hacklab.to

Chrome for OS X is lacking a bookmark export feature. I’m sure it will have one in the future, but it doesn’t have it yet. It will happily import your mozilla bookmarks and let you get started using the browser, but eventually you will notice that your bookmarks are locked in. It [...] [Link]

Tonight I found myself talking to a member of the “seduction community”. As per my new resolution, instead of staying politely silent, I spoke up and said they were full of shit.

I also offered some advice: If you want to date more women, hang around more women. For example, try joining a knitting group. There are knitting groups all over the place (they’re the new book clubs). I know several knitters, and they tend to be creative, fun women, and a lot of them even like nerdy guys.

“But that’s not what I want. I want to be a studly ...

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I sent Trade an email asking them to clarify the non-existence of a mandate letter for the ACTA negotiating team. There is one, but it’s a mandate memorandum. For the record, let me note that letter and memo are synonyms and that the Access to Information Act requires the department to “make every reasonable effort to assist the person in connection with the request, [and] respond to the request accurately and completely” (4.(2.1)).

Procedural complaint aside, the conclusion of the response is that the ACTA negotiating team’s mandate is secret. Trade is negotiating a deal on the behalf of Canadian ...

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Addendum: Following up with Trade reveals that there is a mandate, but it’s secret.

Back in December, MP Charlie Angus asked Canada’s Industry Minister Tony Clement for a copy of the mandate given to the Canadian negotiators attending the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) talks.

Suspecting that Angus was on to something, I sent in an Access to Information request asking for the mandate letter. I got a response today that I think may concern anyone following Canada’s role in the ACTA negotiations.

Please be advised that after a thorough search of our files, we were advised by department ...

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In November, I filed a couple of Access to Information Act requests with the Canadian Trade Department trying to shine some light on the negotiations for the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). ACTA in a nutshell: negotiations for a multilateral trade agreement with alarming implications for copyright reform based on leaked documents of an unusually secretive process (more info). In December, I wrote about Trade taking a 6 month extension above and beyond the 30 days that the Act permits them to answer my request. However, they did respond to one of the requests only a couple weeks later. They were ...

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Pat Robertson is such a dick. One hundred thousand Haitians die (about 1% of their population — the equivalent of 3 million Americans dying), and he says it’s because they “made a pact with the Devil”? What a heartless lying bastard. It’s time we start boycotting any television station that carries his show.

God needs to bring back Tammy Faye.

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The loop

1 2 3 4 5 

sock, $n - $read)))) { /* ... */ } ?>

contains a subtle bug. Go ahead, read the relevant function documentation and see if you can spot it.

PHP’s fread function directly maps the C library’s fread function. As TBlue explains, the C fread function returns 0 when reading at the end of a stream. PHP does the simplest possible thing with this and returns an empty string; to determine that the stream is at end of file, programs must check with feof as well.

Most modern languages realize that explicitly ...

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1) I Want Your Sex

In this U.S. #2 hit from 1987, George Michael begs his female lover to have sex with him. This was 11 years before George was caught soliciting anonymous gay sex in a public lavatory in Los Angeles.

His actual girlfriend of the time appeared in the videoclip. “Don’t you think it’s time you had sex with me?”, he asks of her. “I tell you that I love you but you still say no.”

I suspect it was actually the other way around.

2) Monkey

In this U.S. #1 hit from 1988, George ...

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Or, at least, BSG: The Plan would have been awesome if it had immediately preceded “No Exit” (episode 4.17) instead of coming as a tepid postscript to the series.

Just a little too late

After watching The Plan, I feel like I finally understand what was up with the characters of Cavil (the series’ main villain) and Boomer (a formerly “good” character who defects to Cavil’s side) in the climactic final six episodes of the series. The problem is, I wish I had understood these villains when I was actually watching those episodes, instead of having it explained ...

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Like many people, I’m concerned that the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) negotiations are being used to launder copyright reform through a secretive international trade agreement and do an end-run around the recent public consultations in Canada. However, it’s really tough to comment meaningfully on the subject without transparency into the process. In an effort to enlighten myself, I filed a couple of Access to Information (ATIP) requests with the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT).

One of my requests was deliberately wide-open, requesting any communication between the Trade Department and third-parties about ACTA. I’m trying to figure out ...

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The fee-for-carriage (or value-for-signal) debate misses the point. Television delivery is already moving online. Bell now has a pure IPTV delivery system for television in condos. Sites like Hulu provide on-demand access to programming. Granted, IPTV has been hyped now to the point that people are getting sick of it, but the simple fact is that television is moving inevitably to internet distribution. Canada was almost a decade ahead of the United States on internet delivery, until Parliament modified the Copyright Act to neuter the emerging business model.

