back to blogger...

martyloo is back on blogger... Martyloo doesn't want to pay for web hosting and thanks to very handy software, moving back was a breeze. This not a very interesting post, but I thought I'd mention it for anyone who is trying to write a Wordpress to Blogger migration script. Unfortunately, migrating comments didn't work very well (at all?) I might dig into this and figure it out if I have time. For the few for whom comments have been unceremoniously deleted, I apologize. I'm on blogger for good (as long as it remains free).

movember

Movember, a fundraiser to fight prostate cancer. I'm participating this year and have been faithfully growing what I can since November 1st. I didn't think it would be worth it to put up my pic here, but I've raised $90 already. Please propel me over the edge to get a free Gala Parté ticket. This is a serious charity with a funny face.

the best show... ever?

I've watched the first season of Mad Men. I think it's better than Six Feet Under. It's better than The Sopranos. Maybe.

more democracy

I don't know how peeps can justify staying with the First-Past-The-Post system we currently "enjoy" in Ontario. With that in mind, the upcoming referendum is much more important than the actual election. We need more democracy before we start forgetting what it really is.

I attended the Great Referendum Debate last week, held at the great MaRS facility, and Christina Blizzard from the Sun was embarrassed by Andrew Coyne. The quality of her arguments was woeful, and to makes things worse, she was offended on a personal level when the audience laughed. Repeatedly, she was dared to suggest that the current system always ended up reflecting the will of the people. Even if this claim had a modicum of truth, there wouldn't be any way to prove it. (We vote for a reason.) At one point she used the sports metaphor of winner-takes-all: if the Leafs and the Canadiens faced off in the Stanley Cup Playoffs, and Montreal won 7-6, the winner is still Montreal and it doesn't matter how close the Leafs were. No one responded to this idiocy, but it was an opportunity missed: the winning team, freshly victorious, would not have the match score adjusted to 9-1 after being crowned champions. She partially made up for herself when she blasted Marilyn Churley for reducing MMP to a kind of affirmative action plan for female politicians.

As for Andrew Coyne, mad props.

wise lessons learned from software development

Greg Wilson, from the University of Toronto, compiled the following list of maxims accumulated from years of experience writing software. I recently found them stuffed in the confines of my archive folders and I thought I'd post them here. Just so I don't get accused of plagiarism or some other IP violation, I emphasize that this is his compilation, not mine.  When I was still in school (years ago), I remember him going over the fine points of some of these ideas. What he had to say was very enlightening: he was the first professor that stressed to me the importance of the more practical aspects of software development. The following is worth more than any clever algorithm or mathematical technique. I include them here because they apply to more than just software development. Also, you may find yourself editing some code at some point in your life.  (Did you ever think you would need to use Excel? Look where you are now.)

• A week of hard work can sometimes save you an hour of thought.


• Anything worth repeating is worth automating.


• Anything repeated in two or more places will eventually be wrong in at least one.


• The three chief virtues of a programmer are laziness, impatience, and hubris.


• It's not what you know, it's what you can.


• The deadline isn't when you're supposed to finish; the deadline is when it starts to be late.


• Never debug standing up.


• Tools are signposts, not destinations.


• Not everything worth doing is worth doing well.


• Code unto others as you would have others code unto you.


• Every complex file format eventually turns into a badly-designed programming language.


• Tools are amplifiers: they allow good programmers to be better, and bad ones to be worse.


• They call it computer science because it's experimental.


• Programs come and go; data is forever.


• There's no such thing as one program.


• Discipline matters more than genius; reality matters more than rulebooks.

Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens is the modern day Voltaire.  Check him out.

Avi Lewis: ass

I can't believe Avi Lewis is taken seriously. Here he makes a fool of himself interviewing Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Face it, Avi, you're simply ... out in left field: Islamists are a bigger problem than America. And if you take your head out of your ass, you'll realise that America is not what is wrong with the world.

liberals, pork

Liberals eat more pork than Convervatives and NDPers, apparently.  Interesting, the article shies away from the party members' religious affiliations or lifestyle choices.  Maybe those weren't deemed to be statistically significant.  Are the number of vegetarians who are on the left, and the number of orthodox Jews and devout Muslims on the right not a factor?  I ask the question.

