Entries Tagged 'Uncategorized' ↓

Montreal Tech Watch has a surprising article about a new luxury handbag rental service.

This is great news.

One of the fundamental things we need to do if we are to have sustainable lifestyles is to own less stuff - and the easiest way to make that popular is by giving people access to more. Worldchanging had a great entry last year on Service Envy: Branding Experience Instead of Stuff which explored these themes:

We need to make the bright green city, in which we use instead of own, a place which makes us feel better, sexier, safer, more loved. If it doesn’t, it’ll never work, no matter how good the product design or how strong the wireless signal.

If you haven’t seen it, take a look at the Gmail video. That’s my “Intro to Swing” teachers Alain Wong and Ann Mony featured on the thumbnail, and again starting around 1:09. Congrats Alain & Ann!

There are more videos of them on youtube if you want to see more of their dancing.

I didn’t expect to follow up so soon on my post about agents provocateurs. In a press release, Sûreté du Québec admits they had undercover cops at the Montebello demonstration. (See CBC coverage)

Ces derniers avaient le mandat de repérer et d’identifier les manifestants non pacifiques pour ainsi éviter les débordements. Les policiers ont été repérés par les manifestants au moment où ils ont refusé de lancer des projectiles.

In English: the cops were there to identify trouble-makers and avoid violence, and had their cover blown when they refused to throw their stones.

Could have fooled me.

One thing is certain: they are terrible at either infiltration and provocation. At best they are incompetent, at worst they are criminal.

This deserves a thorough investigation.

Like Elizabeth May, I’m not the least bit surprised about police trying to incite violence in Montebello. She was in Seattle for the WTO meetings, I was in Washington the following spring. I was in ’secret’ meetings between organizers and police, an opportunity afforded by the fact that Quakers supported my going there to protest.

In that secret meeting the police chief’s representative looked for ways to prevent an escalation of the conflict, and in the next 48 hours the police force did the exact opposite. They confiscated cooking and puppet making-supplies, branding them pepper-spray (spices) and molotov cocktails (rags glue for papier-mache). While we chanted “Free the puppets” outside the convergence center, a few of us confronted and video-tapped officers that didn’t have their ID number on their uniform (we had one sent home).

Unaccountable, unidentified cops scare me. You don’t know what they’re getting ready to do. Everything the police force had done led me to conclude they were trying to incite violence to delegitimize the protesters.

Unaccountable, unidentified protesters scare me. They’re either working for the police, or being conned into volunteering for them.

Back to Canada. Three burly guys that were trying to cause trouble are now in police custody. Their identity is now known to authorities, and an investigation has to follow. We need to know what organization created to protect us is trying to incite violence.

Is it the RCMP again? Have they gone from spying on the Raging Grannies to paying thugs? Did their investigation of Amnesty International not turn up any plausible sounding terrorists?

Is it CSIS? Some local Quebec police chief that decided he wanted to teach those hippy protesters a lesson?

I presented url_pipe at last night’s Democamp.  Short story: it’s not ready. Filters work, the command line doesn’t.

The consensus I got from a few geeks afterwards is this could be useful. A few might help, which would be great.

Simon challenged my choice of RESTful architecture for creating filters rather than passing arguments. If the resulting command is incredibly long, it could be passed through a tiny-url function. That’s crazy enough it might just work; it also handles some of the security and caching issues. I’m pretty sure he’s correct, since that actually simplifies the code considerably

Those are the kinds of feedback geeks need to tinker productively. People that say “yeah, that’s cool”, those that say “I can help” and those that point out how you could make it simpler.

Code will be out soon, I promise. For now, I have to catch up on some Standoutjobs work. It’s my day job and they were kind enough to let me have some flexible hours to work on this - despite the fact we’re in crunch mode and getting ready for a beta.

My last big hurdle is getting a server set up properly. I could go on about the technical WTFs I have had working on this, but it probably should go in a post by itself. Actually, it could be a series of posts: I spent more time fiddling with server configuration issues than writing code.

Ok, one teaser: at the last minute at the SAT, my server wasn’t responding. I ssh into it, and it seems to be fine. It turns out no traffic was going through port 3000. I restarted my server instance on port 80, and things started working fine.

A server not responding, minutes before a demo. How stressful is that?

Another post will follow with SVN info when things are a tad cleaned up. In the meantime, please get in touch if you want to help!

At least on Amazon.ca, Lisp is outselling the last Harry Potter.

After finding out that Lisp in Small Pieces was selling for $3.95 on Amazon.ca, I bought a copy and a few extra for my colleagues at Standoutjobs. (Reading the comments, there’s mention that Probability Theory : The Logic of Science is also only $3.95.) If Peter Norvig gives this book 5 stars, I figure I can’t go wrong.

It could be a typo, but I think they would have changed it by now. It’s likely they’re selling extra inventory before a second edition comes out. Old books cost money to warehouse, and selling them at this price is great marketing. If you like the first edition, you’re more likely to buy the second.

So if you are interested in Lisp, now’s the time to go buy a copy.

One apartment I visited had me sea sick just walking from the living room to the kitchen. The floors were so crooked, I saw a one-inch drop under a single door-frame.

Looking for an apartment at the last minute means all the places are either dumps or posh, with no middle-ground. The posh places are roughly twice the price of the dumps. Since living in a dump is not part of my plan for the next year, I doubled my housing budget. I am now considering an all inclusive bachelor that is usually rented by the members of the Alouettes, or a one bedroom also overlooking Park Lafontaine.

I could have misplaced it, or the old man that tripped into me at the Lionel-Groulx metro station exit was a pickpocket. If it was him, he got $20 for his handiwork, while I deal with the major pain of having to get all my cards redone.

Without so much as a metro ticket, I went to my brother’s. He wasn’t there, nor was the neighbour that has a key, so I kept walking to Jonathan’s, who was kind enough to feed me. Almost any other city in the world, and I would have been in trouble.

When you watched Minority Report, you probably didn’t think it was going to happen in the next 5 years. Think again. Consider Behavioural Targetting in Second Life (via one of Michel Leblanc’s articles on SL).

When I started looking at shopping cart metrics around the dot-com boom, I didn’t expect those statistics to one day be used in physical stores. RFID makes that possible. That just changed: AbsoluteSky will install item-level RFID tracking at a Staples Store.

What gets tested online can make its way to the physical. It’s just a matter of time.