Op-Ed
Mar 22, 2007
Power Saving Disincentive
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Toronto Hydro is asking for a rate hike because they wish to recoup a 10.4 million dolloar loss in revenue due to reduction in power usage for the last year and a half because of an energy conservation program.

Now an average increase of $2.07 per month isn't a huge increase but isn't this a bit of a disincentive to save power? If I use up more will you lower the price?
Nov 19, 2005
Spring and Fall Get Shafted
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It's snowing in Toronto today. Yesterday it started snowing for the first time this season.

In Toronto, Southern Ontario and perhaps most of Canada, we have adjusted our notion of when the seasons occur largely based on weather and holiday weekends. Officially, each season is supposed to have three months with the following start days (for the northern hemisphere, give or take a few days depending on your country)

Spring, March 21
Summer, June 21
Autumn, September 21
Winter, November 21

According to Wikipedia meteorologists go by the following
Spring: March, April, May
Summer: June, July, August
Autumn: September, October, November
Winter: December, January, February

Which is still fine as far as each season is concerned as they each own three months and they're all quite happy as they have an even share.

Not so here. We define our seasons as the following
Spring, April to start of May 2-4 weekend (Victoria day)
Summer, May 2-4 weekend to Labour Day weekend inclusively (approximately August 31)
Autumn, after Labour Day weekend (approximately September 1) to October 31
Winter, November 1 to March 31

So clearly Winter gets the lion's share with five months, Summer still hangs on with a bit extra totalling just over three months and Spring and Fall get shafted with only two months. Hell, Spring is only like a month and three weeks.

All because it snows in November, doesn't start to warm up until April and we love to mark our Summers with cottage weekends.

Thanks Fall 2005. It was nice knowing you.





Dec 19, 2002
The Isolated Blackberry
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I have the privilege of playing with a Blackberry 5810 and soon perhaps a 6710. Both of these handhelds are Java based for use with GSM/GPRS networks. Both have cell phones integrated with the traditional wireless PDA. Awesome I thought. I can ditch my cell phone and have the world at my fingertips. Until...

I use Mozilla, so the first thing I check is how to synchronize the address book. Now I'm not that naive to think that this will be simple. I never dreamed that Mozilla's calendar would work but I thought there would be a chance to get the address book synched.

No dice. Blackberry doesn't synch with Mozilla in any way. Perhaps I can write a conduit as you can with Palm? Nope. The synch operations are integrated with the desktop with no third party conduits allowed in as far as I can tell. To make matters even worse, the address book in Mozilla isn't based on a very widely accepted standard but rather a format referred to as Mork, I believe.

Even if Mozilla were a little more open with it's address book, such as implementing it as an LDAP server or something similar the Blackberry software doesn't even offer that as an option.

The calendar is also limited in it's synching abilities but it's still very much a new work in progress. At least if the Blackberry software supported it I could set-up a WebDAV calendar server.

Now the Blackberry is still a wonderful device. I can check email and surf the web wherever I have a connection, and make a phone call with the same device, but it's basically useless as a PDA since I can't synch addresses, memos, tasks or appointments. So I'm trapped using Outlook or another PIM software that Blackberry prefers. The Treo still looks like the best option at this point.

Santa, are you listening?

Nov 21, 2002
Forget the Rules
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Matt Haughey mentions that SpamAssasin no longer appears to be working effectively against spam. Why? Because SpamAssasin is rules based. Not only that but they display their rules list for spammers to analyze. Just like any game if you show the other team your playbook or run the same plays over and over they'll know your game.

Statistical probability filtering or Bayes filtering techniques are the only way to effectively block spam. When working at SonicBoomerang filtering news and opinion postings we quickly found that rules have inherent error due to human bias. At first we thought that classifying news and opinion was a matter or identifying simple rules. Try as you might you can't come up with a rules based system that is as effective as statistical analysis based on a large training set.

Based on my experience 2000 spam messages are an effective training set to start with. Did your filter get a false negative or false positive? No problem. Add the error to the training set and your filter just got smarter without the introduction of bias.

I had attempted to find a server side Bayes filter but couldn't install the one I found without numerous errors. I'll try again shortly and hopefully come up with a web interface so all the users on my server can have this at their disposal.

Sep 13, 2002
Replacing Textarea
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One of the things I do is create dynamic content interfaces for web sites. But standard web forms are limiting for text editing. I had originally tried to implement additional textarea functionality using Javascript but was limited by cross browser functionality due to DOM not being well supported in Netscape 4 if not at all and an annoying bug in Mozilla. 1512

1512I would have thought that a DOM HTML bug would have been fixed before 1.0 or even 1.1 but in the open source world priorities are not always based on important bugs but rather what programmers feel like fixing. Not like I can complain much, I know how to program but haven't tried to fix these bugs myself. Too much of a pain to get into C++ and learn the intricacies of Mozilla code. Bug I'm rambling.