Iraq wins Asian Cup

Sectarian violence in Iraq is not inevitable: the Iraqi national soccer team won the Asian Cup this weekend. The team is composed of Shias, Sunnis, Arabs and Kurds. Under Saddam's rule, this team would have been tortured by Saddam Hussein's son Uday should they have produced unsatisfactory performances. There is no way the team would have competed successfully under Saddam's rule. Now, when Iraq is one of the most unstable nations in the world, they won it all. FIFA President Sepp Blatter praised the players on Saturday.

perspective, scale

This is a cool, nerdy and old video. I'm the only nerd who had not seen it until now.

quality goods

I don't want to pick on Chinese companies exclusively, but this post makes me worried.  Sane, accountable, transparent and enforced government regulations save lives: this doesn't seem to be working in China right now.

death of a blog....

... birth of another. I've had the domain for a while now and, being the stubborn, dogmatic person I am, refused to look at canned solutions for blog/CMS/publishing software. I thought I'd design and implement my own to be able to cut my teeth on the latest and greatest web technologies. Well, after reading up on the latest web programming frameworks, i.e. waffling, I've finally uploaded Wordpress. It took me literally 15 minutes to figure out how it works, install it and import all my blogger posts.

creepy

This creeps me out. I don't want to be uncritically anti-Chinese products, but there's some serious accountability problems going on over there. Needless to say, I don't think it's just Chinese products that we need to worry about. I don't drink water from local streams, so I guess I should be skeptical about ALL products. Thanks to this article, I am now paranoid.

e-waste

Today, I think one of the grossest environmental problems is the amount of electronic gadgets we dump into landfills. That stuff is nasty: electronics are full of lead, mercury and other toxic substances. This week's Technology Quarterly in the Globe (how boring am I) is all about the "greening" of the information technology industry. Very substantially, the issue largely avoids the oh so tired flower-power politics of the environment and instead focuses on health, energy saving and the financial benefits of going green.

Anyway, if you're looking to get rid of e-quipment without poisoning land and water for future generations here are some urls for recycling your computer.

www.hp.ca/recycle
www.dell.com/assetrecovery
www.apple.com/environment
www.rebootcanada.ca
www.littlegeeks.org

martyloo

The martyloo.com domain was silently dropped from blogger.com 2 minutes ago (intentionally) and will be used for other purposes... This blog is simply reverting back to http://martyloo.blogspot.com. If you didn't even know I was in possession of martyloo.com, don't worry about it.

fat idiot

It's amazing how some people are taken seriously despite being complete morons: people like Moqtada "Eric Cartman of Iraq" Sadr do not give me hope for peace in the middle east.

kids and guns

Laugh before you cry:
Never mind the gun: it should be a crime to name your kid Bubba.

NYC

I went to New York City last weekend with Lemon. We had a blast. The weather was beautiful, we saw an excellent play (Talk Radio), we went to the Museum of Natural History. We also went to the Museaum of the City of New York where we saw an exhibit on Robert Moses, and another on the Spanish civil war. We walked around a lot: Central Park, Tribeca, the lower east side, the upper west side, Little Italy, Chinatown. We saw a public debate at the New York Public Library between Al Sharpton and Christopher Hitchens. The topic was "God Is Not Great", the title of Hitchens' new book. Sharpton was lame while Hitchens was his usual sarcastic and contrarian self... We did a harbour tour, passed by Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. We also watched HBO live, went to a comedy club, had a few drinks, and I met some co-workers I'd only called, e-mailed or IM'ed.

élections présidentielles

Participation has reached exceptional levels: French peeps are voting en masse for the presidential elections.

Yesterday, I cast my vote and the lineup was insane. I waited an hour and a half to vote. A lady ahead of me in line had her 2 kids with her. This was not a walk in the park: the 4 year old was getting cranky and she breastfed the 6 month old on site in order not lose her spot. That's patriotism.

not the brightest solution

When Lemon pointed out to me that Ontario was banning incandescent light bulbs, I was wondering what our provincial government was smoking. I thought the city's "upgrade your toilet" campaign was weird, but it was voluntary and sort of made sense.

I think I know why this bulb thing is going down.

It has become impossible for politicians to even suggest that electricity should stop being subsidized at current levels. Everyone knows that we're all paying substantially less for electricity than what it really costs: why would we change our consumption habits or buy new technology to limit it? This, despite the August 2003 blackout.

Faced with a difficult political dilemma, what does our government do? Brainwash us and outlaw perfectly good technology. This is completely backwards and idiotic. What they should do is make people pay more for what they use, and let economizing technologies take hold. No brainwashing, no guilt trips, no wasted advertising money.