I was trying to book a flight to Boston today, on Air Canada’s website and received the following error message:

Due to the extreme number of customers accessing our website at this time, the “Search” option is not available. Please try again later. We apologize for the inconvenience.

By “Search,” here, they actually mean “looking up fares,” which, to my mind, is most of the reason why you would go to their website in the first place. Perhaps they should just say “the website is too busy right now; go away.”

From Steven comes a pointer to video of Howard Dean on Hardball.

This was one of those years where autumn was merrily making its way along and then today, blamo!, winter strikes. Stephen Desroches grabbed a montage of IslandCam images that illustrates this.

Thanks to the magic of Feedster, Cynthia Dunsford, a determined Blogspot hold-out, has rejoined the blogroll.

Here’s her RSS feed, a simulated feed created by Feedster and enabled by a simple and snazzy change in the Blogspot template.

Welcome back!

Thanks to the diligent work of Steven Garrity, the complete video and audio archive of the Zap Your PRAM Conference is now online.

A note about the video quality: our primary goal was to make an audio recording of each session. After some discussion, we decided that shooting video would be the best way to get good audio.

As such, much of the video is of poor quality: bad lighting, people walking in front of the camera, the camera falling to the ground, and so on. It’s also quite small, to keep the file size reasonable (and even at that, the files are still quite huge).

You may recall that the blogroll disappeared from the right-hand side of this website a couple of weeks ago.

After some struggling with french accents, I’ve wrestled it back, this time on a page all its own.

As detailed here, I’m using NetNewsWire to maintain my blogroll now. One side-effect of this is that blogs that used to appear in the blogroll that don’t have an RSS feed are no longer there.

And because I use NetNewsWire to read all the blogs on the blogroll, it only contains blogs that I check in on regularly; I’ve pared off some links that were there but never read. As such, you’re seeing exactly the same sites on the blogroll that I’ve reading every day.

I’ve added a handy link to the blogroll page on the top-right.

Enjoy.

Earlier in this space, I detailed a problem I ran into with accented characters when trying to set up a system to use NetNewsWire to maintain blogroll for my weblog.

At long last, I’ve cracked the accented character problem, and so, if only to assist others who find themselves in the same boat, I present the final results here.

My goal was to export my list of RSS subscriptions in NetNewsWire to a text file, transfer that text file to my webserver, and then post-process it in PHP, loading it into a MySQL database where I could manipulate it at will, including using it to draw this blogroll page on the fly.

The first step is to use AppleScript to export the subscription list as a text file:

tell application “NetNewsWire”
    set c to “”
    set linefeed to “\n”
    repeat with thisSub in subscriptions
        set s to “” as Unicode text
        set s to s & (is group of thisSub) & linefeed
        set s to s & (inGroup of thisSub) & linefeed
        set s to s & (display name of thisSub) & linefeed
        set s to s & (givenName of thisSub) & linefeed
        set s to s & (givenDescription of thisSub) & linefeed
        set s to s & (home URL of thisSub) & linefeed
        set s to s & (RSS URL of thisSub) & linefeed
        set s to s & (icon URL of thisSub) & linefeed
        set t to TECConvertText s 
            fromCode “UNICODE-2-0” toCode “ISO-8859-1”
        set c to c & t
    end repeat
end tell

set blogroll to “blogroll.txt”
set f to (POSIX path of blogroll)
set n to open for access file f with write permission
write c to n
close access n

This script loops through each of my subscriptions in NetNewsWire, gathers the relevant parts to export as a Unicode string called s, and then converts that string to ISO-8859-1 (aka ISO Latin-1) using a scripting addition called TEC OSAX.

To download and install TEC OSAX, simply follow the download link on this page, and then copy the file called TEX.osax to /Library/ScriptingAdditions (you may need to create that folder if it doesn’t exist already; note that there’s no space in the folder name).

Once the conversion to ISO-8859-1 is complete, the resulting string t is added to a string c which will later be written to a file.

Once all the information is gathered about each subscription, the string c, which contains a linefeed-separated list of attributes for each subscription, is written to a file called blogroll.txt.

This file is then copied to my webserver, using SCP, by a shell script, which then post-processes the file using a PHP script, the important part of which is this:

$string =  htmlentities($string);

This line, which appears in the loop that reads in and parses the blogroll text file, converts the accented characters in the ISO-8859-1 character set to HTML entities.

The end result is that the ç that started out in NetNewsWire as a MacRoman 0x8D, gets converted to Unicode U+00E7, then gets converted to the ISO-8859-1 character 0xB8, and finally to the HTML entity ç.

And so accents get preserved and François Nonnenmacher comes out as François Nonnenmacher.

There’s a companion book to the Fueling the Future series I mentioned earlier.

Here’s the weirdness: the publisher’s price for the book is $37.95. That’s also what it’s selling for at the local Indigo store in Charlottetown.

However, on Indigo.ca, the store’s website, the book is listed at $34.95 regular price, with a sale price of $24.46. That means that even with shipping charges added on (for a total of $30.36), the online price is cheaper than the store price.

While I suppose this may make sense on some macro level, it does seem somewhat absurd that the same company will charge me $7 more to get in my car to drive to their store to purchase a book than they will to hand-deliver it to my door.

The final irony, given the nature of the title, is that shipping lots of books to a central location is undoubtedly more energy efficient than hand-delivery by mail to individual consumers.

The CBC’s Fueling the Future project is interesting. I watched the CBC Newsworld Special on Sunday: it was basically “reality TV meets energy policy dicussion.” Leaving out that the hour-long format caused much of the richness of what started out as an all-day session to be lost, it was compelling television, with an interesting cast of energy experts.

You can watch a repeat of the program on December 7 on CBC News Sunday (both on Newsworld and on the main network); there are also segments on CBC Radio’s Ideas on Wednesday evenings until December 10th.

From the CRTC (via Angus TeleManagement Group) comes the news that Eastlink now has 10.5% of the market in local residential lines in Charlottetown.

Here’s the chart in the CRTC report that breaks the numbers down. Charlottetown is second only to Halifax in the country in terms of the market share of local residential telephone competitors.

This reflects my own anecdotal evidence: in the past three or four days, I’ve had two friends mentioned their recent switch to Eastlink. In both cases they were proud to be “Aliant-free.”

Perhaps this explains the recent rash of Aliant television commercials featuring a series of vignettes of Aliant employees talking about the competition. Only time will tell whether Aliant can advertise itself out of the legacy of so many years of arrogant monopoly.