William Lachance

For reasons which are probably obvious, I've decided to move this log to my own server:

http://masalalabs.ca

The location may be different, but I plan on continuing to post approximately the same mix of personal, political and technical content. Hope to see you there!

Today I gave a talk at Podcamp Halifax about OpenStreetMap, trying to stir up a bit of interest in "wikipedia for maps", particularly on the grassroots level here in the HRM. At the end, I promised I'd give the links to the various resources I cited in my presentation. If there's enough interest, I might try to write up a summary of what I was talking about here later to put these resources in context for those not lucky enough to hear me speak. Anyway, without further ado:

Applications of open geographical data:
- Walkscore: http://walkscore.com
- Travel time maps: http://www.mysociety.org/2007/more-travel-maps/
- hbus.ca: Coming soon! e-mail me if you want to alpha test and a get a sneak peek of my transit planner for the HRM.

Why open geodata is important:
- Google maps terms of service: http://code.google.com/apis/maps/terms.html
- HRM's regressive geodata dissemination policy: http://www.halifax.ca/giss/DataDisseminationPolicy.html

Editing OpenStreetMap:
- Best place to start is with the potlatch documentation: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Potlatch/Primer

Questions? Comments? I'd love to hear from you. Feel more than free to email me at wrlach@gmail.com.

For the SECOND time, LiveJournal decided to replace one of my perfectly cromulent userpics with that of a Thai ladyboy (unfortunately taken down before I fully appreciated the humor in the situation). So if you're wondering why the image attached to this post (on livejournal) is stupid, that's why.

Apparently this is a known issue:

http://www.livejournal.com/support/

Up until today, I was under the impression that the options for someone wanting raw Canadian road data were quite limited. Yahoo and Google maps are great, but their terms of use prevent creative and novel use (it's against their terms of use create a derived work). OpenStreetMap is free of these restrictions, but its coverage can be kind of spotty in outlying areas. What's a geohacker to do?

Little did I know that the Canadian government makes a complete survey of this information available under an extremely non-restrictive license (basically all you need to do is provide attribution). One better, they've come to an arrangement with the OpenStreetMap project that allows them to import all this data (under the creative commons attribution license), which will (as long as some care is taken) bring OpenStreetMap up to the level of Yahoo or Google maps. I'm positively giddy about the novel applications this should make possible.

That being said, integration of the data into OpenStreetMap will probably take some time. However, if you're writing an application which consumes OSM data (like I am), there's no need to wait. All I had to do to get an extremely accurate and complete OSM file for the region of the Halifax Regional Municipality was download the Nova Scotia road network in KML and use gpsbabel to simplify and trim said network down to my region of interest, outputting the result in OpenStreetMap format:

gpsbabel -i kml -f RoadSegment.kml -x simplify,error=0.01k \
-x polygon,file=restrictpoly.arc -o osm -F hrm.osm

The result? Pure city road network win. Here's a quick visualization courtesy of a cheesy 100 line script I knocked up using PyGame:

The empty space in the middle is the Bedford basin. The dense structure towards the center is the Halifax peninsula, connected via two bridges to the city of Dartmouth. The cluster to the north is Bedford.

I'd like to emphasize that, internally, this is a complete map, with street names and everything. Apparently GeoBase also provides a data set with address information which could be useful for writing a free geocoder, but I haven't had the chance to look at that yet.

If all that was nerd speak to you, just wait. I'll be bringing this topic down to earth in a way that any conscious being can appreciate in a few weeks...

Green Party Rally in Halifax 3
Originally uploaded by William Lachance

Decided to head out to the train station yesterday to see the conclusion of Elizabeth May's whistle stop tour across the country. She gives a pretty good speech: definitely the most forthright and articulate person in Canadian politics these days. If you care about such things, you ought to listen to her appearance on cross country checkup last week.

http://www.cbc.ca/checkup/archives.html

Yes, this means I'm not voting for the NDP this time around. Maybe I'll consider them again once they start talking seriously about global warming and peak oil. As it is, their focus on "kitchen table issues" (basically a few new proposed social programs) seems like nothing more than politics as usual, a totally inadequate response to the serious problems we're facing. I've been cynical about electoral politics for a long time, but seriously guys, get real.

The crowd was decent (maybe 100?) in spite of the fact that there was virtually no advance publicity for the event. Not being an actual member of the party, I only found out about this through some digging on the Internet. I'll bet anything that with better organization, that number of people present could have been multiplied by 10. Something to think about...

