As plans come into focus for a new roof for the Olympic stadium, cracks are being noticed in one of the key segments of the structure.
Updates from August, 2010 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Those dear folks from the Canadian revenue agency are going to audit city contracts on all of Montreal island from the last four years.
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A young man was stabbed to death in broad daylight this morning in Verdun. 25th homicide of the year, if you’re keeping count.
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zach
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Kate
Eh, it’s not me. The journalists and police are keeping count.
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The World Film Festival opens Thursday and the Gazette’s there with faint praise (“exhausted and under-attended”) from its pundits, Brendan Kelly even complaining it has no rock bands. (What?)
Le Devoir has an interview with Bille August, head of this year’s jury. La Presse has a dossier.
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Police held an evening demo last night at city hall, to welcome the first council session of the rentrée. They’re mad about cuts to the police budget.
(Which makes me wonder: who keeps an eye on a police demo to make sure they don’t get out of hand?)
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Tux
Maybe us citizens should send in some people dressed like cops to start throwing rocks and stirring up trouble…
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A new group called Montréal Ouvert is going to work at persuading the city to make much of the data it collects open and available so people can find ways of analyzing it, displaying it and making it more accessible and useful. This kind of change is promising in ways we can’t even imagine yet, with so many of us now toting mobile data devices.
It’s not mentioned in the article, but a good example of this in practice is the Bixi live data. When Bixi was first introduced and developers wrote apps to use the data to display Bixi availability in real time, at first the city wanted to close them down. I’m not sure what changed their minds, but now it’s cool and several different apps are available. Everyone wins.
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Beeg
Regarding Bixi, my memory is somewhat different. A few weeks after Bixi debuted, when it’s map was basically inaccessible on any mobile device, a private firm called Sparko created a mobile alternative using public Bixi data. Overnight, they put stickers on Bixi docks all over the city. If I recall correctly, Bixi (the private company given the mandate to run the bike-sharing system, not the City of Montreal) didn’t object to the use of their data, but to the use of their intellectual property. I’m fairly certain the website was shut down because it featured the Bixi name and logo prominently, without any prior consent. The Sparko appeared to position its web app as an official Bixi mobile service. The mobile apps that followed (Bixou, etc.) don’t violate Bixi’s copyright, and thus are permitted to scrape Bixi data and make it available to mobile phone users; some have had to change their name to avoid trademark confusion. To my knowledge, these apps all just scrape the data Bixi makes available on its website; Bixi has not issued an API.
See the comment from K at the end of this story: http://communities.canada.com/montrealgazette/blogs/tech/archive/2009/07/13/new-bixi-iphone-app-rocks-flaunts-former-takedown.aspx.
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Kate
Thanks for the clarification, Beeg!
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I feel you have one of the those clickers that bouncers use to count the number of people entering a club. Except you use it to count dead people.