I needed to send $1500 CAD from Canada to Ukraine, and so did some research over the weekend as to the various ways of doing so. Here’s what I found.

(For comparison, the Bank of Canada exchange for USD at noon today was 0.9965; I received a rate of 0.9787 on an unrelated deposit at Metro Credit Union today).

Other options suggested were a bank wire transfer (I was quoted $35 plus undetermined “intermedia transfer bank” fees, with no ability to tell what the net deposit would be), PayPal (good for many things, but doesn’t currently supported payout to Ukrainian bank accounts) as well as the online services Currency Online and HiFX (possibilities, but it’s not clear to me how you get money in to their systems if they don’t have a local presence; if by wire transfer, it might end up being more expensive because of the local wire transfer fee).

I ended up doing the tranfers at The Cash Store, a storefront on University Avenue that is otherwise in the business of cheque cashing and payday loans, and thus a storefront I had, until this point, seen as shady and best avoided. As it turns out, the friendly and helpful clerk there was able to process my request quickly, and while there was some stumbling on the (vast number of) data entry fields on their transfer system, I was assured that should I return to transfer again, my information is all on file it it should be point-and-click-ish.

I welcome suggestions of other solutions to the problem.

My friends at Youngfolk & The Kettle Black on Water Street in Charlottetown have opened a new branch on Victoria Row in the space formerly occupied by Poffertjes.

The new space is tiny and there’s just room for a counter along the wall, with no place to sit. It’s a stand-up or take-out place, and it’s as close as you’re going to come to the feeling of ordering coffee at a bar in Italy in this province (and the coffee is, it must be said, very, very good).

I’ve been for coffee twice now, and both times I’ve observed that, despite (or perhaps because of) the confined stand-up-only space, there’s a social aspect to the new branch that’s unique in the city: personable co-owner Adam Young has confirmed that people stay “400% longer here than in the other place,” and, in my experience, there are conversations between customers that you would see neither at Youngfolk Mark I nor, indeed, at Tim Hortons or Starbucks or any other coffee place in town. 

Whether it’s the forced proximity, or the need to stand, or some sort of social kevorka in the air, strangers seem comfortable with starting a conversation with each other while leaning against the wall enjoying coffee.

With its proximity to the Legislative Assembly, which starts sitting again next week, my great hope is that Youngfolk Mark II becomes a hotbed of political thought and debate, meted out over espressos while winding down after Question Period. I’ll buy the first round, Hon. Premier.

We’ve been using Trac as a ticketing system to manage the work of our web team at Yankee Publishing for five years now — ticket #1, “Correct long-range weather banner,” was created November 7, 2007. We’re now up to almost 6000 tickets in the system and the degree to which Trac has improved our workflow, communications and ability to look back in history is hard to overstate: it’s been a truly transformative tool.

That all said, there’s always remained a level of “ticket friction” with our use of Trac: it’s really rather easy to open up a web browser, fill out a new ticket form, and create a ticket, but it still requires, well, opening up a web browser and filling out a new ticket form.

I’ve always wished we had the ability to use email to create tickets in Trac, but there’s always been a piece or two missing from our ability to do this; last week, though, I figured out a simple way to do this by knitting together Postmark (a system we use for sending transactional outbound email) to handle the incoming email, with email2trac, an extension to Trac that handles all the nasty email-parsing bits.

Here’s how I did it.

Install email2trac

Installing email2trac is easy. On the server where we run Trac itself, I did this:

wget ftp://ftp.sara.nl/pub/outgoing/email2trac.tar.gz
gunzip email2trac.tar.gz
tar -xvf email2trac.tar
cd email2trac-2.6.2/
./configure
make
make install

The result is /usr/local/bin/email2trac with configuration then done via the /usr/local/etc/email2trac.conf file, which in our case looks like this:

[DEFAULT]
project: /web/trac
debug: 1
black_list: MAILER-DAEMON@
drop_spam : 1
drop_alternative_html_version: 1
email_quote: >
html2text_cmd:
ignore_trac_user_settings: 0
inline_properties: 1
reply_all : 0
spam_level: 5
strip_quotes: 0
strip_signature: 0
ticket_update: 1
ticket_update_by_subject: 1
umask: 022
verbatim_format: 0

There’s good documentation for all of the various options — in most cases the defaults were fine for our setup.

