Dragos posts a useful table, charting the costs of living in Bucharest. I would find it very useful to have a chart like this for every major city in the world. Dragos based his chart on a similar effort for Prague.

I have been reading the Disease Outbreak News from the World Health Organization’s Epidemic and Pandemic Alert and Response group for the past while. Like today’s Avian influenza – situation in Indonesia - update.

With all the “we’re all going to die” media hype surrounding avian flu, I find the style of the WHO bulletins pleasingly straightforward. Not that their contents are pleasing. Indeed, absent of hype as they are, the simple stories are starkly depressing:

The first patient was a 13-year-old girl. She developed symptoms on 6 January, was hospitalized on 12 January, and died on 14 January. The second patient was her four-year-old brother. He developed symptoms on 8 January, was hospitalized on 14 January, and died on 17 January.

Two other family members, a 14-year-old sister and the 43-year-old father, remain hospitalized with respiratory symptoms. The sister was hospitalized on 14 January and the father on 17 January. Samples from these cases are being tested to determine whether they were also infected with the H5N1 avian influenza virus.

Investigations conducted by the Ministry of Health and WHO found evidence of a large poultry outbreak in the family’s neighbourhood. Chickens kept by the family began to die three days before the first patient developed symptoms. All family members had close contact with the diseased chickens and assisted in the removal of dead birds.

Regular readers will know that, although I am a staunch Formosa Tea House regular, I occasionally divert to Interlude. Indeed “Gong Bao Thursdays” have become a regular outing for the usual bunch.

Today I decided to mix things up a bit and go to Interlude for lunch on a Monday. And, Gong Bao not being on offer on Mondays, I opted for my old standby of the Buddha Special and an order of dumplings.

And I gotta say, the dumplings were fantastic today. They’re usually pretty good, but there was something about them today that sung.

Throw in a Ginger Black Tea (guaranteed to knock out any mid-winter-blah you might be feeling and fill you with summer sun), and it’s a solid Monday lunch.

Catherine and I showed up at the polling station at Holland College right on the stroke of 8:30 a.m. this morning, voter cards in hand, ready to exercise our franchise.

Unfortunately things didn’t go according to plan.

One of the pages in the register of electors — by chance the one containing the Rs and Ss — was missing. As a result, even though I had my card, and I appeared in the duplicate copies of the lists that the party representatives had on hand, I was forced to re-register as if I was a new elector.

I fear that my R and S brethren in poll 60 will suffer the same fate.

So I waited in a new line, waited while the registrar filled in a new form, and then picked up where I left off.

Which just goes to show that you can invest millions in a National Register of Elections, but if one link in the chain falls out, it’s all for nought.

The rest of the process went as planned; indeed I think, for the first time in my life, I voted with feeling.

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.