Older blog entries for apenwarr (starting at number 544)

I may be internet famous, but I am not a primary source of original research

Particularly if you're thinking of footnoting my high school English essay as one of your references in a book about high-bandwidth network communications.

Yeah, I remember my teacher gave me a 10/10 on that one. 15 years ago. But seriously.

(Thanks to Eduardo for pointing out what happens when you search for "apenwarr" or "Avery Pennarun" in Google Books. Answer: silly things.)

Syndicated 2010-04-17 04:51:58 from apenwarr - Business is Programming

Open source is stupid

Not the software. The people. And not the people who make the software. The people who comment about it. I guess now that includes me, which is appropriate, since writing this post will obviously have no positive outcome.

Background: I love Linux. I've written far more Linux software (commercial and open source) than software for any other platform. Back in the 1990's, I even wrote a Linux kernel driver and poem that's (to my ongoing dismay) still in use today.

So yesterday's random post, in which I said something nice about Apple, naturally tagged me instantly as an "Apple Fanboy." (Of course, the accuser here is "somewhat of an exception" because he "really loves Linux." Uh huh. Yay you.)

By the way, yes, thank you for asking, I do have a Blackberry, and I have used the SDK, and the Blackberry simulator is 100% pure crap compared to the iPhone simulator. This is obvious after 0.5 seconds of comparing the two, after which the iPhone one has finished loading your app and the Blackberry one hasn't even made its window appear yet, let alone booted the simulated Blackberry OS.

Nevertheless, it's true. I am probably officially an Apple fanboy now. I mean, I've had an iPod since 2005, which is nearly the beginning of time. I even upgraded to an iPod Touch recently. Also I have a Mac laptop because they're the only ones where power management actually works. Plus I totally downloaded their SDK last week.

Speaking of which, XCode sucks.

Anyway. Fanboy. Yes. Probably. I do have to admit that it's interesting following along with the whole Evil/Artist dichotomy. Or is it a dichotomy at all? I mean, how can you be a serious artist and then let people use Java? Yes, Android, I'm talking to you.

And oh, speaking of Android. While I'm flaming people needlessly, let me just add one more thing:

Top 10 Paid apps in the Android App Store

See the list here.

  • Abduction! World Attack: 2D game in 1980's style, but with more colours.
  • Power Manager: because multitasking kills your battery.
  • Baseball Superstars: they're afraid to show any screenshots.
  • Open Home: Replace your home screen to further reduce usability.
  • Jewellust: a Bejewelled clone. Guess Bejewelled guys didn't bother.
  • MyBackup Pro: like backing up with iTunes, only not free.
  • Tangram Pro: something Chinese.
  • aHome: Yes, another one. Replace your home screen replacement.
  • dxTop: Oh look! 3/10 of the top paid apps replace the home screen!
  • Aevum Obscurum: the ancient game of Risk, only now you get to pay for it.
Looking at the top 10 free apps is even more apalling. The top 10 free arcade/action games include Pac Man, Tron, Rescue Copter (with realistic 1980's 4-colour graphics!), BrickBreaker, Nibbles, and worse. I'm not kidding about worse.

Remember, folks, Google is the worldwide expert at showing the very best stuff at the top of your search list. Just think what the next 10 look like!

Guys. This is what happens when you let Java people write apps for your platform. Who's evil, again?

Top 10 Paid apps in the Apple App Store

  • The Simpsons(tm)
  • Mega Man(tm) II
  • Scrabble(tm)
  • Monopoly(tm)
  • The Sims(tm) 3
  • Bejeweled(tm) 2
  • plus some garbage
Oddly, the ridiculously addictive and awesome Space Miner isn't even in the top 10.

You will note that Apple actually explicitly prohibits Java developers from coming anywhere near their SDK. It's part of the license. I'm not even kidding. This is not a coincidence.

There. Glad I got that out of my system.

apenwarr. Lowering the quality of discussion since... the 1990's sometime. Aw, who can remember exactly when. Whatever.

