A four-day weekend

I’m not going to make this a full-blown account of what’s happened this week but it’s coming to the end of a four-day weekend for me. I haven’t seen my parents since Christmas some three months ago – unless I have actually seen them since then and I just can’t remember, making this not a little embarrassing – and I promised that for my mum’s birthday back in early January that I’d pay to take her to the ‘Garden of Europe’, Keukenhof after it opened on 22nd March.

I’m not going to say I’m not a fan of gardens and while I was certainly impressed by both the flower displays and exhibits like the Inspirational Gardens, the gardens felt somewhat empty to me. Obviously, it’s themed throughout and that theme is Keukenhof; but I think that it could be diversified a tad more without losing the ‘bulb garden-cum-tourist trap’ vibe that brings almost a million visitors in just two months’ time every year.

We also went to see the Zaanse Schans: a museum village in essence, home to a few dozen windmills and buildings from the Zaanstreek region of Noord-Holland. Very quaint; very Dutch. We then returned to Haarlem to get gifts for various people “back home” before heading to Schiphol once more. After we’d said our goodbyes at check-in, I segued to the http://www.misterb.com (NSFW) store on the Warmoesstraat in Amsterdam and somehow ended up getting half my hair shaved off and watching the titleholder of Mister International Rubber (NSFW), Sly Hands (NSFW) squirming in a vacbed for a good twenty minutes. As you do.

By the way, Keukenhof’s open until 20th May. Even my manager at work – who isn’t a garden-y kind of person) was thinking about going this year – certainly when the weather brightens up a bit, hopefully in time for Koninginnedag.

Door sein- en wisselstoring

There was a failure at the ‘traffic control centre’ in Amsterdam this morning. It took me almost four hours to get to work; and being stranded at Utrecht Centraal (34 km south of my workplace) for a good forty minutes and sitting in traffic on the replacement bus from Naarden-Bussum didn’t help either.

The entire rail network of the Netherlands is, according to Wikipedia, controlled from just thirteen control centres. Closing small signalboxes because they’re cute and you want to be evil is all well and good but the effects if something goes wrong spread like wildfire.

→ Academic paywalls don’t just cost money, they hinder research

Ben Goldacre:

In the two cases [described], academic journal paywalls acted as a barrier to research by slowing peoples progress in accessing content they had a legitimate paid right to. […] These paywalls simply act as a barrier to research.

Even if I did have a day’s wages to spend on a single article, if a journal doesn’t permit me to read and research at my own leisure, I’m sorry but that field’s lost what could have been an excellent mind. And at such a high price per article, a well-designed and well-engineered interface isn’t being put off for financial reasons; either laziness or just good old-fashioned “enough people’ll pay us regardless of what we do”-ism.

Platform numberwang

When I started writing this particular post, the answers which I later discovered weren’t that obvious but I feel quite dumb for not seeing it sooner. I do do quite a bit of research for this blog’s posts but it really depends if the subject is something I can really get into—something closer to my heart, I know enough (e.g. specialist terms) to be able to search deeper and in more detail.

I’d first like to clarify something: I’m not a trainspotter. I’d also like to clarify that I don’t hate trainspotters and apologies for offending any of them fellow human beings by suggesting that it’s beyond acceptable to be interested in such things. We all have hobbies, and we have hobbies that other people either don’t understand or are disinterested in. I am however quite keen on the railways themselves: not so much the signalling and stations, but the tracks and how they all fit together are what interest me most. I’ve been drawing sketches of track diagrams for what, ten years now—just as doodles—and I’ve thought a couple of times of scanning them all in and seeing if they fit together in some way. This isn’t quite the same as when, as a child, I’d draw large town plans on A4 paper and deliberately ‘expand’ the town or village onto another page. There were ferry crossings (easy to draw) and really idiotically complex junctions, but never any houses for some reason; and I always stuck car parks underground (too much effort to draw them on the surface).

To cut a long story short, things on the railways like the stations don’t usually interest me—fine architecture: yeah, sure but everyone enjoys the sight of a nicely built 19th-century station every now and then(!)—but there is something which has been catching my attention since I moved to Haarlem, the provincial capital of Noord-Holland. I take the train to work and pass through a few stations with, quite frankly, odd platform numbering schemes. At this point, you may leave if you want to. Haarlem itself doesn’t have platforms numbered 2 or 7; Amsterdam Sloterdijk begins numbering platforms at number 3; Amsterdam Muiderpoort has a set of platforms—2 and 3—on one side of the station but another set—platforms numbered 8 and 9—on the other.

