Macbraughton

I’m starting to get really excited about the emerging field of open hardware.  The primary concept is analagous to the open software movement in terms of making hardware that can be modified by the user.  Bug Labs is now selling a modular computing device running Linux sofware with an ARM processor.  The possiblities for this are absolutely unlimited.

Here is an interview with Eric von Hippel from MIT discussing one of the Bugbase modules that has been developed in his honor, the BugvonHippel breakout module that expands the capabilities of the Bugbase into being used as a controller for about any electronic device you could think of.  There is also a lot of really good discussion and speculation about where the future economy is going, where design and innovation is user-driven, rather than by the manufacturers.

After all that, I just can’t wait to get my hands on one of these!

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I’m just trying to get the word out everyone. If you look at the wording of official City of Toronto corporation when it comes to Emergency Services, here are a few quotes:

The official statement from Mayor David Miller (who, BTW, happens to have a twitter page @mayormiller.)

And although impacted by the work stoppage, emergency medical services will continue to operate…

And city councilor for my area, Mark Grimes, put on his twitter page @Mark_Grimes:

I regret the inconveniences caused by the strike. The City is trying to bring this to a quick resolution. Emergency Services are operating.

Because the city is so focused on the lack of garbage collection, the public is still not being told clearly that when you call 911 for an ambulance, there will be less dispatchers to answer the phones, and there will be less paramedics on the road to take patients to the hospital by ambulance. Emergency response times will be affected, how could they not be with only 75% of us working?

In an emergency, seconds can make the difference between life and death. The politicians are therefore playing with people’s lives at this point, asking for unreasonable concessions that will probably end up with the Province of Ontario stepping in and passing legislation, as John Laforet discusses in his blogpost City Negotiators Need to Ask ‘What Would Arbitration Do?’

I received my phone call last night informing me that I am not supposed to come to my scheduled shift for this evening. Please understand, I am not exaggerating, I am an emergency medical dispatcher for the City of Toronto. I was scheduled to go into work tonight. I can personally attest that there will be one less person to answer the phone and dispatch ambulances if you call 911 for an ambulance tonight. I am officially on strike.

Ask yourself, should the City of Toronto be able to put public health at risk for their political maneuvering? This is just plain wrong. The people that are really hurt over this are the sick and elderly, the weak and dying, those who already have no one to stand up for them. Call or email or write the mayor’s office and your local city councilor and tell them that you want 100% of the Emergency Medical Services to be operational!

You can find a copy of Mayor Miller’s statement as well as links to many of the media resources on the Toronto strike at Torontopedia.ca. Please help raise awareness that 911 ambulance dispatchers and paramedics are on strike as well by passing this post on to others. Thank you for your support and comments.

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I’m a little irritated right now. Nothing unusual for me, certainly, but this time I know I’m not alone. There are a lot of people in this city irritated right now and a lot more who may be as this week gets going because City of Toronto workers are getting ready to go on strike tonight at midnight.

One of the main issues: sick time. The corporation that runs this town says that it shells out too much cash paying workers when they are sick and don’t come to work. They want to save money by lowering the number of sick days that people are allotted for the year and not allow them to accumulate what is called a “sick bank” of days that add up over a persons career when they don’t use them.

One of the things that I’m probably most annoyed with is that other unionized city employees have already made their deals without any concessions. I’m talking about the TTC, Toronto Police Service, and Toronto Fire Services to name the most visible. The City of Toronto employees that will be striking this week are Local 79 and Local 416 workers, which represent “inside workers” and “outside workers” respectively, that is, all of the rest of the city’s employees who don’t have their own special union.

While everybody on the radio and television is talking about the garbage piling up, and the Pride parade possibly being canceled, these red herrings only keep the public from noticing one very important point: Toronto Emergency Medical Services are part of Local 416 and Local 79.

What this means to you is that come tomorrow morning, if grandpa has a heart attack, there will be less ambulance dispatchers available to answer the phone when you call 911, and less ambulances on the road with paramedics to give grandpa life saving drugs and take him to the nearest hospital. Yes, you can rest assured that we will have public transportation, law and order, and property protection if there is a fire, but for some reason human life isn’t at the top of the priority list for the City of Toronto corporation.

