Google Docs lets you upload any file! Really? No, not really.

I decided to give it a try. Sounded cool.


Uh, ok. That doesn't make much sense. Is the limit 250MB or 1MB? Or what? I guess I'll look at the help.

So tell me, how does this reconcile with "Upload any file"? Not a great experience here. Google, I'm disappointed.

Rogers tells HTC Dream users to turn off GPS or 911 calls won't go through

On January 15 I received an SMS message from Rogers telling me I'd better disable GPS on my phone or I wouldn't be able to make 911 calls. This is the latest chapter in the unhappy saga of the HTC Dream on Rogers.

Rogers/Fido service message: URGENT 911 Calls: Please disable GPS location on your HTC Dream device to ensure all 911 calls complete. HTC is urgently working on a software upgrade and we will provide details shortly so you can re-enable GPS.

Instructions: Select Menu - Select Settings - Select Location - Uncheck Enable GPS Satellite

Message de Rogers/Fido : URGENT - Appels 911 : Veuillez désactiver la localisation GPS sur votre appareil HTC Dream afin de vous assurer que tous les appels 911 soient acheminés. HTC développe le plus rapidement possible une mise à jour du logiciel et nous vous fournirons les détails sous peu afin que vous puissiez réactiver la fonction GPS.

Instructions : Sélectionner Menu - Sélectionner Paramètres - Sélectionner Location - Désactiver les satellites GPS

First Rogers announces that they're not providing any more upgrades to the software on this platform. Then they announce that they'll upgrade Dream users to the HTC Magic for free (well, with a contract extension). Then the damn thing just doesn't work. Ah, the joys of early adoption...

I just want an Android device with a keyboard. Is that too much to ask?

Accountability moment: not one more gay cent until we see some results

When politicians make promises, they should be held to them. Especially when they promise hope, a new kind of politics, that they want to take contributions from actual people and be accountable to them. Well, we heard lots of promises, but we've not seen any action. Until we start seeing the change we paid for, President Obama and the Democratic party can forget about getting any more of my money:

I pledge not to donate to the Democratic National Committee, Organizing for America, or the Obama campaign until Congress passes, and the president signs, legislation enacting the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell (DADT), and repealing the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

And yes, I'm serious about this. You'd better believe corporate donors are getting their money's worth right now, as they belly up to the trough for "healthcare reform". If they don't get what they paid for, they're not going to give again – and guess what, neither am I.

Both DOMA and DADT were passed during the previous Democratic administration. The just-finished Bush administration produced plenty of sturm und drang about teh gays, but never actually did legislative harm to us. The Obama administration had better start righting some wrongs, and President Obama had better start doing something to fulfill his pledge to be a "fierce advocate" for our community. With sixty filibuster-breaking votes in the senate and a strong majority in the house, the Democratic party has an opportunity to actually pass the agenda they trumpet when they come around begging for cash. With the midterm elections coming the time to act is now; otherwise it becomes increasingly obvious that the Democratic party is determined to block action on these issues in order to keep the gay money coming.

Either put up or find another sucker. If you feel the same way, join me in the pledge.

The cross-species dinosaur team meets to discuss the ideal design for a mammal

Distributed is the new Object Oriented

In the 80s, Object Oriented development promised a fundamental reshaping of the software development landscape, and it had distinct religious overtones. (You can tell it was religious because Object Oriented is capitalized.) It was going to be better in every way from procedural programming - everything would be reused, bugs would be eliminated, and mass love would result. Like Theravada Buddhism, once you accepted the Four Noble Truths of Encapsulation, Inheritance, Polymorphism, and Modularity everything else followed. This fever gripped the development world for twenty years, and thousands of developers never made the mental shift necessary to embrace it.

Leaders often made the fateful decision to rewrite existing procedural apps in object oriented technologies. Did the resulting programs run better? Um, no. Did they conquer the marketplace? God no. Did they run faster? Hell no. Windows Vista is a prime example; I'm not going to rehash any personal case histories because the pain is still too great. I'll let you know when I'm strong enough to cry.

Distributed development is as different from Object Oriented as Object Oriented is from procedural development. Most of the existing cadre of developers will never get this stuff, just as most procedural developers never figured out OO. Hadoop / MapReduce and Erlang require a rethinking of how problems should be solved, and a rethinking of what problems can be solved. Instead of figuring out how to best rewrite yesterday's apps with today's technologies, it's much better to treat them as solved problems and move on.

Vancouver's Open Data, Open Standards, Open Source and the Vancouver Public Library

Vancouver has adopted a policy of Open Data, Open Standards, Open Source and I'm really excited about it. David Ascher presented on the topic at Open Web Vancouver 2009 and pointed out that if we don't engage the city and use this data it will go nowhere.

The Vancouver Public Library is one of my favourite places. I love libraries, I love books, but the library here in Vancouver is a really special library for me. So I've been thinking of ways that the library could share data so that I could build applications to make the library more interesting and more valuable to the people of the city.

Here's some data I'd like to have:

• Books on order

  I'd like to know what new books are currently on order, but not available. I want a preview of coming attractions.

• Most unpopular books

  What doesn't get checked out? What's likely to get sold in the next round of disposal, ahem, book sale?

• Most popular books

  What's everybody reading?

• Top 100 sites for library patrons

  What are the most popular sites browsed from the library? I'd like to be able to contrast this with the most popular sites according to Alexa. That should help tell the library what sorts of services patrons need.

These are things that I could mash up into interesting applications, such as presenting a unified view of new popular books on Amazon and which ones are in the library, or popular in the local community.

Spam now leverages social networks

I've been getting spam lately purporting to be from a former co-worker. Apparently they harvested her MSN Messenger list – it impersonates her hotmail account and sends to my work account.

