I was searching for a free Visio-like product today and luckily came across this great website that lists open source software alternatives to commercial products:

The site allows you to browse through various software categories and compare pros and cons of both commercial products and open source software.

The editor of this site, Anders Ingeman Rasmussen, boldly states in a sort of fortune cookie way: If you want success, open source is the way to go.

Who knew the answer was so simple… . . . [more]

On April 1st, 2008, a couple of significant pieces of legislation came into effect in Nova Scotia, no foolin’. Firstly, Nova Scotia became the first jurisdiction in the country to ban smoking in vehicles when children are present. More specifically, by Chapter 54 of S.N.S. 2007 amending S.N.S. 2002, c.12

1. Section 5 of Chapter 12 of the Acts of 2002, the Smoke-free Places Act, as amended by Chapter 59 of the Acts of 2005, is further amended by adding immediately after subsection (2) the following subsection:
(2A) No person shall smoke in a motor vehicle when any person under

The Ontario Court of Appeal has gone off the air. Video coverage of certain appeals, which started last September (see Ontario Court of Appeal is Webcasting on Slaw) has apparently stopped and, more’s the pity, the archive of past hearings has gone. There’s nothing on the webcasting page now except the promises you have to make to get admitted to the screening room.

Watching a court of appeal in action is hardly up there with a viewing of the Sopranos or Six Feet Under, but it has its own attractions, and it would be a shame if the project was . . . [more]

The first video gaming research symposium at the University of Toronto will be taking place as follows:

Tuesday May 13th 2008
8 am – 4 pm

40 St. George Street
Bahen Centre for Information and Technology
University of Toronto
Room 1190

Video gaming incorporates and impacts cutting edge research in the fields of computer science, engineering, sociology, management and law. We are delighted to present a broad array of research projects that are representative of the breadth of work underway at the University of Toronto.

The presentations will focus on the technical aspects of video game design and then consider

I’d like to thank Dominic Jaar for firing up this new screencast on tracking new decisions on CanLII using RSS. The website Dominic uses is called Feedity. A great tool BTW…

I wrote a post back in 1996 on how to scrape cases using Feedtier, the web-predecessor to Feedity. Same software, same technique. But this time you get a great full size movie on how to do it!

Nice work Dominic! . . . [more]

James Hogarth has provided a summary, “How to buy a standard in 10 days“, of the process by which Microsoft’s Open Office XML was approved as an ISO standard (subject to an appeal, as Groklaw notes.) I wonder how many lawyers were involved. . . . [more]

The case of Q. (P.) c. L. (A.), Quebec Superior Court, concerns a claim by a father for damages against his former wife and the mother of his children, based on the fact that she made unfounded allegations of improper sexual touching of their two young daughters against him. The catchlines in 52 C.C.L.T. (3d), 242, say in part, “… Mother’s vindictive behaviour and untimely fashion in which she launched infernal machine against father constituted civil faults for which she was liable”. I cannot find the phrase which was translated into “infernal ma-chine” in the reasons for judgment, though . . . [more]

Times Online has a nice little piece from an interview of Rosemary Martin, the new chief executive of The Practical Law Company, in which Ms Martin argues that law firms will need to change the way they do business, and in particular move away from charging by the hour.

“The clients have been supine,” Martin says crisply. That may be about to change if she has her way. “For the past 25 years lawyers have largely resisted changes. My goal is not to make lawyers poorer but I do want to make law firms more productive and effective.” If

The US SEC website finally has RSS feeds. There’s one for the latest filings received and processed, and one for press releases issued by the SEC.

Thanks to Dealbreaker for noticing. . . . [more]

Scribd is a free service that lets you put your document or image files online, where they are available to the public. Now Scribd is offering to scan your print documents and put those online — for free. You mail in your documents, wait some weeks, and then enjoy your words in pixels. Even accounting for the fact that Scribd is in complete charge of the project and so can move as slowly and as selectively as it wishes, this is a remarkable offer.

…and it got me wondering: would this be a good way to put public domain case . . . [more]

Earlier this week, the President of the Treasury Board tabled the 2008-09 Reports on Plans and Priorities in the House of Commons on behalf of 93 federal departments and agencies.

The 2008-09 Reports on Plans and Priorities (RPPs) are departmental expenditure plans that elaborate on the information contained in the 2008-09 Main Estimates tabled on February 28, 2008.

These RPPs set out departmental priorities, provide performance measurement indicators, and explain a department’s expected results.

The 2008-2009 RPP for the Supreme Court of Canada is included in the list.

One of the big priorities is “court modernization” which includes:

• modernization of

After enjoying years of solid success thanks to its PDF technology, one of the technologies warmly embraced by lawyers, and what must be the number two piece of software in the world, Photoshop, Adobe has begun to move. Google builds a castle in the clouds out of plain boards and fittings, a trifle ramshackle-seeming but for that reason also unthreatening: hey, this is how you’d do it, if you could, honest, simple — not like that pseudo slick Disneyesque Microsoft machine.

Meanwhile, Adobe, having acquired Macromedia and its all-important Flash, has begun to construct its own set of computing in . . . [more]