Lists and a public announcement

Posted on March 20, 2007 by Arthur

This is weird: Whenever I do a ‘reply to all’ to a mailing list message in GMail, I expect it to show only the mailinglist’s/major-domo e-mail address in the To: Field (and that it ignores any individual e-mail addresses). This is a technique I once implemented in RoundAbout, and I dare to say, that I took that idea from Sylpheed.

Alfons seems to have hardware issues with his home-server: Earlier this week he started a photoblog at strncpy (with excellent photos, I dare to say) and I assume he’s (soon) going to move his personal stuff to the same domain too. If you were used to reading his blog, you may wish to keep an eye out around this link.

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Disaster, waiting to happen.

Posted on March 18, 2007 by Arthur

Via AlertMap shown in FirefoxMetaFilter (original discussion thread), the Hungary-based ‘AlertMap’, a service that shows current events in a “Google Maps” map. Not really original, but effective and (as it seems) close to ‘real-time’1.

I need to add that the AlertMap heavily relies on Javascript: it works like a charm on Firefox and IE, but it doesn’t in Opera. Opera users are presented with a ‘boring’ event list and even that list seem to come with plenty of CSS errors.

1 Notice the appropriate quoting of the word ‘real-time’.

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I think I saw a pussycat

Posted on March 17, 2007 by Arthur

Via Paul Miller’s, Green parakeets having a ball, I was reminded that I saw the same birds flying around freely in Deventer last year. Apparantly, these birds enjoyed their freedom by hanging around the cages of their ‘jailed’ cousins in a bird park close to the Deventer railway station. The BBC has an article about that too, and apparently these birds seem to survive because of the string of mild European Winters.

The population boom has been put down to a series of mild winters, a lack of natural predators, food being available from humans and that there are now enough parrots for a wider range of breeding partners

I keep thinking of a certain Monty Python sketch.

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Politics

Posted on March 17, 2007 by Arthur

I followed A Plane and a sunthe events yesterday, when the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform had Valerie Plame on the witness stand who, under oath, told the public her side of the story (QT7). I flipped forth and back between opinions of Democratic, Republican bloggers and what not. I can only conclude that this country, a country with so many divisive opinions, is so frigging screwed up. The Internet, it’s almost like a catalyst for political polarization, semantics wars and twits1.

A couple of days ago, Stephen Colbert had Ayaan Hirsh Ali on his show (QT7). It ended up to be a less remarkable interview (I dare to say ‘boring’).

On a lighter side, UK climate researchers urge for more restraint on global warming issues and warn against the danger of ‘Hollywoodization’. Actually, the only reason why I link to that BBC article is because it has this amazing shot of a plane and the sun (see above).

1 I was quoting Larry Johnson’s remark about mrs. Toensing

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What’s in your flue?

Posted on March 15, 2007 by Arthur

I hate mentioning commercials, but (once again), Capital One’s latest commercials beat the other ones. Earlier, the company was quite successful with their ‘Hand in the pocket’ advertisements. It looks like their ‘exterminator’ ads will be equally as successful: you can view the ads right here. This reminds me that I’ve had some bad experience with people trying to sell me that very same card. If people generally give me a bad time, I will never consider the product they try to sell.

So, I hear that the Dutch government is considering a ban of seal fur coming from Canada. This is old news. However, it may come to a surprise that pro-seal hunt are now targeting the Dutch anti-seal hunt protesters. I’m not kidding:

“The counter-protesters in The Hague — a delegation of two Inuit Canadians and a Newfoundlander dressed in full seal-skin regalia1 — plan to confront the protesters, and then head to the Dutch parliament to present a petition from Canadians arguing the law banning seal product imports should not go into force.”

What can I say?

Earlier, the Atlantic Lottery came out with a report that says that sellers of lottery tickets have been winning larger prizes 10 times higher than their statistical odds. Think of it next time when you cash your ticket and somebody else rings it in and claims you didn’t win. That is if you (of course) beat the actual odds of winning a large prize. If you read the fine print on your ticket, think of this paragraph.

