It's not actually that exciting, just nice to get something working some place other than its original test environment. I'd like to tweak the code on the servers a bit and then I will publish the endpoint, adding, finally, a tiny bit of functionality to the so-called “w5” application. Maybe tonight, probably Friday.

Next up : the long, boring, slog of passing around and parsing Bloom filters in how many different languages?

Translation : Your Canada really does include Québec because, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise, the province's voters and politicians are the king-makers this time around.

I joked to a friend the other week that if the Rest of Canada (and, yes, that's an actual term in Canadian politico-speak) elected the Reformed Conservatives to office, a third referendum on Québec separation would be scheduled by the end of the following month. It was a joke but the kind that only serves to illustrate the point.

Six months ago the Liberal party's calculus for a fourth mandate involved making up seats lost in Ontario (to the NDP in Toronto and the Conservatives in the rest of the province) with ridings won in Québec because people actually liked Paul Martin and everyone else would just ride his coat-tails.

A brief aside : In the last federal election, the Liberal party won a majority of seats (in fact, all but two) in exactly one province, Ontario, and still went on to form a majority government. Notwithstanding the legitimate greivances of those out West, it seems to me that the single most effective solution to Western alienation would be a little more Western lovin' but I digress.

However, since the Liberal's (arguably the most smug and arrogant — and effective — gang of political operatives to ever set foot on Parliament Hill) have replaced Jean Chretien with Paul Martin as their leader Canadians seem ready to exact, in Tim's words, a little spanking for their last ten years in power.

The mood of the electorate was already so poisoned by the time this election was called that Jean Chretien would hardly have guaranteed the Liberal's a win. But the thing about Chretien is that his seeming indifference to just about any kind of criticism garnered him a kind of secret, though never spoken aloud, respect, among the people. (Except Québec but that's another very long story.) No one would ever condone the man for grabbing the protester, who stood in his way, by the neck but everyone smiles when you tell the story. On the other hand, Paul Martin's stammering around covering all the bases but rarely saying anything when asked a question has left people cold and suspicious.

And news, last winter, from the Auditor General that the Liberal's blew 100-million dollars on Canadian flags and various other back-room shell games, all in an effort to win the war on separatism, didn't exactly warm people's hearts in Québec either.

Enter Stephen Harper, leader of Reformed Conservative party. (It's actually just the Conservative Party of Canada, the result of a merger between the Progressive Conservatives and the Canadian Alliance, née the Reform Party.) Of late, they've taken to calling themselves New Conservatives hoping, I can only imagine, that it adds a Tony Blair-esque air to an otherwise fiercely right-wing social and fiscal policy agenda. Since people are pissed at Paul Martin, and no one is quite ready to elect the NDP to run the whole bloody country, Harper is the only man left standing (or, in his case, smirking) and he's enjoyed a lot of attention because of it. Some are already speculating that his party might win enough formerly Liberal seats to form a minority government.

Another brief aside : Why anyone still votes for the kinds of hard-core fiscal conversatives that occupy the right-wing of Canadian politics, these days, after electing (translation : getting screwed by and then upset at) the governments of Mike Harris in Ontario, Gordon Campbell in British Columbia and, yes, Jean Charest in Québec remains a mystery.

Harper is also about as close as you can get to the anti-Christ in secular, homo-loving, pinko-commie, degenerate and community-minded Québec.

So, the only question left to answer is : do people in Québec think that the Liberals will get it together and win enough seats in the rest of the country to form a majority government, thus allowing them to vote their conscience and send the Bloc Québecois (BQ) back to Ottawa, or will they hold their noses and elect the Liberals. Because, even though Québec shares a degree of consensus with some in the Conservative party when it comes to the separation of provincial and federal powers, there ain't no one here who wants to live in the world they are championing.

And in the event of a minority government (translation : Québec, second only to Ontario in Parliamentary seats, votes for the Bloc) the BQ will be the only thing standing between the new government and a vote of no confidence which would, in turn, trigger a fresh election.

Maybe things will pick up for the Liberal's after the leader's debate on Monday. If not, you know where to find the action.

