Garbage Collection -- an idea whose time will never come to C++

Except as part of a boost library if someone wants it that badly. And I'm not sure they would. And that's my insufficiently humble opinion.

I'm frustrated with myself that I wasn't following Herb Sutter's blog closely enough that I could have taken part in the conversation over this blog post on Garbage Collection.

I like Herb Sutter. He's very smart, he speaks articulately about C++, and his effect on the C++11 standard has been good. Still, I confess, I'm annoyed that he has allowed himself to be co-opted by Microsoft to lend any support to the C++/CLI, C++/CX and C# food chains, which if they never crash and burn don't deserve to do anything better than fizzle. Vendor-specific languages are structurally evil (Apple is guilty here, too) and he's smart enough to have figured that out for himself. But in my calmer moments I'm willing to concede that these are things about which reasonable people can (and do) disagree.

So, let me give you my take on "Garbage Collection Synopsis, and C++".

The post opens with the quote: "OK, GC was invented half a century ago. When it is going to land in the C++ world?"

This question is so rife with assumptions that those should be dealt with before the question itself is even touched with a barge pole (which is about as close as GC should come to C++). These would be:

1. "GC is desirable for any language"
2. "Anything half a century old is well-defined enough that bringing it into any language should be easy"
3. "C++ wants/needs GC" (I'm holding my breath already!).

Right aways, Herb enumerates three kinds of garbage collection, the first of which is all that C++ usually needs. It wasn't available in the early days when good pointer-wrapper classes weren't widely available, but it's there now and that should be the end of the story for most of us.

The annoying part of the rest of the article including most of its comments, was the utter lack of effort made in identifying and highlighting those situations for which that option was insufficient, and why. @sim82 mentioned that phylogenetics regularly has circular-referenced nodes that make ordinary pointer-wrapping insufficient but didn't elaborate why the weak_ptr/shared_ptr pattern wasn't enough to solve the problem, either.

Martin Vejnár made the interesting observation about putting off memory releases until later (due to processing burden) to which another major commenter, David Abrahams, answered some'at about it being hard to do memory allocation without locking the world. And that has me wondering if in our wonderful multi-core world, there wasn't a way to do this by other means. Let me post on that idea soon.

Two other things annoyed me about the article. One was the "run, don't walk, to watch this video on Garbage Collection" in the main article. The video, while erudite and informative about how garbage collection worked, failed to convince me that it was good for anything other than allowing programmers to be more lazy. The additional specious was made that because C# had it, ASP was a better web-app-server environment than anything else out there. The other was in Herb's answer to three questions that got wrapped up in why any feature (including GC) should perhaps not be included in a computer language at all:

a) How likely will the feature be abused more than used well?
b) How often is the feature needed at all?
c) What cost or how viral is the feature? (does it force itself on those who might not want it)

His answers to these questions failed to convince me that GC belonged in C++, although mentioning Booch's comments on multiple inheritance raised an important point. Still, since C++ is so expressive, things that are actually in other languages, for instance named parameters (native in Python, in boost, here) can be brought in without including it in the language. The chap who raised these questions also asked if Herb's support for GC was related to his position with respect to C#, C++/CLR and C++/CX and here alone was something that remotely convinced me there was some need. After admitting his complicity in those projects (while denying the connection to wanting GC in C++), he goes on to say:

Note that for several years now I've been writing and teaching about Effective Concurrency in all the major languages — C++, Java, C#, and C+pthreads – and in the lock-free code section I keep having to add comments about how certain examples are easy/easier in Java and C#, and hand-wave about what it would take to do them in C++. I hate that.

I'd hate that, too -- but it'd be nice if Herb could have pointed to one of the examples he's talking about. I'm still none the wiser. Looking at the ABA problem, the other concrete item he mentions, it looks like the sort of thing that could be solved by a ZooKeeper-style version#-along-with-data paradigm, which shouldn't be hard to implement inside a library either, in a multi-threaded (thanks C++11), no-lock, portable way, never mind the somewhat trivial solution of thin-wrapping ZooKeeper!

But it's too bad that so much noise clouded what could have been an informative discussion. And I admit that if I had jumped in, it's eminently possible that I would have missed, in the moment, the way to ask a follow-on question that would have turned it to more useful ends.

Haiku correction...

Let me correct that Haiku:

We are the techies.
We create the job makers'
Chances to dream dreams.

Who are we?

I am many things, including one who wants too badly to talk on too many topics. One of the things I am is a techie. In forwarding a video of a talk to my Member of Parliament I came up with the following sloca -- which as you have not heard, I will now proceed to relate:

"we are the techies, not the entrepreneurs and without us, the entrepreneurs can't dream,
let alone hatch their dreams into wealth and jobs"

which I think reduces nicely to a haiku...

We are the techies.
We create the job makers'
Chances to dream.

And the video? I found it at boingboing, it's hosted at youtube, and it's called "The Coming War on General Purpose Computing" by Cory Doctorow to 28C3, the Chaos Computer Congress. As I told my MP, "If you can spare the time, the 54 minutes you might spend watching Cory Doctorow hold forth on the topic, you will be rewarded well, possibly in two ways: amusement, and (hopefully) enlightenment. Why do I speak passionately about encroachment on my freedom to diddle, innovate and for my children (and grandchildren) to learn? Cory explains this and I commend to you this YouTube video..."

Consider sending this to your representative -- if you have the unbelievable treasure of a representative (or two) who must face your ballot again in a finite period of time.

(I also acknowledge the Kipling fragment in the first paragraph. Rhinoceroses beware!)

An ex-IMF official analyses the US Financial Meltdown

A friend referred me to this article by a former IMF official. You've heard me rant about this before and how to fix it. It's nice to see similar criticism from someone who could be said to know better than me. The comments by others, including a Southeast-Asian chap are as instructive in their own way as the article. Read it and weep.

Little Round Planet...

...in a big universe. This collage of images brought to my notice by my father-in-law reminded me again of the beauty of our little home. Enjoy.

General Fusion -- from Burnaby, on NPR

I used to work at the same company as a bunch of the people at General Fusion and I was delighted to hear about these folks on NPR's All Things Considered last week.

"tau" or "pi"

I looked at this page, advocating τ, the ratio between circumference of a circle and its radius as the more important constant than π, the ratio between circumference and diameter.

Given how often 2π shows up in formulae: capacitive and inductive reactance, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle (and any other equation that uses the Reduced Planck Constant) for starters, but anyone who knows their math and physics will be able to rattle off a few more.

But I wondered if the circle would kill the idea. Surprisingly it didn't! Area of a circle as 1/2τr^2 makes a lot of sense, especially in light of the Quantity - Symbol - Expression table. In fact, that table was missing an important entry! "Kinetic Energy", there should have read "Kinetic Energy - Linear Motion", to be followed by a line for "Kinetic Energy - Angular Motion". The formula? 1/2Iω^2 -- where "I" is the "moment of inertia" (angular mass) of a spinning object and "ω" is "angular velocity".

This idea, this fight looks a bit like tilting at windmills but interesting. I wonder if it's something that will ever get any traction?

I'd like the world to be a place where enough of the life-and-death issues are settled that most people who might possibly be interested in the question would have the leisure to consider it...

Cold Fusion test today in Bologna

Is it a scam? (as many responders to this slashdot post say it is) I fear so, I hope not.

Other articles (like this one, this one, this one -- from serious sources; this one, this one from a less credible one) at least explore the possibility of success.

If successful, the next question is, what happens when oil's most important economic use is as raw material for plastic?

And how poignant the engineer's dilemma: "we see it working again and again, but if only we could come up with some really good science to explain it!"

And then the most important use for polywell generators may be as a way of producing enough neutrons (running D-T) to render fission-waste products safe in decades instead of tens of millenia.

When I see more results, I'll add something here.

Supporting Ron Paul feels cool, is stupid

(cross-post from this slashdot article)

Disclaimer: I am a Canadian, so I do not have a dog in this race; except we are your nearest neighbours (nearer than México in two minor ways only: longer border, no local outcries for a fence) so if you systematically self-destruct, it'll be bad for us, too.

