new "top" utility's "up-up down-down..." sequence

If you don't understand the title, this note isn't for you.

If you use Linux and are nauseated by the defaults of the "entirely new and enhanced replacement" of a really great utility on Linux, these steps are for you, thanks to the ArchLinux BBS:

rm ~/.toprc
top
Inside the top program, press: zV1ymmtttWq

From then on you may invoke top and see the screen you expected before the ghastly upgrade, that should probably have been called top-ng. I decline to say more so as not to start another flame war.

Stephen Harper -- a fitting paean

As moral as a monsignior,

Fair-handed as a Koch.

Haiku #35 - Christy Clark

After she won her second election...

She said, "Wear Pink Shirts!

End bullying now!" and then

bullied all BC.

Healthcare: Her phone's ringing off the hook

Dr. Danielle Martin's getting calls to run for office from all parties at all levels of government. Watching this C-Span hearing from the US, I'm not surprised. She ranked with the best three others on the panel, and made former Canadian, Reagan-Thatcher-Murdochite Sally Pipes look silly.

Our healthcare system may not be perfect, people may be dying needlessly, but not as many as among our neighbours to the south. Hearing about France's, Denmark's, Taiwan's system, I think I'd be glad to trade aspects of our system for aspects of theirs, but we stack up pretty good. And we have another really articulate spokesperson that we can be proud to call a fellow-citizen. When you get past your best times of doing medicine, I'd be happy to see you as cabinet or prime minister, Dr. Martin. Well-spoken, well-stated, well-pointed out on all fronts.

Pranking Indian Computer Jackers

I just finished pranking some Indian ComputerJackers. You know, the guys who claim to be from "Microsoft Windows"? I let them talk and told them that I would have to take down all their instructions so that I could follow them after I hung up. Why's that? Because I only have one telephone line and I use dial-up for Internet. They believed me for a bit and passed me on to three or four other people before they gave up. Saying that I use the Opera browser was the last straw. How many little untruths passed my lips in the space of 10 minutes -- that's 10 minutes of international telephone time they got no return on, 10 minutes reprieve to some other poor victim. 10 minutes in which my sons, admiringly, called me crazy. To which I replied, but you put me up to it. Maniacal laughter ensued.

For the record, their first step was to send me to double-u double-u double-u dot A em why why . com (why should I give them a click-through?) and they claimed to be in Sacramento. AMYY is, of course, based in Moscow, with a local dial-in in Virginia's DC suburbs (I visited them with a text browser, in case the site itself was a 0-day-sploit source and checked the Contact Us page). I was waiting for them to give me the temperature in Sacramento in Celsius (it's 16 there, right now), so I could nail them to the wall over units of measure. No typical 'marican uses SI units (they'd say it was 61) and I was relishing that last skewering step.

At this conference, Richard Mouw talked about "Just Adultery", as a side-handed critique of "Just War" theory. I think I could add a five minute talk-a-roo on "Just Prevarication".

I wonder how many times I'll have to lie like that before they stop calling this number? The story will be different next time. Maybe I'll claim to be running Lindows.

Haiku #34 - Techno-conomy

Straight from department 402.

Technical debt and

Keynesian economics

Don't ever mix well.

Plagiarist Rand Paul

Given his concern, in the face (farce) of a rapidly growing docket of plagiarism, with "being left alone" and having folks stop "casting aspersions on my character" than with academic honesty and with fair dealing in ideas, it's time to stop calling him "Dr. Rand Paul" or "Senator Rand Paul". His proper title and style of address should be "elevated" (at least toward the truth) to "Plagiarist Rand Paul".

And I invite His Xerocity, the Plagiarist Rand Paul to challenge me to a duel at his earliest convenience to deny that he deserves this honour. Weapons to be chosen, according to tradition, by the one challenged.