1. The New York Times is doing features (sic) on Calgary Flames fans. Tangentially related, the other day Maciej asked me if the Canadian military had a contingency plan for American conquest. I'm pretty sure it's this guy.
2. The CBC is reporting (sic) Jack Layton's moustache.
3. The Marijuana Party is of the opinion that marijuana does wonders for art and culture.

Meanwhile, Paul Wells is doing a pretty good job of walking the [please contain your weblogging as journalism debate to this small space] line.

As a rule I try to be sympathetic although it's a feeling that's tempered by memories of my own less than sincere endeavours bumming for change as a teenager. But the whole opening the bank door for me has always seemed wrong on more levels than I am usually comfortable thinking about.

It's Friday night and, already late to meet a friend, I am beating a rough path down the Main when I pass the bank on the corner of Bagg. It's not a branch where it's practical for someone to open the door for you because it's normally locked and swings inwards, automatically, when you swipe your bank card.

Instead, the guy trying to scrape up enough money for food, booze, whatever is sitting directly in front of the card reader with a bank card in his hand and mechanically jamming it in to the slot as soon as anyone approaches the door.

That's at least another layer, or two, of uncomfortable thoughts added on to an already unpleasant situation.

My hair is still wet from the ocean, I have a box of chocolates in my hand and I'm not wearing any underwear.

A couple months ago I had a very unpleasant experience trying to munge the relations between topics in the day's New York Times using RDF and GSS. I can't remember what I saw, earlier today, that pointed to the Perl bindings for GraphViz, but when I read the docs I realized that all I needed to do was loop over a nested hash calling add_*.

After a few false starts I've added code to the cron jobs that run every morning to generate a pretty picture version of the daily Who's on first at the New York Times? stuff. The graph is generated as an SVG file because dumping to PNG creates an image roughly 12000 pixels in width which, in turn, causes Mozilla to die a slow and painful death. I guess the next step is to add happy clicky links to the various nodes...

Since I've finally managed to get jpegrdf working I've been farting around adding different kinds of locative data in the absence of, and notwithstanding, automagic GPS goodness.

The following examples are the results of some experiments that may change but seem to hit pretty close to my personal 80/20 mark (where being able to read and write, not to mention query, this stuff quickly is of premium importance.)

Given the following namespaces :

@prefix :      <#> .
@prefix dc:    <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/title> .
@prefix where: <x-urn:aaronstraupcope:knows:where#> .
@prefix rue:   <x-urn:aaronstraupcope:knows:where:qc-montreal:rue#> .
@prefix blvd:  <x-urn:aaronstraupcope:knows:where:qc-montreal:boulevard#> .
@prefix ruelle: <x-urn:aaronstraupcope:knows:where:qc-montreal:ruelle#> .
       

This picture gets assigned the following data, which is pretty straghtforward :

<20040424-qc-montreal-terres_urbaines.jpg>
      dc:title    "Terres Urbaines" ;
      dc:coverage where:qc-montreal ;
      where:site  rue:marquette ;
      where:near  blvd:du-mont-royal .
      

This one is pretty much the same as the last one but the near property is replaced by corner . Is this sign really on the corner? No — not enough to satisfy our new robot overlords , anyway. But seriously it's not like this data is for dropping bombs on people . If either one of us was trying to give the other directions — stop, stop now, and don't tell me you're going to beam me GPS coordinates unless you want to get slapped; you know who you are — we would fudge them the same way and be no worse for it.

<20040424-qc-montreal-runs_buses.jpg>
      dc:title     "Runs with Buses" ;
      dc:coverage  where:qc-montreal ;
      where:site   blvd:du-mont-royal ;
      where:corner rue:berri .
       

On the other hand, the picture associated with this post depicts something that really is on a corner :

<20040424-qc-montreal-god_juggling_donuts.jpg>
      dc:title     "The God of Juggling Donuts" ;
      dc:coverage  where:qc-montreal ;
      where:site   ruelle:unknown ;
      where:corner ruelle:unknown ;
      where:near   blvd:du-mont-royal ,
                   rue:drolet .
       

