repl.ca

I think this proves that Mike Smit is Big Brother. I do believe I heard him say that not voting was “doubleplusungood”. Also: everywhere you look, he’s looking back, so… Kudos for the online voting system, but I have to wonder about the choice of domain name. Surely vote.dsu.ca would have been more appropriate, and felt more official. One can only assume that Mike plans to make use of the powerful generic nature of his domain name to gather voting data from a variety of demographics, as he expands his system to elections in other student societies. »

GNOME 2.10 was released today. Yay us! I know I push Ubuntu a lot (sorry Phil, but that gentoo fiasco today was insane), but if push came to shove I’d be just as happy with someone running vanilla Debian, NLD, or Fedora. The GNOME desktop is the real beauty of these systems, mainly due to its strong focus on usability. Accessability, internationalization, and of course the community are also aspects of GNOME that matter, to me at least. »

The CEOS website is up and running (mostly) now. CEOS being the Conference on Engaging in Open Source, which will surely become Atlantic Canada’s most popular and relevant tech conference. Tell all your friends! As seen from the sponsors list, CEOS has some heavy hitters involved, but in the spirit of giving props where props is due, I must put out shoutz and greatz to that perennial blogophobe, Andrew Wong, chair of the conference. »

My, how the tables have turned. While Colin was setting his sights on gooey development on Sunday, I was playing with web application development. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been meaning to learn RoR, so I started this past weekend. I’m not going to comment on the poster child of Dal CS web development, PHP, because I’m certainly not in touch with the bleeding edge in that area. I will, however, say some things about RoR that really impressed me. »

Like a lot of kids earning their nerd stripes back in the day, I had played around with VMWare. Remember VMWare, that program that would let you run FreeBSD in Windows in Linux? Those were good times. Then there was Plex86, which was going to do the same thing, and be Free as well, only it never really got off the ground. Nowadays, I guess people still use VMWare, and there’s also qemu and User-mode Linux (used quite effectively at Linode. »

Coupons arrived in the mail from McDonald’s this week, including some discounts on big macs. It’s been several months and 20+ lbs since I ate a big mac, but my lord, they’re so tasty. And those fries… Cherie and I ate lunch there today; it was both delicious and discusting. You can feel the grease on your lips as you eat the fries, but they taste so good. I’m glad I’m too poor to eat there regularly. »

Well, it’s not so much of a rant, really. More of a suggestion. I did my taxes today on the parents’ winderz box, no problem. But the thing doesn’t even use System.Windows.Forms or MFC or whatever they call their widget toolkit; it seems like the quiken people are drawing custom widgets on a canvas. So, why is their software only available for windows? Why not use Java or Mono/.Net and draw your pretty custom widgets using the canvases in these technologies, or SWT or winforms, or, heaven forbid, seperate the logic from the presentation, and make GUIs for each platform using that platform’s widget set, and following that platform’s interface guidlines. »

As Karen observed, there are indeed no professors blogging on the planet. Maybe this is because they are unsure of what to blog about. If so, here is a list of blog post templates for professors to use: Today, a paper I wrote, entitled $foo, was published in journal $bar Star Wars is a good movie, because… I released a new version of project $baz today. You can download it from the usual places Dear blog, Singer fell asleep in class today. »

I had heard recently that Happy Birthday was copyrighted, but until today I didn’t know what exactly this meant. Thank the maker for Unhappy Birthday! Now I know how rampant copyright infringement is, and what I can do to help stop it. Yes, it’s satire. Too bad all of it is true. »

Finally, after being in the shop for a solid month, I got my laptop back today. Being a G3 iBook, it had suffered from the dreaded ibook logic board failure, and so the repair was covered by Apple, even though I hadn’t purchased the extended warranty AppleCare™ for it. This is the last straw. I’ve put up with plenty of crap from their hardware, but frankly, the worst part is that there’s only one lousy company that services Apple products in Halifax, and Apple doesn’t have their own repair depot in Canada anymore. »