Here is a page describing the archive of the sediment data my father gathered between 1968 and 2001 (aka “his life’s work”).

Prince Edward Island, like many jurisdictions, has a government-supported program of providing public Internet terminals to its citizens. Here in PEI this is called the Community Access Program, and it involves 76 locations across the Island that offer a variety of services, including, at the very minumum, one public Internet terminal.

As I’d never been to a so-call “CAP site,” I thought I should visit one, so I went up the road to the Atlantic Technology Centre, which opened this year, and has just expanded and improved its facilities.

One of the first things I noticed was their Acceptable Use Policy, which is posted in front of every terminal. I took one down and asked for a photocopy of it, and the security guard at the front desk helpfully provided one for me (click for a larger image):

Now I must admit, before going any further, that in my heart I am a "let anyone do anything as long as it doesn't harm anyone else" kind of person. I don't believe in limits to expression. I don't believe in censorship. I don't believe in monitoring. So take everything I say with that in mind.

That said, I don’t have a fundamental problem with the notion of an Acceptable Use Policy inasmuch as a corporate entity needs to protect itself from liability. But I think the Technology Centre’s Acceptable Use Policy goes much further than that, and it does it in an annoyingly amateur fashion that results not only in setting up a draconian environment, but a foggy one at that.

It starts off slow: respect the facility, the people and the equipment and keep the noise nown. I’ve got no problem with that.

Then things heat up:

Clients visiting ATC CAP Site are prohibited from accessing inappropriate websites or material. Users are not to visit unacceptable websites (i.e. porn, bomb construction, hate literature, etc.) If in doubt that a site is deemed inappropriate please contact ATC Corporate office.

Now even if you’re willing to set aside that there is a difference between expression about something and doing something (i.e. websites about building bombs vs. actually building bombs), the guideline about what’s “inappropriate” isn’t a technical legal definition. They’ve set up a situation where “inappropriate” is, in essence “whatever we say is inappropriate.”

That’s wrong. Not only do I find this approach personally objectionable, but I would argue that it is in contravention of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms that says, in part, that “Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:”

• freedom of conscience and religion;
• freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;
• freedom of peaceful assembly; and
• freedom of association.

Further, as the mission statement of the Canadian Library Association says:

We believe that libraries and the principles of intellectual freedom and free universal access to information are key components of an open and democratic society.

I agree. And I think “access only to that information we deem acceptable” isn’t the same as “free universal access.”

The next two sections of the Acceptable Use Policy are the “hammer” they use to enforce the policy:

The websites you visit are logged and monitored by Security personnel.

Security cameras are used to monitor the CAP computers and users.

That seems just plain draconian to me: I can’t imagine how it’s possible for anyone to freely and openly explore the world of the Internet with an electronic watchdog literally looking over their shoulder. It’s a violation of privacy, and unnecessary limit to freedom, and combined with the earlier “we’ll decide what’s appropriate” clause, it sets up a dynamic where surfing the web becomes an intellectual minefield.

The requirement that users not install viruses, worms, etc. is reasonable (although it might usefully be accompanied by a warning that this doesn’t mean the public terminals are necessarily free of these).

The limitation that children under the age of 16 must be “supervised by an adult” seems wrongheaded. I think one of the most useful aspects of the Internet is the access it affords to older children and teenagers to information that they would have difficulty — perceived or actual — getting access to otherwise. A teen who wants information about birth control. Or the effects of drugs. Or communism. A more reasonable approach — and one adopted by the provincial library system — is that parents must give one-time initial consent for children under 15, after which they are allowed free, unaccompanied access.

The “first come, first served” policy seems reasonable.

The “Use of profanity, obscenity, or printing content of an unacceptable nature is no acceptable with ATC” suffers from the same problems as the prohibition against “inappropriate websites or material,” namely the lack of a definition of “unacceptable material.”

The statement that “Downloading and copying of copyrighted material, including photographs, books, music and movies is strictly prohibited” is the blanket paranoid “you can’t run Kazaa” clause. Leaving aside that the computers at the CAP site afford no access to floppy, CD, USB or any other way of “downloading and copying,” a statement like this demands considerable elaboration. For example, there is considerable content on the Internet that, even though it is “copyrighted,” is freely available for personal use. This website, for example, is subject to this license, which allows copying.

Indeed it might be more appropriate to simply let the following clause, “ATC CAP Site computers are not to be used for criminal intent or acts,” stand, and leave out the copyright clause, for at least the prohibition against criminal acts has a dispute settlement mechanism, and leaves the responsibility with the user of the computer for determining the appropriateness of their actions.

Why is all of this important?

Because the Community Access Program is the cornerstone of the provincial and federal governments’ program to ensure the closing of the so-called “digital divide” and the universal access to the power of the Internet. Mitch Murphy, at the time the Minister of Technology, put it this way in 2000:

CAP sites enable communities across Prince Edward Island to take advantage of the Internet and other information technologies as a tool for social, cultural and economic development.

When CAP sites are cloaked in unacceptable Acceptable Use Policies, though, government is creating another sort of digital divide: between the people with the resources to freely browse the Internet from their home, without video camera monitoring, security personnel logging and arbitrary content restrictions, and those without their own means, who are left to browse in public under a sort of digital house arrest.

This has to change.

What are the chances that Aliant, after operating without its employees for these many months, will simply decide to do without employees altogether? Could they simply decide that it’s better to offer poor (or no) service, without the “hassle” of actual employees, in perpetuity?

