In case you haven't been paying attention to Canadian politics lately, here's a quick easy-to-understand recap for you:

Roughly six weeks ago we had an election with the lowest turnout ever which resulted in yet another minority government. Canadians didn't want another election, and Harper himself said that he wouldn't call another election, but he changed his mind because he thought that he could win a majority. He was wrong and Canadians delivered roughly the same verdict we had for the last three elections: a minority.

True to form, Harper has continued to run his minority as if it were a majority, repeatedly holding the "do what I want or I'll send us into another election" threat over the heads of the Commons. In his latest move however, Harper appears to have crossed the line. Here we are in the midst of an economic crisis and he's still focused on destroying the opposition when he should be trying to fix the country.

On Friday the Conservatives attempted to pass a bill that would kill public funding for political parties ($1.95 is given to each party for every vote they receive in each election). This funding is important for the Greens, NDP, Bloc and Liberals, but since the Conservatives receive the most private funding, they're happy to see it go.

The other part of the bill was an announcement that Canada was doing just fine, and would actually scrape by next year with a surplus. This was accomplished by way of some creative accounting and the selling off of Canadian assets. There would also be no investment in infrastructure or any stimulus package (money given in the form of tax breaks and grants to individuals and corporations to reduce the need for job cuts etc). Oh, and they also want to ban strikes for public unions until 2011, cancelling all collective agreements.

These together were enough to piss off the opposition for the last time. Tired of being dictated to by the minority of the House, the Liberals and NDP are talking coalition which would mean that Harper would lose his job as Prime Minister and a Dion would take his place, the leader of a mix of representatives from the Liberals and NDP. The Bloc, a predominantly left-leaning and progressive party would support them, but would not be part of the coalition.

Harper's response to this has been to tell the Opposition that they can't speak in the house until next week.

For my part, I find myself somewhat torn. For the most part I agree with the Conservative assessment of the economy. Writing up a stimulus package while we don't know what Obama has planned for his country is pretty pointless. On the other hand, Harper has consistently shown his disdain for democracy and the Will of the People and for that I want him gone. If this is the only way to do it, then I'm on board.

There's already a growing body of support around this NDP/Liberal alliance. Canadians for a Progressive Coalition have published the video seen here. I encourage you to watch it as it explains the numbers better than I ever could.

Canadians for a Progressive Coalition

These are exciting times for Canada and its method of governance. I encourage you to keep tabs on your favourite news source to see history unfold. And for those of you hopeful for a Conservative demise, there's already a Facebook group for Stephen Harper's last day in office.

One of the reasons I switched to Arch Linux was that I didn't want to have to compile all of my packages anymore. However, in leaving Gentoo for the Arch world, I also gave up a certain amount of ease of customisability (is that even a word?). Gentoo does, after all, excel in letting you do whatever you want to your machine and there are some circumstances where that's pretty important... even for users like myself.

Such a situation presented itself when I realised that the KDE binaries shipped with Arch do not include debugging support. This is obviously in place to improve performance, but for a bleeding-edge product like KDE, this also makes it very difficult to offer a good bug report. Thankfully, Arch's build system (abs) allows you to compile any program you want and install it with the package manager with little trouble... so I did just that.

Below is a quick script I wrote to rebuild all of my KDE binaries with debugging enabled. It's commented so you know what's going on:

  #!/usr/bin/env bash

  # Create a workspace if it isn't already there
  mkdir -p $HOME/abs

  # Fetch a list of kde packages from pacman
  PACKAGES=$(pacman -Qs kde | grep -v '^ ' | sed -e 's/ .*//' | sed -e 's/local\///' | grep '^kde')

  # Loop through the package list
  for PACKAGE in $PACKAGES; do

    echo $PACKAGE

    # Copy the package to your workspace
    cp -r /var/abs/extra/$PACKAGE $HOME/abs/
    cd $HOME/abs/$PACKAGE

    # Edit the PKGBUILD file to use debugging
    sed -i -e 's/DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release/DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo/' PKGBUILD;
    echo "PATCHED"

    # Make the package
    makepkg -s

  done

Once you've built all of those (it'll take a long time... KDE is huge), you can install each one with pacman:

  # pacman -U PACKAGENAME-VERSION-i686.pkg.tar.gz

It's also a good idea to recompile qt as well. For that, you just add -debug to the configure list in its PKGBUILD file.

