A Pilgrim's Journal

That is a pretty comprehensive list. I'm probably in the same camp as you claim to be, having broken every one.

The rules are pretty strong as well. I'm still mulling them over in my mind, but there is one that sticks out as unwise, or poorly written. It is #3, which says: "I will not write a program that fails to do tomorrow what it was able to do yesterday."

Taken purely literally, this prevents all change, all experimentation, all feature-level refactoring. I'm sure this is not what the rule was intended to say. I'm assuming it is more of an encouragement for better testing, so that a bugfix in one area doesn't break a feature in another.

Even taking this rule as a Testing Rule, I think it overreaches. There are steps that programmers can take to prevent regressions, but to assume that it is possible, or even common, to prevent them all is wishful thinking.

I think a better rule would be something like: "I will not refuse or hinder the fixing of a bug that I have caused."

I just read this article in the Globe and Mail:

Link [www.theglobeandmail.com]

In it, it explains that there is a new Conservative policy that seeks to determine who can testify and who can not.

The reasoning given is that since MP's are responsible for their areas of work, they should be the ones to speak.

While I agree that MP's should be allowed to speak in their own defense, I disagree that they should be the only ones to speak.

If we liken these committee hearings to a court of law, does the defense get to determine what witnesses the prosecution calls? Of course not. The defense can question each witness, and has the right to face his accusers, but the defense does not have the right to muzzle witnesses.

Why then should the government get to determine what witnesses the committee gets to call? The government is clearly the "defense" in this matter. Why do they think they get to dictate the terms of the "trial"?

Yes, MP's are responsible. If it is determined that some malpractice occured under their watch, then they get to fry for it. But they don't get to limit the testimony.

This seems so basic. Why would the Conservatives continue to fight on this matter, unless they are trying to hide something?

If you spend all your energy on such tactics in the hopes of preventing some loss in polls, do you sincerely expect to make any gains? In other words, if you spend all your energy swimming against the current, you will not have any left over to move forward. And by "current" I am not talking about Liberal vs. Conservative. I am talking about things like Honesty vs. Deception, Open Transparency vs. Closed Bureaucracy, Courage vs. Fear. If you govern, by default, in the open, you will be able to focus more directly on making real progress. But trying to control every message and every piece of information that reaches the public ear takes real energy that could be used toward more profitable ends.

I welcome your response and any insights you can provide. I can also include your response on my blog if you like.

Sincerely,
Chris Frey
Kitchener, ON

CC: Michael Ignatieff, Jack Layton, Gilles Duceppe

Wow.

I laughed. I cried. I laughed again. I shook my head at how we humans operate. How we judge without even realizing it.

I read in shock at the conditions.

I marvelled at the manners of people in those days, at the work ethic, and at Nellie Bly's determination to finish her mission and her sense of humour in the most downtrodden of situations.

I was moved by the compassion. I was dumbfounded at the lack of it. I understood the fear. I applauded the courage. I cringed at the food. I got angry at the cruelty.

And when I thought it couldn't get worse, the next chapter would blow my mind.

In short, this is a book that needs to be read, and needs to be read today. Not because the exact conditions of the asylums are the same as today, but because the conditions of the heart are the same today.

Seventeen chapters. It will take a while to get through, but it's worth it.

Nearly every blog out there supports comments. Even newspapers are supporting comments now. Everybody wants their say, and everybody seems eager to give them a chance.

So why don't I?

First, let me say it is not because I want to stifle feedback. That is not my goal. But rather, I want to encourage thoughtful feedback and discussion.

You may notice that on some of my blog entries related to advogato, I link to other people's blog posts in my response. This is intentional. Someone may write something. I may respond. He may respond back. This conversation should be visible, via HTML linking, to the readers of both blogs.

If I just added a comment on his blog, the conversation would remain there. My blog readers would be unenlightened. And vice versa.

The size of comments generally does not promote thoughtfulness. It does not reward thoughtfulness. Who really bothers to link to a blog comment? Not nearly as often as people link to blog posts.

I would rather read a shorter conversation of thoughtful posts than wade through a thousand short comments and mini conversations tacked onto the bottom of one thoughtful blog post.

