How is it that ITAP, the putative trade organization of the IT industry on PEI, can so effectively take an interesting idea like open source and make it sound completely dreadful?

I ask this only partly rhetorically: I really would like to know whether ITAP purposely sets out to forward a bunged up world view, or whether they’re trying really, really hard to be relevant and interesting but just can’t seem to manage to pull it together.

I mean, really, here’s a movement that has radical and interesting ideas at its core, and ITAP’s plan for open source evangelizing involves importing someone whose job title is “Manager, Enterprise Architecture IT Standards, Architecture and Security Sector, Telecommunications and Informatics Program, PWGSC.”

If that isn’t bad enough, the formal proceedings are followed by “an hour-long ‘visioning’ exercise that would begin to establish the industry objectives for an Open Systems Centre of Excellence.”

Yah, that sounds like fun.

I can’t for the life of me figure this out; it seems a lot like trying to capture butterflies in a bottle, and sucking all the freedom and beauty out in the process.

You would think that life in outer space would be all fun and games: staring out the window at the moon, staring out the window at earth, playing fun anti-gravity tricks with drops of water and the like. Apparently, however, life in outer space is a lot like life on earth, at least according to NASA Space Station On-Orbit Status 29 Nov 2003:

Taking to the air and flying to and fro in their voluminous residence after wake-up at the regular 1:00am EST, morning inspection, hygiene and breakfast, CDR/SO Michael Foale and FE Alexander Kaleri performed the regular weekly 3-hr. housecleaning. [The “uborka stantsii” focuses on removal of food waste products, cleaning of compartments with vacuum cleaner, wet cleaning of the Service Module (SM) dining table and other surfaces with disinfectants (“Fungistat”) and cleaning of fan screens to avoid temperature rises.]

Yee haw!

Of course things did perk up later in the day:

Working off the Russian task list, the FE conducted another brief session of the Russian Uragan earth imaging program, using the LIV Betacam video system and the Kodak 760 DSC (digital still camera) from SM window #9, now available again in LVLH attitude. [Today’s targets were the city of Abudja, Central America in the direction of the Panama Canal, the Caribbean Sea, Jamaica, Cuba and the Sargasso Sea.]

Where do I sign up?

While we’re talking about accents, here’s a revelation that I had last week in Montreal: when native French-language speakers speak, they’re not trying to “sound French,” that’s just the way they speak. This is a key difference between my speaking French (which perhaps suffers from my trying to “sound French”) and theirs. Somehow this hadn’t occured to me before. Probably another instance of Americentrism.

Another thing I realized: the French bonjour combines the word for “good,” bon with the word for “day,” jour and thus must mean, roughly, “good day.” This is why cashiers in Montreal say “bon soir” in the evening: they’re saying “have a good night.”

As you can see, I’m not one for understanding things that are no doubt so immediately obvious as to be unremarkable to others.

My “Montreal as a mostly non-French speaker” weekend with Oliver was buffered by the presence, at important junctures, of the almost bilingual Brother Steve. My big failure was asking, at Ikea, for the “manager’s special” in the restaurant, which was spelled out in French right there on the menu board. Somehow I came out sounding like “erspeckel du deeratrur” and was greeted with blank looks from the cook. I was saved by the English-speaking directeur.

My one success was saying, in French, “is it possible to open the door for the baby” to the subway toll collector when I wanted him to unlock the special door that allows for strollers. I often find myself lapsing into very obtuse ways of asking for things in stores: “is it possible to obtain a device with which I can prevent the water of my small child here from making his clothes wet?” and the like.

Speaking of the subway: Montreal gets failing marks on rolling access to the trains. We didn’t see one elevator in a station the entire weekend; for us this meant a lot of “out of the stroller, onto the escalator, in the stroller” gymnastics; I imagine for people in wheelchairs it simply means not taking the subway. This is in contrast to, say, Bilbao, which had elevators at every stop, or Barcelona, which had them at many.

Joi Ito discusses how the installation of lockers a Japanese love hotels has increased customer loyalty.

We have a version of this here in Charlottetown: coffee places, like Timothy’s and Beanz, where customers store their “frequent drinker” cards in a Rolodex at the cash so they don’t have to remember to bring them with them on each visit.

