Canada Celebrates Its 137th Birthday

July 1, 2004CanadaRaymond Tomlin

Across this great land of ours, Canadians from coast to coast to coast celebrate a remarkable country on its 137th birthday.
As the election dust settles, this is a day to put aside our political differences, to come together in commemoration of a vibrant nation of almost 32 million people, a Canada that is held up around the world as a model of tolerance, civility and social-mindedness.
As the world becomes a smaller place, as globalization and the communications revolution sometimes blur the distinctions between countries and cultures, today is a day to acknowledge Canada’s ‘differentness’ — from our social safety net and welcoming immigration policies, to our cherished Charter of Rights and Freedoms and our acknowledged politeness — these are just a few of the traits that define us as Canadians.
In these troubled times, who we are as Canadians is cause for celebration.
Happy Canada Day !!!

Welcome to VanRamblings’ newest

July 1, 2004Video & DVDRaymond Tomlin

Welcome to VanRamblings’ newest weekly feature, New on DVD. Each and every Thursday, VanRamblings will point you in the direction of the week’s best new DVD releases available at your local home entertainment store.

Woefully overlooked at Christmas-time, and almost completely misunderstood, director Anthony Minghella’s adaptation of Charles Frazier’s best-selling novel, Cold Mountain was little short of magnificent, an epic movie that is all at once as rudely violent, treacherous and politically charged as the source work, yet at times managed a picaresque, hurtfully romantic, chastely sexy, and warmly humorous tone that proves entirely inviting.
How it is that Nicole Kidman’s performance as a privileged Southern Belle was overlooked for a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her work on this Christmas 2003 movie release beggars belief. Grand, poignant, heartbreaking, and exhiliarating in equal measure, Cold Mountain is a must early summer DVD rental (also available on VHS).

Were VanRamblings able to say the same of The Perfect Score, a middling teenage heist comedy. Director Brian Robbins, the former Head of the Class actor, has helmed a number of laclustre teen projects. The only sexy things in this tepid, forgettable teen movie are Scarlett Johansson’s cherry-printed underpants and Leonardo Nam’s bedroom eyes.

A warm-hearted and surprisingly ambitious sequel to the 2002 hit, Barbershop 2: Back in Business is less cartoonish and more generous than the original. From the often affecting flashbacks of Cedric The Entertainer’s early days in the shop during the combustible 1960s and early 1970s (which also give Cedric more time to riff and rip) to the wary eye it casts on contemporary political hypocrisy, Barbershop 2 finds hope in friendship, respect and community, and comfort in the company of a first-rate cast of African American actors, including Ice Cube, Eve and Sean Patrick Thomas.

And, finally this week, Seducing Dr. Lewis, about which Entertainment Weekly’s Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote: “In Jean-François Pouliot’s internationally charming, award-laden comedy Seducing Dr. Lewis, a guppy-size French Canadian fishing village in need of a resident doctor welcomes a smooth Montreal plastic surgeon offering a month’s medical services to expunge a minor drug charge … but while Dr. Christopher Lewis plans a short stay, the citizenry, led by the town’s wily mayor, scheme to ensure longer-term commitment: They reinvent themselves as an irresistible, quaintly authentic Eden built on lies … there’s shrewd wit to Pouliot’s gentle, no-bull farce.” And, by the way, she gives the movie a B+.

Stephen Harper: Picking Up The Marbles and Going Home?

June 30, 2004Decision CanadaRaymond Tomlin

This will be VanRamblings’ final posting on Decision Canada. In the coming days, the Decision Canada button above will transform to Canada, as VanRamblings will continue to comment on the Canadian political scene.
In the political realm, VanRamblings will return to, and increase, coverage of local Vancouver and Greater Vancouver Regional / Lower Mainland politics, as well as British Columbia politics leading up to the next provincial election on May 17, 2005. Otherwise, over the course of the summer, VanRamblings will refine our publishing schedule, introducing a weekly New On DVD feature this Thursday, while maintaining the Tech Tuesday feature and Saturday night’s Unbelievable Truth badinage feature.
Harper Raises Possibility Of Stepping Down

Down for the count?

