At the beginning of the week, I was volunteering at an AI/GI/CRV conference, so I didn’t get very much work done on the module at that point. It was a very interesting conference, lots of fascinating talks, and I worked hard for the conference.

As of Thursday, the conference was finished, and I set about working on the problems plaguing me from last week. After awhile, I decided it would be a better idea to step back, rewrite the code, from a simpler base, and get that working first.

Before, I had been trying to have a PyMovie struct, and three stream structs, for audio, video, and subtitles. However, this was proving to be more complex than I had thought. So now, its all one struct, and I’ve come up with a new design, based on ffmovie.c in the repository that does not use the SDL_Event loop. That was my other realization, that I had to avoid the event loop, and the new design works around it.

It took me one day to rewrite a new base of code, that was smaller, simpler, and easier to hold in my head, get it to a state of compilation, and it works on import. 90% of the initialization of a new Movie object works, and it throws a segfault at the last portion, which I will now be spending time figuring out.

Edit: Per the request of a commenter:

My branch is available at svn://seul.org/svn/pygame/branches/tylerthemovie

I just observed the real world effect of how reputation management or the lack thereof can help or hinder your company. In Kelowna, there are several competing cab companies, but the two big ones are Checkmate Cabs and Kelowna Taxi.

Unfortunately, Kelowna Taxi has been unpredictable, unreliable, and often rude to me in the past. They’ve missed me on the street, got addresses mixed up, treated me rudely on the phone when the cab I was promised in 20 minutes failed to materialize within an hour, and so on.

In contrast, Checkmate has always been excellent, polite, and prompt.

So, at the current conference I have volunteered for, its the last day, and people are asking for a taxi cab number to get to the airport. So, I heartily endorse Checkmate, and thats the number that gets posted. I have effectively given Checkmate an almost monopoly on hundreds of conference attendees, all because of their excellent treatment of one person.

This is what companies miss: Every Customer Matters.

Okay, so its near the end of the first week of development. Its been an exciting week, learning the ins and outs of python module development.

First, I have code that compiles, links, and can be successfully imported. However, no movie objects are created, there’s a bug somewhere that causes it to return a None object to me. All the code is in svn.

To successfully compile the code, one needs the ffmpeg-0.5 package of source code. In there, follow this process:

1. ./configure –enable-shared –prefix=”/usr”
2. make
3. make install
4. cd libswscale/
5. make
6. make install

This will install the libraries and headers into the /usr directory if you are on Linux.

Then(assuming you have all the other dependencies, see here):

1. download the branch of source-code, at svn://seul.org/svn/pygame/branches/tylerthemovie
2. ./configure
3. python setup.py build
4. python setup.py install

And thats it! Of course, like I said, it is not yet really operational yet. I will be fixing this bug.

In addition, I will be spending some time over the weekend and up to Wednesday helping out with the local AI/CG/CRV conference hosted by UBC-Okanagan.

So this morning, I decided to test the parodies on shows like SNL and Simpsons about how easy it is to get ordained as a minister online. Apparently its ridiculously easy.

I typed in to Google, “ordained minister”, and got a bunch of search results leading me to various websites.

I filled out a few forms, and I am now the proud ordained minister of not one, not two, but four churches.

Churches:

• Universal Life Church
• Spiritual Humanism (Not legal in Canada)
• Temple of Earth
• Church of Dude-ism

The reason Spiritual Humanism isn’t legal in Canada is because it is not recognized as a religion, because it does not worship a deity.

Fill out the forms, print out the certifications(or pay in the case of Spiritual Humanism). I did find about 3-4 more sites that asked money before ordination would be done, and decided not to send money to some random site on the internet.

As Dan of compsci.ca points out, most places in Canada still won’t accept these certificates, but it depends on which province you are in. Get familiar with the marriage laws for your area before you perform a ceremony.

Frankly, the ease of the ordination makes an unfortunate mockery of real ordained ministers that have studied for years and worked hard to achieve their title. Such organizations cheapen the title “Reverend” and whatever else they wish to put before your name.

Edit: As Troff asked, there is now a link to Spiritual Humanism. And I was mistaken, it wasn’t transhumanism, but humanism.

Disclaimer: This is a political post, concerned primarily with the politics of BC, Canada. If you don’t care, don’t read. You have been warned.

The BC provincial election is now over; the votes have been counted, and the losers have slunk away licking their wounds. But there is a certain problem. We also had a referendum. This referendum was about using Single Transferable Vote as the electoral system, rather than First-Past-The-Post.  STV was unfortunately defeated, meaning we will have the same old, same old. No proportional representation, no fairness, nothing of the kind. I’d be okay with it, because it was decided by democracy.

Except for one factor: the no-stv side lied. Repeatedly. Continuously. They posted ads in all the major provincial papers, half-page ads. I saw it, and reading it, I felt something wrong. I had an immediate sense that they were lying, but about what. The logic didn’t seem right. So I investigated the facts of the matter. I read wikipedia, I learned about STV, and I checked the facts the ad proclaims.

They claim that STV would remove local accountability. They were wrong.

Each new, larger riding, would have a maximum of 7 MLAs up for running, with a maximum of 350,000 registered voters. The number of ridings would be approximately 20, down from 85. They specifically say  “You would no longer have a local MLA responsible for issues in your riding – instead there would be a committee of MLAs for a much larger area – and none could be held to account.” This is a leap of faith. They don’t show how such an arrangement would constitute a committee. They don’t say why none could be held to account, relying instead on people’s fear of committees and people’s perception of politicians as slimy. You will see that they self-contradict themselves later on the second point in the ad. There is absolutely no evidence that either of those things would happen, and they give us none.

