iMatt :: The Blog of Matt Clare

Car and Driver has started a new campaign: Save the Manuals!

As a fan of rowing my own gears I have to throw my support behind manual transmissions.

I’m a fan, but many aren’t. When I bought my last two used cars I had to cast a very wide net to find a manual transmission. They don’t have a high “take rate” and some vehicles don’t even offer a manual transmission to reduce development and manufacturing costs. I can’t argue with the manufactures logic – but I do have to wonder why drivers don’t want more control.

I know what gear ratio I want and far too often an automatic transmission doesn’t, and beyond that changes the ratio when its not wanted and not change it when its needed. Some vehicles allow drivers to use things like paddle-shifters to control what gear they are in, but the shift often takes longer than a second and that’s way too late.

Porche’s PDK and VW/Audi’s dual-clutch systems amongst others use a clutch and gearbox, not an automatic transmission, to remove the need for the driver to operate a cluch and have a computer control the it for you. Porche driver’s appreciate more control over their transmission than an automatic can provide, but they can’t be the only ones.

One of the most enjoyable cars I’ve ever driven is an 80s Ford Fiesta with three cylinder with a 5spd manual. I’m certain that I wouldn’t be able to enjoy that car as much without being able to ring all I could have out of the engine.

Long live the manual transmission! We let ignition timing and choke operation slip out of our hands – lets not give up the manual transmission too!

More at www.caranddriver.com/features/10q3/save_the_manuals!-car_and_driver

Interesting and insightful comment from Billy Corgan while in Cleveland to kick off the Pumpkins latest world tour:

Do you go online to see what the fans are saying about the new tracks?

No, but I still get a vibe. If I read anything from let’s call it the “hardcore fanbase,” they are stuck in ’93. It’s 17 years [later] and I don’t know what they expect to have happen. It’s sort of beautiful because what they are saying is, “You so touched me in that moment, I want more of that.” But the thing that I find really insulting is there’s a deeper message there which is “You’ll never be better.” To try to tell a man that he’ll never improve beyond something he did when he was half-crocked on drugs or drama, that’s just not right. When I look at Johnny Cash or Neil Young or Tom Waits, those guys have proven that by remaining vital to themselves, that at some point they are able to burst through with another period.

As reported by “The Rolling Stone” www.rollingstone.com/music/news/17386/181497

For the record, I’m aware I’m that guy and just because I’m not that excited about the new music does not make want the Pumpkins to start doing casino gigs “playing all of the hits you love”.

Billy’s an artist, he should keep creating art for any reason he wants and it’s his dedication to that pursuit that made me a fan in the first place.

That said, if CSNY&Corgan unite I’ll go to their concert anywhere no matter what they play!

“Tonight’s the night, Tonight’s the greatest night I’ve ever know?”

Last summer we signed-up to be Peaksavers. In the middle of the summer of 2010′s first heave wave in Ontario I’m still keen.

Once we had signed-up Burlington Hydro sent someone over to install a new thermostat. The new thermostat allows Burlington Hydro / The Peaksaver program to send a signal to raise the temperature in our house by 2 degrees Celsius over 4 hours. Apparently the message is sent infrequently and only on weekdays and you can opt out twice a year. They sweetened the deal with a $25 credit on our bill.

One of the features we’ve made a lot of use of is the Online Control Centre. It allows you to program the thermostat via the web from anywhere in the world. For us it’s been a good way to change the temperature back to a livable temperature before we arrive home from being on the road.

I mentioned to the gentleman who installed the thermostat that I was looking forward to meters that account for time-of-use. He pointed out that it disproportionately affects the elderly and new mothers, as they are the ones that are home during peak-price hours. Fair comment. But I really feel that people need to pay the real price of energy and be responsible for the decisions that make about its use.

After almost a year I recommend the program to anyone in Ontario that can sign-up.

Yesterday I actually snapped a picture of us “being PeakSaved”.

My presentation went really well.

Here’s a picture Mathieu took of me about to burp

I appreciated all the positive feedback in the session and via Twitter.

During my presentation I warned the individuals in the room that “your faculty are Google’ing Sakai help and ending up at our wiki right now because MediaWiki has such good SEO”. After the session someone confirmed that a faculty member had indeed told him that he found help for “this Isaak, but it worked with Sakai”.

I updated the original blog posting the presentation was based on to include the presentation slides and the video. It is at mattclare.ca/blog/2009/11/23/using-a-wiki-to-document-isaak-brock-universitys-sakai-based-lms/

I might post some of my notes and reflections here later.

I’m not presenting at the Ontario University Computing Conference (OUCC) this year, but I am part of a panel:

Birds of a feather: Changing Learning Management Systems

Other panel members include:

• Nancy Owen, Queen’s University
• Kyle Mackie, University of Guelph

It’s too bad I’m not willing to be more of a Sakai zealot, because someone needs to do a conference presentation this summer titled “BlackBoard/WebCT: It’s easier to quit than Facebook”.

