No doubt many of your will feel relief. My picture is no longer at the top-right corner of my blog. Instead, I have done as many bloggers do: show off my skills as a photographer. Yes! I can take pictures! I resisted this trend for a long time, mostly because I could not understand it, but it finally came to me (more on this later).

Sorry though, it won’t be flowers like Tim Bray, travel pictures like Stephen Downes, or beautiful landscapes like Harold Jarche. I’ll mostly be using family pictures.

And it comes to down to why we post pictures on blogs in the first place: to show who we are. What better way to show who you are than to share what you find beautiful?

I also, finally, got Internet Explorer to display my blog properly. Somehow my brain cannot get around the fact that to center elements in HTML/CSS, you need to call upon the text-align instruction. What were the Microsoft engineers thinking? Probably something along the lines of “yep! another paycheck!”

In a recent talk, I said that Academic Research had been surpassed by industrial research as far as databases are concerned. Bill McIver wrote to me that he disagreed.

I have an edge over Bill when it comes to arguing: I have a blog and he doesn’t.

I would say the best way for academia to be useful, is to be totally out there. To be wild. To jump all over industry, to go where they would never dare going. The database research community has been too conservative. But whether you buy this or not, the fact that the database community has said “we need to jump out and stop hanging around the relational model” is a fact, not an opinion:

It is time to stop grafting new constructs onto the traditional architecture of the past. Instead, we should rethink basic DBMS architecture with an eye toward supporting:

• Structured data;
• Text, space, time, image, and multimedia data;
• Procedural data; that is, data types and the methods that encapsulate them;
• Triggers; and
• Data streams and queues

as co-equal first-class components within the DBMS architecture—both its interface and its implementation—rather than as afterthoughts grafted onto a relational core.

(Source: The Lowell database research self-assessment, May 2005)

Warren Buffet, who used to be the second richest man in the world, ran an experiment in his office. He asked his staff to check which fraction of their income they paid in taxes. Surprisingly, he pays a much lesser fraction in taxes than his staff does. This is a great quote:

“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

How can this be, when the majority of the people are much poorer than Warren and thus, ought to tax Warren a lot. No, Warren says he does not even do tax planning: he pays whatever he is being asked to pay.

This is explained away by the fact the poors tend to vote for more tax breaks for the rich. I couldn’t find a quote, but I think it is a well known fact that the poors tend to mistrust the governments to redistribute the wealth.

“People can’t do elementary mathematics” is another explanation. I don’t like this explanation, but that is what it comes down to. In Quebec, we used to have a child care system where poors got lots of money in tax deduction whereas the rich got very little. Then the government created child care programs so that everyone pays the same and gets more or less the same. The problem with this is that it is a measure that benefits the wealthy only, but gives the illusion of wealth distribution because everyone is suddenly apparently equal (except that the rich pay less taxes than they used to).

I’m often amazed at how uneducated about money people are. Take “tax returns”. A tax return is the government sending you back the extra money you paid. This is not an income. Having a large tax return is also a bad thing: this means that you gave the government a large interest-free loan. Yet, time after time, I see people who consider tax returns an income. Heck! The government could probably start taxing tax returns and many would agree!!!

Another one I like is how many people in Canada think that the goods are cheaper in the USA. For example, if you see a $30 printer in the USA, is it cheaper than the corresponding $40 printer in Canada? Depends on the exchange rate, doesn’t it? You’d be amazed how many people do not get that part for the simple reason that they never understood rules of 3.

Repeat after me: income-neutral costs favor the rich. All you need to understand are basic fractions here. The rich should pay more for government services whenever a cost is involved.

(Why am I writing about politics these days? Must be a reaction to Dion’s coming to power.)

These guys from Carnegie-Mellon did something that is impressive: extract reliable 3D models from still images. See for yourself:

Since I have not followed advanced in this field, I have no idea how close they are to the state-of-the-art, but I don’t care. If these guys were to launch a start-up, I’d invest. (If I had any money, that is.)

