Oliver and I were off this weekend to Halifax, and I decided that we should take the train from Sackville. Not only would it allow Oliver and I to spend more time together, but it would means we wouldn’t have a car to lug around (and park) in downtown Halifax, and Oliver would get to ride the train, which he really enjoys (as do I).

We left Charlottetown at 10:30 a.m. for a 12:43 p.m. departure, and had plenty of time to spare in Sackville (it’s amazing how much of the bridge-to-Moncton run is taken up on the Sackville to Moncton portion; it’s less than an hour and a half from Charlottetown to Sackville).

Much to my surprise, there’s a full-fledged VIA station in Sackville, complete with waiting room, luggage check and, most important for our purposes, a free parking lot. I think we’ll switch all of our arrivals and departures by train to Sackville from now on: it’s closer, much less crowded, and you don’t have to experience Moncton at all.

The train from Sackville to Halifax was marred by a problem with the rails downstream, apparently caused by a freight train, so we and our 70-odd fellow passengers were forced to transfer to buses at Amherst for the balance of the trip. The train left Sackville at 12:43 p.m. and we arrived in Halifax by bus about 5:45 p.m., almost two hours late. VIA was helpful and efficient about all of this, and Oliver seemed delighted by the prospect of adding a third method of transport to our day, so we were none the worse for wear as a result.

Going up on Friday and back on Sunday gave us a good view of the contrast between the old VIA rolling stock and the new “Renaissance” stock that’s gradually taking over the eastern line.

How these new cars can be called “Renaissance,” I don’t know. They were acquired after a cancelled European contract left them available: the cars have a storied history as part of an ill-fated overnight Chunnel train project; VIA bought them out of storage in 2000.

In coach class — now re-branded as “comfort” class — the old VIA stock is open and roomy. There are two large seats on either side of the aisle, a wide overhead luggage shelf, plenty of leg room, and everything is on the same level.

In the Renaissance cars, there is 25% less seating, with one seat on one side and two on the other. There is a tiny luggage compartment about each seat that appears not to fit most luggage (our modest daypack didn’t fit), much less leg room, and a foot-high step up into the seats (read “foot-high precipice for children to fall off” or “foot high impendent to mobility-impaired people to conquer”) and, despite taking out 1/4 of the seats, the cars been more like airplane cabins than trains: cramped and claustrophobic.

Perhaps the greatest indignity of all is that the Renaissance trains don’t include the Dome Car (VIA inexplicably calls this the “Park Car,” a term I’ve never heard a real person use; even the conductor calls is the Dome Car).

I heard a lot of chatter about the new cars on both ends of the trip, and nobody seems impressed. Even the train conductors, if pressed, appear willing to admit that the new cars are a big step backwards.

It’s too bad that VIA has taken this tack, especially now that energy and transportation issues are again coming to the fore and efficient rail transport has a chance of winning new converts.

Our train trip back from Halifax to Sackville was, thankfully, actually by train. Despite the aforementioned Renaissance cars, the trip was pleasant. One plus for the Renaissance setup is that the snack bar, replaced by candy machines on the older cars, is staffed and has a broad selection of snacks. They were nice enough to heat up the tasty samosas we’d purchased earlier in the at Pete’s Frootique in their microwave. The train pulled in to Sackville on time at 4:43 p.m., and we pulled into our driveway in Charlottetown, with a brief stop for a snack on the way, at 6:30.

All said, we’d do it again.

From the excellent Slovenia Bulletin comes news of a Big Brother-like show called To sem jaz. My favourite part of the story:

OBN has had experience with reality TV in the past, having aired the first Balkan reality TV show in June 2001. The show, 60 Hours, featured two Bosnian Serbs, a Bosnian Muslim, a Croatian from Zagreb and Jana Prepeluh of Ljubljana. The five spent 60 hours in a luxury apartment in Sarajevo, and the whole thing was not only televised, but aired over BH Radio 1. The show did not include the concept of voting contestants out of the house, since it was decided that it could cause unwanted nationalist tensions. The show itself turned out to be rather boring, and viewers were particularly disappointed that there was no nudity or sex. Lav, the Croat, was the only one to venture into the shower during the show, but he wore a bathing suit.

There is nudity and sex on To sem jaz, Slovenia Bulletin reports.

An eagle-eyed anonymous user points to the new CBC RSS feeds. They’re not perfect — headers only, with no actual text — but it’s certainly a great start. Here’s the Prince Edward Island headlines RSS feed. Of course the CBC can’t do anything without paying a lot of lawyers; here’s a snip from the terms and conditions:

Journalistic control. CBC/Radio-Canada has full journalistic control over the CBC Feed and Feed Content; this includes the exclusive right to amend, correct, withdraw or drop the CBC Feed and Feed Content incorporated in your website and you undertake to amend, correct, withdraw or drop the CBC Feed and Feed Content in accordance with CBC/Radio-Canada’s decisions in its sole discretion. Furthermore, you undertake to display the CBC Feed and Feed Content as they are provided by CBC/Radio-Canada, without altering them in any way, or changing their order of presentation, unless CBC/Radio-Canada expressly indicates you should do so or if you receive the written authorization of CBC/Radio-Canada. You undertake not to combine content from other sources with the CBC Feed and Feed Content. You also undertake to clearly indicate that the CBC Feed and Feed Content has been produced by CBC/Radio-Canada and display a CBC/Radio-Canada copyright notice at all times and under all circumstances. You may not archive the CBC Feed and Feed Content. You will not edit, alter or in any way manipulate the CBC Feed and Feed Content nor shall you allow its reproduction by anyone. You will not distribute the CBC Feed and Feed Content in any way or allow its distribution or redistribution in any manner or form by anyone.

The entire text of the terms runs 3,361 words.

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