A little sidestep

Ok - a bit of a plunge into the bru-ha-ha of the Gomery Inquiry (A.K.A. Adscam, A.K.A Sponsorship Scandal) here in Canada. From the perspective of an internet user and a blogger, I find the Attorney General of Canada's reaction to Captain Ed's website interesting and somewhat depressing. There may be a media ban in place, but I do not think that this precludes Captain Ed's source from revealing information to Captain Ed. It doesn't really matter who Captain Ed's source is - the fact remains that Captain Ed is writing from a personal blog in America. He is not media - at least, nobody has defined blogs yet (even political blogs) of being media and therefore having the rights and responsibilities that the press have.

It seems to me that companies and governments in the Western hemisphere are trying to play blogs both ways - as a tool to be used when it suits them (like for positive advertising) but not allowing the freedom of expression that is granted to a person who is writing in a personal blog. The guy who got fired from Google for writing his personal opinions is another example. Personally I think that for the protection of the general public, some base definitions of a blog need to be nailed down such as definitions of personal versus special interest blogs and the rights and responsibilities that each type should be accorded. There - politics, law and computers rolled into one...

BTW, yes, I am using the comic the Captain Ed also posts - I find it interesting both from a political side and from the technological viewpoint

Keeping Busy

Although not much has happened to me in the past couple of weeks, I've been occupying my time outside of my job search with learning new things and re-acquainting myself with stuff that I haven't used for a while. Last week I spent some time relearning XML & XSLT which I mostly knew. Then, on Saturday, I studied through Core PHP Programming for PHP5, which is essentially C++ but more specialized for web development. It looks like most other modern languages, although it is easy to figure out its origins and original purposes - although the newest version of PHP can be used for large scale web application, it still doesn't look like it was designed for it originally (which it wasn't obviously). One thing I don't like about PHP is that is not strongly typed - a variable is defined by the $ in front of the variable name, and the variable can be anything - a string, a number, an object. To me personally, this seems to encourage sloppy programming, possibly leading to problems with code maintenance, especially if this is a language that is to be used for large scale application. Also, I have to admit, I do prefer dot (.) notation to arrow notation (->) when accessing methods and properties of a class - easier to type with a period.

This past week has also seen me finally get a GMail account - I was invited to an account by a friend. I think it is ridiculous that they have not opened it up to the general public yet - its been in Beta form for a year roughly - how much does it take to know if it works well? There are enough people using GMail now and inviting others to open accounts that it will snowball, and those servers better be able to handle the load... I guess what I am saying is that not making the access to accounts public is a redundant policy and not the most client friendly - either you are or you are not a public webmail service. Getting the new account also made me realize how little I actually write emails now, in terms of writing to friends and relatives. Maybe I have grown too complacent about emails?

There has been one interesting thing happening for me though - I have been invited to be a member of the Executive Council for the Calgary .NET Users Group. It is a volunteer position, but I know I need greater visibility for more employment opportunities. It will also be nice to do something that isn't purely tech related again, similar to when I was doing work for the Canadian Consulate in Chongqing, China as an intern. Regardless, some different stuff while getting to meet new people.