On Current Canadian Politics

Posted: March 22nd, 2009 | Author: | Tags: , | No Comments »

In the past few months since the brouhaha in parliament ended, and the parliament came back to resume its normal business there has been a distinct absence of something. I realized this the other day when I heard a news report about our Ministers of Foreign Affairs and Trade traveling to Afghanistan. I realized that the ruling government of Canada has not been in the media since much.

It’s no secret that Stephen Harper, and his government are not fans of the media and like to put out propaganda more than informing the public. But at some point the duty of the elected representative is to inform the public. We elected these guys (albeit with a 34% majority!) to rule, and it is their job to tell us what they are doing. Ruling in secrecy is something we like to think the other governments do, but apparently we are very good at it!

So when are these guys going to start being transparent?


Omidreza Mirsayafi 1981-2009

Posted: March 21st, 2009 | Author: | Tags: , , , | No Comments »

Omidreza Mirsayafi
He was my age. I’m not sure what he studied, and what he did to make a living. But on his time off he was a blogger, and criticized Iranian society and government openly. Last year he was sentenced to two years in prison for “insulting the authorities”. And now he is dead. Just before the new Iranian year. Many bloggers are lamenting his loss: here, here, and here and here’s an English language post. And the interview with Omidreza’s lawyer is here.


I Fought Windows And I Won!

Posted: March 3rd, 2009 | Author: | Tags: , , , | No Comments »

windows vs linuxYesterday I went to my home theatre pc to be greeted by an endless barrage of error messages. In my efforts to fix the problem, I forgot to take a snapshot of the error, but suffice it to say that it was some odd error about svchost.exe being unable to write to a memory location.
I tried a reboot hoping it would fix the problem, but after the system came I was bombarded by pop-ups! Good old adware! It was years since I was a victim of one of those…

I saw this chance to put one of my diabolical plans into action: Install Linux.

So, I didn’t even try fixing the computer. I quickly backed up my important files, and knowing my media files were safe in a separate drive popped in the latest copy of Linux in – which happened to be Kubuntu 8.04. The install took no more than 45 minutes, and right away the difficult stuff was over with and the Logitech diNovo Edge was detected with all buttons working!

As we speak the system is updating itself to the current version of Kubuntu: version 8.10 and soon I will be able to install MythTV and have a proper HTPC.

Man, I remember the days when I had to scour the internet boards to get info on get X working on my old 90MHz Pentium. Or when a simple install was a frustrating experience.

I just like to say great success!.