News from Great Castle Wilson

Author: adminmcq

  • 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.

  • What do you mean mysql can’t find my wp database?

    Well, that was more excitement than I was expecting.

    Tonight, Deb wandered into my downstairs office and said, “Are you playing with the server? I can’t get to my blog”. I naturally assumed it was the normal problem of my dynamic dns address changing and the associated delay before mikew.ca catches up. So I tried connecting to my blog and what did I see: “WordPress can’t find your database”. What!!! That would be bad; very very bad.

    Well, after about an hour of messing around, I realized it wasn’t quite that bad. MySQL and all my data really were still there, but it turns out they had been masked by some misguided hacking I had been doing with MacPorts.

    Whew!

    Well, in honour of the near miss, I promptly did a full backup of my entire website (as apposed to the incremental nightlies) and the mysql database, and then upgraded to WordPress 2.5.

    So far, everything looks good. The upgrade went painlessly, as it has for me since I started using WP. Man, I wish all software was that easy to deal with.

  • EclipseCON

    It’s Wednesday night, and I’m getting ready to head out to the e4 kickoff BOF. We did our Eclipse 4.0 talk this morning and it seemed to go pretty well — big crowd, no rotten fruit thrown. It will be interesting to see who shows up for the BOF tonight.

    I’m rapidly approaching my limit for being away from home. The weather is nice here, and there are lots of smart people to talk to, but I really need to be back in my own environment. Oh well, at least I can say the weather’s good. Here’s a shot from outside the hotel:

  • I’m traveling next week.

    Next week is EclipseCon 2008, and this year I’m going. Those of you who know me, understand how big a deal that is. I really don’t like to travel; I feel about travel pretty much the way most people feel about getting a limb amputated.

    Despite that, if the prelude was any indication, I expect it will be a very exciting conference this year. I’m looking forward to talking f2f with many of the people who are active in the community that I know only from mailing lists and bugzilla.

    I fly out Sunday, and will be back in the city on Friday. Wish me luck. 🙂

  • GUI Bloopers: Paste Special

    So in case you haven’t seen it, “Paste Special” is a common feature in many applications that support rich content of one form or another. The intent is that, instead of having the application decide (based on the available content types of the object in the paste buffer) the best format to use when pasting, it offers the user a dialog with a range of available formats, something like this:

    The typical behavior, in this case, is to open the dialog with the format that would have been chosen if the user had simply picked “Paste” already selected. I guess this is done so that, if the user hits return when the dialog opens, they will get the same behavior as Paste provides. The thing is though, no one who opens that dialog ever wants that behavior. The only reason why a user would go through the extra pain of the dialog is because they want to paste in some way that is not the default, so in point of fact, picking any other choice would be better than picking the one that does what Paste would do.

    The question is then, what should the dialog have as the default selection?

    In 99.9% of the times Paste Special is used, the intent is to remove any rich formatting from the content in the paste buffer, so that it can pick up the surrounding formatting of its destination. Given that, when there are multiple possible formats, always pick the “plainest” one. So, for example, in the above dialog, it should have “Unformatted text” selected by default.

    Of course, as usual, the Apple guys have understood the underlying problem better. Instead of a Paste Special command, in Pages I get this…

    … which does what you (almost always) actually want, without putting up a dialog at all.

  • CBC Radio’s WireTap

    I am an avid CBC Radio 1 listener, and as such, I have heard pieces of the CBC program “WireTap” somewhere around twenty times now. In all those times, the longest I have ever been able to convince myself to listen to the show was about five minutes.

    I honestly can’t imagine how such blecherous dreck ever got the green light, let alone how it can continue to be aired. It is essentially a half-hour of incoherent, neurotic rambling, of the sort that you would barely put up with if it was being generated by someone you cared about. In this case, the host is one of the singularly most unlikeable on-air personalities since Kenny versus Spenny, so the only possible reaction is to leap for the channel change dial.

    Please, CBC, kill this show. It single-handedly lowers the quality of your entire station to the level of “crappy audio-blog”.

  • Sometimes it’s the little things

    It’s been a while since I’ve done a link-of-the-day, but this one made me think. (Specifically, “Are my UI designs getting this right?”):

    Thanks, Windows. If I had a cookie, I’d give it to you.

    Well… That’s disappointing. Not only is the original post gone now, but it’s been so long that I can’t even remember what they were on about. Oh well.

  • Happy Birthday Randy and Tim

    The snowstorm on Friday provided an excellent addition birthday present for Randy and Tim as they spent the day, yesterday, at Pakenham ‘boarding in the nicest powder we’ve had all season. Dennis, Katie and I were able to receive this benefit as well. 😉

    The extended family and friends got together that evening to celebrate the birthdays, and a good time was had by all.

    Presents!