Now that we've given the pot smokers in the audience a few moments to giggle and nod knowingly to each other I will note that without creating a magic RDF Bag of Holding it's not possible to indicate that the two corners are the same : unknown, except relative to some other street. So, you fudge it again and assign an unknown site and an unknown corner on the grounds that, given the way the graph gets built, you can still find what you're looking for.

There are site s which are nice and vague and have a higher precedence than a corner which has hight precedence than something that is near . Streets, avenues, and such are all assumed to live in a namespace specific to their locality because anything else starts to smack of a grand unifying theory and who really has the time?

I suppose it would be useful to extend properties like near to add some sort of spacial element like, say, -e for East. But let me just point out that in Montréal East means anything on one side of the Main and South means anything towards, and beyond, the old city. Neither of which are true statements since both are off by about forty-five degrees. No one in Montréal cares.

There are a few things sweeter still than beating the Boston Bruins in the playoffs, going up to the roof on what is the first real day of spring and listening as les rumeurs de la ville travel across the night sky.

But it is pretty fucking great.

With the release of the Mirror Project Random Image Widget just waiting for some final decisions to be hashed out, I started work on porting the code to a more generic random image client.

The first step was to add hooks that allow a user to specify a maximum width or height when displaying an image. I really don't want the number of options, or preferences, to exceed more than a handful but this one seems important. Using only myself as a judge I know that I would get annoyed pretty quickly if the little toy sitting in the corner of my monitor kept swelling to fill the entire screen.

As the screenshot illustrates this approach raises some issues with the menus available to user to which I say : the program was not meant to be used with your operating system's “magnify” tool — if you're going to set the maximum allowable width to 100 pixels, you'll just have to use the keyboard hooks if you want to pause the application.

Anyway, here's the road map for version 1.0 :

• add hooks to talk to more than one server
• add hooks to read server list (and any login data) from a config file
• add preferences widget to manage config file
• add hooks to watch config file for changes so that the program will just DWIM if a user changes the list of servers via the command line, or whatever
• figure out how to muck with the transport layer to allow the user to specify a maximum allowable download size — necessary?
• add hooks for handling some kind of Bloom filter-esque data store as a way of preventing the same image from being displayed twice
• finalize the API
• bless as 1.0

There will likely be source releases along the way.

Version 2.0 might have hooks for reading and displaying Creative Commons data, similar to what the mozCC Mozilla extension does. I'm not sure about this one because it feels like feeping creaturitus. But it would be nice to do something to help promote the initiative and another part of me thinks it's one of those applications where quick and easy access to that kind of licensing data is a no-brainer.

A few months later the owners tore the place apart and turned it in to an aggressively airy Rem KulturZöne.

I've spent the last couple days creating a little wxPython application that periodically polls the Mirror Project for a random image and displays it in a window.

Whether this particular application, or the service it talks to, are made public remains to be decided.

Either way, I'd like to spin the idea into something more generalized that would allow me to display random images from Out There. So, I am thinking of adding hooks to store a list of servers that expose a w5.RandomImage() method and return a hash-like data structure containing six pairs:

• image (base64, as in the actual binary data for an image)
• who (string)
• what (string)
• where (string)
• when ( string )
• why (string)

Currently the widget only does this via XML-RPC but, depending on things like requirements for unencrypted authentication, it could be taught something like Atom.

The idea here is that people will build, or have built, the server-side widget that figures out how, and to whom, to return a random image. The method itself currently doesn't pass any arguments and if did it would be a single hash-like data structure like this:

• login (string)

  As in a traditional username:password string, or a key consisting of random gibberish or even a nonce if I ever get around to understanding them.

• exclude (base64)

  As in, something LOAF -ish in nature that the client passes the server indicating which images have already been seen . If the server has been taught to handle Bloom Filters it could use this data to check a return value before sending an image the user. This has the advantage of sparing the photographer wasted bandwidth and the viewer the annoyance of seeing the same image twice.

  Careful readers will note that this means the server needs to return a seventh pair (a unique ID for the image) not listed above — cookies and a glass of milk for you!