1512So, I thought, why not do it in Flash? Turns out there are two good starts on this. 1512Josh Dura has a Flash text editor and so does Stuart Schoneveld although Stuart's is not available to download and therefore tweak and use. It's too bad since Stuart's has a link option that Josh's doesn't yet have.

1512So I'll have to stretch my limited Flash muscles to plug in a link bar into Josh's editor and solve some issues I noticed. First, the text field in the editor seems to only update it's associated variable with formatting information after more data is entered. So just calling setTextFormat won't apply it to the variable right away. The second thing is that the HTML stored in the variable has the tag <textarea%gt; which last time I checked is not standard HTML. Small details to fix.

15121512Timothy Appnel had some good ideas on Flash based editors.
Aug 26, 2002
The Windows 2000 Incident
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My hard drive was slowly dying from the dreaded click of death. The reads were slower and slower and various diagnostic tools were telling me of multiple read errors. For those who aren't aware, I've lost over three hard drives in one year. If you're looking for a subject in a human magnetic field study, I think I may be able to help you.
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1512So I went out and bought a new hard drive. 80 GB, 7200 RPM Maxtor for $202 with tax, Canadian dollars. I also came into possession of a legitimate copy of Windows 2000 Professional. Away I went partitioning the drive into OS and documents, then installed Windows 2000.1512

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1512The problems started with the Windows Update program. I like to get all the updates before working. Best to be safe and up to date. The problem was the Windows Update program didn't work. Clicking on the 'Accept' button did nothing. I had a small contract deadline so I decided to forgo the updates for now. I had to install IIS for the project, without an update this turned out to be a big mistake.1512

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1512After working on the project for a few short hours I noticed a consistent amount of drive activity that shouldn't be happening. I installed McAfee virus professional and after a scan found the Nimda virus all over my drives. I proceeded to clean it out taking several hours as I didn't realize it wasn't able to clean a lot of files until IIS was shut down. I also installed the firewall portion of the software only to discover just how many programs Windows opens up to the network by default.1512

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1512Finally several hours later the virus scan was complete. But a new problem decided to rear it's ugly head. Every time I logged in as Administrator the system would reboot. After much searching through the registry for what I thought would be some sort of Trojan horse I reformatted the OS partition and started the reinstall again.1512

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1512After the reinstall McAfee went in first. A full scan showed more Nimda left over on the documents partition. Finally it was all cleared out. "Perhaps I'll try Windows Update again" I thought. Still no go. I tried several times until magically one of the critical updates for networking and IE worked. Upon reboot my Internet connection was lost. Great. I guessed that it might be the firewall getting in the way. I removed McAfee firewall and sure enough the network was back up. Back to Windows Update. No go. In fact now it wouldn't even scan the system to see what updates I needed. Furthermore deleting the Update ActiveX control didn't cause IE to download the control again. I ended up downloading Service Pack 3 (SP3) manually.1512

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1512What to do about the remaining updates? I noticed that SP3 had installed "Automatic Updates". Shortly after that the automatic updates icon indicated an update download. For now, this will suffice. I don't know if I'm getting all the updates but exhaustive searches on the net resulted in no solutions for my Windows Update problems.1512

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1512Finally to add further frustration to this upgrade / reinstall, the dreaded mystery reboot returned. Attempting safe mode failed several times until a hard boot allowed safe mode and I surmised that the mystery reboot was being caused most likely my the Adaptec software I just installed. So a little registry hunting and editing and the programs were removed so I could log in again.1512

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1512So now I can hopefully get back to work in between program reinstalls. The saga continues, stay tuned...1512

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Jul 18, 2002
DRM Debates
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Recently the U.S. Commerce Department held a roundtable discussion on Digital Rights Management or DRM. Slashdot posted a submission pointing to articles by Declan McCullagh, Tech activists protest anti-copying, and a personal synopsis by Grant Gross, Fair use advocates silenced at DRM "public" meeting.

15121512I point to U.S. meetings because Canada is frequently a single step away from U.S. digital law. Arguably ahead or behind at times, but lets face it, their economy directly affects ours.

15121512It is unfortunate that the Commerce Department failed to include a representative for the activists at the table. It may have avoided the unpleasant outbursts during the roundtable. Declan describes the activist's comments as disruptive, whereas Grants states the activists "were basically told to sit down and shut up". Knowing the typical behaviour of self confessed "geeks" I can well imagine their inability to take their comments seriously.

15121512The points raised by activists are valid, simply delivered poorly. Photographs taken by Declan show the division without having to read the story. At the table, we have Commerce Department's Phillip Bond and Motion Picture Association of America's Jack Valenti dressed suits and ties. The image of corporate America. Crammed at the door observing the roundtable with have people such as Richard Stallman and "Vincenzo", looking like the prototypical opponents to corporate America. Perhaps these advocates are not the best choice for the activist's lobby. Then again, they don't appear to have been given the opportunity like AOL Time Warner's Elizabeth Frazee.

