This was a bloody-brilliant idea and they're popping up all over the city.

If anyone has any ideas as to who's behind them, lemme know eh?

On our way out of Metro Hall tonight after a long TEV meeting, Melanie and I stopped in on a rather large town hall-style gathering in the rotunda. Apparently, the city wants to build a homeless shelter in the Entertainment District and they were getting an earfull from the residence and business owners of the area.

It was maddening to listen to these people try to mask their prejudices with claims of property value decreases and (a favourite) "hooliganism" from the homeless. Some people even tried to claim that there were no homeless there, and that this centre would "draw them in". I got so mad that I shouted out at one idiot: "Why don't we just put 'em all in a truck and ship them up to North Bay?", only to have one woman respond: "Why not?"

Seriously, these are the kinds of people who would prefer to build a wall and moat around their neighbourhoods if they could.

But despite all of the chaos and stupidity, Adam Vaughn was up there, fielding questions on top of accusations and slander... and he took it. Not only did he stand there and take it, but he responded with eloquence, civility and a solid understanding of the situation along with what needed to be done. He was amazing.

He may be a fan of CCTV, but even despite that, I'd still vote for him if I lived in his ward.

Well not really, but I saw this this morning on one of the mailing lists to which I belong. Apparently, someone realised that McCain's MySpace page was pulling images from their site rather than copying them over to their own server (essentially stealing bandwidth). But rather than taking down the image, the owner replaced the pic with one containing the following message:

Today I announce that I have reversed my position and come out in full support of gay marriage…particularly marriage between two passionate females.

Bloody brilliant.

However, one area they've always been very good at has been the low-wattage boards like the hardware in my firewall. While a standard desktop computer drinks down about 60-80W just sitting there doing nothing, my Via box uses ¼ of that.

Via has since come out with a new benchmark for those of us interested in the amounts of carbon we spew into the air as a result of our computer purchases. They call it Tree Mark™:

To underscore the importance of the environmental impact of computing, VIA is introducing a new benchmark, TreeMark™, intended as a useful tool for organisations looking to balance environmental impact in their computing purchase decisions. The methodology behind the calculations, validated by independent consulting firm Best Foot Forward Ltd, take into account average use of a PC and derive the amount of carbon dioxide created as a by-product of the electricity generated to power the processor over its operational lifetime – and, thus, the number of trees required to offset that amount in the environment.

The math works out like this. If you're using an Intel or AMD based machine, the chip in the computer you're reading this site with will put about 26 trees worth of carbon into the air over the course of its lifetime. A Via chip on the other hand needs only 4 trees to make up for the CO2.

I guess I know from where I'm getting my next computer.

Aileen just introduced me to one of the eeriest things I've ever seen: In the united states, parents can take their kids to a special mall that's explicitly designed for their dolls.

Read that sentence over again and let it sink in: america is so rich that it spends its wealth on catering to the desires of plastic playthings.

At American Girl Place you can:

• Give your doll a $20 haircut
• Have Brunch with your doll
• See a show with your doll
• Get your face on the cover of a magazine with your doll

Did I mention that you can go on a full-blown shopping trip with fake-money to outfit your plastic companion for the low-low price of only $280USD? Has the world gone mad?

In a day and age when finding fresh water is a toss up in most of the developing world, the united states scares the hell out of me.

It's a strange thing to attempt to import a table from an 11MB SQL dump only to run into the same error over and over again:

ERROR 1114 (HY000): The table 'someTable' is full

"WTF?" I thought, and so started googling... no luck. I even asked my buddy Jay from Ottawa about it since he toys with the MySQL more than I usually do. The answer though was weird, so I thought I'd post it for the rest of the world to google one day.

Basically, Gentoo sets the table sizes on InnoDB tables artificially low. The theory being that you prevent your filesystem from getting overrun by unchecked database growth -- seems a bit overkill to me, but whatever. Anyway, /etc/mysql/my.cnf needed to be tweaked:

56c56
< key_buffer = 16M
---
> key_buffer = 64M
100c100
< innodb_buffer_pool_size = 16M
---
> innodb_buffer_pool_size = 64M
102c102
< innodb_additional_mem_pool_size = 2M
---
> innodb_additional_mem_pool_size = 8M
112c112
< innodb_data_file_path = ibdata1:10M:autoextend:max:128M
---
> innodb_data_file_path = ibdata1:10M:autoextend:max:1024M

I didn't bother to figure out which of the above modifications really did the trick, but my guess is that things would work just fine with only the last change in effect. I hope this helps someone :-)

The UK, for fear of hordes of terrorists trying to destroy it's great democracy from within has been pushing for these new ultra-safe, super-protected passports to be the norm. Unfortunately for the group that designed them though, they're neither safe, nor protected:

Using a simple gadget built from parts bought on the Internet, it took the Mail less than four hours to copy the details from one passport.

More details on The Daily Mail.

Careful, they're not the same thing.

I sifted about YouTube today and found two interesting clips I thought I'd share. The first clip is called Young Americans, a multi-part series shot and produced by troops on the ground in Iraq. The small part I've seen so far looks like a pretty raw look at what it's like over there.

The second part is considerably more light hearted, but unfortunately related. A news crew from New Zeland (I think, it might be Australia) hit the streets of an American city with some simple questions about the world. Stuff like: "Who's Fidel Castro?", "Which country should America invade next?" and "How many sides are there on a triangle?"

You should be surprised at the results, but sadly, you probably won't be.

Sandra Bullock couldn't save this one. So bad... SO BAD. I mean, not Ghost Rider bad, but really bad... and with a stupid ending.

Melanie has started getting me into Canadian films. I'd always wanted to see more of them, but they don't tend to be well publicised and they often don't stick around in theatres for long. I was happy to be able to see Fido this time out though.

It's absolutely brilliant. I want to give the director a big hug. Set in 50s middle America, the Zombie Wars are over, and we now enjoy a slave society of Zombies to help us mow the lawn, walk the dog etc. It sounds absurd, and it is, but it's delightfully fucked up. Carrie-Anne Moss has one of her best roles ever. Everyone should see this (if only to support Canadian films)