None of these parameters are required. They are included as a way to provide some baseline of control and convenience for people on both ends of the connection but, really, nothing more.

After all, this is just a dumb client for displaying chance images that live out there on the Network because it's the kind of thing that makes the day a little richer. If you feel like you're going to need to be able to blog something as it travels across your desktop, take a screenshot or something.

Anyway, the next step is to figure out how to make the widget in hand into a stand-alone binary on the various platforms. Then I will work on adding the required fu for talking to muliple servers.

Expo 67 is, apparently, the only thing that a certain segment of Americans know about Montréal.

Bucky Balls were all the rage in architecture circles until 1974, if you believe the guy I used to work for, when everyone gave up the dream and decided to make money instead.

The painter Barnett Newman was commissioned to create the eighteen foot tall Voice of Fire for the pavillion. Twenty years later the National Gallery of Canada acquired the painting to hang in Ottawa. To the shock of the lay-folk they paid two million dollars for the purchase prompting a farmer in rural Canada to reproduce the work on the side of his barn for a grand total of twenty bucks.

A few years after the Fair, a local kite maker was in the Bucky Ball finalizing arrangements to create an permanent installation when the building's exterior shell caught fire. It burned for two days and was never replaced.

Expo 67 was held on St. Helen's Island which is also where the International Fireworks Festival takes place. One year, in high school, after watching the event under Dangerous and Other Circumstances my friends and I were wandering around the Island. We heard the sound of beer bottles being tossed from a lookout in the distance so we scampered up the side of the hill and stuck our heads over the top of the stone wall. When the gaggle of head-bangers saw us they yelled Ahhh! Extraterrestrials!! and ran away leaving standing near the two-four of empty beer bottles. At which point, we ran away.

Later that same evening as I was climbing over a metal fence I impaled my palm on the twisted wires at the top. My first reaction was to pull away which only caused the puncture to be torn laterally and I spent the rest of the evening walking around looking as though I was offering people my stigmata. As was often the case in those days I drew the short end of the stick and was forced to sleep sitting upright in a chair with my up-turned hand resting uncomfortably on its arm.

The Bucky Ball lay empty until 1995 when it was re-christened as Environment Canada's Biosphere, the only museum of water in America dedicated to the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes .

Maybe I would be happier if I just numbed the pain by painting my teeth with Liquid Paper, at night, like everyone else.

The scenography will be conceived in collaboration with a Montreal architect so as to maximize the functionality of the various places to be set up in the incinerator, all the while promoting an aesthetic approach that corresponds to the scale of the building.

The presentation of the works themselves and the design of novel presentation structures will focus on the increasingly narrowly defined relation between the work, the concrete context of its diffusion and the audience's perception within the interior spaces of the incinerator.

For the uninitiated this probably gives you same uneasy feeling I had the first day I was introduced to the Unix command line.

Note to self: consider proposal to write a Masters of Fine Arts thesis in shell script. You laugh. This is why I am a better Artist than you. No, really.

Anyway.

The first paragraph simply says : We're gonna hang stuff in a way that makes sure people appreciate how big the place is. Leaving aside, of course, our built-in ability to recognize really big things as being, well, big.

The second paragraph says : We know that only a small and rarified group of overly linear thinkers will be able to grok, let alone appreciate, any of the work on display. So for the pea-brains out there we'll just emphasize how small they are in such a big room.

The rest of the piece goes on to recycle (sorry) all the truisms of the industrial complex in an urban landscape, of renewing the space as some kind of sickly-sweet after-school special teen center (read: condos in five years) and as the site for, god help us, a little more self-exploration. All of it, I am loathe to admit, true enough in its own way.

But it's a bit discouraging that in all the high-minded blather no one thought to mention that right next to l'usine, the city has set up one of eight éco-centre s where people can bring all manner of crap for recycling or at least proper disposal.

The centers were created for residential use; people building highrises still need to rent their own damn garbage containers. I'm sure that there are some contractors who play fast and easy with the rules but by and large the centers are frequented by plain vanilla folks who want to do the right thing with their paint thinner or that wall they've just torn down in the living room.

