Updated: Never — Philip's Blog

I'm running a bit behind on the news again. One advantage of reading a week's worth of newspapers in a day however, is that stories develop much quicker than if you have to wait a whole day for the next episode. A disadvantage is that idiocy becomes much clearer and gets the blood boiling much quicker too.

Next month, like everyone else in Europe, we'll be voting for our representatives in the European parliament. In Belgium, we will also be voting for representatives in the superfluous "regional" parliaments.

Elections are compulsory in Belgium. This is a good thing as it allows politicians to campaign on facts (should they so choose) rather than having to expend a lot of energy on motivating the uninterested to vote. A parliament voted only by fanatics would be a very bad thing of course. A couple of weeks before the elections, every eligible voter gets a summons in the mail from their local council telling them where they need to go to vote.

Some towns in Belgium have very mixed populations. Much to the dismay of certain right-wing linguistic supremacists, there are people speaking Dutch, French, Arabic, English, Turkish and other languages all living together in the same town. How very untidy! One such town near Brussels decided to be practical and send out the elections summons in Dutch and French. This is much more efficient of course than writing it in Dutch and adding a footnote that anyone needing a French translation can request one specially.

"Gosh, it's a letter from the government, three weeks before elections, could this be my summons? I don't know, we should request a translation to be sure!".

Of course, this got the extremists very upset. And the newspapers have exploded again with cries about "wasting money" and such. Only in the fictional region of "Flanders" do we have politicians who seriously believe that forbidding efficiency can save them money.

What can possibly be gained by emphatically deciding not to write to your inhabitants in a language they understand? Do they think it will motivate people to "integrate" (nasty word) better? If anything, I think it would make people feel more left out.

Forbidding efficiency. What a stupid idea.

I think it's obvious that I'm not going to vote for anyone promoting such lunacy.

Grump.

The machine that used to serve this blog (an aging Sun Netra T1) had been starting to show its age for a while. Rock-solid hardware though it is, it really is no match for the bloated scriptware running websites in the 21st century.

It has now been replaced by a shiny multi-core amd64 machine from iXsystems.

As part of the move to new hardware, I decided to replace Apache with lighttpd and move some more stuff into jails. This should ensure that the beast continues to be fast even if stuff gets even more bloated.

This was a remarkably smooth ride.

Geeks love puzzles. To kill time before our flight and to satisfy gnn's need for trains, we went to the Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa. George got to see trains and we all enjoyed a number of amusing demonstrations of things not to try at home with liquid nitrogen.

In the museum shop, there was a large selection of tanglement puzzles, which of course I could not resist. I bought one called The Anomaly, which is classed as "mind boggling". And the classification was dead-on too. It took me hours to solve this one. Useful use of jetlag!

I'll take this one to work tomorrow and share the frustration with the usual suspects. Muaahaha.

I am Philip and I recommend this puzzle.

17:47 EDT

Airport wireless access continues to amuse me. At YOW, one can now get fifteen minutes of free wireless access. Normally, this would mean continuous wireless access, because few providers actually kill sessions. Just keep a tunnel open. Unfortunately, here they actually do kill sessions.

So I have to pick a new MAC address every fifteen minutes. Somewhat annoying but not impossible to script.

Next many hours will be spent in a little tube pointing towards an island off the coast of Europe. Not fun. Checking email for free before boarding makes it a little less bad.

10:07 EDT

I've been in Ottawa for a couple of days again and the local Second Cup staff is starting to remember me from last year as the bearded nerd who likes to be surprised for breakfast. So far, I've not had a duplicate muffin yet. Whoopie!

Just to be different, I'm now also asking for arbitrary ice cream and beer. Surprise is good!

Last night, I started upgrading Coverity to the latest version and poked dmaxwell about things which are obviously obvious to him but less so to me. I expect to get the defect spam working this weekend. With some luck.

12:14 EDT

My old floating head was starting to show its age. It had been in place since November 2006. A couple of weeks ago, Wouter hackergotchified the infamous "pointy hat" photo for Planet grep and I'm rather chuffed with the result.

It'll last a couple of years again, I'm sure.

13:50 EDT

I decided to fly from Toronto to Ottawa this morning. There is a perfectly functional (if slow) train, but my carbon footprint for this trip is already gargantuan so I didn't feel too bad about saving a couple of hours and collecting a couple of hundred miles along the way.

Printing my boarding pass and bus-ticket to the airport yesterday, I noticed that for a domestic flight of under an hour, it is recommended that I get to the airport three hours before my flight.

What are these people smoking?

I showed up 40 minutes before my flight and had an ocean of time to get bored in. What on earth do they expect people to do for three hours? I have yet to miss my first flight due to showing up to the airport too late.

Flying is supposed to be the most efficient (if most polluting) way to get between two points. If you tell people to come to the airport with enough time to walk to their destination, it's no wonder airlines are losing business.

19:12 EDT

I survived another eight hours locked up in a steel tube pointing towards Canada earlier today. first thing I did after I got here (after witnessing the mandatory introductory card crash) was buy money for my Canadian pre-paid phone.

Rogers has also gone the robot way. Has anyone ever got one of those robot systems to actually work? Do we all need to take lessons in robot pronunciation now?

Long live gethuman.com!