Syndicated 2010-04-08 21:58:00 from apenwarr - Business is Programming

8 Apr 2010 (updated 8 Apr 2010 at 20:06 UTC) »

How to run an iPhone app in the simulator without using XCode

I spent a lot of time looking around on the Internet for this answer, and the results were basically nonexistent. The answer is: iphonesim on github. (Despite its name, iphonesim isn't an iPhone simulator; you still need the iPhone SDK to be installed so it can use their simulator.)

The bad news is there's no obvious way to run your app in a Debugger using this system. Hopefully someday it'll be added or I'll figure it out, and then I'll be rid of XCode for good.

Why the iPhone Simulator is Awesome

While we're here, I'm very impressed by the whole concept on which the iPhone simulator works. Most embedded devices (including Blackberry, Android, and other phones) use software to emulate the embedded CPU, which then runs the embedded OS, which then runs your app. This kind of sucks, because the emulator has to work really hard (it often runs at only a fraction of the speed of a real device), and if you crash it you have to reboot it. Plus loading apps onto a simulated device is extra crappy, because you have to simulate a slow USB connection, and so on.

The iPhone simulator works nothing like that. Instead, you compile your app for your native CPU, and they made the iPhone simulator just a native program that runs on your workstation and provides the iPhone API (using native libraries). You simulate and test your program, and when you're finally happy with it, you recompile your app for the target CPU that actually runs on an iPhone. Then it won't work on the simulator anymore.

The result is that the simulator starts instantly and there's no insane two-layer debugging scheme in which you're running a native debugger and decoding non-native (and usually JITted) CPU instructions.

Some people would argue that this method is "less accurate" than precisely emulating the target CPU, and thus the simulator doesn't add much value, since you'll have to test the native app in the end anyhow. It's true that simulating this way is inaccurate and you should do final tests on a real device. The misconception, though, is that the old, annoying, slow, "emulate everything" method is any more accurate. In fact, it's worse.

The fact is, emulators are never perfect. CPU/hardware emulators are really hard to get right, especially if you're trying to make them run fast. If you're not trying to make them run fast, you have a whole different set of problems, because now your simulator is way slower than the real device, so all the animations/etc will be wrong. Try debugging an OpenGL app when your framerate is 1/10th what it should be.

By contrast, the iPhone simulator's method seems magically wonderful. Since the iPhone OS is MacOS, all the kernel APIs are the same. The natively-compiled frameworks, libraries, and display engine are built from the same source code, so you know they're the same too. And your Mac's CPU is a lot faster than the iPhone's CPU, so the simulator can slow down your program to iPhone speed, which is a lot easier than speeding it up (although admittedly imperfect).

In fact, with this method, the only potential sources of incorrect simulation are a) speed (which they seem to have gotten right); b) cross-platform bugs in gcc (I don't know of any); or c) differences in memory layout making memory corruption behave differently. (c) could be a problem, but they seem to provide a lot of debugging tools and you shouldn't be depending on memory corruption anyhow.

Incidentally, this design justifies the fact that you have to have a Mac to do iPhone development, and you have to have the latest MacOS (Snow Leopard) to run the latest SDK. This annoyed me when I first heard of it; I thought Apple was just trying to lock more people into buying a Mac. But now it totally makes sense: iPhone OS *is* Snow Leopard, so if you want to run the native simulator, of course you need Snow Leopard, or the simulator can't possibly work.

That's a really brilliant design tradeoff with huge benefits. And they get to lock more people into buying a Mac.

Update 2010/04/08: A few people have pointed out that the Blackberry "emulator" is apparently not actually an "emulator" but in fact runs a natively-compiled version of the Blackberry JVM. Okay, I guess, but that's not really the point. The point is that it still spends upwards of 30 seconds booting the "virtual Blackberry" before it even gets to the point where you can run your program. (And you have to do this every time you want to run your program.) This is annoying, slow, and pointless, and the (apparently native??) JVM still runs everything horrendously slowly - slower than a real Blackberry. So if it's not a native device emulator, then congratulations, it's somehow even stupider. Yes, I've done real Blackberry development, and the difference between the Blackberry and iPhone simulators is night and day.

