ɐɔ˙ɹǝʃʃıɯɹǝʇʃɐʍBecause I can't entertain everyone, but I can entertain myself.

I’ve always loved http://merzo.net, but I’ve always hated the fact that dragging only works in IE.

So I through together a quick script to fix that. Requires Chrome or Firefox w/ Greasemonkey.

View the code on github,
https://gist.github.com/1988543

Or just install it
https://gist.github.com/raw/1988543/merzo_drag.user.js

Then drag the ships around and make laser sounds. You know you want to.

Given the news lately, is assembling a do-it-yourself robocall app using Twilio hilarious or not funny at all?

Think about it. Twilio connect lets you let users pay for their own calls from their own Twilio account. I could easily put together a quick app that let people robocall people in Toronto–Danforth with their own message. Uploaded as an mp3 of course. Or recorded in Twilio Client.

And I could event include a button for Elections Canada subpoena the records in order to file charges.

It’d be awesome.

Youhavedownloaded.com tracks who’s been using bittorrent.

You see with bittorrent and a public tracker the ip address of every users is available to anyone.

Surprisingly Naturally I’m in the clear.

But others are not.

In the spirit of the season, I thought I’d try to find out who’s been naughty, who’s been nice, and who’s been torrenting at work.  This is a quick check of a few IP addresses I’ve pulled out of my server logs.

For instance, the parliament hill gateways are parl153.gc.ca and parl203.gc.ca.
Let’s have a look at what they’ve been up to!

http://www.youhavedownloaded.com/?q=192.197.82.203
http://www.youhavedownloaded.com/?q=192.197.82.153

Now that’s just wrong. If you’re going to steal, why torrent Premiere Elements?  

The full version of Premier has many more features.

agrgate.agr.ca is the gateway for Agriculture and Agri-food

http://www.youhavedownloaded.com/?q=192.197.71.189

French is important.

Gateout.pco.gc.ca (198.103.111.110) is clear. As is user.fin.gc.ca (198.103.53.5).

I’ll try to get some more data, I don’t have a long list of GoC IP addresses ready to check. I’m not sure what the lesson is here, but it’s definitely worth noticing.

So the Ontario election isn’t going as well for the PCs as things looked in the summer. I think they’ve made a few strategic mistakes…

First of all the public sex offender registry idea is very 90s…

Since then the average worker has seen their life threatened by the spectre of terrorism.

Their job threatened by the rise of China’s manufacturing sector.

And their retirement threatened by the wall street collapse.

Stranger danger just isn’t what it used to be.

McGuinty has been dropping the ball as well.

That’s actually to be expected… when a government first comes in it’s filled with the clever, competent, and hungry people who brought it in from opposition.

After 8 years they are overtaken by pleasant and presentable individuals who are good at office politics, but bad at electoral politics.

However Kinsella’s campaign strategies haven’t been interesting enough to talk about, so lets get back to the Ontario PCs.

The “Tax Man” label is a little weak. It lacks a deep emotional appeal. It also doesn’t present a unifying theme for what’s wrong with McGuinty.

I suggest “Dalton McGuinty: not on your side”.

The idea being that he’s more interested in looking good to his upperclass friends than with helping the average man. You need to use it in the right context, but I think it hits the spot.

Remember when the Liberals wasted a billion dollars on high priced eHealth consultants with nothing to show? That’s because Dalton McGuinty is not on your side. He just wanted jobs for Liberals.

Did you see Caledonia when it was occupied by violent native protestors? That’s because Dalton McGuinty is not on your side. He cares more about trying to make Harris look bad than the odd citizen who gets a cracked skull.

Green Energy Act? Not on your side. He’s trying to show off at international conferences and give money to ex-Liberal staffers who are now somehow “green consultants”

They pretty much write themselves.

Remember when the Ontario government looked the other way while union thugs turned downtown Toronto into a stinking pit of filth in order to extract unreasonable demands in the middle of a recession?

Dalton McGuinty is not on your side.

He doesn’t care how disgusting your streets get as long as he gets to stay on the good side of union leaders.

That last one was a little wordy but still like the imagery.

Last October I contributed some code to Google Chromium.

You can view the code here.
http://codereview.chromium.org/5018002/

It fixed zero valued restrictions being ignored,

if (schema.minLength && instance.length < schema.minLength)

0 will cast to false, and the check will be skipped.

I also added a check for large values. Javascript stores everything as a double. The ‘integer’ type check just checked if it was a round number. Internally Chrome assumed that integer meant int32. So you could crash the tab with a large value.

Throw in some unit tests, and I was all set.

My submission seems to have gone nowhere.

Later, in May 2011 someone else patched the integer overflow.
http://codereview.chromium.org/7042021

Then a few days ago, someone else patched the minimum values not being validated problem.
http://codereview.chromium.org/7787004

Grumble.

I think people often overlook the real reason that large government IT projects fail.

In every large organization, there are people who are obsessed with making rules. Unfortunately they are generally also the sort of people who don’t like to think things through.

Those more prone to looking ahead quickly notice that each rule and process greatly increases the complexity of the system, and greatly increases the number of edge cases they need to worry about.

