The CBC aired a report this evening on The National about the continuing fall of Conrad Black. Towards the end of the segment, reported by Havard Gould, a statement from Black’s lawyer “Eddie Greenspan” was read over an image of “Greenspan:”

I’m fairly certain that isn’t Conrad Black’s lawyer Eddie Greenspan, but rather Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan.

The Quicktime version of the story currently running on the CBC website has a different graphic:

I guess even the best news organizations in the world can make mistakes.

Have you been accused of “promoting a not-in-my-backyard attitude?” Loathe to “embrace change?” Not one to “seize opportunities?” Maybe you have an obstructionist attitude! Don’t shy away your defiant lifestyle: celebrate it, with quality products from The Obstructionist Attitude Store.

We’ve got a complete range of products for sale, from clothing:

…to baby wear:

And even coffee mugs:

All proceeds from the sale of obstructionist attitude products go to charity. Start shopping today!.

One of the problems standing in the way of wider adoption of VOIP (voice-over-IP or, to over-generalize, “telephone calls that use the Internet”) has been “the directory problem.” If you ever tried to use Microsoft’s NetMeeting back in the day you will recall that it was almost impossible to figure you simply how to call someone.

One of the create achievements of systems like iChat and Skype is that they solved this problem, and made it point-and-click easy.

As we glue together our own VOIP experiments and fiddle with systems like Freeworld Dialup and Gizmo, we’re facing “the directory problem” again. Who needs more telephone numbers to remember (and distribute?).

Fortunately there are answers to these problems. And in fact the answers are based on rather long-standing technologies like DNS. Here’s a demonstration of how simple it can be to use open standards like SIP to glue “Internet calling” together with “regular old telephones.”

• Download Gizmo for your PC, Mac or Linux machine.
• Install. Register (it’s free).
• Call the “phone number” sip:peter@rukavina.net.
• The phone rings in my office.

Here’s a brief screencast that shows this all happening.

If you’re curious, I’ve created a page that explains how it all works.

Never satisfied to leave well enough alone, I’ve set up another SIP URI — sip:formosa@rukavina.net — that, if you call it, will automatically play you the latest episode of our Live From the Formosa Tea House podcast.

Oliver has an Arthur doll. He talks. When you squeeze his belly.

One day last week I heard Arthur talking to himself upstairs in Oliver’s room while we were all eating dinner. Catherine suggested that something had fallen on Arthur’s belly, thus forcing him into endless dialogue.

I sarcastically commented something along the lines of “well, I guess we’ll have to put up with this until Arthur’s batteries run down and Arthur dies.”

Those of you with more parenting experience (and innate compassion) than I will immediately recognize that this was a grave, grave error: one should never suggest that a lovable star of children’s television may be on his deathbed. Especially a lovable star of children’s television that your child has visited the house of.

Oliver, who is only 5 and, I thought, had only the vaguest sense of “life” and “death,” immediately broke down in tears of grief. It took several hours to get the episode out of his system. I think he is still suspicious that Arthur has some chronic disease that we’re not telling him about.

Let this be a lesson to me.

O un ejemplo para aprender a usar google maps.

Evidemente no tengo mucho interes en saber los horarios de los autobuses de Charlottetown, pero en este caso es interesante la aplicación web ya que se han molestado en publicar el codigo y en hacer lo que todo programador odia: documentarlo!.

Cool.

From Brenda Brady, College Librarian at Holland College, comes a pointer to Wayfaring.com, which describes itself like this:

We’d would like it to be a community of travelers who use our web-based tool to create, use, or share information about their travels and the places in their lives. We built Wayfaring because we thought it would be cool to see people share trip ideas and places with each other. That seemed like as good a reason as any.

Think of it as RealCharlottetown.com for the entire world. And with polish. And lots of features.

The Guardian is reporting that local developer Tim Banks “is asking Charlottetown Mayor Clifford Lee to remove Coun. Kim Devine as the chair of the city’s downtown revitalization committee.” Banks is quoted as claiming that Councillor Devine has an “obstructionist attitude.”

Apparently in Mr. Banks’ world, anyone who disagrees with his “take no prisoners” attitude towards developing ugly downtown buildings in the name of “revitalization” is an obstructionist.

Councillor Kim Devine is my representative on council. I voted for her. She’s also a friend and neighbour. She’s a smart person, with the best interests of her constituents and her city at heart.

All evidence suggests that Mr. Banks is a megalomaniacal developer intent, under the banner of “embracing change and seizing opportunities,” on developing Charlottetown mega-projects — like his proposed (and now withdrawn) “$8-million head office building at 190 Water St.” — while paying no need to anyone else’s opinion, least of all residents of the neighbourhoods that he seeks to cannibalize.

