Soluto... my Windows issues are solved...

I recently installed a free utility called Soluto, and I'm quite honestly stunned by how good it is.  The goal is to speed up boot time, clean up drivers, and diagnose crashes.  It seems to be doing an excellent job on all of these things, but the really incredible part of it is the application's user interface.

It's amazing.

Incredible.

Inspiring.

(Well done, folks!)

Strange but true....

So google has this little microphone that shows up in their search bar.... and I accidentally clicked on it.

When the "Speak Now..." dialog opened up on me, I said "I don't think so", because I don't have a microphone on this computer.

...or at least, I didn't think I had a mic on this machine.....  those google people are scary!

Bye Bye Elections

(This article is part of an ongoing series...)

I think our electoral process is broken.  Elections are held at the whim of a single party, generally at a point in time when they think they will win.  They interrupt the actual business of government, both during the election and for a period before and after it.  And to this writer, the promises made during elections are mostly forgotten once the ballets have been counted.

To fix this "brokenness", I suggest that we get rid of elections.

More specifically, we should replace the "general election" with a regular series of bi-elections.  So instead of electing 308 MP's in a single vote, we would elect one MP each week[1] or perhaps six each month.  Ideally, the elections will be in a reasonably random order, to avoid grouping specific constituencies into a single time period.

So what would this look like in practice?  Heaven knows.  In terms of campaigning, we could think of the parties as never campaigning, or always campaigning.  If the leaders spend too much time campaigning and not enough time governing, then eventually the voters will start voting for other parties.  If the government does a good job, they will see their support rise, and if they abuse their power, then you could expect seats to slip away to the opposition.

The office of the Prime Minister would change under this approach, since they might gain or lose a majority at any time.  In a minority situation, a non-confidence vote would not force an election, since general elections are no longer held.  Instead, the MP's would vote for a new PM, presumably one of the coalition leaders.

Humourous side-note: The title of this piece contains a homonym, and is somewhat of a pun.  I can think of four different interpretations of the phrase "Bye Bye Elections", each of which could have been used here.

[1] There are 308 seats in the House of Commons.  If we elect six ridings every month, then a single riding will hold an election every 51 months.  That is reasonably close to the current standard of four years for an election.

Talkin about a Revolution...

Revolution.  It's a frightening concept, but at the same time it's tremendously exciting.  There's been a lot of revolution in our world this year, and I'd like to think that this is a good thing.

While other people are rising up and over-turning their political systems, I think that there's a need for everyone to give thought to their own government, how it works, and especially, how it doesn't work.  Any human system is a compromise built to meet the needs of its constituents, and once these compromises have been reached, we rarely review them.  And can you blame us?  Redefining a political system is painful and hard.

I think that our system (the Canadian Federal Government) works for the most part, but that it is also somewhat broken.  So I'd like to throw some ideas on the table in order to foster some reflection and discussion.  Over the next couple of weeks I will be publishing some articles/essays on alternative approaches that might improve upon, or at least question the "status quo".

Playoffs: Playing the odds

So my team is out of the playoffs.  Sigh.

This unfortunate turn of events has given me more time to think of other things though, and one of those things was the "fairness" of the playoff system.  In the NHL, sixteen teams compete in four rounds of playoffs, with each round being a best of seven elimination.  All things being equal, every team would have a one in sixteen chance of winning the Stanley Cup... but of course, things are never equal.

But what would happen if one of the teams was, say, twice as good as every other team in the league?[1]  What would their chances be of winning the cup?

Would you believe that they're more likely not to win the cup?

There.  That made me feel better.  (Okay, not really.  Sigh.)

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

[1] It's tricky to define what "twice as good" might mean.  For simplicity, I'll define "twice as good" as being twice as likely to win a single game.

Looking at this year's regular season, the top-ranked team earned 117 points, while the bottom-ranked team earned 62.  If all those games were played against each other, then the top team earned 65% of the points, which is 1.88 times the points earned by the bottom team.  If you only compare teams that made the playoffs, then you're looking at 117 to 93 points, which is only 1.25 times as many.

