In case you aren’t on Twitter, Rick Miles  has pre-announced that Research in Motion will be adding 50 new jobs to its Fredericton operation. This will be in addition to the unknown number of employees it got when it purchased Chalk Media.

There is good reason to be excited as these will be high-paying product development jobs.

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Recently there has been a lot of talk about broadcast reform in Canada.  Here’s another argument as to why we need legislation to be more consumer-friendly:

A Personal Video Recorder (PVR, also known as a DVR) can be rented from $20-25/month, depending on your provider (Rogers $24.95, BellTV $20).  In the US, they cost $6 (Comcast, DirectTV).  Why so different? In the US, the FCC has consumer-friendly regulations in place that bring the cost of the PVR down to what it’s actually worth. In Canada, TV providers use the lack of regulation to force customers to pay exorbitant PVR rental fees.

Firewire ports are currently disabled on Rogers and Shaw cable boxes. Rogers may currently have it enabled on some boxes in Ontario only, it was enabled on boxes in New Brunswick until March 2009. BellTV and Shaw Direct receivers don’t even have Firewire outputs. Firewire allows for a digital HD (or SD) signal to be sent to a 3rd party PVR. Firewire can also allow your cable box to be connected to a computer so you can burn copies of your favourite shows to DVD. This is actually legal in Canada and covered under fair use rights. In the US, providers are required by the FCC to provide Firewire outputs on their HD cable boxes.

Another dirty trick is to encrypt the digital signal on the cable lines. In the US, they are required to keep the local channels unencrypted. In many places, all basic cable channels are unencrypted. This removes the need to rent a cable box completely; you can just plug your TV into the cable outlet and receive HD channels (as long as your TV has a QAM tuner). Here, we don’t even get the HD preview channel without a cable box.

The cable companies are using their near-monopoly position to shut out any competition for their PVRs. Unfortunately, government regulation is there to protect Canadian companies from foreign competition, not actually help keep Canadian companies from ripping off their customers. The only alternative is an antenna, but only if you’re lucky enough to be in an area that is required to have digital over-the-air service. Maybe it’s time to dissolve the CRTC.

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With all these stories about identity theft and crime on Facebook, I thought I’d give a few pointers on keeping yourself secure.

1. Make sure you don’t have anything set to “public”.  There’s a lot of information on there that you don’t want random people seeing.
2. Keep the personal information to a minimum. Can you trust all your friends? Really, all 500 of them? Can you trust that their accounts will never get hacked?  No you can’t, which is why you shouldn’t have your address or your date of birth on your profile.  These can be used to gain access to accounts.  If you wouldn’t want it in the phone book, don’t put it on your Facebook. Don’t forget that some applications will steal your data; you will probably never know which ones are doing it.
3. Beware of long-lost relatives, they probably aren’t long lost relatives.  Eventually, they’ll come up with some sob story and ask for some money.
4. Beware of impostors, sometimes people aren’t who they say they are.  If it seems a little suspicious, put them on a limited profile until they can prove they are who they say they are.  Ask them something they would only know if you met them in person where they said they met you (such as Junior High)
5. Don’t say that you’re away from home.  One of your idiot friends will tell one of their friends who will break in to your house and steal your stuff.  Post your vacation pictures after you’ve come back.
6. Don’t advertise parties or else you’ll find 200 people showing up at your house and trashing it.  Also watch out for idiots who post stuff on walls about your party, don’t invite them.
7. Use a good password, don’t use ones that are easy to guess. If you login with a Gmail or Hotmail account, don’t use the same password for both.  If someone does get your Facebook password, they’ll get also have your e-mail password.
8. Facebook will never phone or email you asking for account details. If they do, then they aren’t really Facebook. They are just trying to hack your account. 99.99% of account hacks are caused by people giving away their account information to strangers.
9. Beware of hacked accounts. Your friends may have given out their passwords.  If you get an urgent message from them saying that they are in jail in Mexico and need money for bail, it isn’t really them. Remember that they will have a lot of personal information in their account (and they will be able to see your account).
10. Remember the golden rule: if it sounds fishy, it probably is.

