Let's Call it Bob

Well that's an anachronism, and no mistake

2009-11-19T23:04:00.002-04:00

I'm installing the beta of Office 2010 (solves my problem of not being able to get a decent, gratis office suite, at least until November of next year). Check out the icon for the installer though - anachronistic in so many ways ... 16 bit colour, CRT monitor, boxed software, floppy disks (I mean, c'mon, FLOPPY DISKS?). I know its a standard, long running installer icon, but you'd think they could have found a more modern one. Just saying.

Little annoyances in Java

2009-11-19T11:57:00.003-04:00

I have a couple proposals for some syntactic sugar in Java, that fix a bunch of minor annoyances.

Make Map iterable.
That is, Map<K,V> should extend Iterable<Map.Entry<K,V>>, such that Map.iterator() behaves exactly like Map.entrySet().iterator() - it would save the extra ".entrySet()" in all those for-each loops, as well as making it easier to switch data structures from a List or Set to a Map.

Speaking of for-each loops, they should check for null in their iterable part. It lets you replace this code:
Iterable<E> collection = methodThatMayReturnNull(); if (collection != null) { for (E element : collection) { //do stuff ... } }
with this, which seems to be sensible and much cleaner:
for (E element : methodThatMayReturnNull()) { //do stuff ... }

Because that makes everything better ...

2009-07-25T21:10:00.002-03:00

A snippet from an article on browser market share:

Microsoft’s [share of the browser market] has continued to decline, to 66 percent from 72, though it argues that most of that loss has been on computers that don’t readily support Internet Explorer, like those from Apple

So a 6% market loss for IE isn't that bad, because most of that comes from computers that don't run IE (or, put another way, computers that don't run Microsoft Windows). I'm sure they're thrilled with that excuse.

Google Chrome "OS"

2009-07-08T10:00:00.003-03:00

Well, Google is coming out with another operating system. I don't think Microsoft should be worried quite yet though. Basically, as I read it, their new OS is basically just Chrome dropped on top of a minimal Linux kernel, optimized for quick boot times. All the "programs" will run off the web. Its actually not a terrible idea, but it will be fairly limited in terms of functionality - effectively a thin client for webapps. I can see it taking off on netbooks, but not much else. If you're someone with multiple computers, it might work for you - Google's services for email, feed reading, etc. may not have as many features as desktop clients, but the ability to have them automatically set up, synchronized, and available from any computer with a web connection is a major win. There are plenty of games online, and a few decent web clients for instant messaging. About the only type of program I can't see this really replacing is a media jukebox. There's always YouTube, and plenty of music streaming sites (even legit ones), but, to as best as I can understand Chrome OS from the limited information available, won't likely be able to take advantage of anything (like music) stored on a local hard drive - in fact, Chrome OS systems likely won't have a local hard drive beyond a small, fast SSD for the system files and browser temporary files - I think we'll see some thin, light netbooks, with ridiculously long battery life, but the trade off will be that all their applications will depend on a web connection - they'll be "thin clients", in multiple senses of the phrase (I think I'll call them "webbooks" - lets see if it catches on). Very interesting.

Neo-neoism

2009-05-30T00:16:00.002-03:00

I've noticed something - the prefix "neo-" (meaning "new") is often added to political/sociological views with a pejorative connotation ("neo-conservative" would be the canonical example of this phenomenon, but I'm sure you could think of others). Whatever happened to the Matrix, where Neo was wicked cool? I'm declaring myself a neo-neoist ("one dedicated to putting a positive connotation on the prefix 'neo-'"). I've done a Google search, and there's some guy with a blog called "neoneoism", but I don't think the name is otherwise taken. Due to this, I've declared myself Grand Oracle of neo-neoism, and am accepting applications for lackeys.

Ok folks, show's over - that's my random wackiness for tonight. Peace.

A new model for browser extensions

2009-05-22T00:08:00.003-03:00

I'll open with my standard disclaimer: I haven't investigated this in any detail, nor do I have any experience developing browser extensions. That said, this is a blog - rampant, uneducated speculation is my speciality.

Mozilla is releasing a new extensions framework named "Jetpack". The main feature of this API is that installing an extension would not require a browser restart. Now, its still in early beta, and the security framework hasn't been completed yet, but, if I may speculate, this may be a useful model for browser extensions. The main thing that catches my attention is that this appears to be an API of some sort - if I understand the current extensions model correctly, they basically work as patches to the browser, re-writing chunks of its code. (The last sentence implies that Jetpack will deprecate the current extensions model - as well as I can tell, that is not the case.) Now, back to this being an API - instant install/uninstall (I assume) is nice - a good security model is a must have - but, beyond that, I could see other browsers implementing Jetpack. Firefox is great, and I love its customization options, fair desktop integration, and good rendering - but it is a bit heavyweight - some of the webkit browsers coming up show promise, but the customization is a bit lacking - this could be a useful common ground. Just saying.

I am not a beta tester

2009-05-17T22:15:00.003-03:00

Operating system stats: Windows 7: 0.41% market share, Linux: 1% market share. Win 7 isn't even gold master yet. (Windows 2000 has 1.2% - its coming up on a decade old ...) This is not the year of the Linux desktop. Nor is that year in the foreseeable future. Sorry, Linux fans, y'all come back now.

Opinion: yes. Knowledge: no. Ahh, the blogosphere!

2009-05-16T12:15:00.002-03:00

So, as the title suggests, I know nothing about royal protocol, or naming horses. Still, reading this article that talked about the Queen being given a horse renamed George (after her grandfather), it occured to me that I would likely be slightly insulted if someone gave me an animal named after a member of my family. Just saying.

Coppertop

2009-05-15T23:39:00.002-03:00

Here's the final sentence of an article about the recent Google failure:

I can only hope that Google, Amazon, and others notice what a difference it can make to treat their valued customers like valued customers -- and, little by little, move toward becoming even more open and honest with us all in the future.

One minor nit - we are not Google's customers. We are Google's product - its customers are advertisers (They pay Google's bills, we don't).

Let's Call it Bob Launches PC World Killer

2009-04-30T15:52:00.002-03:00

One of my pet peeves is new product X is announced in a category where product Y is predominant, and the headline reads "Y killer X announced". (PC World is especially bad for this.) Thing is, X rarely ever kills Y - no matter how much endless hype it gets. Sometimes X isn't even meant to kill Y - they're designed to solve different problems, and fill different niches (The columnists hyping X are always disappointed later when it doesn't kill Y like they said it would - obviously they know better than X's makers what it was supposed to become). To anyone who disagrees with me here, please announce Let's Call it Bob as a Z killer in whatever medium you have access to, where Z is your favourite website - obviously, because its on the Internet, and has content, it can replace any news or opinion site, and the availability of comments makes it capable of killing any social networking site.

Thank you very much for reading tonight - we now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

Apparently I'm blogging again ...

2009-04-20T20:40:00.003-03:00

One more thing - a couple excerpts from a CBC news bulletin about a family who lost their house because their barbecue blew up:

The family had been cooking steaks on an outdoor barbecue and they were inside when it exploded.
Doug Hamer, the Riverview Fire Rescue chief, said the family members escaped, but didn't even have time to get their shoes on.

"The whole second floor is burned off it. There's fire damage on every floor of the house," Hamer said.

...

The Riverview firefighter said it was a good thing the family was inside when the explosion happened.

Later in the article:

"And any items like that shouldn't be left unattended. It's not a good habit to put your cookables on and walk away."

I see the general case there, but wouldn't someone be dead if they'd been standing beside that barbecue when it blew up? (Ok, Ok, the reports from the neighbours said there was a fog (I'd assume propane) that formed around the BBQ beforehand, but if that hadn't been noticed, or just mistaken for more smoke?)

Ham Radio Will Never Die

2009-04-20T20:07:00.004-03:00

I am not a ham radio operator. I have never seen one outside of movies. I would not know what to do with one if it was handed to me. But ham radio will never die. If I remember rightly, it played a big role in Katrina cleanup, and just today I saw this story, about the recent cable cuts and subsequent Internet outage in LA:

Even worse, the vandalism affected the local police, fire, and ambulance services, as well as making it virtually impossible for tens of thousands of people to call these services in case of an emergency. (Local ham-radio operators jumped into action, fortunately, becoming a key communications medium between first-responder services and setting up way stations at strategic locations for people who might be experiencing an emergency.)

Computer tech is too complicated - it depends on too many things - even I, a half-trained computer scientist, would be basically useless if forced to try and get something working on 40-year-old computer systems - I just don't know how things work at the low level (that to be rectified somewhat in this summer's classes). Internet, take this as your warning.

How to solve AI: Hire 10,000 spammers to do it for you

2009-04-20T18:56:00.003-03:00

I laughed out loud when I saw this article - its a brilliant idea. CAPTCHAs (the funky distorted text that proves you're human to various websites) have made spammers highly motivated to solve optical character recognition (OCR) problems - there's apparently a $500,000 prize to break the latest state of the art. And, if that Artificial Intelligence problem is broken, well, there are plenty of other ones to solve - anything that a human can do that a computer can't is both a good basis for next-gen CAPTCHAs (using images, maybe), and an unsolved AI problem.