Support for Ron Paul by the young and sometimes geeky has intrigued me for some time. Is it a result of reading Ayn Rand? Is it because his ideas seem so much more sensible than so many others? Is it because he does not appear beholden to any lobbyists? Is it primarily because he wants to end drug Prohibition? Possibly all of the above.

But it's also confused me because a number of the things Ron Paul wants to do away with are things that help the young find their first footholds -- things like student loans (or even grants). When I read this headline, I thought for just a second that perhaps Dr. Paul wants to throw open the universities for all, call a full education a civil right that you get to take advantage of based on merit. But I dismissed that thought before I saw the rest of the post, and I was right to do so. My response: his analysis may have some truth in it but it's so simple as to be suspect, in my view. On balance, like much of what Ron Paul says, it's too simple to be right.

Whoever thinks Ron Paul is cool, whatever lobby groups he is not beholden to, make no mistake: the über-rich and powerful wish his ideas well because their adoption would entrench and deepen the growing class divisions in America and put an end to the American dream as anything but that: a wistful dream of what expectations used to be.

Something is rotten in the way the US is going these days. For instance, in my lifetime, before 2008, I had never heard a leading politician in the US say of their president from the opposing party that they wanted him to fail. Whether you agree with Mr. Obama or not, that attitude on the part of any member of your government is pernicious. I'll stop there because the list of things going wrong is so long (most of them decades in the making) as to make this too-long post ridiculously so.

But Ron Paul is not the answer to those problems: his ideas (and incidentally those of the Tea Party) are only going to help the rich get richer and inherit the meek (and the not so meek). Do yourselves a favour, folks, and elect leaders that remember what they learned in Kindergarten (without forgetting all the things they learned since) and value their neighbours over hard lines -- internal neighbours, of course! I wouldn't advocate that you would elect the people I, your Canadian neighbour, want you to elect. I'm just confident that if, overall, you voted in line with your interests (and that may take a lot of thinking to figure out who's going to serve those best) and do well, then you won't become neighbours that we have to fear from across that longest unarmed border in the world.

be good to each other, folks...ank

iPhone pros and cons

In some ways, I am one of the geekiest people a lot of my friends know. In other ways, not so much. Let me explain.

One of the geekiest: I have been a professional software developer for 25 years now (with no plans to join management any time soon) and I generally understand technology trends and can navigate my way around new stuff that arrives as and when etc. etc. On the other hand, I have been a devoted practitioner of contentment, shunning the bleeding edge to make my family's budget work reasonably well.

Not so much: I actively practice contentment. I know about the bleeding edge but I don't live there. I only got a cellphone six years ago, and it was only in the last year or so that I upgraded (I call it a downgrade in some ways) to a smart-phone. It's a phone for crying out loud, my third one, and there are features from my first phone that I still miss. I don't need the extra charges of a data plan. I don't need the extra distraction of all those apps and games. Weather happens, my wife and kids are great company and there are so many books to read (and yes, I still love the feel of paper in my hand) so although I enjoy my smart-phone (it's an android), I'm not really a zealot for one, or for the platform that I chose.

Every now and then, though, someone will ask me "android or iPhone?" and I don't quite know what to say. A lot of them aren't techies and don't know how much they ought to care (for my sake and those like me) about freedom. All they want is a smart-phone that will do what they want, beautifully, seamlessly and not exorbitantly (although they're probably all willing to pay more day-to-day than I am).

This week, though, I saw a pair of answers to this problem which I present to you. I wish everyone would choose anything but the iPhone because of this article from CodingHorror. I totally get why many to most people, especially the non-technical ones will choose the iPhone over other options because of this ZDNet article. I, too, have had to do parental tech support. And often enough, it's been cleanup tech support when some misfortune, small, large or unintentional (on the part of the perpetrator) has befallen their tech.

So I don't want to serve only at the pleasure of the King but my parents will probably never want to use an Android either.

Patents, Math, Software

Since the most important body of patent law in the world is that of the US, I begin this post by quoting this wikipedia article, where a judicial finding in the US pre-empts the patenting of Mathematics:

'[SCOTUS] ruled that a process claim directed to a numerical algorithm, as such, was not patentable because "the patent would wholly pre-empt the mathematical formula and in practical effect would be a patent on the algorithm itself."'

Here's a follow-on syllogism:

• No mathematics is patentable
• All software is mathematics
• Therefore no software is patentable.

One of my regular addictions is groklaw. Some time ago, someone posted an article there, titled 1 + 1 (pat. pending) — Mathematics, Software and Free Speech. Today the same author posts a follow-up, A Simpler Explanation of Why Software is Mathematics, which I submit for your consideration, admittedly before I've read them all.

Intellectual freedom to the people: shorten copyrights, narrow applicability of patents, enable imagination and innovation without fear of lawyers breathing down your neck.

Two articles in a morning?

This time it's microbes that generate electricity while stabilizing radioactive spills. What a wonderful world.

Cool article of the morning: superconductors!

And I do mean cool. Slashdot today reports on an advance in superconductors. As usual there's more noise than signal, this time not only on the slashdot end but also in any of the sources that could be used to talk about the story. Charitably, the title used is clear but these articles could all be improved.

The best article so far is behind a paywall at IEEE but the abstract here tells you all you need to know without getting lost in the details. The sapphire strand is being used as a place to hang a real high-temperature semiconductor that uses Yttrium, Barium, Copper and Oxygen. The results keep a low temperature more easily and are superconducting at microwave frequencies and 77 K (around the boiling point of Nitrogen -- "high temperature" in superconductors is different than "high temperature in weather).

Canada asked to be called a copyright pirate!!?

Sent to my Member of Parliament this morning -- Canadians, especially those residing in ridings represented by Conservatives, consider sending something like this yourselves:

To: the Honourable Member of Parliament for Port Moody-Westwood-Port Coquitlam, Minister of Heritage and Official Languages, Mr. James Moore
Regarding: Michael Geist's story on leaked cables

Hello again...

After this story, the only credible thing for the Canadian government to do is to write new copyright legislation that enshrines the public good above all other considerations, declares anything edging towards DMCA unconstitutional and restricts the length of copyrights to the limits that were in place before Steamboat Willie's copyright was first just about to expire.

This is a shameful way for a government of Canada to behave. I am disgusted. There are more important moral issues to be disgusted or happy about but if this is one of the "smaller" things, how can we hope your government to do right in the greater things?

Sincerely

Arthur N. Klassen

If you need help finding your MP's contact information, get in touch...

Haiku #31

Summer winding down,

Cool rains threaten my commute

But no hurricanes.

(maybe rain this week in Greater Vancouver -- Hurricane Irene just roared through eastern North America)

The 2015 Mindset List is out

I keep hearing about this list in the news or somewhere but today, I know where to find it. Click here for the 2015 mindset list. It's the usual mix of, "okay... I figured that" and "oh yeah. that's right. wow!" Enjoy...

My comment on American Fiscal Policy

A deficit built on the backs of 2 wars, deep tax cuts and bank rescues should be solved on the backs of the poor, the sick and the old. Yeah right.

HST -- what's the right course of action?

Looking back at my blog, I'm kind of surprised that I never posted anything about the HST debacle in BC. It's overdue that I say something, given my last post about Mr. Campbell's unworthiness for the next job he seems to be heading towards.

I am of two very distinct minds about it as I e-mailed to a friend who asked my opinion...

My first response to harmonization was that when you say you're not considering it (though papers later come to light proving that you were), you don't just ram it through the legislature because of budget conditions or "competitiveness" concerns, not without a protracted public debate first. With that kind of a reversal better to run a referendum then and there. Or if you really believe it's so important, call an election over it. That's the honourable thing to do.

My next response was anger over surrendering made-in-BC policies, such as no sales tax on books, groceries, school supplies and kids' clothes: simple, common-sense, positive social policy that comes cheap at the price, even if some claims are fraudulent (and I know some families did routinely claim all stationary as school supplies).

So I signed the referendum initiative when it came by -- and I don't regret that because the process by which it was brought in was absolutely corrosive to an open government. Like the FastCat ferries. Like the BC Rail lease. Like lots of other things have been done here.

