“The problem is TransFair can’t limit the usage of ‘Fairly Traded.’ They can & rightfully do frown upon...” 
“Just for your information “Fairly Traded” and “Fairly Traded Certified” are two different things....” 
“Bevans, I think you need this plugin http://wordpress.org/extend/pl ugins/time-machine/ It lets you do hourly.” “First off, I love you and your plugin, it’s been a huge time saver. I’m using it on 5 blogs now! 
I have two...” 
“you don’t have a clue unless you’ve went through it or know some one who has.My daughter was 7 of age when she...” Earlier this week, Richard Colvin dropped a political bomb, suggesting that his reports of torture had been ignored by the Conservative government. The respected diplomat said:
Richard Colvin testifying before the Special Committee on the Canadian Mission in Afghanistan
As I learned more about our detainee practices, I came to a conclusion they were contrary to Canada’s values, contrary to Canada’s interests, contrary to Canada’s official policies and also contrary to international law. That is, they were un-Canadian, counterproductive and probably illegal.
[...]
According to a very authoritative source, many of the Afghans we detained had no connection to insurgency whatsoever
The allegation is serious. According to his testimony to the Special Committee on the Canadian Mission in Afghanistan, Canadian soldiers routinely handed over detainees to Afghan authorities, who were then routinely tortured. During 2006 and 2007, Colvin produced over 17 reports telling higher-ups that that abuse was happening. Initially, his reports were ignored. Then he was told not to put things on paper.
He compared Canada’s performance with that of the British and Dutch, whose military took many fewer prisoners while operating in equally dangerous environments. British and Dutch militaries reported each hand-over to their parliaments, and monitored the prisoners’ condition in Afghan prisons. Canada did no such thing, citing security concerns.
Our military went so far as to ignore the Red Cross for three months when the NGO tried to inform our mission in Afghanistan that our detainees were suffering torture.
Initially, government lawyers attempted to prevent Colvin from speaking in front of the Committee. Since his allegations, Peter MacKay has called Colvin a Taliban stooge: nothing short of hearsay, second- or third-hand information, or that which came directly from the Taliban
and blamed the Liberals. The federal government has refused to pay Colvin’s legal bills, even though he is a whistle-blower.
This is not my Canada. This is not what Canada means. We are better than this.
We are the country that invented peace keeping. Our country is built on peaceful compromise between the colonies of two warring empires. We have never needed a revolution to clean our government. Our country was born democratic. We export human rights. Or so I want to believe.
Canadian soldier tortures Somali Shidane Arone in 1993.
I hope not.
A couple of weeks back I saw a guy with a map of the world tattooed onto his upper back. The first thing I thought was “Mercator projection? What a douche!” Then I wondered why someone would do that. In a recent conversation about tattoos, I brought the guy’s tattoo up:
I saw a guy with a map of the world on his back.
I had to explain that it didn’t cover the entire back, it was just on one side:
I saw a guy with a map of the world on his shoulder.
And then I got it:
I saw a guy with a map of the world on his shoulder.
It only took me a week or two to get it.
City Council will apparently be voting on the Lansdowne Live proposal on Monday. As time has gone on, my out-and-out opposition to the OSEG proposal has tempered from “the proposed plan is terrible, and should be stopped” to “the proposed plan is mediocre, lacking any kind of vision.” Perhaps it was the public consultations that didn’t consult the public. Or maybe it’s the reports that most of Council supports the OSEG proposal.
In any case, here’s hoping that our municipal government puts the Lansdowne Live proposal on ice and runs an open design competition. If OSEG is the best the world has to offer, let’s do it. Otherwise, let’s go with a plan that involves some public space, and perhaps even a few sports fields for Ottawans.
On the off chance our councilors are still listening to what their constituents have to say, I sent the following with letsgetitright.ca.
Please vote against the Lansdowne Live proposal.
The OSEG proposal is unimaginative and would add little to Ottawa’s public life. The plan shown during consultations provides no public space, nothing to attract residents outside of shopping, fewer sports facilities than are at Lansdowne presently, and is financially predicated on the success of a CFL team. Lansdowne must be redeveloped, but the new facility should be something that all Ottawans can enjoy, not just CFL fans and up-market shoppers.
Instead of taking the first proposal to come along, Council should reopen the design competition and choose the best proposal on offer. Please vote against the Lansdowne Live proposal.
Update: One of the Councillors actually responded. Alex Cullen (or one of his minions) wrote back:
Thank you for this – I share your views.
[...]
No matter what corporate confidentiality disclaimer may appear below please feel free to share this message as you wish.
Nice. I dig both the sentiment and the signature.
I’ve put together a Gnome applet that checks the balance of an online bank account at predetermined times and emails the balances to a selected email address. It’s unimaginatively titled “balancer“.
It’s (1) useful, and (2) scares the crap out of me.
The useful part is pretty self evident. I want to know my current balance so I can reign in my spending if I’m going overboard.
The scary part is equally self evident. balancer keeps bank credentials on the user’s computer. That’s a terrible idea. An attacker who wants to make some cash just has to trawl the secrets stored in the GnomeKeyring to get access to the user’s life savings. In theory, GnomeKeyring could be secure-ish, if it kept all of its secrets on a portion of the disk hidden from users and blocked access on too many failed access attempts. But it doesn’t seem to. It looks like it keeps secrets in ~/.gnome2/keyrings. If an attacker can subvert an app owned by the user, then they can read ~/.gnome2/keyrings/balancer.credentials.keyring and pass the file offsite for an offline dictionary attack. Eep!
On top of that, GnomeKeyring differentiates between apps based on the path to the app binary. I guess this works for native applications, but it breaks when the app runs in a virtual machine. My app, balancer, is written in Python. After I run it, other Python apps are able to dig into the GnomeKeyring without the user being prompted for a password. Noes!
It’s funny. I tried Wesabe, and had no problem putting myself at the same risk balancer would inflict on me. Even though the Wesabe client has the same security problems, I put them out of my head because someone else wrote the code. But I’m having a hard time doing that with something I wrote.
A couple of years back I wrote a javascript version of a quasi-diagnostic test used to help diagnose Asperger syndrome. I wrote it for a lark: I was working with peeps that were socially awkward (like me), and I wanted to play with javascript. I stuck it on this blog and forgot about it.
Today I noticed a link from Common Sense Atheism pissing on some god-botherer’s ebook. It turns out that my AQ test has been tramping around the intertubes and is now moonlighting in theist/freethinker debates.
The apple falls close to the tree.
