Leap of Faith

The book club I belong to decided to read Queen Noor’s “Leap of Faith: Mem­oirs of an Unex­pec­ted Life”, her auto­bi­o­graphy, and this is a sum­mary of our review. Part of the reas­on we chose this book was in the hopes that it would be a more access­ible way of learn­ing more about that part of the world, and par­tially because one of the mem­bers used to work in the same com­pany as Queen Noor when she was still Lisa Halaby, and was curi­ous as to what the book would be like.

The book was obvi­ously pop­u­lar amongst book clubs; there was a list of poten­tial ques­tions for people to dis­cuss in the back, most of which missed the point of the book in our opin­ion. So we ignored them.

Leap of Faith was writ­ten not only as an auto­bi­o­graphy, but also to expose Jord­an’s point of view to a wider (West­ern) audi­ence; Queen Noor is quite clear about that in the book. As such, it’s suc­cess­ful. It’s an easy read, though very choppy. The book has a mostly chro­no­lo­gic­al struc­ture, but keeps wan­der­ing off into themes and so you hear about vari­ous chil­dren and what they did before you get to read the chapter in which they’re born, for example. If you can read the book reas­on­ably quickly, then it all still hangs together. 

Our book club mem­ber who had known Lisa before (albeit not very well) poin­ted out that a lot of things were miss­ing; this is not a tell-all book and Queen Noor seems to be at some pains to paint her­self as naive and inno­cent before her mar­riage, des­pite her edu­ca­tion and work exper­i­ence. But the book does suc­ceed where it presents Jord­an’s point of view on issues, par­tic­u­larly the issue of Israel and Palestine. I am not par­tic­u­larly well read on Middle East­ern issues and pre­vi­ously had­n’t known that any­body there con­sidered the Egypt-Israel peace treaty of 1979 a bad idea; the book goes into some detail on why (chiefly that many wanted a com­pre­hens­ive peace treaty and feared that a piece­meal solu­tion would hinder that). I also had­n’t known that Jordan is a poor coun­try with no oil, or any­thing about the Hashemites, and this book is an access­ible intro­duc­tion to both of those topics.

In sum­mary, I found the book worth read­ing even though the chop­pi­ness and incon­sist­en­cies annoyed me. A good intro­duc­tion to a part of the world that I did­n’t know enough about pre­vi­ously, and prob­ably still don’t, but at least I know more than I did.

Moose Deadlines

The regis­tra­tion is open for North­ern Voice 2007 and the speak­er sub­mis­sions will be clos­ing on Fri­day Decem­ber 1st. We exten­ded the dead­line to let people recov­er from the tor­ren­tial down­pours, record snow­falls, high winds, and assor­ted oth­er draw­backs of Novem­ber in the Pacific North-West. 

And if you want a t‑shirt, you can vote on which col­our it should be as well! Just head over to the sur­vey and let us know.

Pat’s Lightbulb

I have the good for­tune to work with Pat Pat­ter­son at Sun and one of the things we dis­cussed quite a lot shortly before I went on mater­nity leave was how to make it easi­er for people to use Liberty pro­to­cols for their iden­tity needs. One of the com­plaints I’ve heard is that there isn’t enough sample code in the world show­ing how to use and imple­ment SAML. Giv­en that Sun­’s Access Man­ager does imple­ment SAML, along with vari­ous oth­er Liberty Alli­ance stand­ards, it seemed like it should be pos­sible to put togeth­er some sample code that uses Access Man­ager. And, giv­en that Access Man­ager is now open source as part of OpenSSO, it made sense to cre­ate anoth­er open source pro­ject. But, this pro­ject should use lan­guages oth­er than Java, to give the LAMP (or MARS) developers and imple­ment­ors some code that they can use, tweak, and fur­ther devel­op. And put back into the pro­ject of course <grin>. I came up with a bunch of use­less names, and Pat came up with Light­bulb (goes with LAMP). Then as I waddled off into mater­nity leave, Pat did the pro­gram­ming and came up with a way to imple­ment a SAML 2.0 ser­vice pro­vider in pure PHP, without even need­ing the OpenSSO or Access Man­ager code. 

Pat’s giv­ing a webin­ar on this tomor­row morn­ing Pacific time; you need to register for it first.

We’re hop­ing that oth­er people will con­trib­ute rel­ev­ant code, in any lan­guage, for people to use when they want to imple­ment or integ­rate SAML cap­ab­il­it­ies into their sys­tems, wheth­er they’re blog­ging sys­tems, wikis, or any­thing else where iden­tity man­age­ment is use­ful. The pro­ject is loc­ated here; it’s easy to join, add a sub-pro­ject, and com­mit some code. Or just browse and see what’s there and what’s use­ful. Have fun!