That line in the sand

2009-04-19T21:56:00.003-03:00

Chris Walley, over at News from Farholme (check out his Lamb Among the Stars series as well - its pretty awesome) just put up a post about how, in many areas of life, we draw a line in the sand, and keep thinking everything is ok, as long as that line isn't crossed, and we live with our heads in the sand sometimes (yes, I know, that's one sand metaphor too many - Dr. Walley is a professional author, I am not). Here's an excerpt:

In a complex world it is easy over issues of concern to mark a line in the sand at some particular point. You turn your attention elsewhere, constantly glancing back at your line in the sand and, as long as it remains untouched, you conclude that all is well. So, for example, I consider that everything is all right as long as I can walk down to the city centre in daylight without being mugged. There are many such benchmarks in society and in our lives. Indeed I suspect almost all our public and private morality is composed of a series of such benchmarks.

Linux Foundation Attempts to Displace FAT

2009-04-01T20:00:00.002-03:00

An interesting idea - that won't work. The Linux Foundation wants the industry to move to an open format for storage devices, rather than Microsoft's proprietary (and outdated) FAT. Which would work great - if Windows didn't run on ~95% of consumer desktops. You need Microsoft on board to switch USB drives, etc., off FAT. Microsoft earns royalty money off of FAT, and can use it as a lever to get smaller companies to pay them. Microsoft thus has no incentive to support anything but their own proprietary file systems in the Windows client. It'd be nice, but it won't happen - you give an 800lb gorilla whatever it wants, and Microsoft is definitely an 800lb gorilla.

Ban Bloated Browser Bobbles

2009-03-17T22:20:00.008-03:00

My first rule for computer user interfaces is "All the data and controls I want should be immediately available - nothing else should be taking up space". Its corollary is "Screen real-estate is the most valuable commodity on a computer - there will be more of everything else next year". With those principles in mind, I recently set out to trim the fat from my Firefox 3 UI, and found some pretty decent extensions, hacks, and tweaks.

Ditch the Search Box:
I know, this sounds crazy, right - isn't the search box one of the most useful parts of Firefox? It is, but I can do you one better. Google Chrome, and the Linux-based browsers Epiphany and Konqueror have the capability to assign a search engine a keyword ("g" for Google, for instance), so that you can type, say "g Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog" into the address bar, and it will search Google for "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog". Little-known fact: Firefox does this too - just right-click on any search box and choose "Add a keyword for this search ..." in the pop-up menu - do this for every search in your search box, and you don't need the search box anymore, you can just use the address bar.

Ditch the Menu Bar:
Tell me, how often do you actually use any of the menus in Firefox? The awesome bar has replaced even bookmarks for me. So, to get rid of my space-hogging menu bar, and condense it to a nice tidy dropdown icon, I installed the Personal Menu extension - its dead useful, and, if you do happen to use the Bookmarks or History menus, you can give them their own separate icons. (You can also move your remaining buttons and controls up to the menu bar from the nav toolbar, to save more screen space)

Get rid of Disabled Buttons:
This one is a bit trickier, but will save even more space. Isn't it annoying to have a greyed-out buttons sitting in your nav bar? Well, you can tweak the userChrome.css file in the chrome/ subfolder of your Firefox profile folder (instructions to find it here) - adding the following lines will remove the forward, reload, and stop buttons when they wouldn't do anything anyway:
#forward-button[disabled="true"] { display: none !important;} #stop-button[disabled="true"] { display:none !important; } #reload-button[disabled="true"] { display:none !important; }
If you're like me, and never use the forward button anyway (the drop-down menu will replicate its function any time you'd want it), the following line will remove it all the time: #forward-button { display: none !important;}

Just restart Firefox, and the userChrome.css tweaks will be put into effect (and I have no idea how removing the forward button will look on Windows or Mac - it looks fine on Linux, just switch operating systems (or I suppose you could find a new theme ...))

Well, that's my bag of tricks for today - anything I missed? (Also, I have Firefox set to automatically re-open my tabs from last time on launch, but, on the rare occasions when I use a homepage, does anyone know a good extension to get one like Google Chrome?)

Cool ... wait a second ... ?!?

2009-03-13T22:11:00.004-03:00

I just finished a good book - it has a neat view of what the world could be like in 30 years. I might have blogged about it before (my Google-fu says nay), but its a really well worth reading - there are some interesting, plausible ideas about the future of society, the environment, and the net. Then I got to the end of the book, where the author is writing his notes about writing a 50-year forward projection, and talking about the end of the Cold War as a current event ... wait a second. A check of the front cover reveals that it was published in 1990 - that's right - we're nearly halfway into the future depicted there, and its still a reasonable idea of what the future will look like. I would definitely recommend reading it if you get the chance - available on Amazon or possibly your local public library (they're wonderful places, incidentally - they even have music and movies nowadays).

And did you really think I'd reccommend a book without mentioning the title or author? Earth, by David Brin, is what you're looking for.

Ramen-men from outer space

2009-02-22T20:58:00.003-04:00

I just had an idea for a B-grade (C-grade ?) sci-fi movie - Hungry giant space aliens want to cook some ramen noodles, using Earth's oceans as their boiling pot. Now back to your regularly scheduled programing - Peace.

Now THAT'S Power

2009-02-19T19:28:00.002-04:00

President Obama changed rush hour.

Admittedly, only for one day, but still, that's something. He was in Ottawa today, and his motorcade was driving from the Ottawa airport up to Parliament - a route that more or less bisects the city. This wasn't a major inconvenience this morning (I think) as most of the road closures were effected after the morning rush hour. But, his return trip (around 4 in the afternoon, I think), changed traffic. With the city more or less carved in two, everyone was leaving work early (myself included - don't worry, someone about three levels up the org chart from me authorized it - I wasn't playing hooky) - I left work at 3, and still had to ask an RCMP officer for permission to cross the street, and it was rush hour traffic for my entire trip home, well before one would expect rush hour to be. (I'd hate to imagine the security when Bush went to Iraq (and still got shoes thrown at him) - this was a visit to an allied capital, where Obama is popular). So, the President of the United States can change rush hour for a city of 1 000 000, simply by his presence. That's power. (And no, I didn't see the motorcade - missed it both times - though its got to be weird not to hear helicopters all the time after you retire from the Presidency)

Web Standards Incompatibility

2009-02-19T19:05:00.002-04:00

So, Microsoft has released version 1 of a list of websites that won't run in "super-standards" mode in IE 8. Some highlights:
google.com
youtube.com
yahoo.com
wikipedia.org
ebay.com
facebook.com
amazon.com

And, my personal favourites:
microsoft.com
live.com

There were a pile more, some of similar calibre - I didn't bother scanning the whole list myself (there were a thousand or so). I suspect a lot of these were the sites making fixes for older, less standards-compliant versions of IE, in which case they'd be fixed shortly. But still, a bit crazy.

An Ode to Paper

2009-02-02T19:24:00.003-04:00

The Gmail developers put up an interesting blog post today - talking about how they were trying to beat paper with their new Tasks widget for iPhone. They cite the following advantages for paper:

Easy editing. Cross out with pen and write something new.
Works offline. You can read paper even when your PC is not connected to the internet.
Mobile. Fold paper and stick in pocket.
Instant boot up. Just pull paper out of pocket -- don't have to wait for it to load.

I can add one more: its cheap - a fraction of a percentage of the cost of iPhone and data plan - I carry a pad of paper and a pen with me at all times, in addition to my (very basic) Palm PDA. Long Live Paper!

Linux will beat Microsoft, because Microsoft builds software for techies

2009-01-20T22:21:00.002-04:00

No, I haven't gone insane ... it was in an opinion piece by a software consultant I read (somewhat worth reading) - his main point was that Microsoft was alienating customers with their new UI's, and that if people have to change user interfaces, why not change OS's (OpenOffice.org spends a lot of effort emulating Microsoft Office's UI, and the default Linux desktop on a lot of distros looks awfully similar to Windows (on a surface level, at least). Here's a quote from the article:

When the time comes that Windows XP can no longer be pre-installed on new computers, Macs and Linux will both benefit, of course. How much? I can't wait to see. If someone has to learn a new operating system, they may as well do it on a system that's immune to most malicious software. I hear that the tech support from Apple is terrific, certainly the price on Linux can't be beat. And they can both run Open Office.
As techies, Microsoft builds software for techies. It's only natural. But, they may become irrelevant as normal people look elsewhere.

The Obama Inauguration

2009-01-20T20:53:00.002-04:00

So, like half the other politicians, political pundits, and armchair statecraft enthusiasts on the planet (likely), I'm putting a post up about the Obama Inauguration (I haven't checked yet - why waste an opportunity to talk about something I'm completely unqualified for by doing research :-) ). A few of the people at work had CNN on at lunch, so I joined them and watched President Obama's swearing in and speech. He was obviously nervous (he fumbled twice during the swearing in, though I think the first time was the other guy's fault), though it didn't show on his face. His speech, IMHO, was good, but not great. It was eloquent, well delivered, and seemed to balance realism with inspiration fairly well, but nothing really stood out. (Well, besides the parts where my Canadian background snickered at the American-ness of parts of it - this inbuilt assumption that America is naturally a world leader, and needs to return to that state.) I think it set a good tone for his presidency, and he does look like he'll do, at the very least, a competant job, especially given the conditions he's been dealt. However, I think those who are expecting Obama to save America, and singlehandedly fix everything will be sorely disappointed. He's only human. His speech, though very applicable now, will likely not be remembered in 10 years - schoolchildren will not be memorizing it for decades to come, and, if I can measure a President by his inaugural speech (why not, this is the blogosphere), I think that while he may be what America needs now, he won't be very much noted a generation from now.

