Monthly Archives: January 2008

Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet

By Mack D. Male ·

International Week 2008 Tonight I attended a lecture as part of International Week 2008 on campus at the University of Alberta. The speaker was Jeffrey Sachs, who is probably best known as the Director of the UN Millennium Project. Unfortunately he was called away to a special meeting in Africa with Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and so he sent a pre-recorded video message instead.

His talk was very high-level and lacking in specifics. I suppose the idea is that you attend the lecture to whet your appetite, then you buy his new book (which, btw, he mentioned at least a half dozen times). All joking aside, I probably will buy it. I read his book The End of Poverty and thoroughly enjoyed it. I think his message is really important, and he’s great at delivering it.

Because Sachs could not attend, the organizers invited two other guests to make remarks and answer questions. One was Andrew Nikiforuk, a Calgary-based journalist, and the other was Dr. Rick Hyndman, Senior Policy Advisor for the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.

Nikiforuk presented after the Sachs video, and he delivered a great presentation with just some notes to refer to. Hyndman presented last, and he had a laptop with some PPT slides. There must be a law somewhere that if you’ve got two presenters and one uses slides, the person with the slides invariably has the crappier presentation! It just doesn’t flow as well, nor does it sound as convincing.

That said, Hyndman more than redeemed himself in the Q&A session, during which he was pretty much attacked. One guy who lined up to ask a question was wearing a bright green t-shirt with "Greenpeace" emblazoned on the front – how would you expect him to treat a representative of the oil companies!

The event tonight wasn’t long enough to delve into any details, but it definitely was an opportunity to think about some of the issues that Sachs is so passionate about.

Visit the U of A’s International Week 2008 website for more information.

Community Server to WordPress: Part 2

By Mack D. Male ·

WordPress Okay, time for another update on the blog migration. I stopped keeping track of hours, but I would guess I’ve spent about 9 hours or so on it thus far. Part of that time is for the theme though, and I tend to take quite a while working on those.

Here’s what I’ve accomplished since part 1:

  • Discovered that extracting the tags from existing posts was harder than I first thought! That’s because I’ve used three or four different styles for including tags over the years, so I had to update the code to take that into account.
  • Same problem affected the “Read” link at the bottom of a post.
  • Ran into a bunch of crap data problems in Community Server, mainly around trackbacks and and spam comments. For some reason they were appearing to me as posts. I solved the problem by deleting them in the source where appropriate, and accounting for them in the code otherwise.
  • Another crap data issue – one post had four entries!
  • Implemented and tested the redirection code necessary so that existing links will continue to work. I think this part is really interesting because I’ve basically got PHP and ASP.NET running in the same application.
  • Spent some time working on the theme, which you can see at the test blog. It looks more or less the same as this theme, but with some nice improvements.
  • Also spent some time looking into plugins and activated a few.

After some trial and error, I was finally able to import all the content from Community Server to WordPress successfully. Yay!

I didn’t start tagging posts until early 2005, so there’s around 400 or so that aren’t tagged, but even still I think the tag cloud on the test blog is really interesting. Looks like I blog about Microsoft quite a bit! Maybe even more interesting is the fact that I’ve used 1843 different tags.

So I guess I’m about ready to make the switch. Just a few more “clean up” things I need to do (like delete more spam comments). I think I’m going to replace my website with another WordPress installation too, but that shouldn’t take long. The current site is really old, based on ugly code, and it’s mostly out-of-date because updating the pages is so difficult. I think WP will work nicely (plus I can use the same theme).

I’d say the migration is going much more smoothly than I anticipated!

Tuition is not the problem, books are!

By Mack D. Male ·

Post Image On Friday, the Board of Governors at the University of Alberta approved a 4.6% increase in tuition fees. That translates to an extra $215.55 for general arts and science students. Of course the decision made the local news and predictably the segments focused on the extra burden this places on students.

But more than teaching or deferred maintenance, it was the question of affordability that concerned Students’ Union President Michael Janz.

Janz stressed that every time fees are increased, the debt loads that students incur go up, as do the chances that someone will not apply to the U of A because they see it as financially unfeasible.

I mean, what do you expect the SU President to say? Of course he’s got to side with students on the issue, that’s his job.

