• Provide the concept of internal clients. These clients run within the local space of the X server and perform pass by reference calls instead of local remote calls, reducing the need for serialization costs
• Provide the concept of UI managers. These UI managers handle the drawing of buttons, scrollbars, etc.
• Provide support for pluggable XHTML parsers and renderers. These are used by the UI managers to render rich text into their widgets.
• It should still use the same method of client server communications as it is now. That means use SSH tunnelling in order to get it working over the firewall.
• X should provide the full user experience not just Window management, so it should support sound as well as other input methods.
• X should have support for a thin layer to the audio/video drivers.
• Remove the concept of low color screens and color maps from clients. It will provide 32-bit color (and render down as needed) as well as alpha blending.
• JPG and PNG renderers are built in
• The internal graphic format is PNG.
• SVG is used as its vector renderer.
• The all renderers (e.g. JPG, PNG, XHTML, and SVG) are hot-pluggable. However, at least one is present at all times.
• Fonts use OpenType format only.
• Should be backward compatible with X.
• Graphic and Audio Contexts can be exposed to local clients for increased rendering speed.
• Pluggable to existing windowing systems easily. So if we wanted an app to run on Windows we just need to put in a smallish daemon program that would translate them to Windows calls.

Well I finally wrote my first RAR module. Its pretty flimsy, but it seems to work. Its a NNTP client, which just uses the apache commons-net stuff to do the actual work.

My impression with RAR/JCA stuff is that it is basically a way to pool instances of objects such as connections to EIS or News servers. Not really rocket science, and overkill for most apps, but important thing is that it gives you free connection pooling with your J2EE server.

I haven't really gotten it to work in WebSphere, but I have it working on JBoss (which is good enough for me, I think if I really needed to do it in WebSphere I would be able to).

It got me to thinking of how I can make my own BNR program in Java. Of course the way I am going to do it will be ridiculously overkill, no one really needs all the J2EE stuff to build something that just downloads binaries from newsgroups. But what the hey, its a learning experience.

I was thinking of using CMP entities to handle the database stuff (BNR uses its own database mechanisms which keep on getting fubared often) this way I can delegate the database stuff to people who know what they are doing (or so we hope).

The connection to the newsgroups are done via JCA which I have already done, somewhat, it still needs to be more parametric, right now everything is hardcoded into my news server.

The next thing I need is a YEnc + UU decoder which I can download off the net. Then create MDBs that would do the decoding work. That way its asynchronous. There will also be another MDB that reads the data from the NNTP server and creates a file. It will send a message to a Topic to inform components that it has finished downloading and created a new file.

The UI will be either a SWT/Swing based applet or something that gets executed by Java WebStart.

Well when I have something more concrete, I'll probably start off another sf.net project for this.

Just had this idea while I was driving down to work the other day. I noticed there were many places in Toronto where people parallel park.

One of the things that happen is when people use these spots, it reduces the number of lanes by one. So a 3 lane spot like Bloor and Church will reduce to one lane because one lane is for the parking and the other lane is used up by the parker. In Bayview around Lawrence and Eglington I think. They have two lane roads and when people park it effectively reduces the number of lanes to zero.

Sometimes some people parallel park improperly and take up more room on the road than necessary or they have large vehicles in the first place. Personally I know I do not parallel park too well so I avoid it when I can.

My suggestion is to remove parallel parking from "commercial" streets. Residential streets I would agree is still okay, because you'd want your guests to park close to you. However, residents must own a garage to park their own vehicles.

So what would happen if we remove parallel parking on commercial streets?

Well traffic on those streets will move smoother because there are more lanes.

But what about those stores that will lose customers because clients can't park near them? Well that is just "bad" location and planning in their part. However, read on as I will explain how this is will be offset.

Toronto will lose money from parking fees. However, people will pay more for the better parking spots. Toronto will save money from the maintenance of the parking meters.

This will increase TTC ridership because its will be more expensive to park downtown. This will increase TTC services, therefore will offset the lack of people going to Toronto by car instead will increase the number of people going to Toronto by transit. The existing parallel parking lanes can be converted to bus lanes as well to smooth out traffic.

Another side effect of this will be a bit more distribution of people to non-core areas. Since there is more flow of traffic, people will move more freely. So the Greater Toronto area will benefit more.

Having parallel parking lanes on city roads is just poor municipal planning. (Just like saying 3 lanes is good enough on a highway namely DVP). Parallel parking should be used as a last resort not a norm.

Although I would agree that ethical investments are a good idea in terms of the long term, I do not think it is realistic. Primarily even if in the long run they would yield a lot, a lot of them would disappear before people would really reap their benefits. There are two observations I have on this:

1) Money rules in the govenerment in general

As your guest noted, you have a the US government subsidizing the purchases of SUVs, it does not surprise me the least bit. Even after Sept 11, though they disallowed most things to be brought inside an airplane, including nail cutters, they still allowed "Bic lighters" (I mean for what? we're not allowed to smoke in the airplanes anyway).

