Advice to Politicians

With both the Cana­dian and the U.S. elec­tion cam­paigns in full swing, I figured I’d toss my few cents worth into the fray in the form of some advice to politi­cians, or those run­ning their cam­paign. I fully expect it all to be ignored.

For the Cana­dians: If your team has lots of exper­i­ence, make the most of it. Let some of those people expec­ted to play a major role in gov­ern­ment, should your side win, speak out on rel­ev­ant issues. The sys­tem of “shad­ow” roles in the UK works well to my mind, and would work well in Canada (tough to tell how it would work in the US). Of course, it does assume that there are people run­ning for office who are cap­able of becom­ing cab­in­et min­is­ters and cap­able of dis­cuss­ing policy cogently in pub­lic (and if the oth­er side does­n’t, what bet­ter way of show­ing that?)

Show respect to the oth­er side (this is sorely lack­ing in the US cam­paign). Each of the four major can­did­ates in the US cam­paign has shown them­selves com­pet­ent enough to build and win a cam­paign to get them where they are today. I can­’t ima­gine it’s all that easy to become sen­at­or or gov­ernor in any state, which means all four have at least some degree of intel­li­gence, per­spica­city, and capa­city for hard work (you can fight over how much all you want). Wheth­er someone is like­able or trust­worthy, or has the right set of policies, is a dif­fer­ent set of ques­tions that does­n’t obvi­ate the need for respect. Isn’t this some­thing most people should have been taught as tod­dlers, or in kindergarten?

More non-spam

The false pos­it­ive prob­lem with Gmail con­tin­ues, in the last few days the fol­low­ing have wrongly gone into the spam bucket

  • noti­fic­a­tion of my bank state­ment (nev­er used to go into spam, so this is a new problem)
  • noti­fic­a­tions about my tod­dler­’s music class
  • my son’s class list
  • Bob Park’s “What’s New” newsletter
  • a reply to email to the pub­lic W3C DOM mail­ing list (the ori­gin­al email made it through ok)
  • a request from someone to use one of my photos

Few of them match the prob­lems to which Gmail prof­fers solu­tions. I’m going to have to rethink what I do for travel and week­ends and stop using Gmail as a pass-through spam filter.

Gmail and Spam

When I’m trav­el­ling I run my per­son­al email through my Gmail account, so I have a bet­ter web browser inter­face than the one my ISP provides. Lots of people told me about how good the spam fil­ter is; I tend to find too many false pos­it­ives (admit­tedly, most from mail­ing list sub­scrip­tions) so I check my spam folder reg­u­larly. I was puzzled as to why many of Tim’s emails to me ended up in spam , and in par­tic­u­lar those to the soc­cer team our son is on. If you’re send­ing email to a num­ber of people, some of whom may use Gmail (even if their email address isn’t Gmail, they still might use it as I do, or their com­pany may use Gmail for mail), or if you use Gmail your­self, you need to be aware of this problem. 

Google has a help page on the top­ic and it turns out there are two solu­tions. If you’re on the receiv­ing end, you can set up a fil­ter to whitel­ist a par­tic­u­lar email address. If you’re send­ing the emails, make sure the To: head­er does­n’t match the From: head­er. This can cause a prob­lem with some dis­tri­bu­tion list sys­tems where you put your own email address in the To: head­er to obscure the email addresses you’re send­ing the mes­sage to; if you need to do this it’s prob­ably a good idea to get a Gmail account if you don’t already have one and try things out.

Mountain Photos

On the way to Bal­is­age in Mon­tréal, the plane flew very low for the first part of the trip, about 19 000 feet (about 5800 m), to escape the smoke from fires in the Okanagan. Unusu­ally for me, I was in the win­dow seat and decided to take some pho­tos of Mount Baker and the oth­er moun­tains as we flew by. Mount Baker is famil­i­ar to every­one in Van­couver who can see far enough south; when we lived in an apart­ment in Yaletown we could judge the weath­er and the air pol­lu­tion by how clear Mount Baker looked. Fly­ing by with such a good view gave me a good chance to see what it looks like from the oth­er side.

Mt Baker

The rest of the pho­tos from the set are up on Flickr, tagged with “moun­tains”, should you be interested.

WordPress and Atom

On my craft­ing blog I use the Tarski theme, and that used to give you the choice between Atom and RSS for the feeds. Then they took it out, say­ing that Word­Press itself gives you the choice. Well, maybe it does (or maybe it did), but nowhere in the options for 2.6.1 that I could find (maybe you need a plu­gin to do it?). Then I dis­covered that this blo­g’s default feed had been changed to RSS2 some time when I was­n’t look­ing, which also was­n’t what I wanted. 

To jog my memory next time I upgrade Word­Press and want to use Atom by default, here’s where to change the set­ting. For­tu­nately PHP code is easy to search through! The file is feed.php in the wp-includes dir­ect­ory. Change the second para­met­er in the get_default_feed func­tion to atom. With­in any luck this meth­od will even con­tin­ue to work in the next ver­sion. I’ll cer­tainly know to check what the default feed format is in the future.

A Week in August

It seems that August is con­fer­ence sea­son, at least for me. More pre­cisely, one week in August. First Bal­is­age in Mon­tréal (for which the online regis­tra­tion is clos­ing next Fri­day) August 12–15, and then Vinocamp here in Van­couver, at the UBC Botan­ic­al Garden, on August 16th. I’m speak­ing at the former, and help­ing organ­ise the lat­ter (for which num­bers are lim­ited to 120, so don’t wait too long to register). The premise for Vinocamp is a friendly con­fer­ence about wine, put on by a bunch of tech­ies; this is its first year. Both con­fer­ences should be fun! Enter­tain­ing as well as edu­ca­tion­al, and a cer­tain amount of good food and wine in both loc­a­tions. I can cer­tainly think of worse ways to spend a week in August.