Via Kottke, I found about this movie (Sunshine) where a team of brave souls are trying to save our world by “repairing” the Sun, which apparently is ready to collapse into a black hole. Or something like that. Don’t you just love disaster movies?

And to answer that question in the title: it was a starling. It’s dead, Jim.

1 For some kind of reason I keep thinking that this could be a great start for a joke…

update: OK then, I’ll try:
A delegation of two Inuit Canadians and a Newfoundlander dressed in full seal-skin regalia make it to Europe. During one of the anti-anti-seal-hunt demonstrations, the Newfoundlander turns to one of the Inuit and says:
– “Do I look stupid in this seal-skin?”
Says the Inuit:
“Well, to be honest, it depends on the angle we look at it.”

04/06/07: Canadians snubbed by Dutch MPs.

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Stats, Canada

Posted on March 13, 2007 by Arthur

You may have noticed that the results of the Census 2006 were officially released today. If you plan to dive in the numbers yourself: The Flash version at CBC’s is god-awful: for a good overview, you may just as well head over to the Stats. Canada site (PDF version).

Remarkable findings:

  • The current Canadian population stands at 31,612,897
  • The rate of Canadians born is lower than the rate of immigrants moving over here.
  • Ontario took half of Canada’s growth (the sum of the two factors above).
  • Canada’s population is getting more urban.
  • Alberta has the highest growth rate.
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tech>he>d

Posted on March 12, 2007 by Arthur

Last week, I read about the Canadian Tax problems, which forced the Revenue centre to shutdown operations because of ‘inconsistent’ data. I hear that they expect to be up and running starting next Thursday. Earlier, via the Postgres mailing-list, I read that the problems were more in the ‘design’ of some of the internal tables, which (of course) started a whole discussion about the lack of professionalism in the industry:

CRA spokesperson Jacqueline Couture said the problem resulted in scrambled information in electronic tax returns. For instance, in some cases the field for the social insurance number was instead filled in with a birth date (ed. What, you mean, these weren’t strongly typed fields?)

If your stomach can bear it, the postgres thread follows right here.

Alfons reminded me of XSLT, which is an XML language used for transformations. XSLT comes in handy when you have to convert from one XML format to another. Obviously, his choice of flavour nowadays is XML and (good for you), C# comes with good XSLT support too. Earlier last year, I was looking into the XBRL standard.

I also found out that Berkely DB has been a part of Oracle (since when?). Better yet, Oracle released the Berkeley DB XML as open source too. It’s a good 52 MB download.

On the flipside, recently, I have played with SQLite, which is a highly portable (multi-platform) embedded database engine. It’s so good, that it has been thrown in the Public Domain. And yes, apparently, the designer was heavily inspired by Postgres.

Posted in Ordinateurs | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

You’ve got flu

Posted on March 9, 2007 by Arthur

I happened to run into a meeting with the flu, last Monday, and I’m gradually recovering. I’ve not been sick since I’ve lived here: a feat I thought was so unique that it could have earned me a place in the Guinness World Record book.

That said, I’m almost certain that the cold spell (-10 to -16 degrees temperatures) had something to do with it too. So, tomorrow it finally looks like we’re back to subzero degrees, with the additional touch of rain. Gone will be the couple of centimeters, to reveal that bunch of left-over leafs from last Fall.

Tomorrow, or rather Sunday morning, we’ll be moving into Daylight Savings Time, thanks to the brilliant decision made by US senators. I’d like to see statistics or data on the purported energy savings for those extra 4 or 6 weeks.

1. During my illness, I actually enjoyed watching videos like this (excellent) episode of the Dutch science show ‘Noorderlicht’ (featuring Lee Smolin), and ‘The Man Who Wouldn’t Paint Hitler’
2. Update 03/12/07: Slashdot discussion about the not-so-many-savings of Day Light Savings.

Posted in Truro NS | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

What?