(This is, by the way, a very good illustration of how video-on-the-Web can be used to promote one’s research.)

We now have Slashdot quoting Tim Bray on XML Schemas:

W3C XML Schemas (XSD) suck. They are hard to read, hard to write, hard to understand, have interoperability problems, and are unable to describe lots of things you want to do all the time in XML.

How is this news? Tim is just saying what anyone, I really mean anyone, who ever tried to get anything done with XML Schemas knew already. It is only a bit of news because Tim invented XML, among other things.

The problem with technology is that there are too many people who think you can understand technology just by learning the buzzwords and hiring programmers. It is like cars: how can you tell if it is a good car without driving it? Well, you cannot. No matter how wealthy you are, at some point, you have to sit in the car and drive it to determine whether you will like it.

Firefox and the Adober Reader plugin is a bad mix. The plugin has the benefit that it can display PDF files “on the fly” (without loading them all first), but on our home machines, it tends to eat up a lot of memory and even crash. John Haller has written a nice piece about disabling the plugin.

(Disclaimer: I rarely write about politics. One reason for this is is that I’ve become an anarchist over the years. I especially oppose most forms of top-down social programs aiming to forbid individual initiatives.)

Stéphane Dion won the Canadian Liberals leadership race. This means he might be the next Canadian prime minister, assuming the Liberals can defeat the Tories in the next election.

You should recall that the Liberals, last time they were in power, had setup a Mafia-inspired system by which the sent millions to friends under the pretense of promoting National Unity. Interestingly enough, the Liberals did not talk about it. Surely, there were strategic reasons involved, but I cannot help but be worried that they do not feel the need to learn from the once rampant and deeply-rooted corruption in their ranks.

Apparently, Tim Bray likes Stéphane Dion because he is smart. I argue that while being smart is a good thing in politics, thinking that you are smarter than the people is where you have to draw the line. Stephen Downes has not yet taken position, but he commented earlier that his choice went to Bob Rae, mostly because Bob is a socialist. I was living in Ontario when Bob Rae was elected primer of Ontario. Bob is alright, but not exactly thoughtful and he probably has an obselete vision of Canada, though it hard to tell given how little he said during the campaign.

I think that Stéphane Dion is bad news for Canada and I can only hope the Tories will remain in power. The problem with Stéphane is that he believes strongly in a centralized, top-down Canada which is completely at odd with the bottom-up federation Canada needs to be. For example, in his speech, he made fun of the Tories for sending checks to parents instead of setting up a child-care program. But do we need a coast-to-coast child-care program in Canada? We already have a child-care program in Quebec, and many other provinces do. Do we add yet another government-managed layer? That is what the Liberals think: the more federal-run social programs you have, the better you are.

These sorts of top-down programs are generally counter-productive for governments in general and even worse in the context of federalism where both level of governments can add to the problem. I think that while governments should redistribute wealth, they should not try to replace parents. One liberal commented that the Tories approach would mean that some parents would buy beer and chips instead of spending the money on their kids. I think this is basically what Stéphane Dion thinks as he made clear in his criticism of the Tories.

Basically, Dion will set us back to the Trudeau era. Many Canadians have fond memories of Trudeau because he had a strong vision for Canada and he was, arguably, the most Nationalist prime minister to ever rule Canada. However, back then, Canada was mostly defined by the lower and upper Canadas (Ontario and Quebec) and Trudeau was able to unite both of them behind his vision. Stéphane Dion will be unable to achieve this feat, but even if he did, it would not be sufficient to run Canada in 2006. At best, the vote in Quebec will be divided: Quebec has changed dramatically in the last 20 years (and not necessarily for the better). And we are forgetting Alberta which used to be a piece of the country where people raised cows, but has since become the fastest growing province in Canada. In part, Alberta grew because of its abundant oil resources, but it has since attracted many smart and progressive people who go there to build their dreams. Stéphane’s vision of a strong, centralized Canada will not fly over there. The fact that he is from Quebec will surely hurt him too.

In short, I predict that Stéphane Dion will cost the Liberals the next election.