Landed

Posted on October 7, 2007 by Arthur

I must Flight 861 has landedadmit that Halifax International Airport (or Stanfield International Airport as it is called nowadays) has changed for the better in some parts: The observation deck is one of them. We were right in time to see Alfons’ plane land and taxi to gate 24, which is right on the left in that photo above. The plane was right on schedule too: there’s a couple of monitors downstairs (and on the ground level) that show locations of airplanes flying towards and from the airport, and in this case, at the time of our arrival, we discovered that flight 861 was already somewhere above Cape Breton.

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Heathrow, sucks and then II

Posted on October 5, 2007 by Arthur

Talking Heathrow inside from plane or outsideabout Heathrow (previously), I just read this October 4th Boing-Boing entry about that very same airport. Hey, lets share that pain when flying via Heathrow!

The lines are like something out of the ninth pit of hell, especially in the Virgin terminal, and the rules about carry-ons and so forth keep getting more and more inhospitable.

It’s those rules about the carry-ons that got me pissed off too: I had a laptop bag on my back and a camera bag on my shoulder and was tagged by security personnel, who told me that I had to put the small bag in the laptop bag. Obviously, the camera bag didn’t fit in the laptop bag. However, I was able to strap the camera bag on one side of the laptop bag and eventually made it back in the slow moving crowd.

I have nicknamed it “The George Orwell Theme Park” because of that horrible, horrible security queue.

Queue? It’s queues. The only entertaining parts of these queues are the ‘Guess What Laptop I have’-game and ‘Guess what nation I come from’-game, that is, whenever people took out their laptops out of the bags or their passports out of their pockets (this is also where I discovered that most Canadians apparently were into Toshiba laptops)

December 2006: Passengers forced to queue outside in tents in freezing conditions after dense fog grounded 40% of all flights [ed. this is from the link mentioned below].

I think I mentioned before that when I flew back to Holland, there were already doubts if my connecting flight was actually going to take off or not: It was a couple of days before Christmas, and Heathrow was in a lock down because of heavy fog. I was told I probably had to prepare myself for a run or an ‘airport stay-over’. The moment I landed on Heathrow, all I remember seeing was an airport in chaos, line-ups and people running around trying to catch their last flight(s) to Continental Europe.

Back to that Boing-Boing posting: I see that the British Competition Commission has warned the (Spanish) operator of Heathrow to do something about the unacceptable delays because of long security lineups. For some kind of reason it comforts me that I wasn’t the only person going through pains to make it to my connecting flight.

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Heathrow, sucks and then

Posted on October 4, 2007 by Arthur

You know that you went too far giving instructions about ‘Heathrow’, ‘flying by plane’ or ‘entering no-mans-land called Customs’, when you become aware that the instructee is a actually a regular flyer too. OK. Then. No worries. Safe flight.

That said, it brought up those good and bad memories about flying via Heathrow, an experience I have complained a-many times about (With! Pictures!). But I don’t want this item to be all about Heathrow: There’s one good thing about traveling to Europe and that is, that it invites improvisation. I was reminded of this after reading Peter Rukavina’s posting about ‘First time Europe’ a couple of weeks ago. He says:

Book a room for your first and last night. And then leave the rest to chance. Of course this is more difficult if you’re traveling in the heart of the season to a popular place. But if you’re in the off-season you’ll almost never have a problem finding a room, even if you show up in a new city at 4:00 p.m.

I dare to add to that, don’t let your local travel agent book for you, just do it yourself: Most hotels in Europe do have a web presence and can be reached by phone (and fax). Hotel personnel in Western European countries speak perfect English1 and are willing to hold your room without even asking for your credit card, as long as you check-in before 5 PM. This is even true for 5 star hotels.

For your flight, consider flying to a different location and travel by train to your original destination. In most cases, flying directly to (say Amsterdam) can be more expensive than flying to Frankfurt first and taking the train from there to Amsterdam. In Europe, traveling by train (and even by bus) is always a great experience. However, always (as Peter suggests and I agree with that) travel light.

