The Greatest Game Out There

Ahh... the political season is upon us again.

After a quite summer and a real sleeper of a Provincial Election (The only excitement I saw during the election was when a voter at the poll refused to tell me his name -- that's another story) we're back at it full force.

Harper has made a strong opening move with this week's Throne Speech. In my opinion, he's forcing an election. Let's look at his recent statements plus the throne speech:

• He has stated that if the opposition parties vote to pass the Throne Speech, they have an obligation to pass any and all legislation mentioned in the speech. (Also known as, "I double-dog dare you to vote this down!")
  
• A clear abandonment of the Kyoto Accord.
• Scrapping the gun-registry.
• Several violent crime and anti-terror bills which were voted down in the last session have been combined into a single omnibus bill and is first up on the order paper. This bill has been specifically designated as a matter of confidence.
• Extending the Afghan mission to 2011.

Naturally, Layton and Duceppe immediately stated that they would not support this while Dion has been conspicuously absent. Ignatieff gave a brief interview where he spoke lots, but said absolutely nothing.

Layton and Duceppe can bluster with impunity. If an election were called tomorrow, or 6 months from now will make very little difference to them... what do they have to gain or lose? A dozen seats? Out of 304? Most likely insignificant. It would take a near-complete collapse of AT LEAST one the major federal parties (ie: Liberal and/or Conservative) to install Jack Layton at 24 Sussex as anything higher than the gardener and, with respect to Gilles Duceppe the numbers just aren't there. Quebec only has 75 seats.

Edit: I suppose it IS possible... assuming that the Bloc sweeps Quebec with 75 seats and the Liberals, Conservatives and NDP each win 74 seats, the Green Party wins it's first seat ever, then 10 more (maybe some Independents and fringe parties too) we could have a separatist Prime Minister.... and I thought I had has conflicts of interest in the past!

75 Bloc
+74 Liberal
+74 Conservative
+74 NDP
+11 Green and Other
-----
308 Seats

But, back to the original topic, it looks to me like Harper is trying to goad the opposition into forcing an election. He can then use the Throne Speech as his campaign platform. What could be better than having the Governor General make your first campaign speech? He can then play the wounded man and talk about how he wanted the parliament to work, he wanted to do what was right for Canadians, he was sabotaged by an opposition who are only thinking of their own opportunism. Bullshit! As I said to Paul Martin in 2005, treating a minority government like a majority is a good way to ensure your next job is Leader of the Opposition.

All that being said, Harper has the most to gain, or at least the least to lose at this point. Lets face it, the Liberals are bleeding from every orifice right now plus a few others they've just found. I'm sure Dion is looking for a way to oppose the Throne Speech while still letting it pass (I foresee a flu epidemic in the Liberal back benches in the next couple of weeks). Even if this works, he'll still have the Crime Omnibus coming up for vote in as little as three weeks, back to square one.

The short answer though is, that if we're going to the polls anytime soon it's 100% Stephen Harper's doing. How much do you want to bet that most people won't get that?

Running a DoS... on myself

For a few days I had a client whose main NetWare server would practically hang every afternoon for about 1/2 hour(The server did this for a few days... I didn't have the client for a few days). It was the craziest thing until I saw what was actually happening...

This server is one of those small biz servers that does practically everything. File, print, GroupWise, FTP, routing, BorderManager Reverse Proxy, iFolder... get the idea?

When the server was misbehaving, I happened to look at the BorderManager screen and saw that is was going nuts... hundreds of requests per second. Shutdown BorderManager and activity returned to normal, start it up and within a minute we'd be back in the thick of it.

Now, this was by no means a "standard install". In order to secure the system (there's a fair bit of organizational paranoia and an inordinate amount of money - not for IT - considering there's only 25 users) with no real budget we had setup BorderManager reverse proxy for a web server they had inside the network. We also configured it for GroupWise webaccess which ran on the same server as BorderManager (but a different IP). Of course, this affected ALL web services on that IP including... wait for it.... iFolder.

