Apologies for the more gentile readers for this niche technical post, but I’m hoping to solve my technical brothers and sisters some frustrations with Trac, the excellent open source issue tracking system (we’ve been using it for more than 2 years to manage our work with Yankee Publishing, and it’s been truly transformational).

If you’re upgrading from Trac 0.11 to Trac 0.12 and you’re using Trac with Apache and mod_python you might find that after you upgrade you either get a “500 Internal Server Error” form Apache when you visit Trac or, if you have mod_python debugging on (or if you look in your Apache error log), an error message ImportError: No module named trac.

And yet you think that Trac actually is there: you can use trac-admin from the command line, and if you look where you think Trac should be (say, perhaps, in /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages), you find that it is indeed there.

What’s going on?

It seems that Trac 0.12, at least when I installed it, installs itself as a “zipped egg.” I realized this was true when, after I did:

easy_install Trac-0.12b1.zip

I ended up with a file (not a directory) in /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages. My earlier versions of Trac were directories, not files. This, and this helpful post that says, in part:

mod_python 3.x is still unable to import modules from .zipped .egg-files. Command-line python (even older version 2.4 which is included into RHEL5/CentOS5) imports modules from zipped eggs without any problem, but not mod_python for the same version because it overrides the standard importer in its own special way.

So, in other words, Trac is there, it’s just that mod_python can’t see it because it’s zipped. Once I knew this, the solution was easy:

easy_install --always-unzip Trac-0.12b1.zip

Installing this way ensures that the resulting egg isn’t zipped, and once I did this Trac 0.12 ran without issue.

I first met Reg Porter on Christmas Day many many years ago. We’d decided not to travel up to Ontario for the holidays, and Catherine Hennessey kindly took us in for Christmas Dinner. Sharing the table with us were David Weale, Darren Peters and Reg.

Needless to say it was an interesting meal.

I’d not laid eyes on Reg Porter again until last night when I was in the audience for the third installment of The College of Reg: The Architectural Heritage of PEI.

I’m not usually a big fan of the “bunch of heritagey people gather in the Carriage House at Beaconsfield to listen to someone talk about finials” kind of event. I’ve got nothing against heritage, nor against finials, I’m simply averse to so much listening. Especially when the subject matter is so earnest.

I’m happy to report that The College of Reg proved the exception to this.

Yes, there was a lot of listening to be done – Reg held forth, without interruption, for almost 90 minutes.

And finials reared their head a few times – I think there might have even been a suggestion that certain finials could “make your heart soar.”

The tone was indeed earnest (albeit with a certain amount of irreverence, especially in matters of church and cats).

Heading out the door when it was all done, I wouldn’t have said my life had been transformed, nor even, particularly, that I’d had a good time.

But then, this morning, walking through the city on my way from dropping Oliver off at school, I passed the Paton house at 241 Prince Street and realized that something was different about my eyes.

I’d walked by that property a thousand times over the years, and suddenly I was looking at it in a different way. I noticed the “window in the chimney” and that the entrances had been covered-over, the dark-light-dark pattern of the curve over the entrance that mirrored the pattern in a French cathedral, and the many varieties of stone near the peak of the roof.

Somehow Reg Porter, without me noticing, had inserted an interest in the buildings of my everyday life into my head. And my eyes, previously blinded to all this interesting detail, were now open.

I continued down Fitzroy Street (past the “place where a church tore down a lovely house”) to Queen, past the City Hall (with its tower in which to hang hoses so they wouldn’t rot) and realized that the city will never seem the same to me.

Perhaps The College of Reg is the greatest kind of education of all, education that you don’t notice happening until it’s too late. And for that I’m truly thankful.

The final session of the college for this spring is June 7 at 7:30 p.m. at Beaconsfield. Admission is $5.00 and you don’t need to register in advance; just show up at the door. Recommended.

At long last all the bits I needed to gather together to run a real job through my Adana Eight Five press were in place on this holiday Monday: I picked up a couple of “one pound or assorted card stock” packs at DeSerres on Barrington Street in Halifax, my ink and tympan paper arrived from NA Graphics in Colorado last week, and I picked up some low-odour Varsol this morning at Canadian Tire to clean everything up when finished.

