Skype Premium pricing – international rip off?

I’ve been looking at Skype Premium (for group video calling). I know there are other solutions around, but convenience is key. Here are here prices listed today on Skype’s site in US dollars, UK Pounds, and Australian Dollars for a 12 month subscription, with a 25% discount applied all up as the total shown, plus the rate that skype is claiming for now to Australian dollars, and the equivalent Australian price:

  • USD$80.88, 1 USD = 0.99 AUD = AUD$80.07
  • GBP£44.88, 1 GBP = 1.63 AUD = AUD$73.15
  • AUD$89.88

So If I purchase this in Australian dollars I am paying an extra $16.72 than if I buy in Sterling. Hey, USA, looks like you’re paying more as well – an extra $9.81 than the UK!

Now, USA, that may seem a bit wrong, but the rest of the world has had this for years. Australia’s been paying a surcharge on iTunes content for years; there’s been a hot trade in US iTunes Store gift cards to Australia to help avoid the Australian price.

MD5s

Using an MD5 Digest (or md5 sum) i a neat way of building a predictable key for data. Obviously there is the issue of MD5 collisions (there two completely different source data both produce the same MD5 Digets), but unless you’re building medical or safety equipment, for general text manipulation its pretty negligible.

However, MD5s can be represented in several ways. Lets discount the binary envoding of the 128-bits (16 bytes) of data as thats rather cumbersome, and if you’re storing this in a database such as MySQL, there isn’t a 16 bytes numeric data type; BIGINT is 8 bytes, so you’d have to use two BIGINTs and do lots of horible stuff.

That brings us to the base encodings. Base 16, or hexadecimal, would require us to use a text data type to store the results – as the base16 encoding will contains the numbers 0-9, and the letters A-F (or a-f – the case is irrelevent/insensative in base 16). It would be 32 “characters” long. We can stuff that in a column with no trouble (char(32)).

We can also use a Base 64  encoding, using upper and lower case letters and a few symbols as well as numerals 0-9. This comes to 22 characters (you’ll sometimes see == appended to a Base64 to make it 24 characters). Using 22 chars as a key instead of 32 is 31.25% less data. That makes your indexes that much more compact as well as the column data.

It may not be a perfect primary key, but its possibly reasaonable. But then comes the question of converting between Base16 and base 64. Here’s one way:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Digest::MD5;
use MIME::Base64;

my $data = "foobarbasbifffoobarbasbiff";
my $md5_base64 = Digest::MD5::md5_base64($data);
printf "%s in base64 as hex: %s\n", $md5_base64, unpack('H*', MIME::Base64::decode_base64($md5_base64));

Rusty is coming to Perth to talk!

If you’ve not seen any of the PLUG news, then you may not know that PLUG is organising for Rusty Russell to come to Perth for our October presentation. This is the first time that PLUG has flown a speaker in to Perth, and if successful, probably wont be the last time! The cost of doing this is being split amongst attendees by way of ticket sales at $20/member, $50/non-member (and PLUG membership is $20/full, $10/concession, so you can work out what’s cheaper!). In order to help us with out budget, door sale tickets on the night will be $50 for everyone, so please get your ticket now (details).

On top of this, free tickets are being given to UWA 3rd year Comp-Sci students… except… PLUG committee has just voted to extend this to all full time tertiary computer science students at any university. You still need to get a ticket – email tickets@plug.org.au to request one. This event will be on Tuesday October 11th, starting from 6:30pm (doors open 6:00pm).

For those unable to attend, PLUG will again be endevouring to live-video stream the session, and make the recording available afterwards.