Corporations fund the government. Whether it is during their campaign or during elections. I wonder how much funding would the "Green Party of Canada" receives in comparison to the Liberal, Conservative, or NDP parties. Heck they were not even invited to the debate. And since marketting rules in the end (sad to say), those who have the most money would always win.

Also, I think people would want to vote for someone who has a chance of winning, the usual comment I get when I say I am voting for the "Green party" is "you're wasting your vote" and I would agree to that, but I still do it anyway just because its the principle of things. But I also think it is a waste of time because I know the party won't win.

2) People want the cheapest products and services.

People still want the cheapest they can get for their products, if it wasn't then we wouldn't have these outsourcing to China, India and Mexico. Employees be damned, the customer takes priority over anything else. This is the mantra that goes through my company and Walmart. I suspect almost all companies that are sucessful in the current economy.

This will cause morale problems in companies, but this is something that won't go away because most people need jobs (whether they are happy with it or not). People will usually want the cheapest products. Whether it was done by an ethical company or not is not something that goes into most people's purchase decision.

The only way this would be solved is:

• Products from ethical corporations need to be cheap
• The govenrment need makes it more expensive to run unethical companies.
• That would require people to vote for politicians who are willing to do that.
• Those politicans have to market themselves better.
• The politicians need to get money from corporations.
• The corporations need to be ethical.
• The corporations need to have an incentive to be ethical.
• People need to buy products from ethical corporations.
• Products from ethical corporations need to be cheap (see the catch-22)?

I do hope I am wrong with my observations.

As you know there are a lot of portable storage devices some the size of cigars with a USB port. What if instead of a USB port, it has a 802.11g wireless stack? Then you can have something called bucket 'o storage where if you need more storage just chuck another one into the bucket.

But let's extend that concept a bit, instead of just storage, what if we used it for compute power and RAM?

For lack of a better term, I would call each compute and storage unit as a "cell"

In theory, we can have a computer in a bucket which can be infinitely scalable just throw more "cells" into it.

We can also have more specialized cells, perhaps a cell that specializes in MP3 decoding, DivX encoding, 3D raytracing, etc. Cells can also have special purpose storage for database like structures and search engines. The system would be able to delegate some tasks to these specialized cells as needed, to free up room for the general purpose cells.

We would still need a way of ensuring that each cell is allowed to be used in the bucket, so we would need some device used to do initialize each cell. I would call this the "initializer".

The "initializer" would have a socket where each cell can be put into and programmed so that it will only respond to the the network that it expects.

We also need a way for each of these cells to communicate with each other, though peer-to-peer communications is good, a centralized hub is more efficient I think, (I mean we usually use Wireless Access Points instead of ad hoc networks). For lack of a better term for this, I would call that a "spine" like the spinal cord of the human body.

Although wireless may be good, sometimes a wired connection is more cost efficient. The "spine" can also be a USB 2.0 hub whereby you can attach "cells" into it directly so it will be powered by AC instead of batteries.

How do we get all of them to work properly? Well you would still need a standard computer to talk with them because it is so much more easier. The computer does not need to be all powerful though, as it just offloads its tasks to the "bucket". To the computer, it sees the general purpose storage "cells" as one or more drives, depending on the "initializer". It sees the compute "cells" as web services where they send data to. It does not see the RAM "cells" though because those are used internally by the "bucket". It will also have a JMX/SNMP type connection to the "spine" so it can track problems such as low battery power on some of the cells so they can replace it.

The way things would work is:

1. Controller: Ask "spine" get a free delegate cell. A delegate cell can be just another general purpose compute cell that is designated as a delegate by the spine, or it can be a special purpose cell that is programmed to perform delegate operations quickly.
2. Controller: Gives delegate code and data to process
3. Delegate: Ask "spine" to find appropriate compute cell
4. Delegate: Give data and code to the compute cell
5. Delegate: Tells controller which cell will give the information
6. Delegate: waits for next request
7. Compute cell: performs computation, may request other cells to help out if the request is threaded.
8. Compute cell: sends data to the controller.
9. Compute cell: waits for the next request.

I was just going through the news today about David Suzuki's report [www.davidsuzuki.org] on urban sprawling of Toronto.

I think one of the better ways of doing this is to make office space more expensive and force companies to embrace telecommuting.

Also to provide better and cheaper broadband to people so we can work from home more effectively.

Perhaps set up common meeting areas for companies so people can meet each other more easily, with facilities to do video conferencing and such. These places can be rented out to companies on-demand. Actually that wouldn't be a bad business to start up.

