daylight savings time disasters averted… was there any real danger?

As most North Americans know, Daylight Saving Time came earlier this year due to the changes introduced by the US Energy Policy Act of 2005. My colleague Gabriel and I have probably cumulatively spent 80-100 hours on patching CBC.ca systems to handle this change, and so far (keep your fingers crossed!) nobody’s noticed a thing.

My personal view of DST, however, is that the whole thing is folly; and furthermore, attempts to justify the DST change as an energy conservation measure are ludicrous. In fact, you can listen to an interview right on CBC Radio’s The Current with Prof. Ryan Kellogg of the University of California at Berkeley, who’s done a study stating exactly that.

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Government of Canada to override CRTC on VoIP regulation

As many of my regular readers know, I’m an open-source VoIP hobbyist, and as such, I’m a "member" of the Toronto Asterisk Users’ Group (I use the quotations because the group does not have membership requirements nor is it a formal organization per se). One of the hot topics recently on the TAUG mailing list was the Government of Canada’s recent decision to override the CRTC‘s position that VoIP is a telephony service and should be regulated as such.

The CRTC has traditionally regulated telephone companies and set minimum pricing on services such as land lines and DSL so that the incumbent carriers like Bell Canada cannot use predatory pricing to drive non-incumbent firms out of business, only to raise those prices later when the marketplace has been clear-cut. Now that the government has proposed to override the commission, VoIP service will become a free-for-all, with hobbyist and startup VoIP providers like Unlimitel and AtlasVoice getting squeezed by the incumbents for large commercial deployments.

This is bad news for VoIP telephony in Canada and will greatly reduce consumer choice, except for those consumers, such as hobbyists, who are willing to take an "anything but Bell" attitude. The government’s actions in overriding the CRTC’s fair and thorough process aimed at protecting consumers is a blatant demonstration that it is pro-big-business to the exclusion of all other factors. (That process, by the way, arrived twice at the outcome that VoIP should be regulated like regular telephony, despite a Conservative government Privy Council Order which attempted to pressure them into reconsidering their original decision.)

It’s a shame that this particular issue is too esoteric for the mainstream press to cover, but I think it’s very much a bellwether for how the government plans to treat other emerging technology trends that threaten traditional big-business hegemony.

visiting the Canadian Clock Museum

Today I’m going to digress a bit from modern IT topics and talk about an aspect of turn-of-the-century IT that many of us have forgotten about: the venerable analog clock. It was less than 100 years ago that a wall-mounted, spring-driven, windup analog clock was still considered a major appliance. Salesmen used to go door-to-door and sell clocks; sometimes they would loan one to a household for a month to see how they liked it, and many times a household would find that they couldn’t do without it and would purchase it.

How do I know all of this? Because I recently visited the Canadian Clock Museum in my home town of Deep River, Ontario. Both Meredith & I expected to be underwhelmed, as many small-town museums are poorly-lit, haphazardly organized, and with little regard to proper museum cataloguing and preservation techniques. However, we were duly impressed with the clock museum, which has over 1000 artifacts, bootstrapped by more than 600 clocks from owner Allan Symons’ personal collection. The story goes that Allan retired from the local AECL research facility after 27 years, and once he hit 600 clocks his wife made him move the collection out of the basement, and so the museum was born.

The $5.00 admission fee includes a tour by Allan himself, which is well worth the money. Allan’s visibly passionate about the clocks that he has collected, preserved and/or restored, and it shows — he stayed over an hour past closing time to answer our questions and lead us through the museum. He has an intimate knowledge of clock machinery and clock history in Canada — he has an extensive collection of clocks from the now-defunct Western Clock (a/k/a Westclox) company based out of Peterborough, among other artifacts.

The museum also has a handful of other interesting artifacts, such as a collection of windup gramophones. Among them is an original Edison wax-cylinder gramophone with a number of four-minute (!!!) records. For a device that’s over 100 years old, the sound quality is actually surprisingly good.

If you’re ever in the Deep River area or even just driving through Deep River along Highway 17, I highly recommend dropping into the clock museum for a tour to learn about this fascinating piece of our history.

a quick reflection upon DemoCampToronto7

This evening I went to DemoCampToronto #7, a project of BarCamp Toronto. As BarCamp’s website says,

BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees.