But in hind-sight, and with the experience of the FST to GST transition, I think I actually want the tax to stay. I certainly don't want the Zalm back in BC politics.

And it's never just what the consumer pays as tax that's the problem. What does it do, over all, to the market? I didn't buy the "prices will come down" rhetoric over the GST but it proved to be true for certain classes of goods (big ticket items that we don't notice at the grocery store every week) and promises to scrap it proved treacherous. Are we primarily consumers? or citizens? or neighbours?

Is the pre-HST system fundamentally fairer and less complex for those of our neighbours who run businesses? Maybe not? Well then, despite the feel good of spitefully turning over the tax because it costs us (admittedly more than a few pennies) more than it did, maybe the right thing, the neighbourly thing to do would be to keep the tax. This is about what's best for us, not just for me.

Whether we like it or not, bringing in the HST had consequences which will have further consequences if we try to unravel them. Businesses (especially small ones) have had to bear chaos-costs to bring in the HST but now it's here, and in the long run, it's probably an idea whose good will eventually become self-evidentially, even if it takes another 10 years. (probably less). Should we triple the chaos that the businesses (especially small ones) have to undergo, unrolling the tax now (x2) only to bring it in eventually anyways (x3)? I don't think that's a good idea, even at the x2 level, whether you the harmonization is a good idea or not.

Christy Clark's tweaks to the tax are pointless spin. In fact, I think the benefits from simplification of the tax are subverted by the exemptions that have been thrown as a sop in a possibly vain attempt to keep the HST.

All that said, though, I will be voting NO (if, in the presence of a postal strike, I can get a ballot) and hoping that if the referendum passes (to scrap the tax) the turnout will be so low that the government will be unable to take the result seriously.

Gordon Campbell: Rewarding Bad Behaviour

Regarding Gordon Campbell Set to Become Canada's High Commissioner to the UK

Congratulations, Mr. Campbell, you have received your reward for loyal service to the Federal Government over service to your own electors. I hope you enjoy Britain. I have every time I've visited.

Can we BCers contact our Conservative MPs, perhaps, and ask that this appointment be rescinded? I mean to.

On the face of it, Campbell has simply joined the list of former premiers appointed by the Conservatives to sinecures, regardless of what party they were from, an action which seems noble enough. To British Columbian voters, it is offensive and undeserved. Mr Campbell, in complete disregard of his own campaign promises used his majority in the Legislature to bring a sweeping change to BC's taxation system just because it seemed expedient at the time for a short-term budget shortfall. Then there is his DUI episode in Hawai'i (the mug-shot which the CBC has conveniently lost is here) for which his apologies ring hollow. Then there is the lease on bargain-basement terms of the BC Rail assets to CN (which resulted almost right aways in an ecological disaster and a fatal accident). And then there was the ham-handed way he fulfilled a campaign promise about the PacifiCat ferries (most of the blame there going to another ex-Premier with better intentions than cleverness) which probably saw them sell for more loss than necessary. The most honourable thing I can think of that Mr. Campbell did was to try to bring treaty settlements to First Nations in BC but even the way that has been done has appeared somewhat clumsy to me, as disputed territories were awarded in some cases to whichever group got to the table first. This man deserves no post-elective reward for his "services" to the people of this province.

So what does it look to me like he is being rewarded for? The federal government has always wanted to impose HST on all provinces that had their own provincial sales tax and without considering the dishonourable way in which it was accomplished, the federal government has rewarded Mr. Campbell for performing its will. Western alienation will continue to have a hearing in this province until Ottawa heeds the advice Paul Newman's character gave to Robert Redford's in The Sting: "You can't play your friends like marks." Until the provinces are treated as friends and partners and not potential victims, until the political processes within them is respected by Ottawa -- not to the detriment of the central authority but still, valuing the integrity of their processes above any particular result, in honour of the over-all sovereignty of the nation -- politics in this country will be at constant risk of subversion to the wills of idiots, charlatans, fear-mongers or worse. Why? Because provincial politics will always be at risk of harm from the machinations of federal politics and the people who graduate from provincial to national politics will be more likely to be rogues and stooges than mature and capable practitioners. In Québec, this may very well continue to manifest itself as continued separatism while the rest of us aren't blind to the inherent risks that poses, nor do we possess the same obvious fundamental differences.

Hence, I call upon my MP, the Hon. James Moore, to speak up to his Prime Minister and request that he rescind this sinecure appointment to a dishonoured politician from my province. He doesn't deserve the honour and his appointment to it is mischievous. Conferring it does no honour to my province.

Canadian Budget, party subsidy, a letter to my MP

It seems a small matter but in the middle of the recent budget was a measure which I opposed to my MP and today, when it has been introduced as part of their plans for the budget, I wrote to him, James Moore, about it, with carbon copies going to the Prime Minister, the Finance critics for the Liberals (Scott Brison) and NDP (Peggy Nash) and the leader of the Green Party (Elizabeth May).

Congratulations, James, on your overwhelming victory in our riding.

As I said on the phone to you during the recent election campaign, I oppose ending the per-party subsidy from my taxes. Given that my choice for MP does not ever get to parliament, that subsidy is the only outlet that my federal vote currently has, so taking this away from me is muting my political voice, mine and those of anyone who doesn't believe the large political parties serve their interest. Your party has the power to do it, the votes to do it, perhaps it even seems properly frugal. But you are taking away part of my political voice and that is very unneighbourly, very un-Canadian of you.

In a time when declining interest of the young ought to be the gravest long-term threat to our form of government, anything which pushes those at the margins of its processes out beyond the distance of audibility is something that should not be done.

Please step back from this first sign of the neo-Thatcherism I was fearing would result from your election victory this spring.

If diversity in the Canadian parliament matters to you, perhaps you would consider writing something similar to your MP, especially if Conservative, cc-ing a similar group.

Haiku #30

Doing the hard things
Brings satisfaction unknown
But to such doers.

Canada's National Shout, 2011

So, the election is over and it turned out differently than I expected. I expected area-code 905 (outer Toronto) to be the big story and it did send Conservatives to Ottawa in record numbers, but 416 (inner Toronto) went Conservative even more. I often said that Michael Ignatieff can't fulfill a reasonable "residency requirement" to qualify as a Canadian Prime Minister (if such a thing existed) before the Conservatives started hammering the point in their advertising. Not too surprisingly, the ads hurt the Liberals far more than they helped the Conservatives, at least if popular vote is anything to go by. The Conservatives essentially matched their last popular vote total but gained enough more seats to form a majority government -- good for them but I hope my fears of neo-Thatcherism are overblown. I don't think they are.

Part way into the campaign -- and I don't remember if this was before or after I heard about their popularity rising in Québec -- the thought struck me that if Québec ever stopped voting for "sovereignty" they would be the most natural, consistent NDP voters the country has ever seen. The Parti Québecois is about as socialist-leaning as any provincial branch of the New Democratic Party. I get the impression that it's part of the political culture there that the government is supposed to be there for its citizens, like the "Democratic Socialist" parties of Europe. And that's the biggest story that happened on May 2 this year.

The Bloc Québecois, the herald of separatism in Ottawa, is all but gone, at least for the moment. If the newly elected NDP MPs come to the end of their terms without self-inflicted bullet wounds to the feet, we may have seen the beginning of the end of Québec's 100-year dalliance with departure. I hope so. And the beneficiary was... not the Tories, not the still-discredited Liberals. No, it was the other natural party of Québec: the NDP. And as Chantal Hébert pointed out toward the end of election night, Stephen Harper has an almost Chrétien-style majority. 40% or so of the popular vote, domination of Ontario and significant other areas, and yet, unlike Chrétien, not benefiting much from vote-splitting to win many of his ridings.

Two leaders were knocked out of parliament -- the senior of the four, Gilles Duceppe of the Bloc, an honourable competitor to the end and Michael Ignatieff of the Liberals -- but one notable new leader joined them: the ground game in Saanich-Gulf Islands elected the first member and the leader of the Green Party. The Greens' popular vote dropped across the country -- but not as much as might have been expected -- because the now Honourable Elizabeth May made the strategic decision to focus on her own riding. So at the cost of a few percentage points -- that may not mean anything if the now unstoppable Conservatives decide to end public funding of political parties -- the Green Party of Canada now has an elected Member of Parliament.

