taylortbb writes “Canadians are fighting back against Bell Canada’s traffic shaping (recentlly discussed by Slashdot here and here) by organizing a rally in support of network neutrality. The rally is being backed by a long list of organizations including Google, two major political parties, three ISPs, and two major unions. It’s set for Tuesday at 11:30am on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. The only question that remains is, will the government listen?”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

rsax writes “Bell Canada recently announced that it is launching a downloadable video store just as it is caught up in a government inquiry into its traffic-shaping practices. Some consider this a conflict of interest since several content providers were in the process of distributing TV shows using P2P technology before the Bell throttling issue started getting media coverage. Bell’s FAQ states that it is not available for Mac users right now (and not Linux either of course) because they are using Windows Media DRM. They do, however, invite feedback on their site.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Trolltech developer has implemented a new Qt style that uses the GTK+ theming API. It will enable Qt and KDE applications to share the GNOME look and feel when used in the GNOME desktop environment.

Read More…

Summer seems to have arrived, at last.

As you may have noticed, today’s comic contains an algorithm for converting dates into local coordinates. For a given day, you can calculate what that day’s coordinate is for your region. Dan has put together a tool for calculating a day’s coordinates and show it using Google Maps. Note that you can’t calculate a day’s coordinates before the stock market opens on that day (about 9:00 EST) — except for weekends and holidays, when it uses the most recent opening price.

We’ve been having fun trying to reach these coordinates for some time now, when the coordinate is reachable — that is, when it’s not over water, in a military base, or in the middle of Bill Gates’s house.

If you happen to be looking for somewhere to go, driving to the coordinates can be an adventure. If you do, please take pictures and drop them on the geohashing wiki (feel free to help fill it out).  I’m gonna get some rest and then, at 10 AM tomorrow, see if I can get to the Boston coordinates (I have no way of knowing where they’ll be until then, of course).

And finally, when the coordinates are reachable, meetups are Saturday afternoon at 4:00.

Edit: I answered a bunch of questions in a comment below.  Further discussion is also happening on the wiki. I’m going to get some sleep and then head out to today’s coordinates (or as close as I can get).

Last week, I wrote a short Python script that uses a USB GPS device under Linux to help with navigation.  It doesn’t have maps or anything — it just gives distances and, while you’re moving, the direction to the destination (as in “two o’clock”).  It prints this info on the terminal and speaks it using speech synthesis.

I joked about this in Comic #407, but it’s actually a pretty practical way to get around.  Just knowing what direction something’s in is a huge step toward finding it.  This past week I’ve used it successfully to find my way around towns I don’t know, and we even used it while driving to navigate to an out-of-town destination.

Plus, there’s the bonus that when you’re walking, wearing an earpiece, laptop in the bag, listening to the computerized voice whisper “TARGET DIRECTION THREE O’CLOCK DISTANCE ONE POINT THREE KILOMETERS ETA FIFTEEN MINUTES” into your ear, you feel like a cyborg.  I’ll have to set it up with a female voice and rename it “jane.py”.

Edit: I’ve just been testing the recent changes to this script, and it’s really not in a condition where I should be posting it anywhere.  But if you can use it as a starting point for hacking, here’s the link.  Some of you might find it useful sometime soon.