rwmtest

I've met a few dozen federal MPs so far, and given how important technology law is to me I am always wanting to be introduced to and meet with more.  This is why I was so happy when I heard that a very technology savvy MP was going to be joining us for a GOSLING gathering on April 15th this year. This was David Graham ( Laurentides — Labelle ) about the only Canadian MP I've heard being spoken of highly on SlashDot as this is a person already well known in the Linux and FLOSS community.  As technology literacy of politicians is a huge problem (it is what allowed most discussions around the "paracopyright" part of Canada's Copyright law to sound more like a scene from Harry Potter than actual science and technology), I was so happy to be meeting someone who would understand these issues. When I went to introduce myself, David asked me what I was doing.  Demonstrating what makes him a good politician he explained that he knew me well, and reminded me of the vari...

I spent the morning being reminded of the importance of public service.  I first met Mauril Bélanger  in 1996 the context of  the  Defence Fund for the Montreal Rally  (Rally during the Quebec referendum of 1995), and SOS Montfort . When I moved into his riding in 1997 I  wrote him a letter . This was a point of transition in my life.  I wasn't involved in politics until the early 1990's, and at first all I saw in government was corruption.  I was very much at what I now call my "smash the state" phase where I felt the whole lot of current politicians needed to go.   Mauril was someone who gave me a different impression, of someone who even from within government was visibly trying to do the right thing.  While he knew I didn't vote for him or his party, he still listened to me and offered feedback and help. This continued each time we met, where he was always extremely friendly and gave helpful advise on how to move forward on th...

As a member of the Green Party of Canada, I am being asked by the party about my views on the recent resolution passed in support of the BSD movement. Short answer I do not support  g16-p006 , and believe the resolution should be repealed. I felt embarrassed as a party member to hear that the resolution was tabled and passed. I do not support the motion of the Canadian Parliament  that called upon the government to condemn those who promote the movement, and believe the motion should be repealed.  As a Canadian I felt embarrassed to hear that motion was tabled and passed. I believe Mr. Clement's motion was trolling , and unfortunately some members of the Green Party decided to feed the troll .  This is a no-win scenario for the Green Party and Canadians generally, and the only way to minimize the loss is to exit the conversation quickly. Longer answer Having given my own thinking on these and related topics some thought, I came to realize I am part of the ...

Canadiana is sending me to Access 2016 .  While I expect to learn quite a bit and meet new people, I wanted to make an additional introduction online ahead of time. I have participated in many changes to the technical platform at Canadiana since I started in January 2011.  As always, what I write is my own thoughts and isn't an official statement from my employer. Software platform In early 2011 Canadiana was in transition from an access platform simply called "ECO" for Early Canadiana Online.  This was a mod-perl 1 application that was tightly tied to a legacy version of Apache, was written by an outside consultant, and was in need of upgrading.  I did my best to keep that running as long as possible while keeping our machines secure by having the mod-perl1 application running within a chroot() environment within a newer version of Debian which no longer supported mod-perl1.  This is something we would use linux containers for today, but that wasn't ready in 2...