So they avoid the rules committees. The people who try to get on are the sort of people who enjoy controlling others and avoid thinking things through. The results are predictably awesome.

Now, with classical human run organizations this was less of a problem. Rules could be bent so that they are flexible. Situations could be delt with.

However IT systems naturally lack this sort of flexibility. So the office is held up by the manager who is too busy to order pens, but refuses to grant anyone else the pen order permission.

Single typos require multiple calls to tech support to fix, since records can be created but not modified.

Insane rules are followed to the letter. More process meetings are called to fix the process. The same people run them. The results are just as awesome.

The solution to most permission problems is to give write access to people who likely need it, track changes with something like git, and fire people who keep screwing up.

Keep track of who’s doing what, make the changes reversible, and deal with malice or incompetence appropriately.

You’d be amazed at how much that fixes.

A few days ago there was an “Oh Trudeau, where art thou” article. There have been quite a few.

Many Liberals seem to dream about finding another Trudeau. I suspect that they haven’t honestly analyzed his success.

The key thing about Trudeau is the era, and especially his opponents. They had been hardened by the great war, the great depression, and world war 2.

Trudeau however had lived a life of privilege untainted by poverty or violence.

To his credit, he spent much of it trying to better himself. He spent his youth in Jesuit leadership programs. He then went to academia, and seemed to quite enjoy it.

I don’t want to do dig out books, so I’ll end the mini biography there.

Anyways he had spent his life studying history, philosophy, and poetry.

By comparison, Diefenbaker had lived through abject poverty during the depression. He was in the habit of saving uneaten cheese in his desk. Because he was still horrified at the thought of wasting food.

I like Deif, but I can understand why Trudeau would have seemed like a breath of fresh air.

But back to the point.

In the near future, no party is likely to field a candidate that has feared starvation or seen a friend die in front of them.

I’m not sure if the Jesuit youth leadership programs are still operational. I doubt provincial government run youth leadership programs will be as successful.

And Trudeau had a relatively easy path to tenure. He studied during bad economic times, so the competition was lower as few could pay tuition. Then professor jobs were plentiful as universities expanded to support the baby boomers.

Leader’s are products of their times. Trying to find another Trudeau is like trying to find another Charlie Chaplin, Babe Ruth, or Bob Dylan.

That’s just not how it works.

Donations over $200 by party by FSA (first 3 characters of postal code).

FSA breakdowns produce a fairly interesting result. They are larger than postal codes but still small enough to refer to a neighborhood or area.

So here are the top FSA’s for the first half of 2011…

The top FSA is M4K. That’s Playter Estates in Toronto.
The NDP received $104,421.00. Of course $85,000 of that came from an estate donation. So it’s a bit of and outlier.

Next, at #2 it’s T2V in Calgary. I don’t know anything about the area, but it looks pleasant on Google Streetview.

Skipping over a couple, K1S is a very interesting FSA. It’s the Glebe in Ottawa. Plus Old Ottawa South. It’s one of the nicer parts of Ottawa. Generally home to the well paid and child free. It’s a little too close to some sketchy areas for many families.

K1N is also pretty interesting. It’s the market in Ottawa. Filled with upscale restaurants, bars, nightclubs, crack addicts, homeless shelters, and many people who regret paying $1,000,000 for a condo in that neighborhood.

The top 20 are dominated by Toronto, Calgary, and Ottawa. If the second character is a 0 than it’s a rural area… T0M is just north of Calgary, K0A surrounds Ottawa. The only exception is S0K, which is the area around Saskatoon.

This is a rush job, the graphs don’t look fantastic, but the results are interesting.

I’ll try to do something nicer when I have more time.

2011 riding maps are also in the works, I haven’t forgotten.

Twilio has a cool new feature. The Twilio client allows you to interact with the Twilio system in browser.

This would be great for virtual call centers.

In ’08 the Obama campaign had a system where you could call in and it would automatically connect you to voters. It was pretty cool, there are a few companies doing it now.

Last year I was looking at the Twilio API, and doing something similar seemed straightforward.

After building an http interface you can compete with other providers with minimal overhead.

Still, it would still be difficult to compete with established players without a specific edge. Sure, I could do it cheaper, but they can get their phone calls returned.

Clearly I needed to take it another step.

The next idea I had was to have a web interface. They could see the details of the current caller (wait… callee?) on the screen and leave detailed notes. This would be an obvious improvement in terms of functionality, but they would still need to communicate using a phone.
I could use a comet set up to try to keep everything real time, and Twilio allows you to interrupt current calls with new instructions. But it’d still be quite complicated. Both to build and explain.

Mostly to explain. There’s an obvious question, “Why do I need to use a phone while I’m using my computer?”

The obvious answer, “It’s cheaper because I have minimal overhead” makes price negotiation difficult.

“By cheaper, I meant for me.”

The new Twilio web client is perfect for this sort of project. You can integrate calling from a web interface using your computer’s mic or a headset. Allow people more options then a standard calling system. Even integrate directly with other voter tracking databases.

And if anyone wants to give my idea a shot and build a company around offering this service in Canadian politics, I wish you the best of luck.

Seriously, getting paid in Canadian politics is like pulling teeth.

Now, if you have some way to sell this to banks, call me.