blogx
musings of mark since 2001

First it was Accenture, now the takeover of our Province by way of its institutions is almost complete as a company in the grand tradition of Imperial Rome is called “Maximus” and last week was handed the contract to keep all the personal health information of the people in this province. Never mind that the company is US owned and the Patriot Act says that our information can be had at any time; as our illustrious Health Minister Colin Hansen said, “If Maximus is found sharing information with any investigative agency, the BC government will seize the company.”

As if they could, yeah right. This is a big company that is basically a false front for the US government. Maximus does a whole lot more than allow our own government to outsource jobs and money from British Columbia and manage health records. According to their web site, one arm of the company called JailView offers “a complete integrated law enforcement package” which includes a complete image recognition system along with a “mass transit utility” that “makes it easy to send large groups of inmates to and from the court”. Sounds like a lot of other facist countries, how sad.

Besides their deep involvement in the penal institutions, they have a solution for viewing private material on law abiding citizens via real and personal property management software; it allows Pooling Administrators, (and hackers), to view, retrieve, and share property and underwriting data over the Internet.

Just go where the money is basically, and as it’s a US company the standing rule applies: All your base are belong to us as their product list reads like an Orwellian tracking system from cradle to grave

Maximus has ongoing contracts with the US Secret Service, the Treasury, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms to supply smart card-operated access security to buildings and computer data to those agencies’ staff. It also provides some management of records for some of those agencies. Yup, just the people we should be giving our personal information that is nobody’s business but our own to eh?

Being reminded it’s March and not summer yet as the temps dip to a seasonal 11 degrees and the wind and rain make it feel like 37 on the Fahrenheit scale. I’m off to the continent today to help a friend out with some home repairs and hoping it’s all inside stuff.

The Gospel station is about complete, they have a sermon archive about to be launched along with my schedule and data from it on the home page and side bar for the “now playing” items as well. The Coppermine photo gallery turned out to be quite easy to customize and did one for another site as well. They haven’t found the time to organize the pics yet, and the albums/folders are still the original names from when I was playing with it.

Getting pretty frustrated with trying to find a CMS that was simple enough for anyone to use, had the ability to create links dynamically, and an easy templates system to convert existing web sites to a CMS. Biting the bullet, and open up a bunch of folders with code libraries in it ready to create something from scratch. Not a small task, and while contemplating how to cache pages to keep hits to the database at minimum or even if it conks out I ran across Web Site Baker.

Following along with the thread about using rewrite to cache the results and thinking: ‘why not just let php write to a file instead?’ for those that don’t have access to their Apache config or having problems with htaccess. Didn’t get the rewrite method to work for me immediately anyways, so going to go the php only route for an html-ized page cache anyways because WB has the hands down easiest interface for the site admin I’ve ever seen. They are using htmlarea for the WYSIWYG bit, think I’ll see if FCKeditor will slip in easy instead while I’m at it and we’ve got a really, really nice CMS and it’s time to make some donations.

The Municipality finally has something up on their website and the missing savvy of the developer is showing up right away as the tool of choice is not an HTML editor, or even a professional WYSIWYG like Dreamweaver. Instead, these meta elements pop out at you immediately when you view source:

meta name=”GENERATOR” content=”Microsoft FrontPage 4.0”
meta name=”ProgId” content=”FrontPage.Editor.Document”
meta name=”Microsoft Theme” content=”blank 011, default”

I just about busted a gut rotflmao when I saw those, would have thought that at least the Microsoft theme wouldn’t have been done in evil frames instead of when they really are useful and should be used.

At least when you run their domain through Netcraft we find out they are using Linux and Apache, it would have been beyond funny to see them putting the islands’ sensitive information on a M$ box and the community has enough taxes to not have to pay M$ licensing as well.

Did notice that their copy of Front Page has a button they can click to obfuscate their email addresses, they were wide open when I first visited and so emailed them as my good deed for the day and suggested a javascript and/or uuencode fix for them. Looks like the newbie web developer used the Front Page bot instead, which uses the javascript method of writing out the mailto: but fails even so.

It doesn’t include text with a noscript element, and instead of letting the script write the email address on the screen for those that want to write it down for later, it has an image you need to click on, which opens your email client if you’re lucky. If not, then you don’t get their email address very well. They certainly have made it difficult for the spam bots to read their email address, but now humans can’t read it either

I guess they haven’t read Tara Cleveland’s article on Evolt.org about Accessibility Laws In Canada

Looks like the renovations on our local coffee shop, The Snug, are going to take a little longer than planned. They were to open yesterday, and I was looking forward to having Sunday breakfast in the new digs but alas, the door was locked and just the owners were huddled around the lone table in the room making their plans. Good for the Oven Door Bakery next door, as the place was filled all morning just like last weekend.

It seems more like a West Coast end of winter spring weekend than the others have with grey skies and rain and wind. We’re getting spoilt here with the nice sunny weather being around so much.

Attempted to send in my taxes last week, went out and bought the latest tax software and was ready to go up to the point I got on to the CCRA web site. I filed over the internet last year using my regular email address, but this year you have to sign up for something called an “Epass”, and it’s done through the postal service. That means after you think everything is ready to go, it’s another five day wait to get your access code in the mail. I liked the old Netfile system better I think.

Odd day at work yesterday as the boss cleaned his own toilet instead of someone else. There’s more to the story…

Earlier in the week, we replaced a fuse that had blown on the pump that takes the raw excrement from the marina guest Float House, to the main sewer line. The unit had not been running for some time apparently, the holding tank was full and it smelled of age, being the most likely time for it to fail was during our cold spell in the winter. After turning the power back on and going back to the unit, the circuit breaker for the motor was tripped and then the relay that controls it started chattering. Looked like we need a new relay.

True to form, after getting half my story out to the boss he decides that it’s the motor that is the problem and it has to be taken out and what ever obstruction he is convinced is in it, removed. There’s a problem though, they have about 30 gallons of raw stink sitting in a public harbour and nothing resembling the proper equipment to dispose of it. Myself and the other maintenance fellow aren’t going near this toxic soup of hepatitis, dirty needles and what ever else happens to lurk in a tank used by peoples from all over the world.

Rather than spend the money, (they are looking at buying a boat in about the half million $ range), he decides that he’s going to take care of it himself. So boss man does this by getting the fire pump, sticking the suction end that usually goes in the ocean into the vat of excrement, and the discharge end straight into the sea! Needless to say he was noticed, you couldn’t miss the smell as the brown tide drifted by, and was reported to the authorities.