Specifically, Parliament modified the Copyright Act to prevent retransmission of television online, despite ...

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DVD FBI warning (source: antypography.com)

Richard Ackerman (@scilib) tweets: “I wonder how many Canadian person-hours are wasted each year by us being forced to watch FBI piracy warnings on DVDs & some iTunes content“?

I decided to take a stab at estimating an answer. Note that this is a total back-of-the-envelope calculation that is likely on the right order of magnitude but otherwise wildly inaccurate.

There are a number of things we need to know:

Thing Quantity Source Notes Number of DVDs watched in a year 50 Harris Interactive via Video Business This figure is for Americans in ... [Link]

The Hill Times released a policy brief yesterday Monday all about copyright reform (pdf). If I were to identify a theme running throughout the article, it’s that the process of copyright reform is as important as the result. For example, Ministers Moore and Clement focus on the public consultations held over this past summer.

Rather than try to summarize everyone, I’ll highlight some key passages and let the writers’ words speak for themselves. I’ll start with Simon Doyle, who writes about the reasons that Canada has seen a number of bills introduced but no actual progress since signing the WIPO ...

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I just rebooted my work desktop into Karmic Koala, the new release of Ubuntu, my preferred distribution of GNU/Linux. I don’t have much substantive to say, but the qualitative experience has so far been pretty amazing.

Not only did I get to work all day while the upgrade was downloading, only having to reboot at the very end, but everything worked as I expected when I rebooted – which is to say that the only thing which didn’t work was VMWare, which I expected to not work as with every kernel upgrade. I might even take this as an opportunity to give ...

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In “The (legal) music fades out for Canadians“, Barrie McKenna repeats a number of American recording industry talking-points, and ignores the depth and breadth of the copyright reform debate in Canada.

McKenna makes a number of misleading claims. To address some of them: Canada’s copyright isn’t out of step with the Western world, but is fully compliant with Berne; Isohunt is involved in a lawsuit with the CRIA, but it was Isohunt that first sued CRIA for a declaratory judgment; the music industry contributes far less to Canadian GDP than does the technology industry; and, there is tremendous growth in ...

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My Mum is English by ancestry, and has for a number of years been making one of her family’s traditional recipes to go with Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner. I think it’s really yummy, so I asked her if I could share it. Here it is, mostly verbatim – I just separated out a list of ingredients for easier shopping.

English Bread Sauce

Ingredients

• 10-15 cloves
• 1 medium onion
• 3 cups milk
• 1 tsp salt
• 1-2 cups bread crumbs (the ones you can get pre-made at the grocery store work, but bakery ones are better :) )
• butter

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This is worth watching all the way through:

Colbert: “It’s like looking into a mirror…”

1h

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I was reading through Bjarne Stroustrup’s The C++ Programming Language, supposedly the definitive book on the C++ language by the man who invented it, when I found a mistake in it.

In Section 7.2.2 (in the chapter on operator overloading), he says:

In particular, operator=, operator[], operator(), and operator-> must be non-static member functions; this ensures that their first operands will be lvalues.

That’s not true at all. Being member functions won’t ensure that their first operands are lvalues. And nor do the first operands even need to be lvalues. (I’m sure we’ve all written code like get_smart_pointer()->foo(), where get_smart_pointer returns ...

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It seems to be a standard trope in celebrity journalism to talk about what a fashionable woman Cheryl Cole is.

They’ve obviously never seen this photo:

I know, you’re probably thinking that it must be some sort of stage costume. But no. It’s the dress she wore to her 26th birthday party. As in, she voluntarily chose to wear that dress. To an event where everyone would be looking at her.

In some ways, the dress is amazing. I mean, you just stare and stare at it, thinking that maybe it might start to seem less horrid and tacky. ...

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It’s funny how quickly the public can turn on you.

This time last year, Cheryl Cole could do no wrong. She was on the cover of Vogue Magazine. She was voted sexiest woman in the world by FHM. Women liked her, men liked her, and who cares about that pesky criminal conviction for assault. I’m sure it was just a misunderstanding.

But now the headlines have changed. “Cheryl’s too thin”, “Cheryl’s showing too much skin”, “Dannii outdresses Cheryl again”.

And on top of that all: Her debut solo single is crap.

Where did it all go wrong for Cheryl? Well, I ...

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