For my part, I have been voting Green for a few election cycles, partially in protest since I have never lived outside sock-puppet-for-conservative ridings, partially in support of a wider variety of voices. But my biggest reasons are twofold.

On the one hand, the big parties don't care about the little guys, none of them. Not even the perpetual third-brother in federal politics, the NDP. In my view, government's first priority should be protecting the weak from the predations of the strong, whether strong, rich individuals, strong, violent individuals, large ethical-compunction-free corporations or even, as they've often become bands of thugs as well, trade unions (although it was a long descent from their one-time important function).

My other reason is that wise husbandry of our environment is imporant -- not in fear of some still-controversial bogey like "Global Warming" which still has deniability in many quarters -- but just because taking good care of your neighbourhood is what good neighbours do. And we're neighbours, all of us. Of each other, as Canadians, of the other nations of the world, of our floral and faunal co-inhabitants, and we owe it to our neighbours not to wreck what we share. The Conservatives are beholden to the big forces of commerce. The NDP are too cosy with big labour. The Bloc just want out of confederation. And the Liberals only had a "will to power" left before the electorate took a lot of the wind out of their sails: self-evident with the presence of two former NDP premiers in their caucus (change of heart? or opportunisim?). Only the Greens even begin to consider the larger future for its own sake and that of  its inhabitants, our grand-kids. And that's a voice I want to have at our national table, though I had no hand in sending Ms. May there.

On environmental fronts, too much effort has been put into regulatory hammers to force choices this way or that. At the end of the day, those are just new tools to impoverish people by other means. What we need is better education, broader research and more cross-border co-operation to produce the kind of world-wide energy production and distribution revolution that will make everyone, everywhere comfortable and secure in the supply of all the necessities for a livable existence for themselves and their children. I don't know if even the Greens have such a large vision but they're closer to it than anyone else on the Canadian landscape.

So... that's what happened in our National Election, from my point of view, and those are my hopes for what comes next. I'm not holding my breath, but for now, I think I'd be content if our new government went against its own grain and cut down the size of the Prime Minister's Office to pre-Trudeau levels and to re-empower the cabinet and the Commons committees to prevent their government from becoming a neo-Thatcherite nightmare. Are you listening, Mr. Moore? Mr. Harper?

Another energy-use innovation

One of my keenest interests has long been the more efficient use of energy. For myself, this has meant choosing one sedan over an SUV or more than one car (until recently) for a family of five, but I digress. If you know me you've heard me talk about various options -- and I still prefer things that don't consume precious resources over those that do, but this story caught my eye this morning, especially the video presentation.

In one sense, this is for automobiles a little bit like the transition for Diesel- to Diesel-Electric traction for railways -- but it goes farther than that. Diesel-Electric traction is still internal combustion. Professor Müller talks of his device as "contained combustion" and it seems to be useful with limited modifications for deriving power from a wide variety of fuels from liquids to gases, he even mentions Hydrogen.

And the simplicity of the thing! Cool. But without the transmission, the cooling system or a large lubrication system, I wonder how happy the auto makers would be to see this begin to become popular...

oh, and yes... I'll probably post some "back-fillers" on other energy-use stories that have caught my attention over the years. The innovations have been amazing.

C++0x -- draft standard

I have begun using the Java language at my place of work but the language I have done most of my professional work in is C++ (and as I sometimes remind a co-worker who projects a sense that Java is the answer, no matter the question is, "without C, there wouldn't be a good Java Virtual Machine") I have been watching the standards process with some interest and last week-end a new standard for C++ was accepted by the ISO committee over-seeing that project. It's too bad Alexandrescu's latest ideas on iterators probably didn't show up in time to affect the process.

Bjarne Stroustrup who first developed C++ and continues to be involved presents this FAQ, in case anyone is interested. I'll be reading it.

Being in the know...

Every now and then a story comes along that lets me know I'm listening to at least one or two of the right sources for stories. One of my regular reads is an e-column called "I, Cringely" (with obligatory Alan Parsons album cover misquotation: "And so the experiment failed because [high-tech] decided to make [Cringely] in its own image..." -- and wondering if the chap who wears the Cringely name is, in fact married to someone named "Susan Calvin"? -- but now I'm really showing my age and nerdiness).

Today was such a moment when I read Cringely's latest column: I told you so. When I first read (in his earlier column) the story mentioned today, it struck me as the most rational reason why Steve Allen left Microsoft when he did and ultimately in the way he did. And now we get the full-colour Paul Allen's-eye view of the scenario, almost as though he lifted that portion of the story from Cringely's column.

Cringely has had some other interesting things to say about the earthquake in Japan, the resulting tsunami and the downstream results. Add his RSS to your reader. You won't regret it.

Haiku #29

I wrote on a white board at work on Friday (reminiscing from The Princess Bride, this scene), "There will be ballots this spring!"

Someone scrawled, "but no bullets, folks. Let's keep things civilized." The resulting haiku needs no further introduction, offered with prayers for peace in all the places where there are more bullets (and sabotage of the reasonable aspirations of ordinary folks by entrenched structures that impoverish them) than ballots:

Transfers of power

no stormier than spring rains:

nearly as precious.

One more reason why I'm glad we're having another election

This probably hasn't gotten a lot of attention outside the Geek community but this slashdot story is one more reason why I'm glad the government fell. We don't need a DMCA in Canada, we pay levies on blank media but it's just not enough to pay for all those holidays various studio execs need to take, so American lobbyists are calling us a haven for piracy.

Hey, politicians: you want my vote? Pledge never to bring another DMCA clone into the Commons and I'll vote for you, despite my strong disillusionment with the lot of you.

"He who has a Tates' is lost..."

Anyone not heard of the "Tates' Compass"? You're guaranteed to get lost in the wilderness if your only source of direction is a "Tates' compass". "Why?" you ask. Because he who has a Tates' is lost! (hesitates? Act IV. S. 1, paraphrase)

The CBC has put up an interesting "political compass" which puts my views far, far away from all the parties in our election (and indeed reflects the results I got when I took a similar quiz at politicalcompass.org... hmm. I wonder if the CBC got permission to use the phrase?) but tells me that I am closest to one of them. I was surprised until I saw the relative distances they were speaking of: I was about 5% closer to one than the other but in both cases their views were quite wildly far away from my own.

Oh well. It was interesting to see their analysis of the parties along a familiar pair of axes, and the quiz was interesting as far as it goes. Canadian voter! Knock yourselves out! Take the poll and figure out where you would stand.

Vancouver Sun Headline -- Meh

This A.M.: "Battle for B.C. Tory quest for a majority could be determined here"

In a word: claptrap. Two more words: poppycock, horse-hockey.

So long as Québec belongs near-exclusively to the Liberals and the Bloc, B.C. is irrelevant and any rhetoric to the contrary is nonsense.

Any questions?

The Writ! The Writ! (Fourth Canadian election in seven years about to start)

It's a Spring (just don't tell Newfoundland) and that means it's time for an election!

The issues haven't changed much. It's being called "Historic!" because <gasp!> the government fell when the Prime Minister was found in Contempt of Parliament. But let the blood pressure drop: it was on a party line vote that wouldn't have seen the light of day under circumstances we usually call normal. Corruption there may have been, but it still doesn't come anywhere close to HRDC (look for the name "Pierre Pettigrew" in Jane Stewart's wikipedia article) or the Sponsorship Scandal.

One thing is certain: this election will not be decided in BC or Alberta, probably not even in Québec or the Maritimes. Nope, 905 will continue to dominate. We're sure to have another hung parliament with the Conservatives at the front, unless those Conservatives can capture the vote- and riding-rich outer Toronto area. I predict. I do not prefer. Here's my take on our leading politicians (in alphabetic order by surname).