I like driving myself, though spending up to 3 hours on the highway (I only take one hour max, but they said some people do take up to 3 hours). I would suggest increasing the taxes on gas, but the money raised on it goes partly to transit and part to subsidize costs for hybrid cars. I would pay more for gas if I can afford to get the Prius.

I personally like living in outer suburbia, as long as everything is within a 15-30 minute radius. Which is kinda why I like my place, everything I want is within a 15-30 minute radius and I do not live in the core, I live in Scarborough.

I personally hate taking transit and would avoid it if I can, I hate losing control over where I can and cannot go. Though transit is still a good thing to have. Perhaps we can have those rentable cars on demand here, but I doubt it. I wouldn't trust them or all people to be good to them. Unless of course they make it fool and gang proof, but that is a research topic that I hope someone starts (wish it was me).

I sent an e-mail to Michael moore about his movie. Here is the e-mail.

Hi, I recently purchased the DVD and I found it to be entertaining and informative. Its a really good movie.

Personally, I live in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. And when I saw the segment you had there, it prompted some questions on the validity of the movie. Is what you say in the movie all true facts or just facts chosen to prove a point?

I don't know too many people who do not lock their doors. However, most of my friends are predominantly Asian decent. So we are kind of accustomed to locking our doors. I myself do lock my own doors, but I do feel safe enough that if I do forget to lock my doors and I am a certain distance from the door, I do not worry too much. I'm not too paranoid about these things since I live in a condo which has better security. I think would be paranoid if I lived in a house though.

The slums that you showed sound valid, I don't recall seeing slummy areas too much. However, I would suggest you film the homeless people in the city core underneath the expressway and get their views.

News television wise, if you look at our primetime news (around 6pm to 7pm) we are also innundated with black this, teen that, asian whatever killing each other. Check Pulse24 its is pretty much the same. Listen on our news radio station 680AM around the top of the hour and we get innundated with murders and other bad news too. And I think getting worse and worse at times. Heck, we have racial profiling allegations in our police, though they deny it. Although, I would say otherwise, because it would be easier for the police and government to use statistics the involve race, gender and age to help find where to put the most resources in reducing crime.

Is there anything wrong with using all the tools you have available in order to reduce crime? Yes and no, the US government has gone out and put some seriously stupid laws recently that make regular citizens "Guilty until proven Innocent", in which case this is the wrong approach. Using statistics is not bad as long as it is kept on the management level of the police, not the enforcement level. If it is on the management level, it can help us plan where we would need more police presence to help reduce the crime rate in the area, but not to automatically charge people because they are black, white, young, etc.

I am surprised at the low gun fatality rate in Canada, and really surprised at the relation of it to the US. I know your documentary was about guns, but if you show the fatality rate in relation to homicide rates it will prove to be a stronger argument. I think in Canada we had 542 murders a few years ago (http://www.statcan.ca/Daily/English/011031/d011031b.htm), I wonder what it is on other countries.

I really liked the idea of bullet control as Chris pointed out. I think if I were to run for office I would put on something like that although $5k a bullet is a tad bit pricey. I will still increase the cost of it and remove the sale of non-hunting guns which would include all semi-automatic or fully automatic weapons. I would also ban the sales of hand guns, BB pellet guns though painful and can still cause major injury should still be sold for people who like to do target practice (virtual gun games are still not up to the task, though I play with them more often as I don't like playing with real guns). Armor piercing bullets will also not be sold, there is no real purpose for them except to kill people anyway.

We have our own version of Corporate Cops here in Canada called Silverman Helps, though its Toronto specific, its also on Pulse 24. Though its not as entertaining as yours, it is still good to see that the small guys can win. Its too bad he is just one person, I do wish there were more of him.

Can't wait for Bowling for Columbine 2 :) Though I do wish the next one will be titled "Shooting the puck in Toronto" hopefully you can show some of Canada's faults before they get really bad. Think of it as a pre-emptive attack to promote anti-bush-like behaviour.

Archie (www.trajano.net)

I bought and watched this DVD recently, its interesting and funny and scary at the same time. I live in Canada, so I doubt what he says about Canadians is true, I lock my doors and some news in Canadian side are also fear mongering a bit, especially the primetime news.

I released a new version of my plug-in earlier today. I have significantly expanded it from its earlier version, well it was a fun playing with it trying to learn Eclipse development at nights.

You can get the plug-in at http://sf.net/projects/ttl/

Just going through the news again about the election and there was some talk about same-sex marriages.

My position on this? I would have to say "Marriage is supposed to be a union between a man and a woman, if I were a Roman catholic."

Key words: "if I were a Roman catholic" meaning that it is a religious thing. Marriage itself is a relious thing. How'd it get mixed up in our laws was probably something in lines with tradition.

If I were to have the power, I would just get rid of the legal definition of marriage. Its useless and I think its mostly used for tax purposes. This is something for your religion to uphold and adapt to, not the government.