It just so happened that the SQL server would do a regular database dump every afternoon into... you guessed it... an iFolder. This wasn't a problem until we added the BorderManager proxy. Suddenly, we had an 800MB file being transferred accross a 1Gbps link to BorderManager, then being retransmitted (again at 1Gbps) to another IP on the same NIC. In essence this file upload was trying to transmit itself 3 times over (1 - SQL to BM, 2 - BM to Apache (send), 3 - BM to Apache (receive)).

Essentially a DoS on myself.

A question for all the twins out there...

I was thinking the other day... in the case of identical twins, do you really know which twin you are?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not questioning whether or not you're a separate person, of course you are. Is it possible though that when you were an infant and your parents hadn't figured out how to tell you apart, since they hadn't known you that long, and they mixed the two of you up? Maybe you're not the elder one after all?

Just a thought... courtesy of Ian's Damaged Mind....

Single Letter Domain Names

Yesterday, I was having lunch with my friend/colleague Andreas when the subject of single character domain names came up. Between us the only one we could think of was x.com which redirects to PayPal.

This morning I did a non-comprehensive WHOIS and found the following:

q.com: Qwest
x.com: Paypal
z.com: Nissan

In addition 0.com through 9.com are registered to VeriSign but don't appear to be in use. All the other single character names are listed as IANA_RESERVED since 2001.

My brain does it to me again...

This morning I was dropping Benjamin off at school when I saw a poster in the hall for "Elements and Emotions". This is supposedly an art show being held at one of the local high schools, but my brain took the title and ran with it...

Hmm... elements... hmm... emotions...

Suddenly I start thinking of things like Hydrogen Happiness, Selenium Sadness, Arsnic Anger and Iridium Indifference. Then it truly hits me. Hard.

The Beryllium Blues (insert standard blues riff here)

I'm an alkaline metal,
Used for space industry.
I'm the lightest metal,
but toxic to humanity!

I've got the blues, I've got the Beryllium Blues...

Somebody shoot me now!

School Shootings

Ok... time for me to come off as the callous ass you think I am...

Ecole Polytechnique, Columbine, Taber, Dawson College and now Virginia Tech. There is no question that North American gun culture has had an impact on our society.

It's a sad commentary when someone who has some issues... maybe they don't have many friends, maybe they're pissed off about something, maybe they just can't seem to "fit is all together" decides that the best thing to do is grab a gun, go into a school, and kill a few people beofre killing themselves. What is going through these peoples minds?

At the very least, instead of finding a place where the best and brightest can be found, like a university, can't they at least find a place where you're more likely to find average or below average people? Why can't they do this at Wal-Mart instead? If they're going to go out in such an anti-social fashion the least they can do is to help to shore up the gene pool by culling from the shallow end.

SMS Lingo in Business Comminications

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DST - More annoying than Y2K

Today I'm not ranting about the grocery store...

Today, my bone is with the US Department of Energy. That's right, the same people who brought is weapons grade uranium and plutonium are screwing with us again.

With the passage of the Energy Policy act of 2005 the start and end dates for Daylight Savings Time have been moved three weeks ahead and one week back. Here in the IT sector that has made for a LOT of extra work.

Every server, computer, switch, router, and handheld device with a clock needs to be updated. What makes this more annoying is that most software vendors (RIM just announced their patches YESTERDAY, giving us a whole 14 days to get every single Blackberry in North America (excepting Indiana, Saskatchewan and a few other spots).

With Y2K we had years to get ready, teams with dozens of members and budgets. Also, we could simply check out hardware and software against a database... package A is compliant, package B is not. Check one PC from each model you have on site to confirm that they're compliant. That's one of the reasons that Y2K came off without a major failure. We had the luxury of time and consistency.

