Author: Jer Clarke

Great article on CBC.ca about the provincial government’s moronic purchasing practices around software. When they make a purchasing decision, they are required to accept bids from varoius parties and have to weigh them before deciding, but there is a loophole stating that in the absence of any other options they are allowed to just make the purchase from the sole contractor.

Now, this might make sense when there actually is no competition, but they’ve been invoking the loophole as an excuse to buy Windows Vista without even considering other options. Not only could they instead be buying Apple computers (which are completely comparable and have great service available) but it completely disregards the fact that they could buy NOTHING and just install Linux. They complain about lack of service and support for Linux, but there are tons of reliable companies offering support for Linux in all its forms, and you only need to pay for the support when you need it, rather than paying for every copy of the software on the assumption that you might need support (i.e. Windows, where most users will never get support from Microsoft but rather from the IT employees that the government is already paying!).

This is of course made worse by the fact that buying Microsoft products not only enslaves Quebec’s tech infrastructure to a U.S. corporation, it deprives local and international organizations that support and develop Linux from having a chance. If Quebec is serious about independence and solidarity they need to seriously rethink their attitudes about how the knowledge society/economy is going to play out.

Ignoring everything but the entrenched corporate players makes them seem blind and intellectually lazy. Think about it Quebec, you’d love it!

(Thanks to Lloyd Budd for the link)

Was randomly targeted with an IRC direct message by someone who didn’t have a firm grasp of English and wanted to know what ‘due date’ meant. After puzzling out that they actually just didn’t understand ‘due date’, I explained the concept to their satisfaction.

This of course made me ask where the person should have checked instead of bugging random IRC people who happen to be english, so I checked Wikipedia. Lo and behold, there was a page about it, but only defining ‘due date’ in terms of pregnancy (which I hadn’t even considered). Luckily it’s Wikipedia so I just added a more robust definition: Due Date @ Wikipedia.

Best part: Getting to make a wiki link to the page about ‘homework’, which apparently needs more citations ;)

While visiting other countries this summer I was amazed at how useful other currencies can be. While sometimes you need a 100 of a given currency to buy some bread, most countries just don’t bother printing/minting units of cash that can’t buy you, say, a piece of candy or one nut. If you can’t buy anything with ‘one’, then the lowest denomination should be 5. For some reason, Canada (and the U.S.) just ignore this, and force us to deal with worthless pennies in the name of keeping transactions accurate to 0.00. I mean, do you really want pennies? Is your life improved by them? Would you feel less rich if you didn’t get pennies back whenever you buy things?

It turns out the Canadian NDP party agrees with me, and has actually proposed legislation to ban the 130 million dollar penny creation and distribution infrastructure. What a good idea, imagine what we could do with 130 million dollars of NOT PENNIES!

Heard about it from this Yahoo News article about a cafe in halifax that has declared itself penny free, rounding transactions up and down as appropriate:

Each purchase is rounded to the nearest five cents – so a coffee that comes to $1.32 would have the customer pay $1.30, while a muffin that costs $1.73 would see the customer shell out the extra two cents.

Perfect. To those who worry that prices will go up to accomodate the new system all I can say is that a price increase of (even) 5 cents on anything you buy is so small that the energy you spent thinking about it is probably worth more.

With the Royal Canadian Mint pumping out about 760 million a year, Aubrey said pennies are a money pit.
“The reason there are so many is because the penny is not used,” Aubrey said.
“Consumers put them in buckets in their houses.”

And because I, like Yahoo News, am not too proud to end with a cheezy one-liner:

“I suggest we hold a birthday party and a funeral simultaneously and not issue any 2009 pennies,” Martin said.
“Making cents just doesn’t make sense anymore,” he said.

(via. mira, CC photo by Dystopos)

(Graphjam FTW)

I hadn’t heard much about Google’s new open source browser when I tried searching for it. Obviously searching for a new Google product in their own search engine was going to point me at whatever they wanted it to, so I was surprised to find that instead of the about page for the browser (currently just a Windows beta), the second result after Google News coverage was a beautiful comic explaining the new browser and the various technologies it thinks will be game-changing in the browser market.

While reading it I kept thinking, wow, this reminds me so much of Scott McCloud’s stuff: the blue shading, the way the panels are being used, the whole information heaviness…. The credits were only at the end, so I gave myself a gold star when I was right.

McCloud wrote two mind-blowing books about how comics work and why they are so awesome, Understanding Comics (Wikipedia link) and Reinventing Comics, that really influenced me back when I was feeling the first urges to start making my own comics. He made really solid arguments for using comics as a serious means of conveying information too complicated for written or verbal explanation but with a much lower budget than an ideal film production.

You’ll have to decide for yourself whether this comic about Chrome lives up to the dream of information utopia though sequential art. It’s very complex and actually does explain the core concepts behind their browser programming, so it’s fairly hard to understand everything happening on every page. It’s definitely beautiful though, and makes the programming concepts way more approachable than any text based article ever could have.

(via. icanhascheezburger)