Das eez kaput! Sometime around 2002 I spaced the entire database table that mapped individual entries to categories. Such is life. What follows is a random sampling of entries that were associated with the category. Over time, the entries will be updated and then it will be even more confusing. Wander around, though, it's still a fun way to find stuff.
Translation : Your Canada really does include Québec because, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise, the province's voters and politicians are the king-makers this time around.
I joked to a friend the other week that if the Rest of Canada (and, yes, that's an actual term
in Canadian politico-speak) elected the Reformed Conservatives to office, a third referendum on Québec separation would be scheduled by the end of the following month. It was a joke but the kind that only serves to illustrate the point.
Six months ago the Liberal party's calculus for a fourth mandate involved making up seats lost in Ontario (to the NDP in Toronto and the Conservatives in the rest of the province) with ridings won in Québec because people actually liked Paul Martin and everyone else would just ride his coat-tails.
A brief aside : In the last federal election, the Liberal party won a majority of seats (in fact, all but two) in exactly one province, Ontario, and still went on to form a majority government. Notwithstanding the legitimate greivances of those out West, it seems to me that the single most effective solution to Western alienation
would be a little more Western lovin' but I digress.
However, since the Liberal's (arguably the most smug and arrogant — and effective — gang of political operatives to ever set foot on Parliament Hill) have replaced Jean Chretien with Paul Martin as their leader Canadians seem ready to exact, in Tim's words, a little spanking
for their last ten years in power.
The mood of the electorate was already so poisoned by the time this election was called that Jean Chretien would hardly have guaranteed the Liberal's a win. But the thing about Chretien is that his seeming indifference to just about any kind of criticism garnered him a kind of secret, though never spoken aloud, respect, among the people. (Except Québec but that's another very long story.) No one would ever condone the man for grabbing the protester, who stood in his way, by the neck but everyone smiles when you tell the story. On the other hand, Paul Martin's stammering around covering all the bases but rarely saying anything when asked a question has left people cold and suspicious.
And news, last winter, from the Auditor General that the Liberal's blew 100-million dollars on Canadian flags and various other back-room shell games, all in an effort to win the war on separatism
, didn't exactly warm people's hearts in Québec either.
Enter Stephen Harper, leader of Reformed Conservative party. (It's actually just the Conservative Party of Canada
, the result of a merger between the Progressive Conservatives
and the Canadian Alliance
, née the Reform Party
.) Of late, they've taken to calling themselves New Conservatives
hoping, I can only imagine, that it adds a Tony Blair-esque air to an otherwise fiercely right-wing social and fiscal policy agenda. Since people are pissed at Paul Martin, and no one is quite ready to elect the NDP to run the whole bloody country, Harper is the only man left standing (or, in his case, smirking) and he's enjoyed a lot of attention because of it. Some are already speculating that his party might win enough formerly Liberal seats to form a minority government.
Another brief aside : Why anyone still votes for the kinds of hard-core fiscal conversatives that occupy the right-wing of Canadian politics, these days, after electing (translation : getting screwed by and then upset at) the governments of Mike Harris in Ontario, Gordon Campbell in British Columbia and, yes, Jean Charest in Québec remains a mystery.
Harper is also about as close as you can get to the anti-Christ in secular, homo-loving, pinko-commie, degenerate and community-minded Québec.
So, the only question left to answer is : do people in Québec think that the Liberals will get it together and win enough seats in the rest of the country to form a majority government, thus allowing them to vote their conscience
and send the Bloc Québecois (BQ) back to Ottawa, or will they hold their noses and elect the Liberals. Because, even though Québec shares a degree of consensus with some in the Conservative party when it comes to the separation of provincial and federal powers, there ain't no one here who wants to live in the world they are championing.
And in the event of a minority government (translation : Québec, second only to Ontario in Parliamentary seats, votes for the Bloc) the BQ will be the only thing standing between the new government and a vote of no confidence which would, in turn, trigger a fresh election.
Maybe things will pick up for the Liberal's after the leader's debate on Monday. If not, you know where to find the action.
of the opinion that marijuana does wonders for art and culture.
Meanwhile, Paul Wells is doing a pretty good job of walking the [please contain your weblogging as journalism debate to this small space] line.
As a rule I try to be sympathetic although it's a feeling that's tempered by memories of my own less than sincere endeavours bumming for change as a teenager. But the whole opening the bank door for me has always seemed wrong on more levels than I am usually comfortable thinking about.
It's Friday night and, already late to meet a friend, I am beating a rough path down the Main when I pass the bank on the corner of Bagg. It's not a branch where it's practical for someone to open the door for you because it's normally locked and swings inwards, automatically, when you swipe your bank card.
