TransIT – Information to Improve Transportation

Democratization of Data:
Massachusetts Shares Transit Information in a Publicly Accessible Database
http://www.linuxinsider.com/rsstory/67891.html?wlc=1250687478

Here is an excerpt:
Massachusetts is inviting developers to integrate public transportation information into applications for mobile devices by sharing its code and background data on the state’s official Web site. The move will be an efficient way for the state to provide citizens with easier ways to access directions, bus and train schedules, and transportation routes.

Creative Commons License. Photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/denmar/118562264/

It makes me think of the site:
http://myttc.ca
…which is not an official site. It is better than anything the TTC has in terms of helping somebody navigate the system for the first time.

A rider being confident about how to get where he or she is going before departing will enable the TTC to lure new riders who were previously sitting on the fence. If the routes are presented via GPS coordinates in an open database, then overlays could be made for almost any navigation software or GPS device.

Doing the Math…

xkcd.com - Purity

A year ago, sitting on the commuter train from the suburbs to go to work downtown in the city, I used to listen to some Stars songs from the album “Set Yourself on Fire”. One of the lyrics, “20 years of sleep, before we sleep forever…” inspired me to apply some math and logic to some very obvious parts of my life (and also, more recently, the TV show Numb3rs).

One idea I had was to try to list all of the traits of a romantic partner and then determine how many eligible women live in Toronto… to figure out my odds of encountering someone with whom I could carry on a long-term, monogamous relationship (something I seek; but cannot find). For example, I seek someone who is: female,  single, age appropriate, carrying no STIs and otherwise physically well, post-secondary education and/or employed, ideally a Taurus, Virgo, or Aquarian (I didn’t think I was superstitious; but I am a Virgo… and I accidentally discovered a predisposition in my patterns of attraction that seems to reinforce astrological voodoo mumbo-jumbo), wants to get bizzay to the same degree of freakiness and frequency as I want to, and so on. I am still going to have to take a peek at StatsCan to get some numbers to start with. For now, I will leave you with the following:

xkcd.com - fermirotica

How much time do I have to really live?

If I estimate 75 years old to be the limit of my ‘capable’ time on earth… then…

There are 657450 hours in 75 years, based on 356.25 days per year. If I slept for 7 hours a day, I’d sleep for 191756.25 of those hours. That leaves 465693.75 hours. I am already 28 years old, leaving 291834.75 hours to be alive and awake.

Of those remaining hours, I will probably work at least another 32 years until I am 60 at an average of 2000 hours per year for 64000 hours. I am down to 227834.75 hours before I have gotten into my chores, meals, and daily routine.

Let’s estimate 1 hour per day for showering, brushing teeth, flossing, fussing, other bathroom functions, getting dressed, and getting undressed and undoing all of that stuff at night before bed. That will account for 17166.75 of my remaining hours, leaving 210668 hours free.

How about 2 hours a week of laundry and another 2 hours a week of shopping? That’s 4888 hours in my remaining 47 years. Now 205780 hours are left.

Commuting! It is currently a 20 minute walk each way, which I think is a lot less than the average. That makes for 5333 hours in my 32 remaining working years. The tally is at 200446.66 hours to live life.

Making food, eating food, and cleaning up after cooking must surely count for an average 2 hours per day or 34333.5 hours in 47 years, at least.

166113.16 hours are all that I have left… that is 6921 days.. 989 weeks… or just under 19 years to find somebody great, build a relationship, have a family, play with my kids, snap some photographs, have sex, sleep-in, read, watch TV, surf the net, try to have riveting conversations and debates, relax in an armchair with three fingers of Johnny Blue and a fresh Monte Cristo No. 2.

Chocolate and Chili

I do not eat a lot of chocolate; but lately I have been noticing the presence of chocolate bars with chili flavourings in some of the local stores. As far as I know, the combination of cacao and chili flavourings is a recipe originating from indiginous South Americans. The Aztecs and Mayans used to combine the flavours in hot drinks.

Back in the spring of 2004, I had gelato in Firenze, Italia that was chocolate/chili flavoured and delicious. The bittersweet flavours of dark cacao came first, and as each spoonful melted it delivered a delayed and lingering hint of spiciness. Not too hot; but just enough bite to notice. Since that time, I have been tortured by the wonderful memory of a flavour seemingly unavailable in my home in Toronto, Canada… perhaps until now…

Streaming Media Player with 1080p output for under $200

I have been researching video playback devices for quite some time, looking for one that can stream files over a network as well as play videos at 1080p resolutions. Other important criteria were that it have wireless control, be quiet or fanless, and as inexpensive as possible.