Mike and Me

A couple of days ago, two students were ejected from a political rally because they had posted a facebook picture of themselves with another candidate.  This is the first election that they can vote in, and they were diligently listening to all sides of the story.  Somehow, the campaign office and/or the police decided that they were too dangerous to be in the same room with the candidate.  Check out the video that somebody nearby recorded (courtesy of CBC.)  Pretty dangerous.

For fun, I thought I might upload an image of myself with Ignatieff, but, unfortunately I've never met the man.  After a little programming, and some image stitching , I had my new facebook profile:



Me and Mike and Awish Aslam.  (Almost!)


If you want your own image, you can stitch one up with "Mike and Me", available from http://sites.google.com/site/mikeignatieffandme/.  The program captures your face from your webcam, and stitches it into the student's face.  Hit the space bar, and your face will switch to the other student.  Pose with a friend, and you'll both be included.

Pose with a friend.

Interested? Read more coverage of the story from the London Free Press, CBC, Vancouver Sun, and the Globe and Mail.

Vanity...

Oh, they're good.  They're very good.

I mean the folks at Google, of course.

I just googled myself.  I'll admit it, I'm no different than anyone else.  But to my surprise, the top four results were actually references to me, and not some decade old obituary from some unfortunate who happens to share my name.  Wow.  Four out of four.  Astonishing.

Then I typed the same search into a "private" browser window, and discovered that to the rest of the world, I only get two of the top ten positions.  Of course, I'm sure that a query from France wouldn't even place me on the first page.

I'll assume that they aren't doing this on purpose.  But if they were, wouldn't it be brilliant?

The "myth" of global warming...

So I'm out on a beautiful winter's morning, shoveling off a light dusting of snow from my driveway, when I hear my neighbours chatting about global warming...

how today's weather completely disproves it...

how it's just not true...

and how much they wish it were true, since warming would be a "good thing".

Sigh.

Thoughts on "Picasso at the Lapin Agile"

Mister Martin, if you please,

I'd like to set things straight.

We really have enjoyed your play

And all agree it's great!

But in amongst the funny bits

Scattered here and there

Are little bits that don't make sense

It really isn't fair!

Like why a roof should disappear,

Could you explain that please?

And how can scratching up a hand

Make girls weak in the knees?

No way can Pablo scratch a sketch

In just five seconds flat

Then sell it off for fifty francs

I'll have none of that.

Eighteen percent of twenty four

Works out to four and a third

With nine and five sixths in two other lots

It's really quite absurd!

A third of a bottle makes no sense

In legend or in myth

If fractional bottles must be used,

At least please make them "fifths"

I'm not going into parentheses here,

But if I did they’d match

Each end must have an open

As any editor should catch

Don't get me wrong here, Stevie-boy

I've loved your play, you see

With a hundred million in the bank,

You must know more than me!

The more I think about it, though

These things start making sense

Of course I could be losing grip

These last few weeks were tense

The joke that opens up act two

(Don't say "godzuntheit", please, )

It's starting to make sense to me

It's really quite a tease….

The man could not afford to send

A pie that was too large

Lower case was needed

To cut down on the charge

Of course he couldn't post it

At the ending of the tale

Cause if the baker sent it

It would have been (wait for it…) e-mail.

In closing, let me set it straight

I have enjoyed this show

Most of all because of all

These friend's I've come to know

Thanks for putting up with me

Missed cues, forgotten lines

But next to me, you must admit,

The rest of you look fine.

Though I've said all I need to say

I'll add one little touch

My favourite line of all the play,

Thank you, Thank you very much

Reflections on Sunsets (December 13, 2009)

I touch your hand for the last time
and feel such a sadness in my heart.
I miss you. I hurt.
I don't want to let you go.

They say it's okay to cry.

And I do. But at the same time, my heart
remembers the joy its always found in your presence.
The stories, the jokes, the laughter.
Shared fears and triumphs, tears and song.
My heart knows love, and knows it is loved....
boundless and timeless, unquestioning and complete
You've shown me a glimpse of the divine.

So I hope it's okay to smile, too.

Thank you for sharing yourself with me,
for teaching me of friendship and faith,
of laughter and sharing,
compassion and trust
in myself and in others.

As I leave you I know that you'll always be with me,
in the wind that wipes my tears,
the sunshine that brightens my way,
the gentle rain that washes me clean,
but most of all in the golden sunsets
that you loved so very much,
reminding me every day of your love.

