Southern Ontario Voting

Well, I’m amazed that almost all of Ontario, Southern Ontario in particular, has voted in the Conservative party. For as long as I can remember paying attention to politics Ontario has been a Liberal party stronghold. Something has changed this time, and whether for good or bad…. we’ll see down the road.

If you look at the picture on the right, you’ll see that it is dominated by conservative voted ridings. Up north we get into some NDP (orange), and Liberal (red) ridings, but the blue is overwhelming. If you go to the interactive map ( clicking on the image should get you there ) you can zoom in and see that Toronto is still a Liberal stronghold, but that seems like all of it.

I’m always a political swing vote. I refuse to give my vote to one party from now until eternity. I will give my vote to the party whom I believe will best suit us for the next four years. I’m not really sure if Stephen Harper is our man this time around, but he was a better choice than Stephane Dion… And sadly Jack Layton won’t hold a majority in my life time. I’ve stated my opinion elsewhere that I believe Jack Layton is a good leader. On the other hand, I am not certain that the NDP are a good solution for the country at the moment.

Lastly… there’s the “Green” party. While I’m all for helping the environment, I’m not dazzled by that being their strongest issue. I would rather have a party that was strong on all fronts, and didn’t base their platform on ONE significant issue. It’s sort of like the “Bloc” being a party just for Quebec. But, that’s just my personal opinion (And, we’ll conveniently ignore the fact that the current economy was the one ‘big issue’ for most this election.)

I guess we’ll see how things turn out in the months ahead, won’t we?

First and foremost, there is FireBug. I am so glad that Mozilla threw this in with Firefox version 2. I would have had no idea about it, at least not until someone else sang it’s praises, otherwise. This is the single most used tool that makes my job that much easier! Javascript debugging, Ajax callbacks, examining HTML, benchmarking network bottlenecks…. the list goes on! My only gripe thus far is that in Firefox version 3 there are certain HTML elements, such as buttons, which I can’t right click on and use the ‘Inspect Element’ tool. On the whole, it’s wonderful!

Next come the Firebug plugins… FirePHP is the first. This allows me to send debugging information in a HTTP header, and then view the result in the FireBug console. While I could just dump exceptions and errors straight to the screen this little gem allows me to show the same screen the user would experience in such a situation, but at the same time see detailed debugging information! It is great for use on my local development system, as well as our testing server!

After FirePHP, there is FireCookie! While, this extension isn’t as used as the above two it is still a wonderful addition to my toolset. With it I am able to see any changes to cookies in the FireBug console. Very useful while testing Ajax scripts which may or may not make changes.

Lastly… this isn’t a development tool, but interesting nonetheless. FireGPG is a tool which will encrypt/decrypt GPG blocks right in your browser window! Not highly useful, but it works and you can run into the odd encrypted block out there. It’s not a key store though, so you have to have GPG already installed and point FireGPG to it.

Hope someone finds these useful as well!

I took the time today to sftp into my home box, and download a copy of Head Like a Hole to verify. Guess what, the copy on my PC is actually right! This leads me to believe this is either a) a problem with rhythmbox or b) a problem with the iPod. I’m guessing it’s most likely the former… but it will require some digging to figure out what exactly is going on here.

*sigh*

Wordpress is definitely nice, but probably waaaaay more full of features than I really need. Oh well, it looks and feels very nice. I’ve added another last.fm plugin for wordpress, and this one actually downloads album images rather than just song names!

I also tried to upgrade my gallery from gallerypy to gallery2. I’ve tried this upgrade in the past, and it didn’t go so well. I should have stuck with my gut feelings, but I was interested to see how a wp->g2 plugin would work. While it worked reasonably well, I still can’t get past gallery2’s stupidness. I really hate that I can’t just point it at a folder of pictures, which are already on my site here, and have it parse them. I don’t have the time or willpower to sort thousands of pictures into albums… when the folder heirarchy I already have does that just perfectly as it is!

Anyway, I just hacked the template for gallerpy so it would look like the blog. It’s exactly the same thing I did with bblog a couple years ago! C’est la vie… take the easy route I guess!

There were 3 booths selling tickets for the show, ending up in a lineup of an hour and half!!! Yes, I waited for 90 minutes in order to pay $25 to get in. I think this is utterly ridiculous. You would think that since they’ve been doing this for a while now that there would be some extra ticket booths open in order to quell the rush. Hell, make an automated ticket booth or something that I can stick my credit card into!

Secondly, the vendor displays were again a little poor. I used to remember a wide variety of different things for sale in these expos, but I didn’t see that. If you weren’t looking for comic books, action figures, or DVDs there was nothing really there for you. We tried to check out the gaming section to see if there was any interesting board games on display, but were underwhelmed. We ended up sitting down and playing ‘Settlers of Catan’ for an hour and a half. A game that several of us own and didn’t have to pay $25 each for the privilege of playing.

Maybe I used to be more into the stuff that was there… or maybe I’m just losing touch with my geekdom. Personally, I was happier when we went back to Matt’s place and played D&D for the rest of the night. I just wish we hadn’t wasted half the day doing other stuff when we could have been doing that!

First off - the Video. Apparently ATI hasn’t release a version of their driver which will work with the new Xorg (version 7.4) that is shipping with Intrepid. This isn’t Ubuntu’s fault, so I won’t dwell on it. I will mention that ATI did just release a new driver about five days ago which we were hoping for support, but it didn’t come.

So to alleviate the issue, I switched to the open source Radeon driver. Not a real problem, since I’ve had to do this several times before. The driver works nicely, and I can get one monitor up in its native resolution (1680×1050). The problems start when I try to get the dual-head (two monitors) configuration going. The MergedFB method which used to work doesn’t. The Xinerama route does work, but my VGA monitor is EXTRA bright. It’s so bright that I can’t read anything that’s on a white background. Unfortunately that means this solution doesn’t work either. The ‘official’ way of doing this now is supposed to be with a tool called XRandR, but I’m not having much luck here either. Sometimes I can get the dual-head to work, but it will consistently revert back to a mirrored configuration showing the same desktop on both monitors. That makes this slightly unusable in my opinion.

Secondly there’s the sound issue. I’m not certain exactly what the issue was, but previously I had a USB headset connected to the computer for gaming and applications like Skype. Usually it defaults to the secondary output and I can select it in the preferences if I would like to use it. The issue seems to be that Ubuntu wants to use it as the primary all of the time! And, to top it all off I can’t get any sound out of the sound card (SB Audigy2) any more now that I have the headset unplugged.

So, as I type this I’m burning a copy of Hardy Heron (8.04) in order to reinstall. Not a big deal though, it’s one of those things that lets me get rid of all the extra crap I installed and don’t need anymore! This is actually made quite easy as well since my “/home” partition is on a nice RAID and everything else is on an 80GB partition of another HD.

Looks like it’s done… so time to format and start again!

Bear Lake 2008