This was probably due to a virus which hijacked MSN messenger, it's a notoriously problematic service: between the service outages, trojans and viruses, its usefulness is debatable. But even as Microsoft gets its security act together a decade too late, the attack is inevitably shifting someplace else.

With social networking sites asking for email passwords to "import connections", people respond quickly. After all, they say it's safe, and you can always change your password later (but you don't). As it has been pointed out, as an industry we've trained people to type passwords, and that's what they do – whether it's a good idea or not, and that's why phishing is so successful. But once they have your contact list they can keep that forever, and it's a wonderful tool for a spammer.

Facebook and Twitter are unlikely to misuse this data too egregiously, they are connected to real money and companies with reputations to protect. But Pownce, which is going out of business – what about their data? And tacky little utilities like Twitterank which spam your stream, you'd better believe they're warehousing your connections. And your private messages. And everything else. You can put these things together and draw meaningful conclusions about the people involved.

Science fiction has been talking about spambots impersonating your family and friends for years, but now it's happening for real, and expect to see a whole hell of a lot more of it. Expect to start seeing requests from friends and family, asking for money through new and unfamiliar websites (or even familiar websites that have been compromised). Expect increasingly strange and subtle requests: you may not even know what they're really trying to get you to do, or why. In short, this is going to get deeply weird, really fast.

Favourite packages for Ubuntu Intrepid

I recently upgraded to Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex, the 8.10 release. I use "upgraded" in the general term because the distribution upgrade option has never worked for me – I did a clean install.

Add the Medibuntu repository.

then:

sudo apt-get install aacgain acidrip acroread acroread-plugins audacious azureus cabextract easytag ffmpeg flashplugin-nonfree gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad-multiverse gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse gtkpod-aac hardinfo inkscape libdvdcss2 libdvdread3 libdvdread3 libxine1-ffmpeg meld mozilla-acroread mozilla-mplayer mozilla-plugin-vlc mp3gain mplayer msttcorefonts network-manager-pptp openclipart-openoffice.org nfs-common nfs-kernel-server portmap rapidsvn skype smartmontools smbfs totem-xine ubuntu-restricted-extras unrar vlc vlc-plugin-esd w64codecs wine

Georgia: dump Saxby Chambliss on December 2

Saxby Chambliss, chickenhawk extraordinaire, is in a runoff to keep his Senate seat in Georgia. Despite McCain carrying Georgia 52%-47%, Chambliss was unable to ride his white coattails to victory. People were pissed at him for voting for the Wall Street Giveaway, and they punished him just enough to force him into runoff against Jim Martin.

I'm voting for Jim Martin. He's the most progressive candidate Georgia has produced in a white, heterosexual male body since Jimmy Carter. His legislative record is solid, he's smart and hard working. I've voted for him many times over the years, and I'm happy to do so again.


But most importantly, Jim Martin is not Saxby Chambliss. In 2002 Chambliss won his Senate seat by sliming his opponent Max Cleland (a veteran who lost his limbs in Vietnam) as a terrorist sympathizer. He ran hand-in-hand with Governor Sonny Perdue whose platform of a "Confederate Flag for Georgia" helped propel them both to victory. It was shameful, and I'm still ashamed. It would be redundant to call out his record on voting for the Iraq war, voting for torture, voting for spying on US citizens, voting for retroactive immunity for the telecom companies who spied on Americans, and so on.

Georgia's Secretary of State has no information about the runoff election on her department's website or its Election 2008 website, so she obviously doesn't want people to vote – after all, turnout would be bad for the GOP. It's a shameful state of affairs, but if we "other folks" vote again, we can send Chambliss packing with the man he said he was "goin' to Washington DC to work for", George W. Bush. This time we can elect Jim Martin who will work for the citizens of the State of Georgia.

Vote December 2.

Asking more from family and friends on queer rights

Following the election last Tuesday, I am very happy and hopeful about the future. Even though Proposition 8 passed in California, President Barack Obama will appoint liberal Supreme Court justices who will eventually give me full equality in the United States, maybe even in my lifetime. I have hope.

But in the meantime, it's going to be rough. Each step forward will be met with stiff opposition. Queers have long been convenient targets for political hate campaigns. This will get worse before it gets better. It already is.

Recently I've discovered that several long-time friends don't agree I should have equal rights, including the right to be married. Some of them have participated in campaigns specifically intended to take away my civil rights. By definition, these people are not my friends, and I will no longer encourage such behaviour with my continued association. These people will no longer be able to truthfully say "I have gay friends, but..." – not if they're referring to me.

I am also raising my expectations of my friends and family. In the past I simply asked friends and family to accept me and not say bad things in my presence. I didn't feel I had the right to ask them to volunteer for a cause, contribute money, or vote a certain way. Although I knew in some cases that they were opposed to my rights, I ignored it. I had very low self-esteem, and I just felt happy that people actually liked me: Internalized homophobia is powerful and insidious. Those days are past.

Now I will call on my friends and family to help advance my civil rights whenever I see fit. Since my friends and family love me as I love them, I expect they will be willing to help me. If friends and family are engaged in or supporting organizations that hold anti-gay agendas, it is my expectation that they work to improve those organizations from within. To be clear, I'm not unreasonable: I don't actually expect my friends and family to live up to my every expectation any more than I live up to theirs.

Queer issues will never be as important to most of my friends and family as they are to me. But now I'm not going to hesitate to ask for help, and if that turns out to be a problem, it will be short-lived. It will be fantastic if they choose to help, and it will be okay if they don't, but no friend will be allowed to work against my civil rights and remain my friend. This is called self-respect, and it starts now.