I sent the following “talkback” to [[Island Morning]] this morning, and it was read just before 8:00 a.m. It was in reaction to a interviews with the University of PEI Dean of Arts and the President of the UPEI Faculty Association about Prof. David Weale’s offer to his students to give them 70% in his course if they didn’t attend.

It seems odd to me that in the discussion of the situation with Prof. David Weale’s class that neither the Dean nor the President of the Faculty Association seemed concerned at the conduct of the *students* in the situation.

The fact that almost 20% of the students in a course opted not to participate when given the chance speaks more about “excellence” at the University of PEI than any other part of the story.

Perhaps we should be asking ourselves why on earth a student would attend university and sign up for a course if they’ve no real interest in *attending* (and presumably *learning*).

I don’t know Prof. Weale’s rationale for making his “get out of jail free” offer to his students, but I suspect it was intended, at least in part, to shine light on whatever it is about university that would corrupt students to such an extent — and make them feel that a course is a “jail” worth escaping from.

This has been upgrade weekend here at [[Reinvented]]:

• I upgraded the Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the main server (you’re looking at it) version 3 to version 4. I’d waited a long time to do this, mostly because the upgrade path seemed foggy; turns out that it isn’t all that foggy — the RHEL 4 install CDs have an “ugprade” mode that did all the heavy lifting. The only thing I needed to do was install the compat-libcom_err-1.0-5.i386 package from the RedHat Network to fix some application breakage.
• I took the opportunity to upgrade to PHP5. I’d been running PHP4 for what seem like forever, and it seemed like a good idea to join the object generation. Again, I’d held off because I feared incompatibility, but I haven’t found any yet, and the combo Apache 2 + PHP5 compile install goes exactly like the PHP4 compile and install. I’m crossing my fingers that this doesn’t cause any problems, and I’m looking forward to taking PHP5 for a ride.
• Because Asterisk, which runs the phone system here in the office, has to be recompiled when the kernel changes anyway, I decided to upgrade to Asterisk 1.2.2 as well. I ran into some post-RHEL4-upgrade problems here, problems solved by:
  • Installing the kernel-devel-2.6.9-22.0.2.EL.i686.rpm package.
  • cd /usr/src
  • ln -s /usr/src/kernels/2.6.9-22.0.2.EL-i686 linux
  • ln -s /usr/src/linux /lib/modules/2.6.9-22.0.2.EL-i686/build
  After doing that, Asterisk compiled and installed without problems. To get things working, I also had to follow the instructions here about making the swtich from devfs to udev.
• The third-party Asterisk application app_notify needed to have a #include <stdio.h> inserted into app_notify.c before #include <asterisk/file.h> — after that change, it compiled fine.
• I resisted the temptation to upgrade to MySQL 5 as part of all this — why tempt fate. I’ll get around to that next time I’ve got a free Sunday afternoon.

As a result of all this, if you notice that the blog is appearing in Russian or emitting strange siren-like noises, please let me know.

Recent versions of Mint support a non-administrative public view of statistics (you enable it under “Enable open, Client mode” in the “Login” section of the Preferences screen). So you’re now welcome to take a look around for yourself at ruk.ca traffic statistics.

In addition to the stock Mint installation, I’ve added a few add-on modules (in the world of Mint these are called “Pepper”); right now you’ll find Window Width, User Agent 007, Sparks! and Fresh View. Note that Fresh View requires an SVG-capable browser (it’s working fine in the latest stock Safari for me Safari requires the Adobe SVG Viewer v3.0 for Macintosh).

Later in Nicole Simon’s conversation with Stefan and Felix from Plazes they talk about their plans to roll out a new mobile-phone based twist on [[Plazes]] soon. Felix pointed me to these Flickr photos of the new “Plazes for phones” application; they’ve got it running on Nokia phones, and have plans to work on other platforms in the future. Cool.

“Once elected, we will ingest special giantification drugs that will allow us to grow to an enormous size, and lord over Charlottetown like gods…”

Back in the late 1980s, I filled in as office manager in the NDP campaign office of Linda Slavin, who was running for the party in Peterborough. It was a non-political temp job, and I was only there for a week — not enough time to really do any damage to me or to the party; the most remarkable event I can recall is that my bicycle was stolen from just outside the campaign office.