The Éco-centre de la Petite-Patrie is not on the site of the incinerator, proper, but you would be forgiven if you thought it was. It is pretty much the only thing you notice when you're not paying attention enough to keep yourself from falling in to a giant garbage bin.

Frankly, I always thought it was just a matter of time before the center expanded in to the incinerator. Regardless, it is difficult to overstate just how important these places have become to the city-folk.

[A] concrete and anthropological definition of the urban desert , indeed.

via Michael , who I'm relying on to remind me when the vernissage for this goofy thing is.

The sommelier and I got along fine after I told him that I had absolutely no idea whether or not it took our bottle of wine some time to open up but , yes, we liked it very much. We talked for a few minutes about how and where to get wines that are imported in to Québec but not sold at the SAQ and agreed that even if they are producing some decent wine in Ontario it's still hard to feel good about buying them.

The rest of the wait staff was not nearly so much fun. There seemed to be a different person for every aspect of our meal whether it was clearing the plates or bringing the bread or peddling desperately over-priced water . And they became visibly nervous when you asked them to do something that was, apparently, the domain of another waiter. I guess one of the side-effects of only being given one job is that you stand around all night waiting, with bated breath, for an opportunity to do it. I try to sympathize with situations like that but there is no getting around just how annoying it is while you're eating.

(No one thought to ask when the English had suddenly become the arbiters of quality fizzy water but by the end of the night we might have.)

I have good friends and the other night they took me to Les Chevres which only after being told many time that it was West of Parc Avenue did I figure out was in Outremont and not some tiny little spot tucked into the industrial buildings that ring the top of Mile End.

Les Chevres is supposed to be all the shit these days and they clearly went out of their way to hire designers to make it look that way. If you ignore the fact that they look a little too much like sheep you can sort of imagine the two goat silhouettes on the front window having a White Stripes album cover quality to them. Albeit Gap-ified and in delicate pastels. The kidney beans and other celular automata painted on the walls, also in passive-aggresive lime greens and bitter pinks, were kind of annoying but all the chairs had tasteful brown fun-fur! (Not a phrase I ever thought I'd say.)

The overall design is a bit heavy on the intimidate anyone whose pocket book hasn't swollen their self-esteem to new heights of arrogance and generally bad behaviour schtick, but it is otherwise a very nice and very elegant place to eat a meal. Did I mention the fun-fur?

Whenever you read about this sort of fancy, high-end restaurant, sooner or later you stumble over the word innovation . I'm all for innovation, in principle, but I am not willing to overlook it's abuse as an all-purpose get out of jail card for the kind of intellectual navel-gazing that gave the world colour-field painting.

I'm also always suspicious of the context; namely the rarified air that people who can afford to eat at these places, on a regular basis, breath. I'm sure that avocado soup — with oranges and cilantro, no less — seems innovative in the middle of the winter but I also go to the market every week and I know that this part of North America is enjoying a recent harvesting of avocados from Mexico or California.

It was very good, as were all the appetizers. At this point it's worth pausing, before I forget, to say these three words together : parsnip; toast; good. No, really.

Ask yourself : Is there anything that warm porcini mushrooms can't do?

[big plates, small food] — this is the place-holder I left myself while drafting this piece. It sums it up nicely but always leaves me wondering : Why do people who like to spend so much money eating out eat so little?

And why do French restaurants insist on trying to make risotto? No one can deny the contribution the French have made to the art, science and all-around good times when it comes to food and the celebration thereof. But sweet Jesus, can't they just accept the fact that this is the one dish they are wholely unprepared to handle? You can dress it up in tasty, carmelized biologically pure carrots but it's of dubious effort if you can't cook the bloody rice properly !

Nothing was actually bad — I mean, except the risotto. My only disappointment was the sense that it could easily have been so much better and that the people in the kitchen didn't see any point in trying too hard. That is, it all tasted a bit too much like the art of opportunity rather than the art of eating.

At this point the waiters started trying to steal our wine glasses.