Create the Inbound Hook

While Postmark Inbound helpfully parses email into JSON, email2trac actually needs the original email, or a reasonable facsimile of it, to parse into a Trac ticket, so our web hook needs to take the JSON from Postmark and reconstitute an email message.

The PHP script I created to do this is quite simple: it uses the Mail_Mime PEAR package to take values from the JSON-encoded message we get from Postmark and create a new MIME-encoded email that can then be passed to email2trac: it takes the JSON as input, writes out a MIME-encoded file as output, and then sends this to email2trac. It handles attachments (it base64 decodes them into local filesystem files and then adds them back as MIME attachments).

This PHP script becomes the “Inbound Hook” for Postmark. So if I call the script create-trac-ticket.php, and put it online at, say, https://example.com/trac/create-trac-ticket.php, then that’s what I paste into Postmark as the “Inbound Hook.”

Set up Postmark Inbound

Setting up Postmark Inbound is easy: under the “Credentials” tab of a Postmark server, you’ll find an email address that looks like somethingsomething@inbound.postmarkapp.com (where somethingsomething is a long hex value). That’s the email address you’ll send email to when you want to create a Trac ticket.

On the “Settings” tab of your Postmark server you then set up an “Inbound Hook” which is a URL where you want to direct the JSON-encoded version of any incoming email to. Just paste in the URL for the PHP script you created to do this.

Set up an Email Alias

I didn’t want to have team members required to remember a complicated somethingsomething@inbound.postmarkapp.com address to send ticket to — I wanted something simple, like ticket@example.com. So I added a user to our Google Apps account with a simple email and forwarded its email to the more complex somethingsomething@inbound.postmarkapp.com email address. There’s a need to confirm forwarding addresses when this is done; fortunately Postmark provides a way to inspect all incoming email, so you just need to look under the “Incoming” tab of your Postmark server for the Google confirmation email.

Setting Ticket Options

Once all the pieces are in place, creating tickets is easy: you just send email to the address you created, with the ticket’s title in the Subject, the ticket’s description in the body of the email. The email2trac script is smart enough to assign you as the ticket’s “reporter” as long as you email from the same address you’ve connected to your Trac account. You can also include macros in the body of the email to affect the setting of different ticket options. For example, if I add:

@owner: billg
@priority: blocked
@severity: Critical
@cc: hankj,floj
@datedue: 11/20/2012

Then the resulting Trac ticket will have its owner, priority, severity, cc and datedue fields set appropriately.

Using up an Email Signature

I went one step further toward frictionlessness and set up a Mail.app signature like this:

@owner: peter
@priority: sprint
@severity: Normal

When I’m creating a ticket, I just select this signature and change the options as needed.

Why this is Great

This is a great improvement to our Trac system because it allows not only for less friction when creating tickets — it’s really easy, for example, to grab a screen shot with Skitch and create a ticket with it — but also because it allows any system that has the ability to send or manipulate email to become a Trac ticket generator. We can, for example, build alerts into our Nagios system that will result in Trac tickets being created when systems fail. Or build local scripts with AppleScript to make ticket creation even more frictionless. We’ve only begun to scratch the surface of what’s possible over the last week, and already we’re considerably more productive.

The news has just come in over the wire that the Homburg, err, Holman Grand Hotel has gone bust and will close on Monday.

For those wishing a refresher course on how we started down this road, I invite you to read How did Charlottetown end up with a new hotel covered in beige aluminum siding? for the blow-by-blow from the initial announcment of the hotel in 2007 up to its completion and opening last year.

