David Akin’s On The Hill

Sometime in the evening of Friday July 2, every Blogware blog I know
of, including my own, fell off the Web, so far as I can tell. And yet,
friends in the U.S. say their Blogware blogs are working fine. One
correspondent suggested there was a connectivity issue with ATT Canada.
Whatever it is, it's now Saturday monring July 3 and I can't see my
blog, Accordion Guy's blog, Ross Rader's
blog, and some other sites. I'm connecting to the Net from home
through the Cogeco cable.
You can help me get a sense of what this problem is by sending me some e-mail and letting me
know where you are and what time you were reading this. Thanks for the
help.
[This was posted using the helpful Blogware moblog function]

[A press release received
today says:] “A team of researchers from the Intelligent Robotics
Laboratory at the University Jaume I (UJI) in Castellón, Spain, has
created the first automat capable of performing the tasks usually
carried out by a library clerk. The robot uses speech-recognition to
identify the book that is being requested, then determines its
location, goes to the shelf, picks it up and takes it to wherever it is
instructed to do so.”
That's pretty cool.

[From the June 30 edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch]

Readers Explain Why They Don't Watch Local News

By Gail Pennington St. Louis Post Dispatch

We asked; you griped.

Encouraged to comment on St. Louis TV news, more than 100 Post-Dispatch readers weighed in with their pet peeves.

 Many also offered theories on why viewership of late local newscasts continues to fall. Some of those comments appear below. There's not enough space to print every one, but the gripes break down into several categories.

Here are the most common.

Top 10 Pet Peeves About Local TV News

1. Self-promotion. Viewers notice, and hate it, when stations spend news time plugging their network's shows, disguising the hype as legitimate news. —snipped [See the full list ] =============================================== 'Course, one of the reasons newspaper readership may be down is that readers find “top 10 lists” that masquerade as a column a weak excuse for a carefully crafted opinion that makes a particular point with wit and charm. 🙂

Earlier this week, the Supreme Court of Canada rendered its decision on an important and significant Internet music case, known in legal circles as the Tariff 22 case but known among those who are not lawyers as the SOCAN case.
I put together a story for CTV's National News on this. Blair Packham, who you might remember from The Jitters, was in the piece. Like a lot of musicians, Blair was frustrated because, in his view, there seems to be a disconnect between Canada's copyright laws and common sense.

Blair Packham, formerly of The Jitters, in his studio in downtown Toronto. Blair is also a leader of the Songwriters Association of Canada.

Blair is also a member of the executive of The Songwriters Association of Canada, a group that was sympathetic to SOCAN's legal fight. SOCAN is the Society of Canadian Authors and Composers. It represents music authors and publishers in Canada and collects royalties on their behalf and then distributes the proceeds.
Back in 1995, SOCAN thought it would be a good idea if Internet service providers paid an annual royalty to SOCAN. SOCAN thought ISPs ought to be treated like radio stations. Radio stations pay an annual license fee (in 2002, Canada's radio stations paid $32-million to SOCAN) in order to play all those hits.
Canada's ISPs, not surprisingly, resisted the idea of being asked to collect royalties from their customers to pay someone else.
So the case went to the courts and finally ended up at the Supreme Court of Canada.
The ruling earlier this week, though, goes beyond the basic issue of royalties.
The University of Ottawa's Michael Geist believes that the judgement is significant because Justice Binnie (who wrote the unanimous decision) stressed that individual privacy rights should not be trampled simply because someone thinks a copyright violation has occurred.
For ISPs, the ruling is a big deal because it suggests that courts will treat ISPs like the telephone company, that is, as a conduit for information and not as entity liable for the information travelling through that conduit. That kind of thinking has important implications for ISPs and their customers when it comes to a range of other issues including pornography and slander.
For triva buffs, the ruling is important because it's believe to be the first time the word 'cyberspace' has appeared in a Supreme Court of Canada judgement (or so says University of Western Ontario professor Mark Perry).

Apple took the wraps off its next-generation operating system, code-named Tiger. The desktop version of Tiger sounds like it's got some neat features, particularly an improved system-wide search function and something called Automator. Automator sounds like the Macro Recorder I used to use on WordPerfect for the PC back when an IBM XT was the hot machine in the office. Automator will let those who do not know the Tao of Applescript to reach the same state of zen when it comes to avoiding repetitive tasks.

Tiger Server sounds like a good deal, too, including a Weblog server based on Bloxsom, that will allow administrators to create a powerful publishing tool by simply checking off a box.

I have two suggestions, though, for Apple's commendable Mail application.

The first should be super simple for those smarty-pants Apple folks:

Please, dear Apple developers, let me move from an open message to the next message in my list with a simple keyboard command. Every major e-mail client, save Mail, lets me do this. Instead, if I have a pile of mail, I have to open-close-select-open to get through my Mail mail when I'd really like to just COMMAND-] or COMMAND-something to get to the next message. Please can someone write that little bit of really good functionality into the application?

Here's my second request, and one which, if implemented, will really set Mail apart from the pack. Let me explain:

The Tiger version of Safari will support RSS, so that you can assemble and create RSS feeds in your browser.

But who wants to read all that in your browser when it's so much easier in your mail application? Why not let Mail also retrieve and display RSS feeds? Over on my PC, where I”m using Outlook, NewsGator integrates terrifically well with Outlook, letting me drag and drop RSS feed items, save them, forward them and do everything else that I would normally do with any mail in Outlook. Can Apple's Mail do the same thing? I hope so!

Thanks!

 

 

Paul Martin's Liberal Party won a minority government in yesterday's general election. Investors, currency traders, bond traders — the whole lot of them — didn't seem much interested. Here's a sampling of reaction from some Bay Street economists:

Andrew Pyle at Scotia Capital:

Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin pulled off a rabbit-out-of-the-hat trick that would have made Harry Potter proud, as the Liberals defied the pollsters and formed a comfortable minority government in Canada . . . Some fiscal erosion emanating from a coalition government might follow in the year-ahead, simply because of the diverse fiscal agendas and political objectives of the political pairings. However, given policy lags, not to mention the precarious nature of minority governments, spending initiatives would likely unfold slowly. A commensurate reaction from monetary authorities would likely only evolve over time, not immediately. Similarly, the Bank will approach any near-term currency volatility in a cautious fashion, if at all. In fact, in a recent speech, Governor Dodge noted that central banks should avoid smoothing “unnerving” short-term currency volatility. Simply put, a minority government should not hinder (1) Canada/US spread compression and (2) or the longer-term CAD appreciation trend.

Robert Spector: Merrill Lynch Canada

Given that the financial markets had largely priced in a minority government, we don't expect any major near-term movements in FX or fixed-income markets. Over the medium term, however, we continue to be mindful of two factors regarding minority governments in Canada. First, historically, minorities have lasted roughly 18 months, and there is the potential for some volatility in currency and bond markets related to this outcome, particularly since at the margin, it represents a movement to the left.
Secondly, political factors rarely dominate movements in Canadian financial markets— the dominant macro trend of the day will largely govern.

Douglas Porter: BMO Nesbitt Burns

This will likely lead to an increased reliance on issue-by-issue coalition building as NDP support will not be enough to ensure the confidence of Parliament. Canadians are likely to head back to the polls within a year. Before that, left-wing issues will predominate in the forthcoming Parliamentary session—health care, municipal finance, the environment—but fiscal policy might not loosen as much as it would under a Liberal minority solely propped up by the NDP. Although there is no majority government, Canadian markets will be relieved by the results. Bonds won’t face pressure from as large a ramping up of government spending and the Canadian dollar should face less uncertainty of a deadlocked House.