One of the bonuses of living in Québec is never having to suffer the indignity of being told that the Brie de Meaux has been pre-wrapped and in the next aisle, below the grateables. We may not have l'Union Syndicale Interprofessionnelle de Défense du Brie de Meaux (I kid you not) but we do at least try to give cheese the respect it properly deserves. In our case, we promptly ordered another bottle of wine and started badgering the table-monkeys for more bread.

We ordered a smattering of everything they brought to us on the cheese tray; a collection of chevres and tommes from France and Québec. The drama queen of the lot was an electric orange (some flavourless pigment which begs the question) cheese that reminded us of Parmesan in its taste and texture. Everyone else liked it but I prefered the semi-soft cheese from St. Jean.

Ask yourself: Who can you resist a sweaty goat cheese covered in ash?

In the end a good time was had by all and we sauntered out, smugly and in search of vanilla ice cream, confident that I could make a better dessert.

Canadians are well-known for making fun of Americans. Especially when it comes to the subject of how little most Americans know about their friends to the North .

So, it was sort of refreshing to be in the States with a group of Canadians as they tried to wrap their minds around the fact that absolutely everything is closed on Thanksgiving.

You mean, nothing is open? Really?! The whole country?

It was also pretty funny finally finding a place to get a drink and being carded with people who've been going to bars, without thinking about it, since they were fifteen. In other words, for a minimum of sixteen years. If you've ever wondered whether people from Québec are laughing at you, under their breath, while you scan their driver's license trying to find a birth date : they are.

Seriously, why doesn't the States just bring back Prohibition? I know, I know. If Dubya gets re-elected, they will but you can imagine what it was like being in Boston with two Montréalais after they were told that all of Massachusetts is dry on Sundays. No one asked me but Americans sure seemed to enjoy themselves more back when they drank gin out of bath tubs .

And it would be an opportunity for the Bronfman's to make some of their money back (modulo whatever complaints people filed with the NAFTA review board.)

Prompted by all the talk about using Movable Type as an open relay for spammers, I decided to poke at the actual code and see what was going on.

There really isn't anywhere that Movable Type should be disabling taint mode but if I had to list things in order of importance, the mt-send-entry.cgi script would be near the top.

The script is potentially handing off to the sendmail program whose entire existence has been marked by security exploits. There is nothing to suggest that more won't be found in the future. Relying on sendmail to test for Potential Badness being passed by a ne'er do well via the Internet is wishful thinking, at best, and just plain crazy, at worst.

In fairness, the Movable Type mail widget tries to load Mail::Sendmail which does some basic sanity checking and, drumroll, untainting on the stuff you pass it. On the other hand it is not part of the core libraries shipped with Perl, nor is it in Movable Type's extlib directory which is a mystery since two thirds of it's dependencies are part of CORE and the other third has no non-standard requirements itself.

Untainting email addresses can be brain-crushingly difficult and inaccurate and the last thing you want to do when you're selling a computer widget for non-techincal people is start spewing errors where there are none. But not only did the Movable Type kids disable the -T flag on the mt-send-entry.cgi script they don't appear to have ever done any kind of untainting on the to and from parameters. Hello? Is anyone home?

I find this especially discouraging because one of the first things I did when Movable Type was released was send Ben code to at least try and untaint email addresses .

Just in case there's anyone left who doesn't think The Shameless Huckster made a pact with the devil, what was up with all of the Oilers wearing Ford toques?

And having to watch The Great Sales Event's daughter lip-synching, badly, while the television cameras fawned over Janet's frozen tears was like a final, brutal, kick in the gut.

In fairness, had the game been held in Québec we would have all been forced to endure Céline Dion butchering Mon Pays . So we can't fault the good kids in Edmonton too much for that one.

(Canadianophiles, before they become too disillusioned, would do well to accept that our dirty little secret is a preternatural ability to export some of the worst performers in the history of popular music. We are, indeed, taking care of business.)

All the evidence suggests that I am incapable of cooking for just two people. As it sometimes happens, this turned out to be terrible gnocchi so it's not like you missed anything.

Do you suppose taking pictures of food robs it of its flavour?