Syndicated 2010-04-07 17:54:06 (Updated 2010-04-08 20:06:46) from apenwarr - Business is Programming

Dear StartupCampMontreal:

You are not a "camp." You are a "conf."

The xxxCamp naming scheme appears to have originated with O'Reilly's "FooCamp," which was an informal event where a bunch of famous techie people came to discuss stuff. The more commonly known "BarCamp" series was created as a backlash to the invitation-only FooCamp, but in the same "unconference" style. Thus, the "xxxCamp" series of events is defined primarily by its unconference attributes, to wit:

  • Poorly organized (in a good way)
  • Informal
  • No prearranged agenda
  • More conversations than presentations
  • No cabal of unelected organizers who decides who gets to speak
  • No keynote presentations
  • No direct financial upside for any participants
StartupCampMontreal claims to have an "unconference component," but this component is obviously a second-class citizen. Among the many reasons that this is obvious (from my observations when I attended it last year), one is especially egregious: the unconference portion is from 1pm to 6pm in the afternoon... on a weekday.

It's reasonably possible for many people to get a day off work to go to a conference; company-sponsored "professional development" days are common. Getting a free day off to go to an unconference is very unlikely. And you know this, because you put the "core" (non-unconference, ie. conference) part of your so-called camp in the evening, when people will be easily able to attend.

I don't actually like "conferences." I find them tedious. Keynote speakers, no matter how famous, are almost universally cliches. Presentations selected by a cabal of organizers are almost never the presentations that would have been selected by an audience (as they do at StartupCampWaterloo, which is a real "camp") - they are therefore boring. And a highly structured set of presentations leaves little time for socializing and unstructured discussion, which is the main purpose of an unconference.

Basically, StartupCampMontreal is not actually interesting to me, because it is not actually a StartupCamp. Your name is essentially false advertising.

Your conference is well organized, well marketed, smoothly running, and attracts a lot of people including numerous sponsors, reasonably famous keynote speakers, and an ever-increasing number of attendees. I'm sure that many of those people are happy to go to StartupConfMontreal, and I'm not suggesting that you change your format just for me.

But what I want and expect from a StartupCamp is an unconference. This is why I will not be attending StartupCampMontreal in the future.

Best of luck and have fun,

Avery

Syndicated 2010-03-24 18:55:49 from apenwarr - Business is Programming

bup is now more popular than all my other projects combined

...at least if you measure it by counting the number of watchers on github.

It is also featured in the top 100 or so interesting github repositories, although there's no particular indication of what they mean by "interesting."

(Previously: bup: it backs things up. It's matured quite a bit since then, though, and is now usable for backing up real work that you care about.)

Syndicated 2010-03-03 21:27:20 from apenwarr - Business is Programming

The problem with stealing movies is you *can't* pay for them after

Imagine you go into a clothing store and steal a pair of pants. And you get away with it.

Not long after, you realize that, you know, these pants are *really great*. And never mind that, these physical object thingies really do cost people time and effort to produce. You feel guilty. So what do you do?

Well, you sure don't go back to the store and pay retroactively, that's for sure. Not only will you single yourself out and look like a weirdo, but you risk having the police called on you anyway. After all, you just admitted to a crime.

Nonphysical objects like movie downloads aren't quite the same. It doesn't cost the creator a dime if you make your own copy. Obviously it still cost them to create it, so they'll need to get paid somehow. And let's be honest, if someone creates a product - even a digital one that costs nothing to copy - that improves the lives of hundreds of millions of people, they deserve more than just a pittance. They deserve millions of dollars. Maybe hundreds of millions, which is still only a couple of dollars per person. We all know this is true. Even if we think the producers and marketers are morons who seem intent on making our lives worse instead of better, we know that somebody who made this awesome entertaining stuff deserves to get paid. A lot.

Copying a TV series from a friend, watching a few episodes, enjoying it, and then deciding to buy it is easy - and not something that will get you into trouble, because nobody will know but you and your friend. But somehow you'll still feel like a weirdo if you go out to a store and buy it just to relieve your guilt.