Critical Miss

[Author's note: A reader asked me to explain this post. I'm amazed to find out that I have readers! But more to the point: this post is about the table top role playing game "Dungeons and Dragons", not about a computer game. If you don't know what D&D or RPG's are, then this one might be confusing. My apologies;)]

So Sarah Darkmagic posted an article called Swing and A Miss, where she's asking DM's and players to comment on "failure stories".

I've always DM'ed with a "house rule" for critical misses. Whenever a player rolls a 1, I ask them to roll a second D20 to see how bad the miss was. Then I arbitrarily choose a reasonable outcome, based entirely on the game context. No random deck for me! The outcomes are worse on low rolls, and sometimes even help the party if the second roll is high.

Most of the time the player will trip, stumble, or lose their balance, and find themselves granting combat advantage, or prone, or maybe just losing any remaining actions in the current turn. Weapons are dropped, axes get lodged into door frames or into opponent's shields, and the player will need to spend an action (perhaps with a skill test) to get it back. Ranged combat is dangerous - usually it ends up with the player rolling again to see if they hit the dwarven defender holding the line... Good thing defenders have armour.

Environmental effects are always fun. Players can slide down a slope, drop into water, or get tangled up in chains or ropes. Fire is also fun - there's nothing like setting fire to the temple you were trying to defend, and then having your group forever remembered for it. Spilling acids on the floor to create a new hazard, setting off traps, stapling the rogue's cloak to the door, or cutting the rope that holds the chandelier. These effects don't usually harm the players directly, but they often add tension and or humour to the combat.

If the second roll is exceptionally high, I have more fun with it. You missed the target, but somehow managed to thwack the invisible gnome that was sneaking up on you. The troll dodged your attack, but tripped backwards over into the well. Your sword is now lodged into the dragon's hide, so if he moves you can hold on and treat it as a grapple.

Rolling a second "1" is a double critical miss, and that's an entirely different story. The table goes quiet and grim faced players slowly turn to find out what has befallen their unfortunate friend. Recently a wizard blasted his familiar (an invisible, telepathic, and extremely moody Drake) who skulked off for several sessions before finally forgiving him. Another player rolled a double critical, and managed to lodge his magic axe into a stone column, and was only able to pry it out after the combat, breaking it in the process. My players felt I was exceptionally harsh on that one, but they didn't know that the party was one room away from an enchanted forge, which allowed the dwarf to repair his weapon.

In the last session we saw a spectacular run of bad luck as the party tried to clear out a cavern full of orcs. A fighter tried to use a chain to sweep some orcs into an underground stream. Critical miss, and he found his arm caught up in the chain. One action would have freed him, but he decided to press on and attack instead. Another critical miss and the chain was wrapped around one of his buddies, who was unimpressed. The orc then scored a critical hit on the buddy, knocking him into the fast flowing river, and after many failed attempts to free themselves, the fighter got dragged into the river as well. As the party rushed to aid the pair, one of the remaining orcs scored a knockout blow against the fighter, leaving him as a dead weight in the water, dragging his buddy downstream. Other party members grabbed on, but nobody could slow the progress (how many times can a party roll without scoring a "5" or better???) and slowly the human chain was dragged into the river.

The last free moving character was the familiar-less wizard. He finished off most of the orcs, and was facing the last surviving orc who was at this point down to one hit point (our group calls these "born again minions"). The orc wisely chose to drop his spear and fall on his knees in surrender, allowing the wizard to grab onto the last player in the chain. Although he failed the roll to pull the group out, he did provide enough ballast to stop them.

The party heaved a sigh of relief, thanking their lucky stars. Then the wizard heard the orc walk up behind him, and very gently push him in.

Classic.

(Did I mention that sound of a thundering waterfall that the party had heard from up ahead?)

I blinked...

Wow, I feel like a hostage must feel. Through administrative confusion, our corporate account at a certain web service got frozen out today. I'm not going to name the service provider, because then it might sound like I'm whining. I don't want to do that. So we'll just leave the details blurry, if that's all right with you.