Geek Moments

2008-12-25T11:21:00.004-04:00

Every so often, I have an "Oh my, I AM a geek ..." moment - two were this morning, when I was removing plates for Christmas breakfast (Merry Christmas to everyone by the way) from the bottom of the stack, instead of the top, and I have a mental conversation with myself somewhat as follows:

Me: "Ha, its a queue, not a stack (chuckles)" [for those of you in CS, if your data structures class didn't involve the spring-loaded plate dispenser example for a stack, you're missing out]
Me also: "Oh my, I am a geek ..."
"Hmm, I have a lot of these 'oh my, I am a geek' moments"
"I should blog about -"
"Oh my, I AM a geek ..."

Anyway, Merry Christmas to everyone, and a Happy New Year - I'll end with this link ("If programming languages were religions") that I've already posted to Facebook, but should repeat here (if you get most of the jokes, you are a geek too - if not, there's still hope for you :-) )

Repost - Christmas back home

2008-12-25T00:38:00.005-04:00

This is an XKCD comic from last Christmas - I posted it then, and I'll post it again now, because its cool (and oh so true - the subscript is "Family going to bed at 10pm is so much worse than jet lag") (apologies for the formatting - Blogger is not so great at that)

... Another note from Christmas Break back home: - my mother has a rather steampunk iron (ha ha, punny, eh?) See the picture above (I was ironing a dress shirt for the church Christmas Eve service):

Star Trek Insurrection - HMS Pinafore

2008-12-25T00:20:00.001-04:00

This is Picard, Data, and Worf singing a number from HMS Pinafore - for real, in an actual movie (Insurrection). Too cool, I love it.

An interesting idea

2008-12-24T13:06:00.002-04:00

Here's an interesting idea, courtesy of John C. Dvorak - once higher bandwidth wireless routers become ubiquitous, allow a setup whereby you can share a smallish (say about 50 mbps) chunk of your bandwidth as an open connection, for the benefit of the general wired (unwired?) public. His point is that while wifi hotspots are more ubiquitous now than they used to be, there are fewer open hotspots (as is good security policy). This slice of open bandwidth would be sandboxed off of the rest of the network, and would have bandwidth caps, to prevent abuse, but would be left otherwise unencumbered - a way to share internet connection, and provide an easy public service - it would certainly increase the usefulness of portable wifi-enabled gadgets (iPhone, netbook, Nintendo DS, laptop, I could go on ...) by about an order of magnitude, and reduce people's reliance on expensive, slow cell phone data plans, perhaps give the telcos a bit of competition in that field (which is always good - telcos are pretty evil, and could use some competition to make them listen a bit better).

Why the Republicans should have run Fred Thompson

2008-12-11T23:16:00.001-04:00

He has a wicked sense of humor. (Unfortunately I can't figure out how to embed youtube videos in this blog anymore, so I'll just link it)

Widescreen Web

2008-12-10T23:00:00.002-04:00

I've been doing more of a tiling layout to my desktop lately (when I have some free time to risk tanking my computer, I'm going to try a tiling window manager) - this is fairly simple though - taskbar along the bottom and left side, MSN bar along the right, and my web browser in the middle. Now, this is nice, keeps all the information I want at once accessible (or at least most of it - tiling is good, overlapping windows are pointless, but that's a post for another day) - thing that's a bit weird is, there are quite a few webpages (facebook, apple's page, etc.) that are wider than that window (which I measured at 948 px, window chrome included) Now, certainly I'm not saying that web pages should all fit in 640x480, but the fact that a lot of common ones want 1000 pixels or so across seems a bit high - that's the entirety of many screens - what if I want to look at other things simultaneously (like IM conversations, or the controls to my music player, etc.)? Anyway, I declare this "hug a web developer day" - and then remind them that interface scalability is considered a good thing :-)

Wicked Cool Canadian Invention

2008-12-10T00:13:00.004-04:00

Apparently the trackball mouse was invented by the Royal Canadian Navy. Wicked Cool. I love my country (and trackball mice - I have a fairly nice Logitech I picked up on sale at the Bookstore).

More Coalition Drama

2008-12-09T23:54:00.002-04:00

Well, Bob Rae and Dominic LeBlanc have dropped out of the Liberal leadership race, leaving Ignatieff uncontested to lead the party - this is totally about the whole coalition thing - my reading of it all is that the leadership candidates don't have confidence in Stephane Dion, and want to replace him before they pull the pin on a non-confidence vote - Ignatieff is the only one of the three candidates who has much credibility on the economic front - Rae is still hurting from when he was leading Ontario during a recession, and LeBlanc is just too young and new yet. From what I hear, Ignatieff actually wants to wait and see what Harper comes out with in his budget before deciding whether or not to overthrow the government (which sounds fair to me) - with luck all this ridiculousness will blow over soon, and our government will get back to the business of governing, not being the butt of Jon Stewart jokes (admittedly, its slow news in the states, with Bush on the way out)

A few good links:

2008-12-09T00:16:00.002-04:00

Keeping up with my habit of blogging in bursts during downtime (yes, finals is downtime - if it weren't for the exams, it'd be the slackest time of year :-) ), A few links I've run into that are pretty good:

Stuff Christians Like: Applies leg drops of sarcasm (all in good Skittle-flavored fun) to some of the ridiculousness that happens around Christianity (potlucks and DVBS food and all that other fun stuff), with some seasoning of real stuff about how big and awesome God is, and what he's done in the author's life. [kudos to Christina for giving me the link to this one]

Global TV: Streams full episodes of a bunch of shows on Global (so I can still get House and The Office when I have no TV). Admittedly, this is pretty standard for TV network sites these days, the great part is, ... wait for it ... it works in Linux! Major props to whoever did their website

Well, I guess that was a couple, not a few ... oh well ... enjoy.

The Coalition

2008-12-08T18:55:00.002-04:00

So, in case you've been living under a rock for the last week, Canada's three opposition parties have signed a deal to overthrow the Harper Conservative government. They propose a governing coalition of the Liberals and NDP, with the Liberal leader (currently Stephane Dion) as the Prime Minister. Prime Minister Harper, in response to this proposal, got the Governor General to suspend Parliament until January. Now, while I strongly dislike Harper's government style, and think people underestimate Mr. Dion, I'm not quite sold on the coalition idea. Their entire point is that the Tories aren't doing enough, quickly enough on the economic crisis. However, their own plans have been somewhat slow coming out (announce downthrow of government first, release plans later), and switching governments mid-Parliament would certainly slow down anything getting done. Also, as one of my good friends once said, "you can trust Stephen Harper to do exactly what will get him the most votes" - crashing the economy would get him chased out with a stick next federal election. He's also trained as an economist, and from what I hear did fairly well at it. So, while I don't really like him, and think the opposition parties ran on significantly better platforms last election, I won't complain if Stephen Harper holds on to government, as long as he gets some good things done - on the flip side, if the coalition gets into power, and then makes a hash of things, I may just vote Conservative next election.

10 000

2008-12-08T18:33:00.002-04:00

Well, I haven't posted for a while (can't believe I completely missed the federal election ... I probably should say something about the "coalition" in another post), but I realized something this week I thought I should say: I could live quite comfortably on $10 000 a year. I was looking at how much I've spent over the last four months, and, discounting tuition, it was only about $2 500. This isn't trying to be holier-than-thou, it just made me think about how much we demand as "basic necessities " as a society. For one person, in the size of city I live in, the poverty line is about $17 000. Sure, I don't own a car (which would probably eat up another few thousand dollars a year)), but in the city I live in, I don't have to - public transit (which is very good here) and my own two feet serve me well enough (Here's a link to a guy's blog about why cars are largely unnecessary - he's full of vitriol, absolutely spitting acid, but he makes some decent points nonetheless, I think). My furniture may be second (or third) hand used, but it gives me a comfortable place to sit, and somewhere to store my stuff. I have money for real food with real meat and vegetables, and even entertainment (cable TV, the high-speed internet connection I am typing this on now, the occasional movie, dinner out, etc.). Sure, people usually want a higher quality of living - bigger, nicer places to live, and newer, better stuff - when they get out of university, but I wonder a bit why - do I really need that? We hear newscasters talking about the present economic crisis until they're blue in the face, and I know a lot of people are in real pain from it - lost jobs and bankruptcies - but we really brought it on ourselves as a society. We've let capitalism and materialism run out of control, and forgotten the value of hard work, savings, and making things to last (not saying I haven't done this too, by the way). I just hope it doesn't take another Great Depression to make us all remember.

A Home in Gnome

2008-09-01T20:11:00.002-03:00

Well, I just finished installing openSUSE 11 on my computer (well, I still have some issues to tie up, like wi-fi ... ugg ...) - contrary to my usual practice, I installed it with the Gnome desktop environment instead of KDE. My reason was that openSUSE is shipping with KDE 4.0 at the moment (and 3.5, but I want 4 sometime, and it seems like it would just be a hassle to try and upgrade a major version in place), and from what I've heard, though openSUSE has one of the best implementations of KDE 4, its still a bit point-oh in its feature support, and in its applications being updated for it, etc. - my plan is to wait for openSUSE to package up 4.1 before going back to KDE, so, in the meantime, I'm using Gnome. (Why didn't I just wait untill December and get 11.1, you ask? - my package management was completely borked on my previous install, and openSUSE 11 has big updates there) - It has been a bit of an adjustment making a home in Gnome (much more fun than making a home in my new apartment, which is still not quite unpacked :-) ), but my initial impressions are quite positive. - I use Firefox for web browsing, and Thunderbird for email, so that was no change (by the way, there is a great extension for Firefox called FEBE - it backs up and restores all your profile settings - the UI stinks, but I was able to transfer my Firefox over with much less hassle than re-downloading and configuring all my extensions). I've been using Pidgin instead of Kopete for IM, which I actually really like - the UI has a lot of the things I liked from the Google Talk desktop client (my first experience with IM) - its clean, well laid out, and provides exactly enough information). For a music player, Rhythmbox is doing a passable job - I don't like it quite as well as Amarok, but it has promise - the music selection and queueing interface seems a bit like a cross between Amarok's playlist-based model and iTunes search-based model. For a terminal, I've been using Tilda (as opposed to Yakuake on KDE) - both are basically hotkey based terminal emulators, and support tabs - Yakuake does it a bit more prettily, but no big differences. For other software, OpenOffice is, as always, my office suite (tab completion rocks!), but I've added TexMaker this year (you try taking set theory notes in OOoWriter, and trying to inseart a union symbol all the time - LaTeX rocks for that, and TexMaker is a good editor (you can get it for Windows too)). Anyway, if any of you have fuel for a Gnome vs. KDE flame war, feel free to toss it at me, and if you have any suggestions for good Gnome apps, I'd love to hear that too (especially if anyone knows of a graphical Go game - I'd like to learn to play, and computers are good for that).

