As I was walking into work, I had a flash of a thought – to put a reminder in my calendar so I would not miss an event. By the time I got to my computer, I’d forgotten what it was that I wanted to add to my calendar. By the time I remembered what it was, I’d missed the event. Crappy.

With the run-up to the next New Zealand general election, we’ve been subjected to a lot of banter about laws passed and policies announced that get in the way of regular people. My problem is that people seem to push around a mantra that they can gather under and get support, regardless of the issue and regardless of the facts. A fine example¹ appeared today on Stuff.

Taupo’s water is sourced from the lake and treated by filtering and chlorination, but the treatment does not guard against giardia or cryptosporidium.

Mayor Rick Cooper said the compliances required were “political correctness gone mad”.

It seems to me that since giardia and cryptosporidium are both water-borne infectious diseases that can result in diarrhea, this is a bit more serious than just being politically correct. I think we may need another term invoked for this sort of behaviour. Let’s call it Anti PC Madness Gone Mad.

¹ Note that roughly the same argument can be said for another common Kiwi mantra: Nanny State.

That is the sound of weight being applied to a broken wheel as it turns around its bearing. I was making that sound until early last week, when I swapped out a #3 for an old wheel of roughly the same size. That was the sound that the very same wheel was making this morning, and also the sound that my #2 on the other foot was making by this afternoon.

Apparently, I am hard on my wheels. I don’t know what exactly is happening, but I am starting to suspect my rocker. At a guess, if I drop off a curb, the bulk of my weight is spread across two wheels instead of four. Trying to decide how to deal with this, I see two options: going with a flat rocker, which will kill my turning radius, and finding a wheel that handles stress better.

I would assume that a solid hub would be a good approach, assuming it can evenly distribute any sort of force across the whole of the hub, rather than cracking at a weak point. Alternatively, a softer wheel may spread the impact through the urethane before the shock hits the hub. Of course, the softer wheel would wear down faster. While I was down at Cheapskates, I noticed that the bulk of the aggressive wheels were solid pieces. There might be good reasons for that. Looking at the on-line retailers, I noticed that several race wheels are also solid core, citing lower drag. Sure, but I am not going to worry about that. Just give me something that I am not going to break.

It might be a good idea to contact some of the companies that make these wheels. I would like to know if there is anything I can do to stop the problem outright. I cannot guarantee that I will never drop off a curb again, so another solution needs to be found.

The recommendation stream from Last.fm today has been incredible. A major highlight was catching Mike Doughty doing some post-Soul Coughing work. Check out this acoustic series. It’s poppy and bouncy, with Doughty’s unmistakable voice. I can see some shopping in my future.

With the end of August loitering over on the edge of the calendar, it’s time to take stock of the upcoming changes to the way buses are operating.

The Eastbourne routes are displaying posters announcing the end of the trial, which extended the #83 to the Wellington Hospital. The trial has been terminated and is considered unsuccessful, citing insufficient patronage to continue the service. Users are advised that they can still reach the hospital by bus, requiring a transfer from the Valley Flyer service to a Go Wellington service. However, this transfer will incur a second full fare, since there is still no integrated ticketing available for the Wellington region.

As of August 29th, Go Wellington will be discontinuing 10-trip tickets in favour of Snapper payments. Snapper offers a 25% discount over regular fares, compared to 20% for the 10-trip tickets, but after October 1st will start to incur transaction costs to load money on the card. On the other hand, regular fares are on the rise. The extra discount that Snapper offers will easily be lost in the increases. No one should be surprised.

With the new prices, however, it is again time to evaluate the benefits of the monthly pass versus per-trip fares. The short story is that my beloved Platinum Pass is no longer cost-effective. A combination of smart-cards will be responsible for getting me to and from work.

These two graphs show the cross-over point of affordability for trips on a single bus. The comparison is the constant price of a monthly pass versus the increasing cost of discounted fares – two trips per day, ranging from 16 to 22 working days per month.

A Gold Pass is marginally affordable for people traveling 2 zones, depending on any extra trips that may be taken outside of work requirements.

The Platinum Pass becomes useful for 5 zone commuters, but only in months without holidays.

With my recent move from Hataitai (Zone 2) to Mount Cook (Zone 1), my affordability line has shifted away from using the Platinum Pass. For a 20-day working month, I fall $36 dollars short of affordability, considering only work. Even with a weekly 2-way 2 zone trip to Kilbirnie, I still don’t quite cross the line for a normal month. I may hold off on the shift, though. September has 23 working days and 5 Mondays, costing $165.60 and $22.50 for the two requirements, which just passes the $180 of a Platinum Pass, assuming I don’t take a day off along the way.

Future changes may make this sort of evaluation irrelevant. Poneke says that Snapper is to replace the Gold Pass next year, and the Platinum Pass may be replaced eventually, if the bus companies can work out their integrated ticketing roadblocks. Ideally, a clever smart-card would stop charging a user who has surpassed the cost of a monthly pass. One could hope.

I have been interested in technical documentation details for a long time. Separation of content from layout is just as important with documents as with software development and I have been keeping an eye on formats as they emerge and become accepted. A short time ago, the ITS department presented a road-map for the near-future, a lot of which I was disappointed with. In an effort to get involved, I started asking questions relating to compliance with the Public Records Act 2005. After a short number of steps, I accepted an invitation to join a committee overseeing said compliance.

There is a fair amount of documentation to go through and probably a lot of discussion needed to keep all players in line with the requirements. My hope is that the end result will be a relatively transparent process that helps the work that we are doing, rather than getting in the way.