I think the focus should not be on tuition, however. Looking back on my time at the university, I think the problem are textbooks. Sure tuition is expensive and I am repaying student loans now, but it was textbooks that were the real killer.

In my last two years, I avoided purchasing textbooks whenever possible. The idea of spending $175 for a 150 page book just drove me nuts. Especially since most of the content in the books can be found elsewhere. The other thing that sucks is when a professor requires the latest edition of a textbook, meaning students cannot purchase the less expensive old editions.

There’s no reason to force students to purchase ridiculously expensive textbooks. Hell, there’s pretty much no reason to have physical textbooks at all! Just offer digital versions instead. Or incorporate free materials.

I think getting rid of the expensive textbooks would help students far more than trying to prevent tuition increases.

Read: The Gateway

Freezing Cold & Lots of Snow

By Mack D. Male ·

Temperatures have been icy cold today here in Edmonton. When I went to work it was minus 30, with a wind chill of minus 46. And it got worse during the day! I had to shovel my way from the house to my car, thanks to the crazy snow drifts.

This graph shows the temperature here in Edmonton since midnight. Nasty isn’t it?

The Edmonton Journal is reporting that there were 106 crashes causing property damage today. There were only 4 collisions causing injury however, compared with 8 a week ago.

109th Street Outside the office Where I usually park

We weren’t the only ones experiencing the cold today. Calgary hit minus 49 with the wind chill this morning, and indeed most of Alberta experienced similar temperatures. I heard that St. Albert was minus 62 with the wind chill this morning. Even Yellowknife, where my parents live, was colder than normal today with temperatures of around minus 40 and closer to minus 50 with the wind chill.

I’m working from home tomorrow. It took forever to get to work today, and when I did I almost got stuck! My co-workers ended up turning around and going home. I don’t expect conditions will improve much overnight. City officials claim it’ll be more of the same until later this week. For everyone using transit, officials say buses are running up to 30 minutes late, which means prepare for an hour. Express buses are making more stops than normal, however. Garbage collection is also going to be delayed, apparently.

For everyone in the Edmonton area, here are some sites you may want to keep an eye on:

Stay warm and drive safe!

Notes for 1/27/2008

By Mack D. Male ·

Here are my weekly notes:

Community Server to WordPress: Part 1

By Mack D. Male ·

Post Image Back in July I mentioned that I wanted to switch to WordPress. Obviously I haven’t completed that yet, but I have started on it! So far I’ve spent about three and a half hours on the project, and it’s going well. You can see my test blog here.

It’s a difficult migration, for a number of reasons. Firstly, I am on Community Server 1.1 which has been pretty much abandoned. I have no desire to upgrade to a newer version – I’m trying to get rid of CS, after all. Secondly, I want to take advantage of the built-in tags that WordPress 2.3 has, among other things. In my current blog, the tags are actually part of the post content. Thirdly, I don’t want any links to break! So there’s a number of things to worry about.

Here’s what I’ve done so far:

  • Installed a test instance of WordPress 2.3.2.
  • Created a solution in Visual Studio 2008 with three projects: a WordPress data access layer (DAL), a Community Server DAL, and a command line app.
  • Configured SubSonic to automatically generate the two DALs.
  • Wrote some static functions to: extract the tags from my existing posts, remove the footer and reformat the link I sometimes have there, generate a slug for WordPress posts (the words in the link), and build the existing and new URLs for a post.
  • Started implementing the command line app to read a post from CS, apply all of the necessary transformations with the static functions, and then add it to WordPress.

For the most part it’s working well! I’m still tweaking the code a bit to deal with oddball posts, but it’s more or less ready to go. You can see on the test blog that I’ve started testing the code. I think the actual migration will take quite a while, considering I have almost 2000 posts and 5000 comments.

After the migration, I still need to work on a theme, and I need to ensure all the links are redirecting correctly. So there’s quite a bit of work to do, but I think the hardest stuff is out of the way. My goal is to have it all rockin and rollin by Northern Voice.

