Today is Family Day, a new holiday created in Ontario because there wasn't a holiday in February and our government thought it would be a good idea.
So put up your family tree, watch some old episodes of Family Ties, and spend some time with your family. That is, if you're not one of the 40% of people who still has to work on Family Day.
Well, a title like Politics is far more likely to scare people away than invite them to read, but politics has been on my mind lately and I wanted to do a bit of a brain dump while I'm thinking about this stuff.
I'm a Canadian but I like watching CNN and Fox, and these days, talk is mostly about the US primaries. Looks like John McCain is going to be the Republican candidate and either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic candidate. The race between the latter two is too close to call at this point.
What does mean? I'm not here to provide in-depth analysis of the candidates, but let's look at the system.
In Canada, the major parties on two sides of the political spectrum are the Liberal and the Conservative party, and I think those are better names than Republican and Democratic when talking about ideologies, so I'm going to use those terms, but without the capitalization so you know I'm not talking about specific parties. So we've got the liberals, and we've got the conservatives.
Wikipedia is a great forge for things like definitions of loaded terms, so let's compare the two there:
Liberalism refers to a broad array of related ideas and theories of government that consider individual liberty to be the most important political goal.
And...
Conservatism is a term used to describe political philosophies that favor tradition and gradual change, where tradition refers to religious, cultural, or nationally defined beliefs and customs.
These aren't much help, but they do set a bit of a tone; in my opinion, the tone only really covers social issues, not necessarily foreign policy issues, for example. There's also the progressive conservative, which is a term used in parties in a number of countries to basically mean conservative, but not quite as conservative.
Trying to distill something as complex as the set of beliefs and policies and strategies that make up the platform of a political party into a one or two word description is just not possible, so it's important to distinguish ideals from the Democratic brand of liberalism and the Republican brand of conservatism.
When I was growing up, I heard the words "liberal" and "conservative" for the parties in Canada, and I came to my own conclusions about what these parties stood for based on what those words evoked. I never paid too much attention to politics, but one day I noticed the Conservatives didn't seem all that conservative and when it came to spending money, the Liberals didn't seem quite as liberal as the conservatives.
And now we've got the current US government, an allegedly conservative government, spending money like there's no tomorrow. Whether you agree with this particular fiscal policy or not, I don't think it's very conservative.
But Bush did cut taxes, and both Hillary and Barack (why are they so often referred to as "Hillary and Obama"?) are promising to take away those tax cuts. So maybe those terms do still apply but only to the idea of personal income tax.
So in the US there are two brands of politics. Democratic and Conservative. The aspect of politics that has been on my mind lately, though, is how partisan the US has become. People are either strongly Democratic or strongly Conservative; it's rare in my experience talking with Americans that people are ambivalent (which, on the other hand, is the norm for many Canadians).
It's interesting to compare political parties and religious denominations.
Both of these things represent a vast array of beliefs on various issues. If you "become" a Pentecostal or a Baptist, there are particular stances on various aspects of theology that you're basically expected to believe if you're going to stand under that label.
The same seems to be true of the political parties. If you want to be a Republican then you must be in favour of both the tax cuts, and the war on Iraq. If you declare yourself a Democrat then you must favour both increased taxes and withdrawl from Iraq.
With religion, it's presumed that the leader of your church or denomination is doing the Lord's work, and if he preaches on one particular side of a denominational divide then you're expected to believe it unquestioningly. But hey kids, political parties don't have divine leaders.
There are some instances where it makes sense to inherit the beliefs of the party. Chances are they're fairly well researched and are more reasoned than what you'll come up with on your own. But still, when there are experts on both sides of an issue, it means that there likely isn't a right answer. Is the right answer for you going to mesh with what your party decides? What if it doesn't?
I believe the political process needs more granularity. I don't want to be a Democrat or a Republican. I have my own stances on many issues, and neither of the mainstream brands fits my particular beliefs. And I'm not willing to change them just to fit the archetype.
To be continued.
I've been in California for the last week and one effect that I've noticed is that a lot of web sites are more responsive down here than in Ottawa.
Of course this makes some sense - Ottawa is a long way from California, so the number of hops from me to, say, google.com, is much greater than it is here. Also, even if it was fiber all the way from my house in Ottawa to Google HQ, the speed of light still limits that to ~40ms.
When you're developing on a fast computer, it's easy to create software that runs well on your own system but runs slowly on what an average user might have.
A lot of "Web 2.0" happens in California, and it seems that living and working in California might be akin to having that fast computer: It's easy to create websites that run great in California but don't run nearly as well on the other side of the continent.
It's scary how fast Gmail responds here.
Oh look, another Google search result that leads to an MSDN page that's gone missing (the 2nd link on the results page, at least as of right now).
This happens far too often. There's really no excuse for Microsoft not realizing by now that search engines index their site, and that users use search engines to find developer content far more than they use MSDN.
How about some search engine friendly URLs? For example, the link above is:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms123402.aspx
Basically a meaningless string.
This is the page that should have been hit by that link (I think):
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa965225(VS.85).aspx
Another meaningless string.
How about something like...
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/win32/windows2000/system/memory/about/memory_performance_information
This has a version number in the URL. I can tell from the URL that it's for a win32 function and that the documentation is relevant to Windows 2000. With a URL like this:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/win32/vista/sdk/apiref/CreateProcess
This URL would even let me Google for Vista specific documentation, and tell if I found it because it's right there in the URL.
