ian andrew bell

Apparently I’m one of the “People to Watch” on the Vancouver tech scene for 2008. As if it’s not easy enough to look into my townhouse from the street already, you people have to watch me working as well?

Kidding aside, it’s great to be listed among such folks as the RainCity crew, Danny Robinson, and Mozilla’s David Ascher. Missing from the list are folks like David Gratton, Boris Wertz, and Dick Hardt. Their enterprises are I think poised for big things this year, and success on their part will do much to bolster the tech scene in Vancouver in general.

Read More

Readers of this blog and my old mailing list know that I am no big fan of Network Solutions and its long history of anti-competitive and generally dirty business practises. From YCombinator comes this nugget about Network Solutions, exploiting a loophole extended by ICANN to pre-register domain names you’ve searched for on their site, thus preventing other registrars from handling the transaction later. Network Solutions currently charges $35 for an annual domain name registration, while most of their competitors land squarely between $7 and $15.

The problem exhibits itself thus: A query at the Network Solutions web site via its whois service will cause the domain name to appear to be available via NetSol, but in performing the same search via a third-party registrar the domain name appears to have been registered via Network Solutions to a private registrant. This is evil.

The piece has since been picked up by eWeek and in some depth at DomainNameNews.

Read More

There are rumours circulating that the NHL season will start with games in Sweden and possibly other European capitals for 2008. This might vindicate my post from a few days ago which stated that the league needs to start a dialogue with fans in Europe. Looks like the NHL would start the season with a two-game series between Ottawa and Pittsburgh at Stockholm’s Globen Arena, and Ottawa would warm up for the game with an exhibition match vs. Frölunda in Gothenburg. This a still a rumour, but is discussed with little real substance in a Swedish daily called “The Local”.

Read More

It ended this afternoon (early evening, Buffalo time) with a shoot-out goal by phenom Sidney Crosby on Buffalo goalie Ryan Miller before 70,000 freezing, mostly-drunk fans mixed from Canadians and the occasional actual Buffalo Sabres fan amid a blinding snow storm.

If you squint a little, that’s kind of how professional hockey began, more than 125 years ago, in the ponds and rinks of Ottawa and Montreal. Ironically it was in Buffalo where the beautiful game captivated the imagination of my favourite author, F. Scott Fitzgerald, inspiring him to become a sports writer. Even with more than 45 minutes of delays for snow clearing, hole patching, and refreezing, it was a great game which took hockey back to its roots. I think that’s an important point.

Read More

This, dear friends, is a headline which should scare you.  Last week’s The Economist featured this rather alarmist (but accurate) headline on the cover.  And you should all pay heed.  Food is of course a benchmark for inflation, and among peoples in differing classes its price has served as a great equalizer.  When food costs more, we all suffer in a reversal of “trickle-down” economics (though this chain reaction actually works).The article blames of course our increasing gluttony and penchant for beef, and typically the rise of China and their emulation of our gluttony.  But more succinctly it targets agflation in the United States (and Canada, and Europe) sparked by the boom in Biofuels like Ethanol which, as I’ve been known to rattle on, is in turn economically-driven by subsidies and artificial incentives to convert what used to be food into fuel. Read More

I was pretty overjoyed to report a few months ago on Letterbox: a three-pane email plugin for Apple’s mail.app written by Aaron Harnly, which has made my email life blissful indeed.  With Leopard came some unexpected changes to mail.app that broke most of the plugins out there, so it was back to the drawing board for Aaron.Thing is, he’s been stuck on “any day now“ for releasing his update for two weeks or so, and the comments from others are turning from words of encouragement to sheer hair-pulling frustration. Read More

Telecom has, generally speaking, become a zero-sum game. In fact it probably always was, despite numerous attempts by governments at deregulation. The fact of the matter is that even today, full-duplex voice conversations between two parties is almost entirely controlled by a cabal of international telecom companies, both wireless and wireline, who manipulate and milk their effective monopolies with customer lock-in and draconian pricing. Furthermore third-party access to these networks is hugely restricted thanks to highly limited and uneconomical network-side interfaces, fundamentally incompetent internal provisioning and support, and of course the omnipresent threat of lawsuits, manipulation of regulators, and political pressure.

There is, in most respects, not much room for the little guy. Read More

I’m starting to think this subject warrants its own WordPress Category. As I previously disclosed, despite the fact that Apple is at war with its users on the iPhone and other platforms, iBought. I seriously love the thing. It has a great user interface, the applications are easy to use, and when unlocked and jailbroken, I can add my own applications. I now have a phone that runs BSD. Wow. At the Web 2.0 conference last week, I went completely without my MacBook Pro and relied solely on my iPhone to stay in touch, surf, etc.

Since I made my purchase, though, there have been three major developments: Read More

It’s a miracle that people running XP/Vista can ever get anything done.  As friends of mine will know our house is all Mac except for my girlfriend’s HP notebook (which, inexplicably, doesn’t shut down when you close it… but that’s another story).  Since I’m sharing a printer, my HP OfficeJet 6200 series, from an Apple Airport Extreme connected to my home network, one would think this would have been a piece of cake.  But oh-ho!

The networking stuff used to be the hard part, but Apple’s bonjour makes it easy.  But as for installing the correct drivers, the Windows world knows no delimiters of common sense..  Two hours later I had performed the correct sequence of incantations and solved the problem so I thought I’d share the misery with you here in the hopes of saving you an hour or so.

Read More

Wired magazine has eloquently attacked the new RBK Edge jerseys which adorn every player of every team in the league as of this season, which were the mastermind of huckster Gary Bettman. They actually had the temerity to suggest that the jerseys are Bettman’s latest scheme to milk the dwindling ranks of existing hockey fans for more money — far be it from anyone to suggest that this is not technological innovation solving the ages-old problem of wind resistance slowing down hockey players!

Oh … wait … you didn’t know that wind resistance was slowing down our precious pastime? ‘Zounds, it’s true! Read More