Nick Crawford

Drop Pants, Not Fees

Nick — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 20:28:20 +0000

Here is my response to several questions that have been asked regarding the Drop Pants, Not Fees event.

I think that this blog post is a perfect way of expressing how a lot of students on campus feel. I can’t add a whole lot to that, but I can reiterate a few points. One of the most important lines in this article states “I do not believe that the SFUO should have the right to represent us on a political basis”. This makes up a very large portion of my reasoning for this event. The SFUO claims the following. “The Student Federation of the University of Ottawa (SFUO) as the student union, the instrument of political action of the undergraduate student population.” This, in itself, is forcing every undergraduate student at this university to be politicaly represented by the SFUO. This goes against every possible modern human rights notion one might think of. Not only should this idea not sit well with you on a personal level, it is also a very clear violation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, as well as article 20 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states “No one may be compelled to belong to an association.”

A large portion of the students on this campus (including 93% of voting Engineering students) have made it very clear that they do not wish to be represented politically – or in any capacity – by the SFUO. By flat-out ignoring the democratic process, the SFUO shows that they have no interest in representing (or asking) what students really want. I also like Lydia’s analogy. “Let us imagine for a moment how the student body would react if they made these decisions for us in terms of religion. Imagine that our student federation spent slightly over $100,000 in a year promoting and fighting for arbitrarily chosen religious causes that don’t actually represent the beliefs of the student body whatsoever. I’m no lawyer, but that sounds like something that’s probably completely unconstitutional and not allowed, as well as just being totally rude and insensitive.”

Finally, to keep my message concise, I would like to add that I personally do not believe that the Drop Fees campaign is effective. It costs uOttawa students alone up to $600,000 every year. Imagine how much that is across Canada! It would be much more wise and economically feasible to invest this money and use it for scholarships and grants. This would make a real, constructive, and realizable impact.

Let it be clear that we are not protesting lower tuition fees, but rather, we are protesting the illegal and illegitimate actions of the SFUO in forcefully and falsely representing students on this campus.

Nicholas Crawford

New Projects

Nick — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 13:00:40 +0000

I’ve hitched on with two new start-ups: uoEvents and Toori.st. uoEvents (a public events calendar for the University of Ottawa) has launched and Toori.st (a crowd-sourcing tourism initiative) is just starting.

uoEvents has gained a lot of traction very quickly. Launch at the end of July, it has received 2300 unique hits in its first month alone. A large portion of this success is due to the launch timing. The beginning of September marks the start of the new academic year for the University of Ottawa, and of course – frosh week! Using uoEvents as a source of events, activities, and information for the incoming students has proved highly beneficial to both the students and our promotion plan.

Social media has helped tremendously. We’ve mostly been using Facebook, and although we do have a Twitter account, it hasn’t been used much. We have both a “page” and a “person”, but the uoEvents person is what is showing the best success. Students are “friending” the account to get updates through their Facebook news feed (when we set a new status). With over 350 friends, it shows that we have 15% rate of students friending us on Facebook after visiting the website – that’s incredible!

uoEvents actually started off as my “PubCal” plugin for WordPress. I took the Events-Calendar open source plugin and modified it to fit our needs. Taking someone else’s plugin and redoing it actually opened my eyes to the danger of using open source software blindly, especially WP plugins. The plugin was riddled with security holes, mostly SQL injection vulnerabilities. I fixed up the security holes, added it tons of functionality (including event tagging), made it publicly modifiable with security levels, connected to Facebook, and we were off to the races!

I think what made uoEvents so popular versus other calendars is the simplicity. To have an event posted, all you have to do is invite the uoEvents Facebook account, and it will appear on the calendar within 15 minutes (the script to check for new event invites runs every 15 minutes).

All in all, a pretty great success.

The Quest for Canadian Music Licensing

Nick — Thu, 26 May 2011 21:00:49 +0000

We are beginning a transition from YTDJ to Ryt.hm (rhytm without the h); once this transition is complete, it will mark the official non-beta launch of the service! At this point, we have obtained licensing with SOCAN and (almost obtained with) CSI for their respective online interactive streaming tariffs. We have begun attempts to contact the major Canadian music labels (SONY BMG, Universal Music, EMI/Virgin, and Warner; with the help of AVLA) to obtain the master licensing privileges.

Along with the final transition with licensing will be a remade GUI, with HTML5 support and a canvas-based player (more details on that later). I’ll post back when we’ve heard back from some of the labels. Hopefully we’ll have better luck obtaining the licensing than some of the other interactive streaming services out there!

Redirecting a domain to another local server

Nick — Fri, 20 May 2011 01:38:31 +0000

One of the reasons I decided to start a blog again (after giving up on my old one due to nothing to write about) was to document the various problems and solutions I have run into. A lot of the time, system administration can be overwhelmingly frustrating, but there’s likely a simple solution.

In this case, it’s hard to explain the problem in brief other than “redirecting a domain to another local server”. Basically, here was the scenario. I have one IP. Both my room mate and I have our own web server boxes, and we both want outside access to our respective websites through port 80 (the standard, default port). With only a standard wireless router, the solution wasn’t obvious. This is going to assume you know the basics of VirtualHosts (and that you have set the NameVirtualHost *:80 directive).

We decided to make one box the “master” (let’s give it an IP of 192.168.0.1) and the other the “slave” (192.168.0.2). So, on the router, forward port 80 to 192.168.0.1. Now, on the master box, we can make use of VirtualHosts. In knowing that the first VirtualHost that is defined will be the default (if no other VirtualHost matches, the first defined VHost is used), we can allow all domain names that aren’t applicable to the master to forward on to the slave.



 ProxyPass / http://192.168.0.2/
 ProxyPassReverse / http://192.168.0.2/
 ProxyPreserveHost On

Notice the “ProxyPreserveHost On” directive. This is important if your slave box needs to support multiple domains. This was where I struggled. If this directive is not set to “on” (default is “off”), then the slave server will receive “192.168.0.2″ as the host and will be unable to differentiate between domains (such as “OtherDomain.com” versus “OtherDomain.ca”).

If you set this as the first “VirtualHost” on your master server, then you can follow it with all the VirtualHosts corresponding to domains on the master server. All domains that aren’t defined on the master server (in the VirtualHost blocks after the first one) will be forwarded to the slave server.

On the slave server, you can just set up the VirtualHosts as your normally would. Below is an example.



 ServerName SomeSlaveDomain.com
 ServerAlias www.SomeSlaveDomain.com
 DocumentRoot /srv/www/htdocs/SomeSlaveDomain
 ServerAdmin me@myemail.com
 
  AllowOverride None
  Order allow,deny
  Allow from all