As the UN climate talks continue in Bali, and many countries continue trying to make progress on international agreements on dealing with climate change, Canada’s conservative government seems to have a different plan - do the bidding of big oil and sabotage all progress at the climate talks, contrary to the wishes of most Canadians. So far has Canada slipped, under the current government, from its former position as bastion of international diplomacy at the Montreal negotiations two years ago, that at the weekend Canada won the “fossil of the day” award, for doing the most to block progress at the negotiations.

It’s time to make some noise, Canada: head on over to avaaz.org and tell Harper to stop blocking the UN climate talks. It only takes a minute.

Once you’ve done that, read on for more contact details. A phone call is worth a thousand emails…

read on

Google recently added Vancouver to Google Transit. This is extremely useful, as Translink’s own trip planner is so bad as to be almost unusable. However, one of my friends noticed something which I thought was rather amusing…

The system appears to think it is possible to walk on water.

Amazing.

As anyone who knows me probably knows already, I use Ubuntu and / or Debian Linux for all of my day to day computing now - and have done for almost three years - everything from word processing to presentations, web development and organising my campaign work on climate change, and it’s getting more user friendly every month.

One thing that’s always been a problem, specifically when working on website development, is the need to test them using Internet Explorer. For a long time I kept an old laptop to hand, running Windows 2000 for those moments when I needed to be 100% sure everything looked flawless in the browser we all love to hate.

Today I came across IEs For Linux and in a few minutes (most of which was download time) had IE 5.01, 5.5 and 6.0 running under wine - something I’ve tried to do before and failed.

The actual program is extremely neat - a set of scripts that configures wine for you, and downloads the necessary Internet Explorer components from Microsoft, setting everything up smoothly with shortcuts on your desktop to each version of Internet Explorer. Until firefox buries IE six feet under and the scourge of web developers is gone for good, this will be very useful.

Oh, and they’re even working on IE 7.

The governments assembled at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity meetings in Brazil today reached an agreed to stop the push towards commercialising so called ‘terminator’ (sterile) seeds - a huge victory for the safety of the world’s food supplies:

“This is a momentous day for the 1,4 billion poor people world wide, who depend on farmer saved seeds,” said Francisca Rodriguez of Via Campesina a world wide movement of peasant farmers, “Terminator seeds are a weapon of mass destruction and an assault on our food sovereignty.

Read the full article on banterminator.org…

The Guardian today has a wonderful series of ‘look how bad the snow is’ photos… I just find it amusing how, compared to the huge snow banks here in Canada, the UK almost comes to a standstill whenever there’s a flurry.