For more information, please visit the Arch Linux wiki page on ABS.

All this month, I've been growing out my facial hair (I'm beginning to look like a Mountain Man and it's damned itchy). "Why would you do this?" you might ask. Well, a short time ago the Prostate Cancer Research Foundation of Canada decided to do a Movember fund raising effort for men's health, specifically targeting prostate cancer. The idea being, I grow hair like crazy and you all give them money to support my pain ;-)

To donate to my Mo you can either:

1. Donate online using your credit card or PayPal account
2. Or write a cheque payable to the ‘Prostate Cancer Research Foundation of Canada', referencing my Registration Number 2194621 and mailing it to:

     Prostate Cancer Research Foundation of Canada
     Attn: Movember
     145 Front Street East
     Suite 306
     Toronto Ontario M5A 1E3
   

Donations are tax deductible to the extent permitted by law.

The money raised by Movember is donated directly to the Prostate Cancer Research Foundation of Canada who will use the funds to create awareness and fund research across the country into prevention, detection and treatment, with a goal to ending the threat of prostate cancer.

Did you know:

• Every year around 24,700 Canadian men are diagnosed with prostate cancer and about 4,300 die of the disease, making it the number one cancer threat to Canadian men.
• 1 in 7 men will develop prostate cancer in their lifetime.
• All men over the age of 40 are potentially at risk and should talk to their doctor about the disease and early detection. Prostate cancer is 95% curable if detected and treated early.
• The results of last year's fund raising are available online.

Thanks for your support.

More information is available at movember.com.

Update: Proof!

Angela requested photographic evidence, so here it is... in all its hairy glory... ew.

My friend Melissa called me the other day with questions regarding how to setup a blog with profit in mind. Since I obviously don't have any experience with this (I've never had, nor do I ever intend to place ads here) I wasn't sure if I could really be any help, but I offered the following. If you have any ideas of your own, or think that I'm wrong, please comment below:

Here are some good Vancouver blogs:

• http://www.miss604.com/
• http://hummingbird604.com/
• http://www.beyondrobson.com/

And here are some excellent Toronto blogs:

• http://torontoist.com/
• http://blogto.com/

There are also a number of blogs out there that specialise in a subject rather than a particular location:

• Spacing
• Worldchanging
• TreeHugger
• icanhascheezburger
• FailBlog

These are off the top of my head but there are literally thousands, if not millions of them out there. All of the above however are profit-driven while the majority of blogs out there are not.

Some of the things I know they do:

• Focus on readership:
  • Post every day to keep your site fresh, this keeps search engines happy.
  • Don't do anything too personal, but don't be too professional either.
• Link to everyone else in your sphere
  • If you have an environment blog, link to other environment blogs.
  • If you have an urban blog, link to people who blog in your city.
• Tap into the multiple other social networking tools out there:
  • Twitter
  • Flickr
  • LinkedIn
  • Technorati
  • Digg
  • Del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • In each of these sites, link to other bloggers in your sphere.
• Advertise using a tasteful ad broker.
  • Suite66 (my old employer)
  • Google AdWords
  • RealMedia
• Collect statistics on your traffic.
  • Google Analytics
  • Sitemeter
• The trick to all of this is to:
  1. Be interesting. No one will read your stuff (or link to it, thereby increasing your search engine rank) if what you're writing isn't either fun or witty, or accurate.
  2. Be current. Your search engine rank is based partially on how often your content changes.
  3. Use Wordpress. It's a software package designed explicitly for blogging. I don't use it because it's not as powerful as I like (and I'm a control freak, I like to roll my own code) but most of the big bloggers out there use it. Either that or Drupal.