Why is that? Why don't people pay for stuff they stole, even if they love it, even if it won't get them into trouble?

Of course I don't know for sure. But I have a couple of thoughts. First of all, going out to the store and buying a DVD is silly; it wastes time and energy, plus you end up with a useless DVD, which is an obsolete form factor much less convenient than the one (file on hard disk) that you got for free. What are you going to do with the DVD? Either throw it away (not likely), sell it (defeats the purpose), or keep it on your shelf forever. Dumb.

You could go buy it on iTunes, I guess. But then you're sponsoring a wannabe monopolist, plus you know you're paying some middleman at Apple for their bandwidth, which you're not even planning to use. You already downloaded the thing.

You could buy it online and have it shipped to you - but then you end up with the useless physical DVD, plus you pay for shipping the useless physical DVD. (Even if the shipping is "free," you know it's hidden in the price somewhere.)

And you also might figure the price is too high. $47 for Season 5 of House, MD? You don't have that kind of money just lying around. Plus you didn't even watch the whole season.

Another reason you don't pay is simple: you just never quite get around to it. And by the time the guilt is overwhelming, you've watched so many shows from so many seasons of so many series that you can't even keep track of what you owe anymore, other than it's now way more money than you have lying around.

What if there was a service that could help?

PayUp.com: "Because you should."

(Note: payup.com is not a real domain name as of this writing. It's just an example.)

Imagine there was a plugin integrated into, say, Boxee or XBMC, that would track what you watched - and give you a dollar value based on the cost of the DVDs. If you have a season of House, MD and a season of Firefly, and you watch half of each one, your total would come to ... half the cost of the two added together.

Then what if, on the first of each month, the plugin pops up a list of the shows you watched but haven't paid for, calculates a bill, and offers to send money to the manufacturers on your behalf?

The amount of money could default to the auto-calculated amount. Or you could assign a monthly budget, and divide it between the shows you watched. Or you could manually override it and send whatever amount you wanted. Or you could have it round up to buy the whole DVD after you watch 50% of it, or whatever.

Then, after you approve the payment, it debits your credit card and the cards of all the other users, and buys a bunch of DVDs from Amazon.com (or whatever) based on what the users chose to pay for.

So if you pay for 10% of House, MD, Season 5, and nine other people do too, the service buys 1 copy on your behalf. Amazon ships the DVD to Payup.com, which promises never to open the DVD, and just stores it in the warehouse forevermore (or just destroys it). Maybe they charge 5-10% of the purchase price for being the middle man. Maybe they can get a bulk distribution deal somewhere and not charge any extra at all (since, after all, there's no more "free" shipping and handling charge).

A typical cost for cable TV is $60 a month or more; that's more than a full season of House, MD, which is more TV than I can handle in a month. (Of course, some people watch much more TV than me.) What if you cancelled your TV subscription and just assigned $60 a month for payup fees instead?

This won't make your movie stealing any more legally sound. But morally? That's up to you.

Business Considerations

The Payup.com service, of course, would be a bit of a strange entity. Think of it as Netflix without the distribution. Sure, business people think distribution is everything, but that's old fashioned thinking. This is the 21st century. In the 21st century, distribution is free and everybody can do it, so you'd better find some other way to add value.

Think about that. Distribution is free and everybody can do it. Of course, it's not really free yet. It seems free to you and me, because we pay our monthly internet bill, and as long as we don't go over the limit, we don't pay extra. And we can copy DVDs for our friends for less than $0.50 each. But if you're Apple or Amazon or Hulu or Google, distribution sure the heck isn't free. Outside of licensing, it's probably your #1 cost, your most complicated technical overhead, and it hurts your business every time you have to pay for it.

So distribution isn't valuable. What's valuable is getting money back to the copyright holders. Because when copyright holders don't get paid, all we have left is Youtube, and God help us all.

What if you could build a business around not the distribution, but just the paying for licenses? Okay, sure, BitTorrent sharing of movies is illegal and all, but that's kind of a side issue. It's not like your service is making it easier to steal stuff. That's already easy. You're just making it easy to give money to the copyright holders. You're totally taking the moral high ground here. You're turning a net loss - piracy - into a net gain - vastly reduced distribution costs (zero) and paying customers.

