News just in on the wire that National Road Network 2.0 has been released. For the uninitiated, the NRN is:

…the representation of a continuous accurate centerline for all non-restricted use roads in Canada (5 meters or more in width, drivable and no barriers denying access) to which will be added a set of basic attributes, street name, place name and block face address ranges.

In non-map-geek terms this means a high-quality royalty-free digital road map of Canada.

For anyone interested in GIS, map-hacking and similar pursuits, the NRN is an amazing dataset. That it’s made freely available for any use is a dramatic departure from usual practice with government data in Canada, where we usually have to pay for data that is, by all rights, already “ours.”

Locally here in Prince Edward Island, Dan MacDonald and his team at the Department of Transportation and Public Works deserve the credit for leading the PEI contribution to the project. What’s more, the PEI dataset is being used for the NRN 2.0 demo dataset and is available as a Google Earth-compatible KML file, which means that viewing the data is as easy as grabbing a single file and loading it into Google Earth:

Prediction: the Timothy Chaisson song all over again will be used as closing credits power ballad on a prime-time television U.S. program in the next 12 months. You heard it hear first.

After school today, [[Oliver]] and I went to get hair cuts at Ray’s Place (we hadn’t been since the day before he graduated from kindergarten in the spring), then went to Tai Chi Gardens for a late, late lunch, and then finally, on the way home, we stopped by the Confederation Centre of the Arts for the Speaker’s Reception following the opening of the fall session of the Legislative Assembly.

Oliver may be afraid to go down a slide at the playground, and have an aversion to playing “What Time Is It Mr. Wolf,” but he is a natural in social settings, and managed to wrangle himself a tour through the receiving line not once but twice. He also made cold introductions to several people in line, shaking hands and telling them his name, and generally catching them unawares.

The Speaker’s Reception was, unfortunately I think, almost entirely the preserve of adults. Other than Oliver, age 7, and the members of the Colonel Gray Jazz Band, there was almost nobody under 30. If kids are going to grok democracy, I think it would be good to have them deeply integrated into things like this.

In any case, the child-free nature of the event meant that Oliver had all the adults to himself. And so when Premier Robert Ghiz and his wife Kate walked in, Oliver knew it was time to make his move. After making introductions and shaking hands, we left the the Premier to greet others; Oliver, however, felt it important to make another swing around on the way out, and managed to convey that he is 7 years old, attends Prince Street School and, I believe, something about how he has plans to rearrange our living room tonight.

On the way home he suddenly realized that he’d forgotten to tell the Premier about his new computer game and also to seek the Premier’s counsel on what adult computer games he enjoys. It was all I could do to steer him home with the promise that he would be free to query the Premier on these weighty matters on his next encounter.

Some days there is just no doubting that you live in Prince Edward Island.

We recorded the first episode of The Plazes Podcast last week, focusing on an upgrade to Plazes.com that went live on Friday. This was my first podcast edited completely with GarageBand, which worked surprisingly well. It’s also my first attempt at hosting podcast files on Amazon S3, which is also working surprisingly well.

The whole experience reminds me, though, of wise words I read recently from a prolific podcaster; he suggested that if you open the door to doing anything other than simply wrapping up raw audio in an MP3 — in other words if you decide to do any editing at all, from “um” deletion to trimming down for clarity — you’ve got to be prepared to put in some time.

It only took us 30 minutes to record the podcast (I recorded Skype using Audio Hijack Pro); to edit it down to the 18 minutes it ended up at, with intro, extro and my voiceovers edited in, to convert to MP3 and AAC, and to set up a podcast feed and hosting, took about 6 hours all told.

Oh, and apparently in Germany you say “places” when you read “plazes”. Here in Charlottetown we say “plazes” to rhyme with “blazes.”

Helpful reader Mike pointed out that the RSS feed for comments for this website haven’t been working properly since August 17th. I’ve fixed the problem — this will teach me to carelessly modify database tables without thinking of The Implications — and all should be back to normal now. Thanks, Mike.

So I’ve got some Euros in my PayPal now, and I want to move them to a Canadian bank account. But I don’t want to lose anything in the conversion from Euros to Canadian dollars, so I want a Canadian bank account with the balance held in Euros. Here’s what I’ve learned after sending email to the major Canadian banks:

• Bank of Montreal: “Regrettably, our accounts are provided exclusively in Canadian and U.S. currency.”
• Citizens Bank of Canada: “Citizens Bank of Canada does not offer foreign currency accounts except for US dollar chequings/savings accounts.”
• Bank of Nova Scotia: “We advise that we currently do not currently offer accounts for Euros.”
• Royal Bank of Canada: “We offer accounts in Canadian or US dollars only at this time.”
• National Bank of Canada: “This message informs you that the e-mail you sent has not reached its destination because the domain “sibn.ca” is not valid. Please resend your message with the corrected domain.”
• CIBC: No response received.

The only positive response I received from from TD Canada Trust, which emailed back:

I am pleased to advise that TD Canada Trust does offer foreign currency accounts. However, you can only access our foreign currency accounts directly at your TD Canada Trust branch in Canada. They cannot be accessed via bank machines, EasyLine or EasyWeb.