Haiku #34 - on freedom

I wrote this in response to Eben Moglen's talk about Innovation Under Austerity and a discussion that ensued after the conclusion of Eben's speech (at about the halfway point of this video on Youtube).

all I know for sure

is that freedom starts inside

where no thug can reach

Haiku #33 - The Return

So, I've been plodding along, writing haikus but not posting them and I wrote one this morning after a week-end that included, among other things, folding seven loads of laundry while watching IPL Cricket on PVR from SportsNet One. It was a match over a week old between the Chennai Super Kings and Royal Challengers Bangalore, shortened by 10 overs in the first innings, but to no great detriment. That's why there's sports on the telly, anyway, isn't it: to give you something to watch while folding laundry, right? Okay. Getting together for a Grey Cup, Super Bowl or Grand final party can be great fun, too, but whatever.

This AM it struck me how similar this was to my watching NHL hockey on 1 week tape delay (1960s, remote BC town) when everyone knew the outcomes already. I might have been the only one (besides the real die-hards, that did not include anyone of my acquaintance) watching it back then. So I wrote a haiku about it. And a co-worker liked it. So I'm posting it. So there:

Back to my childhood,

watching sports no one else does

on week's tape delay.

The Most Important Question U.S. Voters Face in 2012

"It's the economy, stupid," is not the question, although that IS an important one.

No. The really important question is this: Why do so many REALLY, REALLY rich white guys want people to vote for Mitt Romney and/or against Barack Obama? (face it, folks, the way things are structured today, nobody else has a hope...)

I'm not an American voter so I shouldn't say more but I can't quite resist.

Maybe it's because they're such patriots. But I doubt it.
Maybe it's because they want your best. But I doubt that, too.

But think about this question for more than a few seconds before you decide how to vote, please. And don't settle for simple answers either. This is one case where Occam's razor is more likely to slit a throat than give a close shave.

So maybe my MP is reading my mail...

But I don't think he's getting the message. After a long delay, in answer to the letter I posted here, Mr. Moore sent me this not-quite-as-canned-as-usual response:

Mr. Klassen,

Thank you for writing to me about copyright reform in Canada.  I appreciate you taking the time to share your views with me and have noted your concerns regarding the impact that providing legal protection for technological protection measures (TPMs) may have on different parties. I have read your previous correspondence as well.

Copyright is a marketplace framework law.  Accordingly, copyright owners may decide whether to use TPMs for their content and consumers whether to pay for such content.  Detailed information about Bill C-11 is available online atwww.balancedcopyright.gc.ca.

Our government wants legislation that balances both the rights of creators and the interests of consumers.

Once again, thank you for taking the time to write and share your concerns with me. I appreciate the opportunity to respond.

Sincerely,

James Moore, PC MP

Unfortunately, it's still about C-11, that's still bad in so many ways that Michael Geist can't keep silent about it to this day. My reply back to him went as follows.

Mr. Moore,

Thank you for what I perceive to be a much more individual reply than previously. I regret to say that your assurances of the law's balance of the different rights at stake do not convince me. Rights holders (often, from many artists' point of view, rights grabbers, frankly) get far too much consideration and rights of fair use, presumption of innocence of the consumer, and a healthy guardianship of a creative commons that should be allowed to grow with orderly expiry of copyrights are not protected adequately.

The RIAA and MPAA and their member organizations have demonstrated graphically and without any ambiguity their willingness to bully individuals into outrageous and financially devastating settlements, to go on fishing expeditions and to do so when their failing profits are more closely related to the sagging quality of their product than to the results of piracy. This kind of behaviour should not be rewarded in the court (and that sort of thing is gradually being stopped) but even more it should not be protected by law.

Academic studies, time and time again, show that the most widely-shared (by any means) artists are the most successful ones. The most stunning cases of these are the careers of Radiohead, Metallica and even the Canadian, Neil Young, who released the whole Living With War album online -- I listened to it several times that way before buying it myself. So the whining of multi-national bullies, who effectively want the right to pillage Canadian families for the meagre improvement of their American bottom line, should not be brooked.

