rwmtest

My wife and I went on a vacation to London, leaving Ottawa on July 18th, and returning August 1'st. While we did the traditional tourist things, this is not what has been stuck in my mind since. I was a Copyfighter in London, so of course I sent an email to Cory Doctorow to see if we could meet in person. We met on the 26'th at Shoreditch House , his club. Among other things he handed me a discussion draft of his latest young adult book: Pirate Cinema (Third manuscript printing from May 18, 2011). From the beginning there was a familiarity that I loved from when I read Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town . Someone was set in Toronto, and had fictional characters doing things which were part fiction, part science, that made the line between what was real, what could be real, and what was pure fantasy sometimes a bit of a blur. Pirate Cinema is set in London, surrounding many of the places I had been which made reading it feel like an extension of my vacation. It w...

I attended my first PAB last weekend. Even though it is in Ottawa, I hadn't heard of it until the folks at DyscultureD started to mention it. My initial thought was to crash the party a bit to meet with them while they were in Ottawa, but after looking at the schedule I decided to sign up and attend everything. It also turns out in hindsight that people wouldn't have been happy if I had crashed. I'm not a PODcaster, and that is beyond the fact I think the term is too closely associated with my political opponents at Apple. This is an artist conference, and I'm not really an artist: I've been invited on Netcasts, I take pictures (moving and still), record audio, and I blog (really?), but I do it primarily as a form of political expression rather than artistic expression. I have attended a number of conferences in the last decade that were artist focused, and have learned quite a bit which is helpful in understanding how others see the area of policy and p...

There is an election coming up in Ontario on October 6, 2011 . In the last Ontario election I voted for Dalton McGuinty. I like his brother David, and I thought : why not. This election the issue that is most on my mind for provincial politics is the HST. I think it is wrong to have added tax to labour in the form of adding HST to services which previously only had GST and not PST. There are many reasons, some simply relating to job creation and others relating to sustainability, why a tax shift from labour onto other resources such as energy is appropriate. I have been a long-time supporter of the Green Tax Shift, before there was a Canadian political party that also supported it (Greens, and temporarily the federal Liberals). An increase in the cost of services means that purchasing products that may replace services (replace rather than repair, etc) becomes comparatively cheaper, a policy that heads us in exactly the opposite direction to what we should be doing if we had any th...

I'm wanting to write a tool that looks at some pipermail archives and creates a MessageID to URL table. If I run `strings /var/lib/mailman/archives/public/discuss/database/2011-March-article` I can see that the information that I want is in these database files. If I look at /usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/Archiver/pipermail.py it looks like this is a baddb formatted file. If I try to write a python script to read these files, all I get is: bsddb._db.DBInvalidArgError: (22, 'Invalid argument -- /var/lib/mailman/archives/public/discuss/database/2011-March-article: unexpected file type or format') Anyone have any ideas? I'm not a Python programmer, so it is quite possible that I'm just not understanding how to do things in Python. Any suggestions greatly appreciated. Note: This is python-2.4.3-27.el5_5.3 , on a CentOS 5.5 machine. I'm running the following script on the same machine that is writing the files, so there won't be a version mismatch. #!/usr/bin/pyth...

I sent the following as a letter to my federal member of parliament, David McGuinty. I suspect it would be useful for others to send similar letters to their MP if this issue disturbs them as well. Mr McGuinty, MP for my riding of Ottawa South, I wanted to make sure you are aware of a citizen from the security/hacker community I am part of that is still in prison from before the G20 summit. There is an audio story about the issue: http://www.tvo.org/cfmx/tvoorg/searchengine/index.cfm?page_id=613&action=blog&subaction=viewPost&post_id=13995&blog_id=485 "The strange, suppressed story of Byron Sonne, the G-20 security hacker who has been held, unconvicted, for 6 months and counting. An interview with technology journalist Jesse Hirsh." I find this very disturbing. There is a media ban on talking about the issue, with this being a case of a security person investigating the security measures being set up for the G20. In our community, security research...

I just received a call from someone looking for support for OpenOffice in the Ottawa area. They did a search, and my company came up. While I would have had better answers for them in the past, I realize that with all the changes initiated this year that I am not as up to speed on the current situation as I once was. I'm offering what I know, in the hopes that other people will add comments. In the past the lead developer and primary copyright holder for OpenOffice.org was Sun. Sun was sold to Oracle in April 2009, and the relationship between Oracle and the various Open Source communities that Sun had participated in have been very strained. In the case of the OpenOffice.org project, the lead developers within and outside of what was previously Sun have largely left to create the The Document Foundation , which produces a community driven derivative of OpenOffice.org called LibreOffice. The second largest participant in OpenOffice.org was Novell, which was acquired by Attach...

As someone who disagrees with the HST I have been receiving notices from the Ontario NDP and the federal NDP about their disagreements with the HST. As is often the case, just because someone disagrees with something doesn't mean they disagree for a compatible reason. Why I disagree with the HST I consider the HST to be a tax shift from products onto services. Services were previously taxed with the GST, but not PST, and thus services only had the 5% GST applied. Now in Ontario services have to charge 13% (an increase of the 8% from Ontario). This will mean that products will seem comparatively less expensive than services in those scenarios where one is competing with each other, such as repair/reuse compared to replacement of damaged goods. This will have a net negative impact on our environment. This is in my mind the opposite of a Green Tax Shift type of initiative which would tend to be removing taxes from services and placing them onto products. If the HST were to be rem...