With the possibility of only 75% of the paramedics and dispatchers who work for Toronto EMS coming to work tomorrow, despite what disinformation the City of Toronto corporation feels like spreading, I can tell you that there will be delays in 911 calls being answered and dispatched, as well as paramedics arriving to the scene of calls and transporting patients to hospitals.

In the event of a labour disruption, emergency calls for ambulance/paramedic services will continue as usual. Non-emergency and low priority calls may be affected.
~City of Toronto – Labour Relations

Part of the problem is that Toronto Emergency Medical Services should either have its own union or bargaining unit, or it should at least be designated an essential service so that public health is not put in jeopardy just because the City of Toronto is trying to save a few bucks.

I can’t speak for other Local 416 or Local 79 employees because I don’t know what it is like for them.  I can only speak for myself, and my wife (who is a paramedic), and the people I know who every time they go to work they put themselves in the center of the some of the most difficult and traumatic experiences that our community faces each and every day. 

I know that paramedics come into contact with the sickest people in this city, and also have a very physical job that involves a lot of lifting (for instance, moving an unconscious person is probably a lot harder than you would think).  Emergency Medical Dispatchers (the group that I belong to) deal with the constant stress and anxiety of family members calling 911 for sick loved ones, as well as the distressed patients themselves whether they be trauma victims or suffering from acute or chronic medical conditions.

As a group, we deal with human frailty each and every day, 24 hours a day seven days a week, yet, by threatening to take away paid sick time, we are not even afforded the respect of being acknowledged as frail human beings ourselves.

Wake up, Toronto! The people who answer the phone when you call 911 and come and take care of you and your family and friends through difficult and traumatic times are just people, just like you. There is a cost for putting one’s self out there to help people in distress, and again, I can only speak for Toronto EMS employees, unfortunately there are a lot of people in our line of work who deal with their own medical conditions, sickness, and injuries.

Citizens of Toronto, this is your city. It does not belong to the corporation who is elected and appointed to serve you, its citizens. Please pass along your voice of support for Toronto EMS to your local city councilor and to David Miller’s office in support of the people who are always there when you need them, who need your help right now. Remind them who they work for – You! It is neither fair nor equitable for them to put public health at risk because of their political maneuvering. Show them that you care about more than whether your garbage gets picked up next week.

Just to be clear, those of us who work for Toronto EMS and are manning the phones and ambulances during this strike will do our best to serve you, the citizens of Toronto. Just be advised, there will be less of us there to carry the load. At only 75% of normal staffing, this will definitely affect our response times.

Also, on a personal level, I want to say that I live with my family in Toronto, so as fellow residents this affects us too. This goes beyond my employment, I don’t appreciate the City of Toronto corporation thinking that it is okay to keep Emergency Medical Services staffed at less than 100% of normal operational levels. That is why I am posting this right now. At this time we still don’t know if the strike will happen or not.

Thank you for your support and comments are welcome.

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Despite all of the cheesiness that pretty much anything done by Michael Bay, well, maybe even because of it, the next Transformers flick Revenge of the Fallen looks promising as the biggest film of the summer (or at least the biggest robots, although I hear the robots in Terminator Salvation are pretty big too). Robots, cars & Megan Fox… it doesn’t really need to be coherent in any way. Did I mention Megan Fox?

I made a comment to my wife while we watched the trailer that I guess they were working on a trilogy, with Revenge of the Fallen sounding a little too much like The Empire Strikes Back, and sure enough, as per imdb, Transformers 3 is in development.

Add Star Trek and it sounds like a perfect drive-in combo.  Sweet!

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So I just learned a really cool way to share music from Tara Busch, whom I met I recently on Twitter. It’s called SoundCloud, and I like it because I’ve wanted to push more content from my own site instead of referring people to other sites such as Myspace. Like clips uploaded to YouTube, you can embed the track in a webpage with HTML.  Really cool… so without further ado, here you go…

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You know, with a name like Macbraughton, which apparently I can’t even spell myself, it is no wonder that people have trouble finding the stuff I write on my blog. After god-knows-how-long I just noticed that I had spelled it wrong in the wordpress header settings and all of my pages were titled Macbraugton instead of Macbraughton.