DemoCamp consists of a set of presentations totally no more than 15 minutes apiece (including questions) on up-and-coming software projects. It’s basically the same as a WiP session at any USENIX conference.

I don’t have enough time to summarize all of the presentations, but I’m sure others will (and I’ll try to link to some of the better summaries here). I just wanted to step back a moment and reflect on the fact that a room full of 150 passionate, articulate coders — in Toronto, no less — makes me think that we’re having a renaissance in the software development and IT industry. These are not coders who are just buzzword and Web 2.0-compliant; I sense that these folks are making real productive use of technologies like Ruby on Rails, AJAX, DHTML, Flash, and all the other gadgets that are revolutionizing the Internet by providing a true challenge to the classic thick application.

This renaissance is borne out by the increasing proliferation of jobs. Tucows just held a job fair, after which they hired a number of individuals fresh out of Computer Science at U of T (I know because two of them were sitting at my table). Exciting companies like Nurun and Critical Mass are hiring and expanding. I’ve personally been courted by one or two companies, unsolicited. Contrast this with the state of affairs five years ago, which is when I graduated from U of T. Jobs were scarce and I was lucky to land a position programming PHP for a firm that hadn’t blown its money in the dot-com crash.

It seems to be a great time to be in IT. The buzz is in the air again, and I have but one word of warning for many of the IT firms that have just barely stayed afloat for the last few years: You’d better do something to make sure you hang onto your technical staff — i.e. give them interesting, challenging work, and respect their talents — or you will lose them to other companies that are willing to make those tools available.

cbc.ca now XHTML compliant

I don’t work there anymore, but I still feel some affinity for the site, particularly since many of my friends are still on staff. So I must congratulate my long-time colleague David Raso (we’ve worked together both at cbc.ca and at VerticalScope) for making CBC.ca completely XHTML 1.0 Compliant! For those of you who know the complexity of the CBC bureaucracy, this is quite an achievement. Kudos, Dave, on your temerity. Sadly I think the long road and uphill battle to XHTML will be lost on certain senior management types who “don’t understand what those programmers even do.” (the source of this comment will remain anonymous)

TheDailyWTF.com on AJAX and Web 2.0

If you work in IT, and you don’t already read The Daily WTF, you should. The site bills itself as documenting “curious perversions in IT” and I have to say that this is an understatement; the code that frequently shows up there is bad enough that the word “poor” does not begin to describe it. Sadly, I think much of the code behind so-called enterprise-grade software out there in the world is of the same calibre. We should be afraid.

I had to laugh at their recent skewering of AJAX and Web 2.0. I’ve complained about such things before, but this one does it in such a brilliant way that I really don’t have to say much more:

The introduction of the XMLHttpRequest component opened the doorway for a new breed of “fancy schmancy” web applications like Flickr, GMail, etc. This, in turn, spawned an entire sub-industry and a new series of buzzwords seemingly based on the names of household cleaning chemicals. It even incremented the current version of the Internet to 2.0.

Although the Web is apparently now at version 2.0 much of the software continues to be in beta.

the risks of “outsourcing to the web”

It seems that within the last few months, much has been made of so-called Web 2.0 sites. The fact that it is impossible to even attribute a noun to describe “Web 2.0” — is it a paradigm? a metaphor? a meme? (ugh) — should be enough to convince you that “Web 2.0” is just the latest buzzword to describe webpage design and innovation, but I digress. My objective today isn’t to complain about the use of the term Web 2.0, but to talk about one alarming aspect of these new Web 2.0 sites: the fundamental outsourcing of your private data storage to commercial entities.

Many of the new, highly interactive web properties like Flickr, Gmail, Friendster, and the like, use sophisticated technology — at least in the context of the Internet — to make their sites operate much like thick clients (traditional software running on your desktop computer). One of the primary technologies in use, of course, is Asynchronous Javascript and XML (AJAX), which creates the illusion that you are interacting with a web application without a connection to the server. This has made it possible to create web-side lookalikes of traditional desktop applications, such as e-mail (e.g. GMail), bookmark managers (e.g. del.icio.us), CRM applications (e.g. Salesforce) and even office applications like a word processor (e.g. Writely). A number of factors have made these sites particularly attractive to the end user:

  • ease of use
  • no need to worry about data storage on one’s local (volatile) storage device
  • no need to be maintain one’s locally-installed software, apply security/bugfixes, etc.
  • ability to quickly “upgrade” to new vendor-released versions since the application is centrally-managed

We can expect the adoption rate of these applications to increase both as more users discover their utility, and as more such applications are created.

