One of the challenges in setting up the Raspberry Pi’s I use for the Social Consumption Project is that I need to arrive at my test households with a ungainly HDMI monitor plus a keyboard to allow me to configure the units for the wifi network in the house.  This only takes a few minutes, but I need a keyboard and a display to be able to do it.

To help address the ungainliness of this, I purchased a LCD Car Reverse Rearview Monitor Color Camera DVD VCR Remote Control 4.3’ TFT hg for about $16 in eBay from a Chinese vendor. These units are intended to be connected to “backup cameras” in automobiles, but they’re just regular everyday analog video monitors with an RCA input, so, in theory, they can also be used as a display for a Raspberry Pi.

The unit arrived a few weeks ago, and my first challenge was finding a power supply for it: because it’s intended for in-car use, it needs a 12 volt power supply (the web is full of mods to allow it to be USB-powered, but I didn’t want to take out a soldering iron). Fortunately I had an old Apple power supply here in the office (not the first time the “never throw away old power supplies” rule has paid off), so that solved that problem.

However even with the power supply in place, I couldn’t get the display to, well, display.

Fortunately, the solution was simple: following the advice here, I commented out this line:

hdmi_force_hotplug=1

in the /boot/config.txt file and rebooted.

Presto! I had video:

I then followed the helpful instructions here, and changed the console font size to a bigger one (16x32 Terminus), which makes for a much more readable console:

It even displays video:

It’s been remarkable to hear the degree to which the wholesale eradication of the elm trees of Charlottetown has affected people of the city.

People from all walks of life, of all political stripes, of all relationships to the ecology of the city.

Never have trees received so much of our collective attention, alas, until they’ve fallen.

Recognizing this, a group has assembled to organize Ode to the Elms of Charlottetown: An Earth Day Remembrance, a sort of “tree memorial” being held Wednesday, April 22 at 7:00 p.m. at Trinity United Church on Prince Street in Charlottetown.

There will be songs and stories and art and remembrance. It’s not a “religious” event, but certainly it’s a spiritual one, inasmuch as the spirits of the fallen trees are very much on everyone’s minds.

There’s a Facebook event where you can ask questions and get more information.

Among the many things contained with the Mike Duffy Diaries are notes of the movies he attended from January 2009 to December 2012.

Our taste in movies has considerable overlap; of the 34 movies he notes, I’ve seen 24. Here’s a handy list should you wish to see them all:

• January 19, 2009: Defiance
• February 8, 2009: Taken
• May 15, 2009: Angels & Saints
• December 23, 2009: It’s a Wonderful Life
• January 1, 2010: At Sea and Doubt
• January 31, 2010: Edge of Darkness
• March 20, 2010: Hurt Locker
• September 8, 2010: The American
• October 29, 2010: Convicted
• November 20, 2010: Wall Street
• December 30, 2010: The King’s Speech
• January 5, 2011: Barney’s Version
• January 26, 2011: Unknown
• April 23, 2011: The Lincoln Lawyer
• July 9, 2011: The Remains of the Day
• August 3, 2011: Horrible Bosses
• September 11, 2011: The Debt
• October 15, 2011: Ides of March
• October 23, 2011: Johnny English
• November 20, 2011: J. Edgar
• November 38, 2011: The Descendants
• December 11, 2011: Margin Call
• December 25, 2011: War Horse
• January 5, 2012: The Iron Lady
• January 6, 2012: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
• February 25, 2012: The Safe House
• May 28, 2012: Away from Her
• June 2, 2012: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
• October 5, 2012: The Master
• October 13, 2012: Argo
• November 12, 2012: Skyfall
• November 15, 2012: Flight
• December 9, 2012: Lincoln

(Updated April 22, 2015: Green Party additional candidates)

According to the 2011 census, Prince Edward Island is made up of 48% men and 52% women. One would expect, then, that political parties would seek to run approximately equal numbers of men and women across the 27 provincial electoral districts. All parties have now published the lists of candidates nominated for the 2015 provincial general election:

According to the PEI Coalition for Women in Government, 22.2% of MLAs are women, slightly under the national average of 24.7%.

The Coalition’s 2005 Action Plan to Elect Women in PEI set an initial goal of electing a critical mass of 33.3% women in the following provincial election, pushing on to elect 50% women by 2015.  In this first phase, the Coalition says, they were “successful in garnering public commitments from all four provincial parties active at the time that they work towards the goal of nominating at least 9 women (33% of candidates) in provincial elections.”

What happened?

I’m not a stranger to gender issues in democratic organizations: the organization I lead, the PEI Home and School Federation, is a broadly-based one, rooted in 53 member associations in local schools. The presidents of an overwhelming majority of those locals are women, and our provincial board is 73% woman and 27% men.  This all despite our work to include more men in home and school.

Balanced gender representation in our public institutions is something we all need to work harder at.

Twitter displays a “followers” count for every user and using the Twitter API this information can be extracted for a collection of Twitters users. I fed the Twitter handles of PEI’s registered political parties into the API and extracted follower counts for each party:

I thought it would be interesting to contrast the Twitter follower “popular vote” with the actual popular vote from the 2011 Provincial General Election. This isn’t quite an apples-to-apples comparison because whereas each elector can only vote for one party, each Twitter user can follow any number of others. To calculate the “followers” number, I took the total number of followers of all parties, and then took each individual party’s total followers as a proportion of that. Of course, “Twitter users” is an imperfect reflection of “electors.” Also, following a party doesn’t necessary convey supporting that party (journalists, for example, will often follow all the parties). But it’s an interesting comparison nonetheless, inasmuch as the two sets of numbers are somewhat aligned:

It’s a different story when you compare the number of tweets each party has posted over the years they’ve been active; the NDP is the clear winner here. Again, though, this isn’t necessarily a measure of anything other than proclivity for tweeting.