Gilles Duceppe, Bloc Québecois: The senior of the current four leaders, he has run a well-informed and serious caucus. They have been notable to me in that when I have written e-mails to my MP, a cabinet minister, and the shadow ministers from the other three parties, the critics from the Bloc have sent me the most cogent, replies. My message to Québec (chanted): Nous avons besoin des vous; vous avez besoin des nous. So I oppose the ends for which the Bloc stand but with a shadow cabinet like that, I would be tempted to vote for them notwithstanding.

Stephen Harper, Conservative: After all this time, he's still a wonk. You have to admit that he has managed his minority parliaments very skillfully. But his facial expressions still look unnatural. One headline in the Vancouver Sun this week asked if he had maneuvered the opposition into calling this election for him: with popularity rising and not having to pay any price for foisting an election on people who don't want one this time, one could argue he has nothing to lose. For my part, though, he looks too much like Margaret Thatcher to suit me and I fear that Canada's enviable social safety net will only suffer more if he is granted a majority government. Campaign finances are also likely to become more American as a Conservative majority is likely to do away with proportional funding from taxes and may with the same stroke take spending limits off, too.

Michael Ignatieff, Liberal: He may have been born here but he has spent the bulk of his adult life in other countries, especially the USA. The Conservatives have driven this point home in repeated attack ads but it sticks because it's true. He has written to Americans as though he were a fellow American and then, after spending all but fragments of his childhood in Canada he returns and asks us to vote for him as our Prime Minister? If the were the US, his lack of residency would disqualify him from running for president. 'Nuff said.

Jack Layton, NDP: After all these years, he still feels like an over-achieving Toronto City Councilor. The NDP were on the ropes when he took over their leadership and he hasn't helped their fortunes much. In my view, he is too closely allied with big labour (which can be just as oppressive in its own way as big business) for me to view him as a fit guardian of my interests. Also, he hasn't a hope of gaining more then twice as many seats as he currently has -- which would still leave him in charge of a still-all-but-invisible rump.

Elizabeth May, Green: Desperately trying to get even one seat with a popular vote equivalent to the one that gives the Bloc 50 ridings in Québec, she's come out here to BC to try getting into parliament from one area the Greens might actually succeed from. I'm not in love with Green policies, either, but in my Sock-puppet-for-Conservative riding, I have voted for her party as an investment in a more diverse legislative future.

I am a disillusioned voter. I see confrontation and multiple dualisms ("my way good; their way bad") going on and all the while the legislators have forgotten that government should be there to protect the little guy from the big guy, first and foremost: from the large multinational company with enough money power to enrich or impoverish at will, without concern for the results, from the large labour union that has become more concerned with power than protecting the worker, despite their noble beginnings (if you've never belonged to a union as a Canadian worker, as I mostly have not, you owe it to yourself to visit the Crowsnest Pass area between Fernie and Lethbridge to see what it meant for the unions to look out for the workers' interests, for instance), from criminal gangs and other bullies, and even occasionally (but only occasionally) from ourselves.

But if we don't get involved, if we don't at least vote (with or without clothespin attached to our noses) we resign what little chances we have to affect our country as we might want to see. What policies would I like to vote for?

How about these for a start?
* more commitment to education
* more commitment to scientific research into a much wider array of energy alternatives (not just the current fads like wind and solar, how about a Canadian project investigating polywell fusion? or more support for Burnaby's General Fusion?)
* stronger commitment to the Canada Health Act -- and strengthening it into the future
* re-direct the Gas surtax back into Transportation infrastructure (especially mass transit) within the general area where it is collected
* stronger commitment to peacekeeping and independence from American agendas, including going back to a made-in-Canada refugee policy
* aggressive trade development with nations other than the US -- nothing against the US, but our trade surplus becomes a deficit when you remove our sales to the US and that makes us unacceptably vulnerable to every downturn they experience: This is nothing more than a sensible hedging strategy
* national security of supply -- if we are not self-sufficient on our own supplies for dailyl staple commodities, especially food, we may become vulnerable to nonlocal price shocks, and in any event, our resource-use footprint will be higher than necessary. Also, our resources should go first to supplying our own needs and foreign capital should not be permitted to have a controlling interest in any vital supply chain from our resources to our citizens: water, food, energy (all forms), telecommunications and so on

One party is beholden to big labour, others to big business and none will support this kind of hybrid platform. If they did, I could support them gladly. Until they do, I have no clear choice for any election.

Comments on Software Engineering Radio

It's been so long since I posted to this blog that it probably qualifies as a slum but I'm still here. It hasn't been personal tragedy that has kept me from writing here but a large dose of personal busyness. Some of that has settled down to a dull roar -- and I've arrived at a bit of a milestone that bears marking in some way -- and this way seemed the best choice -- so the time has come to dust this blog off and write something, in this case, something a bit more substantive than Yet Another Haiku.

About six months ago, a colleague introduced me to the podcast from Software Engineering Radio, specifically mentioning Scott Meyers' interview regarding C++0x. When I saw that it was Episode 159, I decided to go back and listen to the rest of them: my travel times can be long, auditory input is good in the context of multi-modal commuting and more training in any form is always a good thing.

So now I've listened to the first 50 -- nearly the first 70 by now, actually -- and it's time I should mention my impressions. Here they are:

1. Given that the first episode is over five years old by now, these pod casts have aged quite well. The approach of sticking to just one topic for an hour-or-so or less allows for many things to be covered reasonably and well without becoming ponderous.
2. And where a topic can't be exhaustively covered in that time frame, going back to it again and again also gives the opportunity to cover them well.
3. Further, not necessarily going back to a large topic sequentially, again and again has kept the collection, so far, from being ponderous in that way either.
4. I found the rationale for choosing to podcast in English despite the fact that the original podcasters are all German speakers amusing: especially the part where most Germans wouldn't understand them because of their strong regional accents. On the question of accents, I was occasionally tempted to write a note about pronunciations, of "meat-ah-model" for instance, but five years on, someone else seems to have put in a word or two and it's been metamodel, properly for some time. My condolences go out to any ESL speaker to get English pronunciation right the first time. It's crazy to keep so much of our linguistic history alive in our orthography, but I digress.
5. Occasionally I have been put off (a very little) by blanket statements about how some thing is wonderful in Java, or Ruby, or with Spring or whatever whereas "you just can't do that in ..." C or especially C++. Particularly, when it comes to memory or object management (or indeed management of any kind of resource) stating that "it's just so hard in C++" again and again struck me as naïve about C++. Admittedly, it may be easier to do bad things in C++ (which has been my favourite language for about 10 years) but by the same token, it is often more possible and indeed cleaner to do the right thing in C++ than in Java, for instance. I have just begun using Java and I find the constant use of the acquire-try-doSomething-finally-release idiom really clunky. In C++ I would create an auto-release object around what I wanted to acquire and the destructor (whose invocation time is known precisely) would take care of releasing it at the point I would choose, without further ado. And Java is somehow better at that point? As for memory leaks, my impressions are that when Java programs leak, the leaks can be far harder to find than in otherwise well-written C++.
   
6. This being put off has gone the other way as well: along with denouncing what I find useful, the podcasts have sometimes praised things which when I have met them seem wrong-headed. In the Java work I have begun to do, I have been exposed to Spring's dependency injection. After hearing it praised so highly in the podcasts, I was disappointed to see that it was essentially a way to acquire the use of something implicitly, without the costs of instantiation and management being exposed to me. It's all very well to say "@Component" or "@Autowired" about some piece and have it magically instantiate at the right time and the right place, but it strikes me as the kind of thing that would encourage sloppy practices rather than make good practices easier. But to each his own. With the way that Java mashes up the interface with the implementation in an individual class, I can see the benefit of pushing away these details. I've just seen so many people do all kinds of things without understanding their costs that I am not by default convinced that this is the right approach.
   
