Giving Thanks

Well it's Thanksgiving in the States and even though I am no longer living down there I still think of home and family on this day. I have so much to give thanks for, I am truly blessed. My children are all healthy and heading in the right general direction. My parents are in a new home that they are happy with, thanks to my brothers and sisters-in-law. And of course the ones closest to me who make me thankful to be here in Canada.

And now we are awaiting the birth of our second child together. A new life is always reason to give thanks. We have a fairly good idea as to the sex of this baby, but respecting my mother's wish not to know (she's old fashioned that way), I will not reveal that piece of information at this time. It certainly helps to know this when trying to pick potential names though.

We gave grandma the opportunity to break the news to all of the Western Landi, a task she lives for. So this Thanksgiving should be a little more special for all due to this special little one.

Children are the only miracles that we humans are able to perform.

Canning the spam

I have established a multilayered approach to keeping my spam in line.

Firstly I use my ISP email address in all situations where addresses are likely to be harvested. This gives me an initial filtering point as well as lets me take advantage of my ISP's Yahoo based spam blocking and tagging. I reserve my .Mac email address for friends and relatives.

Next Apple's Mail program applies its teachable filter to put "junk" mail in it's own folder. Then what got past the Yahoo filters is re-directed to my gmail account for later review. Re-directing is not the same as forwarding in that a reply from a re-directed email will go to the original sender not to the re-directer. This setup lets me quickly review my inbox to delete anything that doesn't look important, knowing that a copy is over on gmail if I need it.

I then review my junk folder when I get the chance. There is a lot of non-junk in my junk folder, emails that I might have requested or expect to receive regularly but that I don't need to keep. This establishes a natural order to the lives of my mail messages. If I see something slightly interesting in the junk but can't bring myself to drag it out to the inbox then it just slowly sinks into the mire and is gone in a week. This keeps me from holding on to those "might be useful" messages that never are.

Apple's .Mac mail system has a new alias feature that I will have to try. Its purpose is to give you the ability to create and dispose of email aliases frequently enough to prevent abuse from spammers. With up to five aliases, you could also determine exactly which sites are more likely to leave your address out where it might be grabbed.

What's a lyrix?

As you might have noticed I have posted the lyrics to a few songs here. This came about from my walking to work. I walk one hour each way listening to 2500 of my favourite songs. If you have heard AAC encoded songs then you know that everything is very clear, especially the lyrics. There are songs that I have been listening to for 30 years and only now really heard the lyrics!

In other cases I knew the lyrics but I had never really "heard" them. The in-ear intimacy of the iPod combined with the clear rendering has renewed my interest in some of these tunes.

Anyway, I decided to list select lyrics here along with a link to where you can pick up a copy for yourself. They are mostly selected for the actual words, but sometimes it's just the tune and occasionally it's just a sample from a group whose music really moves me.

Cheers!

MSPatents

Continuing my rant from yesterday...

I can almost hear the conversation between Gates, Ballmer and their newly hired Patent Lawyer:

PL: So guys, what innovations have we got to patent?
Steve: Well, there's was MS-DOS...
Bill: No wait that was just a copy of CP/M and besides we bought it...
Steve: A graphical user interface?...
Bill: No, no we copied that from Apple... hmmm
Steve: Well there's always Bill's BASIC language interpreter, I know he wrote that...
Bill: Yeah! We took a great simple learning language and made it practically incomprehensible, er, I mean we extended it with new and useful features!
Steve: Let's see, how about one of those object oriented hacks we crammed in?
Bill: The IS operator?
Steve: No, there's almost definitely prior art on that one.
Bill: How about IS NOT?
Steve: Cool! We're in!
PL: All that money, all that time... this is the best you can come up with?

Say it IS NOT so!

So here I am reading through an excellent article in The Register describing Microsoft's strategy to make Open Source software illegal and I come across this... Microsoft has applied for a patent on the IS NOT operator! Quoting from the patent application:

The invention relates to programming languages and in particular to an operator within a language that evaluates to "True" when two operands point to different locations in memory.