Surely the implosion of this “did anyone every actually think this was a good idea?” colossus should allow us to move on to a post-Homburg era here in Charlottetown. 

Let’s finish the job: close the crazy tunnel under Grafton Street, reinstate the name “Main Stage” on the Confederation Centre of the Arts theatre (what is “Homburg Theatre” now other than a reminder of our propensity to fall in thrall to the grand delusions of impresarios), and make a point of thinking twice before doing anything like this again.

Several months ago I started to catch word of The Alpine Review. The references were coming from people who I hold in the “automatically pursue anything they recommend” place in my heart — people like Martin and Peter and Igor. And so, without being completely sure of what I was getting myself into, I paid the $35 to order the first issue. It arrived in my post box on Monday.

It turns out that not only are the aforementioned recommenders of magazine, they’re deeply steeped in its creation. Peter is an editor. Martin’s an author. Indeed as I scanned the table of contents I realized that I’d had lunch at one time or another with a healthy cross section of the issue’s contributors.

As to the magazine itself: wow.

My elevator pitch would be “A contemporary take on the Whole Earth Review zeitgeist with the production values of Monocle” (and, fortunately, with none of the “you should really wear this $290 scarf and this $2900 watch” aspirrationality of the latter).

The writing is substantial but accessible; the design is magnificent. And, true to its title, the approach is to survey the terrain from a distance (but not from far enough away that you can’t leap down and make connections to everyday life). This is a magazine that I will spend weeks making my way through, for every page holds a new insight. And each new insight leads me down a rabbit hole.

On page 180, for example, is an item titled Red Telephones and Pink Ponies that starts off:

Napoleon famously said that ‘If you start to take Vienna – take Vienna.’

I was inspired to find a reference for this quotation, which led me through vast swaths of the Internet, through the UPEI library ready-reference desk, and into an email dialog with the magazine’s managing director Louis-Jacques Darveau, who told me he’d heard the quote from the late Ben Weider, a Canadian businessman about whom Wikipedia says “well known in two areas: bodybuilding and Napoleonic history.”

Well, okay.

Satisfied, I then continued my tangent, reading parts of the English translation of the 1823 book Memorial de Sainte Helene: Journal of the Private Life and Conversations of the Emperor Napoleon at Saint Helena. Wherein I found the following entry from March 31, 1816:

This day the weather has continued very bad; we suffered from it; besides, we are absolutely infested with rats, fleas, and bugs: our sleep is disturbed by them, so that the troubles by night are in perfect harmony with those by day.

The weather changed entirely to fair on the 31st; we went out in the carriage. The Emperor, in the course of conversation, observed, speaking of Egypt and Syria, that if he had taken Saint Jean-d’Acre, as ought to have been the case, he would have wrought a revolution in the East.  “The most trivial circumstances,” said he, “lead to the greatest events. The weakness of the captain of a frigate, who stood out to sea instead of forcing a passage into the harbour, some trifling impediments with respect to some shallops or light vessels, prevented the face of the world from being changed. Possessed of Saint Jean-d’Acre, the French army would fly to Damascus and Aleppo; in a twinkling it would have been on the Euphrates; the Christians of Syria, the Druses, the Christians of Armenia, would have joined it; nations were on the point of being shaken.” One of us having said that they would have presently been reinforced with 400,000 men. “Say 600,000,” replied the Emperor, “who can calculate what it might have been if I should have reached Constantinople and the Indies; I should have changed the face of the world.”

Not quite the pithiness of “If you start to take Vienna – take Vienna.” But certainly the same sentiment.

As with many good things, The Alpine Review, though international in scope, is published in Montreal. Louis-Jacques calls the city “a silent actor” in the magazine, but I think some of the sensibility of the city — pluralistic, international, complex, chaotic — shows through.

