War — Page 13

No one tops Gilles Vigneault

December 16, 2000 by Michael Boyle

, really, at describing Quebec. “Mon pays ce n’est pas un pays c’est l’hiver” is how he put it – roughly – my country isn’t a country, it’s winter.

We had over a foot of snow dump on us in the last week, today it’s warm and it might rain – leading to whispered concerns that we might have another ice storm like the great verglas of 1998.

And yet, and yet… things go on. Cheerfully. The pubs on St-Laurent were packed last night. Christmas shopping continues apace, amidst 24-hour-a-day snow removal that messes with parking, walking, driving – everything.

I really couldn’t imagine living anywhere else but here.

December 6 is a sad day

December 6, 2000 by Michael Boyle

. It was 11 years ago today that Marc Lepine strode into the Ecole Polytechnique, the engineering school at the Universite de Montreal, and proceeded to separate the men from the women. Then he shot and killed 14 of the women before taking his own life. Since then, many people have observed a National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence against Women.

Marc Lepine wasn’t simply a madman – he was a calculating killing machine on that day, bent on punishing “feminists” for his failures in the world.

But don’t remember him on this day, remember his victims: Genevieve Bergeron, 21: Helene Colgan, 23; Nathalie Croteau, 23; Barbara Daigneault, 22; Anne-Marie Edward, 21; Maud Haviernick, 29; Barbara Maria Klucznik, 31; Maryse Leclair, 23; Annie St-Arneault, 23; Michele Richard, 21; Maryse Laganiere, 25; Anne-Marie Lemay, 22; Sonia Pelletier, 28; Annie Turcotte, 21.

And remember the horrible toll that is taken by violence against women throughout our society.

There was a big

November 30, 2000 by Michael Boyle

Quebec web and multimedia awards show last night at the Spectrum on Ste-Catherine at Bleury called Boomerangs 2000. Some of the winners are pretty interesting.

The Florida Courts

November 21, 2000 by Michael Boyle

The Florida Courts have an excellent site, and according to one report they often publish material on the web before it is publicly available in paper form. All of the documents pertaining to yesterday’s Supreme Court of Florida case are online – again, an example of how governments are using the web to distribute primary source material. Years ago I researched a story about an Ontario Court case, and it literally took me weeks to get the primary documents.

I think many of us “in the business” forget about this part of the web from time to time. Nothwithstanding all of the current issues – how to make money, questions of the appropriate use design and technology, usability, etc. – it’s good to remember that the web has made these important (though arcane) documents available to just about anyone who is interested. There’s a great deal of power in that, even if the web were to stay as-is from this day forward.

Upon further consideration,

November 14, 2000 by Michael Boyle

although Netscape 6 does work in broad terms – and what it does well it does very well – it is so rife with bugs I can’t even think of any commercial software or shareware that I’ve ever used that is as unfinished.

Luckily few of the bugs are crashing bugs, and my machine hasn’t frozen due to any of them. But they drastically affect the usefulness of Netscape as an alternative browser. Some examples of bugs I’ve found:

text entry boxes are flaky (text jumps around, spaces and soft wrapping is wonky);
it uses its own interface elements, not widgets from the UI, and so is very slow at rendering certain things, and when it does, they don’t conform with the OS under which it runs;
changes to preferences don’t always take;
new windows are quite slow to open;
some of the program’s other behaviour deviates both from what one would expect from the OS and from older versions of Netscape;
and the whole thing takes at least twice as long to load (in spite of having fewer plugins in my case) than IE;
the whole thing takes up twice the space (browser only, no email stuff included on my machine) and more memory than IE5;
and I can’t seem to drag and drop URLs or links onto the favourites bar.

Add to that the fact that I can’t scroll with the wheel on my mouse and their own skin updating/loading procedure doesn’t seem to work and it’s a mess. The worst though? They’ve buried their release notes so you can’t even make a reasoned judgement for yourself without downloading the installer. It should be online, and prominent. [I found the release notes after posting this]