Blog

How exactly am I supposed to react when I hear about the particularly brutal gang rape and murder of a 23 year old medical student in India?

There is, of course, the obvious stuff. There's horror, sadness, and anger mixed together. There's also a certain amount of incredulity. I like to give people the benefit of the doubt and I have a hard time imagining that anyone is capable of this kind of thing.

If I'm honest with myself, there's a kind of smugness too, because you think that sort of thing doesn't really happen here. And, to be fair, it doesn't - at least, not on the scale on which it happens in certain other parts of the world. I think it's fairly non-controversial to say that being a woman in Canada or the U.S. is safer than being a woman in India.

Read more »

I've been using Linux since about 1998, when I started my first "real" job at PCI Geomatics. At the time, most of PCI's workstations ran a version of Red Hat Linux. The standard setup revolved around FVWM and Emacs.

I did not find Linux easy. But it was fun.

I installed Linux for the first time in 2000, on a computer I built from scratch (my first one). It was Red Hat 6.2. That installation was not what you'd call "smooth", but I did eventually get it working.

Over the past 12 years, I've used 3 distributions. So that means, on average, I tend to stick with a distribution for about 4 years.

Read more »

I don't really consider myself Canadian.

Of course, that's kind of a lie. It does say "Canada" on my passport, so there's that. If you ask me about my nationality, I'll say I'm Canadian. If you mistake me for an American, I'll politely correct you. I mean, everybody's got to be from somewhere, right? And I'm from Canada. So I guess that makes me Canadian.

But I don't feel "Canadian" in the same way that many people feel, say, French or British or Indian (or even, dare I say it, Quebecois). My place of birth doesn't form a big part of my personal identity. The nationality of my parents takes up even less head space - I don't consider myself Italian, for example, despite the fact that my mother was born in Sicily. I've never felt a strong desire to go "back to my roots". It rarely occurs to me to care very much, beyond a fondness for lasagna and rapini.

Read more »

Over the last couple of years I've put together what I consider to be a fairly impressive home bar, and I've spent much of that time experimenting with various cocktails.

There are people in my social circle for whom mixing drinks is a bit taboo. When I say that I use Calvados) or Cognac in a cocktail, the first reaction I usually get is "What a waste!"

I disagree. My guiding principle with regard to cocktails is that you should use good quality liquor that you'd have no problem drinking on its own. Calvados falls into this category, and so does Cognac. It doesn't have to be the really expensive stuff, but it should at least be middle shelf. The idea of making a cocktail out of foul tasting gut-rot in at attempt to mask the taste is anathema to me. When a cocktail is well made, the extra ingredients enhance rather than mask the taste of the main liquor.

Read more »

Have you ever wondered why the separation of church and state is good idea?

I'm assuming, of course, that most everyone in my immediate social circle actually thinks it's a good idea, though since I read about that fiasco involving the mayor of Saguenay, this assumption is perhaps on shakier ground than I would have liked.

But, assuming that I'm correct, have you ever sat down and actually thought about why you think it's a good idea?

I've noticed at least two schools of thought among my friends. Some of them are simply anti-religion. They look at, for example, the Catholic Church's history of child abuse, or the practice of sati, and they conclude that the separation of church and state is a good idea for much the same reason that the separation of murder and state is a good idea. Religion is bad and the less it has to do with public life, the better.

Read more »

I can never seem to blog in a timely manner. Lots of things in the world happen which I feel are deserving of comment, but my comments always seem to come a few months after the fact.

Take that recent Daniel Tosh incident, for example. He makes a rape joke during one of his routines, gets heckled by a female member of the audience for it, and then proceeds to suggest (jokingly, I can only assume) that some males in the audience rape her in retaliation.

So far, all we have here is a guy being a dick, which is nothing new. What makes this particular example of extreme dickery somewhat different, however, is that the woman in question complained to friend, who then proceeded to voice her displeasure via her Tumblr account. The whole thing snowballed from there, ultimately resulting in a public apology from Tosh.

Read more »

I started this blog 4 years ago, got a few entries in, and then promptly shut the whole thing down when it got overrun with spam. I have now resurrected it, using a new version of YAWT written in python which, for lack of a better name, I shall call YAWT 2.0.

At some point, I hope to write an article on the features of YAWT 2.0, but for the moment I'm just happy this thing is working again. Somewhat working, anyway; comments are still deactivated until I figure out how to do it properly.

Read more »

In the past, I've commented on France's ban of the niqab, noting in passing that the distinction some people make between religion and culture (emphasizing, for example, that the niqab is a Middle Eastern cultural tradition rather than a specific Islamic law), is irrelevant to question of whether a woman has the right to wear whatever the hell she wants in public

At the time, I more or less glossed over what I thought the actual distinction was between culture and religion, so with that in mind I'd like to expand a little on these thoughts and make the further claim (not so very controversial, I think) that the line between religion and culture tends to be blurry at best and, at worst, damn near non-existent.