So our company has been using this service for some time now, and it's been very effective at helping our dispersed team collaborate. The service has also accumulated a lot of our corporate knowledge in its logs and transcripts. When our account was frozen, we could no longer use the service, which is quite understandable... you don't pay, you can't play. What surprised me though is how there was absolutely no way to get back any of the data that the service had accumulated. At least, not without paying to thaw our account.

I always thought that you should just shoot the hostage taker, and live with the consequences. Negotiating with terrorists and all that. But when I was the one feeling the gun to my head, my perspective changed dramatically.

And I blinked.

I paid up the ransom, and now we have our data back.

But I swear, I'll never do that to any of my customers.

Old friends...

Ran across Chaos Manor Reviews earlier today. Jerry Pournelle was one of my favourite authors in my youth, and I always enjoyed reading his technology commentary in BYTE. His writing is wonderful - good storytelling combined with solid science (even when the science is science fiction;) Even so, it's been years since I've read anything from him - I guess I lost track of him in the bustle of my life, and the tidal wave of content that makes up modern life.

So I dove into his writing again - his post on the iPad is engaging, thoughtful, and (most importantly) speaks to my point of view on the technology. (To wit, that the iPad is a great consumer device, but not a "producer" device. But that's not the point of this posting.)

What a treat... it's kind of like bumping into an old friend you weren't expecting to see. Thanks, Jerry.

But you're not saying anything either...

Seth Godin wrote a nice piece on boilerplate/meaningless text. The example he gave was

The firm will remain competitive in the constantly changing market for defense legal services by creating and implementing innovative and effective methods of providing cost-effective, quality representation and services for our clients.

Like any qualified geek, the first thing I did was to load the text into Google to see where it had come from. Funny thing is... I found two different law firms using it. What are the odds?

Windows Media Center refuses to start

I'm having some problems getting Windows Media Center to start on my machine. Whenever I click on it, it complains that "Windows Media Center has been closed because it does not support running in portrait mode. You must restore landscape mode in order to use Windows Media Center."

The funny thing is that on this machine, one of my two monitors is in landscape mode. WMC should just use that one... but it doesn't.

Two obvious solutions:
1) Ditch the second monitor, or disable it, or switch it to landscape mode when running WMC. These options are not that great.

2) The geek way is to tweak the registry;) By deleting the "monitor" value from "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Settings\MCE.PerUserSettings" I can force WMC to start on my primary (landscape) monitor. If you don't know how to use regedit, there are lots of tutorials available.

Troubles with ISO Recorder v3

Executive summary:
ISO Recorder v3 captures ISO images into "C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Windows\System32\".

I've used ISO Recorder v3 for some time now to burn iso files onto CD's and DVD's. It's simple, fast, and free, and I've been a very happy user.

Today I needed to make four copies of a DVD - videos and photos captured from my family's recent holiday, and I decided to use ISO Recorder. Right-click on the DVD, choose "Create image from CD", and name the file to copy to. Simple.

Of course, once it was finished, I then wanted to burn that .iso to my DVD. The only problem was.... I couldn't find it. Desktop? User directory? Application directory? Um, Temp directory? Nada. I tried to capture a second copy of the ISO into a well known location (root of my C: drive, perhaps), but found that the user interface didn't let me specify a location for the file - just a name.

After a 15 minute (automated) search, the file turned up in "C:\Users\egirard\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Windows\System32\Cottage2009.iso" - and once I found it I was able to easily burn my copies. I'm using Vista, and I expect that other operating systems (XP, etc) would find the file in "C:\Windows\System32". So for anyone else out there whe can't find their ISO, hope this helps you.

And by the way, I'm still a happy ISO Recorder v3 user.

Tapping Maples

I tapped a maple tree yesterday, after finding a tap in a Montreal restaurant, and a little bit of web research. So many questions - is it too late to tap, is it actually a sugar maple, will tapping hurt the tree, and will local teens vandalize the equipment? I felt ever so foolish drilling into the tree (3/8" drill, two inches deep, pointing slightly upwards at about waist level), hammering the tap into the hole (firm strokes are required - don't worry, the tree can handle more than you can dish out), and hanging my home-made pail (a two litre pop bottle with a hole cut at the top - slides right over the tap with no need for a lid). But it was all worthwhile when the sap started flowing.

Managed to collect about about two litres of sap on that first day.

Sweet.