Sun did a great job of this with Java. Even though the documentation is way old:
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.3/docs/api/java/io/PrintStream.html
This link still works, and I can tell by reading it what I'm going to get.
The Ottawa Citizen has a short article that gives a good summary of what's going on with this current issue of the government voting to re-open a nuclear reactor that the folks responsible for nuclear safety in Canada shut down (for safety reasons).
The gist of it is that this is a small reactor whose purpose is to produce isotopes used in medical scanning equipment. This is one of the few places in the world this stuff is produced, so the shutdown created a world shortage.
The reason the reactor was shut down was because the rods that are designed to drop into the reactor to stop the reaction in the case of an emergency get jammed and can't drop into the reactor, thanks to a manufacturing error.
This seems like a pretty serious problem, and in my opinion, the AECL was doing its job when it shut down the reactor.
The current government has fired nuclear regulator Linda Keen, the woman responsible for the shutdown.
Is the production of medical isotopes worth the risk of a nuclear accident?
Here's the article: Why Chalk River’s ‘1957 Chevy’ still has no backup reactor
I use Windows Media Center as my PVR, and for the most part, like it a lot. It's a huge step up from the PVR capability built into the cable box that Rogers supplies, although it can't do HD.
Something simple like "record every new episode of a show" is not possible with the Scientific Atlanta PVR that Rogers supplies. It will either record every episode (which, with time-shifting channels, means you get way more than you wanted), or every episode in a particular time slot (which means you miss it if it moves).
TiVO does all this too, but requires a subscription for the data. I wouldn't mind paying it if I could get an HD TiVO, but I don't really want to pay a subscription for something I can get from Windows Media Center for free.
One TiVO feature I don't get with MCE is predictive recording. This is the ability that the TiVO has to analyze what I'm watching, what other people are watching, and automatically record shows it thinks I might like.
With a PVR you spend less time flipping channels, so it's harder to run across new shows you might like; predictive recording is a good way to find new stuff, assuming it works well. And it's something that Windows Media Center doesn't have built-in.
Enter MyTV Genie.
This is an MCE add-on that adds predictive recording to Media Center. I've been looking for this capability for a while, so I'm surprised I haven't run across this before.
So far it's only suggested a couple of shows to me, and they're not ones I love, but I'm hoping that more users will equal better recommendations.
Our TV watching pattern must seem schizophrenic to a tool like this, since TV time here is divided into roughly three distinct categories: Toddler Time (Thomas the Tank Engine, Sesame Street), Wife Time (Dr. Phil, Mcleod's Daughters), and Adult Time (Nanny 911, Flip This House, The Daily Show).
Either the prediction engine needs to find someone else that also watches TV in roughly this combination, or some Daily Show viewers are going to start getting Sesame Street recommended to them. It will be interesting to see what happens.
Dreamhost, the host that hosts my blog and some other sites I play with, screwed up.
But they did something that most companies don't do when they screw up: They posted a very good explanation of what went wrong, how they fixed it, and how they set things up so this particular problem won't happen again.
I would prefer that the companies I deal with never have any problems, but when they do, it means a lot to me that they admit the problem, tell me what it was, and fix it.
The only thing missing is some sort of "and here's how we're going to make it right" token gesture.
(Contrast this experience with Xbox Live, which has been having intermittent problems for nearly a month, with no explanation at all from Microsoft).
That's the error message I get when I try to activate Windows Vista on my media center. The product key is good; I called Microsoft and they even generated and gave me a different product key to try. Same message.
Vista has decided that my grace period is over (60 days after installation) and it's time to shut me down. I tried to activate online, using the automated phone system, and with the help of a human representative. No luck - I get this error message, which they don't have an explanation for. The folks on the phone can't help me.
The knowledge base mentions this error code here, but the steps don't actually help in my case.
Isn't this the nightmare scenario that people predicted when WPA was first introduced? Well, it's real, and I'm living it.
In case you weren't aware, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is back (as "A Daily Show with Jon Stewart" - as Jon explains, it's not The Daily Show without the full staff, it's just A Daily Show), with Stewart writing his own material until the strike ends. Same with the Colbert Report (now with an empahsis on the T).
I figured these were both smart guys so they could handle doing some of their own writing, but I was expecting an abbreviated show, a show with more filler than usual, or maybe a short burst of good material with the quality tapering off. But so far, they've delivered. I liked Colbert's explanation on the first day back that it's just a technical glitch with the teleprompter - that there weren't any words in it.
The shows that have aired since they went back on with their own stuff are at least in the top 10%, maybe top 5% quality for the entire series. I'm impressed.
Looks like the Blu-Ray camp is making an attempt to end the format war. Warner Bros just signed on as an exclusive, meaning now about 75% of studios are Blu-Ray exclusive.
I still think this is a bad idea, because the lack of a combo format means stores will have to stock two SKUs for every movie for the next ~10 years, but if it means we can just pick a format and move on, then maybe we're better off.
Warner's reason is a good one - that they believe consumers are going to sit on the fence until this gets sorted out, so the industry needs to choose a clear winner to remove this uncertainty - but Ithey've picked the wrong winner.