Really Awesome Wicked Cool

2008-09-01T20:00:00.002-03:00

For those of you that haven't heard yet, Google is coming out with a new web browser, and it looks beautiful. Google Chrome [link very well may be broken, but this is supposed to be the official site] is set to release Thursday - its open source, based on Webkit (the same rendering engine that powers Safari - its open source, standards compliant, and, as it is in Safari, gets enough developer love that it works well on the majority of web sites), has an entirely new JavaScript engine (called V8 - its supposed to be super-fast, so we'll see), Google Gears offline integration, and some really neat under the hood stuff, that they've explained in a comic [link has been intermittently down due to slashdot effect - try refreshing in a few minutes] (you'll get most of it if you're reasonably familiar with some programming/system administration concepts). The beta coming out Thursday is for Windows only :-( but they're apparently hard at work on Mac and Linux versions (I hope they actually use the native interface widgets, instead of their own separate theming engine, a la Firefox ... I mean, Firefox is pretty enough, but it doesn't really match the desktop ... (and in that case, I hope they do both a KDE and GTK version for Linux ... that would be really sweet ...))

So my grandparents are on facebook ...

2008-05-13T17:38:00.001-03:00

Yes, that's right, my grandparents have a joint account on Facebook. Its either become mainstream and permanent, or rung its death knell. Rather shocked ...

MSN is terrible (a rant on IM tech in general)

2008-05-02T22:53:00.004-03:00

I have come to the conclusion that the MSN Messenger protocol is terrible. This because there is not a single implementation of it that works nearly as well as any implementation of the competing protocols - even Windows Live Messenger drops the connection or fails to sign in sometimes, and that comes straight from the source. (Incidentally, meebo.com (which is pretty much text-only) is fairly good - its been a while since I tried Trillian, but I don't remember any problems with it either (though it is also limited in feature set)). I've tried aMSN - it's got the same problems, but worse. Kopete, my primary messaging program, logs into my GTalk and AIM accounts almost instantly, but usually requires two or three pushes to log into MSN (and even then, takes a few seconds). Now, considering these experiences, I put the blame for flaky MSN performance on the actual protocol - admittedly, AIM and Jabber (GTalk's base) are more open, so external developers will have an easier time implementing them, but the fact that even the official Microsoft client is flaky lends support to my theory that the fault is in the protocol.
Why does this matter, you ask? I live in Canada - the most common messaging protocol in Canada? MSN. The solution: Microsoft does one of their major updates, that forces everyone to move to the new messenger, or not be able to talk to anyone (it has happened) - this update will include a backend update to a completely new protocol. Base it off something like Jabber (which is open-source, and stable), and open-source the extensions they add to it to support all their features. This should give them a stable base to work from. Also, work with Google - make it interoperate with GTalk (also Jabber based) (IM should be like email or the phone system - any vendor's product can talk to any others - this would be a step in the right direction). (Incidentally, I haven't used it for a while, but I loved the UI on the Google Talk desktop client - if they released a Linux version that could talk to MSN, I'd ditch Kopete in a second).
Anyway, that's what I want to see in IM tech - anyone else have anything they wish Microsoft (or AOL, Yahoo, or Google) would do?

Ninety-six Percent

2008-05-02T22:46:00.002-03:00

A quote on Vista SP1, from All About Microsoft:

Ninety-six percent of new system runing Vista have all their drivers just working out of the box.

What about the other four percent? These are new systems.

Update

2008-04-27T13:59:00.001-03:00

Hi all - you may be wondering about the change of look - I just figured it was time for an update to the look of my blog - I know its one of the Blogger standard templates, but I think it looks pretty sharp. Ciao

Content for free

2008-04-27T13:49:00.002-03:00

As some of you may know, Dilbert.com has done a major redesign, every day's comics in color, animations, all sorts of jazz. What you may not know is they're now giving away content for free - the days comic, the entire archive, on a site with no ads. Now, this is not the main Dilbert site - they are not advertising this (though Scott Adams mentioned it in his blog). But, if you go to www.dilbert.com/fast - you'll see a simple site with the comic, an archive, some nav links, and nothing else, not even ads - content for free, from a major syndicate no less - go quickly, before they figure it out :-).

Messages from the future

2008-04-12T17:16:00.002-03:00

You know, if I could get a message from myself, twenty years in the future, and it told me that I never owned a car - I'd believe it, I think. (Providing the message from my future self could authenticate its sender reliably - I strongly doubt the feasibility of time travel) - But about the car - I wouldn't mind owning a car, I have my license, I like driving, and I fully expect to own one at some future date - but I wouldn't be surprised if I never owned one. Back home, I could always borrow my parents - living in a university town, foot and public transit suffice to get me around - a car just isn't worth the expenditure. I can see that not changing though - gas is only getting more expensive - unless a viable alternative to petroleum-fueled internal combustion engines emerges, owning a personal automobile will soon become infeasibly expensive. Its going to make changes - one of which will be the fall of the small automobile - better dust off your bicycle helmets.

Smells like Microsoft

2008-03-22T12:22:00.002-03:00

News came out this week that Apple is using its iTunes software update to push their Safari web browser out to Windows users. You can, of course, opt out, but that's not the point. This is just another example of Apple trying to use its music player monopoly to leverage in on other markets. Buying an iPod basically forces you to use iTunes - that is sketchy to begin with. But using iTunes to push out unrelated software - you just shouldn't do that. The Mozilla CEO compared it to malware distribution techniques, and I'd have to agree. There's a good comment stream here.

A few political notes

2008-02-22T22:51:00.002-04:00

So, just quickly, American presidential race - I still want Obama to win, he's got a lot of momentum, and there's rumblings about Hillary's race being in trouble. On the Republican side, McCain has it pretty much wrapped up, though Huckabee is staying in it. The Democrats are going to win the election anyway.

On the Canadian front, the election rumblings are dying down, as the Liberals and Tories have made a deal on Afghanistan pull out. It's not set in stone yet, but its looking good. What I think more interesting, is that, in a recent poll, the Greens are polling even with the NDP - I'd like to see them win some seats in the coming election, and I think they may be able to manage it. (The Conservatives are near majority-government level support - not a bad thing - Harper is competent, and has done a good job as PM)

Peace

Reaction: Microsoft's new open-source pledge

2008-02-22T22:08:00.002-04:00

So, Microsoft is giving am bunch of stuff away for free - firstly, free development software for students - Visual Studio Pro, SQL Server Enterprise, etc. As a student myself, this is pretty shiny - not sure if I'll take them up on their offer - not much into .NET, and mySQL has got some decent DB software (I like Linux better anyway - really, for anything but .NET, Linux is a better devel environment) - but its nice to know I've got the option. The only kicker I see there is once I graduate, said multi-hundred dollar pieces of software will cease to be free, and if I end up using it, I'll be stuck with old versions.

Other news: Microsoft is making big openness pledge - its opening up API's for many of their big money products, and letting plugins into Office to use other file formats. Now, commentators are flaming Microsoft for this being a low business ploy - the Office announcement came one day before they were being evaluated for (highly lucrative) open source accreditation on their Office Open XML file formats, and the APIs are free only for non-commercial use. Now, Stephen J. Vaughan-Nichols (who, I gotta say, is a bit of a FOSS zealot) said "Microsoft isn't offering open source a new opportunity, it's offering open source a trap." I wouldn't go that far - sure, that means that any commercial open source companies will have to licence Microsoft's technology - I say that's fair - open source is all well and good, but MS has a right to make money on their work. I predict the commercial companies will license APIs for better compatibility, some of that might trickle down to non-commercial implementations. But, overall, Linux, etc. will play better with Windows, etc. but things aren't really going to change - Microsoft will still spew FUD, the FOSS ecosystem will still have flaky and/or hacked integration with the MS ecosystem, and, in general, things won't be different.

This has been long, so, later.

Movie Review - Juno

2008-01-05T22:25:00.000-04:00

So, I went and saw Juno a couple days back. I'd categorize it as a quirky romantic comedy about an unfunny subject, teenage pregnancy. Which, I must say, they treat well - without going into specifics, a lot of how things work out in the movie seems believable and more real-world than happy-movie-world. Also, the film is really funny. The style of humor is sarcastic, and relies heavily on odd, funny words and phrases (which is a good thing) (the sequence near the beginning where The Office's Rainn Wilson plays a convenience store cashier is especially good). The entire theatre (moderately well filled for a Friday evening) laughed out loud at multiple points. So, bottom line, the characters were quirky, but believable - you could see them inhabiting your own neighbourhood. The writing was funny, but still treated its less funny subject matter with some gravity. It was funky and funny and good. 3 1/2 stars out of 4.