Late last night, in a story published on Calgary’s CFCN CTV website, Conservative leader Stephen Harper suggested that he is considering the possibility of stepping aside, after leading his party through a disappointing election campaign. This follows on the heels of an earlier Globe and Mail story suggesting Harper was “mulling over” his future.
VanRamblings has felt for some time now — dating back two weeks just subsequent to the live television campaign debate — that Mr. Harper seemed ill at ease, out of sorts. We have wondered to ourselves as to whether the Tory leader wasn’t suffering from some sort of dissociative disorder, a pervasive sense of melancholy, impairing his ability to function.
In the first two weeks of the federal election campaign, Mr. Harper was voluble, aggressive (in the most positive sense), directed and seemed eager, always, to speak with the media, in order to communicate directly to Canadians. In the final two weeks of the election campaign, though, the Conservative leader appeared almost to be in hiding, was rarely available to the press, as he took days off at a time, staying almost hermetically sealed inside his political bubble and speaking only to groups of supporters.
All the hyperbole published on VanRamblings about Mr. Harper and the ‘new’ Conservative Party aside (we’re hardly unaware that the attacks on Mr. Harper and the Tories were often visceral), we have felt these past almost three weeks that Mr. Harper seemed to be in some sort of trouble psychologically and emotionally.
Gone were the ready smiles, replaced by bizarre attacks on the issue of child pornography directed at opposition leaders. Gone was the energy that defined not only the Conservative campaign, but the campaign itself, in its early weeks, replaced by the braggadocio talk of a Tory majority. With each misstep by a Tory social conservative, from Cheryl Gallant’s ravings on abortion to Randy White’s musings on invocation of the Constitution’s notwithstanding clause, Mr. Harper seemed more and more deflated.
And now, Mr. Harper is pondering resignation from his post as Tory leader? Where has Mr. Harper’s fight gone? Is the Conservative leader honestly suggesting that he will not lead the opposition party in the 38th Parliament?
Commentary From Various Quarters
Perhaps the most incisive commentary VanRamblings read in the period just following the posting of election night results appeared in the Toronto Star, in Thomas Walkom’s column …

Martin came to the prime minister’s office six months ago like the hero of a classic Greek tragedy. Successful, popular, powerful, he seemed blessed … he was a man who talked of vision but lacked one, who lauded ideas but who, in the end, had none to offer. He was the classic emperor with no clothes. As finance minister he had been self-assured. But as PM, he was too often an empty vessel, echoing platitudes.
For 11 years and through three elections, the Liberals played a cruel hoax on this country. At election time, they campaigned to the left. They promised to right the wrongs inflicted by the Conservatives of Brian Mulroney. They vowed to protect social programmes from the depredations of Preston Manning’s Reform Party and Stockwell Day’s Canadian Alliance. And then, once elected, they stole the ideas of the parties they claimed to oppose and governed to the right. They were cunningly hypocritical. And finally, people caught on.
(As for Stephen) Harper, he is smart and serious. He does have ideas. But he’s a radical in Canadian terms who would devolve power to the provinces and who would dismantle the protective state. While he tried to play that down during the election campaign, enough voters figured him out to deny his party power.
As for his new Conservatives, they are not new at all. Rather they are a hoary, old bunch — a coalition of convenience, dominated by hard-edged Republican clones and sprinkled with old-time Mulroney fat cats. Their economic ideas are pre-1914, their social ideas pre-Cambrian. Eventually, the voters figured out that, too.

Of course, there is more punditry and commentary. National Post columnist Colby Cosh (quickly becoming one of my favourite columnists) writes with wit, intelligence, humour, humanity and insight, and is well worth a read.
Andrew Spicer weighed in with a point form analysis. Ian Welsh and Kevin Brennan continue to wrap things up nicely at Tilting at Windmills, while Conservative apparatchik Norman Spector offers a series of readable links.
Don, at Revolutionary Moderation is certainly the most passionate commentator, as he tackles the reasons for the NDP’s poor showing (VanRamblings had earlier offered advice to both the NDP and the Liberals, on the issue of the urban vs suburban / rural split).

