5000 Kilometre Hike

Ever thought of taking a hike … and not coming back for 4 months?

A business associate of mine, Dave Baggenstos, is doing exactly that. Very cool.

Papers, can I see your papers, please?

The phrase “papers, can I see your papers” brings back one massive conglomerate image in my mind of the hundreds of cold-war spy movies I’ve wasted my time on … the hero/ine is stepping onto the train or walking through the street in some Eastern bloc country with a totalitarian government.

But that could never happen here, could it? Maybe it already has ….

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Europe: Doublethought lives! (updated)

Speaking as a Canadian of relatively recent European descent, Europe is really ticking me off these days.

What’s bugging me? European hunger to sell methods of killing people to China.

Maybe I’m just stupid. But I have this impression that Europe thinks it’s a kinder, gentler place than, for instance, the US of A. That’s, at least, what one might think after the huge wedge (also called the Atlantic Ocean) driven between Europe and the States by the ongoing Iraq situation.

But why, oh why, are the Europeans - France in particular - always so eager to be merchants of death? It’s not OK to make war on other nations, but it is OK to sell weapons to others so they can go make war? After all, that’s what weapons are for.

Not that I have anything particularly against China. Chinese people are great. Unfortunately, their government is totalitarian, puts people in jail whenever it wishes, has occupied and attempted to destroy Tibet, is continually rattling sabers at Taiwan, does not allow true religious freedom (and in fact jails and persecutes Christians), and in many other ways, feels compelled to throw its considerable weight around. Not the kind of government you want to sell weapons to, huh?

But European principles, apparently, are up for sale to the highest bidder.

Note:
I was kind of inspired to finish this column after I read Pieter Dorsman’s blog on politics. I had been meaning to write it ever since I saw the NY Times article linked to above, but had kept putting it off. I met Pieter at Vancouver Enterprise Forum, and his blog is quite good. Plus, he’s a fellow Dutchman!

Finder Art

The last 3-4 posts on my blog to the contrary, I swear I am not on a bug-hunting binge right now … they just keep popping up. Finder (the windowing app for Mac OS X) kinda went crazy today.

Every time I moved an icon or a window, it left tracks somewhat like a jet contrail. So, I thought, let’s make some art. Here’s the result:

Ajax and dirty laundry

Ajax applications (Asynchronous Javascript + XML) are the hottest topic du jour, due to Jesse Jame Garrett’s essay on the topic a few days ago.

(Offtopic: I hate being scooped by Slashdot! I noticed the Ajax article a few days ago off a link at Peterme, and was going to blog it …. but … Slashdot beat me to it.)

In any case, Jeffrey Veen, another Adaptive Path associate, mentioned that 1976Design.com had a pretty neat implementation of this: the live search results it offers.

Cool - but the same rules apply: validate your input.

While doing things the old fashioned way might have brought up a standard error page, this Ajax implementation sort of hung out the dirty laundry in public, when I fed it something indigestible (an apostrophe):

Google Error - Wow!

I saw a Google error today for the first time ever …. Mike Skovgaard, one of our developers, found it first.

Screenshot follows, as proof:

Vancouver Enterprise Forum, Feb. 22 2005

I attended the Vancouver Enterprise Forum tonight for the first time.

It’s a bunch of people who are related to the technology, venture capital, and entrepreneurial worlds who get together every month around different topics. This month was cleantech, or green energy. Not really my specialty, but the speakers were interesting. They included Jeff Moris, a particularly clueful representive in the Washington state legislature, Kirk Washington, who, in addition to having a cool name and being one of the people in at the ground floor of Ballard Power Systems, is a venture capitalist, and a really smart young venture capitalist, Christine Bergeron, who should really get that ‘Miss’ taken off her puff page at her current employer’s site, Chrysalix.

The coolest part, though, as usual, was schmoozing with all kinds of interesting people before and after the speakers.

I met the CFO of Actenum, Peiter Dorsman. Actenum is a high-end scheduling firm with several PhD’s on staff, who you’d really do well to talk to you if you need to solve the stereotypical travelling salesman problem, or if you have 700 trucks in your fleet, and need to figure out the most efficient way to get them all the places they need to go. Pieter is the only CFO I know (not that I know an incredible number of CFOs) who is also an amateur astronomer, which is kinda cool.

I met Thomas Dowad of BeforeTechnologyLimited, who is a veteran programmer working on ways of making smart embedded systems programmable by mere mortals for mere pennies. Very cool.

And I met a bunch of really smart grad students from UBC and SFU who were working on all kinds of cool stuff: alcohol-based fuel cells, automation and robotics control systems, you name it.

All in all, a well-spent evening. Hopefully next month’s topic will be just a little bit more up my alley: web application development.

Apple: Speed up iPhoto, ASAP

iPhoto’s slowness is turning a great iApp into the Achilles heel of Apple’s digital lifestyle.

It’s just so easy to start using, that - amazingly enough - people actually use it. And what happens when you do? Frustration and disappointment, to a degree.

iPhoto is still cool, don’t get me wrong. It’s just dog-ass slow.

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