Programming an ExpressVu 3100 to talk to a Sony VCR

I'm trying to teach my ExpressVu 3100 Satellite Receiver to talk to my Sony VCR, so the receiver can tell the VCR to record shows for me.

The documentation and the online help tell you to first program your remote to work with your VCR, by trying a number of code numbers, and then to use that same code to program the receiver. For my Sony VCR, the list was 500, 501, 502, 503, 504, and 629. Not surprisingly, it was the last one that worked.

Didn't work for the receiver though. Ran the test a bunch of times, moving the VCR around, just in case something was blocking the IR signal. No dice.

Finally I give up, and contact a helpful Bell technician (Claude) through chat support. It turns out the receiver might use a different code than the remote. Exactly the opposite of what it says in the manual. In my case, 500 worked just fine in the receiver.

Thank god for smart technicians.

Connecting svn checkins to Campfire (under Windows)

We use campfire for office communications, and wanted hear from subversion (our source control repository) whenever a checkin happens. There's a great article by David Naffis at Intridea describing just how to do this, but unfortunately their solution is aimed at linux.

To get the same magic to happen on Windows:

1. Install ruby if you don't already have it. Instant Rails is a fairly easy install.
   (i) Download version 2.0, or look here for the latest build.
   (ii) Unzip that download wherever you want it to live - I chose C:\InstantRails-2.0-win because that was the default name. (Note that Instant Rails doesn't like spaces in their file names.)
   (iii) After you download it, run InstantRails.exe from the root of the package. (On my system, this was C:\InstantRails-2.0-win\InstantRails.exe.) This configures all of the instant rails package, including some stuff we don't need, like apache and mysql.
   
   
2. Install Tinder.
   (i) I downloaded tinder-1.2.0.gem from rubyforge - check for a more recent version here. I copied the gem file into C:\InstantRails-2.0-win
   (ii) Open up a command prompt. (Start|Run|cmd)
   (iii) Switch to the InstantRails directory. (CD C:\InstantRails-2.0-win)
   (iv) Run "use-ruby.cmd". This will add ruby to your path.
   (v) Run "gem install tinder-1.2.0.gem". This will take a little while.
   
   
3. Create svn-campfire.rb as described in Intridea's post. I copied their text into C:\InstantRails-2.0-win\svn-campfire.rb, and then I removed their code at line 17 which read:
   project = ARGV[0].gsub("/home/user/svn/", '')
   and replaced it with
   project = '/svnrepos'
   This could also have been "project=ARGV[0]".
   I also replaced the login info with a local account and password, and replaced line 7 which read:
   campfire = Tinder::Campfire.new 'campfiresubdomain'
   with
   campfire = Tinder::Campfire.new( 'campfiresubdomain', :ssl => true)
   
   
4. I tested svn-campfire.rb by running
   C:\InstantRails-2.0-win\ruby\bin\ruby C:\InstantRails-2.0-win\svn-campfire.rb /svnrepos 1000
   (Where svnrepos is the name we use for our svn repository, and 1000 was a random checkin number.) There may be some debugging required here - especially if you mess up the login information in the svn-campfire.sb. Have fun!
   
   
5. I then added
   C:\InstantRails-2.0-win\ruby\bin\ruby C:\InstantRails-2.0-win\svn-campfire.rb "%0" "%1"
   to the post-commit.bat file in C:\svnrepos\hooks\post-commit.bat. (Your batch file will probably be found elsewhere, so figure it out;) If you don't have a post-commit.bat file, then you will create one. (Note that the %0, %1 parameters are different here than on linux, which would use $0, $1.)
   

And that's all it took.

(In this author's opinion, this installation process is a nightmare, and should be easier. But on the plus side, at least you can do it. Thanks for the helpful article, David)

Fresh, not frozen.

Wow.

I just read a posting by Raymond Chen in "The Old New Thing", where he describes his writing process. Apparently he writes articles ahead of time, and publishes about one article per day. The article in question was written a year ago, and the current backlog of articles stretches out to June 2010.

Is he just kidding?

Somehow I thought blogging was about topics that were current. Maybe even "topical".

Well, I guess his tag line makes even more sense now. As for me, I don't feel quite as compelled to follow his writing. Strange how perception makes the product....