By doing this, you would also get rid of the notion of divorce. If a couple wants to split up they just separate their bank accounts and liquidate their fixed joint assets if they want.

The only question now would be... "what about the children?"

Well I think there is some sort of law saying that the biological parents should provide for the well-being and support of a child equally, unless a sufficient replacement for the parents is provided.

Ontario Elections are coming up on October 2, 2003.

Here are my views of the candidates so far:

Ernie Eves (PC) - though he may be good as a leader, the government they want to provide goes against a lot of things that I would believe in.

Granted, if I do vote for this party I would stand to gain a lot of benefits (tax cuts and such), since I am a relatively high paid worker.

But it is still pretty lousy that those who are working, but on the lower pay scale are going to suffer because the basic needs (e.g., health care, electricity, water) are more expensive or lost in quality.

Personally, I am all for increasing my taxes, assuming that I see it being used properly.

McGuinty (Liberal) - had good potential of being a leading party, but the guy that represents them acts like a crybaby and just rants about problems without providing any credible solutions.

In terms of the party, I don't think I like the way they worked on the Federal level, so I don't want them to work on my province.

Hampton (NDP) - my concern if this party gets into power is unions in essential services (police, fire, electicity, water, transit, education) will be able to strike anytime they want. Granted that some of them may be underpaid for the work they do, this is a problem that has to be resolved as well.

So who will I vote for? I will probably vote for none of the above. I wish I could run for political office, but I don't think I would have the time to do so.

I was actually thinking of joining the "Freedom Party of Ontario", just so there would be someone to represent my region. Actually, they are still not the best one, but their charter is still better than what I have seen from the other parties. Well who knows maybe someone may come up.

And for the municipal election, I will probably vote for the one who is running the Province of Toronto party, though I would rather have Mel Lastman back again.

Made my first Eclipse plug-in last night. Its quite simple actually, but I found it lacking in the current system. It just adds another menu with two actions:

Restart Eclipse - which is useful if you play around with a lot of plug-ins.

Run Garbage Collector - which immediately reduces the memory footprint of Eclipse in case it has been running for a long time.

The source is on http://sourceforge.net/projects/ttl/ now.

Oh on July 17, I finally got married. Woo hoo. It took me so long to reply because immediately after I got married I was on a 3 week assignment in Belgium. Not much time for a honeymoon anymore. Maybe we'll postpone it to next year.

I think the total cost of my wedding was less than CA$2,000 for almost 30 people. And it was in a good restaurant too, very cozy atmosphere etc.

Pictures should come in shortly, because my PC powersupply blew up recently when I got back home. After replcaing the motherboard and the processor I determined it was the power supply. Well I got a more higher end powersupply this time, hopefully it won't fail me anytime soon.

Agh, I am so pissed off at Home Depot today. Well not exactly Home Depot itself, just that specific branch. I am not the best in negotiating, especially when I feel like I am being force into paying extra for something that is not my fault.

Also the instructions that came with the flooring never said anything more than using glue, a tapping block, the "reverse tapping metal thingy" and a hammer.

So are they saying that the instructions are wrong? And if they are wrong why are they still selling them without some notice to the consumer?

If the product instructions are defective and the instructions are part of the product, then the product must be defective.

Why are they selling defective products to the consumer?

If they are intentionally selling defective products to the customer. why does the customer have to pay for the store's mistake?

Sad to say I may do some "racial profiling" in the future when it comes to shopping, I've been burned way too many times by salesmen fitting a certain "profile".

BTW, "racial profiling" is wrong. Don't even get the idea that it is ever right. Prejudice is a bad thing no matter what the reason.

However, one should still go with your instinct and if you burn yourself one too many times when you do something, you should learn to stop doing it. No sense in being a push over. And learning to extrapolate from it would help avoid it.

Its still bad, I don't want to make excuses, I am not a nice person for thinking about it this way. So use at your own discretion.

I will most likely ask what the name of the head manager is, ideally the last name. And if it sounds like it matches "the profile" its time to move on to another store or branch.

I am planning to get one of these phones to start recording my conversations with any sales/service customer service staff. Of course I would let them know I am recording them, because they have the right to know and act on their best behaviour.

http://www.futureshop.ca/catalog/proddetail.asp?sku_id=0665000FS10011306&catid=10559

Just got a call from Logitech just now. Grr I am quite pissed off. I bought one of their wireless headset for PC and phone and it does not work since I got it for $90.

After about $15 of long distance phone calls. They told me that they will refund the cost of the product because it was discontinued.

Now they tell me they are not even going to give me a refund. They don't even give me a phone number or e-mail, just snail mail

ATTN: Customer Service Department
Logitech Inc
6505 Kaiser Drive
Freemont CA
94555

Well I guess I won't be buying nor recommending any Logitech products from this point on.