Pie Palace

can be found here. Interestingly, it’s got government logos all over it. I guess this way they can say that they’re doing something to improve public transit options.

Google is finally rolling out a Linux desktop app. When I say “rolling out”, what I mean is, “creating a link to a portion of their website that doesn’t exist, making downloads impossible”. When I say “Linux desktop app”, what I mean is, “using a third-party compatability layer (Wine), many of the features of an existing desktop app become available”.

Forgive my cynicism. Google couldn’t have build their search engine without open source technology, but they aren’t giving much back to the world of open source (other than a couple of toolbars for Firefox). It would be nice if they ported their apps to the platform that has provided them with the basic infrastructure for their business.

Update: Jordan corrects my initial (uninformed) whining, noting that Google has contributed 225 patches to Wine to date. gawp points out that Google is running the Summer of Code project, which pays students to work on open source projects. It looks like I was plumb wrong with this post.

Stephen Harper is now apparently refusing to talk to the Parliamentry Press Corps, complaining that “[the] press gallery has taken the view they are going to be the opposition to the government”. I guess he’s forgotten that it’s the role of the press to question the direction of the government, not blindly repeat what they’re told.

Which is kind of funny, because I’ve never really thought of the Canadian media as being anything approaching critical.

There’s going to be another bus riders union meeting on Tuesday, May 30th:

CAN’T AFFORD THE FARE:
Ongoing Meetings and Discussion on the Prospects
for an Ottawa Bus Riders Union

================================
7:00pm
TUESDAY, May 30th, 2006
Ottawa District Labour Council Boardroom
5th Floor, 280 Metcalfe (at Gilmour)
Ottawa
FREE
================================

Groups and individuals interested in forming an Ottawa Bus or Transit Riders’ Union will meet to discuss the possibility of forming a local bus riders union to fight for the rights of transit users in our city. Everyone is invited to join the discussion and the fight.

This is part of an ongoing series of meetings intended to formulate the structure, principles and priorities of the Transit Riders’ Union.

The first meeting on May 10 began the discussion as to what problems exist with bus service in Ottawa, and possible solutions to those problems. It also allowed us to sketch some possible guidelines on which the bus riders’ union would be based:

 Strive to represent all bus riders
 To be an organization that is multi-lingual
 To organize in a way that opposses racism, sexism, classism, ableism, heterosexism and all other forms of oppression and domination.

And also some core demands:

 OC Transpo and City Council must be accountable and transparent.
 Accessibility
 Safe, reliable and affordable public transit
 Work to increase ridership
 Prioritize transit dependent people
 Environmentally friendly
 End OC transpo practices that are oppressive (End transit racism. End transit sexism.)

The priorities/agenda for the meeting on the 30th will be:

 Creating a basis of unity and mission statement for the BRU
 Formulating some initial demands
 Establishing what needs to be done in order to make the BRU work (research, outreach, actions, and so on)

Like I said before, I really do agree with their goals and their approach. But don’t talk about demands, oppression and words ending in -ism. This is 2006. Terminology has changed: speak in the positive, talk about working together with OC Transpo, and talk about shared goals. Being militant won’t get support. Being constructive will.

A nifty looking buyers guide for longboards. Looks like I might have paid a bit more for my board than I should have.

Schweet! I can delay death a little longer with a headlight for my skateboard. Pity the damn tail on my deck is long enough that it would cover the rear lights.

I really feel like I’ve earned a dose of frustration when I’ve spent half an hour trying to figure out why a pointer has gone wild, only to discover that the pointer is, in fact, completely valid (in the uninitialized sense), but that I’ve failed to check a return value two lines above the offending chunk of code (which explains why the pointer hasn’t been initialized). Then again, I should probably just initialize all of my pointers to some common value that would provide a hint as to their invalid nature.

Okay, I know this isn’t exactly earth-shattering news, but Green Party leadership candidate Elizabeth May has a blog.

She sounds pretty balanced. Her current top post does go into a bit of a blame rant, but that could be construed as laying blame at the feet of the guilty. The most noteworthy posting contains some ideas on what she would do if elected:

We would invite the best minds in the country, whether from universities or independent think tanks, or from non-government organizations, whether they are from the Green Party or not, to put forward and discuss the very most innovative and effective policies to achieve a better Canada. The purpose of these conferences is three fold:

• To keep the Green Party in the news with a higher profile before the next election;
  
• To develop excellent policies and ideas, “grist for the mill” for the Green Party platform development process; and
  
• To position the Green Party as the party of real content and substance, in contrast to the main parties where policies are increasingly devised by opinion polling and focus groups.

Those are all good things. But they don’t answer my two central concerns: would she like to see the Green Party as a one issue party, and her alleged my-way-or-the-highway leadership style.

The Green Party of Ontario is hosting its annual AGM and policy convention in Toronto on May 27th. Good for them, I say. But why did I get my first notification of this event on May 12th?

It’s annual. Can’t they plan far enough in advance to let me know about it earlier? Say in January? Or perhaps seven or eight months out? Get your act together!

Every time I make a revision to my thesis and chop some text out, I stick it into a LaTeX comment. After two cycles of revision with my advisor, I currently have 559 uncommented lines and 894 commented lines. That’s 5340 words of text that are usable, and 7033 words of text that will only ever be seen by me.

That hurts.