The R Word

By Mack D. Male ·

Post Image Every morning on the way to work I listen to podcasts. Usually I listen to the NYTimes Front Page, and BBC’s Global News. Lately, both have been talking quite a bit about "the R word". So has the rest of the press (see the R-word index). I’m no economist, but it seems to me that the USA is not bracing for a recession, they’re already in one. And that in turn has affected the rest of the world.

The media coverage of the recession has understandably increased this week, with world financial leaders meeting in Davos for the annual World Economic Forum. A couple quotes from those leaders in this article at the International Herald Tribute caught my eye:

George Soros, the financier who made a fortune betting against the pound, went so far Wednesday as to say that the downturn would put an end to the long status of the dollar as the world’s default currency.

"The current crisis is not only the bust that follows the housing boom," Soros said. "It’s basically the end of a 60-year period of continuing credit expansion based on the dollar as the reserve currency."

And on the completely opposite end of the spectrum:

Not everybody was grim. John Snow, the former Treasury Secretary and chairman of Cerberus Capital Management, said that if the United States slipped into recession, it would be "short and shallow."

"That’s been the pattern of recessions in the U.S., and there’s a reason for it," he said in an interview. "There is an inherent resilience in the U.S. economy. We’re already seeing an adjustment."

So which is it? Is the United States losing its status as the world’s top economy, the so-called "default" currency? Or is this just a temporary blip that won’t shake things up too much, the normal ebb and flow of the markets?

My money is on the latter. The economy follows a pattern of expansion and contraction, and perhaps it is time for another contraction. And Snow is right, with the US at least, periods of contraction are historically much shorter than periods of expansion.

You can read more about recession at Wikipedia.

Read: I.H.T.

Use Twitter for Breaking News

By Mack D. Male ·

Post Image Are you a news junkie? Do you want to be the first to know about things? Look no further than Twitter. Reliability problems aside, it really is the best place to get the latest, breaking news. When the primaries are on in the US, I find out who wins via Twitter, as soon as they are projected. Today I found out about Heath Ledger right away. Increasingly I get my news via Twitter.

The best part about Twitter is that it can follow you anywhere! You can view it on the web, on your mobile Internet device (like the iPod touch), over instant messaging using Google Talk, or on your mobile phone via SMS.

Here are a few Twitter accounts you should consider following for all news:

  • nytimes – the latest headlines from the New York Times
  • bbcworld – the latest headlines from BBC World News
  • cbcnews – the latest headlines from CBC News
  • cnn – the latest headlines from CNN
  • cnnbrk – breaking news only from CNN

In addition to the above, I’ve found the following accounts to be useful for news about the US Election:

  • politics – lots of political news, as you’d expect
  • davewiner – he’s really quick at posting when the networks declare a winner
  • johnedwards – the official Twitter of John Edwards
  • barackobama – the official Twitter of Barack Obama
  • ronpaul2008 – the official Twitter of Ron Paul

Also useful is the Politweets site, which lists the latest messages mentioning the candidates across all Twitter users.

Enjoy!

REVIEW: Brother HL-4070CDW Color Laser Printer

By Mack D. Male ·

Wireless!Like Tris Hussey, I received a comic from Darren Barefoot back in November with an offer to review a new Brother color laser printer. Unlike Tris, I am really late with my review! In any case, I jumped at the chance and have had the printer for a couple months now.

There were a few options to choose from (all part of the new color laser lineup) but it was an easy decision for me – the Brother HL-4070CDW has wireless connectivity! So that’s the one I received.

My first impression was "wow, where the heck am I going to put that?" The printer is gigantic, as is the box it came in. We’re talking 75 pounds of printer. It was immediately clear that this is a business printer, not a consumer one. It has been sitting on my kitchen table ever since. But because it’s wireless, I have been using it!

Setup took me quite a while, but it was no fault of the printer. I didn’t have a network cable long enough to go from the kitchen table to the router, nor did I have long enough USB or parallel cables (isn’t that odd, that a fancy new printer with wireless still has a parallel port? because it’s for "business" I guess). And while I have the popular Linksys WRT54G Wireless-G router, it’s one of the earliest revisions, so it doesn’t have the "SecureEasySetup" feature. That left me with some complicated wireless notebook setup routine, or entering the details manually via the LCD and buttons on the printer itself. I opted for the latter, and eventually got it working. I think an improvement would be some sort of USB-key support, where the installer on my computer would copy something to a USB-key that I could plug into the printer for setup.