Read more »

I'm a bit late to the party on this one, but last year France started fining women who wear the niqab in public, in defiance of a recently passed law banning religious face coverings in public. From the article, other countries (Belgium, Italy, Denmark, Austria, the Netherlands and Switzerland) are planning similar legislation.

The article is noteworthy, not only for the content, which is informative, but also for the handy reference at the bottom explaining the difference between hijabs, niqabs, burkas.

Read more »

Debates about the relative merits of Toronto versus Montreal are rarely level headed. Each city has its champions and its detractors and, unfortunately, the loudest are often the least objective, having only ever lived in one city or the other, but not both.

I've lived in both, for extended periods of time, so I feel I'm in a better position than many to dispense some useful observations on Canada's two largest cities.

On a warm day, you can walk lengthwise from one end of downtown Montreal to the other without really breaking much of a sweat. You'd be hard-pressed to do this in Toronto. The situation is made more extreme by the fact that a large chunk of the island of Montreal is taken up by an airport. So the amount of usable space in Montreal is even less than the size of the island might suggest.

Read more »

Some people from work invited me to the Dominion Tavern a week or two ago. I was persuaded to try the gin and tonic, as I was told that the tonic water was homemade.

I ordered one. The drink that came was orange in colour and looked vaguely like tang. In other words, it did not look like a gin and tonic. It tasted, however, unmistakeably like a gin and tonic - a rather good gin and tonic at that, and this comes from a guy who's not particularly enthusiastic about gin and tonics.

I was inspired to try this out myself. The active ingredient in tonic water, giving it its characteristic bitter taste, is a substance called quinine. Back in the day, quinine was used as a painkiller and malarial treatment. In the (rather large) quantities required for medicinal purposes, it was known for its strong, unpleasant bitterness, so people started mixing it with gin to make it more palatable. As time wore on people started consuming quinine less and less as a medicine and more and more as a flavouring agent, especially in the quantities used for modern day tonic water, which is many times less than required to receive any therapeutic benefit (you'd have to drink something like 8L of modern day tonic water to approach even just one dose of malarial treatment).

Read more »

When I started this blog, I didn't expect very much in the way of comments or trackbacks. I also didn't expect any spam, which means I didn't take any precautions. I mean, how would anybody even know about this blog?

Silly, silly me.

So, I have turned off comments and trackbacks until I figure out a reasonably reliable way of separating the spam from the ham. This will probably entail a bit of a rewrite of YAWT as I figure out a way to do this in a clean and modular manner. Why make it easy on myself when I can make it hard?

Read more »

Okay, this won't be the most exciting entry in the world. There are several different ways of logging or recording errors and warnings in perl, and I find I easily get confused. So this entry will serve as a very, very basic reference for me. Other people may find it useful. Or not.

Taken from the Perl 5.10.0 documentation:

Outside an eval, prints the value of LIST to STDERR and exits with the current value of $! (errno). If $! is 0 , exits with the value of ($?>> 8) (backtick command status). If ($?>> 8) is 0, exits with 255. Inside an eval(), the error message is stuffed into $@ and the eval is terminated with the undefined value. This makes die the way to raise an exception.

Read more »

This will be a short entry. The Montreal Canadians won the playoffs last night and some fans took this as an excuse to act like criminals.

I just wanted to voice my extreme displeasure, for what it's worth. It's a game people. Get a fucking clue. And we won, morons.

Read more »

In a previous blog entry, I described various solar system simulations I played around with in high school. These were perhaps more properly termed "gravity simulations" since what I simulated was not a solar system per se but rather Newton's laws of gravity and motion as applied to a bunch of swirling rocks, which would produce a solar system if the conditions were set up correctly. The orbits that you saw in these programs appeared naturally out of the math, as emergent properties of the equations - they were not explicitly programmed.

Read more »

So I got myself a new weblog, hosted on Netfirms. I'm not particularly enjoying the Netfirms experience, but it was only $10 for a year and I get SSH access. They're quite skimpy with the perl modules, forcing me to install a bunch of stuff in my home directory.

I'm using a homemade blogging program because I got tired of blosxom's ugliness and I didn't really like what I saw of Bryar. I'm calling it YAWT in my head - short for Yet Another Weblog Tool. I'm hoping to extend it at some point to handle photo galleries in a seamless and efficient manner - my last attempt to write an online photo manager was quite slow. We'll see.

Read more »

I've been recently spending a significant amount of my free time watching "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Angel" on DVD. I never watched them when they were on the air, but now I'm catching up.

This has earned me accusations of being hypocritical, since I apparently tend to be critical of people who spend (what I consider to be) too much time watching TV.

Well...yes and no. I don't think I'm critical of people who spend a lot of time watching TV. How could I be? I watch a lot of TV myself. I am, on the other hand, critical of people who spend a lot of time channel surfing.