1Talking about perfect English: When sleeping over in an Amsterdam hotel for my flight back home to Canada this year, I had a Dutch hotel employee give me a wake-up call in English. This was so funny, that I had to laugh after answering the call.

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The Duh

Posted on October 3, 2007 by Arthur

I think I saw the announcement of the new Boing-Boing TV on MetaFilter or Reddit, I can’t remember (Oh wait, it was via Laughing Squid). I generally have no problems with videocasts (For example, I always enjoyed watching ‘Rocketboom with Amanda Congdon’ and ‘Ze Frank’), but the show produced by Boing-Boing was not something I could bear longer than one minute. I also know why: it smells ‘over-produced’, thanks to that ‘glossy soft-focus’ look. Yeah, ‘over-produced’ sounds like the right word.

Hey: Microsoft announced their Zune 2.0s. The only real killer feature of the Zune is the wireless connection feature, which allows Zune users (limited) filesharing. And talking about Microsoft, I hear that they plan to release .Net code under (Microsoft’s specific) Reference License (which falls under the company’s Shared Source Initiative, which allows you to view the sources but not to copy and ‘recompile’ them). Read the Slashdot thread.

And to top it off, at CBC’s there’s an excellent discussion (and a podcast) about the HPV vaccine.

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Weatherwise (and other news)

Posted on October 2, 2007 by Arthur

We’re going through some sort of ‘heatspell’ (if you can call it that way) with temperatures ‘clocking around’ the 20 degrees. Which is generally good, but then, the temperature has been going down fast at night: a couple of nights ago, the thermometer hit -1 degrees Celsius. Time for the trees to drop their leafs.

Last week, a couple of items got my attention: First there was the Carol Anne Gotbaum case (over at the Gothamist): a 45 year old woman died while in police custody. The only reason why I mention this is because it reads like something surreal. Apparently you can kill yourself when you’re handcuffed. Don’t try this at home.

You may have heard about the Blackwater incident but the real story seems to be in the details: employees who by accident kill Iraqi guards and then get flown out with the State Department’s consent. Or, what about that story on Blackwater employees linked to the Pentagon.

On a lighter note, RawStory also has an AFP story about this year’s hurricane season: Forecasters predict that two Atlantic hurricanes will form in the remainder of the hurrican season (which ends at and around November 30th). It has been a rough ride for Mexico this year, I hear.

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Me count(*)

Posted on September 25, 2007 by Arthur

I just finished upgrading to WordPress 2.3: so, curious as any developer would be, I took a look in the WordPress database definitions and noticed that three new tables were added. All of them take care of categories and (the new) tagging system. This means, Wp_Cat is out and has been replaced with wp_terms: the actual distinction (i.e., which terms is a category and which one is a tag) is now made in the the wp_term_taxonomy table.

I have issues with that last table because it has a count column (to track the number of posts). This is the second table that has a count column (earlier): I mentioned before that version 2.0 introduced a comment_count in the wp_posts table. Why not make use of the regular aggregate functions (like the standard COUNT(*))? After all, these aggregates are generally highly optimized functions (written in C) for tables with the same primary key(s). Also, as a good database designer, during database design you should take the use of aggregate functions in account when setting up your tables structure.

Notice that count of posts for a tag/category can be done simply by:

select count(*),
p.term_taxonomy_id,
q.taxonomy,
t.name
from wp_term_relationships p,
wp_term_taxonomy q,
wp_terms t
where p.term_taxonomy_id
= q.term_taxonomy_id
and q.term_id = t.term_id
group by p.term_taxonomy_id,
q.taxonomy, t.name

Sure: a query on that same table with that count column may look as easy as ‘select count from wp_term_taxonomy’, but remember, it (always) takes an extra write to put a number in that table (via a regular UPDATE). If your transaction on that table ever failed, your fancy report will most likely report wrong numbers.

Posted in SQL, Wordpress | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

And then

Posted on September 25, 2007 by Arthur

I‘m pleased to announce that CommentCentral is compatible with WordPress 2.3.