Election Update - Iowa

2008-01-05T00:01:00.000-04:00

Well, as some of you may have heard, Obama and Huckabee won the Iowa caucuses by a significant margin. I haven't really heard enough about the Republican field to decide who I would rather win (but have no real impact on, as I'm not American ...). Huckabee doesn't seem any worse than any of the others (he was a Baptist minister at one time), but the Republican candidate isn't going to win anyway (and pundits more professional than myself are saying that Huckabee's Iowa win isn't all that significant - lots of Baptists there). Obama's win in Iowa is more encouraging - his message is one of unity, and co-operation - something American government sorely needs after the previous administration's polarizing election tactics. Also, relieving my earlier doubts somewhat, Iowa is primarily white, yet Obama won as a black man - perhaps race won't be as big of an issue as I feared. In any case, it was a major boost for his campaign, and a hit to Clinton's and Edwards', the strongest of the other candidates. Anyway, though an election I could actually vote in would be more interesting ... this one's not bad. Later.

Completely off message

2008-01-04T23:54:00.000-04:00

I saw this article, titled "Google Looks to Tech that Recognizes Text in Images" and immediately thought "circumvention of CAPTCHA systems" (the wonky security text). Of course, the press release talks about reading street signs from Google Maps Street View, etc. It must be a computer science thing - seeing a system, and immediately thinking how to break/corrupt it - finding the extreme cases (useful, of course, for making software more stable). Any other computer scientists agree/disagree? (yes, I've come to terms with the term "computer scientist" - it isn't so bad as I thought it was at first ...)

Bigger News

2008-01-03T13:44:00.000-04:00

In case you haven't heard, the RIAA is now suing people for ripping legally purchased CDs. That's right - if the RIAA has its way, you won't be able to listen to your own music on your computer, mp3 player, etc. Now, I believe in fair use - you buy a copy of some media, say a song, and you should have license and legal right to play it on any and all playback device you own. It is yours, for your personal use. If buying a CD only gives you rights to play that CD in some CD player, its way overpriced - the actual disc and packaging can't cost more than a buck or two to produce. Watch this carefully - the recording industry is just trying to suck the money out of your pockets.

Small News

2007-12-30T13:26:00.000-04:00

If any of you use iGoogle, they've updated their theme selection - there still isn't a good selection of styles, but there are more options now (the Solar System theme looks neat). Ciao.

Presidential Prognostications '08

2007-12-29T13:50:00.000-04:00

Well, just because I like to, I'm going to sit down in my armchair and put on my political analyst hat. What I'm thinking about is the American Presidential election of next year (a subject which I, admittedly, know not very much about, not being American - then again, I also have a more objective outside perspective ...). For starters, the Republicans are sunk. Bush and Cheney have wrecked their support, and I think it would be very hard for any Republican candidate to win. That said, I think Fred Thompson has the best shot of any of the Republican Presidential candidates - never underestimate the Schwarzenegger effect - Thompson played a very presidential figure on TV, and has actual Senate experience ... In the Democratic race, I predict Hillary will win, but would rather see Obama take it. Clinton is a polarizing figure, while Obama seems to have a more co-operative style of leadership. Of the candidates, from both parties, I'd most like to see him in the White House next year. I think that's unlikely however. We like to think we've moved beyond race as a society, but America, especially, has fought a war over it, and had all sort of historical racial stressors. That sort of thing stays in a society, and is not easily gotten over (just look at English and French in Canada - and we haven't been at open war for centuries). I don't think America will elect a black President (though they should). So, my current prediction: The Democratic candidate, likely Hillary Clinton, will be POTUS this time next year. I'll keep you posted (as we may not have a Canadian federal election to keep me occupied until 2009 ...).

Christmas Break

2007-12-24T13:58:00.000-04:00

Today's xkcd is super neat, and really captures the experience of going home for the holidays. (if you don't read xkcd, you should, its only the greatest webcomic in the 'verse (and no, it has nothing to do with Firefly (but if the author saw it, I expect he'd be a fan (I just love nested parentheses :-) )))) Just last night, I was at a friend's family's Christmas party, helping him get some stuff running on his new Kubuntu installation - we were in the middle of trying to get DVD playback running when I heard his parents cleaning up upstairs (it was about 11 at this point) and figured I'd better leave - you forget at university, when having friends over that late or later isn't terribly abnormal, that your parents' generation tends to leave at 9 or 10. Anyway, Merry Christmas all, and a Happy New Year.

I have something in common with Bill Gates!

2007-12-11T19:24:00.000-04:00

Its a somewhat little known fact that Bill Gates full name is William Henry Gates III. I was curious as to exactly which of his ancestors were William Gates Sr. and Jr. A short trip to Wikipedia later, and now I know. His father, William Gates Sr., was born William Gates III. When he joined the Army to fight in WW II, he changed his name to William Gates Jr., to avoid elitism. Later, when his son became really famous, he again changed his name, to William Gates Sr. (neat, eh? - he was all three). More sanely, his father and grandfather were born William Gates Jr. and Sr., respectively. Since the third William Gates had dropped his 'III', Bill Gates (of Microsoft) got the 'III' suffix instead of 'IV', and is nicknamed "Trey" (for "three") within his family. But still, Bill Gates is (unofficially) a "IV", as am I, BruceIV. Confusing, but cool.

Why is Gmail still in beta?

2007-12-07T22:36:00.000-04:00

So, why is Gmail still in beta? Its a mature product. They've just come out with a "new version" with some substantial interface updates (these are being phased in, but fairly quickly) - for anything else, they'd call it version 2.0 - even for a web app, this whole beta thing is ridiculous. A quick check of Wikipedia reveals that it has been out since April 2004, and open to the entire public since February of this year. (which might explain the periodic "Google outages" I suffered last winter - that and YouTube must have put a strain on even Google's servers). Gmail is offered as part of a paid service (Google Apps). Anyway, the entire point of this is, it is ridiculous on multiple levels that Gmail is still in beta. Google, take the silly tag off the graphic, and have a grand unveiling. My two cents for today.

Crazy Idea of the Month

2007-11-04T18:25:00.000-04:00

Well, the recent Daylight Savings Time change got me thinking about times. Specifically, why are they still tied to the sun? It is archaic. We have electric lights, we have globalized communications - why are our clocks still synchronized to the time that the sun rises or sets in our particular corner of the world? Why can't we just use a 24-hour time clock (because 12-hour clocks are redundant, confusing, and would likely completely disappear if TV switched to a 24-hour clock), universalized over the entire map. (UTC, known in the past as GMT or Zulu, would work). As far as the calendar goes, January is midsummer in Australia, yet midwinter here. Why is it that 6AM is morning in both locations? Just a crazy idea ... I'm sure there are (increasingly less valid) reasons for tying our clocks to the sun's rise and set ... but still - it would help with a few things (international communication and transport come to mind) (admittedly, I expect those whom it would help most - FedEx and such - are already using this sort of system). Signing off, time: 2225.

This could get interesting

2007-10-06T22:41:00.000-03:00

Apparently the Green party is polling at around 10% of of decided voters, and the majority of people think it will keep at least those levels of support come election day. This could make the federal election interesting. (As an aside, many political watchers expect the Tories to come out with a throne speech the opposition parties won't be able to accept, and thus force an election for early this winter or late this fall). Now, it looks like the environment will be a key issue this election - the Green party has got a lot of media buzz the last few years - yet still holds no seats in Parliament. This is their year. They need to put together a coherent platform, and run a strong enough campaign to convince the general public that they should have some seats in Parliament. If they cannot win any ridings in this coming election, then I would say that their chances of ever recovering are slim to none. I'll be watching with an interest - I respect the core Green aim of environmental support, but if they want my vote, I'll have to see two things - one is a comprehensive national platform - how they'll vote on every issue, not merely the environmental ones. The other is a local candidate that seems capable of representing the local interest well - it is an unfortunate habit of some of the smaller parties to field less than impressive candidates in some ridings, especially less populous ones, and the Greens only recently managed to run candidates in every national riding. I'll keep you posted.

Public Service Notice

2007-10-03T10:06:00.000-03:00

Hi, if anyone in this particular public happens to own an iPhone ... there's been a major security vulnerability discovered. Apparently EVERYTHING on the iPhone runs as root. For whatever reason. Basically, even the calculator is god on the phone. If one program gets cracked, lots of people end up with a wide open phone. Details here.

