Reading this interesting article about the ‘cents’ symbol [pointer from Ian], I remembered that the first printer I ever owned — it came used, from Langford’s Drug Store — did underlining by printing the characters to be underlined, doing a carriage return (but no line feed), and then running underscore symbols along the same line, where underlining was required. It was an amazing dance to watch.

Which reminds me that for a time, if you wanted to check your email at Trent, there was an unlocked room in the basement of the Science Complex that contained an old DEC line printer connected to the network. You could login to your UNIX account, and use mail to read email, everthing printing out on paper as you typed. Somewhat cumbersome (especially if you ran out of paper), but a handy printed record of all your correspondence was a useful byproduct.

Kids I knew in Hamilton who were two or three years ahead of me in school used to do their high school computer programming assignments by filling out punch cards and sending them to City Hall for processing.

Ironic that now that almost all the physicality of computing has been removed, we see more physical problems resulting from data processing than ever before.

The Edmonton Folk Music Festival takes place in Gallagher Park in the downtown Edmonton neighbourhood of Cloverdale. According to IABC Edmonton:

Most residents of Cloverdale also receive free tickets, a way of compensating them for the extra noise and traffic levels in their neighbourhood during the Festival.

This seems like a possible model for Charlottetown. If the rock weekends are inevitable, perhaps the least the organizers can do is take the edge off and let downtown residents actually see the performers we can otherwise only hear from behind the fences.

I am not a big beach-goer. Catherine would like me to be. And, indeed, we have been to the beach two days running, which is something of a first. It seems absurd, living in the beachy paradise that we do, to not go to the beach as much as humanly possible, if only to ramble around in the shallows.

Beach going is much easier, and much more fun, now that Oliver will wade independently, something he started, appropriately enough, in the Mediterranean south of Barcelona in May. Today at Tea Hill beach he was romping around in the water like a duck. Although, for now, he can only “swim” backwards.

In any case, even with my relatively infrequent beach-going, I’ve seen a lot of the beaches that the Island has to offer, both in the spring and fall and in the heart of tourist season. With the exception of a rather busy day up at Basin Head, I don’t think I’ve ever shared a beach with more than a dozen people. Indeed, most of the time, especially if you visit in the late afternoon, you literally can have miles and miles of beach to yourself.

Which makes this photo of Coney Island on July 4th seem like another planet of beach-going. I’ve never been to Cavendish in the heart of the season… does it ever get that crowded there?

Reminder to fellow Island indoor geekfolk: do not let the summer go by again without noticing; soon the snow will be flying, and you will regret every sunny afternoon spent in front of the screen.

From time to time the discussion in this space has turned to the technical arcana of the web. When this happens, there are usually one or two grumpy gusses who chime in with a comment like “hey, less talk about HTTPS and SSL and more talk about rock bands and breakfast spots.”

For that reason, and in a breathless attempt to keep up with the young lads at silverorange, I’m happy to announce a new ‘blog, Reinvented Labs. This is where you will find technical discussions, code we release for use by others, and other such circus tricks.

Things over on this side of the door to the lab will continue on much as they have otherwise.

Like many other weblogging systems, ours sends an XML-RPC ping to Weblogs.com whenever a new item appears. Weblogs.com is a busy server though, and when we do this is “real time” there’s an 5 or 10 second delay before the ping is finished during which authors have to sit and wait.

As a way of working around this, we’ve set up a “ping cacher.” Ping requests are dumped into a MySQL database by the weblog authoring system, and then a cron job does the actual pinging, checking once a minute to see if there’s any new items deserving of a ping.

To keep things simple and universal, we set up our own XML-RPC server that mirrors exactly the XML-RPC parameter format of the Weblogs.com web service at rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2. Ours lives at www.reinvented.net/RPC2 and, just like Weblogs.com, accepts a request with two parameters, weblogname and weblogurl.

Pings to our XML-RPC service are dumped into a MySQL database, and then a cron job checks once a minute for new items that haven’t had a ping sent for them; if the cron jobs finds one, it sends an XML-RPC message to the rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2 and marks the item in the database as having been “pinged for.”

We used the useful inc. PHP XML-RPC implementation (update: this code has moved here, and recent changes may require tweaks to the function names in my code) to build the server and the client.

We’re making the code available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license:

• WeblogsPingCacher.tar.gz [2KB]

There are two scripts included: index.php is the XML-RPC server that mimics the Weblogs.com ping server and ping.php, which assumes you have installed a CGI version of PHP, runs as a cron job.

Our implementation assumes you use MySQL as a database server, but of course it would be easy to substitute any database server with a few modifications.

Imitation is flattery. Following in the model of Google and silverorange, we’re happy to unveil a little corner of the web for talking about the technology that we at Reinvented create.

The rambling boulevard that is the Reinvented blog will stay in place in much the same form. This space is for talking about technology and how we use it. Like our colleagues at silverorange, we’ll also be releasing some of the bits of our code into the public domain so that others may build on them (and, we hope, tell them how to make them better).

The CBC is reporting $25M reward for Saddam, dead or alive.

This seems to me to be an excellent opportunity for my reference librarian friends to use their skills for great monetary gain. Of course it will all have to be on spec, and there is a language barrier, but a 747-load of librarians could, I’m sure, locate Saddam in a couple of days. Even after expenses, there would be enough for a healthy honourarium for everyone.

Espionage for literacy.