7. At times, I have also been struck by the blind faith placed in garbage collectors (which have admittedly gotten a lot better since I saw someone showing off Smalltalk's wonders in the mid-80s) while conventional memory management, especially in C and C++ is maligned: inherently leaky etc. etc. Ten years ago, this would be a relative criticism that stuck but with good class library support (such as that in a modern version of Boost, for instance, with a good modern compiler) the explicit control given to these things through reference-counted pointers, auto pointers, strong and weak references etc. seems to me to be preferable by far to the periodic holiday that, for instance, my Java-based cellphone goes on at the mercy of its need to collect the garbage. Others may disagree, and indeed, I have said enough in the last three items to spark several religious wars. Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that Java, Ruby or Spring are always "wrong" and C++ is always "right". I suppose I have fallen prey to the temptation to defend C++ to the death when hearing it falsely accused from other quarters. Add a grain of your favourite salt at this point and long live the free exchange of ideas!
   
8. At the time it was posted, one podcast was described as an experiment in a hands-on how-to in using meta models in developing a simple Java component. Even on a bus, far from a keyboard, this sounded interesting and one of these days I'd still like to sit down and test drive what they were talking about while listening to it again.
   
9. In the mean time, there have been many VERY profitable things to hear on the pod casts: discussions about various agile approaches to software development, basic topics (error handling) and more advanced ones (concurrency, ultra large scale systems), daily-use ideas (refactoring) and arcana (internals of GCC, C++0x and Corba -- all with people who actually knew what they were talking about!) as well as interviews with folks (whether as well known as Grady Booch, or not) whose ideas and/or tools we have been depending on for years: it's an impressive collection and has been profitable. I expect the rest of it will be as well.

I am very likely to continue listening to the podcasts because even where I disagree with the presenters, it's exposed me to ideas that I have not gotten from other directions. Some 18th or 19th century poetic piece said that "even fools have their story" and neither the SE-Radio team nor their guests are fools. I commend their work-product as an effective tool to continue enriching any professional software developer's toolbag, to continue exposing oneself to new ideas and not least to help realize that there are more ways of solving every day problems than the one vendor, system or language that one uses all the time.

Thanks, guys, ever so much, even as I finish with one more tiny critique: the ID tags of the MP3 files are occasionally very inconsistent, claiming, for instance to be by team@se-radio.bet or @se-radion.net but perhaps that, too, is something that has been taken care of in a more reliable way since the episodes I am currently listening to were put out four years or more ago.

Haiku #28

It's somewhat better
To be useful than happy
But only somewhat.

To Friends Who may be Using Gizmodo, LifeHacker and other services...

This story came through on slashdot on the weekend, stating that Gawker  had been compromised.  Gizmodo and LifeHacker are among the compromised password sets (as are Kotaku and io9):

'Our user databases do indeed appear to have been compromised. The passwords were encrypted. But simple ones may be vulnerable to a brute-force attack. You should change the password on Gawker (GED/commenting system) and on any other sites on which you've used the same passwords. Out of an abundance of caution, you should also change your company email password and any passwords that may have appeared in your email messages. We're deeply embarrassed by this breach. We should not be in the position of relying on the goodwill of the hackers who identified the weakness in our systems.'

If you don't understand this story, perhaps it doesn't apply to you. So don't worry about it. I know of at least one reader who does use these services.

Trying Chrome

I have been trying Chrome out for a few months now but ultimately, I'm walking away because it lacks a simple feature that I find needful while others (the seriously visually impaired) find it absolutely crucial. I can't over-ride page fonts with user fonts in Chrome.

Somebody please let me know what setting I've missed if it's already there. Somebody please let me know, too, if a new version of Chrome includes this feature.

Despite the potential for search-traffic analysis and Chrome sending my address-bar contents to Google after every character, there were lots of things to like about Chrome and I could be tempted to come back. It seems all browsers are doing that now anyways, with no option of turning it off. My objections are purist, possibly to the point of Luddism: it's a text-entry field, for pity's sakes! Kindly wait until I hit return before sending it anywhere.

If you use Linux

With the purchase of Novell by the Microsoft-backed Attachmate, it is imperative that users of -- especially large users of, as well as users of large numbers of systems running -- Linux consider the final dispostion of 882 patents formerly held by Novell, and considered by some to be covering elements of Linux.

I point to this article from groklaw, and encourage you to consider the deadline imposed by the finality of the sale. Members of the Open Invention Network will be held to have a license for those patents by Novell at least until January 23 and in perpetuity after that for those who were members at that date.

So far as I can see, joining is as simple as subscribing to their newsletter, which you can do through their "Contact Us" web form. If this is not enough, then as soon as I find that out, I will post a follow-up to these instructions at that time.

Headline puzzles -- moment of redemption and Puzzle #N0

I am content. I've gotten my headline-puzzle-maker script working. Here are the results:

ISZ QLDP DJNPLKIPKO OJ RMK UPZO BJMZO OMKHPL OLMEEYB
XYPJL GOLIWBGGQW SGJQILPY PZIXGIQ IKJNPT
QBYBQGIVBU MGAUNR'I NCXIIAX DENR GNHQAX IVBE VN RTECAE HGBEJA
IRXHGKHG SIR YLGRL BHWGB KH OWVEHGVWG MHS AHK RLKI
PJDQKGZ-AGJJUXN ZPMWPH EP ONEROM EP QUOINE UE HGXMGVGZUME KOGZN ZREH

For the record, I am from Greater Vancouver, BC and these headlines are from a recent issue of our venerable (some would say stodgy) paper, the Vancouver Sun (quite a different paper from the Calgary, Edmonton et al. varieties, let me tell you! Not even our other rag, "The Province" descends to such depths).

I will post an answer in two weeks or so. If you need help brute-forcing the headlines, try the applet at this location (thanks to The Phoenix Society for their link). If you need an introduction to solving headline puzzles, try this document (also from the Phoenix Society). Happy solving! Feel free to create your own headline puzzles and send them to me -- you can use my tool if you want.

Haiku #27

Cultural distances:

Today's slashdot poll

Means quite different things

Based on your locale.

Haiku #26

Excessive adverbs

Detract from the gravity

Of important words.

Headline puzzles -- moments of shame

Some years ago, I tried to put up some headline puzzles. They seemed a cool idea but I wasn't equal to the task of generating them by hand. It took way too long and I always suspected the result of being wrong.

This fall, under the guidance of the guide given at the Phoenix Society, I wrote a python program that produces headline puzzles and I looked back at the puzzles I had generated. They were so, so wrong. There are parts that are clearly correct but they were not right. So... I'm going to get one of my guys to use my script to generate a puzzle for me to solve and once I've solved it, perhaps I'll start posting puzzles here once again.

Given that it'll be a program generating them, it should be easier to get them out regularly, and it'll be a simple matter to get them correct. Thank you, Phoenicians. I appreciate the straight-ahead directions you posted on your website.

Riddle for a Friday Afternoon

Q: How many iPhone users does it take to change a light bulb?

A: Nobody knows. There isn't an app for that yet.

Český Sen -- what a hoot!

I watched Český Sen with the family this evening. And laughed. And cried. And had sober thoughts. Imagine a jingle that ends with a choir's mellow crooning:

It will be a big bash
If you don't have the cash,
get a loan and scream,
'I want to fulfill my dream!'

It's funny, sad and sobering all at once. And I can heartily recommend it. I hope the people who got camera time have recuperated from the experience.

Haiku #25

So much to learn but
so little time to learn it:
that's what frustrates me.

Haiku #24

The story behind this one is too long for this space. Written for all those thus vaccinated: may the vaccination expire soon!

Nothing vaccinates
Any heart against truth like
its caricature.

Open Letter to Carole James and the BC NDP

Dear Ms. James,

Three-letters have become a tub to thump in BC right now: HST. As many other BCers do, I oppose it, too, not necessarily because I think it's bad policy, rather because this government had no mandate to bring it in -- in fact, if anything they had an anti-mandate. And I am appalled to see Mr. Vander Zalm acting as though the referendum against it is his baby or something. He, if anything, is even more corrupt than this government, or indeed any other of the last eight former premiers of BC. If we are to have a once-and-future premier, is this is choice to give anyone hope?  Pfui.

But there is another three-letter acronym that is even more important and will make your next mandate overwhelming if you adopt it: If you will promise to bring in the STV election reform in your first term in the legislature no seat in the province will be safe for the Liberals.

