Image from ZENN Cars.

Awhile ago, I heard a rumour that ZENN, the Toronto-based electric car manufacturer, was ceasing production.  I originally assumed that meant the company was finished.  As it turns out, they are just slowing down until battery technology catches up with our automotive demands.  But what if it had gone under?  Now, it strikes me as strange how casually I took the news.  “Oh, another small business has fallen through, better luck next time.”  After all, that’s what capitalism is all about right?

Well that seems to be how people are currently programmed to think, including me.  However, as a progressive student of innovation, I am also a proponent of New Growth Theory (Evolutionary Economics), and to follow this new economic thinking is to realize that the loss or impediment of ZENN could have enormous detrimental effects on the future Canadian economy.

In New Growth Theory, economic growth is not created by building capital stockpiles, but by generating new knowledge that lets an economy use their current resources in a more efficient, and valuable, way.  To generate wealth in a knowledge based economy - we need to invent and innovate.  It may be true that not all ideas are good ideas, but we always learn something, and all knowledge is valuable.

Furthermore, instead of suffering from equilibrium-trending, diminishing returns, knowledge-based economies in New Growth Theory have positive returns.  It may cost millions to write a piece of software, but subsequent copies are all nearly free.  If there are a million customers, and you can produce a million widgets for the same per-unit cost as one widget, then your goal would be to sell one million widgets to all one million customers.  However, to reach monopoly or a legally-acceptable oligopoly status, a company must make sure its product becomes the standard amongst competitors.  This often happens through a process whimsically called QWERTYnomics.  While Dvorak is generally accepted as a superior keyboard layout for speed and efficiency, society is already accustomed and locked-in to the QUERTY style.

QWERTYnomics demonstrates how important the decisions of the past are on our economic future.  How much more productive would we be if we could all type slightly faster on Dvorak keyboards?  We probably won’t ever know.  And had ZENN actually folded, we would never know what future Canada could have had in the electric car industry.  As it is, we could already be strangling our economic future in all the red tape around making the ZENN car road-legal.  It is not about one company being profitable or not.  It is about the knowledge that company produces, and how it evolves new generations of transportation, battery technologies, and power generation.

Yes its true, I am inanely suggesting that some incalculable number of our infinite possible futures have ZENN as the foundation of some major economic driver in the Canadian economy.  I have no opinion on the likelyhood, I only suggest that it could happen.  What is certain, however, is that if we continue to prop up businesses with old norms and routines, then entreprenurial effots in those fields will be undermined, and new knowledge generation will be suppressed.  And according New Growth Theory, this ultimately harms future economic growth.

The thought of letting a company like GM fail is almost infathomable, but maybe its time has come? Creative destruction is a concept well known to innovation academics; chaos theory is aptly named in biology; and natural selection makes no qualms about what happens to those who do not get ’selected’.  New Growth Theory recognizes that change can be painful, but in trying to avoid the pain, you could seriously retard the economy and suppress long-term economic growth by hindering knowledge creation, adoption, and diffusion.

For an indepth summary of New Growth Theory and Evolution Economics, try this well-written and comprehensible article.

I was talking to a friend of mine about my job hunting strategies, and he suggested I just Google it - so I did. In response, I received a message I was definitely not expecting.

The first Google result when I searched for the fairly generic and laughable “how do I get a job”, was a link to the, “10 reasons you should never get a job.”  Sadly, the whole website is setup to sell some money making scheme or self-help (or self-harm) book.  However, you can imagine how hard we laughed when we saw the result.

My website probably needs one of those veils of suspense, but I refuse to use such an obvious ploy.  Instead, please note that my website is under evolution.  That’s right, it is constantly changing, each iteration is an alteration of the past – for better or for worse.  There will be multiple branches, some will fail, and some will succeed.  Hopefully, within a few billion years, this website may become something intelligent.