My post about concert noise on the weekend has received a flurry of vigourous discussion. For purposes of understanding the various general points of view, I summarize each below:

First was a general area of opinion I’ll call yes, there was too much noise, which was my original thesis. Rob, who used to live about 12 feet from the main stage on Water St., and so who is as expert a commentator as anyone, is the chief proponent of this point of view::

I heard it over in Bunbury near Fullerton Marsh! I used to live at 108 Water Street. Summer had become unbearable and we had to move out for this week and for the festival of the Fathers.

And later, more generally:

The result was that at the height of the summer with windows wide open to keep cool, there was a procession of drunks yelling, vomiting and defacating outside our window.

Alan was another proponent of this general attitude; the thrust of his arguments concerned the proper location for large loud events:

Is what Charlottetown is doing stunned more due to the location rather than the event? Stick it at UPEI next time and set up shuttles.

Justin added his voice too:

Yesterday while I was at work a particularly loud band was playing across the parking lot. Inside my building the only audible sound from them was the bass and drums. I did a 14 hour shift and had about 10 hours of “Bumm ka-boo-boo thumm umm boom boom”. I now understand “Those Drums!!! Stop those drums”. After a day of that I was about in tears when the noise began last night.

Hannah wasn’t necessarily against the concert noise, per se, but more about the consequences:

I do not have an issue with the concerts, though I do not think the Landing Park is an adequate, suitable, or safe place to hold events for thousands of people. I do have an issue with the severe lack of policing, and the lack of planning for obvious (?) things like temporarily closing roads when the concerts finish to let 10,000+ leave safely and quickly (plus more adequate garbage collection).

The other general group of opinion I’ll call the it’s good for business, so put up with it and the closely related you do live downtown, what do you expect?. Andrew was first in on this:

It’s only 3 days a year and the economic impact can be felt for mo[n]ths on the downtown and the island in general.

Nathan continued the trend:

You do live downtown. Mosts cities have loud street noise all hours. For me the noise of garbage and recycling trucks early in the morning where I live is a tradeoff for the all the benefits of living downtow

Lana was most succinct on this point:

As always, it’s a choice to live downtown. Love it or leave it.

Ritchie shares this point of view:

I live downtown and I’m quite prepared to share the experience for a few days with everyone who wishes to come to this festival. Its great for Charlottetown, well organized and improving every year.

Brian agrees:

…Rock Concerts are fun, and it was proven by the ticket sales this weekend. Canada Day should be fun, I think adding some spice downtown for _one_ weekend out of the year is fair. It IS downtown afterall, where things should happen. The buzz brings in much needed business to local shops, and I have a hard time believing that some people are actually complaining about it.

There was a sub-conversation about the idea of notice that I raised — warning downtown residents about the noise to come. This notion was almost universally deemed crazy. Dave says:

but you can’t tell me you didn’t know there was a concert going to go on last night. i mean advertising… warning… it’s a notice either way. and there was plenty of it.

Andrea agrees:

This happens every year, on the same weekend, at the same location for the past several years. I think it would be a gross waste of time and resourses to have the city send out letters to down town residents to say “hey you know that concert that is here every year? Yeah well, it’s happening again, sorry”.

The only person to agree with me about notice was Rob:

It seems to be rule of humanity that if we are to be f*cked and even if we know that this is coming, we need to be kissed first - hence Peter is right - to apologize up front or at least to acknowledge the discomfort and the sacrifice that the residents make upfront is about grace and good manners and allows for acceptance.

Thank you all for your insightful commentary.

One of the hipsters at silverorange emailed me about a year ago: he wondered if I could configure this server to respond to requests for reinvented.net as well as for www.reinvented.net, as his habit was to leave off the www. I was happy to oblige, and this alternative mechanism has been in place ever since.

Not being a hipster myself (but trying hard every day), I am embarassed to admit that not only do I continue to call up this website using the www, but I almost always type the URL as http://ruk.ca/, even though no browser I know of has actually required this for as long as anyone can remember.

Back at the dawn of time, you couldn’t assume the http:// because you might just as well be connecting to a Gopher server with your browser, which required gopher://. My fingers got trained under that regime, and I’ve not yet been unable to untrain them.

I’ve probably wasted years of my life typing http://, and dented my carpal tunnels an extra 23% while I was at it.

Here’s a pointer to a gopher server (at Trent University) — if you can click through, then your browser still supports Gopher, which is pretty amazing, as it isn’t in common use, and hasn’t been for many years.

Funny to think that back at Access 1994 in St. John’s we were all busy debating whether Gopher or the World Wide Web would emerge as the dominant medium. I think one of the sessions at the conference was a demo of a 3D Gopher Server. Those were the days.

I’m strangely excited about the impending opening of Cora’s Breakfast and Lunch on Queen St. It’s amazing to see a business moving to downtown Charlottetown, I guess. And since the demise of the Perfect Cup Cafe, I’ve been looking for a new breakfast place.

They’ve certainly done amazing work on the old Uncommon Grocer space: walking by tonight, the place is basically ready to go, with the tables all set up, the signage in place, and menus at the ready.

Cora’s, as readers have pointed out, is a branch of a Quebec-based chain. A story from the Toronto Star starts:

Until I’ve had a decent cup of coffee and a good meal, evil hell witch doesn’t begin to describe my morning persona. But enter through the doors of Cora’s Breakfast and Lunch, and you’re instantly transported to Happyland. In fact, I’ve forgotten what unironic cheerfulness feels like. Not only that, but if four urban homosexuals rush on over to a Mister and Mississauga strip mall on a Saturday morning after a Friday night of total debauchery, then the food just better be good. Boy, is it.

They seem to be big on variety, portion size and fresh fruit.

There’s a big countdown sign in their front window that says, tonight “2 Days until Opening”. So I imagine they open on Saturday. Anyone game for breakfast with Oliver and I?