LCD Information Panel The Printer The gigantic box it came in Parallel ports? Seriously?

I despise installing printer software, but the setup for this printer was pretty painless actually. No problems, and it didn’t install a bunch of unwanted crap. I think I’ve had a few too many horrible experiences with HP software, and that has left a bad taste. Fortunately Brother decided to keep it simple.

Oh yeah I had to stick in the toner cartridges too, but that was really easy. New printers these days are pretty idiot-proof with the labels and tape that must be removed, and the cartridges themselves clicked nicely into place. They sent me the standard yield cartridges which can print 2500 black and white copies, and 1500 color. The high yield cartridges bump that up to 5000 black and white, 4000 color.

Inside the front Now for the actual printing! Bottom line – the quality is superb. The color pages I have printed look wonderful, with really sharp, bright colors. The black and white pages are good too, nice and crisp. My main complaint applies to all laser printers – I hate how the pages are curved! Because of the heat used during the printing, the pages don’t really lie flat, they curve with the shape of the printer. Not a deal-breaker, but you don’t have that problem with an inkjet. I didn’t do an official timing, but printing black and white pages full of text seems pretty close to the advertised 21 pages per minute.

I’ve used laser printers before, and there’s one problem I’ve always had – paper jams! That’s all I can remember about the laser printers of the past. Fortunately, I haven’t had any paper jams with this printer. I have even stuck thick paper (like the greeting card quality) on top of normal paper in the tray without any problems.

How about the wireless? No surprise here – I absolutely love the ability to print wirelessly! It’s just so useful. Whenever I can cut a cord I will. It gives you more flexibility about where you can put the printer too. The printer has a sleep mode, which it goes into after a period of inactivity, but it wakes up when I send a job, even wirelessly (which I guess is obvious, but still seemed somewhat surprising for some reason).

As I said, this printer isn’t meant for the home user. It’s big, heavy, and expensive (MSRP $629.99 CDN). That said, it’s a wonderful printer for business users. Cartridges cost about $85 for standard yield, and $160 for high yield. That’s probably quite a bit more cost-effective than an inkjet. Business users who need to take advantage of the wireless capabilities should especially check this printer out. If I was doing a lot of color printing in an office setting, the Brother HL-4070CDW would definitely be on my list of printers to consider.

Notes for 1/20/2008

By Mack D. Male ·

Here are my weekly notes:

  • Last night Megan and I went to see Disney’s Beauty and the Beast at The Citadel. It was the very first night (a preview night, opening night is Tuesday) and while there were some technical difficulties, it was still a great show. It makes me want to crack out the old VHS and watch it! I especially enjoyed "Be Our Guest".
  • Went out to Violino for Annie’s Birthday on Friday night…it was yummy! Oh and the U of A president was dining a few tables away from us. Some photos are here.
  • I’ve been playing around with Buxfer this weekend, and I think it may be a winner! Buxfer is a personal finance app that helps you track your money. Just like Remember The Milk, I can access Buxfer in a variety of ways: on the web, via email, via Twitter, and on the iPhone/iPod touch. I think that’s what makes it extremely useful for me. Even better is this – I submitted a suggestion this afternoon, and received a personalized response a few hours later. Awesome customer service!
  • Speaking of iPod/iPhone, you’ve gotta check this site out. It lets you use a custom image for adding bookmarks to the home screen in 1.1.3. Hat tip to darylcognito.
  • Tried Fatburger on Tuesday evening. I noticed it in South Edmonton Common a few weeks ago and was curious. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t anything special either. Kinda cool how they call out the order like they do in Starbucks.
  • For the .NET developers in the crowd – I’ve been using SubSonic a lot lately, and I just love it. Rob Conery has two posts up sharing some of what’s coming in the next version.
  • Liveblogging of major events is becoming increasingly more common. Macworld was liveblogged by a ton of sites this past week. I guess it should be no surprise that people are developing software specifically for liveblogging, such as CoverItLive.

Some photos from the past week:

Fatburger Me with Stanley Sharon and I Annie!