technology

Mobile coverage

12 February 2011

A friend and regular Stubborn Mule reader drew my attention to an article in the Sydney Morning Herald this week about the Australian telco Telstra. Much of the recent commentary has focused on the implications of the national broadband network (NBN) for Telstra. While the NBN certainly gets a mention here too, for me the [...]

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NBN in more than 140 characters

27 September 2010
Colourful Optic Fibres

migNow that Labor has scraped their way back into power, it looks very likely that the National Broadband Network will go ahead in some form or another. Debates on the merits of the scheme continue apace, not least on Twitter, conveniently labelled with the #nbn hashtag. One frequent twitter on this topic, @pfh007, is also [...]

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How old is the Mule?

12 September 2010

According to one automated blog analyser, I am rather older than I thought I was: stubbornmule.net is probably written by a male somewhere between 66-100 years old. The writing style is academic and upset most of the time The gender is correct and academic writing style I can accept, but I am not so sure [...]

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Getting Protovis working on WordPress

6 September 2010

When I started experimenting with Protovis*, I quickly found that getting it to work in a WordPress blog was rather fiddly. With a lot of help from Google (and this page in particular), I managed to piece together what needed to be done, but since I did not find any explanations specifically focused on Protovis [...]

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Experimenting with Protovis

6 September 2010

A couple of weeks ago I gave a talk on using graphics in R. During the question session, someone asked whether I had tried using Protovis, a javascript data visualisation library being developed at Stanford. It was an easy question to answer: no! However, a bit of subsequent investigation revealed that Protovis has been developed [...]

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The Mule goes SURFing

30 July 2010

A month ago I posted about “SURF”, the newly-established Sydney R user forum (R being an excellent open-source statistics tool). Shortly after publishing that post, I attended the inaugural forum meeting. While we waited for attendees to arrive, a few people introduced themselves, explaining why they were interested in R and how much experience they [...]

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Graphing using R

17 May 2010
R Logo

Long-time readers of the Stubborn Mule will know that charts are a regular feature here. Almost all of these charts were produced using the R statistical software package which, in my view, produces far superior results to the most commonly used graphing tool: Excel. As a community service to help rid the world of horrible [...]

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The Re-birth of the Tablet

5 May 2010

The iPad looks set to inject new life into the tablet computer, which has been limping along for the last 10 years, not dying but not setting the world on fire either. Even so, I am not about to dump my Kindle.

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Gigabang for your buck

1 May 2010
Small ISP chart

The Age and the Herald published an extremely junky chart about broadband plans that hides some anomalies in the data and provides a valuable lesson on the importance of good charting technique.

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The Kindle in Australia

24 October 2009

Initial impressions of the Kindle now that it is shipping to Australia: the good, the bad and the crippled.

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