Now this is all pretty trivial but I found it pretty strange that some stations didn’t have certain platforms. Or more correctly, platform numbers. And that’s when I started to feel pretty dumb.

In the United Kingdom, we would use the word ‘platform’—a train stops at a platform, you board a train from a platform, and it’s "platform 1 for the …". The Dutch word used, however, is ‘spoor‘ which translates as ‘track’. There is a word for ‘platform’ but this refers more to the physical object itself: ‘perron‘. It’s just that the Dutch noticed that a train could be at more than one platform, in principle, but only ever on one set of tracks. I think; I’m not sure which country has the better system.

But there is indeed a track between the ‘platform 1’ track and the ‘platform 3’ track at Haarlem, called ‘spoor 2’. It’s used by trains to bypass platforms 1 and 3, which makes sense, but it doesn’t have a platform of its own—think of a sandwich with three cheese slices: the bread is/are platforms, and each cheese slice is a different track. But what’s more interesting is why I’m asking you to imagine a cheese-and-platform sandwich.

Amsterdam Muiderpoort also now makes sense: from west to east, the first viaduct to be built supports tracks 1–6 including platforms serving tracks 2 and 3. When the line down to Utrecht was built later on, its viaduct carried tracks 7, 8 and 9 and platforms serving tracks 8 and 9; track 7, I believe, has been lifted but the tracks are still numbered in sequence. Amsterdam Sloterdijk does have two tracks to the north of the track serving platform 3 that I guess could be considered part of the station’s area, but not part of the station; I think they’re only used by freight traffic but they could well be numbered as tracks 1 and 2. Will investigate.

And just for trivia’s sake: Nijmegen has the highest numbered platform in the country, platform 35; pretty good going considering Nijmegen only has four platforms in total.

Stages of learning Dutch

Dutch: a language renowned for its synthetic compound words and as many velar fricatives as you can shake a stick at. It’s a beautiful language and much, much less complicated than English—which is, frankly, a collection of hacks.

I never really had a roadmap when I started learning Dutch. Between Christmas and April last year (2010–11), I was learning it as a hobby more than anything else. When I landed in the Netherlands all those ten months ago, my knowledge of Dutch was pretty basic—I’d learnt quite a few words, but had no real knowledge of how to put them together; but I was only planning on staying in Hilversum for three weeks. Ten months later, I’m still in the Netherlands with a full-time job and a flat to furnish; I think it’s about time I settled down and planned on staying here. So, like I do, I thought about it while commuting and jotted a few notes down and came up with a few milestones I’d like to accomplish:

Now clearly, I’ve left out a number of things that other people might find more important, but these are the things that I‘d to accomplish.

I try to speak Dutch wherever practical but sometimes, it doesn’t always work out how I expect. My supervisor at work Nelson, for example, speaks a lot of English to me—”[he’s] always spoken English to [me] before” and it’s now become a habit for him to switch to English when speaking to me. Team meetings can and regularly do get quite confusing at times; with alternating sentences in Dutch and English.

(Quickly) on Dutch society

The Netherlands is a very interesting place. It appears to be quite unregulated to most outsiders; but it really isn’t. Dutch bureaucracy is like nothing I’ve ever seen. It’s taken me nine months (seven of those with a full-time job and a taxed salary) just to be recognised as a resident.

But I plan on staying here. I don’t think I’d be very comfortable going back to the UK—I’d certainly miss krentenbollen, the cycleways, HEMA, and the cheap and reliable railways too much. Plus, and no offence to my brethren, but I never really got the British.

Written after training at the gym

This article was written for the ‘Without the Internet’ series. I’ve been without a fixed Internet connection at home for about five weeks, but I’ve received an estimate and my Internet’s on the way.

When I moved from Amsterdam-Noord to Haarlem a month ago, I decided that it was in my best interests to join a gym (Dutch: sportschool, less commonly healthcenter). My apartment in Haarlem has no secure cycle parking and my recumbent (Dutch: ligfiets) sits unused in my flat. I knew, with all certainly, that I would gain weight and become obese if I didn’t get my fair share of exercise and I felt that the walk to and from the station every day simply wasn’t going to be enough. So I joined a gym – and it later turned out that my boss – concerned about his employees’ health, as any executive should be – is willing to pay two-thirds of the cost of my subscription. Goed zo.