The number 1 thing I want for my province is neither your party's policies, nor specifically those of the current government. The number 1 thing I want for my province is transparency and elections that are not run on the basis of collectivized fear-mongering. ("I can't vote for what I really want because it'll let those Other Guys get power and that would be the Most Awful Thing" -- I've heard these words during every provincial election of my adult life. Pfui, again!)

In the next provincial election that collectivized fear-mongering will undoubtedly grant your party an overwhelming mandate -- who knows but that enough Liberals can be recalled on the current rage to give you a mandate in midstream. But such a mandate will only be temporary no matter what you do because the winds of fear will swing. The best legacy your next government can give the people of BC will be elections that may never yield another majority but that will teach our politicians to play nice and force them to do it in the open more than has ever been done: STV.

I don't want police raids of the legislature any more than I want Bingogate. ICBC and HST may both be equally good as long-term public policy -- if sometimes onerous in practice. But I'd like these choices to be made after public consultation and not as the result of back-room deal making and ignoring the chorus of dissenting voices because a 60% seat mandate trumps a 40% popular vote.

I have never voted NDP and I am not planning to as of yet. But if you promise this one thing, I promise to do something I have never done before: vote NDP. And I am sure that many, many others would strongly consider it. My MLA has about as safe a Liberal seat as any in the province but I am sure that not even the Kelowna ridings will be safe for Liberals if you will make this one pledge, that the 2017 campaign will be an STV election.

Sincerely,

Arthur N. Klassen
address, etc....

HST in BC: Jon Kesselman asserts, I rebut

In the Vancouver Sun for today, Jon Kesselman wrote in support of the HST. I posted this to the digital edition of the paper but it doesn't seem to be sticking there, so I'm cross-posting it here:

Opponents of the HST are accused of being hysterical, ignorant and blindly acting in opposition to their own interests but such name-calling is not helping this debate in the least.

Decrying lack of transparency is not hysteria. Objecting to politicians turning 180 degrees from a not-very-well-publicized answer during a campaign is not hysteria. Alarm because governments are listening to some elite economists instead of the voters who sent them to Victoria is not hysteria.

Notwithstanding that Mr. Kesselman's remarks may be the last word in wisdom on the HST, the failure of the government to walk through this reasonably and transparently is serious enough that I will sign the petition and vote against the HST -- and in doing so, I will object in the strongest possible terms to anyone who calls it hysteria.

Fears that HST will drive more of the economy underground are well-founded. Whenever I deal with an independent contractor whose services are taxable under the GST, I still regularly get quoted a cash price -- clear evidence that collecting, tracking, paying and being rebated the GST is unacceptably burdensome to the lower end of the economy. The HST will only make this worse. If opposing HST can be construed as hysterical, cheerleading for it can just as easily be construed as naive and out of touch with ordinary folks. I don't see Mr. Kesselman dealing with that risk, at all.

As for the savings of business that will be passed along to the consumer once they begin to flow, did any of these savings result after the GST came in? I don't remember the price falling and I expect the businessmen to pocket the difference again when the HST arrives. That's what happens to savings passed along to all businesses at the same time. That may be cynical, but it's not hysteria.

PST, whatever its ills to B2B commerce in BC are, has the compassionate, enlightened, valuable exemptions on groceries, books, school supplies and childrens' clothes. GST has no such exemption -- one of the reasons I still oppose it -- and HST will not either. Maybe this exemption no longer has value to BC's families but if that's the case, they should come under public scrutiny and widespread debate before we turn and walk away from them. If opposing HST is hysterical, supporting it strongly can be construed as heartless, uncaring and ignorant of the needs of the least well-off families of the province.

Of course these families will receive HST rebates (which will, hopefully be at least twice what the GST rebates are now) but that requires the knowledge that the rebate should be applied for and the freedom to save up that rebate to apply to the no-longer-tax-exempt necessaries that need to be bought every week of the year. Anyone who knows such families understands how unreasonable it is to believe that this "no addded burden" for greater benefit. Unawareness of this segment of society isn't just heartless and uncompassionate, it's willfully so, and therefore an even more culpable condition.

Maybe HST is better for the province. The way the Liberals are bringing it in and imposing it on us is even more heavy-handed and anti-democratic than the introduction of the GST was under the over-sized majority enjoyed by the Mulroney government. If the government of British Columbia thinks this is such a good idea, the time to convince BCers of this is before negotiations with Ottawa began, not as the regimen is about to be imposed on us in a manner that is impossible to escape from for a period of five years.

This is not the mandate they earned in the last election -- in fact, given one (to my knowledge) campaign-trail answer before the last election, the mandate runs the other way. Scrap the HST and make sure we want you to bring it in or as surely as Bill Vander Zalm and the NDP are the most unlikely of political allies, I will sign this petition and vote to defeat the current HST when the question is put to me.

More articles by Gwynne Dyer

A bunch of new articles have been posted by Gwynne Dyer. Everything here, from "The 2010 Question" onward is new. I just finished reading it. I couldn't agree with the final sentence more, and I desperately hope that sanity will prevail to prevent the same outcome as the earlier ignorance in the face of similar questions.

What I Want from My MP

To the Hon. Mark Warawa, Canadian Member of Parliament for Canada:
cc the Rt. Hon. Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada:

Mark,

I'd like to bring this article from the BBC's website to your attention:

It includes a 42 minute excerpt from the British House of Commons which I found very interesting, not so much for the content of the debate (which is interesting) but for the number of stern questions Labour backbenchers posed to a minister of their own government. The outline of the clip is as follows with comments from Labour MPs in bold:

Statement: David Miliband (Lab.), Foreign Secretary
Rebuttal: William Hague (Cons.), Shadow Foreign Secretary
Counter: 14:15 David Miliband (Lab.), Foreign Secretary
19:00 Ed Davey (Lib. Dem.), Foreign Affairs Critc
21:14 David Miliband (Lab.), Foreign Secretary
23:30 Diane Abbott (Lab.) Hackney North
24:30 David Miliband (Lab.), Foreign Secretary
25:38 David Davis (Cons.)
26:45 David Miliband (Lab.), Foreign Secretary
28:45 David Winnick (Lab.)
29:33 David Miliband (Lab.), Foreign Secretary
30:45 Julian Lewis (Cons.)
31:22 David Miliband (Lab.), Foreign Secretary
32:17 Keith Vaz (Lab.)
32:46 David Miliband (Lab.), Foreign Secretary
33:12 Douglas Hogg (Cons.)
34:07 David Miliband (Lab.), Foreign Secretary
35:10 Dari Taylor (Lab.)
36:01 David Miliband (Lab.), Foreign Secretary
36:20 Andrew Tyrie (Cons.)
37:12 David Miliband (Lab.), Foreign Secretary
38:21 Jeremy Corbyn (Lab.)
39:02 David Miliband (Lab.), Foreign Secretary
39:44 Henry Bellingham (Cons.)
40:03 David Miliband (Lab.), Foreign Secretary
40:52 Paul Flynn (Lab.)
41:14 David Miliband (Lab.), Foreign Secretary
41:53 Martin Linton (Lab.)
42:16 David Miliband (Lab.), Foreign Secretary

Especially scathing were the comments from David Winnick (at 28:45) and Diane Abbott (23:30), no less those of the MP representing the riding where Binyam Mohammed's family resides, Mr. Martin Linton (41:53).

I don't recall the last time a non-cabinet member of a Canadian ruling party did that sort of thing and I think it's a sorry lack. Several times now I've sent you comments about the ACTA legislation that keeps bubbling up in the House -- and I'm sure I'm not the only Canadian to complain to his or her Conservative MP about that measure. When will you MPs stand up for the concerns of your constituents against your own Primer Minister and Cabinet? We elect you. You! for crying out loud. So please start thinking of things from your constituents' point of view and show some spine.