Lola with mouse
Originally uploaded by William Lachance

Friedrich caught another mouse this morning. I think that makes two for him, tying him with Lola (pictured) for number of vermin killed in the Côté/Lachance household.

It's incidents like this that remind me that cats are actually insanely useful animals. It wasn't too long ago that rodents were a huge menace to public health and the food supply. In order to prosper, we needed some way of controlling their population, and the domesticated feline provided.

Perhaps the development of civilization can be attributed not just to ourselves, but also the organisms that we have a relationship with. Not only cats, but domesticated crops, dogs, bees, and innumerable other things. Following this metaphor, perhaps the human animal can be likened to the nerve cells of a much larger organism: necessary for its development perhaps, but hardly sufficient.

Surely I'm not the only person to have thought of this.

I picked up a Mac Mini earlier this week, primarily for work related reasons. The user interface is indeed as shiny as people claim, but I'm amazed at how often the whole operating system seems to _completely_ block on some stupid application. The most recent offender is iTunes: when faced with the task of copying a bunch of files from my desktop folder into its "music library" folder, the whole thing ground to a halt, completely locking up my computer (even my mouse wouldn't work). WTF? First off, why would iTunes have trouble with such an apparently simple operation? Was it written by monkeys? I can copy the same files in a fraction of a second using the file manager. Second, why would one badly-behaved application bring down the whole system? Does the mac have a terrible scheduler, does the UI just run in one thread, what?

I'm in Montréal for a few days. Had some time to kill yesterday, so I decided to check out if Cuisine Bangkok in the Faubourg was still around. Yes, indeed it is and a good thing too. Way above average Thai cuisine at food court prices. I got a plate of green curry chicken (with carrot and potato) and spring rolls for under $7. Divine. How do they do it? And why don't more of my friends in Montréal know about it? Go there you must. Strict vegetarians are excused, as I believe most/all their dishes are made with fish sauce.

Work view from my window
Originally uploaded by William Lachance

I never particularly thought of myself as an outdoorsy person, but I must admit the allure of the wider world has recently become overwhelming. I look out the window, and my inner voice screams at my to stop what I'm doing and get out there. It doesn't help that Halifax only has tolerable weather 4 months out of every year (June - September).

Sackville, an enduring, proud maritime tradition. Allow me to present:

Baron Sackville
Sackville, Nova Scotia
Sackville, New Brunswick
Lower Sackville
Middle Sackville
Upper Sackville
Sackville Bus
Sackville Street
Sackville High School
Sackville River
Historic Sackville
HMCS Sackville
Sackville Public Library

Can we ever get enough Sackville?

Wow.

I honestly wouldn't have thought it possible that the liberals (of all people) would be the first to catch on to the other major environmental trend of the 21st century. I'm quite curious to see how this plays out. Given the shoddy record of public debate so far on climate change, I don't really have much faith in the short term that Canadians will be able to properly understand such a subtle issue. It's still good to hear that the conversation (however ill-informed it might be) is about to get started.

Spent some time today planting tomato, basil, cucumber, and green onion seeds in yogurt containers... less than two weeks before the last frost here in Halifax. I've been *meaning* to start a garden for the last 3 years or so, it feels very good to finally take the first necessary steps. Here's hoping that I'll be able to eat at least one or two of the things I planted. At the very least, I haven't lost much money on this endeavor (~ $15 Canadian).

Two interesting stories on cbc.ca today, on the soaring prices of grain and gasoline, respectively. Conveniently, of course, these two necessities aren't factored in to the measure of inflation ("core inflation") that central banks and governments use when making decisions. Ah well, what's an extra $50 a month (or so) to the people that really matter?

--

Meanwhile, my new(ish) cat Friedrich continues to delight with his trick of playing "fetch" with milk bottle rings (we throw, he brings 'em back). When he wants to begin playing, he drops one on the floor right next to me and meows distinctively. How cute is that?

I guess I deserve every one of them for being such a smart ass.

Date: Thu, 1 Nov 2007 10:07:57 -0300
From: William Lachance <wrlach@gmail.com>
To: Air Canada <confirmation@aircanada.com>
Subject: Re: Air Canada - Booking confirmation

On 10/31/07, Air Canada <confirmation@aircanada.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>  ****** PLEASE DO NOT REPLY TO THIS E-MAIL ******

Ok.