The Pirate Bay deserved to lose their court case because as much as they tried to pretend otherwise, they totally lacked the moral high ground, and were playing legal tricks to try to dodge that simple fact. The Pirate Bay could only reduce, never increase, income for copyright holders. Payup.com will be different; not only will it directly provide income to copyright holders, but it'll make services like The Pirate Bay retroactively less evil. Suddenly not all the piracy it caused would be a loss of income.

Of course the copyright holders won't see it that way. Your Payup.com will probably get sued. But when that happens, how can you lose? You're not doing anything wrong. Basically, you're accepting donations from users and forwarding them on to the copyright holders. You're not copying content, indexing content, linking to content, sharing content, or anything of the sort. In fact, you have nothing to do with the content whatsoever. That can't be illegal, can it? (Disclaimer: I really don't know. Talk to a lawyer.)

What about your users? Are they at risk? After all, sending you 10% of the cost of House, MD seems to suggest that they copied the other 90% without paying... or that they copied any of it without a license. But is it really true? Is it sufficient evidence for the police to demand your customer list and start arresting people? I don't know. If it's framed as just donations - I really like this show, and I want to pay you extra for it, but I really don't want another useless DVD - then maybe not.

Is the only reason this won't work, the same reason you can't go back to the store and pay for your stolen pants? If so, that's pretty sad.

Or maybe people just won't pay for stuff if you don't force them to. I don't want to live in such a world. Maybe I'm just a naive Canadian and/or a communist. But I'd pay for this service if it existed. Firefly and Futurama need more donations than the cost of a mere DVD.

Syndicated 2010-02-07 22:56:01 from apenwarr - Business is Programming

A git-subtree tutorial

Jakub Suder has a nice tutorial on how to use my git-subtree tool to manage git repositories that track other projects in subdirs.

It's quite nicely written, and unlike my own documentation, it has pretty diagrams.

Syndicated 2010-02-04 19:43:11 from apenwarr - Business is Programming

25 Jan 2010 (updated 26 Jan 2010 at 18:07 UTC) »

More on prorogation

In response to my previous post about prorogation, someone emailed me this comment:

    My participation in our democracy is limited to voting when there's an election and mostly ignoring everything else. [...] Despite that, I can tell from the rumbling that there's something unusual about this particular prorogation. If it was just normal boring governing, nobody would be talking about it.

I actually think this comment is very insightful, because it gets right to the heart of the issue I was trying to address. Other people sent responses that were more like, "But what gives them the right to manipulate it in such an evil way?" It's almost the same question, but those comments were not insightful. They missed the fact that there may not be any manipulation at all, and therefore turned it from a question of fact into a question of opinion.

I'm not a professional journalist. Yesterday's attempt at factual reporting took all the restraint I had. So this post will surely not meet my own high standards for journalistic integrity. I'm just some guy on the Internet. You've been warned.

How I came to know what "prorogation" means

Full disclosure: I personally don't like the Conservatives. I think if they had a majority government, Canada would be worse off. I think the fact that Harper does most of his public relations through a "spokesperson" is a total embarrassment. I also think our current batch of other political leaders, with the possible exception of Gilles Duceppe, are even worse, and I sorely miss the days when Jean Chretien used to beat people up with statues. But I wouldn't vote for Ignatieff, precisely because he pulls the current kind of crap. I wish I still lived in Quebec so I'd at least have a party worth voting for.

That's the perspective with which, not knowing anything about the current prorogation debate (or even what "prorogation" means), I returned to Canada from my vacation in Mexico and was met by an angry Internet mob complaining about our upcoming dictatorship.

See above: "My participation in our democracy is limited to voting when there's an election and mostly ignoring everything else." Me too. You know why? Because I think the system works. That's the beauty of representative democracy. But I figured, okay guys, I'm pretty smart, I can figure this stuff out. If there's really a dictatorship coming, I want to be on the winning team. So I thought I'd better look into it.