But getting back to the point of this series – how I’m dealing with not having a fixed Internet connection – the treadmills (Dutch: loopbanden) at my gym have on them an Internet application, which one can use to browse the Internet. It’s not a stripped-down version of the Internet, but the browser’s part of a wider kiosk-style interface – one can watch television or listen to the radio by plugging headphones into the bottom of the screen, and information about one’s workout (not the right word when you’re only jogging) can be overlaid anf hidden as one sees fit. (Sorry.)

The browser ‘frame’ is roughly 800 x 600 pixels, which is one of a number of technical and practical limitations of the machines but, for most people, checking Facebook or browsing nrc.next is all one needs and can be done with relative ease. But I’m not “most people” and I see chances for improvement in software. Here’s a little list I compiled (something I’ve been spending the last fortnight almost doing at work):

• one cannot select text in input fields. Well, one can but you can’t then delete it – only overwrite it with more text. Say you were writing a quick email and you wanted to take a sentence out. While you can drag over the text to select it, iOS-style, you have to at least replace it with a space character.
• the keyboard interface hasn’t been rigorously tested either. One submits text to forms, rather than writing in them directly and after the preview field above the touchscreen keyboard is constantly resizing what one’s entered as one types more; after six or seven words, given the movement of jogging, it becomes very difficult to read what has been written. This means submitting text in six- or seven-word chunks, which isn’t the best way of writing …but the longer you stay on the treadmill, the better; no?
• again relating to the physical motion of jogging or running… even on the largest text size, which one can change with the large ‘plus’ and ‘minus’ keys provided, it’s a little difficult to read a 200-word summary of a physics paper in Google Reader (for example). Different websites have different standard ‘starting’ font sizes, and so following the article through to its source usually gets over the problem I have specific to Google Reader, but I’m there to clear my feeds and get through as many posts as I can; clicking through, reading the post and going back is a slow and irritating process.
• as far as I know, there’s no support for Flash nor any of video elements but I’ve never watched any videos online on the machines. There is a button with a speaker symbol and the word “WEB” written immediately underneath it for (I assume) muting and unmuting web content but, again, I’ve never had a chance to play content so I wouldn’t know whether that button …well, works or not but its presence suggests that at least playing audio from the browser is possible.

But not everybody wants to do everything they can do at home (or, in my case, at work) on a computer attached to a treadmill. But I’d at least like to see how many emails from people (as opposed to automated emails) I have, or to bookmark decent texts for reading tomorrow on my Kindle on the forty-minute train journey into work… but if I can’t get the job done in however many minutes, I’ll just add extra minutes to the clock and keep running.

Just as trivia, I wrote most of this post by dictation-transcription while handwashing my clothes for the first time – handwashing for the first time that is. It takes an hour to do a dozen items (from the first plunge into soapy water to putting them on the radiator after rinsing them out in the shower) so I might as well dictate a blog post or technical document to myself while I knead away, transcribing it at a less soapy time.

CLEANMAP

It wouldn’t be Rants & Renderings without the occasional OpenStreetMap post. The next few months mark the countdown to the switch to the Open Database Licence (ODbL)—as far as I know, come April, anyone who has not yet signed the new licence will have their work effectively removed from the OSM database. In some cases, these users’ accounts are simply no longer accessible but we still need them to accept the new terms in order to keep their edits.

I came across a neat site called CLEANMAP the other day. It’s basically a Mapnik rendering but with old licencees’ work removed. The site states that it “hide[s] objects that were created by mappers that have not [yet] agreed to the [new ODbL] contributor terms”.

Annotated screenshot of southern Cambridge, as seen on CLEANMAP. Parts of the A1134 are missing on Trumpington Road and Long Road but most of the map will be preserved come the switch to ODbL. Not too sure what the licence of this image is anymore, so I'll assume it's copyright OpenStreetMap.org and its contributors / CC BY-SA.

My home town of Cambridge is alright for the most part: as annotated above, some parts of Trumpington Road and Long Road have gone missing but most of the city’s doing just fine. What would be more helpful is a rendering showing the inverse: ways and POIs that will disappear. And of course CLEANMAP only shows what Mapnik renders—as I’ve discussed on previous posts, Mapnik only renders certain ways, POIs and relations. The database goes far beyond roads, woodland and bus stops for example.

