So apparently this blog is going to feature two consecutive posts about trains. I took Amtrak twice this week. In one direction, the train was delayed an hour; in the other, it was delayed forty minutes. This would not be considered remarkable in most of Amtrak’s territory, but usually things are better than this along the “Northeast Corridor” between Boston, New York, and Washington DC. Of course, when this happens on Amtrak, you get a half-hearted apology from the train crew but nothing more.

But I became curious: in countries with first-rate train systems, how are you compensated when the train operator makes you late?

Okay, probably not too many people are interested, but information on this topic seems to be extremely hard to come by — I did web searches in English, Spanish, and French, all to no avail.

The Moroccan railway operator ONCF has, apparently for about a month, been operating a new rail line north from Taourirt to Nador and Beni Ensar (which is also spelled Beni Nsar, Beni-Enzar, Beni Ansar, بني نصار, and probably a dozen other ways). There are also some intermediate stops, but these are probably unlikely to be of interest to tourists.

On this blog, we consider it important to note “important” clock-numerological events. So, please note that if you generally use the month–day–year date order (as is usual in North America), then tomorrow afternoon, the time will be

$ date -d 'tomorrow 12:34:56 pm' +'%T %D'
12:34:56 07/08/09

If you live in a day–month–year part of the world, you have almost another month to get ready; if you’re in a year–month–day region, you missed your chance in August, 2007.

Presumably this is to be celebrated at 34 minutes and 56 seconds past noon in your local timezone, not UTC.

I’m working on a project built in Rails where the data storage is being handled by CouchDB instead of a conventional SQL database. Thanks to Ruby’s dynamic nature, we can disable ActiveRecord and the rest of Rails is just fine seeing subclasses of CouchRest’s ExtendedDocument instead of ActiveRecord::Base.

One of the nice things about CouchDB, and one which is quite helpful for our project, is its ability to store file attachments in the database. This is less effort than mucking about keeping files in the filesystem. Unlike BLOB columns in SQL, the file attachments are not given to the application unless specifically requested, which reduces the odds of unnecessarily transferring a lot of ignored data from the database.

Last night on Off the Hook we announced a number of discounts to upcoming conferences. All of them use coupon code 2600.

• HAR 2009, August 13-16 in Vierhouten, the Netherlands, is offering €5 off; also, the early bird registration price of €155 (€150 with the discount) has been extended for an additional couple of weeks.
• Notacon, April 17-19 in Cleveland, OH, is offering 10% off, bringing the registration cost down from $75 to $67.50 — but only until the end of the week.
• Toorcamp, July 2-5 in Moses Lake, WA, is offering 10% off. The current cost is $150 ($135 discounted), but it will go up to $200 ($180 discounted) at the end of the month.

I think of the three I’ll only be at HAR, but I suppose this could change.

The PBCore cataloging tool that I’ve been working on has now been released under the GNU GPL. Here’s the announcement from pbcoreresources.org:

WNET/Thirteen hereby releases the software of its PBCore Repository Project under the GPLv3 license.

The PBCore Record Repository is an online database tool built on Ruby on Rails, Sphinx search, and MYSQL that was created at WNET/Thirteen to facilitate the import, export, search, creation and modification of PBCore records according to the PBCore 1.2.1 standard.

For testing and evaluation a public installed version of the application can be found at pbcore.vermicel.li (for administrative testing log in as username=admin and password=secret).

This work employs PBCore. The PBCore (Public Broadcasting Metadata Dictionary) was created by the public broadcasting community in the United States of America for use by public broadcasters and others. Initial development funding for PBCore was provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The PBCore is built on the foundation of the Dublin Core (ISO 15836), an international standard for resource discovery, and has been reviewed by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative Usage Board. Copyright: 2005, Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Further technical documentation can be found online and a current snapshot of the source code here. This tool is under development and feedback is appreciated.

The Cuban newspaper Juventud Rebelde reports today that Cuba has developed a new GNU/Linux distribution, “Nova.” Reuters has also picked up the story.

Reuters quotes Hector Rodriguez, dean of the School of Free Software at the University of Information Sciences, who says that 80% of the computers in Cuba currently run Windows. This comports with my observations when I travelled to and reported from Cuba in 2006.

Obviously there are elements in Cuba who don’t like this. In addition to a Communist régime’s natural affinity for Free Software over proprietary alternatives, the US embargo makes it difficult for Cuban entities to legally procure Microsoft products. It’s probably also bad security policy for the Cuban government, in particular, to rely on closed-source, proprietary software produced in the US.

However, it’s uncertain if this new initiative will be successful. Cuba announced in 2005 an intent to switch to Linux, and apparently not much progress has been made. Richard Stallman, founder and leader of the Free Software Foundation, traveled to Cuba in 2007 and met with some acceptance of his ideas; however, as he notes, Microsoft’s inability to sue Cubans for violating copyright law makes windows costless and thus harder to eliminate.

It’s an interesting situation, and we’ll see what happens.

A week from Friday (that is, February 13), at 6:31:30pm EST, is 1234567890 seconds since the UNIX epoch.

$ date -d '@1234567890'
Fri Feb 13 18:31:30 EST 2009

Please schedule your parties now, if you have not yet done so. If you are in a different time zone, see timeanddate.com for further assistance.

Since writing my blog post on “Common” PBCore Errors, I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a PBCore validator—a tool to automatically verify if an XML file complies with the PBCore standard and best practices with the aim of better ensuring interoperability among PBCore implementations. Such a tool has now been written, and you can check it out at pbcorevalidator.org.

Like the W3C’s HTML Validator, this is designed to be a tool which you can use to check the conformance of your documents with established standards. Some of the PBCore standard, however, is a bit more subjective or poorly-defined than HTML, so the results of the validator are also somewhat subjective.

For a project I’m working on, we’d like to have the rails truncate helper truncate strings at word boundaries rather than at the in the middle of a word after exactly a certain number of characters.

Daniel Morrison’s awesome_truncate provides the basic idea, but it has a few problems:

• it’s not compatible with Ruby 1.9
• it doesn’t support the new Rails 2.2 calling convention for truncate, in which options are passed as a hash rather than a list
• you have to replace your calls to truncate with calls to awesome_truncate

In addition, our client asked us to ensure that there is never a single word on a line by itself at the end of the truncated string.