Posted on March 4, 2007 by Arthur

Computer I don’t like you at all…stuff then: The first thing that caught my attention was the ‘FizzBizz’ discussion (started here). The main point of discussion is how to filter out programmers from not-programmers by asking them to write a simple program. I’ve got a better idea: why not ask new hires for their math grades? That would take care of the whole problem!1

TI’m not what I amhe other thing that caught my eye is the EssJay problematique: What to do with a person who misrepresented himself and the organization that is unwilling to see the ethics problem. Maybe it’s time that Wikipedia (the organization) takes a critical look of itself. (via Burningbird, which has excellent links to commentaries to both Seth Finkelstein and Cadenhead).

Oh. And your computer doesn’t like you.

Posted in Ordinateurs | Tagged | 1 Comment

Where was that moon?

Posted on March 3, 2007 by Arthur

We had Moon rising above the treelinea hard time locating the moon today, as we were anticipating the lunar eclipse (earlier).

Nothing happened at 5:30 PM, apparently and it wasn’t until 6 that we finally saw that moon coming from behind the distant tree/mountain line. Yeah, that figures: we should hire some explosives experts to blow up the mountains so that a future eclipse is for all to enjoy.

It was harder though to make photos with the 50 mm, particularly later that night: the town lights obviously refracted in the lens and turned the (hardly visible) moon into a full-duracell-powered moon. A kind of undesired effect that you can only get away by using an ultra high ISO setting and the lowest (or longest, whichever you prefer) possible time-stop.

update 03/10/07: APOD’s image of that day (which appears to be a combination of 2 separate shots)

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Winter March

Posted on March 2, 2007 by Arthur

There’s a weather warning for the Maritimes, and I can tell from the snowshovels that appear to be driving around the block (and the wind gusts):

Snowfall accumulations of 10 to 20 centimetres are forecast for many areas before the snow changes through ice pellets or freezing rain then to showers. Rainfall amounts could reach 5 millimetres over southwestern regions. Strong southeasterly winds will develop ahead of this system with wind gusts of 80 km/h giving reduced visibilities in blowing snow..Higher gusts of 90 km/hour are expected over southwestern Nova Scotia and up to 120 km/h over the Cape Breton Highlands.

Notice that the weather is gradually ‘getting warmer’ over the course of the night, where at the end (and hopefully) the snow will change into rain. The freezing rain is the tacky part. Might be pretty.

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Nah

Posted on March 1, 2007 by Arthur

I closed Giant Mooseheaddown the comments for now: the last 3 days I received spam that came (consistently) from one IP address (Australia, if you want to know). Consistently. For three days. You’d say that an administrator would know after 3 days.

Weather has been on the up recently: It looks like it’s hitting the 0 degrees the next couple days. This comes right in time for next Saturday’s Lunar eclipse, which (according to the CBC) we have the best spot for. If you’re European, you have exactly one day to fly over and spend your valuable Eurodollars over here. I mean, Canada ranks 7 in the World Forum’s Travel And Tourism Competitiveness Report.

I read this on the Tubes: A Saskatchewan man found this giant moosehead in the Bay of Fundy (see image above, Google link goes here). For family members reading this: that’s close to the spot where we made pictures too (Cheverie). Actually, we ate around that area too: there’s a small restaurant there. And plenty of potholes. Unless they fixed that recently. It is pretty there, yes.

Earlier I heard stories about a company looking for gold in Nova Scotia: test drilling has commenced in Beaverdam. I’ve heard stories about gold mines around here, none of them really having produced a lot of that worthy stuff. At one time, I heard a story (on CBC radio) that rocks containing gold were actually used for the Halifax Airport runways. I’m not sure if that’s a true story or not.

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Planes

Posted on February 28, 2007 by Arthur

I just read about the financial troubles at Airbus, which are caused by both a weak US dollar and by serious delays to its flagship A380 Super Jumbo (Wikipedia).

There’s an interesting quote from an employee at a German plant who says that:

“We used to build 200 planes a year when we were doing great and now we are even making 438 a year and it’s still the end.”

So, the question that popped in my mind is: how many planes are there in the world. According to this special US Census release, it appears that there were 7,900 airliners in 2003.

– Airbus loses freight customer UPS

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