Open data

One of the things that I would love to get changed at work (and across all gov) is to have all public information provided in formats that are easy to mashup. It's nice that gov sites have a consistent look, but that only helps if people are looking at a page. It does not make it easy if you want to transform the data into another format. The part that makes it a bit more difficult is that it's another output that an app would have to be tested to make sure that it will support the new format. More code, more testing, more cost. Not necessarily a large cost, but a non-zero cost.

It's funny - I just did a search for open data and I found Open Data in Canada. It looks like I have some reading to do.

Public criticism

Today was training day. It was an orientation to an organization that I've been working for since 2004 (add another year if you count co-ops). I have to say that I did learn some things, and others that I hoped to learn but didn't. Ah well. I always knew that blogging could be a risky business. I've heard of people being fired for blogging about the org they worked and their bosses weren't happy about those details surfacing. I didn't really feel that this applied to me in the fact that as long as I was somewhat professional on this blog, I'd be fine. Apparently it's a bit more formal than that.

"Employees violate their duty of loyalty if they engage in public criticism or act in a way that is detrimental to their employerís legitimate business interests." from section 5.6 of of A loyal and non-partisan public service: a legal requirement. Huh - "public criticism". So, for example a public blog post saying that I don't like the new government's policy of painting the roses red would be a violation of my duty of loyalty. This is pretty tricky because of the government is involved in so much and at some point they are going to do something that will piss me off.

Crap.

That's what I use this blog for! For ranting, for formulating arguments, for documenting what's going on in my life as it's happening. Now, I can't see myself publicly criticizing my employer and having that fall under my own definition of professional behaviour, but this is going to make me even more cautious.

One of the guy's at my table today knows a guy that was (recently?) fired for blogging something critical. I'm not sure what he was blogging, or when (from his workstation?) but it really brings it home. You know, that I know a guy that knows a guy who it happened to. I've heard stories of people having criminal convictions against them for stealing stuff from work and they still weren't fired. But let this be a warning to you all. You can tell people that you read online about a guy who knows a guy who was fired for blogging or something - and they'll believe you.

Most days

Most days I know that I'm very lucky. We've got a roof over our heads, food on the table, and people that love us. But some days when the pvr has run out of comedies and there's a long list of "work" that I need to do, I feel a bit bummed out. On those days I just have to ask myself: WWMVD? I just have to blame it on the rain.

<del>ExposÈ for FF</del>, no, I mean <del>Tab Candy</del> ... or Panorama (for now)

It took me a while to figure out what the new feature in firefox we stumbled over at work was called. It doesn't help that they kept on changing the name. And the keyboard shortcut to get it to work. *sigh* Currently it's Ctrl+Shift+E for windows and Command+Shift+E for mac. There's a video of the feature somewhat early on explaining what "tab candy" is. Pretty cool.

Where have I been, #4

An update of the usual places we've traveled to. Other places are tracked in #1, #2, and #3. Last October we traveled to Peru and hiked the Lares trek for 3 days as well seeing Machu Picchu. After that we headed to the Gal·pagos Islands where we did a boat tour. Awesome, awesome vacation, but a little too rushed.

Places we visited included:
Peru:
Lima
Cusco
Ollantaytambo
Sacred Valley

Ecuador:
Quito
Baltra / North Seymour
EspaÒola Island
Floreana Island
Santa Cruz Island

Places that we saw the inside of the airport included San Salvador (El Salvador), Miami and Washington, D.C.. I have a whole other post about D.C....

On our next trip we'll be making stops in:
Labadee, Haiti
Falmouth, Jamaica
Cozumel, Mexico
Fort Lauderdale, USA

IMAX schedule for the Canadian Museum of Civilization

I promised that I'd talk about my little side project. Like most software projects, it came from an itch that I wanted to scratch. The museum has a schedule that I find difficult to use. It works under the assumption that you pick the movie you want to see, then figure out when it's playing. For the people that have a membership pass, we usually want to see what's playing in the time slots that we have.

I took their pages, scrape them and format it into an iCalendar format that is useful to me - works in google calendar AND my iphone. I don't know if it works in Outlook, but I assume that it does. I tested it in iCal as well, but that's the first time that I've opened the piece of software.

I wanted to learn more ruby and for me to find that interesting I needed a "project". As my first foray into ruby, I'm sure that my code was more procedural that "rubyish", but what are you going to do. I used nokogiri for pulling down the html and parsing it out. I used RiCal to create the icalendar file as well as tzinfo for the time zone stuff.

At this point I don't think that anyone else has even looked at the page, and I'm okay with that. It serves my needs right now. But if anyone needs a schedule for the imax moves at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, I hope that this will help them as well.