an unwillingness to state that prior management recommendations are wrong and should be replaced with better ones. In fact, new techniques have typically been presented to me as new “tools” that can be added to my “toolkit“. This toolkit apparently can grow without limit, and it is largely up to my discretion as to when, where and to whom I should apply a given technique.

I grant that there is difficulty in running experiments needed to show that a particular technique is better than another, and dealing with people is a messier problem-space than dealing with germs or injuries. Also, sure, management science is a relatively new discipline. Still, it feels like a cop out.

I hope that one day, looking at today’s management courseware will seem as quaint as looking at my old baby book.

Ginger Spice Cake Recipe

This is my favourite ginger cake recipe – I’ve made it at least three times now – and yet I don’t know where it came from. We have it as a photocopy, and it appears to be from a book called “easy baking” although, to be honest, it took me a number of goes to get the icing right so I didn’t find it *that* easy. Anyway, since clearly I like making this, I’m going to put it in a more accessible place: my blog. The original name of this recipe was “divine ginger cake with caramel icing”.

Ingredients – Cake

125g unsalted butter
3/4 cup (190mL) firmly packed brown sugar
3/4 cup (190mL) plain flour
1/2 cup (125mL) self-raising flour
1/2 teaspoon (2.5mL) bicarbonate of soda
2 teaspoons (10mL) ground ginger
1 teaspoon (5mL) ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon (2.5mL) ground nutmeg
2 eggs
2/3 cup (170mL) buttermilk (although you can get away with using ordinary, full-cream milk)

Ingredients – Icing

3/4 cup (190mL) icing sugar
60g unsalted butter
1/2 cup (125mL) firmly packed brown sugar
2 tablespoons (40mL) milk

Method

Heat oven to 170 degrees Celcius.
Grease a 20cm ring tin and line with baking paper (or you can use a 20cm round cake tin like I did in the picture, but you’ll need to add at least 10 mins to the cooking time and it won’t rise up as much with the bigger volume tin).
Melt the butter, e.g. in the microwave for 30s on HIGH, and set aside.
Sift dry ingredients into a mixing bowl, then add the wet ingredients (melted butter, eggs and buttermilk). Beat on low until combined, then beat on medium for a minute or two until the mixture has combined and there are no visible lumps.
Pour mix into cake tin, and bake for 35 mins in the oven.
Remove from oven and stand for 10 mins before turning onto a wire rack to cool.
Before the cake has cooled, crack on with the icing – it should be poured onto a slightly warm cake. First, sift the icing sugar into a small bowl and set aside.
Place the butter, brown sugar and milk in a saucepan and cook over a low heat, stirring regularly, until the brown sugar has dissolved and it starts boiling.
Remove the saucepan from the heat, then immediately mix in the icing sugar.
Allow to cool slightly (if it starts to set, heat it up a little) then drizzle and spread over the cake.

Serves 6-8.