I began evaluating the PlayStation 3; but it lacks the ability to playback h.264 encoded Matroska MKV files. In fact, most media players will be compatible with DivX, XviD, and MPEG-2 videos; but hardly any of them were capable of playing back MKV files or h.264 encoded HD content.

Then came the Popcorn Hour and other Networked Media Tank-based players (HDX1080). They met all the technical criteria; but with $300+ price tags.

Enter the Western Digital WD TV player. For $120+tax CAD, out of the box, it can play 1080p video including MKV files. It has 2 USB ports to connect external hard disks to; but it has no stock network streaming capability. There are HDMI, optical audio, and composite audio/video outputs (so you can connect to an old non-HD set). It is tiny – not much larger than an external hard drive. It is quiet because there are no moving parts, and it has very low power consumption – somewhere well under 40w max, when playing back video.

With this hack from B-RAD, it can use a USB ethernet adapter. I suggest the following WIRED ethernet adapters (there is no working wireless solution that is fast enough at this time):

Get the TrendNet TU2-ET100 (should be ~$28).

Or have FutureShop or BestBuy price match $28.99 for the Apple USB Ethernet Adapter (regularly $49.95)

**Update May 13, 2009: I have tried and tested the wdlxtv hack and it works as advertised. Please note that I have the Apple USB2.0 Ethernet Adapter and I can stream a video file that is a movie (roughly 90min) sized 4.5GB or less. I have tried a movie that was over 6GB in size and the player stuttered in streaming it over CIFS. I suspect you would require an NFS share or that you are better off copying it to a USB drive to obtain a higher transfer bitrate in those cases.

 

Campaign for Democratic Media

I received this message today, from the Campaign for Democratic Media:

STAND UP FOR AN OPEN INTERNET

In an exciting move, the CRTC is seeking to engage the public in an online consultation regarding what Canadians want from their Internet. Your input will help shape the upcoming hearings on Internet traffic management practices.

http://ISPpractices.Econsultation.ca/

More than 11,000 of you submitted your comments by the February deadline. Now the federal telecommunications regulator is putting forth a series of questions that it would like Canadians to answer.

This is a great chance for all of us to let the CRTC know that we need an open Internet that isn’t controlled by big telecoms. We only have a few days left before the consultation is closed. Get in on the conversation:

http://ISPpractices.Econsultation.ca/

Need to know more? Find some background information here: SaveOurNet.ca

Also be sure to check out the raging online discussions happening on Youtube, Facebook and Twitter. And stay tuned for a series of open Internet “town hall events” in several cities across Canada.

Bell Canada – Squeezing out the Competition

Firstly, everybody in Canada should be informed that there are competitors to Rogers, Bell, and Telus in the market of Internet Service Provision. These competitors sublease bandwidth from Bell to provide DSL service. In most cases, they provide this connectivity for prices $10 – 30 less per month, than the big 3 ISPs.

I personally use Acanac, and have at least 5 friends who have been using Acanac for years. They have a promotional rate of $18.95/month for DSL if you prepay for your first year. That comes to under $230/year for 5mbps DSL service.

Teksavvy and Micro-Works are other DSL providers with lower prices than Bell and Rogers.

Read the CBC news Articles linked here:

http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/04/14/bell-unlimited-download.html

http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/04/15/bell-no-unlimited.html

When network infrastructure is in place to handle certain amounts of bandwidth, it does not cost the network operator more money to transmit or receive more signals. Additionally, the information itself does not carry a financial burden to the network operator dependent on the volume copied. They have no rights to claim in terms of charging the consumer for any content consumed – that is an issue for copyright holders, not ISPs.

We as consumers are already charged for bandwidth – the rate/speed of throughput possible on the network. This is a reasonable charge because network throughput is limited by network infrastructure. In turn, throughput multiplied by time gives a ‘natural cap’.

For example: 5 mbps x 86,400 seconds in a day = 432,000 megabits maximum transfer (or about 52.7 Gigabytes per day) To additionally impose a total transfer cap of 60 Gigabytes means that if a subscriber has purchased a 5 mbps connection from the ISP, they are effectively getting a little less than 1.154 days worth of use.

In other words, Bell is trying to sell you a 5 mbps connection for $40/month; but you can only actually transfer 1/30th of the data the network is supposed to be capable of delivering. If you buy a 5 mbps connection from Bell, it is actually a 0.1667 mbps connection with a 5mbps burst rate. Their network must be built to only accommodate 1/30th of the network traffic that they have oversold.