We have consistency with DST as well... it's consistently screwed up. We've been handed the problem at the 11th hour and told "when you have a minute make sure that you get this done too". Just add it to an already overworked IT person's plate. Plus with DST we KNOW that every machine will need to be updated. Can't test one and know that it's good for everything, EVERY SINGLE MACHINE NEEDS TO BE TOUCHED.

It's times like this that I want to disappear and go herd goats in Tierra del fuego...

My NEW local grocery store

So the files are still copying...

I've mentioned before that the grocery store seems to provoke a lot of these posts... here I go again.

I used to have a Loblaws a block from my house.

It was a strange store, shoved onto a too small lot. They worked hard to make it work though, building it on stilts above it's own parking lot. It was strange but it worked. The store was accessed via stairs, elevator or, if you had a cart (especially on the way out), via a long ramp which granted access to the store proper.

About 10 months ago it closed under the guise of renovations. It re-opened recently as a Fortinos (still in the Loblaw family). The renovations are very nice, but I don't like what they've done with the entrances.

Both the stairs and ramp are gone. They still have an elevator, but people are discouraged from using it. Now to get in you use the escalator and they have a special conveyance for carts (I think they call it a cart-veyor). It's kind of like a cross between an escalator and a roller coaster, there's a linkage a the bottom of the cart which drops into a track and the cart is pulled up or eased down. The actual shape of the device is such that the cart stays level at all times. It's very cool, but it's energy intensive.

The new entry/exit features of the store annoy me. I can't enter or exit without riding some electircal appliance. I have to take an escalator up and down. These escalators and cartveyors are running all the time, whether someone is on them or not. Continually sucking up power, be it from fossil fuels, uranium or falling water. Wherever it comes from it's energy we'll never see again. I don't like to see this kind of coddling continuing wherever you go these devices "make your life easier". Heaven forbid we might have to climb a flight of stairs, open a door or push a grocery cart up a gentle incline.

This has to be contributing to the epidemic levels of obesiety in Canada. Recent statisics show that 1/3 of Canadians are overweight or obese (I'm one of them). The fact that they don't have to exert themselves isn't helping.

I, for one, will continue to do most of my shopping elsewhere.

Life in IT

So here I am again... it's 11:30 on a Tuesday night and I'm wandering around an empty office building while I wait for files to copy.

I've been here before.... too many times to remember let alone count. I figure I probably work 10-20 nights/weekends per year like this. It's a strange place to be...

For those of you who aren't in the IT biz here's a little taste. It's almost midnight and you're still at work. It's not your office though... it's the office of a client... you spend a fair bit of time there, but it's not your space... it's not completely comfortable. You've been working for a good 15 hours... most of the last 5 have been spent waiting... backing up data... restoring data... time consuming, dull as hell. You can't just go somewhere else though since something may go wrong and you'll need to take remedial action. You've passed the point of no return... if this doesn't work (usually by this time you're on method #4 since the first 3 just didn't pan out the way you had intended them to) you know you won't get the system online by the time the staff gets here... you really don't want to see their chipper faces in the morning. All you want to do at this point is to be done. All of your idealistic plans that you were finalizing at 3:00 are no longer important... working is all you really care about.

This is usually the time when I start to wonder why I went into this business... and why, after 15 years, I'm still doing it. I mean, really, what's the best result you can hope for? The absolute best result from a server upgrade is that NONE OF THE USERS REALIZE THAT ANYTHING HAPPENED. That's it... the best I can hope for is that my phone doesn't ring at 7:30 tomorrow morning with someone who wants to know if the Internet is down.

In case you haven't realized, I'm feeling tired and a little low at the moment... I know that when I walk out of here I'll be feeling good... very tired but good. The feeling you get when you know you've done a good job. There's no feeling like that one (especially at 4:00 AM).

I'll be better tomorrow... for now say a quick prayer to the Server Gods and, time permitting, sacrifice a chicken to them. My eternal thanks will be with you for that.