wandership.ca

We should move more
written on 2005-08-10 at 12:01

We should move more. Though I mean this generally, of course I mean it especially of myself: when the most interesting single thing I can remember doing in the last couple years was travelling in Europe, and can regard moving to the city of my birth as a novel experience, I think this is a sign that I had become a mite too comfortable in my former state.

I am now a Hamilton resident, by choice rather than forced assimilation. We live in a huge and moderately expensive apartment on MacNab St. S. (near Aberdeen) which can be best described as “faded opulence”: really, I'm not much of a chandelier person myself, and it looks a bit odd over our $30 IKEA table, but the place will be comfortable at least.

(Back when I worked in London on co-op, I declared to a thirtyish yuppie co-worker my intention of living like a student after graduation in order to amass savings, and he laughed and said that he'd never known anyone who didn't allow their living standards to rise with income. He was right, and though I can try to use my relationship as an excuse and argue that I really could have lived an ascetic life were I but single, this argument rings false in my ears. Spend it when you got it, within reason.)

An unintended bonus of our apartment is the potential for conversation fodder from the previous occupants of our place. All our stories about them come from the other people in the building, who were (to say the least) very happy to see them go. Maybe I'll write about them later.

The biggest surprise of moving back is the realization of how little I really knew of my birthplace before. Partly this is because Dundas is an insular place, and my parents didn't bother much to experiment with Hamilton restaurants and culture. The main reason, however, is that I was a socially clueless teenager who also didn't drive. (I am, thankfully, a wee bit less clueless now, but I still don't drive.)

So, living in what is almost a new city is fun and healthy. The biggest perk oif moving, however, is the introduction of mental distance from the past. In the the last couple years in Waterloo, I spent most of my time at home, at work, or in various stores and restaurants near them, and was almost never at any of the places I'd hung out in my undergrad years. Nevertheless, it was hard to excise the idea that I was lingering around, ‘past my time’. Despite growing up in the area, I somehow don't feel that way here.

One thing I'll have to get used to in Hamilton is the comparative scarcity of computer-minded people. In Waterloo, it's quite difficult to go to a restaurant at lunchtime and not hear two people discussing some computer-related subject (e.g. Apache, makefiles, character encodings, etc.) at a heavily technical level. It was unusual to go to Classic Indian for lunch and not run into the development team of Inscriber. Here, you're more likely to hear technical discussions between healthcare professionals (apparently, Hamilton now has more people working in health than in the steel industry), and my declaration that I intend to study computer science is generally met with silence or a disinterested “mmm hmm”.

Some life left yet
written on 2005-05-31 at 03:43

And lo it is now finally official: as of August I will be a Master’s student in the Department of Computing and Software at McMaster University in my birthplace of Hamilton, Ontario.

Needless to say since I orchestrated it, I am happy about this change, largely because it is about damn time I did something new. I'm less concerned with where I'm going and what I'm doing than I should be, but I'm pretty hopeful that I will end up working on something interesting and useful.

Going to Mac, as it's familiarly known, is something that I would be guaranteed to have complex feelings about. Since I left for Waterloo in ’96, Mac has been the university I didn't go to, and my onetime intoxication with the cult of Waterloo left me with a somewhat sour impression of Mac, even after its passing.

As well, I get the vague sense, every now and again, that the Mac administration is capable of even more insanely ill-conceived, baffling decisions than Waterloo is. A very minor example is that, apparently, webmail is the standard way of reading email. Another is the curious idea of an institute for the study of origins. The idea of “beginnings” seems a natural choice for organizing a popular book or a public lecture series, but a formal institute putting biologists studying organic soups beside physicists studying the Big Bang seems like a forced marriage. (Then again, Waterloo is talking about an undergrad degree in nanotechnology, so craziness abounds everywhere.)

Of course, a lot of these issues can be explained in either of two ways: (1) Being forced to deal with Waterloo regularly, I have a good idea of its faults and successes, while my as-yet sporadic experience with Mac means I selectively notice its faults; (2) I've assimilated Waterloo's climate to the point where it is now second nature and doesn't seem strange. Nine years is a damned long time.

One nice thing: three years after being one of the primary authors of a code generation package, it seems I will finally learn something about compilers.

