Oliver and I are taking the train to Halifax for the weekend. Of course the trains were banished from Prince Edward Island years ago, so we have to drive to Sackville, NB first. $138 round trip for both of us, so not cheap. But we both like trains, and I don’t like driving. We’re staying at the Residence Inn, right downtown. Fun father and son activities will ensue.

Here’s a good, simple map of Europe. Useful for plotting future journeys.

Supreme Court OK’s same-sex marriage.

Here’s a new feature, introduced today, for the Air Canada website: a “I am flexible with my dates” checkbox. All airline websites should have this feature: it saves endless iterations of trying different dates to get the best fare. Here’s what it looks like:

Update on January 2, 2005: I’ve concluded this little BitTorrent experiment, removed the download link, and shut down our tracker. Thanks for playing.

After settling down to a general consensus that the 1940 film His Girl Friday is in the public domain, and operating on the assumption that this means that it can be freely and openly shared with any and all, I’ve decided to run a little BitTorrent experiment.

What is BitTorrent? Simply put, it’s a handy way for making really large files available over the Internet without placing the bandwidth burden on a single server.

If I took the 269MB MPEG file of His Girl Friday and simply put in on my webserver for anyone to download, then every single copy that was downloaded would travel from my server to the downloader’s client, sucking up a lot of my bandwidth in the process.

Using BitTorrent, each person downloading the file also becomes an uploader of the file at the same time, thus sharing the load. I “seed” the network with a complete copy of the downloadable file, and every time there’s a new request to download it, each downloader obtains little bits of the file from all of the other people downloading at the same time.

Want to try?

First, go here and download a “BitTorrent client.” Clients are available for Mac, PC and Linux.

Once you’ve installed BitTorrent, download this HisGirlFriday.mp4.torrent file (removed link 2005-01-02), save it on your desktop, and then open it with your BitTorrent client. You should then see something like this:

That’s how it looks on a Mac; it will look different, but conceptually similar, on a Windows or Linux machine. What you see is the name of the file being downloaded and uploaded (HisGirlFriday.mp4), an estimate of the time remaining (25 minutes at this point), the number of “peers” (i.e. fellow download/uploaders working right now), and the portion of the file downloaded so far (111 MiB of 269 MiB at this point). On the right you see, a measure of the amount and rate of the upload to others (top) and the download from others (bottom).

It’s considered polite to leave your BitTorrent client running even after you’ve downloaded 100% of the file: this lets you continue to act as a peer for others, therein making the network broader and the impact on any one node less.

You can see some information about the BitTorrent “tracker” itself (the application running on my server that is a sort of “switching station” for all BitTorrent clients looking to join the swarm) on this page: you’ll see information about the number of clients that have 100% of the file, the number who are actively downloading, and the total number who have downloaded.

If you decide to jump in, let me know how it goes.

Amateur legal notice: His Girl Friday may or may not be in the public domain where you live; as such, you should only download it if you’re confident that it is.

Continuing from where we left off in Episode One, here’s some additional fun to be had with the combination of the free ArcExplorer and free GIS data for Prince Edward Island.

First, following the earlier instructions, fire up ArcExplorer, and add the Geobase National Road Network data.

Next, download this file [1.7MB]. This is a ESRI shapefile (explanation: ESRI is GIS software company; they make ArcExplorer among other things. The ‘shapefile’ is simply a GIS data file format that ESRI uses; it’s a common format for sharing GIS data) version of the same public PEI civic address data available for free download here; all I’ve done is convert the text data into a shapefile (using PHP MapScript, which you don’t have to worry about because I’ve done this for you). Unzip the pei-civicaddress.zip file you’ve downloaded, and remember where the resulting files end up.

Click the “Add Data” icon in ArcExplorer, and find the pei-civicaddress.shp file you just downloaded and click OK. Because there are more than 68,000 addresses in the file, this will take a while to load (perhaps 3 or 4 minutes); the result will be something that looks like this:

What you’re seeing here is the road network, overlaid with a dot for every civic address on Prince Edward Island — there are so many that the “mush together” into a solid mass of address-blob. We can help reduce the size of the blob a little by changing the way the addresses are marked on the map. Right-click (Mac users hold down Control on the keyboard and click) on “pei-civicaddress” in the left-hand layers list in ArcExplorer:

Select “Properties” from the pop-up menu, and then on the Properties screen, change the “Size” of the circle used to mark the civic addresses from 6 (the default) to 1 (i.e. a much smaller circle):

The result makes it a little easier to see both roads and addresses:

Let’s save this setup so that we can come back to it: from the ArcExplorer menu, select “File,” then “Save As,” and save the file with a name and in a location that you’ll remember later: ArcExplorer saves the layers, the configuration of the layers, and your “zoom level” when you save, so when you load this file again later, you’ll be right back where you left things.

• Monday: ballykissangel
• Tuesday: The Amazing Race and NYPD Blue
• Wednesday: The West Wing
• Thursday: The Apprentice and Without A Trace
• Friday: Medical Investigation

If you’d like a view of Prince Edward Island 60 years ago, check out this NFB film about PEI from 1943. There’s a 3 minute RealVideo clip on the website. Who knew that the entire province was a “restricted tubercular free area?”

Next to the Lika Museum in the town of Gospic, Croatia is the public library. When we were there in October, I snapped a photo through the library window:

Note that there are three copies of the Naomi Klein book No Logo on the shelves.

By the way, if you missed The Take at City Cinema last week, you missed a pretty interesting movie. Directed by Avi Lewis and written by Klein, it’s a documentary about workers taking over shut factories and operating them as cooperatives, set against the background of Argentina’s tumultuous political situation.

So you want to start playing around with GIS (Geographic Information Systems) on your home PC? Here’s a simple guide on how you can start exploring maps of Prince Edward Island using only free data and free tools.

First, go and grab a copy of ArcExplorer from ESRI. This is a free basic GIS tool that will allow you to load digital map files, and do some basic queries. ArcExplorer is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux; pay attention to the “Supported Platforms” section of the download page to make sure you get the right version. Download the version you need, and follow the instructions for installing it.

Next, go to the Geobase download page for the National Road Network and download the “ESRI Shapefile” format of the file for Prince Edward Island. This is a 2MB ZIP file. Unzip the file once it has downloaded (on a Mac you can simply double-click on it; on the PC you may need a tool like WinZIP). The result will be 31 files with extensions like “shp” and “dbf.” Remember where these files ended up.

Now you’re ready to play.

Start up ArcExplorer; you’ll see a blank map screen (your ArcExplorer might not look exactly the same as below; I’m using the “Java Edition for Education” on the Mac):

Click on the Add Data icon on the toolbar (it’s the one with the yellow “plus sign” on it):

Locate the directory where you saved your GeoBase National Road Network, highlight the file named ROADSEG.SHP, and click OK.

The roads of Prince Edward Island will load into the map window. Depending on the speed of your computer, and the version of ArcExplorer you’re using, this might happen instantly, or could take a minute or two. In any case, the result will look like this:

What you’re looking at are all the roads of Prince Edward Island. You’ll notice that the ArcExplorer toolbar now allows you to select a host of additional icons. For example, click the “Zoom In” icon (it’s a magnifying glass with a “plus sign” on it):

Next use your mouse to draw a box around an area of the map, the map will “zoom in” to that area. Here’s the map of Prince Edward Island’s roads “zoomed in” to Charlottetown.

You can also “zoom out” (the magnifying glass with the “minus sign”), and pan (the hand icon; lets you drag the map to see a different area).

In the next episode, we’ll look at some of the other tools, and we’ll grab some other layers for the map.