So, did I miss anything?

Hand made with silicon, this cellphone camera shot doesn't do it justice. See more here

This guy was about 3' tall and looked so real you'd swear that he was going to walk out of the room any mintue to put some clothes on. Again, my cellphone camera fails to convey the detail.

I went to the East Side Culture Crawl yesterday and thought that it might be fun to share with you some of my experiences.

For those of you who have never heard of the Crawl, I suggest a perusal of the website (it's still on for one more day!) but here's the gist: Vancouver's East Side is home to a lot of really talented artists. Once a year, these people open their studio doors to the public so we can see what they've been doing, sometimes even take part in the creation of art ourselves. It's a family-friendly event and some of the stuff you see is just awesome -- in the literal sense of the word.

The highlights for me for the evening were Avatar and Kurve, both very talented designers, an honourable mention going to Grace Lee who had some really nice photography and some pretty jewelry that Melanie picked up.

The night was really quite exciting, despite running headlong into a mirror on the bus and cutting my head open... that part was no fun. Anyway, I took some pictures of the cool stuff from Avatar, so I'm including them here, but I encourage you to check out all three pages linked above as well as the site for the Crawl itself. Good fun ;-)

I don't usually write about the economy here. Mostly because I have a well-known distaste for the whole "profession" of economics but today I feel compelled to write something.

I'm scared.

I'm scared that I'm going to lose my job and that there will be no one left to hire me. I'm scared that I'll lose my home, and be forced to live with my grandparents in the suburbs. I'm scared that my parents are going to lose their businesses, and even their home, and that my grandparents may actually need me to live with them because their pension won't be enough anymore. I'm scared that we're looking at another Great Depression and that the only way out of the last one was another World War.

Some of these fears are irrational, I know. But I see what's happening in the world and I can't help but think of the worst: The economies of the world are tied to resources, which are in turn tied to the biosphere. The biosphere is in serious trouble and the governments of the world are all watching the economy.

Will I have to make a decision between standing on my principles or eating? If my own personal economic standing became so dire, would I choose to knowingly do the Wrong Thing to assure my own survival? How moral is that?

Mass unemployment is only one likely result of all of this. Food and Water shortages are coming and with them, violence in its many forms. I think the scariest part of all of this though, is that no one seems to know what to do. It's one thing to know what everything will suck for a while, but that there is a plan in place to get us all out of this mess, but that's not the case here. The "free" market has gone insane and the whole world is just holding on, hoping that it will end soon. No one seems to know how to get out of this mess.

Maybe the way out of this will be the abandonment of the system that created it. Maybe, out of all of this chaos, a new kind of economy and political structure will emerge and we'll be better for it. Perhaps, but in the present, I'm really scared.

Those of you who have seen me in person over the last week are probably not surprised by this picture, but I thought that I'd post it here both for posterity and for those of you who read this blog and are not on Facebook where I posted this initially.

My reasoning behind all of this was actually pretty simple: I'd not done it before and I wanted to know what it was like. I then coupled this reasoning with the understanding that blue hair is an impediment to be taken seriously in the political arena, so if I was ever going to do this, the closer to "when I was young and stupid" the better.

My grandparents laughed considerably.

For the most part, it's the strangest feeling. I walk down the street and I get odd looks from strangers (especially children) and for a moment, I forget why -- it's not like I can see my hair all the time. I also surprise myself when passing a mirror.

The strangest part of all of this though is that strangers actually seem more comfortable around me. Sitting on the bus with a seat free next to me, I've found that young, attractive women seem to sit next to me more often now. What's the deal ladies? You dig the blue-types?