Is there anything even in the latest incarnation of C-11 that comes at the issues from that angle? I think not. Instead this government is intent on defending the privilege and profit of the few on the backs of the many. Fortunately, the best word describing that is highly parliamentary and I cry it out: "Shame! Shame!" Send me a new bulletin when your policies are more in the defense of the people's interests than they are currently, please, and on this subject, not before.

Sincerely,

Arthur N. Klassen

Of course, this doesn't even begin to deal with potential privacy concerns but there are limits if you want to conduct civil discourse even over something as uncivil as C-11. There are just too many things about this bill to complain about them all at once without sounding like your shrieking into the void. If my words are consigned to be redirected to /dev/null (computerese for "the void"), at least they'll be uttered in tones that wouldn't remind any listener of fingernails on blackboards.

Letter to my MP about Bill C-11

(and to the other members of the committee reviewing C-11)

to James Moore, MP for Port Moody--Westwood--Port Coquitlam


Dear Mr. Moore,

I have little hope that you pay attention to any of my e-mails any more. With a margin of 10s of thousands in every election, you need not pay attention but I implore you to do so. The digital lock provisions in bill C-11 are too high a price to pay in freedoms for any of the good that might be in the bill and it ought to be quashed now.

My government is already culpable trying to gin up support for tighter controls by having the MPAA and RIAA lobby the US to call us a nation of pirates, but you and I know that it is not so and it must be depressing to the agitators that no hysteria has flowed from these attempts.

In fact, it is demonstrable that freely allowing piracy (at least of music) ultimately does more good than harm to both musicians and publishers. Just ask Neil Young how many copies of "Living With War" he sold after freely publishing the whole album on the internet. Just ask Radiohead. And then ask Metallica how much dislike they garnered by siding with the lockdown artists.

We don't need tighter locks, and we don't need to give Multinational bullies more opportunities to pillage Canadian families at many 100s of times the value of any piracy they may have engaged in. This legislation does exactly the opposite of what a government ought to do in this particular vein. A government ought to protect its citizens from bullies but this legislation has the potential to unleash the bullies' unjust wrath against Canadians.

It is a good thing that cries of "Shame! Shame!" fall within parliamentary language, for that is the weakest epithet your government deserves for considering this legislation. Drop the bill. Write something with reasonable protections (at 1000ths of the strength of the current one) for commercial interests but with primary protection for Canadians and for a growing, vibrant public domain. Do not hamper the tinkerers of today when they or their children are sure to become the engineers and innovators of tomorrow.

Sincerely,

Arthur N. Klassen

SOPA -- in Canada it's our turn

If you value your digital freedoms and you live in Canada, it's time.

Ireland has already fallen but the rest of Europe is resisting ACTA and even America is taking a second look at it after SOPA and PIPA were stopped in their tracks there. Now it's our turn.

Monday is the beginning of final hearings on Bill C-11 which has in the last stages turned draconian.

Michael Geist's page (click here) tells you what you need to know. I live in James Moore's riding now and so he'll hear from me from both directions -- but I think my e-mail address is on his spam source list. He doesn't reply to me -- that's how a member of parliament rolls in the digital age, I guess. Here's what you should do:

1. Find your MP here (ou ici).

2. Write a polite note expressing your opposition to pre-emptive site blocking, expanded enabler definitions, broad protections for the companies that exploit artists, warrantless subscriber list handovers -- all coupled with a higher iPod tax. And send it individually to the e-mails listed in Michael Geist's page (committee members and ministers) as well as to your own MP.

Just to be sure they get it, write it out on paper, address an envelope and send it to them in Canada WITHOUT A POSTAGE STAMP (for parliamentary mail, that works!) -- but our postal system isn't fast enough to get it to them before Monday's opening.