In the move from the desktop to the web (the so-called “outsourcing to the web”), many issues such as privacy, data retention, etc. are frequently glossed over or simply not recognized by end users as being important. It is difficult for many users to understand even one site’s privacy policy, never mind five or ten. The perplexing question of “How is the data from my personal documents such as e-mails, letters, word-processing files, etc. being used?” may not be adequately answered even by privacy policies, because such privacy policies often cover only the information being stored itself, not any derivative works. By derivative works, I mean that statistical data about your e-mail or Writely documents might be used to target ads to you, or the aggregate statistics of word frequency amongst all Writely users might be shared or sold to marketers for data mining purposes. As one marketing guru said to me recently, the possibilities for data mining are endless (the exact words he used were “we data mine the hell out of things!”)

Another big concern is that many of the applications currently being created revolve around Google in some way. Not only has Google been the primary developer of many rich web applications, with products such as Google Maps, Google Desktop, Google Page Creator, Writely and of course, GMail, but many other developers have taken advantage of Google’s open API to create their own derivative applications (such as Frappr). What happens when Google decides to use the stored user data in new ways? Or what if Google, formerly seen as the benevolent hacker’s workshop, changes its tune and becomes more corporate and controlling like Microsoft? The concentration of power around one publicly-traded corporation should be alarming to any consumer. (I could repeat the same arguments about Yahoo, given attempt to compete in the same space as Google, but by acquisition — their purchases of del.icio.us, upcoming.org, and so on being prime examples of this strategy.)

What is the solution? As I pointed out already, I expect the adoption of such rich applications to increase, not decrease; not only because of their technological merits, but because they frequently build online communities that are appealing to users (and marketers, of course). However, I think that any user who values his or her privacy and finds the notion of data mining based on one’s personal correspondence to be uncomfortable would do well to continue using traditional desktop software to manage these.

Toothpaste for Dinner

Toothpaste For Dinner is perhaps one of my favourite online cartoons… there’s not a lot (none) complexity in the cartoonist’s art, so the value’s all in the raw humour. I just about died of laughter when I saw this t-shirt.

Even very basic jokes, for some reason, have hilarious humour value when paired with an odd character face.

Finally, nothing beats that element of humourous surprise in Basic Electronics Symbols

a crazy little chart about the Bay Area

Recently on sage-members folks have been having a discussion about just how expensive it is to work in the Bay Area. I think Dustin Puryear started the thread as he’s thinking of moving from Louisiana. Anyway, someone posted the following link:

Bill Manning’s Blog >> A crazy little chart about the Bay Area

The numbers in there seem astonishing. When I told my girlfriend, who’s lived in the Bay Area (working for Sun), she wondered how it compares with Toronto. So, after some research at the Toronto Urban Affairs Library, I give you numbers for Toronto. (Here’s a PDF illustrating this in a similar manner to Bill’s original post.)

First, some metadata about wages:

Gross Minimum Wage $7.45 per hour
Federal Income Tax $1.19 per hour
Ontario Income Tax $0.45 per hour
EI Deduction $0.15 per hour
CPP Deduction $0.13 per hour
Net Minimum Wage $5.54 per hour

Now for some rental rates from CMHC‘s research report:

Private Apartment Average Rental Rates for 2004

York Region$851.00$212.7538.43

Zone Avg. Rent/Month Avg.Rent/Week Hours Needed @ Minimum Wage
Toronto (Old City) $950.00 $237.50 42.91
Etobicoke (South) $841.00 $210.25 37.98
York $811.00 $202.75 36.63
East York $844.00 $211.00 38.12
Scarborough $831.00 $207.75 37.53
North York $865.00 $216.25 39.07
Mississauga City $890.00 $222.50 40.20
Brampton City $887.00 $221.75 40.06
Oakville $918.00 $229.50 41.46

So, assuming you were to spend your after-tax income on nothing but accommodations, you could work a regular week in Toronto and be able to rent an apartment. This is about 1/4 the effort it would require in the Bay Area. Pretty shocking!