I haven’t been this excited about a magazine in a long, long time — perhaps not since I read Louis Rossetto’s pitch for WIRED on The Well back in the early 1990s. What’s different about The Alpine Review, though, is that it seems to be a creation of my tribe — a sort of house journal for those of us lurking at the nexus of hacker/maker culture, systems, ecology, psychogeography. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to a “hey, Pete, here’s a magazine made about exactly the things that are interesting to you right now.”

I’ll be buried inside The Alpine Review for at least the rest of the month. I shall eagerly await future issues.

Thank you.

I had the privilege of meeting Andy Wells in the fall of 2009. I had become fascinated with the Prince Edward Island of the late 1960s and early 1970s: the “Development Plan” of that era, and the cultural and environmental transformations it begat were, in light of our current concerns about climate change, a beacon of hope that substantive and dramatic change on Prince Edward Island is possible. Wells’ work with Premier Alex Campbell and, later, with the Institute of Man and Resources, seemed almost unbelievably revolutionary in light of our current paralysis.

Here is how Alan MacEachern introduces Wells in his excellent book The Institute of Man and Resources: An Environmental Fable:

Campbell’s interest in environmental matters was, like much of his thought, nurtured by his executive secretary, speechwriter, and right-hand man, Andy Wells — Machiavelli to Campbell’s Prince, in one pundit’s words. Theirs was what Campbell calls “a remarkable relationship.” For one thing, it was a second-generation one: when Alex’s father Thane was premier of PEI in the 1930s, Andy’s father James had been his assistant. After returning to the Island to take over the family farm in 1959, Andy Wells had worked on Alex Campbell’s winning election campaign in 1966, and soon became the premier’s closest advisor. Wells had a philsophical bent that matched Campbell’s pragmatism, a skill at behind-the-scenes politicking which nicely complemented Campbell’s public persona. When defining policy or preparing speeches they were so in tune — Wells knowing what his premier wanted said, Campbell trusting the words handed to him — that it was difficult to know where one’s ideas ended and the other’s began. Campbell states simply, “He was my researcher and I was his voice.” Wells remembers Campbell once referring to himself as a vessel into which Wells poured his ideas. Though he adds that the premier was joking, Wells is clearly pleased with the line.

It was largely through Wells that the Campbell goverment gained an interest in environmental thought. Wells was an inverterate reader, and was drawing influence at the time from anti-technology works like Louis Mumford’s Myth of the Machine and Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful. He even built his own back-to-the-land project, a home in Hazelgrove heated entirely with wood. Wells got Campbell talking about environmental ideas, and, through Campbell, got the government involved.

Andy Wells died this week. With his passing Islanders have lost a man I would hold to be among the most positively influential public servants we’ve ever had.

More than any of the myriad ways in which the Development Plan and the Institute affected life on the Island practically, the notion that Prince Edward Island can determine its own future, that we can innovate and experiment here as or more nimbly as anywhere, and that we can change seemingly unchangeable things is a tremendous and powerful legacy. 

On a sunny day in the autumn of 2009 I travelled to Andy Wells’ home in Hazelgrove — the selfsame “back-to-the-land project” — to chat with him his role in the Island’s transformation of that day.

It was not in the nature of Andy’s position or inclination to shine light on his own accomplishments; it is my great hope that his contributions to Island society not be lost. Rest in peace.

I’d forgotten all about this photo I took in Oliver’s old bedroom 4 years ago today. I always knew that Bob the Builder was up to something: this photo is the evidence; along with DHL and Santa Claus he’s a leading a revolt of the PLAYMOBILians.

Over the summer I casually suggested to Frances Squire, a teacher at Birchwood Intermediate School, that she bring her students along to my letterpress shop sometime for a printing workshop. She jumped on the idea, and, as a result, 14 of her grade 9 students arrived at the shop this morning ready to print.

We quick ran through the basics of setting type — we only had 3 hours, so we had to be quick — and then they split into 4 groups to set passages they’d worked out before coming. 

