Jamas

Federal Election 2011: May Barred From Debates

Another Federal election and another disappointment for Canadian democracy.  Elizabeth May had been barred from joining the debates.  Instead we will have 4 men debate the future of Canada.

I think it is time Elections Canada took over the debate setup.  There should be clear rules of inclusion.  For example if your party is receiving federal financing based on the results of the last election then you should be allowed in.  Or any other rule, but something that parties can aim for and not the arbitrary decision of a closed door meeting.

Let your displeasure be known.

Demand democratic debates!

JOSSA 2010

Well, only a few months late.  I could list many excuses, including a last-minute ski trip to Whistler, but I won’t bore you with that (future post on that ski trip coming soon!).

So a little late but here are the 10 projects that received my JOSSA (Jamas Open Source Software Award) for 2010.

Firefox/Thunderbird – Mozilla – I have been a long-time user of both Firefox and Thunderbird, both at home and the office. Looking forward to seeing what the next major revision will bring.

Lightning – Mozilla – OK another one to Mozilla but this project deserved its own special mention.  It has allowed me at work to continue to fight our IT department in moving to Outlook.  It still has some issues but with the ability to talk to exchange servers and Google calendars it is easy to overlook these.  Looking forward to the future of this project.

Tab Mix Plus – onemen and Gary Reyes – On a typical day I have 15+ tabs open in FireFox.  Managing these can get a little bit frustrating.  Thankfully the Tab Mix Plus has some helpful options to keep me sane.  For example, you can choose where a new tab will open, my favourite is beside the current tab I am working on, saves me having to go to the last tab and pull it back to where I wanted it.

WP-Stats-Dashboard – Dave Lighthart – Keep track of all your social media accounts tied to your website can be a lot of work.  Dave has created this great WordPress plugin to provide you with a list of quick stats for a very wide range of social media and other community sites (some I only found out about through the plugin).  It has been great to see the progress this plugin has made over the past year.

NextGEN Gallery – Alex Rabe – Most plugins for WordPress are fairly small, which tweak or add a small piece of functionality.  Then there are the plugins in the category that NextGEN Gallery are in, which are massive.  This plugin turns WordPress into a CMS for photos.  Uploading in batches, organizing into galleries and albums, slide shows, thumbnails and watermarking.  I have yet to think of a feature it is missing.

Google Analyticator – Ronald Heft (SumoMe) – Google Analytics is a great tool for gathering information about visitors to your website. This plugin for WordPress makes adding the tracking code a snap.  Extra features include the ability to exclude logged in users, based on permission levels.  It also adds access to stats right in your admin dashboard.

Google XML Sitemaps – Arne Brachhold – Don’t let the name fool you, this plugin does XML sitemap submission for a wide range of search engines, all with a few clicks.  Submitting sitemaps is an important part of SEO for any site.  The fact this tool does it with so little effort is a great time saver.

All in One SEO Pack – Michael Torbert – SEO takes work, there is no silver bullet that will just do it for you.  This plugin, however, makes it very easy to correct some SEO issues on any WordPress website.  It can be used to change the home page title, description and keywords.  It can also automatically rewrite page and post titles for you.  A great tool when getting people started on a new WordPress site.

Contact Form 7 – Takayuki Miyoshi – I tried many contact forms for WordPress until I found this one.  Clean simple interface, with no extra fluff features (like Ajax pop-ups) that would randomly break.  You want your contact form to make it easy for visitors to your website to reach you, look no further than this plugin.

Notepad++ – Don Ho and Team – I do most of my programming in a cygwin or linux environment.  But every so often I have to do things on a Windows machine, which Notepad++ has made less painful. Quick and feature-rich it makes a great C, C++, HTML and PHP editor.  I wish I could same the same thing for most other Windows programs.

Well, that is it for this year.  I hope 2011 JOSSAs won’t be so late, but last-minute ski trips can happen any time.  I encourage you to start your own JOSSA style award.  It isn’t a lot of money but it will hopefully make a developers day, which will make your year better.

HTML5 + Java = WOW!

A co-worker showed me this very cool site, 20 Things I Learned About Browsers and The Web. The content is good, worth checking out if you curios about the topic. The amazing part is the delivery method.  The book and everything you see on the page is done using HTML5, with some Java scripting. The outcome is pretty unbelievable. This was the sort of thing that used to require flash, which has a lot of detractors on the web (resources, Apple vs Adobe battle, lack of SEO).  I look forward to seeing what other great content will be created using this new standard, if this site is any indication the future of the web is looking good.

Capital Dining 2011

My cousin, Anne DesBrisay has just completed her third edition of Capital Dining.  Anne is the Ottawa Citizen restaurant critic and owner of CapitalDining.ca, her site dedicated to Ottawa food news and reviews. For the 2011 edition of the book Anne has compiled a list of over 150 of her favourite restaurants in Ottawa.  New to this edition is a guide to farmers’ markets in the Ottawa area and  her best picks for certain meals, steak frites being one of my favourites. This is a great resource for anyone who enjoys eating out in Ottawa and Gatineau.

Ontario Gas & Electricity Marketers

I have finally decide to write this post out of frustration.

It has been 10 years now since Ontario opened up the electricity and gas utilities to allow competition and to give consumers a choice in selecting who to purchase these items from.  Out of this has come a few great companies that are able to offer customers something different, for example Bullfrog Power’s 100% Green Electricity. To keep things in balance there has also been a flourish of less reputable companies.

I am not here to comment on whether locking in your electricity or gas rate is a good idea.  That comes down to personal choices about tolerating variability in prices vs predicting which way the market is moving, you are essentially making a bet in which the marketer has the advantage.

Instead what I want to highlight is the tactics these companies use to sign up new customers and the fact they have continued to do this sort of scamming for 10 years.  It all starts with a knock on the door.

Unsuspecting: Hello?

Marketeer: Hi I’m from Ontario Energy*?

* They tend to omit the full name of the company in order to make it sound more government like.

Marketeer: What I’m doing here today is to make sure that you are covered for _________**.

** When I purchased my first home it was making sure that the bill was switched correctly from the previous owner.  This past weekend it was to make sure I was ready for the cut over to time of day based billing for electricity.

Marketeer: So if you could just get me your latest electricity/gas bill I can check it for you. ***

*** This is when you should politely slam the door closed.

I hate this approach.  First off they aren’t there to check anything, they are there to sell you something.  If they at least were honest from the outset of the conversation I would have more respect for them.  This line seems to be in the training manual for all of them.

I had a marketeer once who refused to leave my house until he saw my bill. He gave some story about having to come back later if I didn’t.  I had to physically shuffle him out the door.

If you didn’t close the door and actually retrieved your bill then there are several options.

I have heard from several people that the marketeer just wrote down the account number and left. Several months latter they noticed their gas bill had a section saying the gas was from company X.  The Ontario Energy Board who has fined several of the companies has tried to stop this practice but I imagine there will be a few desperate people trying to hit quotas that will try it.

The other option is that the marketeer will break into a sales chat about how rates are about to sky rocket, along with a fancy graph showing historical trends with their estimation line added to show the future rocket based trajectory that prices will take.

I refuse to do any sort of business with companies that operate in this fashion.  Just Energy – was called Ontario Energy Savings Corp – will not be on my list of companies to give any business to after being approached 10 years ago and again this weekend with the same script.  I know based on the OEB consumer issues reports that they aren’t the only ones but I have dealt with them several times now.  Feel free to add your story in a comment below.

If you are thinking of signing up for a locked in prices do your homework.  One site that will allow quick comparisons of rates is Energy Shop, however make sure you understand the full details of each plan.