September 22, 2005 - 12:00 - 20:00 - Car Free Day - at Gastown
Each year on Sept 22, International Car Free Day is celebrated by over 100 million people in about 1,500 cities around the world.
BC River's Day & Salmon Celebration
September 25, 2005 - BC River's Day
Thousands of British Columbians celebrate BC Rivers Day on the last Sunday in September each year, making it Canada's largest river appreciation event.
September 25, 2005 - The Salmon Celebration - at False Creek
The Salmon Celeration is a free event to honour the spirit of the salmon that used to live in the streams that flowed into Eastern False Creek. We invite all to participate. If the spirit moves you, dress up like a salmon or forest animal, or bring rattles, masks or drums. Whatever inspires you to remember a lost salmon stream.
Free Betty Krawczyk
I went to Betty Krawczyk's court appeal hearing the other week. There was a small demonstration just outside the court, I took a few pictures.
The Granville Book Company - dissolved
I dropped by The Granville Book Company today and to my surprise it is no longer in business. It looks like they closed down two months ago.
For technical books there is almost no choice anymore, that's really sad.
Software Freedom Day
Software Freedom Day (SFD) is a worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Our goal in this celebration is to educate the worldwide public about of the benefits of using high quality FOSS in education, in government, at home, and in business -- in short, everywhere! The non-profit company Software Freedom International provides guidance in organizing SFD, but volunteer teams around the world organize their own SFD events to impact their own communities.
Nautilus Scripts for Subversion
Based on the CVS Nautilus Scripts written by Gavin Brown I wrote a set of scripts for subversion. You can right click on a subversion managed file or folder (you can also multiple select) and then select a command from the Subversion submenu. All scripts will give feedback using a zenity message box.
The most important commands are right in the Subversion menu. Not so often used commands are in the Subversion/More... submenu and property related commands are in Subversion/Properties....
Download: nautilus-svn-scripts-0.9.tar.gz nautilus-svn-scripts-0.9.2.tar.gz
Animated Maps: Distortion in Motion
There is a saying, "The map is not the territory". While there are many reasons why this is true, there is one aspect regarding maps of the whole Earth that caught my interest quite a while ago. The Earth is more or less a sphere, how do you project a sphere on a plane? By distorting it, of course. Knowing that maps are distorted projections is one thing, getting a feel for that distortion is another.
If you could animate a map by continously changing the projection point, you could get a better understanding in which ways and to what extent different areas of the map are distorted. A few weeks ago I just realized that the individual frames of such an animation could be generated by xplanet and then an animation can be created by joining together all these frames. Since you don't want to manually generate all the frames you would need a way to automate the whole process. I wrote a short Python script that generates the frames by calling xplanet in a loop and then creates an avi animation using mplayer.
Opening Multiline URLs
A very nice Firefox tip: Pasting Wrapped URLs. Just set the editor.singleLine.pasteNewlines hidden preference (about:config) to 3.
There is also an extension that helps with this: URL Link. It allows you to follown non-URL links and open wrapped URLs in emails.
Google News Does RSS
You can get the Google News using RSS now, even for custom searches.
I am following for a few days the feed for a custom search and it gets properly updated. Depending on the search, make sure you don't update too often or you will end up with many duplicate entries. Too bad Google is not too smart in this respect.
Telus Censors Pro-Union Web Site
Some smart cookies from Telus decided to block access for all their customers, and some, to a pro union web site (Voices For Change - www.voices-for-change.com). What were they thinking?
First of all, this is going to back fire really bad since this is a gross human rights violation. Second, this way they just draw lots of attention to Voices for Change.
Some side effects of this blocking were the fact that they also blocked 766 other sites and that smaller ISPs that are using the Telus network were also blocking their customer's access (and it was not the decision of these small ISPs).