If anyone reading this hasn’t already agreed to the new terms, please consider. Read this guide as to why the change is taking place.

Written after furthering my Main Document

This article was written for the ‘Without the Internet’ series. I’ve been without the Internet for almost a month now and, as a result, I’ve been spending most of my free time pruning my Mac mini inside and out – coming across interesting snippets from the last few years.

I haven’t mentioned my ‘Main Document’ in a while. That might be because I haven’t actually been keeping up with it; it’s been one of those projects that, while having a explicit end, I’ve just never had a chance to complete.

I’ll first explain what the ‘Main Document’ is and the reason behind it being at all. Towards the end of my 2009–10 course at Cambridge Regional College into art and graphic design, I wrote a detailed account of what was called the “final major project”. While I didn’t enjoy the project itself, I did very much enjoy documenting it in detail and I thought I’d carry the practice on into my next course in radio. I was also, on the art-design course, having problems with certain tutors grading my coursework factionally; I thought that I might appreciate having a precise and comprehensive text full of the coursework that wouldn’t get submitted (the ‘working out’) later on, so I could hand it into the qualifications body for reassessment.

So between September 2010 and April 2011—which was the first of three ‘courses’, each one lasting about thirty college months—this ‘Main Document’ document became the centrepiece of my coursework and a place to collate notes, scripts, pieces of copy, despatches and so forth. The document was always written in arrears but, owing to the fact that a great deal of assignments had to be written in late March and early April, I fell a little behind on writing up old notes (the most recent day’s work was always written up soon after) and transcribing old programmes (which takes ages).

In the three-week holiday between the first and second ‘courses’ of the course, I was interning at Radio Netherlands Worldwide in Hilversum, the Netherlands. My plan was that each evening after interning, I’d return to my bed-and-breakfast and write up a page or two more of the document. To cut a long story short, this wasn’t the case; perhaps the distractions of living in a new country were simply far more interesting than writing up old college work. I managed to get myself another month-long internship at RNW before finding full-time employment at Mister B. Again, the distractions of my new home were just too damn interesting (they still are).

It’s nine months to the day since I arrived in the Netherlands and the ‘Main Document’ has come forward little since that Spring day of ferry boredom and suicidal cycling across provincial Holland and Utrecht: at times, I was so damn tired, I almost fell into one of a number of rivers and canals. But being without the Internet this past month means there have been fewer distractions and interruptions, and so back to writing I’ve gone. My parents brought over two cardboard boxes worth of notes and documents a few months ago and, one by one, I’m slowly sifting through the mountain of paper; typing each one up and putting it in an appropriate place in the now nearly 700 kB LaTeX file of 52,660 words. This blog post, by comparison, is hovering at a meagre 4 kB.

Written after clearing out iPhoto

This article was written for the ‘Without the Internet’ series. Simply put, I’ve been without the Internet at home for about four weeks and, as a result, I’ve been spending most of my free time pruning my Mac mini inside and out – coming across interesting snippets from the last few years.

I’ve had more than one iPhoto library on the go for a while now. I was (and still am) a keyword whore; and when the keyword database in one iPhoto library was getting close to ‘ridiculous’, I’d hop over and begin fresh with a new one. This meant that the old library is as fit-to-bursting as the day I, effectively, abandoned it – and it’s quite a time capsule, if not only to demonstrate how utterly clueless at photography I was back in the early Brown years.

2009. A year of picking up film from Jessops and mainstream fake lomography.

iPhoto enables its users to store a significant amount of personal metadata alongside each photograph or image – or at least did enable that; I don’t know about the latest and greatest features of the most up-to-date version as I’m still using a particularly buggy version of iPhoto ’09. But these user-input keywords and descriptions aren’t transferable between libraries since they’re stored deep within the library, rather than attached to the files themselves. One must use adroitness the clipboard, a directory to temporarily store the images, and a text file containing the descriptions and tags of each file. It’s quite tedious work to move these photographs but, because of that, I’m being much less lenient about keeping the most dreadful.

You’ll probably be horrified to know that over the next few weeks, I’ll be uploading a lot more to Flickr. Watch this space and feel free to offer any constructive criticism – I’ll write it all down and send it back to 16-year-old Kevin when I get ’round to founding my time-travel postal business in a few years.