After riding a supermarket giveaway bike (which proudly displayed the MJB Coffee logo on it's frame) for a couple years I finally gave in and bought a new bike. Perhaps more accurately, the bike gave out and I replaced it!
I love it - but it won't stay clean for very long, so I took some pictures while it's still cleanish. I also found out that it takes about 50 minutes to ride home from work, and that riding on pavement isn't as boring as I thought it would be. The cars still scare me a bit.
The Conservatives have finally introduced the DMCA, resulting in somewhat predictable outrage from Canadians. For those not familiar with what this means if it's passed, I urge you to read some of Micheal Geist's recent posts - he breaks down the fine print. He's also posted a nice list of 30 things you can do to make a difference.
For those that don't know why this is bad, It's similar to the American DMCA - It has privacy concerns and removes a lot of consumer rights. It adds a few as well, to be fair, but the problems need to be addressed. For more information I suggest you read Geist's summary of the problems with the bill.
The easiest thing you can do is contact your MP - Call them, mail them, email them, meet them in person - whatever you are able to do, and ask them to oppose the bill. For the lazy, onlinerights.ca has a simple form you can use to select your MP and send them an email. They do read these, and it only takes a minute or two to send.
Keep in mind, we do have a minority government, and we can be heard.
There are good things in the bill, and there is nothing wrong with updating copyright laws in Canada. They are out of date, and out of step with the world we live in. We just need to make sure the Government hears our concerns, and modifies the bill to help protect consumer rights and privacy as well as the rights of content producers.
In Rails 2.1, they added partial updates - which is a great idea and a long time coming. This makes ActiveRecord only updates the parts of a model that has actually changed, and also gives you the ability to see if a field (or a record) has changed since retrieving it from the database. (via model.changed?, model.attribute_changed?, and friends)
There is a gotcha though, If you are using serialized attributes it won't trigger the changed flag unless you assign to it - so if you are doing something like:
model.something_serialized[:foo] = true
ActiveRecord will not realize you have changed anything and it won't get saved. You can get around this by doing something like:
model.something_serialized = model.something_serialized.merge( :foo => true )
I've regressed back to the late 90's in terms of design for my personal blog, and once again have a black-based design. Not sure how long it will last, but for now I like it!
Also, in the name of 'eating your own dogfood' I am now using Viviti for this blog. Previously it was custom blog software, which I'm not missing in the least. Now when I add new features to my blog, other people can enjoy them as well!
My photography has gone missing from this site as anyone who may be looking for it will notice, I've decided along with going back to black, to also go back to splitting my blog and photography into two separate sites and I haven't put that up yet. Soon!
A friend was complaining that there was nowhere he could find to get an RSS listing of movie showtimes, so I made a little script using Hpricot to parse forreel.com. Hopefully they don't mind!
Fr those of you locally, feel free to use it: http://jerrett.nullcreations.net/files/nanaimo_movies.xml
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I'm a programmer and shutterbug living on the West Coast of Canada.
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