The actual mob of complainers were no help. They all figured that someone else knew what was bad about what was going on, or else they figured that just suspending parliament at all made the government a dictatorship.

This left me to do my own "research" (a word that is in quotes because I did all this "research" in bed using my laptop).

First stop: The National Post (via Google), in an article titled, "Thousands turn out at rallies to protest proroguing of Parliament."

    Intermission: A note on how to read political news
    All news sources are biased. The first thing you have to do is identify the bias. Both the National Post and the Globe and Mail are Liberal-friendly and anti-Conservative. How can you tell? Just read any headline about politics and watch the trend. Other tips: 1) all quotes from politicians are weasel words; don't trust them. 2) using quotations from any individual allow the newspaper to avoid fact checking; it is always a fact that "person X said Y," no matter how false Y may be. 3) in constructions like "estimates pegged the turnout at more than 3000 people" note that nobody in particular is being quoted; they are reporting that some random person estimated more than 3000 people. Do not fool yourself into thinking that they don't pull tricks like this. They have to research, write, edit, and publish a fat sheaf of paper like the National Post every single day. Corners will be cut.

...shockingly, the National Post headline is phrased in an anti-government way (since the government is Conservative). Reading on, we see lots of quotes from political leaders (ignore them; rule 1). The whole article is also really a big quote from an angry mob of protesters (no fact checking was done; rule 2), since it merely reports that there was an angry mob, not that what the mob was angry about even exists. And we don't know if the mob was really 10 people or a million people (rule 3).

So that article, although it used many words, was in fact 100% pure unenlightening.

Nevertheless, I could feel myself thinking anti-Conservative thoughts despite the total lack of facts. I thought I'd better go find something biased in the opposite direction so that I could balance things out a little. I realized that I couldn't think of any actual Canadian mainstream newspapers that are Conservative-friendly; I'm probably forgetting something obvious.

So I resorted to blogs, which made things easier. Next stop: Alberta Ardvark (via Google). I have to admit that I assumed they were Conservative-friendly just because they're in Alberta, which means I'm a racist. However, I was not disappointed.

That article was the usual politico-blogger nonsense, giving handy advice on how to win a political argument not by arguing about the issue, but instead by turning the conversation around to character assassination whenever possible. (In this case, it's about the fact that Ignatieff supported prorogation last year, so he's not allowed to be against this particular prorogation this year; that makes him inconsistent, therefore a liar, so it doesn't matter what he says, etc.) Nicely done as always, Internet. But there was one intriguing quote: "...the ones who have been convinced by the media that this prorogation is not a routine event..."

Wait... routine event? Surely this is Conservative propaganda. I was intrigued, so I followed the link.

It points out that Chretien prorogued parliament 4 times. And Pierre Elliot Trudeau, supposed Canadian hero... 11 times?! Holy crap! Who's the evil one around here, again?

My brain's magical pattern-detectors then kicked in and I thought: hey, wait a minute. Those prorogation counts seem to be roughly proportional to the amount of time a particular Prime Minister was in office. Perhaps there's a pattern here.

And then, at the bottom of the article: "In our 143 years of existence as Canada, Parliament has been prorogued 105 times."

Oh dear.

Maybe I'd better go learn what prorogation is. The answer is: it's an all-too-fancy word for the end of every parliamentary session.

And it's a word I didn't know the meaning of until now. A word that every news article and blog entry I've read so far has not bothered to define. A word that, in some tenses, has the word "rogue" in it.

Okay, this sucks. Reading biased articles in a search for truth is getting me nowhere. Is there not any news source that will just give me the facts and not try to spin it the way they want? Well, no, I guess there isn't. But there's something close: the CBC.

Because it would be weird if they didn't, the above-linked CBC article has quotes from politicians; try to ignore them (rule 1). If you fail to do so, you will discover that the first apparent use of the word "despotic" in this context was by Ralph Goodale, Liberal House Leader, whom you should not vote for because he is thus automatically a lunatic.

However, the non-politician-quote parts of the article seem to be well balanced and, notably, identify several reasons why Harper might have wanted to prorogue government right now as opposed to some other time.