Kahsm.com is a playground for me.  I am a technology enthusiast, a science policy researcher, but not a programmer or web developer by trade.  I use my website to keep up-to-date on technology, either by writing about it, or trying it out for myself.  This could lead to drawn-out development processes and wide topic ranges that make the site seem incomplete or incoherent.  Instead, it is simply evolving.

I hope anyone who mages to stumble across my site find something to entertain their minds.

The cover art to C.S. Friedman's Crown of Shadows illustrated by Michael Whelan

Magnificient Bastard

A MagnificentBastard is what happens when you combine the ChessMaster, the {{Trickster}}, and the ManipulativeBastard. He is alluringly confident and dangerously independent. Unlike a ChessMaster, he and his plans are never completely dependent on any supporting power structure. His arsenal can include his [[RefugeInAudacity audacity]], charisma, charm, competence, and self-reliance. Unlike a LoveableRogue, who is loved for his charm, the MagnificientBastard is charming to be loved… or at least grudgingly respected.

A Magneificent Bastard sees himself as his own best piece and will put himself into play whenever possible. He is competent enough to employ a XanatosGambit, but prefers Trickster style XanatosSpeedChess in order to avoid dependence on others. He can [[ManipulativeBastard play people's emotions]] like a piano, and is likely considered a Badass to his more rational and knowledgeable peers.

Deprive him of wealth and status, take away his {{Mook}}s, and foil his elaborate plots — a MagnificentBastard is still a force to be reckoned with. Such resilience explains why {{MagnificentBastard}}s never have {{VillainousBreakdown}}s or descend into {{Wangst}}. He may experience a single moment of fury, but will eventually pass it off with a shrug and a laugh, it’s all a part of XanatosSpeedChess.

“Selfish, ruthless, and treacherous” tend to be the Minimum Manipulation Quotient needed to become one. However, these traits are often cleverly masked with a suave charm or a beloved [[DeadpanSnarker wicked sense of humor]]. There is nothing affable about {{MagnificentBastard}}s (AffablyEvil or EvillyAffable). Although he may be WickedCultured, a MagnificentBastard is not a Villain or easily pigeonholed as evil. He can be used as an effective BigBad for a particular episode, but he would be a WildCard or TheStarScream across a long series or universe. Magnificent Bastards are in it for themselves.

The term was first used by General Patton in reference to Erwin Rommel, in the film ”{{Patton}}”. However, the TropeNamer is Lionel Luthor of ”{{Smallville}}”, given this nickname by the TelevisionWithoutPity boards.

Compare and contrast SmugSnake. The equivalent for craziness rather than brilliant planning is being CrazyAwesome. Contrast the CompleteMonster whose evil acts fill the audience with hate and revulsion.

Harper and Ignatieff photo from an Andrew Coyne article at Macleans

Whereas the Dion liberals would often abstain from votes or vote in favour in order to avoid an election, Iggy wanted to force the NDP or the Bloc to be ‘that guy’. However, the smaller opposition parties called his bluff and made it very clear, very early, that neither would vote for the financial estimates. Makes sense, considering neither party voted for the budget in the first place, so how could they honestly vote in favour of the estimates derived from that budget?

So everything was looking good for an election. I certainly had my fingers crossed. Why? Not for change, that’s for sure. I agree with most pundits that seat distribution would probably remain unchanged. However, I need a job, and elections are ripe with opportunity for go-getting political geeks like myself. But alas, it is not to be.

Ignatieff and Harper locked themselves in a room for a couple days and emerged with a ‘compromise’ that would allow the Liberals to vote in favour of the estimates and yet not look like they caving to pressure (at least they think it might look that that… it does not). The agreement was to create a working group on EI. I doubt there are too many people who think this working group is anything more than a face-saving Liberal construct, so I am not going to get into detail. What I actually want to discuss is the ‘rightness’ of this compromise.

Most of the pundits… if not all of them, have all but hailed the two leaders for their maturity in coming to a compromise and saving the country from an unnecessary election. I even heard it said that Harper and Ignatieff have demonstrated how a minority government should work. This is all ludicrous.