Rather, the situation is more likely to be that if a riding contains several cities or towns, like the Okanagan riding would have, then each city would offer a large amount of support to the MLA from that city. In fact, that is the politically smart strategy, to have MLAs from one party campaign for support in concentrated areas, with some campaigning outside. This means then that they can get some second votes and third votes outside of their area, as people have a tendency to vote along party lines, rather than for individuals.

As to accountability, what is to prevent the people of the riding from not electing the MLA again? They completely ignore that concept.

They claim that the voter will never know where their vote went. Wrong.

The ad specifically says this: “And the complicated STV system chops votes into fractions – you may never know where your vote went.” (Emphasis theirs) Again, no proof. It is a leap of faith. They mention fractions, attempting to scare people with the idea of complex math.  STV doesn’t chop your vote into fractions. They lied, and anyone that takes the time to understand the system can see that they lied. To put it simply, you know exactly where your vote went. If your #1 vote went to the first candidate elected in your riding, as an example, then your #2 vote, if you made one, would then be counted for that person, in addition to all the #1 votes they received. If that candidate has enough votes, then all of the #2 votes of the people that voted #1 for them, and all of the #3 votes of the people that voted #2 for them, would go to the respective candidates.  You know exactly what happens. The process continues for every winning candidate in your riding.

To make this clearer, lets say we have six candidates in the riding, A, B, C, D, E, and F. You vote for A, and they recieved enough votes to be elected. If you voted for F as #2, then your vote is also counted for F. If doing this allows F to recieve enough votes to be elected, then all of the secondary and tertiary votes for F would be given to their respective candidates. Again, you will know exactly what happened. The no-stv lobby tries to scare people, via intimations of fractions, which you can see are patently false.

They claim that other areas under STV don’t elect as many women as FPTP does. Wrong.

They quote that Ireland and Malta, which use STV don’t elect many women, implying that this is the fault of STV. They ignore issues of sexism, or the cultural roles of women in those countries. In addition, they claim only two places use STV. I will address that in a bit. Yes, Ireland has an low amount of women in office. But they fail to address that until very recently, the number of women in office in the United States of America was 13% ; the same as Ireland’s percentage. The two countries use different electoral systems, and yet the percentages are the same. By omitting this very relevant fact, they try to make it sound like under STV, people are more biased. This fails a basic test of logic: how does the electoral system make people more biased, or let more bias through? It can’t. It has absolutely no relation to sexism. The system does not affect the rate of sexism… people affect the rate of sexism.

(Useful reference about politics, ireland, and women:  WOMEN IN POLITICS IN IRELAND, NORTH AND SOUTH, Yvonne Galligan )

They claim only two places have implemented STV. Wrong.

The ad claims that only Ireland and Malta have implemented STV. This is wrong. According to Wikipedia, which has all the references you need to double-check this, STV has been implemented in Ireland, Malta, the UK, Scotland, Australia, Tasmania, New Zealand, and the United States! Even the Academy Awards, the Oscars, are decided by STV. In most of the listed countries, STV is used for state/provincial, municipal, or for a specific house of government. Again, no-stv lied.

I’m going to skip a few more erroneous statements, as this post is already over 1000 words, and skip to a couple more.

They claim that the farther from the legislature one gets, the more votes needed to get there. Wrong.

This again, fails simple logic. It is fear mongering. For reference, what they said exactly was this: “Under STV, in Victoria, candidates need only 12.5% of the vote to be elected, but in Dawson Creek 33% and in Prince George 25%. Thats simply not fair! The farther you are from the legislature, the more votes it takes to get you there.” How does this work by logic? They appear to have cherry-picked regions far out in the province with smaller populations, versus Victoria, with a very large population. If we examine the math, which anyone that has passed Grade 9 math can do, then we see where they got their numbers from.

STV uses a quota system to determine the percentage of votes needed to elect a candidate in one of the large STV ridings. Lets take the maximum sample, 7 MLAs, with 350,000 voters. We’ll assume all the voters come out and vote, but as we all know, that doesn’t ever happen. The quota equation is (votes/(seats+1)) +1. That means to be elected, a candidate needs 43,751 votes. This works out to 12.5% of the vote. If we have a riding with 100,000 people, and only 3 seats, then the percentage of votes needed would be 25%! They cherry-picked areas, and made optimistic assumptions for some, and pessimistic assumptions for other areas. They lied. They cherry-picked specific areas, and ran the math, and twisted it for an assertion that is patently false. As an example, in the Okanagan riding under STV, a candidate would need 12.5% of the vote, just like in Victoria, except that Okanagan is hours away from the legislature. This defeats their assertion.

They claim because all of these different groups oppose STV that STV is obviously bad for everyone. Wrong.

They quote NDP, Green, BC Liberal, BC Conservative, BC Refederation, and non-aligned voters as being groups opposed to STV. This is wrong. Individual members of those organizations came out against STV. The no-stv group used these individual statements and conflated them with entire groups, trying to make the stv side sound like they are against everyone else.

Why would no-stv lie, so many times? Why would they falsely conflate individual opinions with a group’s opinion? Why do they feel that they need to lie to defend first past the post? Why do they feel its right to deceive the population of BC, treat them like idiots that are scared of math, and get away with it? The no-stv group has perpetrated a large fraud on the people of BC, and we fell for it. I hereby ask, any politicians that read this, any grassroots campaigners, to work hard for the next four years to change the laws on political ads about referendums. Campaign for truth, even in that small category. We need it.