Hello?

It seems that the patent lawyer who built IBM's patent portfolio into a billion dollar business now works at Microsoft and is attempting to repeat his success there. Unfortunately for Microsoft, there's a big difference between IBM's intellectual property stash and their own. For one thing IBM's patents are mostly hardware oriented and for another they are the result of years of investment in real research not just clever word games.

I run, therefore I am

According to this article man was not only meant to run, it helped determine the size of his brain and his reproductive success.

Although walking upright first set early human ancestors apart from their ape cousins, the scientists write, it may have been the ability to run long distances with springy step over the African savanna that influenced the transition to today's human body form.

I don't really have a "runner's body", yet for my entire adult life I have found that, for me, a successful weight management regime must include running. The more I run the better shape I'm in.

I am currently walking to and from work for a total of 50 km per week. Yet even this distance does not yield the same results as jogging 30 km per week. The walking is an attempt to get me back into a shape that will allow me to run again on a regular basis.

All leading up to the Ottawa marathon next May.

lyrix 5 · Superman's Dead

Do you worry that you're not liked
How long till you break
You're happy cause you smile
But how much can you fake
An ordinary boy, an ordinary name
But ordinary's just not good enough today

Alone I'm thinking
Why is superman dead
Is it in my head
We'll just laugh instead
You worry about the weather and
Whether or not you should hate

Are you worried about your faith
Kneel down and obey
You're happy you're in love
You need someone to hate
An ordinary girl, an ordinary waist
But ordinary's just not good enough today

© Our Lady Peace

Training days over

Well the product training class I was teaching this week are over now. It was extra challenging this time because we were using both of our client products, our just released .Net "smart client" and java applet based "open client". Dot Net is still pretty new for this type of product (I think we are one of the first commercial products using it at this time) but it certainly is secure.

Nobody can accuse Microsoft of not taking security seriously with their Dot Net based technologies. Quite a turn around. Almost too secure if that's possible.

Lots of fun training people but it'll be good to get back to my on-going professional services projects.

lyrix 4 · Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys

If you had just a minute to breathe
And they granted you one final wish
Would you ask for something like another chance
Or something similar as this
Don't worry too much, it'll happen to you
As sure as your sorrows or joys

And the thing that disturbs you is only the sound
Of the low spark of high-heeled boys

The percentage you're paying is too high-priced
While you're living beyond all your means
And the man in the suit has just bought a new car
From the profit he's made on your dreams
But today you just read that the man was shot dead
By a gun that didn't make any noise
But it wasn't the bullet that laid him to rest
Was the low spark of high-heeled boys

© Traffic

The Two Towers x 2

Getting ready for training to be given on Monday.
All new material needed for an all new product.
Sitting in front of the computer all day.

Lucky me... The Two Towers is playing on TMN today.

Twice!

All night long

So I stayed up all night at the office last night. I had a few projects that I had gotten behind on and had put people off one too many times, so I went into "I'm not going home until I finish this" mode. I seem to reach this point once or twice a year, last time I was preparing a presentation for a user conference. This time it was a SQL statement that had gone from simple to impossible very quickly.

It's real quiet at the office late at night. The two main annoyances are the lack of air circulation and the fact that from 8pm until 7am the lights go off ever hour. On the plus side, it does force you to get up and walk around at regular intervals.

The jury is still out on the effectiveness of this practice as there is inevitably a certain loss of productivity in the days that follow. But it does usually payoff by clearing out the inbox and allowing me a little breathing room going forward.

The Incredibles

Tate, Suz and I went to see The Incredibles last night. What a great movie. Very different than Finding Nemo (which Tate watches weekly) but the same feel as The Iron Giant which is one of Brad Bird's earlier animated features. Adults will be just as entertained as children, if not more.

In fact, I would also compare it to Spider-Man 2, which is one of my favourite comic book based movies. Non-stop action with a good base storyline is always a winning formula.