Massively public comments generally detract from a post, in my opinion. There have been many times that I've read an article, thought it was good, and then read something unpleasant in the comments, and moved on, forgetting about the original article entirely. This happens on newspapers and online magazines as well. There are "regulars" on these sites, and their squabbles and arguments are not helpful and do not add anything to the topic.

Why would I want to share with a friend an article that is marred by unsavoury comments?

Of course, on smaller blogs, this is much less of a problem. The regulars are often friends of the author, and the comments are often very positive or at least thoughtful. But do we really need to read five "good post!" comments at the end of a good article? I think not. Better to share it with a friend than congratulate the author. Isn't that what the author wants anyway? More thoughtful readers? If the author truly deserves congratulations, send it by email.

In addition, there is the administration headache of dealing with spam, user accounts, Captchas, and so on. I do not want my blog to be used as a link factory for spammers, nor do I want to have to decide whether to delete a friend's post just because he linked to something self-promoting.

The "check out my product XYZ" style of comments turns a thoughtful blog post into an ad.

If comments are allowed, even more questions pop up. Do you moderate them? Do you censor them? What do you delete? Do you write an Acceptable Use Policy?

Bah.

I would much rather encourage thoughtful discourse in the style of old fashioned letter writing. Have you ever read old letter conversations? Perhaps some old letters between St. Augustine and Jerome? How about old love letters? How about your own old letters?

There is a flow of thought and a degree of thoughtfulness that letters encourage. Each person sits down and reads the whole thing, and then responds to the whole thing, with their own flowing thoughts.

This is what I want to see in the blogosphere. Each writer has their own blog. Each writer responds to others in their own posts on their own blogs. If you don't have a blog, then you write an email to the author, and the author quotes your email in his next blog post.

Slower. More thoughtful. More comprehensive. And it solves the whole spam problem.

This is why this blog does not have comments.

You can watch the video here and read the somewhat long-winded New Yorker article here.

The short version is that he went for a smoke on Friday night, and wasn't rescued until Sunday afternoon. He went through various stages in his ordeal, from patiently waiting for help, to trying to signal someone, to trying to escape, to anger and looking for someone to blame.

It was an express elevator that only served floors #39 and above. According to the article, it stopped around level #13, and when he finally did try to open the doors, all he got was a brick wall.

There was a button for an alarm, but while the alarm rang on top of the elevator car itself, obviously nobody heard it. When he tried to get out through the hatch at the top, he found that it was locked. In fact, it was locked by law, from the outside, for operators to get in, not for passengers to get out. The theory is that it is much more dangerous outside an elevator, riding on top, than inside.

When he was discovered, someone was suspiciously wondering what he was doing in that car. But after talking with the maintenance team through the intercom, he was given a series of button commands that got the car moving again, back to the lobby floor.

I would love to know those commands, and whether they work on most elevators. I guess it pays to have your cell phone with you whenever you're in an elevator. Has anyone checked their cell phone radio range while riding?

One thing thst struck me while watching the video is that... hey, there's a camera! If by chance, any security guard or elevator maintenance person looks at the monitors, what are they looking for? Isn't it a normal thing to see a person inside? Therefore, the best way to signal for help via the video system is to make things look unnatural, or to put a written sign in front of the camera, if you can find it. And to keep the sign there for as long as you are there, since you never know when someone might look at the monitor. Make sure the sign has good lighting as well.

Here are a few links to other pages I found with tips for escaping a stuck elevator.

The saddest part of Nicholas White's story is the end. Although dehydrated, he was rescued, and lived. But sadly, he became a bit of a hermit, working more on the lawsuit than returning to his job. According to the article, he lost his job, got a fairly small settlement, lost contact with his former colleagues, lost his apartment, and remained mostly unemployed when the article was written in 2008. In the end, it took much longer to escape the elevator than just 41 hours.

I was unable to find much news about Nicholas White since, but I sure hope that his life has improved by now.

Instead of merely slapping on a helmet and thinking you're bulletproof, though, take a look at this excellent site on bike safety: How To Not Get Hit By Cars.

Whether you wear a helmet or not, the primary goal for safety should be to avoid an accident in the first place. And this site explains the dangers logically and clearly.

I remember being very impressed by the site the first time I found it a few years ago. It changed the way I ride on the streets. I hope it will help improve your safety as well.