Shortening URLs like bit.ly/warningwarning are a bad idea, filling a real need, that seems like it’s not going to just go away.

URLs like mattclare.ca/blog/2010/03/18/warning-about-url-shortening are descriptive, help service like Google but they are way too hard to remember and take a long time to type into a web browser. Services like tinyurl.com , snipurl.com, bit.ly , ow.ly and others provide a short URL that will re-direct users to the longer version.

Google even created their own shortener at goo.gl which, according to the official Google blog:

Google URL shortener is not a stand-alone service; you can’t use it to shorten links directly. Currently, Google URL Shortener is only available from the Google Toolbar and FeedBurner. If the service proves useful, we may eventually make it available for a wider audience in the future.

This was handy a few years ago, and once Twitter took off with its 140 character limit URL shortners took off with it. Most of these services now offer stats on how many clicks a URL has received — perfect for the follower count obsessed Twitterati (I mean that in a positive way – I promise).

The Danger!

The danger with URL shortners is you don’t know where you’re going to end up. With a URL like cbc.ca or mattclare.ca/blog/2010/03/18/warning-about-url-shortening or en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_shortening you have some idea of the reputation of that URL before you follow it. You can identify the domain, see if you know it, some times you can determine if you’re going to arrive at a web page, an image or a PDF document, etc. URL shortners obscure all of that.

This problem of this opaqueness was best demonstrated by the phenomenon of rickrolling. A (debate-ably) worse outcome is individuals clicking the short URL could be redirected to a malware/spyware site. While web browsers like Internet Explorer can be compromised just by visiting URLs this is a bad idea!
Read more... (630 words, 2 images, estimated 2:31 mins reading time)

I want to invite everyone with any interest in Formula 1 to sign-up for Mitch & Brooke’s Fantasy Racing League.

It makes the races that much more fun to watch and gives you five drivers to cheer for.

My siblings and I all had our own teams last year. The inside tip is my sister’s strategy that proved to be the best of three of us was choosing drivers by hotness.

This is why I want to encourage you to sign-up this year. It’s a far better experience when you know the “owner” of the other teams racing against you because the excitement of the race doesn’t end with the chequered flag, but when you find out how your fantasy team did — well in my case, that’s when it ended. You may do well!

Mitch & Brooke’s Fantasy Racing League just opened up registration for this year. If you can look past the web 0.9 appearance of the site I promise you’ll enjoy the experience: www.fantasyautoracers.com/f1_01/

In 2007 I created a web site to designed to help everyone, principally me, track your luck with the Tim Horton’s™ roll-up promotion and let users share their experience with others.

Today Rim Count has been shut down. The site required a little bit of work to update the content for 2010, but more than that, it needed a way for people to access the site beyond the web and e-mail; perhaps a mobile app or Facebook app. Most of all, it was to be a success, it needs more than zero marketing.

That’s not going to happen.

It was a good way to learn the Drupal platform, and I recommend it to anyone building a site with content that’s more than reverse chronological posts. Mission accomplished. Now it’s time to close up shop.

Unless you’re reading this posting via Facebook, you may have noticed that you now have to sign in to add comments to my blog postings.

I tried to resist as long as possible, but the signal to noise ratio was getting too high for me whenever I had to approve comments.

I could have add a CAPTCHA, which is a contrived acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.” But I find their squiggles to be fundamentally inaccessible, even the audio or reCAPTCHA ones, and I didn’t want to further promote the technology.  My admiration for Alan Turing aside.

So I’m now asking commentators to sign in via Facebook Connect or OpenID.  Both technologies never disclose your password to my site, and warn you about what they are disclosing and in this case it’s not much more than your name/handle.

You may not know it, but you may already have an OpenID! Google, Flickr, MySpace, WordPress and others all provide the service to their users.

This also means that comments are no longer being closed after 90 days.  Feel free to comment on all the postings going back to 2004.

Thanks for your time and patience.

I changed the URL of my blog!

It all started with mattclare.ca/wordpress because that’s the software I chose to use to use back when I wanted to try this blogging thing out in 2004.  Shortly after that I regretted the choice (or lack there of) of the url mattclare.ca/wordpress.  A much better choice would have been mattclare.ca/blog

It took a lot of work to get the pretty URLs working, plus there’s the issue of visitors to my blog and search engines still having the old URLs.  Because of this I was hesitant to change the URL, but today after a lot of research and modelling, I finally switched the URL.  I had been testing redirecting /blog to /wordpress since I re-did the main page of my website, but  today I took the big plunge.

The most important thing was to setup the redirect via the Apache web server I use in a way that preserved my Google ranking.  The trick (according to Google) is to send the 301 header with the redirect.

The “httpd.conf” config line was

RewriteRule /wordpress(.*) /blog$1 [R=301,NC,L]

Please let me know if you see anything that doesn’t work anymore!