Linux on the Rise

2007-09-24T13:41:00.000-03:00

So here, just for the fun of it, is me playing armchair analyst, because everyone likes to do that. Anyway, I'm seeing a lot more buzz about Linux recently. This isn't just on enthusiast sites, but working its way into the mainstream (not quite there yet, but getting there). Multiple computer makers are rolling out Linux based computers for consumer purchase, and Linux seems to be finally making a dent on the desktop - if not in market share, at least in availability. About the best example of this I've seen recently is this article about Dell working on a Linux driver framework for the last few years. This is big. Dell is pretty much the Wal-Mart of computer makers - cheap and common (in fact, Dell now sells computers at Wal-Mart, and no other North American retail outlets). If they've been working this hard on Linux, they must see a future in it. I expect this is due to two factors. (1) Linux is maturing as an operating system - its becoming easier to use, more things can be done in the GUI instead of a terminal window, and they have some really graphically advanced GUIs, that have features that Windows doesn't - basically, its becoming more possible for the average user to run Linux (2) Microsoft has been making a major mess of things - Vista has been near-universally panned - the only update it has of any consequence is some graphical chrome, and that chrome eats system resources to a ridiculous degree. Add the fact that Windows costs hundreds of American dollars, and you're alienating most of the emerging markets of the world. Basically, Microsoft has dropped the ball, and alternatives like the Mac OS and Linux have a window to make some space for themselves - which they are taking advantage of. My prediction is that unless Microsoft can make Windows 7 (expected 2010-ish) the operating system that Vista should have been (they had 6 years to work on it - it should have been better), they will never have the level of market dominance they had with Windows xp ever again. Given enough time, OS X and Linux can carve out big enough niches that Windows is forced to interoperate, at which point it will never be able to return to its former monopoly position again. People have been saying this for years, but there hasn't been this good of an opportunity for competition in a very long time, as Microsoft hasn't screwed up this badly since it instituted its OS monopoly.

Tootsie Rolls and Forests

2007-08-28T20:09:00.000-03:00

I went shopping today, had some fun with that - went to the brand new Dollarama in town (oooh - as big as the one in Fredericton ... ). I bought a Tootsie Roll, and then decided it is obviously the superior form of chocolate bar, as you can't just scarf it down (way too chewy for that), so you get to savor the flavour. Very good - not like I needed the sugar, but I want another one now ... I bought a power outlet splitter (because the dollar store is a great place for cables and cords, and there's never enough outlets for our computers in Computer Science classes) - now I can be a good citizen, and share a limited resource. Then I went and bought my supply of printer paper for the new year (at Wal-Mart, not the Dollarama) - 2 reams (that's 1000 sheets) - given previous year's evidence, it'll all go too, plus a sizable amount of looseleaf - I wonder how many acres of forest is forested to feed the paper needs of my university yearly ... its likely an atrocious number (not being a good citizen there, but, what can you do ... paper just works better for a lot of things). Now I'm sitting home listening to my little bro's new headphones - surprisingly good bass for earbuds - still, his iPod is only a few months old - the stock headphones shouldn't have worn out that quickly (they cost like $40 to buy them separately ... they should be higher quality for that price...) - my brother, being smart, spent half that for his new phones - which have an ear clip that's actually comfortable (I had a pair once with a clip made of stiffer plastic - they pinched my ears and were very uncomfortable), and the aforementioned good bass. Anyway, that's my evening, apologies for rambling, g'bye now.

You Can't Make This Stuff Up Dept:

2007-08-23T22:42:00.000-03:00

This was just too funny - I posted it verboten from CBC news. Enjoy

Thieves carried off 22 pigs in compact car - CBC News

RCMP have arrested a pair suspected of stealing 22 pigs from a barn near Sussex, N.B., in a getaway that police say was likely a very tight squeeze.

Thieves took the pigs earlier this month after smashing the locks on a barn in Knightville, rented by Moffett's Farms.

The two from Petitcodiac, aged 19 and 20, are suspected to have used one small car to haul the 22 pigs, weighing 23-27 kilograms each, from the farm to the house in Havelock where police tracked them.

RCMP picked up the trail after one of the men forgot his ID at the scene of a break-in.

Const. Jim Gass said the stench from the pigs was immediately apparent to investigators, who found a small car, filled with pig droppings, as well as sacks used to transport the pigs.

"This little car they transported them in once had like 22 pigs," Gass said. "Man, it wasn't a lot of room in the car. She would have been a noisy affair, I would imagine, and quite a wild ride. Something you see in the movies, I would guess."

Police couldn't recover all of the pigs, worth about $75 each. The suspects allegedly ate one the night of the theft, Gass said. Most of the others, police said, were sold to unknowing customers.

RCMP won't release names of the suspects because the men have yet to be charged.

Both suspects are to appear in court Sept. 24 on unrelated charges.

My Infinity is bigger than your infinity

2007-07-25T20:57:00.000-03:00

Although, in hindsight, it really is intuitively obvious, it has been proven that infinity comes in different sizes. Mathematically, this is interesting, as it'll likely sprout a new branch of mathematics or something within the century. Or not, and it'll be cool anyway. In any case, I'll post a link, and the basic idea of it. Picture the set of natural numbers - it is infinitely large - now picture the reals, of which the naturals are a proper subset. The reals are also infinitely large, but a larger infinity, because the naturals are a proper subset. If you're not a mathie, the article does explain more clearly (and with the formal proof too, so its better both ways). Anyway, later.

Maybe I will be able to stay near home after graduation ...

2007-07-06T22:20:00.000-03:00

New figures say New Brunswick is in the middle of an unprecedented job boom.

A Statistics Canada report released Friday shows the province led the country in job creation in the first half of 2007, and its current unemployment rate is the lowest ever recorded there.

Good news. Encouraging. Like to hear more of it.

Everything comes full circle

2007-07-05T20:24:00.000-03:00

Apple has a new patent - hype says possibly for use with a new iPhone model. What interested me is that it looks a lot like a rotary phone. Retro, eh?

Good news for me

2007-06-23T00:52:00.000-03:00

CBC has an article about a study that says firstborn children tend to be smarter. I find it encouraging ... though the article says its nothing genetic, so if my little brothers decide to call a mob hit on me, whoever's left of them will be the eldest, and thus get the benefits ... hmm, not so encouraging.

Federal Election news (only slightly out of season) [UPDATED]

2007-06-21T18:48:00.000-03:00

The Green party in Fredericton is nominating its candidate for the next federal election tonight. This interests me in a few ways. The first is that what the Greens have revealed of their platform so far looks interesting (although the mess they're making on execution is dampening my enthusiasm somewhat). The second is, if they wait until the school year for an election, I'll get the option of voting for this candidate. And, finally, one of the candidates, Tony Myatt, was one of my professors last year, and would be a good choice for it - he has some good ideas. UPDATE: Prof. Myatt didn't get the nomination - there was a prof from STU who won by a significant margin

Trios, Triads, and Neapolitan Ice Cream

2007-06-21T17:43:00.000-03:00

Today's blog post is brought to you by the number three, and the letters 'U', 'S', and 'B'. (Hmm ... haven't thought of Sesame Street in a while ... I wonder if they still do that ...) Anyway, my point is, there should only be three kinds of USB connectors. I mean, there are so many kinds of USB cables, it nearly completely defeats the purpose of the "universal" bus. I say that IEEE or someone should limit it to three. The first would be the standard USB connector, the one that's on the PC end of those myriad specialized cables. That one's a no-brainer. The second would be the more rounded connector that is in use on most USB printers. The flat type makes it largely redundant, but its already somewhat of a standard (my point here), and is easier to plug in when you can't see the port (as in the back of many printers). The third would be the single type of USB miniplug. There only needs to be one, and that should work in every digital camera, MP3 player, ect. It would make things easier for everyone, and there's too many types as is. Any objections?

Racism is Illogical

2007-06-14T20:06:00.000-03:00

Well, I've been working my summer away for my hometown's Recreation Department. So far, there's been a lot of painting. Part of the painting job has been painting over graffiti, which is rather annoying, because it should be unnecessary, and I just painted that wall two weeks ago. What made me wonder though, was the message on the graffiti. The one I painted over said "Stop Atlantica" (Atlantica being a cross-border trade conference) - I saw another through its paint patch job that said "Racism is illogical". There are similar graffiti messages in other spots. So, why would our vandal put "Stop Atlantica" - this is the message of a socialist activist. There is no one in town that can do a single thing to stop Atlantica. For the racism message, well, its a small town - there are maybe 2 or 3 dozen non-white people in the entire town - racism is basically a non-issue. So, our vandal has a social conscience (or at least, his messages do), yet the messages have no audience. Why put them there then? Its the wrong forum - its fruitless, futile. So why? I can only suppose that our vandal is looking to justify his vandalism. When town workers paint over his messages, he can internally condemn them for being racist pigs, or horrible capitalists, hurting the poor (or so the socialists will say). Instead, the town workers are merely anti-graffiti. Anti-racism messages are a good thing. Just not on the pool walls. ... Anyway, this has been random, but I didn't have much better to do at work then attempt to psycho-analyze the person who was giving me more unnecessary work.

I, Avatar

2007-05-29T19:58:00.000-03:00

So, I performed an interesting experiment this week. I set up a Facebook account ... under my standard online alias (Rule Number One of online life is "Do NOT trust the internet"). The incongruity of it made me deactivate the account the very next day. One does not use a social networking site, which is a means of relation and communication, under an assumed name. It did lead to some interesting thought waves, on how much of an identity my online avatar, Bruce IV, really has. The entity that is Bruce IV has a body of opinion, beliefs, and opinions very similar (identical, in fact) to my own. That entity is also in my year at school, and lives in my town (although neither the tax agency, nor the university registrar would acknowledge it) (come to think of it, I must find Bruce IV's landlord - Bruce manages to get out of paying rent through the dastardly trick of having no physical presence). But, does Bruce IV really exist? He (Bruce is listed as male in a few spots, for purposes of context), for all intents and purposes, has all my memories, and a mind behind him - he could definitely pass a Turing test. However, Facebook provides a breaking point for his identity. While Bruce IV has all my memories, experiences, and opinions, he does not have my friends. He, in fact, lacks any sort of real relationship, having only an academic (if that) connection to the similar entities of "Mr. Fusion", "Uncle Dave", and their ilk in various blog-based debates. So, who or what is Bruce IV? He is an expression, a face I present to the online world - in short, a mask. Masks, though they have a distinct shape and appearance, have no life apart from the one that wears them. So, the moral of the story is: make your Facebook under your own name - you can lock down your personal information from the net at large well enough to protect it from unknown eyes. And a final incongruity - this post is signed Bruce IV - giving that avatar the human quality of introspection. Life's an irony.