Sadly, the colour is far from permanent. Over the past week it's slowly faded from a brilliant blue to a teal, and eventually I'm sure it will be a nasty green. I'm not sure what I'll do then. Probably dye it again with something more subtle like a deep red and then just shave it off before the Ashley's wedding in December... I dunno. Suggestions from the hair dye experienced are welcome :-)

For the longest time, I've been fighting with this problem:

$ ssh someserver.ca
Received disconnect from 123.123.123.123: 2: Too many authentication failures for username

It never asked for my password, it just flat-out failed. After some digging, I realised that the force behind this was my use of ssh-agent, a daemon that holds onto the myriad of keys (and their respective passwords) that I use to access all of my servers. It turns out that by default ssh-agent attempts to use every key you've got to access a server. However, because the destination server usually rejects login attempts > 6, the whole thing blows up before it ever gets to the "enter your password" step.

The solution is this handy one-liner in your ssh client config (~/.ssh/config or /etc/ssh/ssh_config):

  Host *
    IdentitiesOnly yes

Contrary to what you might think this means, IdentitiesOnly doesn't force the use of identities, rather it tells the client to only use identities explicitly defined for this host. This way my client uses identities assigned to a host via the config, and if one isn't set, it isn't used.

Why this isn't the default is beyond me.

What better way to spend a Remembrance Day than to exercise my civic privilege and research whom I should support in the upcoming municipal election?

After hours (and this is by no means exaggeration), I've finally come down to a list of all the people I'll be supporting in this Saturday's election. For those of you not living in Vancouver, you may be interested to know that Vancouver doesn't have a ward system, instead we elect our representatives at-large. In other words, we get a list of a bunch of people looking for our vote and we pick ten of them.

On the surface, it looks all very democratic, even holistic if I can use that word in this context. While in a ward system you have to deal with the perils of NIMBYism, Vancouver councillors must theoretically represent the whole of the city which should lead to decision making that places the betterment of the city first.

I don't really know if it all works out that way though. I'm still new here.

What I can tell you is that there's a very real division here between East and West. Acknowledged or not, culturally and economically Vancouver has been referred to as as a two-ward system. This fits well with the two-party system we have... well sort of:

There's the Non-partisan association, which is traditionally rather right-wing, and an alliance of left-ish candidates comprised of three parties: Vision Vancouver, The Coalition of Progressive Electors (COPE) and The Vancouver Green Party. The funny part is that alliance thing. Since this party system is all about who controls the council, Vision, COPE and Green have reached an agreement not to compete with each other and instead campaign as a sort of team. As a result, NPA is running 10 candidates for council, while Vision is running 8 and COPE 2. There are similar splits in the parks board and school trustee races.

The problem for me is that I really don't like COPE. I find many of their policies (and even some of their candidates) to be naive, and their priorities to be sorely misplaced. However, if I don't support the NPA (who brought us many notable problems like CCTV cameras in the streets, private police, panhandling bylaws etc.) then I cannot vote against that agenda without supporting COPE. Or can I?

There are independents running as well, many of them clearly unfit for office let alone my vote, and there is also the Work Less Party whose platform is very forward thinking and dare I say enlightened. Their only problem is that the group seams plagued with non-professionals incapable of actually doing the job for which they're attempting to get elected. Their policy paper is riddled with typos for chrissake.

So after much research and personal debate I have arrived at this list. If you think I've missed something worth noting, please let me know. Notably missing from here is Michael Geller, a charismatic, intelligent, well travelled candidate... who is running with the NPA. I couldn't in good conscience give my vote to someone who could potentially be motivated to support some of the more disastrous NPA policies either out of loyalty or political pressure. If he were running independent however, I'd support him in a second. Also, Lea Johnson, an independent, seems like a decent guy, but his website talked about his work in Ukrainia... He's probably best suited for working with RainCity anyway.