You can find the original podcast MP3 here and you can find more on that day's episode at the CBC's website here.

The italic emphasis throughout is to try to reproduce the same verbal emphasis that I heard in the interview.

Anna Maria Tremonti: Ursula Franklin is a Canadian giant: a world renowned physicist, feminist, Quaker, author, pacifist, professor, holocaust survivor, public intellectual, mother, and mentor.

When she was 22 and studying in Berlin, she was forced out of school and sent to a Nazi labour camp because her mother was Jewish. Ursula Franklin survived the war, emigrated to Canada, and has been making waves ever since.

She is a companion of the Order of Canada and a recipient of the Canadian UN Association's Pierson's Peace Medal. And these days she has turned her formidable attention to the issue of our Canadian democracy. She says Canadians have work to do.

Ursula Franklin is with me in Toronto. Good morning.

Ursula Franklin: Good morning and thanks for having me.

AMT: You have been working for peace and social justice for decades. You have lived through a World War, through the rise of nuclear weapons, the end of the cold war, the spread of polutants. What is your primary concern as you look around you in 2010.

UF: It's really the future of my grandchildren, of everyone's grandchildren, that all we have done (and it's not a question of whether I have done it) is to make the world a livable, civil, just, and peaceful place. The world has changed, and I'm not convinced that it has changed into the direction that it would indeed make it more livable, more peaceful, more joyful, for all of its inhabitants. And that continues to concern me profoundly, because it's not a private affair. Peace is not divisible or commodity that one buys, and some have more and others, because of that, have less. Peace is indivisible, and in fact, the very nature modern law (?) as well as modern commerce makes it necessary to care for all, and to understand that nobody can survive at the expense of anybody else. And that has been a very difficult lesson, both to teach and to learn.

AMT: Well, we can't talk about that without talking about democracy. What concerns do you have about the state of democracy?

UF: I am profoundly concerned not just about the state of democracy, but about the absence of democracy, of the erosion of democracy. For somebody like me, who grew up under Hitler, parents keenly aware what was coming on. Intellectuals who understood this argued with their friends abroad to say, don't you see what's coming? How easily fascism can take place, can take hold. I'm super sensitive to the erosion of democracy. I came to Canada by choice because it is a democratic country. And I see how our parliamentary institutions are more and more eroded and in fact I came here because I thought I would introduce you, Anna Maria, to a new word. And that word is "scrupling." Just as we make in our daily parlance a verb out of "google" and say we are "googling", there is of course a word "scruple". And way back during the debate and struggle of slavery, the old Quakers used the word "scrupling" which in that time was of real currency, and they meant they went scrupling with their neighbours, sitting down and saying: "We have a horrible problem! Many of us think it is not right to own people. We better scruple about that."

AMT: Scrupling. So in other words, if you have scruples, you talk about scrupling.

UF: Yes. You do something. If you have the need for clarity beyond your own and private things, you'd better scruple. That is, talk with people, and make it clear: it's not my problem, it's not your problem. It's a problem that is bigger than all of us.

AMT: Let me pick up on something there, because you talk about your experience in Nazi Germany. And in the holocaust, you make that connection, then you talk about slavery, and in the same conversation, you're talking about our democracy in parliament in Canada. Can you connect those things? Some people would be offended that you connect those things.

UF: I would say, indeed, not only can you, but you must connect these things. You cannot look at the tree and not look at its fruits. Things don't come in a plain brown envelope. Things grow. And you need to look both at the soil, and what is planted in the soil. Our activity turns over, day in, day out. What are the things that grow? What are the things that shrivel? And I say, Democracy shrivels. And it shrivels at the institutional level. And it's not whether you or I vote, or for whom I vote. It's not firing the coach, or getting a better player. It's looking at the game. What has happened to the game?

AMT: And what has happened to the game?

UF: What has happened to the game is that the game is a ritual. It is not doing what it is supposed to do. And the players know it. And that's why in that scrupling session a month or so ago, we invited three sitting members, one of each party, people who wanted, and got, the job to represent us, to scruple with them. Saying, we feel unrepresented, and we know from our contact with some of you that you feel severely constrained in representing us. What stands in the way? Let's not have a debate, not something to blame, but be concerned about the structure that we need, to enable a representation in that institution that we have, which is the House of Commons.