Dell is selling Linux! Where? [UPDATED]

2007-05-25T22:44:00.001-03:00

So, Dell is finally selling computers with Linux preloaded (Ubuntu, to be precise). The trick is finding them. (I'll give you a hint - www.dell.com/open). If you don't have that link ... well, on the American site (not the Canadian), you can find a site map, and one of the links on that sitemap brings you to the page I just linked to. There are three computers available to be customized, and they'll give you decent coverage of the broader spectrum of computers. Its a start, but there could be so, so much more ... Why aren't there options to set up a Windows dual boot in the factory, choices of filesystem, even extending the distro options to Kubuntu, and maybe Xubuntu - the GUI you use is important ... if someone is installing Linux, they'll know about these things, and care (though they'll likely be able to reinstall things and fix it - still, what's the point of factory installation if you have to change everything up right out of the box). And why bury it so deep - at least put some links from the main page (or even better, put the Linux systems in with the Windows ones in the main computer comparison windows - in all the country sites). Its a nice gesture, placating all the raving geeks on their Ideastorm site, but will ultimately end up letting a very few determined people avoid paying for a Windows license when they don't want it.

--UPDATE--
As one guy pointed out on the Ideastorm site, Dell isn't offering any Linux systems with AMD processors. As a lot of Linux people are AMD people as well (a root for the underdog type of thing), it would seem a logical move. Personally, right now, Intel has the better chips - however, AMD makes some very capable ones, and has a bit of an edge in prices. I'd like to see Dell selling some AMD Linux systems as well.

Gmail Theater: Why Use Gmail?

2007-05-25T20:48:00.001-03:00

Ok, maybe this is misusing my newfound YouTube posting abilities, but this is geeky-cheezy-cool, so why not. (It also says a lot of stuff about what's great about gmail)

A Fair(y) Use Tale

2007-05-25T20:38:00.001-03:00

Just a really sweet video I found online (Dvorak Uncensored pointed me its way). Kinda neat way to talk about copyright. (Hopefully the YouTube embed works right - this is the first time I've tried this)

Snowflakes

2007-05-10T21:38:00.000-03:00

I just remembered something weird from my childhood. I used to like cutting snowflakes out of folded paper - and then you'd unfold the paper, and it would have these lovely repeating patterns. I always wanted to understand how my cuts would affect the pattern, to be able to predict the result before I unfolded it. And also, which seems to me slightly a weird mix, I was always disappointed that I couldn't figure out how to fold the paper or cut the pattern so that my "snowflakes" would be six-sided, because all snowflakes in nature are six-sided. It just was a slightly odd contrast - the art of cutting the paper, and then trying to fit it to rigid science - they seem like two different beasts. But then again, perhaps, as Darth Vader would say, "There is no conflict". There is a certain unity to life, and to reality, and maybe what disturbed me about it was the contrast, not the attempt to reconcile it. Anyway, as I've thoroughly lost any point I may have been trying to make, I think I'll stop my rambling here. Thank you for your patience, and good day.

It shouldn't be that way ....

2007-05-09T00:05:00.000-03:00

There's an article on IHT today about Pope Benedict visiting South America, and the challenges facing the Catholic church there. The article spends a good deal of time discussing the rising Protestant threat to Catholicism. It really shouldn't be that way. While there are some significant and important theological differences between the Protestant and Catholic views of Christianity, there's a lot that's the same too - the two groups should be natural allies, not competitors. Perhaps this is a special exempt case (as I said, there are some important divergences between Protestant and Catholic faith), but I still really don't like to see denominational infighting in the Christian church. When it comes down to it, we're aiming for the same goal, and our collective energies would be better spent in pursuit of that goal, rather than arguing among ourselves.

iGoogle

2007-05-05T22:38:00.000-03:00

Its a ridiculous name. Period. It sounds like some lame ripoff of Apple, and the logo is ridiculous. I much prefer "Google Personalized Homepage" and that's a soulless corporate beast of a name. They could call it myGoogle, youGOOGLE, or Jimbo the Traveling Salesman, and it would still be better. I'm keeping my homepage, because I like the page, but the logo at the top of the site strikes me as ridiculous every time I see it. Which is often, seeing as its my homepage. Anyone interested in checking it out can point their browser to www.google.com/ig. Opinions?

Vanity Searches

2007-04-23T17:24:00.000-03:00

Well, I decided to try a slightly weird type of vanity search today. Instead of searching for my real name, I went looking for other BruceIV's on the net. The results I got were pretty much all me, except for the number one result on Live Search, some other guy's mySpace page. Funky ... its weird knowing that someone else is online using the same identity that I do. Screen names tend to be fairly unique ...

Is this the right thing to do?

2007-04-23T13:55:00.000-03:00

Some of you might have heard of the plans to sell half of the UNB woodlot off to developers. I honestly have never been there, but it seems like a bad idea. I've heard that UNB has one of the best forestry faculties in the country. I would expect the woodlot is an invaluable resource to this faculty. Developing it would have a negative impact. UNB really should celebrate and advertise its strengths, not hide them, or atrophy them. Virtually no one hears anything but the engineering faculty really advertised. Thing is, UNB Engineering, while good, is only in the middle of the pack, where faculties where we're really tops or close nationally, like Forestry (or Computer Science) don't get near the attention they deserve, and people only really find out that they're really great ... after they go to UNB. Through my own university search, and talking to people still in high school, UNB has this reputation as the place people from New Brunswick go because they can't get into anywhere better. It really is undeserved, and the university is not fixing it.

And I thought BC was all liberal and green

2007-04-17T00:01:00.000-03:00

According to an article on CTV.ca, the highest percentages of environmentally-conscious teens are in Ontario (that's right, big, dirty industry central) and Atlantic Canada, while the lowest are in BC and Manitoba. I though BC was supposed to be all green and nature-loving and whatnot ... hmm.

Oh my ...

2007-04-16T17:59:00.000-03:00

There was a really big college shooting at Virginia Tech today ... shocking and horrifying - not much info out yet, but here's one article.

PS - This is my 100th post. Whoo-hoo! Wish I had a better topic.

Ack! They're BOTH Crazy!

2007-04-13T12:37:00.000-03:00

So, having established that Elizabeth May, Green Party leader for Canada, is crazy to go up against Peter MacKay, Conservative Deputy leader, in his own riding next election, I can now say that Stephane Dion, Liberal leader, is nearly as crazy. He's agreed not to run a candidate against her this election. Now, this may be some part of Dion's agenda to make the Liberals appear green, by helping get a Green candidate elected. This deal does improve Ms. May's chances of winning, which would be a major coup for the Green Party (as it has never elected a member), and a major embarrassment for the Tories (losing a high profile minister such as MacKay). However, I think a more likely scenario is that the voters just give MacKay a landslide victory, as there aren't any other strong parties running. The NDP will likely do fairly well as well. And the Liberals, for the first time in years (possibly ever, I haven't looked it up), won't be running candidates in every riding in Canada. Dion and May are both crazy.

Now, that's an IDEA

2007-03-28T00:45:00.000-03:00

Apparently there's a poll in Ontario about banning smoking in apartments that are part of multi-unit complexes. I would love to see this in New Brunswick. My downstairs neighbors are heavy smokers, and the fumes waft up the stairs, and under our door, and make our apartment positively reek. (They even set off the smoke alarms once in a while, though I think their alarm may be wired into ours). Seriously, smoking is a nuisance and a health hazard, and the majority of the population is bothered by it. I understand you really can't tell people they can't smoke in their own homes - but an apartment isn't theirs - it belongs to the landlord, and will be someone else's home after they move out - and smoke smell is devilishly hard to remove from an apartment. Especially for multi-unit buildings - one smoker can make the whole building smell, just as one person with a loud stereo can keep everyone else awake - the noise pollution is banned, why not the air pollution? Anyway, my two cents.

Themes for Google Personalized Hompage

2007-03-26T11:12:00.000-03:00

The Google Personalized Hompage (GPH) has implemented some themes - they just change the title areas of it, but are pretty neat anyway - they're even dynamic by time of day, season, and local weather. You can see screenshots here. I keep a GPH as my personal homepage, and the themes really add to it (I personally use the Sweet Dreams theme). I only have two requests for Google now - First, they should extend the theme to all their personalized Google services - my News page, GMail, and Calendar just don't look as good anymore by comparison (some more themes would be good too - some of the 3-D stuff they have is a little tacky IMHO), and secondly, they should implement the themes on national pages as well (if I go to my homepage on Google.ca, I can still access all the feeds and widgets, but the theme isn't there). Still, I think they have a winner.

She's Crazy

2007-03-17T19:54:00.000-03:00

Elizabeth May, leader of the federal Green party has announced her intention to run in the riding of Central Nova next election - if the name sounds familiar, its because its Peter Mackay's riding. If she's trying to be the first Green elected to Parliament, going up against the deputy leader of the Conservative Party is a strange way to do it. Picking off a backbencher somewhere would be much easier, though still challenging enough. I have no idea what their party strategists are thinking. (Incidentally, May had 26% of the vote in her riding in the last election - the Green candidate in Central Nova had 2%)

Interesting post on the Dilbert blog

2007-03-15T21:24:00.000-03:00

Scott Adams has an interesting post about evolutionary theory on his blog - its not one of the views you hear often, and worth a read. (He doesn't agree with me, but I agree with most of the stuff he says here.) He may just be pulling people's chains to get comments (and links), but its still worth seeing. I'm not going to explain what he said, I'll just leave it to him, the far superior blogger, and tell all you folks to follow this link here.