As I’d been experimenting with a Pecha Kucha poster and had its type set up in the chase, I started off with that. After a lot of thrashing around with bed and platen adjustments, amount of ink, and the press packing, the best I could pull off was this:

Rather than continue my thrashing about with such a physically large job, I decided to back off and try something more modest. The most complete typeface I have (especially when it comes to numbers-and-punctuation) is a one labelled 14 pt. Temple, so, despite my aversion to script-style faces, I decided to use that. I left the black ink on the press, and used some tiny orange card stock from my new pack, and ended up with this:

I’m not completely happy with it: the left-hand side, especially the capital “P” and the lower-case letter “e”, are too dark and both letter e are over-inked and slightly filled in. I expect that with a more deliberate make-ready I could achieve better results.

I noticed a few photos on the wall near the canteen on the MV Holiday Island ferry yesterday that showed the boat in dry dock and pointed out its propellor, which is probably not what you think: it’s outfitted with a Voith Schneider Propeller, in which:

“…a rotor casing which ends flush with the ship’s bottom is fitted with a number of axially parallel blades and rotates about a vertical axis. To generate thrust, each of the propeller blades performs an oscillating motion about its own axis. This is superimposed on the uniform rotary motion.”

Who knew?

For the second year in a row we’re offering online bidding for the Prince Street School Silent Auction. All you need to bid is your name and email address and your generosity. All funds raised go to support the work of the Prince Street Home and School Association.

There’s a great photo on the cover of today’s Charlottetown Guardian taken by Heather Taweel from the top of the Homburg Crane on Grafton Street:

Our house at 100 Prince Street is just out of view; it’s behind the tree on the left-hand side about half-way down the photo.

You can order a reprint of the photo if you’d like a copy for yourself.

If you’ve spent any time transiting through Trudeau Airport in Montreal – and if you live in Charlottetown this is something you can’t avoid – you’ve likely encountered the Provincial Airlines poster above the escalator on your way down into the underground passageway that leads to the remote gulag from which Charlottetown flights depart:

And perhaps you’ve noticed that the map on the poster is completely missing Prince Edward Island (while including, oddly, islands like Anticosti and Grand Manan).

After returning from a recent trip I decided that something had to be done about this; think of the untold damage that has resulted from thousands upon thousands of air passengers left with the impression that Prince Edward Island has disappeared.

So I emailed Customer Service at Provincial Airlines, and yesterday was happy to receive the following reply:

Thanks Peter, for your feedback concerning our map, your timing is perfect because our marketing peeps have picked up on it as well and are in the process of having it changed. 

It’s so nice to receive a reply from a real person at an airline that both acknowledges a problem and points to a solution in the words. Good on Provincial Airlines.

When I first moved to Charlottetown 17 years ago, Carter and Company was still in business on Queen Street. Carter’s was your stationers’ stationer: creaky wooden floors, a vast range of products, excellent customer service.

You couldn’t ask for anything more in a stationery store.

And then came The Great Consolidation of the downtown stationery market in Charlottetown. Staples arrived on the outskirts. Carter’s closed their Queen Street store and opened on Kent Street. Eventually we were left with one stationery store downtown, Colpitts Office Products, seemingly a hybrid of Premium Office Products, Carter’s and Colpits that’s now part of a small Quebec chain.

It seemed like every move from the original Carter’s into today’s pale shadow involved a decrease in selection, friendliness and service. But, committed to downtown business as I am, as much as possible I’ve been shopping at Colpits just to help keep them alive. (After all, who wants to drive out to the edge of town to buy a pencil).

Until today.

Today I needed to mail a big book to Germany, so I needed a big envelope.

I went over to the Confederation Court Mall to Colpitts and in the envelope section I found exactly what I needed: big manila envelopes sold individually.

I went up to the counter to pay and was told “oh, you can’t buy this, you have to buy ten… they should have had a rubber band around them.”

“I just want one envelope,” I replied.

“You have to buy ten,” said the clerk.

“So you can’t just sell me this one envelope here?”

“No.”

Not needing 10 envelopes, nor wanting to spend $12.00 on 10 envelopes to get one, I left.

Five minutes later I had a single large envelope in hand, purchased at the Canada Post outlet at Shoppers Drug Mart. Where they sell big envelopes both individually and in larger quantities.