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Colin Mochrie recently wrote an article about how there aren’t any Canadian content regulations for the Internet:

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/Technology/Canadian+content+getting+lost+online/1296977/story.html

He’s an old media personality and it’s clear from the article that he doesn’t really understand how the Internet works. His biggest mistake is that he is using the “old media” model for production. The CRTC’s rules for old media were intended to reduce barriers for entry into the TV industry (production costs, distribution). For Internet productions, those barriers are virtually non-existent. You can make movies with a $500 video camera, some free editing software and you don’t even have to pay actors (like Colin Mochrie). One of Canada’s funniest Internet comedians is Jon LaJoie. His videos are very low budget, yet he’s one of the most popular producers on YouTube.

He is right about there being lots of Canadian content out there on the Internet, all mixed in with the rest.  Sometimes there are only subtle clues that let us know that it’s Canadian. For example, this picture below (which has been featured on many “funny pictures” sites) should count as Canadian content:

Did you see it? The newspaper on the toilet is the “Times Globe”, a defunct newspaper from Saint John, NB.

Now, look at this entry from failblog:

Did you notice the web site on that ad? It’s from Halifax, NS.

Here’s another one that’s been floating around for several years:

As you’ll see, it’s a clipping from the National Post.

We’ll never know how many pictures of funny cats, badly parked cars, or people falling of skateboards are from Canada. Should we really care? They don’t really define or promote our culture.

There is plenty of Canadian content on the web, it’s just not easy to identify and most of it doesn’t get government grants.  If he wants a “showcase” of Canadian content, he should go find it and start a web site that showcases it. In today’s world, if you want change, you get off your butt and start a web site.

The technical requirements for any kind of ISP filtering would be a nightmare to implement. How do you identify Canadian content when it’s mixed in with everything else? Sure, the ISPs could partner with YouTube and other sites to explicitly identify Canadian content, but for every YouTube, there are hundreds of other sites who will have no interest in segregating content.

What about porn? A lot of Internet traffic is for porn, would the proposed ISP levy support the porn industry?

I suspect his position is just to shill for ACTRA so actors get paid more when their TV shows are streamed from broadcaster’s web sites. He also wants to start a fund for “new media” ventures, presumably so that ACTRA actors will get paid. This is just the classic protectionist attitude that the CRTC has heralded for years.  Hopefully common sense will prevail.

More coverage at: http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/3680/125/

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3 Reasons:

1. It still won’t use the XP driver model so all those peripherals that don’t work with Vista still won’t work with it. This has been one of the biggest complaints with Vista.
2. It will still be riddled with DRM and the precursor to “trusted” computing. This is what’s causing Vista to be so slow at copying files over the network.
3. Fanboys are claiming that it will be perfect out of the box. No OS is ever perfect out of the box, not even Linux.

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So you run your own server and have your blog on it.  The wp-admin dashboard told you to upgrade to wordpress 2.6 and since you did that, none of your permalinks work because they looked like:

http://lamespotting.com/index.php/2008/06/18/back-again/

Of course, that makes you mad as that breaks all your google indexes and facebook imported notes.

Fear not! The fix is simple.  Just go to the wp-admin page, choose “settings” (top right of the screen), then “Permalinks” and choose “Day and Name”, hit save and it should look like:

So if it looks like the above, test it out and you should be good.

If it says “You should update your .htaccess now” then you need to do this:

(Assuming you have shell access on your server)

• cd into the directory that houses your wordpress
• touch .htaccess
• chmod 666 .htaccess
• Go back to the admin page and save the changes (it should now say “Permalink structure updated”)
• chmod 644 .htaccess

Now, go and test one of the permalinks from the main page of your blog.  It should work now, if you get a 404, you need to edit your apache config.  You’ll need to edit your httpd.conf (or /etc/apache2/sites-available/ file if you’re on Debian or Ubuntu) and add the lines in bold below

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin webmaster@dummy-host.example.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/html/lamespotting.com
ServerName lamespotting.com
ServerAlias www.lamespotting.com
Options FollowSymLinks
<Directory />
AllowOverride FileInfo
</Directory>
ErrorLog logs/lamespotting-error_log
CustomLog logs/lamespotting-access_log combined
</VirtualHost>

You should now be in business.  If you can’t access your httpd.conf, then the problem may be with the .htaccess file.  Check with your web host provider (if it isn’t your server) about being able to edit the .htaccess file, which should look like:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

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