As proof that “technology literacy” extends to more than just digital technology, they took to the trade like ducks to water, and quickly figured out their way around the jigsaw puzzle that is setting type by hand.

Hand-set letterpress is all about limitations — you can only set the type you have, and you can only arrange it in ways that physical geometry allows — and so plans had to be adapted in mid-stream (one group’s very ambitious plan for a broadside with two typefaces of different sizes had to give way as the shop wasn’t equipped with enough spaces to allow it to be pieced together). But the students adapted quickly, and we managed to get four passages set and printed before their 11:45 a.m. deadline. Here’s what they came up with:

They were a great group of students to work with: curious, flexible, imaginative. Frances is to be lauded for taking the initiative to get them out of the class doing real stuff.

I learned a lot about what to do (and what not to do) in letterpress workshops (don’t talk about “inches” because students today think in centimetres”, do get out of the way and let them figure out the geometry because that’s the only way to learn it). I was right at the limit of the letterpress supplies I have — I really, really need more 30 point spaces and some additional furniture and leading — and with a single press and a single printer at hand there was a bottleneck for the last 45 minutes as typesetting was done and groups had to wait to have their work printed (I did the actually printing, for safety’s sake — I kept everyone 10 feet, err, 3 metres, away and behind a table from the press). But it seemed to all work out in the end.

I may even do this again…

Johnny and I were down in New England last week visiting with our colleagues at The Old Farmer’s Almanac and Yankee Magazine. Autumn was on the tail end of its colour fury in southern New Hampshire, but it was still a beautiful time to be in the region, and we had a productive week of time, work and social, with our web team. 

Returning to the Island on Friday night we found fall colours here were at their very most vibrant: it’s “peak week” here, and evidence of this is everywhere. Here’s the front yard of Tai Chi Gardens, for example:

On Saturday I took Oliver out to theatre class in Bonshaw, which took us into the heart of fall colour in the Bonshaw hills:

That photo is looking northeast from the village, through the forest, right through the path of “Plan B” (against | for). No matter your feeling on this project, it’s hard not to be deeply affected by the red gash through the Island that you encounter on the right of the highway en route to Bonshaw.

Yesterday we spent the afternoon out in Green Meadows at the potato farm where my cousin Sergii is working. Harvest there is about 2/3 finished, and on potato fields where harvest is finished you get the colour palette of Prince Edward Island at its most intense red and green:

If you’re looking for a drive full of the colours of autumn, drive along the St. Catherines Road through Bonshaw, or along the eastern side of the Hillsborough River from Stratford to Morell, are both in peak form right now.

You may recall that, just over a month ago, Catherine and I switched from Rogers Wireless to Virgin Mobile for our mobile phone service. Today we got our first bill. For $172.03. Which is way, way more than I expected, and about $50 more than our last Rogers Wireless bill.

What happened?

Well, it turns out that Catherine and use our mobiles as telephones much more than I thought we did: 242 minutes for Catherine, 190 minutes for me. A lot of that talk was between ourselves (which is not billed per-minute), but enough of it was to others — 139 minutes for Catherine and 84 minutes for me — that we easily tipped over our 50 “included” minutes each, and so we ended up spending $100.35 extra for all that calling.

My worry going in was data, not voice. Turns out this wasn’t an issue at all: Catherine doesn’t use it, and I used only 151 MB for the month, which was within the $15/month 300 MB “pay per use data” plan that comes standard.

If we’d upped for the $35/month base plan (which included unlimited incoming calls, and free evenings and weekends), rather than the cheapest-possible $20/month plan we started with, our first bill would have been about $90 rather than $172.

So I’ve switched us up (fortunately Virgin makes this really, really easy to do online; the only downside is that the new plan doesn’t take effect until Nov. 6, so we’re stuck with the old one until then).

We’ll still come out ahead of the game compared to Rogers; it’s just taking us some time to find our way there.