In today's Globe and Mail, we have New Democrat MP Pat Martin suggesting that one effective mechanism for abolishing the Senate without amending the constitution would be to cut off its funding.

It's no secret that the NDP wants to abolish the Senate. While I don't agree with this option (and certainly don't agree with the hypocrisy surrounding minimum seat guarantees in the House), I certainly don't dispute that abolition is a legitimate alternative. What I do find interesting is that Mr. Martin's Senate reform strategy is quite similar to the Conservatives: Avoid amending the constitution, but adjust the parameters around which the Senate operates.

Hopefully while the Senate Reform Act is before the House, Mr. Martin will be cognizant of the fact that, while he may not agree with the reforms contained within those bills, he is a proponent of using parliament as the mechanism for reform. Were he to suddenly declare that a constitutional amendment is required, it would be nothing short of hypocritical.

Whether it's your Facebook identity or your Google Calendar traffic, there has been plenty of coverage lately about unencrypted information being sent to websites. What annoys the hell out of me, however, is this notion (coming from people who should know better, might I add) that these issues are only a problem if you're connecting to the internet via unsecured wi-fi.

This is complete and utter nonsense; the only thing that secured wi-fi gives you is a higher barrier to entry!

Consider this mental exercise: What happens to your data after it travels past the wi-fi access point? It needs to travel the remaining hundreds or thousands of kilometres to the website's data centre. If that information is unencrypted at the application layer (let's say via HTTP), it's just as visible by somebody intercepting it as it comes across the wire as it was over the unsecured airwaves. Wi-fi encryption is at the link layer, so it's only going to protect your data as it travels from your device to the access point; from then on, it's open season.

I don't dispute the fact that it's easier to snoop on unsecured wi-fi than it is to monitor a wired medium. What I do dispute is this ridiculous claim that securing your wireless connection or using a wired connection solves everything for you.

Avoiding unsecured wi-fi is not the solution. Using secure application layer protocols such as HTTPS is the solution.

If OCIDirPathPrepare fails with ORA-01403, check and make sure that the OCI_ATTR_SCHEMA_NAME attribute has been set on the OCIDirPathCtx handle.

If OCIDirPathColArrayToStream fails with ORA-12899, you're probably not passing in the rowcnt and rowoff values correctly. The docs aren't very clear on how to specify those two parameters, so I'll try to elaborate here a little bit:

• rowcnt should always be the number of rows that have been set in the column array, including rows that have already been sent to the stream buffer. A column array's set rows don't get cleared until you call OCIDirPathColArrayReset. If you specify a rowcnt that is too large (i.e. it includes unset rows), you may encounter errors.
• rowoff should be the row index into the column array where stream conversion should begin.