These were secret meetings. The meetings were so secret that news agencies did not even know which room it was being held in. CBC managed to run into Ignatieff leaving the PMO’s office building across the street from parliament hill. Furthermore, none of the pundits had any idea what was going on in the meetings because their contacts (MPs and staffers) had no idea what the two men were talking about. Let me put that more bluntly. Your elected member of parliament, the man or woman who represents your riding, had no idea what sort of deal the party leader was going to make with the opposition. How is that in any way democratic?

Two men went into a room; two out of 308 representatives worked out a plan and decided between themselves not to have an election. That is not how minority governments should work. Instead, this is a manifestation of our excessively partisan political system in Canada. Not only are MPs whipped into voting with their party, at the behest of the leader, but now the leader does not even consult those MPs before making his decision.

The Harper Ignatieff deal is a step backwards, not a step forward. The only recent positive development in parliament is when Ignatieff let the Newfoundland MPs vote against the budget. MPs should always be allowed to vote their conscious, but the special permission was a small step forward. Unfortunately, the media covered that move as if Ignatieff were losing control of his party. I do not want to sound like I am blaming the media; I just want Canadians to think it through for themselves and tell their politicians that two men behind a locked door at a secret location should not be deciding on the fate of our country.

Image from PC1News.com article on Berkeley's Spam Research

Now that I’m back, I see that it has been a great week for kahsm.com as well! While I was away it seems I have attracted my first few comment spammers. I had only recently setup the commenting system, and it is far from being refined, but already the web bots have found me and deemed me worthy of their self-serving nonsense. Yes, I know they don’t really have standards; they couldn’t care less if I had 1 million or 1 reader. However, you must admit that tackling the new problem of internet spam does bring my project website to another level.

Unfortunately, this new level comes with very few positives compared to the extra to-dos added to ‘the list’. However, it is an achievement nonetheless, and so I offer sincere congratulations to Kahsm.com for your first spammer attack.

Science Policy Research Unit at Sussex University in England.

One line in the report has touched me at a more personal level, and so I will address those feelings separately, here on my blog.

“In comparison to those in other OECD countries, few Canadian students are completing Master’s and Doctoral programs in areas that drive discovery and innovation” [STIC State of the Nation 2008]

I completed my Master’s degree in Innovation in the UK, because the innovation expertise, and really, the whole school of thinking is nearly non-existent in Canada. Furthermore, I have been home for almost six months now, I have searched every job database, applied to governments, and Googled Canadian technological companies. As a result, I have found very little interest in my skills.

Corporations, business news, and governments spew their rhetoric on the importance of innovation, technology, science, and knowledge, but they appear completely unaware that innovation is a functional aspect of business, similar to accounting or human resources. If you do not have trained expertise in Innovation, how will you do it properly? Corporations and government need to put their money where their mouth is and invest more, not in particular products and sciences, but in the innovation discipline itself. Innovation cannot be guaranteed, but the chances that potential innovations are recognized and properly nourished to fruition can be greatly enhanced by the right corporate and government policies.

Where we are now, if a young university graduate asked me if they should do their Master’s degree in a multi-disciplined or unconventional topic, I would recommend that unless they plan to become a professor, not to bother.

The STIC report goes on to say that, “companies, governments, and universities can encourage more Canadians to complete advanced degrees by educating students on the range of S&T careers and providing students with career opportunities in S&T development, application, management and financing.” This is exactly what we need. However, as you will read in my upcoming article, I have my reservations as to how wide this range of S&T jobs really is in Canada. If there are jobs out there for higher-educated individuals, please let me know where they are. However, if these jobs do not exist in Canada, we need to figure out why, where they are, and how to get them here – and that will take some innovative thinking.

However, despite the awesome potential of this change, the result is that all our healing addons are currently busted.  And I don’t know about you, but having the hots from every Druid show up on my unit frames almost cripples my healing ability.  I don’t know which are mine and what needs refreshing!