Since there does not seem to be a lot of information regarding the PRA and software development projects, I will probably add notes here along the way.

In yesterday’s Dominion Post Watch Your Language column, Laurie Bauer talks about the demise of the sounded r in the kiwi accent. She depicts the slow demise of the voicing from the 17th century through to being inherited by New Zealand settlers.

The resulting spoken language introduces new world of homonyms:

We copy the standard English forms (but not the standard American forms) and pronounce “spar” the same way that we pronounce “spa”, “court” the same way that we pronounce “caught”, “dater” the same way that we pronounce “data” with no “r” sounds in either member of the pairs.

I found the article interesting enough to send an email to the author. I mentioned that in addition to her description, there is also a weird way that kiwis add an r sound in between vowel changes. She quickly replied, agreeing with me, but indicating that this behaviour is much more difficult to explain.

I gave a brief seminar today at work discussing board-level serial protocols, specifically I²C(Inter-Integrated Circuit) and SPI. It was largely a comparative look at high-level implementation of circuits using the two standards, followed by a brief look at interfacing SPI devices to the Analog Devices 21369 DSP SPI Controller.

The talk went well enough, but it’s the side conversations that might become dangerous. Speaking with a couple of my co-workers, I’m seeing a chance to turn a neat idea into a funded project. But if it doesn’t get funded, it might become a slightly expensive personal project. It’s possible that I may try to get a Blackfin sent home¹.

¹ This doesn’t mean that I’ve given up my search for a DSP development tool-chain that runs under linux.

I sat down to watch a movie with a friend the other night and a forgotten problem reared its ugly head again. I was attempting to play a Region 4 DVD in a laptop that was born in Region 1. Since the laptop is running WinXP¹, I was warned and prompted to change the region setting for the DVD drive. I reluctantly agreed, not wanting to futz with computer stuff while my friend was waiting for the movie to start.

New Zealand has held a stance on protecting consumers from region coding. However, many computer-component DVD drives have region coding built in. Since my DVD collection includes both Region 1 & 4 discs, switching back and forth is a very short-lived solution, and given that switching is recorded in hardware, undoing it is very difficult.

My options are largely based around software DVD decoders that don’t involve checking/setting the region. This is normally not a discussion, since the linux-based movie players do software decoding. Herein lies the final hurdle: for some reason that I have yet to discover, all of the movie players that I’ve tried have recently stopped being able to resize video to full-screen. I haven’t had the time to investigate this enough to come to a solution, which is why I was playing the DVD on the laptop in the first place, but it’s really starting to annoy me. I will need to solve this one properly if I’m going to be able to live without a TV/DVD player in the house.

¹ This is the second time since purchased in 2002. The reason is that Analog Devices does not have a tool-chain for DSP development that runs under linux.

After watching my typo-averages skyrocket over a couple months of having a broken LDC, I have finally gotten a new phone. Although I was given a recommendation¹ for a Vodafone 715, I ended up going with a Nokia E65. It’s a used phone, picked up from TradeMe.

I’ve only had about half a day of use out of it, and so far, it seems like a pretty damn good phone. I’ll have to watch my battery usage to see what sort of condition it is in, but there doesn’t seem to be any usability defects. I’ve been able to exploit a few of the nice features, like wireless access, but I have a lot of configuration yet to do (pick up email, prefer data to not come over over-priced GPRS, get some music on there).

There are downsides to buying a used phone. There is no warranty, there may be defects, and you may get more than you asked for. In this case, 44 images, 3 videos and a bunch of email in an authenticated IMAP email connection. I like to think that I’m one of the good guys, though. Everything was deleted as I found it. I have no need to exploit someone who didn’t clean up properly after himself. Besides, he included a 2GB memory card and adapter. I certainly won’t complain about that. I will have to get a set of headphones that work with the Nokia data port. I could use bluetooth, but why drain the battery faster than necessary?

I’ll probably write more about this phone after I get used to it and learn more about it. I’m pretty happy off the start; I hope that continues.

¹ The 715 is a very capable phone. I’d recommend it as it was recommended to me, especially for the price. However, I was taken by the wireless smart-phone capability of the E65.

It’s hard to come to a conclusion about who was at fault for the scare on the bus this morning. The driver is typically a bit aggressive, but this is the first time I’ve ever felt unsafe. However, I’m not convinced that his driving was the problem.

There is an off-ramp to Petone, which leads to my work and an industrial park. As a result, there is a fair bit of heavy-vehicle traffic that takes the exit. In this case, we were late to merge into the off-ramp lane. This isn’t overly uncommon; bus drivers often count on the kindness of other drivers to let them merge in when necessary. As it turned out, our bus tried to merge with less than 500m before the off-ramp.

This is where things started to go weird. There was about 1.5 bus-lengths available to slide into, but that was quickly cut off by a freight truck moving up from behind. Instead of allowing the bus to merge, he effectively cut us off. Horns were honked and our driver continued to be assertive, but to no avail. The freight truck blocked us off all the way to the meridian of the off-ramp, where we were forced to make a sudden stop.

Most of the passengers were a little frightened by the event and I have a feeling that the driver may get into a little trouble over this, but I’m not convinced that he was in the wrong. I’m tempted to think that the truck driver acted irresponsibly and put us all in danger. Having said that, we should have merged earlier.

This points to a problem that I see all over the city. Drivers – car drivers – will often stream past a bus that is trying to pull out of a bus stop. Even after it has merged in, it’s not uncommon to see another car or two race up from behind to overtake the bus? The problem is that buses aren’t given much respect on the road. Can we fix this somehow?