The Boundin' short that was shown before the feature was also very funny. Can Pixar do no wrong?

lyrix 3 · Evelyn A Modified Dog

Evelyn, a modified dog
Viewed the quivering fringe of a special doily
Draped across the piano, with some surprise

In the darkened room
Where the chairs dismayed
And the horrible curtains
Muffled the rain
She could hardly believe her eyes

A curious breeze
A garlic breath
Which sounded like a snore
Somewhere near the Steinway (or even from within)
Had caused the doily fringe to waft and tremble in the gloom

Evelyn, a dog, having undergone
Further modification
Pondered the significance of short-person behavior
In pedal-depressed panchromatic resonance
And other highly ambient domains

Arf she said

© Frank Zappa

Pashua

Pashua is a tool for creating native Aqua dialog windows for Perl, PHP, Tcl, Python, Ruby, Rexx and shell scripts as well as AppleScript. The GUI elements which can be used for such dialogs include text input fields, checkboxes, radiobuttons, combo boxes, popup menus or buttons.

I stumbled across this very cool tool for OSX. It works with virtually any scripting language, even shell scripts. While it's not necessarily meant for production code (although it may be sufficient in many cases), it is ideal for scripting solutions.

One of scripting's weaknesses is the user interface, scripts are meant to get things done, not be pretty. As a rule good scripters tend to be lousy UI designers. They focus on process and functionality and have little patience with those who fear the command line.

OSX promises the ease of a Mac coupled with the power of Unix, Pashua helps fulfill that promise. It is the perfect addition to any OSX scripter's toolkit.

And take a look at Carsten's PipeAlert for a great way to capture your script's output in a dialog.

Coming to Canada

From The Register article Canada offers refuge to distraught Democrats:

The big question for the Democratic Party seems to be not who will be its next presidential candidate, but who will be left to vote for her - because by the time Hillary Clinton even gets a sniff of the ballot box, 98 per cent of her voter base will be on skidoos en route to their three-year-old* kid's first seal-clubbing adventure weekend. ®

*Estimated age at next US presidential election based on departure for Canada immediately after reading this article, short courtship followed by marriage, conception and normal nine-month term.

So the democrats are coming, eh?

It's funny, because one of the reasons I moved Canada in 1995 was due to the strong sense of traditional family values. Maybe I'm more liberal than I thought!? The last US presidential candidate I voted for was Ross Perot (couldn't stand the other two) and 4 years before that, the libertarian candidate (I was a registered libertarian in those days).

Anyway, I wouldn't necessarily label Canadians "liberal", from my experience they just live their lives in a sensibly caring manner.

More fun.

Black and White

On this date in the midst of the Great War, my father was born. I can only imagine what it must have been like to grow up in that era. Before TV, before Hitler, before penicillin. Life was harder and simpler. Looking back, it seems that things were more black and white. It may have been this moral clarity that helped make him the man that he is today. While he has always enjoyed learning and been open to new ideas, he knows what is right and what is wrong... he is a man of few words.

Over forty years later I was born. I grew up during the decades of social change and self discovery. I was taught right and wrong through words and by example. When I came of age, I sailed from home on my black and white ship, into a sea of grey... I talk too much.

lyrix 2 · Shoehorn with Teeth

He wants a shoehorn, the kind with teeth
People should get beat up for stating their beliefs
He wants a shoehorn, the kind with teeth
Because he knows there's no such thing

He asks a girl
If they can both sit in a chair
But he doesn't get nervous
She's not really there

He wants a shoehorn, the kind with teeth
Because he knows there's no such thing

Tour the world in a heavy metal band
But they run out of gas
The plane can never land

© They Might Be Giants

Government Data Security

With studies like this one coming out, it's a wonder to me that governments large and small haven't mandated that the operating system on the desktops and servers in government offices must be evenly split between Windows, Linux and OSX.

Safety through diversity.

lyrix 1 · The Boxer

I am just a poor boy
Though my story's seldom told
I have squandered my resistance
For a pocketful of mumbles such are promises
All lies and jests
Still a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest

© Simon and Garfunkel