Speaking of “over the years,” here’s when each party launched itself onto Twitter:

If you want to keep up with all the parties without having to follow any particular one (or any at all), you can watch this Twitter list of all the parties.

I’m archiving all of the data I used here every night at midnight, and I’ll update this post as the putative 2015 Provincial General Election progresses. That charts, by the way, come via the excellent, free Chartbuilder web tool.

Now we know who is making website for PEI political parties, what about the underlying software, the so-called “content management system” that parties use to maintain their websites.

For every site on the web, you can “view source” in your web browser to see the “source code” of the website – the HTML, CSS and JavaScript that together define how the website looks and what its contents are. By examining the source of Island political party websites, it’s easy to tell what content management systems they’re using:

The clues I used to help me identify which CMS each party is using are as follows:

Drupal

In the HTML source of the site it’s explicity stated:

<meta name="Generator" content="Drupal 7 (http://drupal.org)" />

In addition, the login page for the CMS is at the standard Drupal location of /user.

It’s worth noting that the Green Party is keeping its Drupal 7 installation up to date: if you visit the CHANGELOG.txt for the site, you’ll see that it’s running version 7.35, which reflect a mid-March security patch.

CMS Made Simple

The site is currently offline, but by searching Google for cache:http://movingforwardpei.ca/ I was able to retrieve an older cached version. There’s no explicit evidence for what the CMS is, but references to “modules” called “MenuManager” and “Showtime,” both of which are party of that CMS, are a good sign.

WordPress

A set of clues, including this explicit statement (which only appears on the NDP WordPress):

<meta name=generator content="WordPress 4.1.1"/>

and frequent references in the HTML source to “wp-content”, a commonly-used WordPress directory.

In addition, the login pages for both the PC and NDP sites are in the standard place at /wp-login.php.

As with the Green Party and Drupal, both the PC and NDP WordPress sites are running the latest version, 4.1.1, released in mid-February.

Every time you type a web address into your browser, you’re using something called a domain name – the one for this website, for example, is ruk.ca.

Anyone can register a domain name and there’s a directory of who’s registered what that’s called WHOIS: with this tool you can connect a domain name to the person or organization who registered it.

There’s used to be one big WHOIS for the entire Internet, but, with the expansion of the Internet, the directory has now splintered and you need to go different places for different domains. For the .ca domain, used here in Canada, Webnames.ca’s WHOIS is one place to go.

Every domain name has a “Registrar” (the company paid to register the domain name), a “Registrant” (the person or organization who registered the name) and an “administrative contact” (the contact person for the domain).

Using that tool, you can find out something about the websites of the Island’s registered political parties; It’s possible to hide the registrant and the administrative contact when you’re registering the domain; The Island Party is the only party that opted to do this. Here’s where the domains for the Island’s parties are registered, and by whom:

Remember What’s My Lot?, my web app that will tell you, if you’re on Prince Edward Island, what lot you’re standing in?

Now, in addition to being a regular everyday website, at whatsmylot.com, you can also install it as an app for Firefox or Chrome:

The Firefox web app can be installed on any device running Firefox – desktop, phone, or table – while the Chrome app cannot be installed on mobile devices (only because the Chrome Web Store isn’t available for mobile devices, oddly).

In addition to all the functionality of the original version of the app, the updated version now includes a thumbnail sketch of each lot’s original owner.

If you’re on a Mac using Firefox to install the app, you might have to adjust your security settings, temporarily, to allow the app to be installed.

I’m now 3 weeks into my experiment using a PiAware to track airplanes flying over Prince Edward Island. And I’ve been joined in the effort by my friend Ken, who, fortuitously, lives in Tyne Valley and thus is perfectly positioned to capture overflights that my receiver cannot see. As a result, coverage of all by the most western tip of the Island is very good now, as evidenced by this map that shows three weeks of flights:

Some statistics about what’s flying over Prince Edward Island:

• The top five origins of planes flying over the Island are:
  • New York, NY
  • Newark, NJ
  • Chicago, IL
  • Toronto, ON
  • Paris, France
• The top five destinations are:
  • London, England
  • Paris, France
  • New York, NY
  • Frankfurt, Germany
  • Amsterdam, Netherlands
• The top five aircraft types are:
  • Boeing 763
  • Airbus 333
  • Boeing 752
  • Boeing 744
  • Boeing 772
• The average altitude of flights is 35,474 feet.
• The maximum altitude was 47,050 feet. by a Wells Fargo Bank-registered flight that doesn’t allow its origin or destination to be published.
• The maximum ground speed was 671 knots (1242 km/h) by American Airlines 78, flying from Dallas to London on March 28, 2015.

More than anything else, this project has changed my perception of Prince Edward Island in the world: it’s a lot harder to think of PEI as a remote island disconnected from the global commerce when there are so many airplanes flying directly over our heads every day going to all corners of the earth. Even if they are 14 km above our heads.