Linda is running for the NDP in the current federal election, and is keeping up a campaign weblog. Here’s what she has to say about the local Green Party candidate she’s running against:

While I really respect and welcome the ideas of local candidate, Brent Wood, I’m still concerned about the party itself: it’s right-wing, corporate-friendly stance on issues including voluntary auto emissions, and the top-down structure that Jim Harris has put in place, witness the total lack of a party convention to decide on policy. As a single issue party, the Greens lack coherence. And the formal complaints to Elections Canada of former Board members (six have resigned) that allege violations of both federal law and the Green Party Constitution are worrying.

For the record, the Green party platform plank on transportation says they’ll “enforce a mandatory target of 25 per cent better fuel efficiency for the automobile industry and increase standards over the next 5 years.” while the NDP platform says they’ll “establish mandatory vehicle emission standards, opposed by the Liberals, applicable to all vehicles and modeled on the tough California emissions standards.”

NDP candidates are, of course, genetically pre-disposed to finding holes in the Green Party — Dody Crane almost lost it back in 2004 when she visited the office and was asked about the Greens.

That said, there is a certain pallor the Green Party has taken on that suggests not all is right (of course this taste could simply be the result of the party’s opponents spreading rumours, I really don’t know). The profile earlier in the campaign of the party and its leader Jim Harris on The National certainly did little to dispel this problem.

In any case, I’m certainly giving Green candidate David Daughton serious consideration.

By the way, in the CBC [[Island Morning]] debate amongst candidates in the Cardigan riding, Green candidate Haida Arsenault-Antolick kicked ass, and more then held her own against the likes of Laurence MacAulay.

I was listening to this interview with Stefan Kellner and Felix Petersen by Nicole Simon — one of her podcasts in advance of Digital Lifestyle Day in Munich — on my way home this afternoon.

Nicole starts off the podcast by telling a version of my Hey, Plazes works! story from [[reboot]]. Which just goes to prove that success stories are viral. In Nicole’s version of the story, I become the subject — “a person from Canada” — rather than the object, switching places with Ton and Martin). It’s still a cool story, though.

DLD sounds cool, and if it weren’t full, I would have tried to combine it with my trip to LIFT the week after.

I’ve created a frappr map for ruk.ca — if you’re a reader, and want to take frappr for a spin, feel free to add yourself to the map.

During my visit to the Confederation Centre Public Library on Tuesday, I noticed again how “out in public” their public access Internet terminals are: they’re all arranged in a big “L” shape, in plain view of the checkout desk and in plain view of anyone arriving at or leaving the library. The arrangement means that it’s essentially impossible to have any meaningful sense of privacy when using the terminals, and means that “public access” really does mean “access, in public.”

When I was a kid, the public library afforded a rare opportunity for me to find information in an unfettered environment. Indeed libraries were staffed by people, I had the impression, who would be willing to go to the wall for my right to be unfettered. And so if I, as a 14 year old, wanted, say, to see a picture of a vagina, or to otherwise follow my curiosity towards any of the myriad other things that a 14 year old mind is curious about, I could do so simply by wandering the stacks or using the card catalogue. I could then settle down in a comfortable chair and explore the inner workings of the female reproductive system in relative privacy.

As the Internet replaces, or at least enhances, the printed holdings of libraries, I think it’s important that we not lose that right to access information without oversight. This is especially true as governments look to libraries, and other public access Internet sites, to fill the role of making up the “digital divide,” getting people online who can’t otherwise afford to do so.

The Internet is an amazing and powerful tool, a tool that’s even more amazing and more powerful out here on the edge of civilization where our libraries and bookstores have small collections compared to big cities.

I can think of many things that the Internet can be useful for — finding information about where to get an abortion, looking up divorce laws, finding out about that strange growth under your knee, even looking up information about universities or colleges in far away places if you’re in a family that wants to keep you close to home — that it would be inconvenient or impossible to use the Internet for in a situation where your friends and neighbours can easily look over your shoulder.

If we’re going to decide that public access Internet use is going to have to do for a certain portion of society, I think it’s important that we have respect for the privacy rights of those people, and at the very least reconsider the physical setup of public terminals so that they afford at least as much privacy as curling up with a book in a comfortable chair would.

I didn’t know that Kinko’s, or FedExKinko’s as it’s now called, had expanded to Canada. There’s even a store over in Halifax.