Tea Water

The advis­ory to boil water remains in Van­couver even though there was a lot less rain at the week­end than was fore­cast. The scenes of pan­ic repor­ted on in the paper on Sat­urday are, it is to be hoped, a thing of the past as people real­ise that boil­ing water isn’t all that hard, and then fil­ter­ing it after­wards does get rid of most of the silt. I was amused at the note sent home from my son’s school which poin­ted out “detailed inform­a­tion on how to boil water has been pub­lished in all major news­pa­pers and is avail­able on line” — do they not teach you how to boil water in school these days? If any­one needs the info, here’s the Wiki­How page — just remem­ber you have to boil it for at least a minute to kill any bac­teria. Mind you, read­ing the cur­rent advis­ory makes it clear that there isn’t actu­ally any proven prob­lem with the water here oth­er than the look and taste of it, the author­it­ies are just being care­ful (and no doubt mind­ful of the Walker­ton dis­aster, although they dis­pute any connection).

The biggest con­sequence for most of Van­couver was that vari­ous cof­fee joints were shut (those that could­n’t guar­an­tee boil­ing the water for long enough), as was our loc­al tea shop. I found the lat­ter par­tic­u­larly iron­ic giv­en the likely role that tea, and the neces­sity of boil­ing water for it, played in cut­ting down infant mor­tal­ity in the 1700s in Bri­tain — a sum­mary is in this art­icle: Did tea and beer make Bri­tain great?. Oh well, maybe it was shut because the con­tam­in­ants in the water would affect the taste of the tea; I haven’t yet had a chance to ask.

Shipping to Canada

I see Dave Shea has been explain­ing why he does­n’t typ­ic­ally order goods online; I’ve ordered lots of goods online and had mixed exper­i­ences. I usu­ally only buy online if 1) I can­’t find what I’m look­ing for loc­ally, or 2) it’s sub­stan­tially cheap­er than buy­ing loc­ally. I also make sure of war­ranty implic­a­tions for any­thing I buy that might need one (e.g., my Tung­sten).

I tend to give the nod to Cana­dian retail­ers because of the hassles Dave talks about and also because I like to sup­port loc­al or semi-loc­al small busi­nesses (although I have bought enough at Amazon that the reg­u­lar “you might be inter­ested in” emails give a remark­ably con­son­ant view into my cur­rent interests). I buy books at Amazon.com if I’m not in a hurry to get them and if they’re cheap­er, includ­ing ship­ping, than buy­ing the same books loc­ally. This is often the case right now since books have the price prin­ted on the back, and the Cana­dian dol­lar is cur­rently worth quite a lot more com­pared to the US dol­lar than when lots of the books were printed. 

Although I haven’t had any­thing shipped by them for some time, I agree with Derek Miller, who advises avoid­ing UPS if at all pos­sible; I’ve found UPS in the past to be very quick to charge double fees if two boxes in the same ship­ment are labelled with the total (they charge as if each box had the total value). What I do to try to get around that prob­lem is to either call or email the place I’m order­ing from if I think there’s a chance they might put things into more than one box, and dis­cuss the issue with them. The res­ult is that I haven’t had that par­tic­u­lar prob­lem for a few years now. Com­pan­ies that don’t answer the phone or email don’t get my custom.

Recent exper­i­ences that I’ve had with order­ing from out­side Canada:

  • books from a couple of small retail­ers in the US com­ing via Canada Post: no extra charges
  • two baby slings hand-made by a small retail­er in the US com­ing via Canada Post: no extra charges
  • quite a few books from Amazon.de com­ing through Canada Post: charged GST and asso­ci­ated oth­er fees about half the time
  • books from Amazon.com com­ing via Canada Post: occa­sion­ally charged GST etc. If you request pri­or­ity ship­ping, Amazon col­lects an Import Fees Depos­it to cov­er the vari­ous charges (I guess to save time in delivery)
  • buy­ing a humid­i­fi­er from Venta Air­wash­er: this is a longer story. I called up to order rather than using the web­site, to dis­cuss the deliv­ery issues. They charged me GST and when I said I found that odd since they’re a US store, they assured me everything would be fine. And to call back and let them know if it was­n’t. Sure enough, the humid­i­fi­er (great humid­i­fi­er, BTW) showed up with no extra charges and I was pleas­antly sur­prised. Until the bill from Fed­ex arrived in the mail a week later. I called the com­pany, com­plained, they said they’d take care of it, I called Fed­ex to tell them what was hap­pen­ing, did­n’t pay the bill, and haven’t heard any­thing in the year since, so I assume Venta did take care of it.

In the unex­pec­ted-but-in-the-end-ok cat­egory: I ordered a DVD from BBC Canada, and was charged the nor­mal GST etc. The prob­lem here was that they shipped the DVD from the US, and Canada Post promptly charged me $12 for GST, duties, etc., des­pite the envel­ope hav­ing a “GST paid” stamp on it. I called BBC Canada to com­plain and they cred­ited my cred­it card with the $12. I hope they got the money back from Rev­en­ue Canada; at least I did­n’t have to pay.

XML 2006

The pro­gram for XML 2006 is up; Dav­id and the com­mit­tee (sup­por­ted by the review­ers) look to have done a good job in pick­ing papers. Unfor­tu­nately I won’t be attend­ing this year; I’ve learned from exper­i­ence that con­fer­ences and babies don’t mix (i.e., I could go to Boston but would not make it to enough talks to make the trip and the jet­lag worth­while), so I’ll be rely­ing on the blo­go­sphere and the pro­ceed­ings to keep me up to date. I hope you all enjoy yourselves – I’ll be there in spir­it if not in person.