-- 
William Lachance
wrlach@gmail.com

A great deal of hay has been made recently about the "rising" Canadian dollar. I really think this is the wrong way of looking at things. It would be more appropriate to say that the U.S. dollar is sinking. Hard. Why is this? I think the basic pattern is pretty simple to understand:

1. There's more U.S. dollars floating around than ever before (thanks, in no small part, to the low interest rates that continue to fuel the U.S. housing bubble).
2. Relatively speaking at least, there's less of value that you can buy with those dollars. Did you know that the U.S. trade deficit in 2005 was $725 billion? And it's only going up.

In this context, what sane person would want to hold onto substantial amounts of American dollars? Fiat currency is useless unless you can buy something of value with it, no matter what Alan Greenspan says. I'd take a bushel of Canadian wheat (or a Chinese television) over dubious U.S. asset backed commercial paper any day of the week.

I'm glossing over lots of details here (notably the relationship between the U.S. dollar and the price of oil, which is an interesting story in and of itself), but as far as I've been able to determine, this is the overarching story. Speculation on the endgame of the narrative is left as an exercise to the reader.

A few weeks ago, I spent some time working with George Kenney over at Electric Politics to improve some aspects of his site, upgrading it to Movable Type 4.0, improving the site archives and adding OpenID support to the comments section. It was a great deal of fun, and I hope to do some more work with him in the future.

If you have the time, I'd heartily recommend browsing the site. In particular, his audio interview with Chalmers Johnson is really worth listening to. The book under discussion, Nemesis, probably ranks as the best I've read this year. How much more sense things make when you put them in the proper historical and economic context! A strong and vigorous antidote to the utter shallowness of mainstream apologies for U.S. policy.

I just posted an article to advogato on the proper use of assertions. Perhaps I'm wrongheaded, but I truly believe that the software I use on a regular basis would be of much higher quality if people actually read and used the advice contained therein. If you want to comment, but don't have an advogato account, you may do so here.

For what it's worth... I encourage anyone living in Halifax to do the same. You can find the name/contact information of your councilor here:

http://www.halifax.ca/districts/index.html

Subject: Pending Halifax Transit Strike
From: William Lachance <wrlach@gmail.com>
To: kellyp@halifax.ca
Cc: murphyp@halifax.ca
Hello,

I am writing to express my extreme displeasure with the looming transit
strike on Monday. As a result of this, my partner is due for a one hour
walk to and from her work at Bayer's Road next week, which (needless to
say) is absolutely ridiculous. At the very least, I would expect the
Halifax Regional Municipality to have a similar policy as Montreal,
which insists that transit will continue operating during core hours
(6-9am, 3:30-6:30pm, and 11pm-1am) during a labour disruption such as
this.

I realize there are two sides to this issue, but at the same time you
are the only two people (as the mayor of this city and my councillor)
who I can hold accountable for the continued operation of this essential 
service. Rest assured that I will be watching the news on this issue very 
closely and your (in)action will affect my vote at the next election.

Sincerely,

William Lachance
<address deleted>

apenwarr: Your bit of economic theory is interesting, but I'm still pretty certain the key driver here is supply and demand, not price optimization. See, for example, the testimony by Paul Sankey before the U.S. congress on the subject: "Gouging is an Idiotic Explanation".

The facts are simple: domestic demand in the U.S. for gasoline (refined crude oil) is about 22 million barrels per day, while supply is only about 17 million barrels per day (the difference is made up with imports from overseas). Most of the blame for this expensive discrepancy can be placed on the difficulties currently experienced by the U.S. refining industry (extended maintenance, tighter product specifications, safety concerns), rather than some kind of deliberate conspiracy by an oil oligopoly to restrict supply and/or fix the price.

The marketplace for energy is simply too complex, with too many stakeholders, for it to be treated as a monopoly. If only they could, I'm sure those U.S. refineries would very much like to be processing and reselling those 5 million barrels of gasoline that are currently being imported (who wouldn't given the current high prices?). Why invoke conspiracy and collusion when an alternative, well-sourced explanation works just as well?

Early September is an interesting time to have a Fringe festival, but how about some plays that aren't about dating, relationships, and yuppie women professionals?

Thanks,

Will

P.S. Thanks for introducing me to the wonder that is microbrew India Pale Ale.