15121512Goods points raised though. Philip Bond is quoted as saying to Jack Valenti, "Jack, you say we've got to deal with peer to peer, but I think that's what consumers want." Is anyone listening to consumers? Do consumers really care? As I've said before, most consumers don't care. The majority will just take what's easiest for them.
Apr 23, 2002
Glenn's Law
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Importance of Product Features = Importance of Stability + I where I = Level of Importance and I > 0
Apr 18, 2002
Weblogs Going Mainstream
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Like most techies, we sing the praises of new items and new ideas and loathe when those ideas become mainstream. They seem to lose that elite quality that made them special. The Internet itself is a prime example. When people would ask me "What's the Internet?" or "What's the Web?" I would revel in the chance to explain what it was and felt quite a sense of pride at my unique knowledge. We knew that it was on it's way to becoming mainstream. When that day finally arrived it was bittersweet.
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1512Web logs are travelling down the same path, as well they should. Links in the Daypop Top 40 point to three articles from large circulation publications explaining weblogs. Wired - The Blogging Revolution, Business 2.0 - Blog Nation and MSNBC - Business pros flock to Weblogs.
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1512I wasn't at the head of the weblog pack, but I did create my own from scratch and I feel a certain sense of elitisim when people ask "What's a weblog?". I know however, that I'm going to loathe the day when people will just view weblogs as a natural option for contributing to the web and say, "Since when have you had a weblog?". In the end it's just a form of publishing folks. So I need to get over myself.
Dec 16, 2001
Most of us are Sheep
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Several bloggers have been referencing Microsoft's new Digital rights management operating system patent. This patent describe digital rights management baked into the operating system allowing only trusted apps to control media. This means that in future versions of Windows only "trusted apps" or applications certified by Microsoft can handle rights-managed data.

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I really need to make a push towards using Linux in a desktop environment unless I'm going to follow the rest of the crowd and simply use whatever MS throws in front of me. I still use Windows as the following applications have me tethered to Windows; Photoshop, Illustrator, SoundForge. There are a few others but I can live without them. I hate having to make choices based on principal rather than technical merrit but hey, I don't always like to follow the crowd.

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Dan Gillmour put it best recently. Most people are sheep, it turns out. They take what's put in front of them. Amen brother!

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Linux is still not a viable alternative for the Windows consumer. Lots of work must be done before Linux is even remotely usable as Windows. That's an entire rant of it's own - stay tuned.

Oct 30, 2001
Why I avoid Microsoft programming tools.
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Joel Spolsky's Working on CityDesk, Part Four is a good example of why I refuse to work with Microsoft tools for programming. Let someone else deal with the documentation headaches and lack of source code.
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1512The Microsoft bashing is tiring but my main beef is lack of information. I've worked on two Microsoft ASP based web sites and both times the simplest problems resulted in hours if not days of frustration trying to figure out why certain functions wouldn't work. In all cases a lack of documentation prevented me from obtaining the answer.
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1512Documentation is a pain in the butt to write but it makes things much easier for the programers / user. At least a Java stack trace while not pretty is better than a Microsoft error 9857362. Which BTW, will cost you something to figure out either via Technet or a support phone call.
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1512Articles like Joel's remind me why I should strive to make the user experience better and at least strive for a clear message when developing.
Oct 16, 2001
In the Name of Religion
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I think it's human nature to seek retribution. Hiding behind a religion makes it that much worse, not justifiable.1512

Time and again military leaders describe their actions with references to Islam or Christianity. Neither religion approves of the hatred towards your enemies. In fact both practice forgiveness.

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You want to wage war against your enemies, fine. But don't hide behind your religion when it advocates a peaceful solution. Religion isn't even what this is about. Referring to "your god" will only polarize the issue.

1512A Memo to American Muslims
1512Love Your Enemies
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Jul 22, 2001
Paying for Digital Content
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Dave Winer mentioned today that the New York Times has changed their layout to include mostly Reuters and AP articles, which as Dave mentions, may allude to an upcoming subscription requirement.

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Dave also mentions that he can't point into subscription services. For various reasons I assume this is because one, he either doesn't have a subscription or two, he feels that he shouldn't point as his readers might not have a subscription.

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I personally wouldn't want to subscribe to all the possible content sources that are available online, however it is possible for content providers to offer micro-payment services on a per-article basis. Content providers could offer either a summary or better yet the first third or half of an article and offer the remainder for a small price using either PayPal or the other available micropayment services.

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Now micro-payments are an entirely separate discussion but offer various options for readers. You can pay on a per article basis, per topic (general news, business, sports, etc), or a network of publications could offer a unified discount package.

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Perhaps content marketers knows what I would rather not believe. Readers are used to subscriptions. Anything else is either too complex for them, or not profitable.