Tag Archives: resources

Tax cuts the price of MacArthur Coal

The Prime Min­is­ter is say­ing that today’s Peabody bid for Macarthur Coal demon­strates that the Gillard/Brown “coal tax” has not hurt the prospects of the Aus­tralian coal indus­try. But today’s Finan­cial TImes reveals that the Labor government’s taxes are hav­ing an impact on the value of Aus­tralian resource assets. Peabody has cut its offer price …

July 12, 2011 – 8:14 pm | By pwg | Posted in Resources | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Auto rip multiple audio CDs in OS X

So you want to rip your library of CDs to your com­puter. ITunes will auto­mate this for you—loading and eject­ing CDs as it fills up its library.

But what if you want a more accu­rate rip using the Accu­rate Rip data­base? What if you pre­fer not to store your music only in iTunes; for exam­ple because you pre­fer another player or you pre­fer to use the file-system rather than a pro­pri­etary library to store your music? Or, per­haps, you want to encode to FLAC or some other non-proprietary or loss­less format?

April 18, 2010 – 11:13 pm | By pwg | Posted in Resources | Tagged | Comments (0)

World Opera season programs

YahooPipes_tmb.png

For opera devo­tees, fans, ‘trag­ics’ … etc., but mainly for myself, I’ve devel­oped a syn­thetic RSS feed of news about Sea­son events, tick­ets and sub­scrip­tions for Opera houses around the world that you can find near the bot­tom of this page.

I’ve used Yahoo Pipes and Yahoo’s YQL—an SQL-type query lan­guage for Yahoo search databases—to search for new sea­son announce­ments from the world’s opera houses and man­gled the results into an RSS for­mat. The links in the feed jump to the announce­ment pages for each Opera house.

Hope you enjoy it. Please let me know.

March 31, 2010 – 4:20 pm | By pwg | Posted in Resources | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Century trends in Victorian temperatures

Mean maximum temperatures, January, rural Victoria

There are a dozen or so rural Vic­to­rian weather sta­tions, of the 255 listed as report­ing max­i­mum tem­per­a­ture data to the Aus­tralian Bureau of Mete­o­rol­ogy, that have records stretch­ing back to years before 1900. I have found them by skim­ming through the list­ings on this page at the BOM web­site. It has a help­ful graphic that dynam­i­cally dis­plays the record length.

I thought it might be inter­est­ing to see the trend of max­i­mum tem­per­a­tures in these rural loca­tions. The graphic (click the thumb­nail) shows that in eight of these twelve sites, includ­ing one NSW site—Deniliquin, almost on the Vic­to­rian border—the tem­per­a­ture trend is neg­a­tive or flat. The trend esti­mate is a sim­ple, lin­ear least-squares trend over the longest period avail­able in each record with 1-sigma bands as indi­cated. The idea for this exper­i­ment came from a post at the Carbon-Sense Coali­tion website.

August 17, 2009 – 6:33 pm | By pwg | Posted in Resources | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

Investment barriers stuff-up China relations

No one I know seri­ously ques­tions the impor­tance of China to Australia’s exter­nal bal­ances, espe­cially now in the trough of a reces­sion. Nor can we have any doubts about China’s grow­ing polit­i­cal, cul­tural and ‘strate­gic’ impor­tance for us and our region of the world. So why would a gov­ern­ment led by sinophile make such a ter­ri­ble, embar­rass­ing, stuff-up of its response to a pro­posal from a top Chi­nese resources com­pany to deepen our com­mer­cial relationship?

John Gar­naut bluntly explains in today’s Fair­fax press what a ham­fisted, mis-aimed blow the denial-by-delay in the Chinalco-Rio case has dealt our rela­tions with the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment and top Chi­nese com­mer­cial man­age­ment. How wooden-headed and inept is our com­mer­cial diplo­macy to give the impres­sion that Aus­tralia dis­dains com­mer­cial inte­gra­tion with China when our offi­cial objective—and our real, con­sid­ered objec­tive, I’m confident—is absolutely the con­verse?

Con­sid­er­ing both the tiny trickle of Chi­nese invest­ment flows (below) to Aus­tralia and the top pri­or­ity that China has in our for­eign pol­icy, this error-of-omission beg­gars belief.

June 15, 2009 – 11:12 am | By pwg | Posted in Resources | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Malcolm Turnbull on Chinalco’s bid for Rio

Mal­colm Turnbull’s wide-ranging speech to the Lowy Insti­tute on the bal­ance of power in Asia is thought­ful, well-aimed, and well-expressed. There is much to agree with.

But I dis­agree with all three of Mr Turnbull’s argu­ments against the Chi­nalco bid for Rio (see below). Here’s my main prob­lem. The two parts of this sen­tence just don’t belong together. They should be anath­ema to any lib­eral, demo­c­ra­tic government.

May 2, 2009 – 11:39 am | By pwg | Posted in Policy | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Website engine in new hands

I’m a fan of Bur­ton Malkiel’s analy­sis of equi­ties mar­kets; I invest mainly in indexes. Con­se­quently, it’s not all that often that com­mer­cial A&M actions threaten some­thing of value to me. But this is dif­fer­ent.

Oracle’s pro­posed pur­chase of Sun affects the future of a key asset in which I have a huge con­sumer sur­plus. You, too, prob­a­bly. Just last year, Sun bought the open-source data­base MySQL on which this site—like mil­lions of others—is based. It’s a vital piece of the web: not irre­place­able, but still…

Here’s the prob­lem. Sun was a long-term, ser­ial sup­porter of “open-sourced” soft­ware (maybe that was Sun’s undo­ing?). But Ora­cle makes a com­pet­ing, more pow­er­ful, com­mer­cial data­base server. It will now also own Sun’s other open-source ven­tures such as OpenOffice.org, and Vir­tual Box vir­tu­al­iza­tion software…not to men­tion the jewel in Sun’s dowry: Java.

April 21, 2009 – 9:11 am | By pwg | Posted in Resources | Tagged , | Comments (0)