I’m never going back to Colpitts Office Products.

Why?

Because this experience, perhaps a result of “store policy” or a computer system incapable of selling items a la carte, and very obviously the result of a company that doesn’t allow its employees to be, well, friendly, was completely devoid of humanity.

Here I was, a guy with an envelope and the cash to buy it. An envelope sitting, individually and ready to purchase, on the counter between me and someone who should have been happy to sell it to me.

And her only response was “you have to buy 10.”

This is a violation not only of fundamental laws of customer service, but also of fundamental laws of human decency. A real person, in a company that gives their employees to latitude to be real human beings, would have said “give me a loonie and we’ll call it even.”

Instead their service quite clearly said “we don’t want to sell you what you’re looking for.”

So now they are never again going to sell me anything.

My Internet friend Edward Hasbrouck – you may know him from his columns about The Amazing Race or from his book The Practical Nomad – sent me a link to Canadian privacy office questions US surveillance of Canadian travelers which details the implications for Canadians of U.S. policy regarding air travel passenger records, the heart of which is this:

Asst. Comm. Bernier’s statement was limited to flights to, from, or overflying the USA. We suspect that her office is unaware that the DHS already has ways to get access — without the knowledge or consent of anyone in Canada, including airlines and travel agencies — to information about passengers and reservations for flights within Canada and between Canada and other countries, regardless of whether they pass though US airspace.

Just like airlines, travel agencies, and websites in Europe, those in Canada routinely outsource the hosting of their reservation (PNR) databases to third-party Computerized Reservation Systems (CRSs), most of which are in the USA. When you make an airline reservation with a Canadian travel agency, even for a domestic flight within Canada, the first thing that generally happens is that a PNR is created in the database of a CRS in the USA.

What this means is that if you fly from Charlottetown to Halifax, your PNR – passenger name record – may be stored in a computer system under U.S. jurisdiction, placing it beyond the reach of Canadian privacy legislation.

The story finishes with a suggestion:

We encourage Canadian travelers to request a full accounting of what has happened to their airline reservations from Canadian travel agencies (we’ll be happy to help interpret the responses), and to complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner if they don’t get the answers to which they are entitled or if the responses show that their data was sent to the USA without their knowledge or consent or without complying with PIPEDA.

If you take them up on the suggestion, please let me know what you learn.

After checking out the big hole and making sure that Tai Chi Gardens wasn’t open yet, we continued down Pownal Street toward the water. It was a beautiful, sunny, crisp day.

In front of the Royal Canadian Legion there were about half a dozen cardboard boxes filled with books and CDs, and resting on top was a copy of The (Last) Whole Earth Catalog.

It wasn’t clear from the position of the boxes whether they were being put out to the trash, or in transit – there were about 2 feet in from the sidewalk in an ill-defined no-mans land – so I wasn’t comfortable with just picking up the Catalog as my own and walking on.

So I picked up the Catalog and walked into the Legion.

Spotted a man walking out of the banquet hall: “You know anything about those books out on the lawn?” I asked.

“We’re hauling them to the library,” he replied.

“Wanna sell this one?” I asked, holding up the Catalog.

“Sure. Just go and talk to those ladies in there,” he said, pointing toward the hall. Inside I found three women clearing up from what looked like the end of a yard sale.

(Oliver, meanwhile, was cowering at the entrance; I don’t think he knew quite what to make of the Legion).

“The man out there says you might sell me this book,” I said.

“Certainly,” they exclaimed, in unison.

“How much do you want for it?”

“A dollar,” said the woman behind the bar. You could tell from the reaction on the faces of the other women that she’d spoken too soon and too low.

I looked in my wallet. I only had a $20 bill.

“Do you have change for a twenty?”

“Sure do.”

“How ‘bout I give you a twenty and you give me $10 back and we’ll call it even.”

This was an unexpected turn of events, and they were obviously (pleasantly) surprised. Not only did they give me my $10, but I walked out with a couple of (very tasty) chocolate chip muffins, a half-dozen peanut butter cookies, an invitation to their concert on June 1 and several rounds of thank-yous.

The Whole Earth Catalog is a powerful book, and you gotta be careful of maintaining karmic balance when it changes hands.