And of course there’s the Esso SpeedPass (which the silverorangers turned me onto): it’s got me buying 100% of my gasoline at Esso, despite its being the worst polluter on the planet. Convenience trumps morality; go figure.

From librarian-to-the-stars Brenda Brady comes a pointer to a great new service called isle@sk, which is a web-based distributed reference service that flings queries at a collection of a dozen or so Island librarians, and promises a response within 24 hours.

The isle@sk project falls under the Town Square umbrella; with the library catalogue gateway it now forms the core of the “few projects funded under Town Square that aren’t insane” collection.

Nice to see librarians getting some funding to do some experimenting.

The online International Herald Tribune is truly a thing of beauty. I believe it’s the first online version of a newspaper that matches the richness of the printed page. The “bells and whistles” of the site are useful rather than garish. The paper is building its online brand by simply being better rather than trying to layer a digital skim coat over its newsprint.

The International Herald Tribune is a familiar and welcome friend to travelers: when you are out at the edges of the earth (from a Prince Edward Island perspective), the IHT is often the only local English-language newspaper available.

At long last the Island gets what it deserves: a capable supper-hour news interviewer. Sara Fraser was an excellent newsreader, but one always got the impression that she wasn’t comfortable on the fly. Roger Younker had an annoying habit of talking to interviewees in the third person (like “What’s next for Laurence Macaulay?”). Bruce Rainnie comes into his own on the improv stage: tonight’s political panel was the best example of this yet. I look forward to more of same.

Art relates some detective work that traced a network problem back to sticky keyboards.

Reminds me of the time that my friend Leslie mistakenly wired the HP LaserJet into the telephone system.

As I alluded to on the motherblog, I was happily renovating my blogroll when I ran into problems with François Nonnenmacher’s blog. Here’s what happened.

It’s all about the ç.

I use NetNewsWire as an RSS newsreader. It occurred to me that because I have all of my RSS feeds handily organized in that tool already, I might just as well use it as the source well from which to draw my blogroll. Because NetNewsWire is AppleScriptable, this should have been an easy task (if you ignore the fact that AppleScript itself is one of those “just enough like regular English so as to be completely incomprehensible to me” programming languages).

The actual process of dumping the data out was easy:

tell application “NetNewsWire”
    set s to “”
    set linefeed to “\n”
    repeat with thisSub in subscriptions
        set s to s & (is group of thisSub) & linefeed
        set s to s & (inGroup of thisSub) & linefeed
        set s to s & (display name of thisSub) & linefeed
        set s to s & (givenName of thisSub) & linefeed
        set s to s & (givenDescription of thisSub) & linefeed
        set s to s & (home URL of thisSub) & linefeed
        set s to s & (RSS URL of thisSub) & linefeed
        set s to s & (icon URL of thisSub) & linefeed
    end repeat
end tell

set blogroll to “/Users/peter/blogroll.txt”
set f to (POSIX path of blogroll)
set n to open for access file f with write permission
write s to n
close access n

Where I ran into problems was that François’ name was output as a Mac OS Roman character with hex value 0x8D.

That’s not a big problem, in the grander scheme of things, as I could have worked up, using this table, a translator that would convert all instances of 0x8D to ç. And done the same for all other accented characters.

But I wanted a cleaner solution.

So I entered the murky world of Unicode and UTF-8 and tried experimenting with AppleScript’s ability to output Unicode text, and Perl’s ability to deal with it.

This led me off on an series of wild goose chases. I’m sure this is all supposed to be easy to figure out, and my difficulties may be that I’m assuming it’s much more difficult than it is. However at this stage, I’m suffering from Unicode fatigue, and need to step away for a minute and understand the issues on a broader level. Joel’s piece helps tremendously.

I’ll report back when I’ve cracked this nut.

The blogroll that used to appear to the right of the body copy here is in the shop for some upgrading. I planned to have the operation be simple and painless: the idea is that I’ll use NetNewsWire to maintain my blogroll and kick it out to the website automatically. I ran into some problems, however, when I hit François Nonnenmacher’s weblog: suffice to say I’ve learned a lot more about AppleScript, Unicode, UTF-8, Mac OS Roman and other aspects of internationalization than I ever hoped to.

The blogroll will return shortly.