3. Sign, for instance, the online petition at OpenMedia.ca

4. Do creative things that are outside the control of the corporate gatekeepers of culture.

5. Spread the word, and resist the feeling of impending doom. Keep calm and carry on.

Google's New Privacy Policy

Google, with their new privacy policy, has offered us all a choice: to have everything we've ever googled be remembered for the rest of our lives and beyond, or to stop using all google products in one month. Hello Hobson!

How do we stop this? I don't know if we can, but we can try.

If everyone who uses any google product were to give google one piece of feedback every day objecting to that new policy and stating it plainly to them that:

Any retention of my data, even blinded, for longer than 90 days is an evil and unwarranted potential intrusion into my privacy. Google may still be trying to live up to "Don't Be Evil" but we cannot believe that you will always be able to protect all of our data, no matter what happens to your servers, your company or to the country under whose laws you primarily operate. Please stand down from perpetual storage to "90 days to oblivion".

If this goes viral, google will have to change. Will the rest of the 99% hear my voice and use the people's microphone? It's the only way I can imagine we'll get through to power that still thinks it's not evil so that maybe they'll back off.

Trans-Pacific Partnership and Public Domain in Canada

Earlier today, I saw a post on slashdot about the potential extension of copyright length in Canada as part of a free-trade negotiation called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (CBC article):

slashdot (a little overblown, as usual):

The Canadian government is now considering a plan to enter trade negotiations that would extend the term of copyright by 20 years, meaning nothing new would enter the public domain in Canada until at least 2032. The government is holding a public consultation with the chance for Canadians to speak out to save the public domain.

Michael Geist:

Based on leaks of the current drafts of the TPP IP chapter, the agreement would overhaul Canadian copyright law far beyond what is contemplated in Bill C-11. In fact, the TPP would require even stricter digital lock rules, extend the term of copyright, restrict trade in parallel imports, and increase various infringement penalties.

and:

Canada's term of copyright meets the international standard of life of the author plus 50 years, which has now become a competitive advantage when compared to the United States, Australia, and Europe, which have copyright terms that extend an additional 20 years (without any evidence of additional public benefits).

I wrote the following e-mail to the the public consultations address, consultations@international.gc.ca, cc-ing it to my Member of Parliament (find yours here -- ask me for help if you need it!):

Greetings.

I am a lifelong innovator as a software developer for the last 25 years. I expect to continue doing this for a further unspecified period and I am committed to seeing the best and the brightest be able to develop to their full potential here in Canada, continuing to produce wealth and competitive advantages for Canada well into the lifetimes of my grandchildren. Because of that, I strongly oppose any trading away of freedom to tinker, to study, to reverse engineer, to learn the State of the Art from existing devices. Bill C-11, while less egregious than its forebears, is still an onerous impairment to that freedom but going further, as the TPP IP chapter negotiations would have us do is an unacceptable further impairment.

I urge my government to stop restricting their geeks from becoming excellent geeks. Broader trade is important, yes. But even more important is the development in Canada, by Canadians, in service of Canadian-owned companies of unique and valuable products that can command market premiums wherever they go, regardless of free trade pacts. And the simplest easy way to enable that is for Canada to insist on preserving for its geeks, present and future, the freedom to tinker, study, reverse engineer and learn for private study even where doing so for profit would represent a theft of others' duly gained competitive advantage.

Just as the right to media-shift, to back up, to maintain personal access to digital assets that individual consumers may have purchased is of inestimable value to the consumer, even more the freedom to tinker for geeks and potential geeks, present and future is of inestimable value to all Canadians. Trading such a birthright in return for the week-of-pottage that a free trade agreement might give is as foolish now as it has ever been.

Sincerely,

Arthur N. Klassen

Looking further at the press around this deal, I have to assert, as well, that this agreement looks bad in a bunch of other directions, including opening threats to the high-quality for slightly-higher-price milk and egg market in Canada, so there is no shortage of reasons why an informed Canadian should oppose forging such close ties with all these nations at such a high cost.

Consider writing a letter of some variety to

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.