Host-to-Storage SAN Connectivity Best Practices

Originally uploaded by a virtual unknown

• A SAN fabric is the analogous equivalent to a LAN and is made up of one or more SAN Switches
• A zone is analogous to a VLAN – every Host to SAN Disk Array connection is placed in its own individual zone, on each SAN fabric – therefore even though a switch is employed, storage ports cannot observe other storage ports and host ports cannot observe other host ports – all connections are logically point-to-point
• An HBA (Host Bust Adapter) is the SAN’s analogous equivalent to a network interface card for a LAN – in fact SANs and HBAs can support TCP/IP traffic; but storage communications use different protocols
• All storage addressing on a SAN is done by Port WWN which is the analogous equivalent to a MAC address
• Two (2) separate SAN fabrics exist to provide redundancy for all connections
• Each SAN Disk Array has at least one (1) connection to each SAN fabric
• Each LUN/virtualized disk is presented out by SAN Disk Array through both fabrics
• A host must have two (2) or more HBA ports per SAN Disk Array that it accesses storage from – if a host accesses storage from two (2) different arrays, then four (4) HBA ports must be available on the host
• At least one (1) host HBA connection to each of two (2) separate SAN fabrics is made from the host to the switch, for each SAN Disk Array that a host accesses storage from
• Multi-path storage drivers must be installed on the host (on some platforms, this is a function built-in to the OS) to provide failover or load-balance capabilities for LUN access through multiple paths – it is this MPIO driver that recognizes redundant paths and presents them to the OS as just a single disk/LUN

WordPress thoughts

So I was invited to write on this blog-space and of course I first had to create an account.  Not a big deal but I did notice a couple of interesting things while signing up.

First of all I have two alias’ I usually use on the Internet.  When trying to register my account I was told that the login name was already taken, like most sites I had the option of resetting the account.  Now I’m pretty sure I’ve never registered an account on WordPress before but for fun I decided to see if my e-mail address was already in the system (I don’t know why it would be but I digress).  On the password reset page I noticed I could reset my password by supplying either my username or e-mail address.  I slapped in the old e-mail address and was told that it wasn’t in the system.  Alright that’s good I hadn’t gotten drunk, registered a WP account and blogged while loaded, what a relief.  Now, since my account name is pretty unique I decided to try to submit the username and see if a reset e-mail was sent to one of my older e-mail accounts.  Throwing in the username and bam!  This username is not registered!  Hmm interesting does this mean there’s already an account or not?  This must be investigated later as I really would like the original account name.

Moving on, I registered using the second alias I use and the registration process was pretty straight forward until I had to confirm my account creation through the e-mail address I provided.  Imagine to my surprise when I clicked on the link to activate the account and my username and password were presented to me in plaintext on an unencrypted webpage.  cringe, thankfully I don’t use generic passwords.

I’m sure this has been noticed before but I’m not a fan of this system.  It means that WordPress is storing my password in cleartext on their backend system.  What’s wrong with MD5′ing the password and storing the hash???? This would at least make it a bit more difficult to guess passwords if the system ws compromised, and how many people use the same username and password for every account the set up.  double cringe.

Left 4 Dead – splitscreen on the PC w Logitech Cordless RumblePad2

I am an off-again/on-again gamer and it has been since before 2003 that I had my latest video-gaming stint.

A friend recently introduced me to Left 4 Dead on the Xbox360 a couple of weeks ago, and it was a great time blasting zombies away in two-player cooperative split-screen mode.  There was only one problem: I don’t have a gaming console, I have computers.

So I first searched for gaming controllers for the PC. I had heard that the Xbox360 controllers can be used with a PC (and Left 4 Dead for the PC comes pre-configured to work with such a controller); but I came across the Logitech Cordless RumblePad2 for a much lower price (by making FutureShop match the lowest price on my search of ShopBot.ca)  and bought 2 of them.

If you are having different problems with Left 4 Dead, and need help – check out the Left 4 Dead forums here.

The Logitech controller comes with Wingman Profiler software that allows you to customize and remap joystick axes and buttons to any keyboard, mouse, or game controller command. The ability to program an analog joystick to control the mouse makes it possible to use a RumblePad2 for any first-person perspective shooter (fps) game. Good enough to prevent me from needing to get a console like an Xbox, PS3, or Wii for my very light gaming needs.

To my dismay, when I got myself a copy of Left 4 Dead for the PC, I learned that it does not officially support two-player split-screen out of the box (read on to find out how to enabled this feature)

Back from Vegas…

Originally uploaded by a virtual unknown

It’s been a while since I’ve written on this dealio, and I thought that my trip to Las Vegas to the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show would be a good way to get back into the swing of things.