Justin Trudeau is entering the race for the leadership of the Liberals. Polls within the party are said to show that he’s likely to win. While this might not be a great thing for the Liberals, it’s great for the country.
If the Liberals elect Trudeau, they’ll be sending a clear signal: that their collective wisdom favours the iconic over substance. It will show that they believe – as a whole – that a descendant of the Marilyn Monroe of Canadian Politics (no I’m not talking about Maggie here) will lead us to the nirvana of the centre left.
The challenge with Canadian politics is that our multi-party system won’t work as long as the method of electing representation is the primitive first past the post system. With our irrational fear of coalition governments, and an increasing tendency to move the locus of power from Parliament to the Prime Minister’s Office, it’s virtually impossible to construct a government that is representative of the will of the Canadian people unless they’re presented with a binary choice: Leftish or Rightish.
The Right suffered from this for years, with votes split between the Progressive Conservatives and Reform; now the Left suffers with a split between the Liberals and the NDP.
Justin can fix all that. In one decisive stroke, the Liberals can transform themselves from a crusty dynasty in need of renewal into a national joke. One can only hope that the liberals will subsequently poll in the range of the Natural Law Party. Centrist voters will be forced to choose the NDP in spite of it’s soft socialist heritage, the Conservatives will be back in opposition, and we’ll have a government that is less unrepresentative of the national character. Refugees from the Liberals will join the NDP, taking it further toward the centre, and all will be well.
So go for it, Justin, for the good of the country.
A recent change in U.S. patent law allows third parties to discuss a patent’s merits and submit evidence of prior art. This provides a new method for challenging some of the utterly moronic patents the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has let slip by. (more…)
Twitter has generated a fair bit of unrest lately, much of it in the developer community. The main source of this unrest is changes to their API that make life nearly impossible for third party Twitter clients. Needless to say, this has riled up a good portion of the developer community. (more…)
Welcome to the third major iteration of It’s Fixed in the Next Release. From Blogger (yuck) to Serendipity (which truly deserves more attention than it gets) to WordPress (market share wins, even in the open source world) here we are.
Speaking of open source, what you see here is only possible because of the FOSS (Free Open Source Software) model. Not only is the core of WordPress completely open, most of the themes, plugins, and tools are as well.
Independent of the cost, FOSS made this blog because the theme is a hybrid. The base theme is the free version of “Blogolife”. I’ve made some changes to it, both in terms of some invisible code rework, and by hacking in the tag display from “AskIt”, a commercial template I purchased for a project that died. At first I thought AskIt was going to do the trick, but in the end I just didn’t like the main page layout. Blogolife had the clean traditional blog feel but the display of tags and categories wasn’t all that great (I haven’t done anything to the categories yet).
I also removed all of Blogolife’s admin links and promotions for the “PRO” version. Needless to say I wasn’t likely to be buying that anyway.
It’s interesting hacking on WordPress code, and it’s a classic comparison between simplicity and power. I think it’s possible to keep most of the WordPress API in your head, and its possible to be a true expert on it in a year or so. Meanwhile, I’ve been working with Joomla for almost six years now, and it seems I keep on discovering new tricks, not including the outside-the-core stuff like template frameworks and the like. So there’s a freedom in WordPress that makes it possible to hack bits of two themes together in a few days and get something that works. But at the same time I feel like I’m working in a small shop with hand tools. By comparison Joomla feels like a manufacturing line full of robots — configure each one to do a job then watch the whole facility in action.
Each environment has its place. It’s actually more personally satisfying to feel you’ve built something by hand. WordPress certainly rocks the blogging / simple site space, but it has its limitations. Over in the Joomla development world we wrestle with issues like how to make it so those “robots” of ours plug into each other most effectively and with a minimum of code duplication. While we’re making it easier to plug things together I think we’d also be wise to keep an eye on offering freedom to site builders who need to produce a custom solution but only know the basics of PHP development. We never want to be in the position where someone says “Joomla is a great platform but you need a team of developers to build and run a site.”
After all, market share wins, even in the open source world.
To say this blog has suffered from neglect is to make a rather large understatement. It turns out that converting a passing thought into a coherent post takes too many words and too much time. Or maybe finishing a post just doesn’t generate enough endorphin. Whatever the reason, It’s Fixed in the Next Release underwhelmed my expectations, and then Twitter really made a mess of it. (more…)
Another case where the use of unique, hard to guess mail addresses reveals a problem with data security. This time the co-victim and/or offender is the Yellow Pages Group. (more…)
It seems I had a recurring dream about a man who played beautiful music in the morning. I say “it seems” because the music is quite familiar; I think I have heard it many times in dreamland. He played from some place nearby, a small house or maybe a shack.
A few days ago I dreamed that I recorded his music as I heard it from my window. The music was interrupted by argument, then by shots.
I ran out to see my friend dying on the street — the dream was quite graphic. His race was different from mine but the same as the murderer.
This morning, I dreamt that I was in his house. A crowd – mostly members of his race – gathered outside, angry, seeking revenge.
I had the recording. I played it. We all cried.
I wonder if I will ever dream about this man and his music again.
What’s worse than a security issue? Ignoring it and hoping it will go away.
First a bit of background. For years, I’ve been tracking spam by generating unique forwarding addresses every time I register on a site. The intent was to be able to track the sources of spam and easily disable a compromised address. In practice, it’s proven to be a tool for detecting all sorts of misbehaviour. (more…)
“Great news Bell Fib TV is now available in your building.” [spelling error intentional]
You know what, Bell? That’s just freakin’ amazing! You now have the ability to target your marketing right down to the building! Let’s ignore the fact that the least competent direct marketers in the country have been able to do that for a few decades and just stick to celebrating your new-found skills, shall we? (more…)
Instead of maintaining an increasingly diffuse presence on this site, where not knowing what the hell I’m going to do next gets mixed visitor reactions, I’ve been branching out to multiple web locations, each with a clearly defined focus.
This blog will remain diverse in topics and erratic in frequency, but instead of following the “about everything” tag line so literally, I’ve started moving new things to their own topic-specific places. I figure this will make this blog slightly easier to label and the new locations will benefit from a tighter focus. (more…)
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