News from Great Castle Wilson

Author: adminmcq

  • My vote (in Canada) and a U.S. political note

    I hate the idea of strategic voting. I’ve always been a strong believer in voting for the party/candidate that most strongly reflects your world view. This year, however, I’m strongly tempted to vote Liberal (even though I think they’re idiots), simply because I believe the prospect of having a Conservative majority in government *now*, at the point when the world is about to go through a significant upheaval would be tragic.

    The thing is, when I look at the state of the world — ecologically, socially, and economically — and how I feel that we will have to respond to it, it’s clear that the party that best reflects my views is the Greens. I also believe that many, many others in Canada feel the same way.

    The NDP are also close, if they could just figure out that sometimes “Environment first” is going to have to trump “People first”, so that our kids get to have a world worth living in too.

    So what to do… hm…

    Btw, do you realize that if the Americans aren’t careful, they may end up with a vice-president who believes that Christ will return during her lifetime (or at least believed this at one point during her life).

    Random, unrelated question: Is insanity grounds for disqualification for leadership in the U.S.?

  • What I did this summer [warning: long post]

    As most everyone knows, I’m not a fan of traveling, so I like to find some other way to commemorate my vacation — usually by doing something significant around the house. This year, we chose to move Dennis’ bedroom to the basement. He’s almost 16 now, and it seemed like he needed more privacy than being in a room that shared a wall (and a cold air return vent) with his parents’ bedroom.

    Now another thing most everyone knows is that our house tends to be filled with stuff. This means that as a precursor to any significant work on the house, we need to purge the stuff to make room. We started by giving away the last of Dennis’ Star Wars toys and Lego to friends with younger boys. Then we got rid of our excess pocket books… Hm… that comment doesn’t really do the situation justice. Here’s a picture to give you a better idea:

    What you’re looking at are 36 “2 cubes”, almost all of which are full of books that we are going to donate to charity, along with a couple of bicycles and a several bags of clothing and material.

    With a bit more room to think, we settled on the following plan:

    • Deb would take over Dennis’ old bedroom as both a study and sewing room.
    • I would move the stuff from my room in the basement to Deb’s old study (i.e. the front bedroom).
    • Dennis would move down to my old computer room in the basement. [Added feature: the futon couch that was in Deb’s old study would move to Dennis’ game room.]

    In a frenzy of simultaneous shifting of stuff, we attempted to converge on this plan, but ran into a couple of snags:

    1. I had one of those plastic sheets on the floor in my computer room — you know the ones that make it easier to roll around on a wheely chair. Unfortunately, sandwiching a carpet between a layer of plastic and a cement floor turns out to be a bad idea; when we lifted the plastic sheet, we discovered that the carpet underneath had gone moldy. This threw a major monkey wrench into the planning, since we couldn’t move any of Dennis’ stuff into the room until we could get the carpet replaced, which of course meant that Dennis ended up with his bedroom strewn all over the house while we worked.
    2. When we originally put the desk in Deb’s study we actually built the desk in the room. So, when it came time to move it, we discovered (of course) that we couldn’t get it out of the room without dismantling it into several pieces. At that point we made the snap decision to just leave Deb in her old study, but use the space we got by removing the couch (and some other re-organization) to give her a sewing area as well.

    Those were the unexpected big issues. There were also a couple of other painful (but expected) things that we had to deal with:

    Dennis wanted space more than storage.
    This meant that we had to remove all of the shelving units and cupboards that were in my room, which was a big job since they were all wall mounted and there were quite a number of them. Also, there wasn’t room for most of them in the room upstairs, so they too ended up in the garage, to be given away. (You can see them in the background in the picture above.)
    The network router and file server needed to move.
    Even if there had been space for them in Dennis’ room (and there wasn’t), I end up fiddling with them too often to want them to be two floors away from me. I also wanted to make use of the wired connection in Deb’s study as the main conduit for running the network through the house, which means that, now that she isn’t switching rooms, she has inherited our dsl modem, router and (the imaginatively named) FILES the file server. They’re sitting on top of her bookshelves. [Insert obligatory short person joke.] My machines (including the server that provided this page) are sitting on the other end of a matched (WDS) pair of Airport Extremes. So far, I’ve been happy with the result. In any case, with the help of another wire pulled through the basement ceiling to reconnect Dennis’ setup in the basement, we’re all up and running again.

    Things are starting to converge, finally. Here are some pictures to give you an idea of the new layout. First my room:

    Note the new M-Audio Axiom 49. There wasn’t room for my old Alesys QS 8.1 between the bookshelves and the treadmill (just out of sight in these pictures).

    And here’s Deb working in her new space:

    I’d show you a picture of Dennis’ room in the basement, but I keep forgetting to snap one, and it’s time to get this posted…

  • The Mojave Experiment is a total failure

    The Mojave Experiment is an attempt by Microsoft to show that if people don’t know they are running Vista, they like it. Essentially, people are given an overview of a “new” operating system called Mojave, and then given a brief chance to try it. Afterwards they are told it’s Vista, and they say things like “Wow! This is much better than I thought it would be.” Sheesh. How shallow do they think we are?

    Here’s the thing: Vista looks shiny, and if you get told that it runs all your old programs but gives you the security you need, then of course you’re going to like it. But if you actually installed that OS on the home machines of all those noobs, and made them live through the constant, irritating security prompts, crashes, and incompatibilities, I’m guessing that it wouldn’t take long for reality to set in and the average rating for Vista of 4.5 out of 10 to once again be the norm.