Again, on my "pet issue", I ask you: Do YOU want your children or their friends to be criminalized by not necessarily well-founded accusations leveled at them, not to a due-process-bound law enforcement agency, but to their ISP? accusations not made by individual Canadians, or even Canadian firms guarding the interests of Canadian aritists, but by large American conglomerates? The American DMCA and laws of its ilk (like ACTA, as the leaks have helped to inform us) are headed in that direction. Will you be complicit in stripping away our freedoms like this? Don't be. Again, show some spine!

And Mr. Harper, if there's one thing you can do for the welfare of all Canadians that will put paid to the ongoing whispers that you're scary and people can't trust you, it would be to shrink the offices of Prime Ministerial power back down toward the size they were before Pierre Trudeau's tenure in office and to put the power back in the hands of the MPs, the committees and ultimately the people. I recognize and appreciate the intentions you have of reforming the Senate: make it more accountable. But even before you do that, work to reverse the structures that turn a newly elected MP's loyalty away from his or her constituency where it ought to be, and toward caucus and to cabinet where (valid!) concerns about his or her career drive them to place it. That would be a worthy goal, and one that all Canadians would grow to appreciate.

Sincerely,

Arthur N. Klassen

Haiku 23 -- Sober Second Thoughts Always Timely

In response to this story from the BBC:

Vegetative states
may mean other than was thought
of Terri Schiavo,

Driving while yakking bans make how much difference?

Today I feel a little vindicated. Now let me be a little freer tomorrow, please -- but I know better than to hold my breath. According to this article, cellphone bans reduce the use of cellphones while driving but they make no difference to the accident rate. Well-intentioned law, disappointing results.

I was discussing this with a co-worker in a hallway this week and s/he implied that the wholesale ban on cellphone use is an unavoidable expansion of a wish to ban reading and writing text (SMS or e-mail) while driving. While these things weren't on your phone, a ban was unlikely. Now that they are (not to mention music, games, streaming and stored video, etc.), they can't just ban some hand-held activities, they've gotta ban them all.

Is the law really as coarse-grained as all that? I've often said that laws will always get something wrong because they're unavoidably using a large brush: you can't paint the Sistine Chapel with a tool made for a "lick of paint". But a grain this coarse? I wouldn't have believed it. If anyone knows about this, I'd appreciate hearing from a horse's mouth.

This co-worker went so far as to say that police (in BC) will not be ticketing people who are talking on phones, only those they see holding them and staring into them. I don't plan to tempt that differentiation (and I suggest nobody else do so, either) but I am intrigued. And I still say the law is unjust so long as there isn't some kind of exemption for people travelling at less than some threshold (I'd suggest 40km/h, but I could live with a lower figure) in a traffic line-up.

Google facing censorship in China

When I read this blog entry from google about a change to their policy in China referred from the Register. I wondered aloud about how this would play out: how big is Google in China. Here's a Chinese guy's opinion: not too much.

Some programming links and Haiku 22

This morning on Hacker News, an item called Three blog posts I'd love to read (and one that I wouldn't) caught my eye. Of course, the article was more interesting than the posts about it. The three wanted blog posts were

1. What I learned from Language X that makes me a better programmer when I use Language Y
2. Something surprising that you probably wouldn't guess about Language X from reading blog posts
3. My personal transformation about Idea X

The unwanted post was "Here's why such and such [is truly lame]."

But it wasn't the article that got my attention so much as the follow-on conversation. Don't get me wrong. The article mentioned a couple of books that I think I'm going to want to take a look at some time (The Little MLer and The Seasoned Schemer) but the follow-ons to point one were interesting:

What I Learned from Haskell that improved my C++ was of special interest. Recently, I watched a couple of videos about Haskell from Channel9 (you don't have to install Silverlight to watch them) by Erik Meijer and some of the functional aspects of Haskell and Erlang seem really interesting, especially immutability and how that enables parallel evaluation.

I've also used Python here and there -- even using it to teach programming to my sons, so "How learning Python made me a better C++ programmer" was also really interesting. His contribution was a change in orientation towards using templates and boost. There was a commenter who echoed the prejudice I've seen (and complied with, to the point of echoing) at my current job against using Boost, too. The very next comment was a good balance point. Some of these prejudices made sense once upon a time, but it seems to me that the compilers have gotten a lot better than they used to be.

Jamie Bullock's follow-on to this second article (although the link mentioned on ginstrom didn't work well) was also interesting: "What I learned from Python that makes me a better programmer when I use C". Both of his comments, on readability and on better algorithms, are things that are also worth remembering.

But a Blog post should be about more than pointing at other people's words. So let me finish off with yet another Haiku:

Others can teach you
More about your field than might
At first glimpse seem clear

Thanks for Speaking Up

(cc to my own MP: the Hon. Mark Warawa, MP for Langley
and to the responding cabinet minister: the Hon. Tony Clement)

Hello Mr. Angus,

I was reading one of my usual sources of news, this morning and I came across this piece which included a link to an exchange between yourself and the Hon. Tony Clement. I wish my own MP had the fortitude to stand up to his own party on this issue. Failing that, I wish some other candidate who had the courage to speak up thus had a ghost of a hope of unseating him. You may not be my MP but on the subject of Copyright Law and the insidious ACTA-inspired legislation that keeps trying to get through the Canadian parliament (in the face of a mix of strong opposition and apathy) you are representing me and my interests, along with the interests of younger Canadians everywhere, just fine. Keep up the good work.

The derisive and dismissive way in which Mr. Clement referred to Michael Geist's columns in response, not dealing substantively with any of the issues Mr. Geist raises, reflects badly on the competence of the minister and on the openness of whatever process he claims to have pursued with Canadians.

I have little hope, ultimately, that this bill will be prevented from passing. On issue after issue, at level after level (provincially, federally and even municipally) I feel less and less that our forms of government are "by the people", that they are devolving into more and more autocracy, are more and more controlled by not-even-Canadian moneyed interests. I am pretty sure that the big legislative battles on this issue have to be fought and won elsewhere, ultimately, but how I wish it were otherwise. I can see my liberties slipping away one after another and I am sad that my children and grandchildren will be less free than my parents were and they won't even know what they're missing.

Keep up the good fight and inspire some of your colleagues, regardless of party affiliation to do the same.

Sincerely,


Arthur N. Klassen

Pulling over to place a call

Well... we have the latest Nanny-State law in place and I'll obey it. No more cellphone talking while driving. What a stupidly intrusive law.

I know. I know. I'm flying in the face of "best informed opinion". I agree with parts of BC's law, anyways: texting (even reading texts!) while driving actually is mad. And I'll agree that there are drivers who shouldn't drive while talking. Most of them shouldn't drive while breathing either, not to mention that I've seen them drive while applying makeup, while reading the newspaper, while drinking coffee and eating a hamburger -- and sometimes all at once, too! Apparently other things have been seen in the driver's seat, still more absorbing than that.

If you think I'm being a pig-headed fool, let me show you where the oinker-faces really are: when I'm stuck in a rush hour lineup, to tell me that I shouldn't talk on my cellphone even then, that's pig-headed. That's tyrannical. This law shouldn't even have been considered before the invention of Star Trek transporter technology or at least before the absolute banishment of rush hour lineups -- or at the very least, there should be a rider added that says if you're in a stop-and-go traffic area that doesn't exceed 40km/h or whatever... get my drift? I know I haven't a hope in asking for the outright repeal of this invasion of my freedoms, I'm only asking to be trusted to act responsibly in managing my otherwise less than manageable schedule in the use of a cellphone during unavoidable delays.

But today I feel a bit like I'm going to get a bit of my own back. I've hit on a small piece of civil disobedience to go along with my unwilling compliance to this restriction on my freedoms. If I need to stop to use my phone and there's a fire hydrant by the road, that's where I'll do it. I won't park in front of a fire hydrant -- no, that would represent a safety risk in case of a fire in the area, not to mention that it'll draw a ticket -- and my suggesting that you should do any such thing would be counseling to commit offenses, also something I don't want to do. I'll only stop there. If I'm not parking, only stopping for a brief chat on the phone, I don't see how that should be citable. Still, I'll keep my ear open for approaching fire trucks (and ticket writers) while I'm doing it.

So, if you have a stupid law like this in your jurisdiction, why not consider doing the same thing.