Since I couldn’t handle this, I read up and found the interim hacks for some popular mods.

Elkano’s Buff Bars
Note: Thanks to pigmonkey on curse.com for pointing this out. I used that, it worked great, and applied it to the other addons listed here.

Open up your ElkBuffBars.lua in notepad and search for this line :
local name, rank, texture, count, debuffType, duration, expiryTime, isMine = UnitAura(unit, i, filter)

Go to the end of this line and press enter to create a blank line and add the following:
if isMine == "player" then
isMine = true
else
isMine = false
end

Once upon a time that UnitAura function would return true or false to whether or not that buff/debuff was cast by the current player.  However that changed, as I described above.  So to hack these addons back together we simply have to convert the more detailed return (in this case “player”) back into the simple true/false.

Grid

For grid, open up GridStatusAuras.lua and find the following line:
name, rank, icon, count, debuffType, duration, expirationTime, isMine, isStealable = UnitAura(unit, buff_name, nil, "HELPFUL")

Go to the end of this line and press enter to create a blank line and add the following:
if isMine = "player" then
isMine = true
else
isMine = false
end

Looks very familiar doesn’t it?  It really is that simple. If you have any other addons that have this problem, all you need to do is find the instances where they use UnitAura() function and change the isMine variable (hopefully they use that common name, they might not) into a true/false.

Keep searchign through the auras lua for grid, the use UnitAura a few times and you have to add that if block each time it’s used.

Xperl has a similar issue with it’s big-self-buffs.  However, I have looked through the lua files and can’t actually find where they have hidden UnitAura functions… wish I had comments setup so someone could let me know.  Oh well… I use Elkano’s anway.

Good raiding!

Why the hell dose wordpress use an unordered list (<ul></ul>) to organize their widgets. I’m sorry… but that’s not a list. Normally, I would not bother posting about other people’s foolish programming practices. After all, they are fairly abundant in any language. But now every widget seems to include <li> tags, and if I don’t wrap my sidebar in UL tags, I’m going to get validation errors. I hate you all. Plus, li tags are tricky things in CSS. For example, Mozilla uses padding to make the default tab and IE uses margins. This means I’m adding two styles to my CSS just to remove default formatting that a proper div tag wouldn’t have had in the first place.

Furthermore, what’s with the plethora of paragraph tags! <p> is a paragraph… meaning text. I don’t want to see any parts of widgets or tools wrapped in paragraph tags. The ONLY place I should see paragraph tags is around the paragraphs in my blog. Now I have to make special “exception” entries in my CSS file so that the spacing and text line-height rules for paragraphs don’t get applied to my widgets!

Years ago we developers decided we would separate design from content. I’m just asking the Widget developers, theme developers, and wordpress developers to adhere to that doctrine a little more strictly.

Oh and P.S. Read some PHP coding standards, your source code is a mess. This isn’t Unix.

The simple fact is that more people voted for, and are represented by, NDP and Liberal MPs than conservative MPs. If they have enough common ground and have the BQ’s agreement that confidence motions will pass, let them govern.

This onset of vilifying language from the conservative camp about the BQ is pure nonsense. What does the BQ get out of the deal? They get their share of a stimulus package that they desperately need. Those who believe that some separatist-based demands would be offered in exchange for their support are fooling themselves.

Here’s the proof. Don Newman spoke to a conservative cabinet minister this morning who gave their pre-scripted rant about the BQ and finished by saying they would do all they can to keep the BQ from holding the balance of power. Well the BQ held the balance of power in the 2006 election for the conservatives, and it wasn’t such a terrible thing then.

Conservatives are the government, but in Canada you cannot continue as a minority if you do not have the support of the majority of the house. The Conservatives are not the majority of the house. Therefore, they are required to seek opposition approval on everything that involves a confidence motion. Harper failed to do that, so his government fails. Whoever believes that a majority of MPs in the HoC have some sort of requirement to vote for alongside a party they, and their constituents, oppose simply does not understand the Westminster parliamentary system.