So what have we learned? First, that prorogation of parliament is totally normal, and that the length of the just-ended session isn't even unusually short; and second, that Harper might very well have chosen this particular date in order to benefit himself or his party. Gasp! Let us look at these possible reasons in more detail.

The CBC's suggested reasons for the current prorogation

"Muzzle parliamentarians amid controversy over the Afghan detainees affair." Don't know about you, but parliament has been shut down for a whole month already and I haven't noticed any of those parliamentarians not talking. I wish. But maybe you have a point; when parliament next starts up, I bet the opposition parties will have completely forgotten about the whole thing, despite the obvious political leverage they could gain from bringing it up. Harper has totally outfoxed them on this one.

"To consult with Canadians, stakeholders and businesses as it moves into the 'next phase' of its economic action plan amid signs of economic recovery." Well, I guess theoretically, if you're in parliament you don't have as much time for consulting with Canadians. But don't we have Royal Commissions for that or something? Maybe they just wanted a longer Christmas holiday. (Aside: the reason the prorogation "doesn't start until January 25th" is that they've all been on holidays since sometime in December. Seriously.)

"Strategically, prorogation also prevents question period criticisms from the opposition parties during the Olympics." Hey, not bad. Avoid the bad PR for Canada from discussing our idiotic foreign affairs policies at the same time as we're in the global spotlight. Critically, this allows Mr. Harper, who (let's be honest) doesn't look all that lovable, to hide in the cellar for the whole time the Olympics are on, letting someone cuter represent us to the world. This seems to be a wise strategy no matter which side of the fence you're on.

"By proroguing Parliament, he is unilaterally making a decision to stop any kind of disclosure from happening." As if information can't be disclosed just because nobody's making any laws right now. Remember: parliament is the legislative branch of the government. It's for making new laws. No other part of the government is suspended just because parliament is. (Note: see update below.)

"Gilles Duceppe wrote that prorogation has become 'a tradition for Harper.'" Duceppe has an awesome sense of humour. I had to read this one a few times before I realized that he managed to give them a sound bite while simultaneously making fun of the fact that prorogation is totally normal, ie. a "tradition."

"By the time Parliament resumes, Harper would have had time to ask Jean to name five new senators, which would give the Conservatives a majority on the newly formed Senate committees and greater control for passing their own legislation." (Notably: nobody was quoted saying this. CBC had to look it up on their own.) "Soudas confirmed the prime minister will seek to fill the Senate vacancies between now and March." This one is actually a great example of a real political reason to prorogue parliament; to get more control of the senate in time for the next session. But the Canadian senate system is designed (on purpose) to work like that. That's why the current senate is mostly Liberal even though our elected representatives are mostly non-Liberal. Senators are appointed for life, at which time the Prime Minister selects new ones. No surprises here.

(In case you don't like that system: the only party in favour of senate reform in Canada is the Conservatives. They'd rather you could elect your senators. How "anti-democratic" of them. I actually think such reform would be a change for the worse, but that's just my opinion.)

"Shortly after Soudas' announcement, the government sent out an email saying it would reintroduce, in original form, the consumer safety bill and the anti-drug-crime law that the Tories claimed the Liberals 'gutted' in the Senate." This shows significant political maneuvering. However, bills take multiple rounds through both houses before they (might) get passed anyway, so this isn't as bad as it sounds. The "gutted" version might never have been passed anyway. Also, interestingly, this was pointed out in an email from a Conservative MP. Apparently they don't think it's evil. At least not evil enough to cover up.

Conclusions

Guys, I did my homework. But I'm just not seeing it. The actual facts are:

1) Prorogation is perfectly normal and the recent parliamentary session wasn't abnormally short.

2) We won't have any more new laws getting made for a month or so longer than usual. (Remember: they were on vacation until January 25th anyway.) But being unable to do stuff doesn't make you a despot, it makes you a eunuch.

3) If Harper is really evil, the first thing to happen in the new parliament in March is that there will be a vote of non-confidence followed by an election. If this doesn't happen, it's because the angry non-Conservative parties didn't actually believe he was evil either.