Foreign currency accounts allow you to maintain your deposit without the need to exchange to Canadian Dollars, which may assist you if you are looking for an account to hold a large amount of another currency. In addition to being non-chequing, our foreign currency accounts:

• are non-interest-bearing accounts
• carry no service charges
• do not allow overdrafts
• are not eligible for coverage through the Canada Deposit Insurance Corporation

All of which makes their option even less attractive than PayPal. So that’s where my Euros are staying for now.

I somehow missed the fact that Angels — which I sang the praises of here after taking to task here — has closed. I suppose the fact that it missed my notice is part of the explanation as to why they didn’t make a go of it. But it will be missed nonetheless, and I hope Ken Zakem doesn’t disappear from the Charlottetown restaurant scene, as he’s got imagination, a kind soul, and he can cook.

Elizabeth’s Gardens, the flower shop at the corner of Pownal and Sydney, is closed too. It was another business that I like the idea of, but where I never actually darkened the door.

The PEI Company Store in the Confederation Court Mall is gone too. It was, at times, an excellent place to find interesting gifts. But then it veered pewter-wise, and never seemed to recover. They lost me once they stopped carrying Rogers Chocolates.

Just around the hall, the Family Shoe Shoppe closed recently too. I did shop there, especially for wee shoes for [[Oliver]]. There are fewer and fewer places to buy shoes in Charlottetown, especially downtown, and I’ll miss this store a lot, especially as I walked through at least once a day on my way to and from work.

Meanwhile, [[Interlude]], formerly across from the Fire Hall, hasn’t yet settled into its new home on University Avenue just north of Euston. The sign on the door has “September” crossed off and “Soon!” written in. I miss Gong Bao Thursday and hope they open soon.

Finally, on a brighter note, Sunbeams Café has opened in the space formerly occupied by Just Juicin’. I had lunch there last week — a cheese and tomato sandwich — and it was hearty, inexpensive, and the old “go go go” vibe was pleasantly missing from the space. That end of Queen Street doesn’t figure prominently on my food radar, so I can’t make claims that I’ll be a regular customer; all other things being equal, though, I would be.

Looking back over my wide and varied experience of technical meltdowns, I find myself realizing that when things go wrong, it’s often the DNS that’s at fault.

Of course it never seems like it’s the DNS that’s at fault, so I spend a lot of time debugging lots of other things. But then, once everything else is eliminated as a possible cause, it turns out that faulty DNS is the root of the problem.

Today, for example, I spent a lot of time helping a client figure out why staff on their internal LAN couldn’t access an administrative application on the offsite webserver.

There was nothing obvious on the server itself, nothing on the firewall on either end, and access from everywhere else on earth seemed just fine.

The problem was tricky to nail down because the problem would come and go. Sometimes access for one person would be instant while the person at the next desk would be plagued with constant timeouts.

Things got unplugged, re-plugged, examined and sorted through.

It wasn’t until I compared the output of the excellent Charles tool for one of my (perfectly normal) sessions with the output for one of my client’s (constantly timing out) sessions that the problem became obvious: they were hitting the wrong IP address.

It turns out that the DNS server they have set up on their LAN had a duplicate, incorrect entry for the webserver in place. So a DNS query on the LAN would return two IP addresses, one correct one and the other one that led nowhere.

So some staff were getting the right IP address the first time, and going to town, while other were getting the wrong IP address and then either getting no access at all, or timing out and then eventually getting access after 20 seconds.

We’ve just had the errant entry removed from the DNS, and so far things are swimming along like there was no tomorrow and everyone is happy.

Memories of the hurricane and DNS flood back.

It’s always the DNS…

By all rights Garnet Rogers shouldn’t have been booked into the Trailside Café in Mount Stewart last night. Mount Stewart is in the middle of nowhere. The Trailside seats, what, 30 people? It’s October and it’s cold and all the tourists have gone home. And Garnet Rogers is one of the world’s great folk musicians.

And yet, in some booking anomaly cum miraculous gift, there he was on stage last night (photos).

Careful readers may recall that, back in July, I instructed you all immediately go out and purchase tickets. Those of you who obediently heeded my call were treated to what can only be described as a transcendent musical experience.

Ten minutes before the curtain was to rise I was rewarded (or punished) for my exuberance by being pegged, by amiable Trailside impresario Doug Deacon, to stand up and act as master of ceremonies. Which explains how, for the subsequent 10 minutes I was lost in a delirium of trying to figure out how to appropriately introduce someone whose music I’ve been listening to for more than 20 years.

I fumbled through, and Garnet bounded up on stage, and for three hours, with a short break, he ran through a motley collection of guitars and songs new and old.

The last song of the night was a 20-minute rendition of Night Drive crossed with a new take on his late brother Stan’s Northwest Passage. When it was all over we in the audience were, I think, too overwhelmed to ask for an encore. Or perhaps we simply realized that Garnet had given us his all.

If you have tickets for tonight’s second date at the Trailside, you are lucky, as it’s sold out. If you are unlucky enough to live somewhere other than PEI, take a look at Garnet’s tour schedule and book tickets for his next performance near you. It won’t be as miraculous as a fluke date at the Trailside Café in October, but you’ll still thank yourself.

[[Oliver]] and I needed to kill some time before [[Tai Chi Gardens]] opened yesterday, so we took a side-trip to Victoria Park. Turns out that, if can overcome your fear of chance encounters with urban orgies, there’s a pleasant network of trails running through the park’s forests: