Those crazy idiots are at it again: every year at this time a study comes out from the Canadian Alliance Against Software Theft (see this post from 2002 for last year’s version).

Every year they report that Prince Edward Island leads the country in software piracy and make us out to be a bunch of criminals.

And every year I point out that their “research” is so broken that to get accurate numbers for a place the size of Prince Edward Island is impossible and that, by releasing their numbers anyway, they are slandering all 137,000 of us.

Nonetheless, watch CBC or The Guardian this week or next and, dollars to donuts, you’ll see a story called something like “Piracy Study Shows Islanders Lead the Nation.”

I’m a software developer — I make my living from writing software. If anyone should be concerned about this issue it’s me. But I can’t, in any way, give credence to the work of these people, and consider it criminal that, year after year, they spread their lies.

Sigh.

Earlier in the month, I wrote about my old friend Stephen Badhwar, and idly wondered where life had taken him.

Today I decided to get to the bottom of things, and so with the help of Google, and a kind woman named Heather in Atlin, BC who gave me Stephen’s home telephone number, I just simply rang him up.

“Hello,” I said, “is Stephen there?”

“Peter Rukavina!,” said Stephen.

That’s why we need old friends, to remember the sound of our voice.

Stephen, I’m happy to report, is alive and well and living in Atlin as a writer / teacher / parole officer / ranger / actor / storyteller / gadabout. He sounds content, which is about all one can ask for.

The telephone… such an amazing invention.

Congratulations to Bruce Rainnie, brother of our CBC afternoon radio jock Matt, just named the new Roger Younker for the supper hour newscast on CBC Television in Prince Edward Island.

When Steven Garrity and I were up at the CBC a couple of weeks ago, we saw Bruce nervously pacing, and now we know why. Bruce is well-spoken, amiable, excellent on his feet, and will be, I think, a great newscaster. We’re lucky to have him.

This move reinforces the importance of moving other Rukavinas here ASAP, as we don’t want the fragile Rainnie - Rukavina balance to be thrown out of whack. A longterm goal of mine has been to concoct some sort of CBC Radio game show that is peopled entirely by CBC-related siblings — we Rukavinas, the Rainnies, the McKenna brothers, Karen Mair and her sister, Norm and Ian Macdonald, Peter Mansbridge and his brother Malachy (okay, I made that one up). I can see this plan coming together now.

Kudos to Sara Fraser for handling Compass duties in the post-Roger period; I hope she’ll be re-assigned to reportorial duties and stick with the Corp.

Actually, I didn’t go to school with Dave Hyndman, but, it seems, almost everyone else on PEI did. I think I’ve met a half a dozen people who have identified themselves as being “good friends with Dave from way back” in the last couple of months. They seem universally surprised that, through some tricky manoeuver, I also know Dave (although not well, and obviously not “from way back.”); it’s as though I’ve somehow cracked a code that I’m not, technically, supposed to have been able to have cracked.

I’m honoured. I think.

It’s made me realize that the bedrock upon which much of Island society is built is people [who went to school \| are cousins \| used to work \| once met at a party in Stanchel] with each other. I’m not lamenting this: I see it as the primary economic development advantage of Prince Edward Island.

To paraphrase Stewart Brand, “we are a Borg; we might as well get good at it.”

I just experienced the most effective sales job of my life: three kids from Birchwood Intermediate School came to the door to sell me a chocolate bar. They had a back and forth crazy patter that was completely and utterly compelling. After 35 seconds, I had no choice but to give them two dollars. Bravo!

Because I know that Johnny and Jodi will go to any dog-themed movie, no matter how bad it looks, I will limit my comment on Good Boy! to quoting the last paragraph of the description of the movie:

Owen learns that thousands of years ago, dogs from Sirius came to colonize and dominate Earth, but the dogs strayed from their original mission and have instead become “man’s best friend.” Hubble has been sent to investigate. Now Owen must help Hubble train a group of undisciplined neighborhood dogs to shape up for a visit from their leader, the powerful Greater Dane and the fate of all Earth dogs hangs in the balance.

I don’t know whether to marvel at the inventiveness, or stand in disbelief at the inanity.

A pleasant, uneventful trip from Boston yesterday. Got a chance to visit the North Bennett Street School, which was amazing. Also got Catherine’s whole-bean espresso coffee at Polcari’s which, for my money, is the best place to buy coffee in the entire world. And I don’t even drink coffee.

Air Canada is back in the “minimum possible snacks” frame of mind: current offerings are Ruffles potato chips, Clodhoppers graham cracker chocolate glorbs, and some bizarre almond/pretzel/sesame mixture. Kind of makes me nostalgic for the “some grapes and a sandwich” days.

Suggestion for Boston: if you’re flying Air Canada from Terminal C, don’t wait until you’ve gone through security to eat, as there’s only a Burger King and Pizza Hut on the other side. If you have time to spare, go to Legal Sea Foods, if you don’t, then go to Au Bon Pain, which has a nice colleciton of freshesque wraps, a decent fruit salad, and a good selection of baked goods and drinks.

Warning for Boston: from check-in to waiting room, now that Air Canada’s in Terminal C, can take up to 45 minutes. So if you’re used to the quick 5 minute breeze through Terminal E, make sure you leave yourself lots of additional time. I left North Boston at 4:00 p.m. to head to Logan for a 6:35 p.m. flight, returning a rental car in the process, and, with time for a snack, didn’t have a lot of waiting around time.

Another warning: the formerly wonderful outpost of the Boston Children’s Museum in Terminal C has been drastically scaled back, and while it’s still there, and still a place to take kids, it’s no where near as wonderful as it once was.

And one final Logan tidbit: rental car shuttles no longer stop at the ‘T’ station. So if you’re returning a rental car, and then going back into the city, you need to take the shuttle one of the airport terminals, then get the Massport shuttle to the ‘T’.

It’s a beautiful fall day in Charlottetown; nice to come home to.

If you’ve got a RedHat box, with X11 set up, and you’re moving the box to a new location (like I did yesterday), with new IP addresses, and you want to use the GUI tools (like redhat-config-network) to set the new network settings, you might be disappointed to find that typing startx to start up X11 won’t work — the machine just sits there doing nothing.

The root of this appears to be that missing, or incorrect network settings (and/or DNS settings) give the X startup process problems.

The solution?

Just turn off your Ethernet interfaces temporarily:

ifdown eth0

Then you can startx as normal, set up your network, and then either activate the interfaces with GUI tools, or, from the command line:

ifup eth0

Since my iMac’s hard drive came crashing to a halt three weeks ago (it’s in the shop, care of little mac shoppe, right now), I’ve been using my trust 2001-era iBook as my only computer.

And it has been rather pleasant. There’s almost nothing I miss, save for the large 17” screen. Things are marginally slower on the iBook, but not in a way I notice most of the time. I benefit from having everything in one place, especially handy when I travel. And it’s got a battery, which is a big help when the power goes out.

I think what I’m going to do when I get back to civilization is to pass this trusty iBook on to brother Johnny, sell the iMac (either using the vestibule method, or on eBay), and buy the upgraded 15 inch iBook, which has a bigger screen, a faster processor, and more memory.

In a move that you can’t help but admire, and that ranks up there with the best counter-programming moves the television networks can muster, our colleagues at that other conference (warning: insano-site), after having their life as a PDF folly pointed out to them (note: they’ve reinvented their website as a gigantic, equally non-functional Flash application), have added Dave Winer, UserLand Founder, RSS pioneer, and Berkman Fellow, as a keynote speaker.

It’s nice that Dave will get a chance to see the Island, and good that the sizzling mediaheads attending nextMedia will get exposed to his message. We’ve invited him to come up and Zap His PRAM after he’s done with nextMedia, and I think there’s a plan afront to get an informal blogger dinner or lunch up and running in Charlottetown regardless.

While I continue to think that a smaller scale, more modest and sustainable approach to technology and development (and conferences) is the sane way to proceed, I can’t help taking some perverse joy in the fact that Prince Edward Island is home to two technology conferences in one week.