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.

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.