If you have two cars parked beside each other, with radios on, both tuned to the same station and each radio with the volume turned up to ‘5,’ (halfway, in other words) is this any louder, in practical terms, than only one car?

One of the points that Edward Hasbrouck makes strongly in his book Practical Nomad: How to Travel Around the World is that it’s inherently dangerous to use a public computer (like in a library or Internet cafe) to do things like online banking.

Even if the activity over the network is secure — using a browser to connect to a secure banking website, for example — there’s no way of telling whether or not the computer itself is secure. For example, there could be something in place, installed by a earlier user, that logs all keystrokes to a file. So you naively type in your credit card or bank account number into a “secure” browser, but it’s also logged to a file where it’s later examined and used for nefarious purposes.

The same danger applies to anything you do with a browser that’s not public — checking your Hotmail, for example.

I’m wondering it others have tips and techniques that can mitigate this danger. I imagine, for example, that using a version of “Linux on a floppy” or “Linux on a CD” that you could use to reboot a public machine would go a large way towards averting things like keystroke logging. Any other suggestions?

This is of concern not only for nomads, of course, but for the large number of people for whom “Internet access” is “driving down to the local library.”

I ran into Catherine Hennessey on Queen Street this morning, and she mentioned several benefits of the new central parking kiosks in Charlottetown that I hadn’t thought of previously:

• Because you can buy the same “chit” for windshield display from any machine, no matter the location, you can buy a couple of hours worth of parking and park in several different locations downtown over that time. Can’t do that with parking meters.
• The chits aren’t specific to the car, nor to the person, so if you’re leaving your spot early, you can pass your chit on to someone else who can live it out for you. This is commonly done (although officially disallowed) with public transit transfers in big cities.
• The presence of card-readers in the kiosks will enable, at least in theory, merchants to be able to give their customers “free parking” but giving them pre-charged cards good, say, for an hour of parking.

Here’s a website that’s entirely devoted to hitchhiking. I found a like Airhitch, which appears to be the airliner version of the practice, albeit somewhat more formalized.

One of the afflictions we untrained, shoot from the hip, make it up as you go along programmers suffer from is a tendency to get stuck in our ways. If it works, you keep doing it. Learning happens when things don’t work, and there’s seldom enough time to go back and retrofit code for new learning.

This affliction hit me in a big way this week.

My little project of the day was to take a database of 700,000-odd Canadian postal codes and turn them into an ESRI shapefile that I could load into MapInfo. Or, in simpler terms, I needed to plot postal codes on a map.

Using PHP/MapScript, I wrote a PHP script to loop through the database of postal codes, grab the required information — postal code, place name, province, latitude and longitude — and add each, in turn, to a map layer.

And it worked.

Except that it worked really, really slowly.

It started off quickly enough — zooming through the first 10% of the postal code file in a couple of minutes. But once it got more than 50,000 points in its belly, things slowed to a crawl, and adding each point to the map layer was taking 5 to 10 seconds. I left the script running over the weekend, and it was only halfway through the “J” postal codes in Quebec, alphabetically, when I returned on Monday morning.

My immediate suspicion was that the more points I was adding to the map layer, the slower it was to add new ones. So I tweaked the part of the script related to adding points to the map layer. But things still ran just as slowly. I stripped out even more fluff, and made the code even more efficient. Still got bogged down. I switched the code to created ten individual layers, one for each province. No improvement.

This morning, with a clearer head, I though “maybe it has nothing to do with the map layer part of the code — maybe it’s something else.” So I stripped out all of the map-related code, leaving me with, essentially, a script that looped through 700,000 records in a database and displayed its progress. Much to my surprise, the code ran just as slowly as when it was creating map points. So the problem was database related.

To the manual.

I’ve written hundreds of thousands of lines of database-related PHP code over the past 5 or 6 years. And the vast majority of the queries have returned less than a dozen records. Which is far less than 700,000.

Right here in the PHP manual it says, about the mysql_result function I’ve always used to grab results:

When working on large result sets, you should consider using one of the functions that fetch an entire row (specified below). As these functions return the contents of multiple cells in one function call, they’re MUCH quicker than mysql_result(). Also, note that specifying a numeric offset for the field argument is much quicker than specifying a fieldname or tablename.fieldname argument.

So I modified the code to use mysql_fetch_row instead.

And now I can digitize the entire country in about a minute.

Which, assuming the originally script would have ever completed, is about a 300,000 times improvement in speed. Presumably that’s why the word MUCH is capitalized in the PHP manual!

Moral of the story: never make assumptions about where problems lie, never assume you know everything. And read the manual.

Here’s the Canadian Dept. of Foreign Affairs description of the safety and security of a country. Can you identify which country it is (without using Google)?

Crime occurrences are high in many… cities, but are generally concentrated in areas that travellers are unlikely to visit. Travellers, however, should remain vigilant and alert to their surroundings. Full cooperation is recommended when stopped by police. Street crime can spill over into commercial, hotel, and entertainment areas. Racial tensions and poverty occasionally prompt riots; these are usually confined to the poorer districts of major cities, but the violence can spread to central commercial and hotel districts.

Spectrum, the weekly Deutsche Welle science program, has an interesting piece about the use of iris scanners at Nine Zero, a Boston hotel where I’ve stayed before (albeit in the off-off season, when rates are cheap). You can listen here (it’s the second item in the programme, about 7 minutes in).

The piece was produced by Sharon Dempsey, who interviewed me last month at the DNC.