Canada

Sorting IP Addresses in SQL
SQL God Rudy Limeback has a solution on his SQL Page for sorting IP Addresses. Heckuva good read—for geeks.

» Sorting substrings of different lengths numerically [Part 1]
» Sorting substrings of different lengths numerically [Part 2]

Mr. Limeback lives in Canada, and is interested in solving your database and web problems! Check him out at r937.com.

Damn Hard, But Damn Fair Questions Are In Order
We Didn’t Mess Up, They Did
Canada has put its house in order. It’s time to ask the U.S. hard questions about how Sept. 11 was allowed to happen is a difficult article from Lawrence Martin of Canada’s Globe and Mail. It contains fair questions about why some CIA and FBI asses haven’t been fired with regards to the glaring intelligence failures of September 11th.

An excerpt:

I had in mind a statement from Wesley Wark, one of Canada’s foremost intelligence experts and a consultant to the Privy Council on such matters. “What is happening in the United States took me by surprise,” he said. “I anticipated that in the aftermath of Sept. 11, there would be an enormous hue and cry to find out what went wrong. There has been no hue and cry in the United States. No recriminations, nothing even similar to what happened after Pearl Harbor in 1941…. The United States has drawn a veil of silence over the issue of intelligence failure.”

David McLean of evolt.org got something I wrote onto Yahoo! Canada’s Quotation of the day—today.

“So how do those who would protest get smart? They need to organize in such a way that they can beat the police, and the media, at their own game.

Every protester in my mind needs a video camera, and an online journal. Eyes wide open, direct to the world – Media savvy. Documenting abuses by the police in realtime. I truly believe, all evidence to the contrary, that the truth will out. This is my manifesto – for those with real causes (that is, causes worth fighting for) media-savvy, nonviolent, hyper-protest.

Think: McLuhan meets Gandhi.”

I don’t write much about activism, but I believe in justice, and in the ability of people to subvert the status quo by avoiding complacency, and being smarter. We have so many tools available to us, we should use them. If we don’t use them for ourselves, they’ll end up being used on us.