So just for the record, and for the bots out there, my name is spelled Macbraughton. Not Mac Braughton, Mac Broughton, Macbroughton, Mcbraughton, Mcbroughton, Mcbroten, Macbroten, Macbrotten, Mcbrotten, or any other damn mispelling that I can’t think of at the moment.

There can be only one!

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So I’ve been telling my wife for months to wait to buy a new cellphone because although the iPhone is really cool, Google’s Android platform is even cooler being open source and running Linux and all.  I’ve got to give it to Rogers…  I had read that they were planning to launch their “revolution”in the beginning of June but haven’t had the time lately to catch all the details.  Just now I found this video with none other than Canadian/American actor Joshua Jackson as the Rogers spokesperson for their launch of the HTC Dream and Magic phones.

It’s a little creepy, because next to David Duchovny I don’t know if there is any other actor that my wife begins involuntarily salivating over every time his image appears  (don’t worry, I don’t get the David Duchovny thing either).  I never thought that there was such a specific nerdy female demographic in Canada but apparently there is and my wife is the target market.

I was going to try to get her to keep waiting because there are rumours on the internet that the new Canadian wireless entrant Globalive (aka Yak) is supposed to be coming out with the HTC phones later this year at much more competetive prices, but I don’t know if I can outsell Joshua Jackson.  I showed her the promo video and before I knew what was happening she started watching youtube clips of him and downloading season 1 of Fringe off of bittorrent and telling me about his upcoming movies.

Damn you Rogers, I admit I am dead sexy but I haven’t been in any major movies yet.  If she buys the G1 from you, you should at least give me a cut because I was the one who told her that Android was cool in the first place.

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Using stem cells from the patient’s own good eye, University of South Wales researchers are curing blindness in an extremely simple and non-invasive procedure.  Makes one wonder what kind of other “miracle” medical treatments are just beyond the horizon.

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No this is not a joke, those Germans are really up to some crazy stuff…

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Wow, there is a lot of crap out there about netbooks. And by crap I mean disinformation and FUD by Microsoft and Apple now as well. These big guys really like the status quo. They feed off of each other and have since the eighties. Everybody buy a PC or notebook, or laptop, or netbook running Windows or buy a Mac. Don’t buy anything else because that is all that there is and anything else that comes around sucks, right? I don’t believe it. Maybe that has been true in the past but it doesn’t necessarily mean that it is going to be that way in the future.

I admit, I love my Macs. I just got a 20″ iMac about a month ago and it is amazing. It takes up very little space, has the screen built in, and it is fast. I mean, I the multitasking that I can do on this thing is wicked. I feel like I’ve still barely made the thing break a sweat yet when I’m encoding video, listening to music, surfing the web, playing Civilization IV, editing documents in OpenOffice, and whatever other stuff I happen to be doing. It is a workhorse, and it just works. I can’t believe how fast the thing reboots too.

This was a compromise for me though. I have another computer that I built out of bargain parts and installed Ubuntu that I was using most of the time before this. I love Linux. I love the idea of Linux maybe a little more than the reality of Linux but I love it nonetheless. I love it because it is free. And by free I mean as in freedom. But like they say in Team America: World Police… “Freedom isn’t free, no there’s a hefty fuckin’ fee.” Yes, Linux is free as far as money is concerned, but it is expensive in the time and energy that you have to put into getting everything to work.

At least that has been the case up until now. That may be changing. In fact, I think that it may be a safe bet to say that it is changing as we speak because more and more hardware companies are beginning to get on the Linux bandwagon. The great netbook revolution is also becoming a battleground for Linux to assert itself more into the mainstream. This is because when a company builds a computer that they are planning to run Linux on all along there aren’t going to be the same problems that there are when you’re trying to get a PC built out of odd components to work. Adding to that netbooks aren’t going to be used for running a bunch of peripheral devices and software. I won’t be using my netbook to encode video or play video games. So the fact that there aren’t smooth and easy Linux applications to some things doesn’t really matter that much. I will able to surf the net, check my email, edit documents, and play video.