Cool UNB reasearch

2007-03-14T17:35:00.000-03:00

A friend of mine found this on Slashdot - its something cool happening at my school - and majorly useful I expect - more portability for hydrogen is good:

“The challenge is to find a safer, more efficient and economical way to store hydrogen so that it can be released on demand,” explained chemist Sean McGrady, the lead researcher on the project. “The way to do this is to turn hydrogen into a compound — a solid — so you can use it when you want, safely, in the amount you want.”
Hydrogen gas is typically stored under pressure in large metal cylinders, approximately four feet high. These cylinders are heavy and expensive to transport. Since they are under pressure, they also pose a safety hazard.
“We’ve reached a milestone with our ability to condense hydrogen into a usable solid,” said Dr. McGrady. “The next step is to produce a safe, compact storage system for the compound that is both lightweight and affordable.”

The full release is worth reading, but the gist of it is here.

Are we ready for the New Liberal Party?

2007-03-14T11:13:00.000-03:00

I've been hearing rumblings and rumors (In Maclean's, as well as this article) in the news about a rather intriguing subject - talk of a merger and/or alliance between the federal NDP and Liberals. Now, most of the sources of these rumblings are NDP MP's, not Liberal, but its still interesting. Apparently, now that the right is united, the NDP is feeling the heat, because their voters are more likely to go Liberal to fight the unified Conservative threat. Apparently the NDP is in bad shape, and considering drastic options - I wonder if they'll go the way of the provincial NDP? Anyway, worth keeping an eye on.

Now that's some legalese!

2007-03-08T13:16:00.000-04:00

Well, just because I have no life, I was reading through the terms of use and privacy policy on Dvorak Uncensored. It has some pretty fine, funny legalese in it. An excerpt:

This website is for informational purposes only and is not intended to provide specific commercial, financial, investment, accounting, tax, or legal advice. It is provided to you solely for your own personal, non-commercial use. You may link to and refer to this website freely. You must, when linking to this website, thrust your fist into the air and yell "death to tyrants." This site is not responsible for any deaths to tyrants or any other negative activity except for the yelling which we do not condone except in this context.

Now that's some fine legalese - I've had it in mind for a while now to start a student club focused on board games like Risk and Axis & Allies at school - I only hope I could do as well on the club charter as that - I can't decide whether or not to include a clause forbidding those with actual legal training from working on the charter or not.

An interesting idea

2007-03-07T17:51:00.000-04:00

Here's an idea I like - some European automakers are suggesting an emissions credit system for automakers. So a high emitter, say Ferrari, would have to buy credits from a low emitter, say Honda, to pay for the higher emissions of its cars. This would make higher emitting cars more expensive, and, what they didn't mention in the IHT article I heard about it in, would slightly subsidize more practical transportation. I like the idea - seems good, though the fact that emissions credits for nations didn't seem like such a good idea.

Unexpected Fruit

2007-03-06T20:27:00.000-04:00

There's been an ad on TV recently that's been bugging me - its for fruit juice and jello or applesauce or something. Anyway, it ends with pictures of kids drinking juice, and the slogan "an unexpected burst of real fruit" Unexpected. Since when is real fruit unexpected in fruit juice? What has food come to? I should expect to find fruit in fruit juice ... Its really rather sad.

Great ....

2007-03-02T10:19:00.000-04:00

Well, I managed to escape the great Sony battery scare last year, because my battery was a Sanyo. I felt relieved. Now, this ... they better come up with a replacement for Lithium-ion batteries soon ... that's all I can say ...

Learning Mandarin

2007-02-28T20:55:00.000-04:00

Well, I now have openSUSE 10.2 installed on my laptop - my second stab at learning my way around Linux, but I think I'll be a little more successful this time. It'll take a few weeks to get it tweaked how I like it (my productivity will be completely shot ... oh well ...), but the install seemed to go well. The experience however, has brought an analogy to mind. Moving between versions of Windows is like going from Canada (where I live) to Great Britain - there's a few superficial differences, but underneath, things are largely the same. Switching to Linux is like moving to China. Everything is different. So now, I get to learn Mandarin, so to speak. Should be fun.

Vista UI a "Step Back" from xp

2007-02-27T17:57:00.000-04:00

Well, there's this guy who tests computer user interfaces. He uses some pretty weird (but practical) metrics like menu lag time and mouse precision. And, new results are in - Windows Vista's new Aero interface is a step back from xp. That's right - a step BACK. Yes, menu lag and such can be changed in the registry, but what's the percentage of users who know how to do that, and what's the percentage of those users that actually would edit their registry for that kind of reason? The suggested solution then: drop Vista down to its basic or classic view ... which removes the only reason for having Vista, the shiny effects in Aero. I think the whole situation is quite funny.

Paint Crashed?!?

2007-02-26T09:36:00.000-04:00

Well, a friend of a friend of mine has Windows Vista installed on their computer, and Windows Paint crashed the entire system. Paint program - what, since Windows 3.1, has been the program you let little kids play with so that they can't hurt anything. Paint crashed the entire computer. INSANE. I'm not getting Vista.

FREE STUFF!

2007-02-24T18:51:00.000-04:00

Readers of Let's Call it Bob, you may never say that this blog isn't worth reading (if you live nearby and happen to like grapefruit juice) - That's right, grapefruit juice. It all started earlier this week when I was making a run to the grocery store for a few things, including orange juice. I saw grapefruit juice there, and decided to try something new. Well, I decided I don't like it so well (it is somewhat bitter*), and so now have decided to put on a contest! Yay! Fun! First person that comments on this article and asks for it can have the rest of the grapefruit juice absolutely FREE!** Anyway, this is a limited time offer, so apply now!

* By somewhat bitter, I mean extremely bitter
** Transportation/shipping to be arranged by the winner

Please tell me this is a typo ....

2007-02-24T00:42:00.000-04:00

Please tell me this piece of an article about flash memory has a typo:

"If you look at the market, prices have dropped about 50 percent," said Niebel. "You could get an 8GB [memory chip] for $10 in December. Now you're getting it for $5.

I personally think that they left a zero off each of the dollar amounts - that would put the wholesale memory prices at a more reasonable level, considering the prices of flash-based products. If that's not a typo ... wow are we all getting ripped off.

Anglican-Catholic Merger Proposed

2007-02-19T23:30:00.000-04:00

Interesting - I always thought the Anglican church was very Catholic anyway - now there's a proposal to merge the two (although it is admittedly unlikely that it will be accepted). Neat to see if anything comes of this - more interdenominational communication is always good.

Random

2007-02-15T22:46:00.000-04:00

Here's just a fairly interesting (I thought) article on IHT.com about plastic deck chairs. Kinda random, but I thought it was neat.

Is he wrong?

2007-02-13T23:09:00.000-04:00

I was reading this story on IHT.com about a young-Earth creationist getting a paleontology doctorate. Now, he wrote his doctoral thesis using a conventional geologic model, but there was still debate over whether he should get the degree, seeing as he disagrees with "conventional" paleontology. My question is, "Is he wrong?" - could it be possible that his alternate paradigm (in his terms) is the correct one - his own professors state that he was a good student, obviously knowing enough about geology to merit his degree. Now, could a sharp geology student hold beliefs that contradicted the science he was practising? Does this not suggest that a young-Earth geological model is at least plausible? I'm not saying it can be proved correct, but should it be dismissed out of hand? My bias on the matter is obvious, but I'm going to leave the question open. Peace.

Editor's Note: Looking at the labels for this post ... that's a controversial mix ...

Next Windows in '09 ... yeah ... [UPDATED]

2007-02-11T01:02:00.000-04:00

Well, apparently the target ship date for the next version of Windows is sometime in 2009. Yeah ... right. Microsoft says they're working on something unspecified but major. My crystal ball says - a minor upgrade from Vista - at most a Windows 95 to Windows 98 type of thing - incremental improvements, nothing major, hopefully some changes to the UI - I really don't like Vista's - to much flash and too little substance.

--Editor's Note: Oops - forgot the link for the original story While I'm editing - I told you so - Microsoft is retracting its statement, coverage here.

A Quantum Computer? And from Canada - Interesting

2007-02-10T16:43:00.000-04:00

A Canadian company, D-Wave claims to have created a working quantum computer. Interesting. Seems unlikely, but it would be cool if it was true - especially because its Canadian. If its true, then there'll be a lot of interesting work around when I finish my degree.

Two weird things

2007-01-27T01:36:00.000-04:00

One: I was watching TV this evening, and I thought I saw something that shouldn't happen - it was the middle of the ad segment, and there was one start, then flash to a Roger's ad. I thought I heard the word StarChoice - now, just to go into tinfoil hat mode for a second, it almost seemed as if Roger's (who does our cable) had found their competitor's ad, and replaced it with one of their own ... just seemed a bit weird, and likely illegal (though highly implausible)

Two: While doing some web browsing, I set one finger on the scrolling area of my laptop touchpad, and put the other in the normal mouse movement place in the center. Funny thing is, if I held my finger in the scrolling area steady, moving the finger in the center would scroll the page - its either a bug or a weird feature, but its kind of cool either way.