I have to wonder if it's my traditionally Liberal political leanings that has me thinking this way - but although I felt I had to lodge a protest vote last election in the wake of the sponsorship scandal - I find myself starting to regret having not voted even for a party tarnished by stains of past corruption.  Despite their best efforts, the Conservatives; with their pre-election attack ads, their rhetoric and fillibuster tactics in parliamentary committees have got to be eroding their support.  And if it's not these items which fly in the face of their supposed grassroots origins as a party of reform, there's fundamental disagreement about policy - about their environmental plan (or lack of one), their lack of support for war veterans' families following service or fatality of those who've served overseas.  And, of course, there's still the lurking bill C-60...the parliemntary time bomb which threatens to send Canada back to the proverbial stone age in creating new laws to deal with Internet media piracy.

The latest polls are inconclusive...and to my astonishment there just hasn't been the dip in popularity for the minority government one might expect under the circumstances.  My best guess is that Canadians just aren't paying attention either because summer looms and nobody's interested in politics right now (unless you're a long-time political hack like me) or just because we've had too many elections lately and people are genuinely fed up with paying attention to political issues.

I really, really hope there's a turnaround in this trend before long, though.  I can't imagine my fellow countrymen actually supporting a party that wants to adopt the policies suggested by an organization like the RIAA (or RIAC - the recording industry's lobbying body in Canada), or supporting a government that turns to slander to win votes, or a party that won on a platform of being a new truth-telling entity in politics - but which has proven very adept at breaking campaign promises with far greater consistency than the Liberals ever did - scandal or no.  I'd imagine I could become part of that big apathetic mass pretty quickly if they did somehow win the next election...and I'd never have thought that possible.

For you fellow veteran gamers out there (and I mean those of you who are hesitating about whether to put that first 4 character in the age box when prompted for your age), you'll recognize the quote heading this article as paraphrasing the world's first truly multiplayer arcade game Gauntlet.  But as a veteran gamer - particularly with PC games - you might remember the old single-player hit (also a hit on UNIX systems) called "NetHack" parodied this quote from Gauntlet when one of the characters (a Wizard) started running short of food.  I, feeling nostalgic this past weekend, decided to use NetHack as a self-learning tool in my application of a variety of new programming concepts I've read about in the past few months and re-create this title as "dotNetHack".  In the process of digging into how its namesake was originally put together had my respect for this long lost treasure take a hit: the levels, which I'd previously thought programmatically generated, are in fact statically retained within the body of the sourcecode!

Admittedly, I was hoping to "steal" some of the logic which I'd thought responsible for generating a seemingly endless supply of levels.  Oh yes, I've finished NetHack before....but there are enough levels statically held in the game code that it always seemed they were programmatically generated.  I'm not disappointed that among the challenges a recreation effort will take I'll now add level generation - it's just disappointing that this wasn't a feature of a game whose code base has been evolving since 1989!

On the other hand, it's humbling to think that now, as the game approaches its 20th anniversary, I might be able to contribute to the game's evolution.  Hopefully, knowing how the magic works won't detract from my appreciation of the game's legacy.  One factor to keep in mind as I pursue this volunteer effort - in 1989 the tools a developer had to work with were a far cry from the syntax of Java or C#.  The code, which appears to be ANSI C, doesn't appear very far removed from assembly instruction sets.  In fact...that legacy is very evident browsing through the code of old.

Microsoft, some years ago, entered the instant messaging fray with its inaugural effort in the area: MSN Messenger.  Several versions later, we are at '8.0' and somehow - we are still plagued by the same issues with it as in version '1.0'.  Viruses are still circulating through it willy-nilly; companies are still blocking it whenever / however they can, etc.  I used to think it was a sign of poor network administration: instant messaging can be very handy for us developers to have access to.  But this past week, when suddenly people on my contact list apparently started trying to upload the same virus-infected, bogus file (which I declined, of course), our company's network admins had to take some kind of action lest there be infected PCs hither and thither.  Leaving aside for the moment the fact that, particularly as a software development company, most of the staffers should have been "with it" enough to fix their own desktop PCs if infected and/or know how to avoid becoming infected in the 1st place, our company is a strategic partner of the software giant for developing products and solutions around a number of Microsoft's server technologies; but most critically, Commerce Server 2007 and Biztalk Server.  And yet here we are, quite literally, thubming our collective nose at Messenger - a very unusual thing indeed!

The response from Microsoft should be, obviously, to deal with the chronic problems that accompany Messenger.  When your biggest partners and advocates in the industry are taking such rash measures to avoid its use, how can you claim with a straight face that others should be choosing Microsoft for online solutions?  It doesn't look good.  And at this point, its blocking isn't a knee-jerk reaction to what might happen, or some idelogical hatred for Windows, Messenger or Bill.  It's a response to a failing product that desperately needs to be fixed!

In closing, I have to wonder what the good folks who work at Microsoft itself use to converse.  There's a philosophy at One Microsoft Way, Redmond WA (as at other Microsoft workplaces around the world) to "eat [their] own dogfood" - that is using Microsoft products whereever possible within the company.  Trouble is, Microsoft now offers three or perhaps four other instant messaging solutions; including MS Office's Groove 2007, Communicator (from MS Communications Server), in addition to Windows Live Messenger.  These other two are for chatting with others either collaboratively on the extranet or on the corporate LAN itself - not so much for chatting with the outside world.  Even so, my company hasn't adopted either of these in the wake of the decision to simply block all Messenger traffic.  But if using Messenger was mandated, I can't imagine the software giant putting up with viruses like the one that hit last week for very long, nor do I believe they block Messenger on the Microsoft extranet.