AMT: So you point a finger at the institutions. What responsibilies does a citizen bear in either the growth of democracy or the erosion of democracy? An individual citizen.

UF: I would think the first obligation is clarity. I find one of the real contempts of parliamentary democracy right now is (???) the discussion of the coming immigration bill, in which the minister went to press conferences about a proposal discussing the pros and cons of something which to this point has not been voted upon. Now the citizen cannot stop this, and many people who feel strongly about it want to talk. But they have to preceed that, by saying to the minister, "Listen, this is not the place." We have to have hearings. There is a process. When you have ideas of change, introduce them in the House, let the members go back their constituency, have first reading, have hearings in committee. And there's a lot of difference between consultation, which [is] having tea with your friends, and hearings, which I would call listenings if I could. And the ordinary citizen cannot produce hearings, but the ordinary citizen can remind the minister that he has an obligation to due process.

AMT: Take us to your life, your early life, in Germany, so that we can understand how your views were shaped. What happened to you and your family during the second World War?

UF: My mother is Jewish, my father came from a long German family. I was the only child. Had wonderful parents in a wonderful atmosphere of the pre-Hitler Berlin. My parents, particularly my mother, were intensely aware of what was coming up in terms of the assaults on human rights and social justice. (unknown word) ... and it was very very difficult. Both my parents and I were in different camps but survived partly by luck, partly by the kindness of people. I went back and it was a post-war Germany that taught me how mindful one has to be of the roots of democracy. And because of having survived war in Berlin, and having known totally, intellectually and viscerally, that violence is pointless, leading only to more violence and more hatred, I wanted the involvement in the citizenship of another country that had firmer groundings... so that I accepted a post-doctorate fellowship to the University of Toronto.

AMT: So you're telling me that all that you learned from the traumas that you faced, when you came to this country, this was not solely about your personal space and what you might want to learn. You came to this country to speak out.

UF: And mostly to act out. Not to tell, but to do what I think good citizens are supposed to do and can do to nourish democracy.

AMT: And so you became the first female professor and the University of Toronto's department of metallurgy and materials science. How difficult was it to be a trailblazer in those days? We're talking about the late 1960's.

UF: It's awfully hard to say. You know, I met personally a great deal of helpfulness courtesy, and since I knew what I was doing, and I was prepared to work hard, I found my lot far easier than that of other women who met far greater discrimination. You know, it was more difficult collectively than individually.

AMT: Well you took on the issue of pay equity. What happened? Why did you do it?

UF: There were women who retired before the law forced it equal pay on the university. So they retired with a final salary substantially lower than that of their colleagues, and it was necessary to address that as a group. And since there were so few, there were only 5 of us who could be the representative claimants in a lawsuit, and so as in all these things you do it because there is unfortunately nobody else.

AMT: That goes back to the issue of the responsibility of the citizen.

UF: It does. Except I do not think that everything is everybody's business. I think we do have developed a structure of sharing work and sharing a responsibility. And it is the strengthening and not the shortcutting of the institutions that we have that concerns me at the moment, profoundly. Because our basic parliamentary representative democracy is so curtailed by variety of shortcuts and factors, that I see that with great fear. Because they're not working, at times, one thinks, intentionally, coreography to not work is the invitation to fascism, is a dream of the strong guy who cuts through all this nonsense and gets things done. And that's where it links to my past experience of my parents' horror about the social unrest, inequality, inflation, lack of loans, in Germany, that produced the situation that cried out for the strong decisive male. And totally wrong, and totally authoritarian (age?). And I see this far closer to the Canadian reality than many of my friends.

AMT: Don't you think we have enough checks and balances in our democratic system here?

UF: We have them. We don't use them. And one of the big ones is the opposition, both parliamentary and extra-parliamentary. I was horrified to hear the Prime Minister say that members of the opposition couldn't be trusted. If people elect a representative and they happen to be from a party that is not the Prime Minister's that does not mean they are not trustworthy. We don't want a country in which people who may oppose this or that are considered untrustworthy. They make a contribution. They make a contribution that we may not like, but they make it out of good intent.

AMT: And a lot of this debate, as it were, is happening against a backdrop of increasing political apathy. There are a lot of people who will say the public doesn't care, the public doesn't care about these issues, they don't affect the public. Do you agree with that first of all...