    God, I’m glad my real computers are macintoshes.

  • Z-10s have a profile for LotRO

    Weird.

  • Rosco!!!

    Well, the deed is done, the name is picked. Say hello to Rosco:

    At 8 weeks, he’s already two feet long when lying in that position, and his paws are so big he looks deformed. What have we gotten ourselves into?!?!?!?

    I’ll take some more pictures of him when I can get him to stop moving long enough.

  • Eclipse 3.4

    With a heartbeat that would make a pacemaker envious, another awesome Eclipse release is out. You can get it at the Ganymede home page.

    I am very proud to have had the opportunity to work with such dedicated and absolutely professional people once again on this release, and I’m very much looking forward to getting started on our new challenges in R3.5 and e4.

    I would like to call out the unrelenting effort of the p2 team in particular this year. They did everthing necessary to make p2 a successful part of R3.4, going above and beyond the call every day for many weeks. As a result, I believe we now have the basis for a truly world-class provisioning story, something that will help the whole Eclipse community.

  • Ben X

    I was listening to CBC1 this morning and heard a review of a movie called “Ben X” that’s coming to the Bytown (Flemish with English subtitles). The movie starts Friday and runs until July 3. I’m probably going to go, so ping me if you’re interested and want to coordinate.

  • Bill C-61. Ugh.

    I saw Pookzilla’s post — link left for posterity, even though it looks like their blog is gone forever — about C-61, and that reminded me that I hadn’t blogged about this yet. I too think that C-61 is an epic fail, and for the first time ever, I felt sufficiently strongly about it that I wrote my MP. Here’s what I wrote:

    Sir,

    I am writing to express my strongest possible displeasure with the new bill C-61. This bill is a sledgehammer, where deftness is required. In a misguided attempt to prevent a small number of illegal activities, it will introduce new, significant constraints on the legitimate activities of all Canadians. As one small example, imagine a world where, as a parent, you could no longer load one of your children’s MP3 players with songs you had legitimately downloaded — that is a very real, likely outcome of this bill. The impact will be far reaching, and serious.

    Please research the situation as thoroughly as possible, with particular reference to those who do *not* have a vested interest in profit over the rights of Canadians, and vote appropriately.

    For context, I am a 48 year old member of your constituency who is:
    – a software architect (see http://www.eclipse.org/eclipse/team-leaders.php)
    – a published author (http://safari.awprofessional.com/0321256638)
    – an electronic musician (http://mikew.ca/blog/?p=336)
    – and a member of an orchestra (http://www.divertimento.ca)

    Despite being an obvious potential beneficiary of some of the provisions of the current bill, I feel that it should be strongly apposed. This is the first (and may in be the only) time you hear from me. Please do net let this effort be wasted.

    With complete sincerity,
    Mike Wilson

  • The new album

    First, I have to apologize to everyone for the lack of updates on the site for the last while. Since I got back from EclipseCon my life has just been too fracking busy. There is one bit of good news though…

    Yup, that’s a new HBDI album. If you click on the above image, it will take you to a page with individual links for all of the songs, but you can download the whole album (as a ZIP, including a high-res image of the cover and a printable CD insert) by clicking on the link in the top left corner of that page.

  • Eee!

    Ok, you knew it had to happen. I picked up an EeePC 8g from the guys down at PC Cyber. So far, I have to say, I think it’s very cool. I was looking for a sub-notebook to carry around in my MEC bag, and this fits it perfectly.

    But wait, you say, what about the OLPC XO? Wasn’t that going to be your sub-notebook?

    Well, yes, that was the plan. But after several months of using the XO, too many of its limitations became irksome, and the things that make it great (i.e. the educational software, the mesh networking, the kid friendly case) just weren’t useful to me.

    So here I am with the Eee. It’s still got limited storage (but more than the XO — 8Gig + 4 on an SDHC), a really small (not outdoor readable) screen, and it runs a funky front end onto xandros (not Ubuntu, although that’s pretty easy to get going) but despite that it seems to be a much better fit for me. It comes with all of the software that I would use on a day to day basis, like OpenOffice, Firefox, Pidgin, Skype, Lightening, Java, FBReader… you name it.

    Plus, I managed to get it to

    • sync calendar entries with the rest of my Macs
    • hold (but not sync) all my address book entries
    • mount my iPod (and my 120Gig USB laptop drive)
    • run eReader under Wine (so that I can read my DRM’ed eBooks)
    • …

    Heck, I even got it to run Eclipse, and you know, it actually runs well enough to be usable, although it takes some careful tweaking to get enough screen real estate to run Eclipse on a 480×800 display. (Hint: “Toggle Toolbar Visibility” is your friend.)

    [Latest find: a site that explains how to connect to LEAP/PEAP networks. I’ll have to try that at some point.]

    The only real negatives I’ve found so far are the battery life which is somewhere between 2 and 3 hours, and the fact that it has a fan. The fan doesn’t run all the time, but when it does start up, man is it loud. At full speed it sounds like a hairdryer.

    Btw, the small keyboard is not a negative. In addition to being a lot larger than the one on the XO, it’s actually large enough for me to touch type on without difficulty, now that I’ve gotten used to it.

    Anyway, this is the proverbial first post from the Eee. I guess, if nothing else, the length of it indicates that the keyboard really is usable. I’ll let you know how well it works out once I’ve had it for a few weeks.