Under what definition of “progress” the notion of building an office tower on Charlottetown’s waterfront fall I don’t know. But I know it’s not mine.

Tim Banks is looking out for Tim Banks’ interests. Kim Devine is looking out for the interests of me and my neighbours and she has my wholehearted support in doing so.

One of Mr. Banks’ favourite political tactics is to threaten to pack up and develop elsewhere. I say let’s call him on this, vote him off the Island, and be done with his insolent whining for good.

Tod Maffin is traveling the country “to meet with Canadian podcasters so we can meet each other share ideas, swap geeky tech tips, and more.”

Tod is hitting several major (and several minor) cities across the country, from St. John’s to Whitehorse, but he’s not coming to Charlottetown!

Hey, Tod: come to Charlottetown! Podcasting was sort of invented here on PEI. And we’re podcasting pioneers to boot.

We’ll even pay for lunch at the Formosa Tea House.

We’ve put together a suite of tools to help you find your polling station location for the Plebiscite on Mixed Member Proportional Representation System.

Remember that you can vote at any of the polling station locations in your electoral district. The first advance polls open this Saturday, November 19th at 9:00 a.m.

For many years now there has been talk of creating a local Prince Edward Island “Internet traffic interchange” where traffic from one Island-based ISP to another Island-based ISP could crossover locally rather than going “out onto the Internet.” I’ve long been a supporter of such an initiative, suffering as I have from working on servers connected to Aliant while connected myself to ISN’s bandwidth.

Here’s an example of what this means, in the real world; it’s a traceroute showing the path that traffic from my iMac takes to get three blocks south to the Elections PEI server:

traceroute to www.electionspei.ca (142.176.20.4), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets
 1  gw.isn.net (198.167.161.254)  49.664 ms  2.320 ms  2.756 ms
 2  chtw-asr1.eastlink.ca (24.222.97.237)  5.730 ms  5.635 ms  3.059 ms
 3  hlfx-br1.eastlink.ca (24.215.101.161)  14.468 ms  11.344 ms  13.646 ms
 4  hlfxnsaldr02.bb.telus.com (154.11.184.37)  12.966 ms  19.410 ms  12.010 ms
 5  hlfxnsalbr01.bb.telus.com (154.11.7.226)  76.290 ms  77.149 ms  75.740 ms
 6  * mtrlpqfbbr00.bb.telus.com (204.225.243.197)  78.142 ms  77.185 ms
 7  toroonnlbr00.bb.telus.com (204.225.243.169)  77.768 ms  113.038 ms  77.092 ms
 8  wnpgmbabbr00.bb.telus.com (204.225.243.145)  95.022 ms  75.486 ms *
 9  edtnab02br01.bb.telus.com (204.225.243.85)  83.315 ms  76.504 ms  75.822 ms
10  edtnabxmbr01.bb.telus.com (204.225.243.73)  76.433 ms  76.140 ms  75.585 ms
11  clgrab31br01.bb.telus.com (204.225.243.70)  75.769 ms  76.922 ms  75.639 ms
12  * * *
13  clgrab21gr01.bb.telus.com (154.11.10.217)  75.677 ms  75.450 ms  75.323 ms
14  bell-canada.clgrab21gr01.bb.telus.com (154.11.3.46)  90.996 ms  107.607 ms *
15  64.230.249.253 (64.230.249.253)  101.971 ms  104.196 ms  106.429 ms
16  64.230.207.86 (64.230.207.86)  81.166 ms  83.564 ms  80.917 ms
17  * 64.230.240.17 (64.230.240.17)  82.586 ms  81.818 ms
18  * rtp629207rts (64.230.167.89)  95.580 ms *
19  rtp629008rts (64.230.167.74)  92.913 ms  90.662 ms *
20  rtp629048rts (64.230.203.30)  108.556 ms  90.879 ms  132.622 ms
21  alpe-pcr-oc3.aliant.net (142.166.181.150)  235.873 ms  100.957 ms *
22  142.166.182.102 (142.166.182.102)  112.616 ms  108.111 ms  101.306 ms
23  142.176.20.4 (142.176.20.4)  104.890 ms  122.166 ms  100.093 ms

Near as I can tell, my packets are going through Halifax, Toronto, Winnipeg, Edmonton until they hit the Bell Canada network in Calgary and come on back in this direction.

All of this is happening at the speed of light, of course, so it’s not taking hours. But practical maintenance of a server over so many hops — to say nothing of what happens when things go awry — is problematic.

The logical home for a interchange like this is the University of PEI, as there already both Eastlink and Aliant bandwidth running through their facilities, they’ve got the smarts to make it work, are impartial and public-spirited and, I think, willing and ready to serve.

What’s it going to take to make this happen?