4) There are some valid political reasons why it's better for the Conservatives if they prorogue parliament right now instead of later. However, they aren't very exciting reasons.

5) There is at least one actual reason (Harper is scary-looking and the Olympics are coming) that it's better for Canada if they prorogue parliament right now.

6) All mainstream media that I read - which was quite a bit - failed to properly define the term "prorogation" or to mention that it's perfectly normal. This seems a rather critical thing to know. Its omission suggests to me that they're trying to make news out of non-news.

Epilogue

"If it was just normal boring governing, nobody would be talking about it."

Unfortunately not true.

That's textbook mob mentality: he must be guilty, because otherwise my friends wouldn't be burning down his house.

The only cure for mob mentality is thinking for yourself.

Updates

Some helpful people have emailed me to clarify or correct or question various parts of the above.

Information release on the Afghan torture investigation: make no mistake, this investigation, and the demand for release of information related to it, is very important. It will also be delayed (for about one month) because of prorogation. Because of "parliamentary immunity," the interesting testimony won't be released during the delay. However, you need to think about two key points: first, will the end result of the investigation be any different because of a one-month delay? And second: will the Conservatives benefit because of the delay? Keep in mind that if the results came out now, they would be largely overshadowed by news about the Olympics. If they come out later, the Olympics will be over, the opposition parties could force an election, and the results would be headlining right as we're thinking about who to vote for. And yet the Conservatives have chosen the latter, not the former.

Precise timing of prorogation: Several people responded by claiming that it's not prorogation that's the problem, it's the particular timing of Harper's use of prorogation. This is an insidious line of argument because it's impossible to disprove; if Harper had prorogued parliament back on the 9th of September (9/9/9 is the British equivalent of 9/1/1), you could have accused him of using numerology to choose prorogation dates, and it would be impossible to refute that claim, even if it had been a perfectly sensible date to end the parliamentary session. Thus, to demonstrate any wrongdoing, you really have to be more specific about why the current timing is so evil. I have discussed several possible reasons above. Please feel free to suggest more. But "the timing is evil!" is not specific enough.

With that in mind, however, a lot of bad statistics are being spread with regard to the lengths of various parliamentary sessions. Here are all of the sitting days per session since 1980:

Turner and Trudeau (Liberal): 591, 116
Mulroney (Conservative): 308, 389, 11, 308, 271
Chretien (Liberal): 283, 164, 243, 133, 211, 143 (avg: 196)
Martin (Liberal): 55, 159
Harper (Conservative): 175, 117, 13, 128 (avg. excluding outlier: 140)

Eyeballing it, Harper's numbers are very slightly lower than typical (except for last year's prorogation, which was indeed an interesting event). Ignoring the outlier (13), Harper's average is just 29% lower than Chretien's. However, Harper has also managed to hold together the longest-running (by a large margin) minority government in Canadian history. I find it unsurprising that the effort required to do so would result in somewhat shorter sessions.

Syndicated 2010-01-25 01:16:10 (Updated 2010-01-26 18:07:15) from apenwarr - Business is Programming

Proroguing parliament

"Prorogation" is the term we use to describe the end of any session of parliament in Canada.

Or as the Canadian Parliament web site says, "Each session of a Parliament ends with the prorogation of Parliament by the Governor General, on the advice of the Prime Minister."

Since Canada's confederation in 1867 (143 years ago), parliament has prorogued 105 times. That's an average of about 1.4 years per session (some are longer, some are shorter).

See the Government of Canada's complete list of prorogations.

Use of the term "despotic" in this context makes you automatically a lunatic.

That is all.

Syndicated 2010-01-24 07:11:07 from apenwarr - Business is Programming

The Google Phone

    ...even Microsoft never was brazen enough to pull something like this. Even Microsoft had some tiny bit of shame. Google is a different beast altogether. They're like nothing anyone has ever seen in our business. Not only are they not ashamed - they think they're the good guys!

    -- Fake Steve Jobs

Dot dot dot.

Syndicated 2010-01-06 23:55:58 from apenwarr - Business is Programming

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