I’m speaking in the future tense because the netbooks that I’m talking about haven’t even hit the market yet. So far the netbooks that are out there are all running on Intel Atom chips and most of them have Windows XP as the operating system. The new wave of netbooks coming to the market this summer and fall that I’m talking about will be using ARM CPUs. They are SoC (System on a Chip) devices that have Linux pre-installed as their operating system. Whether they’ll be running Ubuntu, Xandros, or Google’s Android will be a matter of preference for their manufacturers, but they won’t be running Windows because at this time there is no version of that operating system for the ARM architecture. The most spectacular fact about these newest additions to the PC ecosphere is their projected price, $200 to $300.

Apple is dissing netbooks because they say that they’ve already got that part of the market covered with iPhones and the iPod Touch. Give me a break… these are cool gadgets I have to admit, but they are too small. They don’t have real keyboards, and they have watered down versions of OS X as their operating systems. In the defense of the coming Linux + ARM netbooks, they have much larger screens and full keyboards (though slightly smaller at around 92% of a normal one). There is one in development from Always Innovating called the Touchbook that has a multitouch touch screen in addition to a detatchable keyboard. I don’t know about that one in particular but I know that some of them have cellular network capabilities built right into their SoC motherboards (in addition to GPS, Wifi, Bluetooth, etc.) They are also going to have not a watered down OS but fully loaded, fully customizable Linux operating systems like Ubuntu and Android. You won’t have one company controlling what will and will not be able to be done with them. From a developer’s perspective there is no contest, the more flexible the environment the better.

Microsoft is going about their business as usual with their Windows 7 Starter Edition plan. Again, give me a break. The only reason that they are working on Windows 7 is that because Vista was such a dud, and oh yeah, because Vista is way too bloated to work on netbooks. Yes, Microsoft is making Windows 7 mainly to try to get their paws into the netbook market. At this time I don’t know of any plans for the ARM architecture, though it is feasible that they could port it (the real problem for them here would be third party software, which unfortunately for Microsoft is the majority of the actual software that is worth anything in Windows). Windows 7 Starter Edition will come pre-installed for free on some Intel Atom based netbooks and you will be able to run a grand total of 3 applications at one time! Huh? Yeah, three applications, and if you want to run more then you have to give them more money. Yes, you heard me, you have to upgrade to the full version to run more than three applications.

So, let’s see, you can run virus protection software, open a web-browser, and one other thing at once. What a joke. Why would I pay Microsoft more money when I can get a netbook that runs an unlimited number of applications at once and isn’t going to cost me a dime for software? As long as it does the main things that I want to do with it, browse the web, instant messaging, watching video, editing documents… who cares about the brand. At this point North Americans are the only ones who seem to be buying into Microsoft’s bullshit. The rest of the world is happily moving towards open-source software.

Not to mention the fact that Linux is free, there isn’t the same malware and virus problems as there is with Windows so you can go without the virus protection software. You don’t have to pay for anything in fact. There are an unbelievable amount of programs that work on Ubuntu that are in the process of being ported to ARM right now. It isn’t that big a deal either because of the Unix source-based development model most of the existing Linux software out there can be recompiled to work on ARM without much difficulty at all.

Apple could feasibly move into the netbook market a lot more easily than Microsoft, but from the banter that they are dishing out lately I am starting to think that they are going to miss the boat. It looks like that by the time they realize that everybody is getting a netbook for a second or third computer, the new entrants to the market are going to have driven prices down so drastically that there isn’t going to be any way for them to make a profit or differentiate themselves. This is the real crux of the netbook revolution: the eradication of the need for big software companies. The hardware companies that make these devices no longer need someone else to buy their software from. They can plug in to the Linux community and customize it however they like and not pay any licensing fees. Apple has great designers and developers today, but if enough people start moving into the open source community then that is where all of the cool stuff is going to be happening. I think this trend is inevitable myself, that eventually Apple will be just a hardware brand or a design shop and that eventually there will be no such thing as proprietary operating systems. As for Microsoft, I think Keith Curtis said it best in his book After the Software Wars, “they are toast.”

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