UF: No.

AMT: ...and do you see apathy out there, and does it...

UF: Yeah, I see apathy out there, but I also see reasons for apathy out there. And that is the known response of governments. The cure is a bit of response. Any teacher knows, if you want any engagement of your students, you have to involve them. And you involve them not by saying, "Put a lot of work in, but I'm sure not going to read your paper." You read it, you make marginal notes, and you show that in your conduct in what you teach you have heard what was said. Kids are intelligent. Kids learn. They just often learn the wrong thing. And these kids have learned that they can intelligently work with other people provided it's a voluntary, often temporary, association. They do all sorts of things. But the idea that as citizens our instrument as a policy of our government has been so discredited by the inaction of the government that the young think, "We aren't stupid, why should we work you guys? You have to can the word for us."

AMT: And what does that tell you about how you see the future? I mean, you're basically saying they've learned, you say kids learn quickly, but they've learned that government isn't something to be involved in or to get interested in.

UF: Then we have to change. And that's a scrupling. That's why I say, Look at the process. It's not impossible to change. You can give power to parliamentary committees that really make a difference.

AMT: How do you define peace?

UF: I define peace, not as the absence of war, but as the presence of justice and the absence of fear. There is peace when people don't have to be afraid. And people don't have to be afraid when there's genuine justice. Period. It seems to be so, so difficult, although it's so, so obvious.

AMT: Do you think many people who actually agree to go to war understand what you just said?

UF: Those who go to war do so because they have no more attractive or more available choices for what they want to do with their lives.

AMT: And I should clarify, when I say "those who go to war" I'm not necessarily talking about soldiers, I'm also talking about the people who send soldiers to war. Who make a decision to go to war.

UF: I think these are totally different things. The people who make decisions, who go to war has what I consider evil intent. They have no feeling, either of alternatives, or of responsibility to what happened, not only to those whom they send but to everybody else.

AMT: But they would argue with you that they are going, for example Afghanistan, they are going in order to uphold the very democracy that you say is threatened.

UF: Well, good luck. You know, this is not without historical examples. And in fact I think, there are a good number of eloquent people who will say if they want to do nothing but uphold democracy, there are good deal easier ways and better ways of doing it.

AMT: Given all of this, what kind of society do you dream about for future generations?

UF: I used to say, and I have it in the forward of one of my books, that the dream of a peaceful society, to me, is still the dream of the potluck supper. The society in which all can contribute, and all can find friendship, that those who bring things, bring things that they do well and bring a variety of things. Those who can't cook can still organize, help clean up, and all belong. And that, however archaic (?) it might sound, is still the society that I dream of, not that everybody runs everybody's business, but that we create conditions under which a potluck is possible.

AMT: Ursula Franklin, thank you for sharing your thoughts.

UF: Thank you for having me and listening.

AMT: Ursula Franklin is a celebrated physicist, author, and activist. She spoke to us from our Toronto studio.

To add some background, I should probably explain my own views. I believe that abortion is murder. As such, it does not bother me that the Conservatives do not want to include abortion funding in their recent foreign aid program. I do not fully understand their reasoning or purpose behind the way they are handling this, but at least doing something good for the wrong reasons is better than doing something bad. Perhaps some lives may be saved.

To continue with the background, you may know that I am not a supporter of the Conservative party. I think that, while there are some drawbacks to having nationally funded programs such as health care, on the whole it is a huge major whopping success, and a great good for the citizens of Canada. To share each other's medical costs through the tax system is a fair and generous way of meeting everyone's needs. And there are many similar programs where the many pay a little to help the large needs of a few.

The fiscal philosophy that stems from the idea of "less government" that the Conservatives support ends up harming such programs. It may not harm the programs right away, but when you move in the direction of cutting taxes for the banks by $2-billion, that's going to end up touching government programs eventually. People get very happy at the idea of paying less tax -- until they suddenly stop receiving the services they have grown used to over the past decades. Service fees anyone?

Then there is the tendency of Conservative governments to "get tough on crime." The eagerness to lock up the guilty and throw away the key in the name of protecting the victim has a certain blindness to it. The mercy we show comes back to us, just as the condemnation we show will also come back to us. The victim needs help and protection, most surely, but the offender also needs help. Only love can help restore the victim and help the offender turn from his ways so he does not offend again.