Read more »

I just read a very clear tutorial on Perl scoping mechanisms:

http://perl.plover.com/FAQs/Namespaces.html

I often get bitten by scoping issues but unfortunately (or fortunately?) it's usually easier in Perl to work around your problem than to understand the reasons behind it.

One part I found interesting was the section labelled "The Current Package" which explains the use of the package command in Perl. There is a tendency (or, at least, I have a tendency) to conflate the use of the Perl package command and, say, the use of the Java package declaration because they are often used to achieve the same effect, namely the separation of namespaces, and also because, by convention, they are used in a syntactically similar way. Because of this, it is easy to forget that the package command in Perl is just that: a command. You can call it from anywhere, multiple time from the same file even, and the effect is simply to change the current package - which in itself doesn't have a huge effect on how you write your code, just the way to access your variables.

Read more »

When I was in high school, I used to program two dimensional solar system simulations for fun (as you can surely tell, I was extremely popular and desired by all the ladies far and wide). I would put a "sun" in the middle of the screen and I'd spin "planets" around in simulated orbits.

There are essentially two ways you can go about programming solar system simulations. Technique 1, which for lack of a better term I will call the explicit technique, means deciding (or realizing) at the outset that the orbits of your planets will be elliptical, and then writing your program based on that. The explicit technique works because there are certain exploitable patterns in elliptical planetary orbits that can be harnessed to great advantage. Planets move faster when they are closer to the sun, for example, and slower when they are further away, in mathematically determined ways. One can derive formulae for the position of the planet on the orbit versus time.

Read more »

Cheesy title, I'm aware, but Montreal just got something like 30-60 cm of snow, depending on which weather report you read, and it's gorgeous.

I live on the 26th floor of my apartment building and from up there it's a bit difficult to see just how much snow we got. I get to the street level this morning and I see snow banks higher than my waist. I don't remember having this much snow since I was in primary school, and I was smaller then so my memories might be playing tricks on me.

I'm sure there's a lesson in all of this about global warming (why is it that I can't recall snowbanks this high in such a long time?), but for the moment it's nice. We might just get a white Christmas this year.

Read more »

Someone at work commented that, one night, she got into a long rambling discussion about the intersection between art and science. I said that art and science don't intersect, and she said she disagreed.

It's possible that there is a disagreement over terminology. When one says that art and science "intersect" I have in my mind some kind of act that combines the two, i.e. discovering some objectively reproducible feature of the universe by painting a nice picture would count as an intersection between art and science because by doing one, you're doing the other.

Read more »

I went to my friend Neil's bachelor party last Saturday (July 28th). I met the group at the Saint-Sulpice around 2:30pm and I didn't leave till 10:20pm or so. It was a fun day.

It ended up being a kind of a mini pub crawl, and one of the places we ended up was Foufounnes Electriques, a punk bar on Saint-Catherine Street. I had been in there only once before but it was only now that I actually noticed the decor and ambiance.

Something about the whole experience rubbed me the wrong way. An easy explanation would be the death metal music playing on the speakers, but I don't think that was it. I'm not a fan of death metal, but I'm not anti death metal either. Maybe it was the art on the wall. There was one of white clothes on a clothesline splattered in blood, another of a man wailing whilst holding his dead son in his arms, and yet another of some sort of crime/death scene, with blood pooled on the ground. Are you detecting a theme? So was I.

Read more »

Evelyn's birthday passed a few months ago. We were at a bar with her friends and I somehow got into a discussion with some guy about the nature of seeing green.

I'm sure the thought has run though many people's heads in some form or another. It basically goes like this: what if your green is not my green? Ignoring colour-blindness, when I look at the grass I register it as "green" and so do you. We are both, of course, able to verbalize this, but there's no way to tell if we're really seeing the same "green". What if "green" to you is really what I consider to be "red"? There'd be no way of knowing - you'd still call it "green", it's still the colour we both associate with grass, etc.

Read more »

At the moment I'm using blosxom to generate this blog. I'm using blosxom for the following reasons:

the HTML is completely under my control.

there is no database or PHP required.

the codebase is tiny, which means I have a better chance of fixing whatever problems crop up and also of integrating it into my site.

So far, it seems to work okay. My blog looks more or less the way I want it to. More specifically, it looks like it's a seamless part of my web site, which is exactly the effect I was after.

That being said, I'm finding that blosxom has a few warts:

Read more »

I'm using Markdown to write this blog entry. I've converted all my other entries to use Markdown as well. Markdown is cool.

One of the annoying things about Blosxom (and perhaps other blogging tools) is the need to write the entries in HTML. Now, I have nothing against HTML and, as I've mentioned before, I insist on having full control over the HTML that gets used on my site, especially for layout purposes. But for writing actual text, I find the markup a bit tedious, especially since I always end up using the same tags over and over again.

Read more »