crazed monkey

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Posted on January 19th, 2003 in computers, internet - No Comments »

Having written and vocalised against a new war in Iraq, I felt that I should support my opinion with action and so took part in Saturday’s “No War on Iraq” peace march here in Toronto, which operated on the same day as similar marches across Canada and other anti-war marches around the world. It was nice to see many people from all walks of life out on the march, from children to seniors, from those of Asian descent to those of Middle Eastern descent. At one point we were told that we were some 10,000 strong, but it did not seem that many to me. Victor has pictures, one of which contains some funny signs.

Sadly, the rally was exactly what I was expecting. In the midst of placards bearing slogans against a war in Iraq, there were placards condemning other subjects such as the U.S. intervention in North and South Korea, the Israeli occupation of Palestine, multinational corporations, free trade, as well as placards addressing the issues of poverty and unemployment. Why must every public protest, action or rally against a specific practise bring out those who wish to subvert the event towards their own agenda? I attended the event to “vote with my feet” and oppose an impending war on Iraq. When I want to march against poverty and unemployment, I’ll attend a rally which addresses that issue or similar issues.

Before the speeches started, there were a few speakers welcoming the arrivals as well as the various trade unionists in the crowd. The short speech had a serious left-wing bias (the speaker addressed us all as “brothers and sisters”) which I felt worked against what the rally was about. Peace is not simply a left-wing goal, but a global one and I felt somewhat insulted at being fed weak statements which implied that the right-wing was to blame. At the height of the cold war, no doubt communists in the Soviet Union called each other “brother” while warring against Afghanistan as no doubt those in North Korea call each other “brother” today while preparing their nuclear arsenal. To blame war on one ideology or way of life is propagandist as the will to war and its consequences is a disease which touches us all, left-wing or right-wing, rich or poor, east or west, north or south.

Unless the U.S. or U.K. administrations are able to provide a more substantial case for a war against Iraq and receive U.N. support, it is unlikely that Canada will side with the U.S. and join that war. According to an Ipsos-Reid poll, a scant 15 per cent of Canadians said that Canada should join the U.S. if it invades Iraq on its own. Even in the States, a majority oppose a U.S. invasion of Iraq without U.N. support, although over eighty percent are in favour of a war with U.N. backing.

Posted on January 19th, 2003 in politics - No Comments »

Dive Into Mark: Semantic Obsolescence. Mark is pissed about the removal of the cite tag from XHTML 2.0 and, frankly, so am I. However, bear in mind that XHTML 2.0 is still a working draft, so there’s still time for cite to be added back in. Mark isn’t the only one who noticed this change, as a December 12 posting to www-html-editor shows. Sadly, nobody from the W3C has bothered to reply to that post, which might either mean that there isn’t a reasonable justification for the removal of cite or that none of the “powers that be” read www-html-editor.

As for the removal of the q tag, that appears to be replaced with the quote tag. Although that change removes backward compatibility for inline quotes, renaming the tag removes ambiguity. The q tag probably should have been called quote to begin with. Who knows why they decided to change it now.

I can understand Mark’s disappointment. Like Mark, I’ve been trying to keep on top of the W3C’s standards and have been following their semantic markup recommendations to make my pages easier to work with. Hopefully they will be able to redeem themselves before XHTML 2.0 becomes a recommendation.

Posted on January 13th, 2003 in computers, internet - No Comments »

The Fishbowl: When is a constant not a constant?. Charles Miller posts one of those “Guess what this code does” challenges, and it’s in Java. I prayed that I wasn’t right, but was sickened when I ran the code and discovered the worst. Ugh. I’m not all that surprised as sittingDuck is not really a constant, more like a variable which has been initialised to a specific value. Actually, scratch that. I just tried declaring sittingDuck as final and it still works as before. So much for objects as constants.

Posted on January 13th, 2003 in computers, java, programming - No Comments »

The Globe & Mail: Maher still politically incorrect.

And yes, big surprise, Maher still stands by his original 9/11 statement: “As far as what I said and patriotic fervour, to me that was patriotic. To me a real patriot is like a real friend. Who’s your real friend? It’s the person who tells you the truth. That’s who my real friends are. As far as our country goes, we need more people who will do that.”

Bill Maher has a new show on TV for the first time since Politically Incorrect was cancelled following his controversial comments in the week after the September 11th attacks. The new show, Real Time With Bill Maher, airs on HBO and is, sadly, not available in Canada.

“This is an end-of-the week wrap-up show,” Maher said. “We wanted to be up to the minute, and the Bush administration usually releases bad information on a Friday afternoon, so when they do, I would like to be there to nail their ass.”

Man, I love these Bill Maher quotes. Here’s another one from the article:

“I want this show to be different,” [Maher] said. “I want people to feel at the end of the show, like, wow, I just got smart for free — well, not free, but for the very reasonable price HBO charges.”

Maher’s wit, intelligence and his ability to really rile his guests made Politically Incorrect the entertaining show that it was. I am very much looking forward to catching a glimpse of this new show if it ever airs in Canada. It might even persuade me to purchase a TV!

Posted on January 9th, 2003 in culture, television - No Comments »