Stephen Harper Crosses Floor to Join Liberals
OTTAWA — In a bold and unprecedented move, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has crossed the floor to join the Liberal Party. (more…)
Missing Payee on Image-Ready Cheques with Quicken XG 2007 (Rev 2)
I apologize for the title of this post, it should be “another reason to hate proprietary software”, but I’m hoping to save some other poor soul a week of trouble.
The answer is: make sure that the first line of the address field is exactly the same as the payee name, and presto.
Now the whole story: (more…)
Farewell, Dear Globe
I learned to read from the pages of the Globe and Mail newspaper. For longer than I’m prepared to admit (as in — since Grade 2) opening that paper has been part of my morning ritual. I’ve stuck with it through thick and thin, borne with some of it’s ill-fated attempts at investigative journalism, it’s deep insights, it’s left-wing sense of social justice and it’s right wing apologists who heaped praise on (choose a pejorative) like Conrad Black, even it’s tragically misdirected hiring of Christie Blatchford (complete with some contractual clause that seems to guarantee her at least a sliver of space on the front page every time she writes an article, no matter what).
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Intellectual Property in a Digital Era
Last night I attended a presentation by Doug Hyatt, Business Economics Professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Business. Although billed as focusing on the music industry, his comments were actually more broad ranging, even abstract.
I guess that is a telling indication of how early we are in the process of adapting to the digital era. When very smart people who make their careers from studying these problems speak in abstract terms, you know we have a long way to go. (more…)
The Future of the Gardiner Expressway
Last month the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation (TWRC) released a report on dealing with the Gardiner Expressway an ageing elevated highway that cuts through the centre of downtown Toronto and pretty universally regarded as an eyesore.
In general it’s a well reasoned report, but it’s striking for its continuing embrace of car culture. (more…)
SUV Culture 1
Ever hear someone rationalize their purchase of a gas-guzzling SUV as something they did to protect the safety of their kids? I hear that all the time. It’s delusional, and here’s why…
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Fighting Global Warming is Too Expensive. WHAT??
The “can’t quite grasp the concept” set continues to argue that the cost of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to fight global warming is just too high.
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Making the Best of Afghanistan
Canada has a significant proportion of it’s military involved in a combat and reconstruction role in Afghanistan. In principle, the mission is a good one: get rid of what’s left of the Taliban; help rebuild the damage done by war; establish a stable political system that allows the country to become self-sufficient.
Everything sounds pretty good except for that last part. Try holding a gun to someone’s head and saying “right, form a stable civil state or I’ll shoot.” It’s not going to work.
Ranked #1 on Google!
A year or so ago, I needed a tool to generate thumbnails of Web pages. I found a lot of inadequate tools and a server based solution with limited flexibility (thumbshots.org). So I decided to throw together Thumb-Page to do the job, and then I decided to release it as open source.
Since then, it’s been a surprisingly popular application. I figured maybe a few hundred people would be interested in it… instead it’s clocking in at about 400 per month. Now compared to a “hot” shareware application that can pull in 400,000 downloads per month, that’s not so hot, but it’s still pretty good. (more…)
Serendipity (s9y) is Fantastic
After a few days of plug-ins and tweaks, I have to say I’m phenomenally happy with Serendipity, my new blog software. Open source rules the day again.
From the user side, the best feature is the ability to grab an RSS feed by category. Not interested in my ramblings about daily life? Grab a feed from the categories you like.
As a developer, it’s not very often that I install an application without muttering under my breath about something that isn’t done right, or at least could have been done better. This package is as close to perfect as I’ve seen in a long time. In fact, the only thing it did that wasn’t to my liking was create a new user for the posts I imported from Blogger. If it had asked if I wanted to merge the posts into an existing user, it would have spared me a little digging into the database and a quick SQL query to patch things up.
I’ve also deployed Serendipity in the “Flexistuff” blog over at One of a Kind Publishing. This new blog is going to be all about personalization and customization, but it will take a little while for it to get up to speed. After all, blogs are all about content, and good content is never easy. There’s also a good chance that we’ll be rebranding; I’ll update the link if/when things change.
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