Notably on this list are Richard Mayencourt (independent) and two Work Less Party candidates: Geri Tramutola for council and Ivan Doumenc for park board. I had the opportunity to hear Tramutola speak last Friday at the VPSN's Last Candidate Standing event and was blown away by the passionate and eloquent nature of her arguments. It's clear that she knows her stuff and she's by far my favourite candidate. I only know Doumenc from his profile on the WLP's website, but his ideas for parks & rec appear to be in line with my own so I included him as well.

So that's about it. My basic strategy: Start with known favourites, then add Vision. If I needed more, I went down the list of independents and COPE people. If I needed fewer, I went through the Vision list and pulled out weak profiles. It's about the best I can do with 86 candidates and such a short period of time.

If you have different strategy, I'd love to hear it ;-) For those of you just wondering where you can get started, I suggest you take a look at the list of candidates and their profiles on the city's website.

I think that it's been more than 12 hours. More like 14... it's all a blur really.

I started today with a lofty goal: do a complete system wipe of Moulinrouge, my file/web/mail server that hosts pretty much all of my life... including this site. I decided to take the last step in my abandonment of Gentoo Linux in favour of my new love, Arch Linux, the process of which only added to the difficulty. I also moved my DNS and DHCP servers to Serenity my firewall machine as I'd gotten tired of the various exceptions I had to make to host those services with Moulinrouge.

Strictly speaking though, the whole thing went rather well. I had rsync'd my entire filesystem over to the 1TB USB2 drive, and the Arch install ran with no problems at all. The biggest hiccup came when I realised that Exim isn't packaged with MySQL support in Arch, so I had to do a manual compile for that one using ABS. A pretty cool experience I might add, though frustrating when you condiser how common such a setup may be. For those interested, I followed a helpful forum post on what needed to be changed and created a simple patch file for PKGBUILD so I can use it again later:

# pacman -S abs
# abs
$ mkdir -p $HOME/abs
$ cp -r /var/abs/extra/exim $HOME/abs/
$ patch $HOME/abs/exim/PKGBUILD PKGBUILD.patch
$ cd $HOME/abs/exim
$ makepkg
$ pacman -S exim-4.68-5-i686.pkg.tar.gz

The other fun bit I discovered was SSH's ability to not only run its own version of secure-ftp (sftp), but also run it in a chroot environment with ChrootDirectory. This required a lot of experimentation so I thought that I'd post a few notes here:

• In a chroot environment, logging is not possible until OpenSSH 5.2. Don't try, it'll only cause you pain.
• You cannot chroot a user into her or his home directory as the "new root" must be owned by the root user. Instead, what i found worked well was setting up a series of user directories owned by root under /srv/http/untrusted/username which then had the user's websites inside.

Here's my sshd_config snippet:

Subsystem  sftp  internal-sftp

Match Group untrusted
  X11Forwarding no
  AllowTcpForwarding no
  # Won't work 'till 5.2
  #ForceCommand internal-sftp -l VERBOSE
  ForceCommand internal-sftp
  ChrootDirectory /srv/http/untrusted/%u

Lastly, PHP in Arch is very different from my experiences in Gentoo, Unbuntu, Debian, Suse and Redhat. Even FreeBSD was more intuitive. For starters, Arch uses some less-than-common defaults in php.ini:

• error_reporting = E_ALL
• magic_quotes_gpc = Off
• short_open_tag = Off

Then, when you try to start up Apache, you find that it's not loading PHP. To make that happen, you have to add the following to httpd.conf and reload your webserver:

LoadModule php5_module modules/libphp5.so
Include conf/extra/php5_module.conf

After all that though, you'll notice that MySQL and a suite of other extensions you're used to seeing as part of PHP aren't there. If you stopped by this site earlier for example, you would have seen the glaring errors complaining that mysql_connect() didn't exist. To make all of that work, you have to go back into php.ini, scroll down to the bottom and un-comment the various extension lines... among them:

extension=mysqli.so

There were other fun problems, but this post is already quite long and it's almost 5am now. Must get some sleep so I can finish it all up tomorrow!