Driving with Google
written on 2005-02-14 at 12:00

After reading the Slashdot story about Google Maps, I experimented a bit with the service. I'm quite impressed with the responsiveness and interactivity possible by the combination of server-side and client-side code; I'm surprised it took someone this long to get it right.¹

As Google Maps is not advertised as complete, the world for the moment consists entirely of North America. All the U.S. states are labelled, but Canada and Mexico, at least from the top level, are vast expanses of white emptiness. (Of course there are some very obvious jokes that can be made about this, but I don't think that's quite fair to Google.)

For this reason, I expected that no information about Canada would be present, and that zooming in would reveal nothing outside the U.S. border: this is the case with Mexico. Canada, however, is actually there; it's not marked as well as the U.S. (province abbreviations, highway icons, etc.), but the streets are visible once you zoom in far enough.

After some playing with this, I decided to test Google'sg driving directions. At first I tried only in-city locations, which were all quite reasonable. Inter-city transit is a more difficult problem, and Google fared less well here.

My first attempt was the most dramatic and inexplicable failure. I requested a map from my current home of Waterloo, Ontario to downtown Hamilton, a distance which Mapquest reports as 43.98 miles with an expected time of 65 minutes, which is reasonable. For some reason, Google Maps suggests taking the 401 east to Toronto: this isn't ridiculous in itself, but rather than leaving the 401 for Highway 6 or even taking the 403 to Hamilton from Toronto, the instructions then suggest taking Highway 400 North through Barrie, almost to Bracebridge. Oddly, they don't then tell you to go south again, but they do tell you how to get to the 403 as though you were still in Toronto. From this point on they are reasonable, if you happened to be going to Hamilton from Toronto. The total distance is 300 miles and expected time 335 minutes, almost seven times the Maqquest distance.

A bit more experimentation seems to show that Google has a marked preference for the 400-series highways, perhaps indicating that their metric for assigning weights to highways does not yet take into account non-major highways. For example, a route from Cambridge to Hamilton suggests taking the 401 west all the way to the 403 junction (near Woodstock), then east to Hamilton, when Highway 8 directly links the two cities. More dramatically, the instructions from Milton to Hamilton suggest the same suboptimal route.

There's a peculiar feature of the service that I've also seen from Mapquest occasionally. An obvious thing I would desire from route-plotting software is this: if the computed optimal route from A to C passes through B, then I would expect this to be equivalent to the computed optimal route from A to B plus that from B to C.

In isolated cases Google Maps appears not to do this. For instance, if I request directions from my hometown of Dundas, Ontario to Winnipeg, the suggested route passes through Chicago, but first goes around the eastern end of Lake Ontario, through New York State. Yet the directions from Dundas to Chicago go the more reasonable way, i.e. west through Detroit.

If you look closely you'll see that the route to Winnipeg passes slightly west of Chicago (i.e. doesn't leave the highway), so perhaps that slight difference is enough to force the change.

In any case, this is just playing: it's in beta, it advertises itself as U.S.-only anyway, and there is already Mapquest. And even the suggested detour to Bracebridge is not as dramatic as this example from Microsoft's MapPoint service.

1. "someone" referring to web developers generally, rather than Google specifically.

The FBI, eh?
written on 2004-12-21 at 19:20

On November 17th, 2004, I got these search hits in my Apache log.

Obviously someone's just having fun with their customized build of Firefox or Mozilla or some other browser. This is especially likely here, since the poster is using a nonstandard User-Agent ¹; generic browsers would identify the referral site correctly.

I have to say, however, that it did raise my eyebrows when reading the stat summary. This is, I'm sure, just what the author intended.

1. "Microsoft Windows Spy/Internet Tracker", which seems a mite imprudent, even for the FBI.

Welcome!
written on 2004-12-20 at 01:19

Welcome to wandership.ca!

I have somewhat more ambitious goals for this site than my previous one. I'm happy to be free of the confusion and negative association of .cx, and the absurd fees charged by the .cx registrar.

Why wandership? As I explain on the about the site page, I was trying for an English version of the German word Wanderschaft, "state of wandering". Some who know me from real life may clue in to why Wanderschaft might have a certain appeal for me.

Thanks to Yaacov for his orderly site design and CSS, which I stole shamelessly from. Hopefully I'll get around to tweaking things to the point where the appearance of pilfering is less blatant.