Updates for WordPress can be downloaded from the regular site(s). I noticed that the tar-file got corrupted, so you may wish to go for the zip file (I noticed that the tar file is around 3 Meg while the zip file itself was only 1.5 Meg: they must have [had?] issues1).

And upgraded to 2.3.
1 See also the forum.

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Enter and Exit

Posted on September 24, 2007 by Arthur

This weekend, we Exit the old, enter the newattended a wedding ceremony plus the dinner afterwards and managed to shoot some photos too. Here’s something I noticed: it looked like everyone was carrying a digital camera. Many moons ago you wouldn’t even think of taking a camera with you to a wedding because, it was actually pretty expensive to have the film developed. Additionally, you were never certain if photos actually turned out or not. If they did turn out, you were either extremely lucky or just plain gifted.

During the first quick browse through my photo set (the morning after the wedding), I ended up throwing out between 20 to 30 photos: most of them out of focus ones. While I had a flash, I was frequently switching between auto-focus and manual focus: the camera had a (tremendous) hard time to focus on subjects particularly at places where it was (apparently) too dark. Luckily, most people were wearing some white (or light coloured) clothes [reflection is what made the auto-focus work again].

I don’t mind making pictures of people though. There’s something rewarding about having the perfect picture (from a different angle) of people caught with mixed emotions during ceremonies like marriage.

Posted in Truro NS | Tagged , | 3 Comments

It Came From OuterSpace11

Posted on September 22, 2007 by Arthur

A couple things: the first thing that got my attention (earlier this week) was that story about that Peruvian meteor that has scientists puzzled because of claims that over 200 people fell ill by fumes coming from the crater. CBC’s Bob McDonald reports about other known meteorite strikes. Maybe now is a good time to rent ‘The Andromeda Strain’.

The Discovery Channel reports that the Mars Odyssey discovered more (near) perfect circular caves (seven of them actually). These holes are used by the Martians, so that they can spy on us for a future attack on our planet. Fear not: we have a range of Hollywood heroes to fight them.

You have read it: earlier this week the Canadian dollar reached parity with the US dollar, a feat that has many people shocked but not surprised. Blame the US.

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Not the Net

Posted on September 19, 2007 by Arthur

Apparently there was an high-speed outage this morning, lasting up to noon. Remarkably, the router was able to connect to my provider’s gateway plus it was (assigned) a correct IP address. Routing on the provider’s end, however, completely failed. I decided to loop up what went wrong, but it seems that even the Aliant’s network status page isn’t updated that frequently. As of today it still says:

Network Status: There are no known outages at this time. Last Update: 5/2/07 12:50 PM

Brilliant: I guess reporting network status is so Eighties.

I read an article at the CBC’s about wind energy and its potential in Nova Scotia. The provincial government has released online maps that show where wind turbines would be productive. It doesn’t surprise me that Cape Breton is one of the windiest places. The maps can be found at the Department of Energy website (PDF file alert).

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The TeleTube

Posted on September 16, 2007 by Arthur

My TubeTrek started with this thread on MetaFilter (which disappeared from the frontpage) with links to all the episodes of ‘Little Mosque On The Prairie’ (CBC, Wikipedia). It’s not an overly funny sitcom: it’s (at times) preachy and maybe this is the right word, idealistic. The cast is at times flawless, more so than the cast of ‘Corner Gas’.

Later on, I watched a couple of episodes of Season 2 of ‘The IT Crowd’ (you can find them on Google Video). Episode 1 is hilarious, however, having seen last year’s season finale, I was surprised that it actually didn’t follow-through.

Alfons mentioned that he actually liked the 1UP produced ‘1UP Show’, which I haven’t had time to watch yet. I assume it’s about games and geeks and they appear to have a popular following in Olde Country too (Dutch link, with Dutch subtitling, I think). And it appears that if you’re into photography, Magnum Photos has excellent video podcasts (once again via Alfons).

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But, I, like, fries.

Posted on September 15, 2007 by Arthur

Gross and Good

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Friday Night

Posted on September 14, 2007 by Arthur

I could watch TV
and catch the news. Once again
a Windows Update.

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