Tech Tuesday: Tech’s Most Hated Man

June 29, 2004Web & TechRaymond Tomlin

Darl McBride: The Linux Killer

Tech’s most hated man

Wonder why your computer is under almost constant attack by worms, Trojans and malicious code of all kinds? Meet Darl McBride (pictured to your right), the chief executive officer of the widely unpopular SCO Group. For most of the past year, hackers across the globe have set about to hijack computers (including yours) in order to launch a devastating web attack on SCO to physically and psychologically destroy the company. The MyDoom Trojan, in particular, was designed specifically to launch attacks on SCO and Microsoft (more on Microsoft in a moment).
Friends (as well as detractors) comment to McBride that in just two short years, he has displaced Bill Gates as the most hated man in high tech. It took Gates decades of hard work to achieve that distinction.
What has the son of a farmer, a devout Mormon, and the father of seven done to so swiftly earn the honour? In the past year, McBride has transformed SCO — the late 70s developer of the UNIX® operating system — into a legal missile aimed at the heart of the open source software movement. His strategy threatens to undo the progress of Linux and other free operating systems developed by programmers who believe that their selfless efforts have produced a free, robust and reliable operating system.
SCO claims it owns the intellectual property rights to the Unix operating system and that contributors to Linux — the free, open source operating system of the future, and the OS that many believe will transplant Windows in the not-too-distant future — have pilfered that code. Every Linux user, now and into the future, SCO has concluded, owes or will owe it money.
What does this mean to you? First, while at the moment, every three years, or so, most computer users are forced to purchase the latest iteration of Microsoft’s Windows OS — which is bloated with code, expensive and unstable — most techies believe that in the near future a free, lean, stable, widely available and consumer-friendly version of Linux will come onto the market, displacing Microsoft’s core software development business.
Second, because most open source programmers know that they have created Linux and that it is not based on Unix source code, and given that these programmers wish to preserve domain over Linux as a free and available operating system, for months now hackers and programmers worldwide have launched continuous attacks on SCO and Microsoft, compromising not only those two companies, but every computer user in the world whose computer system risks infection and hijacking, in order that our computers might be employed to launch concerted attacks …

“It seems to me that the battle isn’t really SCO versus IBM (a supporter of Linux), or SCO versus Linux,” McBride says. “I think there’s a war going on. The war is around the future of the operating system, and whether it’s going to be free or not.”

What do SCO and Microsoft have to do with one another? Earlier in the year, VanRamblings published an article on the ties between the two.
The Wired article on the SCO-Linux controversy is well worth reading.
Will XP’s Service Pack 2 Cause Chaos?
With the anticipated release of Windows Service Pack 2 just around the corner, the major changes Microsoft has made to Windows XP through the release of Service Pack 2 (SP2) will almost inevitably cause major headaches for most computer users.
In an article published on Monday, PC World’s Joris Evers suggests that the automatic SP2 download will create a raft of problems, from application breakdown (your programmes won’t work), to disruption of your network access (you won’t be able to get onto the ’Net), as well as misconfiguration problems with your computer’s operating system and ’Net access, arising from inappropriate responses to prompts by Windows XP. Yikes !!!
At the moment, Microsoft doesn’t know how it will deliver the required support to computer users experiencing major glitches with XP2. The company could establish a dedicated, toll-free support line. At present, in North America, Microsoft offers the (866) PCSAFETY support line for issues related to computer viruses; that line could be extended to cover SP2.
Otherwise, make sure you’re on very good terms with your techie friends. Chances are, you’re gonna need their help.
Question of the Week

When I use Internet Explorer for Windows, I often get a message that says “Runtime Error has occurred. Do you wish to debug?” What does this mean, and is there a way to avoid it? — Submitted by: James S., Vancouver, B.C.

An Internet Explorer runtime error — one that occurs when a programme is running — can be caused by several problems. Some older versions of the Internet Explorer browser will display the message if you try to open a Web page that contains an apostrophe in the title.
Runtime errors are frequently caused by a mistake in the programming for a script on a Web page.
Compared with early sites, today’s Web pages can be quite complex, with pop-up windows, animations and programming scripts designed to enhance your Web-browsing experience. With all of those bells and whistles, it is possible for a page’s author to make a programming mistake that goes unnoticed during testing. Typically it is only programmers who need to use the debug option in the error box.
Some types of spyware (particularly the subset known as adware), may be trying to open windows or run other types of scripts, and some of these programmes may be causing the runtime errors. If you have installed ‘pop up’ blocking software to cut down on distractions while you browse, the programme may be zapping the extra windows before the rest of the Web page’s intended script can run, thus causing the runtime error message.
You can adjust your settings so that you are not alerted every time the browser programme trips over some bad code. In Internet Explorer, go to the Tools menu, select Internet Options and click on the Advanced tab. Check the box next to “Disable script debugging,” uncheck the box next to “Display a notification about every script error” and click on O.K.