Instead, the guy trying to scrape up enough money for food, booze, whatever is sitting directly in front of the card reader with a bank card in his hand and mechanically jamming it in to the slot as soon as anyone approaches the door.
That's at least another layer, or two, of uncomfortable thoughts added on to an already unpleasant situation.
My hair is still wet from the ocean, I have a box of
chocolates in my hand and I'm not wearing any underwear.
A couple months ago I had a very unpleasant
experience trying to munge the relations between topics in the
day's New York Times using RDF and GSS. I can't remember what I saw, earlier today, that pointed to
the Perl
bindings for GraphViz, but when I read the docs I
realized that all I needed to do was loop over a nested hash
calling add_*.
After a few false starts I've added code to the cron jobs that
run every morning to generate a
pretty picture version of the daily Who's
on first at the New York Times?
stuff. The graph is generated as an SVG file because dumping to PNG
creates an image roughly 12000 pixels in width which, in turn,
causes Mozilla to die a slow and painful death. I guess the
next step is to add happy clicky links to the various nodes...
Since I've finally managed to get
jpegrdf
working I've been farting around adding different kinds of
locative
data in the absence of, and notwithstanding, automagic GPS goodness.
The following examples are the results of some experiments that may change but seem to hit pretty close to my personal 80/20 mark (where being able to read and write, not to mention query, this stuff quickly is of premium importance.)
Given the following namespaces :
@prefix : <#> .
@prefix dc: <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/title> .
@prefix where: <x-urn:aaronstraupcope:knows:where#> .
@prefix rue: <x-urn:aaronstraupcope:knows:where:qc-montreal:rue#> .
@prefix blvd: <x-urn:aaronstraupcope:knows:where:qc-montreal:boulevard#> .
@prefix ruelle: <x-urn:aaronstraupcope:knows:where:qc-montreal:ruelle#> .
This picture gets assigned the following data, which is pretty straghtforward :
<20040424-qc-montreal-terres_urbaines.jpg>
dc:title "Terres Urbaines" ;
dc:coverage where:qc-montreal ;
where:site rue:marquette ;
where:near blvd:du-mont-royal .
This one
is pretty much the same as the last one but the
near
property is replaced by
corner
. Is this sign
really
on the corner? No — not enough to satisfy
our new robot overlords
, anyway. But seriously it's not like
this data is for dropping bombs on people
. If either one of us was trying to give the other directions — stop, stop now, and don't tell me you're going to beam me GPS coordinates unless you want to get slapped; you know who you are — we would fudge them the same way and be no worse for it.
<20040424-qc-montreal-runs_buses.jpg>
dc:title "Runs with Buses" ;
dc:coverage where:qc-montreal ;
where:site blvd:du-mont-royal ;
where:corner rue:berri .
On the other hand, the picture associated with this post depicts something that really is on a corner :
<20040424-qc-montreal-god_juggling_donuts.jpg>
dc:title "The God of Juggling Donuts" ;
dc:coverage where:qc-montreal ;
where:site ruelle:unknown ;
where:corner ruelle:unknown ;
where:near blvd:du-mont-royal ,
rue:drolet .
Now that we've given the pot smokers in the audience a few moments to giggle and nod knowingly to each other I will note that without creating a magic RDF Bag of Holding it's not possible to indicate that the two corners are the same : unknown, except relative to some other street. So, you fudge it again and assign an unknown
site
and an unknown
corner
on the grounds that, given the way the graph gets built, you can still find what you're looking for.
There are
site
s which are nice and vague and have a higher precedence than a
corner
which has hight precedence than something that is
near
. Streets, avenues, and such are all assumed to live in a namespace specific to their locality because anything else starts to smack of a grand unifying theory and who really has the time?
I suppose it would be useful to extend properties like
near
to add some sort of spacial element like, say,
-e
for East. But let me just point out that in Montréal
East
means anything on one side of the Main and
South
means anything towards, and beyond, the old city. Neither of which are
true
statements since both are off by about forty-five degrees. No one in Montréal cares.
There are a few things sweeter still than beating the Boston Bruins in the playoffs, going up to the roof on what is the first real day of spring and listening as
les rumeurs de la ville
travel across the night sky.
But it is pretty fucking great.
It's not actually that exciting, just nice to get something working some place other than its original test environment. I'd like to tweak the code on the servers a bit and then I will publish the endpoint, adding, finally, a tiny bit of functionality to the so-called “w5” application. Maybe tonight, probably Friday.
Next up : the long, boring, slog of passing around and parsing Bloom filters in how many different languages?