The history of the United States under the recent years of G.W. Bush was almost terrifying to me. Here was an administration, carried to power with a solid support from the Christian right, who ended up taking the country into a large war on two fronts. And in the end, did the Christian right get the ban on abortion that they wanted? Not in the slightest.

This is the voting dilemma that I speak of. Where is a person to turn if he supports Christian morality, and yet also supports kindness shown through the government through taxes? If we vote for the Conservatives in the hope of ending the murder of abortion, we get war, crippled finances, and jails. If we vote for the Liberals or NDP in the hope of boosting health care, human rights, and justice with mercy, we get abortion.

There is no main party that solves this dilemma. If there were, I think the current parties would be left in the dust.

In the end, I have to look at the fruit of each party, and decide which to support, or whether to support any party at all. Fortunately, the Liberal/NDP side do have a solid track record of at least trying to support the kinder style of government. And just as obvious, the Conservatives are skilled at removing it. As for abortion, the Liberal/NDP side has a solid track record of supporting it. This is terrible. How can I support murder? But the Conservatives can barely even state where they stand. You can tell they are uneasy with it, but it seems they don't dare to stand against it, for fear of losing power.

So in terms of what I believe, when looking at the practical results, at least the Liberal/NDP side get something done in a major area that I support, while the Conservatives fail in both. But when I hear the current hue and cry over lack of abortion support to foreign countries, even the Liberals and NDP sound utterly distasteful.

It's almost enough to make a person stop voting altogether. But perhaps that is a topic for another blog post.

It would still be nice if timegm() was in a library of its own instead of libc. But that's probably asking too much.

Good to know. Thanks!

There is also a very handy set of functions that goes in the other direction. The function gmtime() takes a time_t and converts it to a struct tm in the UTC timezone. And localtime() does the reverse of mktime(), converting a time_t to a struct tm in the local timezone.

The one function missing is the reverse of gmtime().

One way to do it, via standard library function calls, is to adjust the TZ environment variable to "UTC" and then call mktime(), which will then use it as the current timezone. But that gets messy. Not only do you have to save the old TZ setting to restore it afterward, if your program uses threads, messing about with the global TZ variable is hardly safe.

Another way to do it is to use gmtime() as a reference point, and loop while adjusting the original struct tm until mktime() + gmtime() gives you the result you started with. This is brute force and inelegant, but it manages to do the job without fiddling with the global environment.

When parsing ISO timestamp strings, this problem is hit pretty quick. An ISO timestamp can contain a time in either the local timezone or UTC, depending on the trailing 'Z' flag. In my research, it does not appear that more specific timezones can be specified in the timestamp format, so at least we only have two states to worry about.

After much searching, I've ended up with something that I find suitable enough to release. I tackled this problem back in 2007 for the OpenSync project (you can see similar code in the opensync_time.c file), but looking back on it now, the code is not clean enough for me to reuse very easily. And even though there's a vtime2unix converter function, it leaves the burden of timezones to the user.

I took a look at Boost's date_time library as well, and while huge and comprehensive, and though it breaks the problem of time, dates, and durations into nice manageable chunks, it seemed to reverse the status of the C library: it made UTC conversions easy, and local timezone conversions hard. And it reads timezone information out of CSV files... I don't want to have to maintain my own timezone database when the OS does it for me.

So, if I don't want to write my own conversion routines, and if I don't want to maintain my own timezone database, I'm stuck with the C library method, and the first two solutions. Might as well make it easy to use.

The source files for TzWrapper contain the following utilities:

• iso_to_tm() - simple ISO timestamp converter
• utc_mktime() - the brute force UTC to time_t converter
• TzWrapper - C++ wrapper class for setting and restoring TZ

Using TzWrapper, it's now possible to do things like:

	struct tm pacific_tm = { ... };
	time_t t = TzWrapper("Canada/Pacific").mktime(&pacific_tm);
	cout << TzWrapper().Set("Australia/Brisbane").ctime(&t);
 
	const char *iso = "20100430T231500Z";
	time_t stamp = TzWrapper::iso_mktime(iso);

If you have any further tips to make this code better, or pointers to better libraries that make this code obsolete, please let me know!