Last weekend I went for a new walking adventure. This trip was shorter but still interesting. I had a party to attend at Bloor and Windermere, so I walked from my place at Front and Spadina. I completed the 8km trek in one hour and seventeen minutes. Although I passed thorugh the lower part of High Park on my way, the most interesting part for me was at the start of the Queensway. I got to walk right above the garden based signs seen along the Gardiner when entering the city from the west. I remember these signs from when I was young, My family used to live in Brampton and we would sometimes drive into the city to see Bluejays games.

Since I don’t have a hobby, and everyone should, I’ve decided to adopt walking as my hobby. I like walking and hiking, and so does Adrienne, so it seems like a good choice of hobby. Apparently in the UK the word ‘rambling’ is used. Maybe I should also use that word so that I can sing “Ramble On” to myself as I walk and think about Lord of the Rings. Anyway, to start off my new hobby, I walked from one end of Toronto to the other (in the shorter direction). I started at the lake and walked north from 1 Yonge Street all the way to Steels, 6500 Yonge Street. I covered 18km and took approximately 3 hours. not including breaks but including stop lights and delays due to annoyingly misleading signs. My plan had been to duck tape my camera to the back of my backpack and have it take pictures every 30s along the trip. This part of the plan didn’t work out completely. I got some pictures but the camera ran out of power around Bloor and I sadly forgot the pack the replacement batteries. I did have extra duck tape with me, but extracting the camera and replacing the batteries every half hour would have been a pain anyway. I need a better solution.

I took the a bus from Steels to Finch and took the subway back down to Union. In total I believe I walked more han 20km and was home in 4 hours and 15min. I ended up crossing Yonge St 6 times more than necessary. I originally crossed to the east side, guessing that it would be less busy. However construction at Chruch St forced me to cross. When I got close to York Mills I was trying hard to remember which side of the street I need to be on in order to survive the 401 on ramp. Then I saw an apparently helpful sign saying “For Yonge St N, Pedestrians use east side”. So I crossed, only to discover when I got to the 401 that there wasn’t even a sidewalk on that side and I had to cross again.

Anyway. Here’s the video. Thanks to Matt for info on how to make and flv and for the swf of unknown origin that plays it for me. Amusingly the images were originally to large and I had to resize them.

We took the Airport Express from downtown to Person. Everything went according to plan. The bus not only has free wi-fi, but also plugs in the seats. We arrived at terminal 1 with plenty of time before our flight and found the US Airways counter without much difficulty. Checking in also went smoothly, the ticket man weighed one of our bags by hand and apparently decided that neither would be over the baggage limit. After receiving our tickets we went through US customs. Adrienne and I went to separate customs officers. Neither of us had any problems, but she received a stamp in her passport and I did not. Security was easy as well. Adrienne even got a ’shoulder hug’ from one of the security staff. We shared a Vegie burger at the Molson bar on the other side of security. The meal was good, even thought we didn’t get exactly what we ordered. Then we waited around to board the first plane.

Our very first flight was by far the worst of the many we ended up taking. The plane was tinny and cramped. One of Adrienne’s first comments was “It’s smaller than a streetcar”. She was not pleased, and if I had known what the flight would be like I would have booked something different. I don’t know if the size of the plane is to blame, or if we simply had a bad pilot but I was worried about being sick during take off. I watched what was happening out the window as we landed and I think doing so helped a lot.

Once we got of the plane in Philliy we took a shuttle between terminals to get to the gate for our next flight. The airport had free wi-fi at the particular time we were there, so we browsed the internet for a bit. However, our flight boarded much sooner than we were expecting. Now, when booking our flights, Expedia allowed me to choose seats flights but never communicated my choices to US Airways. I learned about the problem before we left on our trip, but not soon enough to book seats together for the flight to Dublin. We talked to many US Airways staff members but the only one remotely interested in helping us was the one in Canada who printed our tickets. As he did not have any special powers we ended up sitting separately. The trans-Atlantic flight was much easier on the stomach. The food, with the exception of the dessert, was edible but reminded me of bad microwave dinners. The dessert which was a satisfying square of something like chocolate cake. I slept very little on the plane. As the flight went on I did find myself drifting off over and over, but I kept waking up for worry of falling asleep on one of the people on either side of me. Adrienne did manage to get some sleep though.

The Dublin airport seemed relatively small. The area we ended up in after getting of the plane reminded me of train station (for some reason). Going through Irish customs was straightforward. We spoke to a nice female Irish customs officer, she asked us a few questions and stamped our passports. Afterwords we waited around for our luggage for a bit and found our way out of the airport. We paid €12 to take the 747 express bus to the central bus station in downtown Dublin. The ride into town was quick. As we got into town one thing that stuck out was the barbed wire in use everywhere. A theme which continued throughout our trip. The central bus station in Dublin is located very close to the B&B we had booked, but sadly it took us a while to find it. We walked around the station several times before we were able to determine the names of enough roads to figure out which direction to go. (I brought my compass with me but at this point it was in my luggage.) Once we realized/remember that in Europe the street signs are placed on arbitrary structures close to the intersection, instead of somewhere useful or constant, we were able to navigate our way to the B&B.

The B&B we stayed at was the Anchor Guest House. Although it did provided us with a bed and breakfast, it was more like a motel. The room was acceptable and quiet, there was nothing wrong with breakfast, but there was no love. An annoyance was that we had to leave the keys in a safety box whenever we went out, and retrieve them from a staff member when we returned.

The day we arrived we took tour of Trinity Collage and went to see the Book of Kells. Although the book was impressive, we thought that the old library of the collage was equally impressive. Sadly, we were not permitted to take pictures of either. Besides Trinity Collage we also saw Christ Church Cathedral and simply wondered and explored Dublin. The next day we visited the Guinness Storehouse and took part in the self guided tour there. The tour wasn’t that interesting, and the lighting conditions made it challenging to take pictures. We did get one important one though


The tour ends at the ‘Gravity Bar’ which is at one of the tallest points in Dublin, so it provides an excellent view of the city. Each tour member is also entitled to a free pint of Guinness when they reach the gravity bar. Here are my thoughts on Guinness


A few hours after I drank half of my pint of Guinness I started to feel sick. We visited Dublin Castle and Adrienne had to visit the Chester Beatty Library without me. I was worried that I was going to throw up, but never did.

After Dublin we traveled to Galway. We rode an Irish Rail train which took us from one end of the country to the other. The train ride was quite pleasant and provided us with our first real glimpse of the Irish country side. When we arrived in Galway, we decided to walk to our B&B even though it was a long distance, considering we were lugging around suitcases. We were pretty exhausted when we arrived. Berta, who runs the B&B, sat us down in a sitting room and served us Tea, biscuits and freshly made pie. We were so very happy.

Overall our stay at the Devondell B&B was amazing. Berna, was extremely nice and helpful. Our room was quiet and cozy and the house was beautiful. Especially the backyard. Everything was much fancier than I’m used to, but I also didn’t feel awkward. Breakfasts were had two parts. A series of fresh baked goods, fruit and cereals were provided to pick and choose from. Then there was the actual meal, chosen from a list of meal options the night before. The options were quite fancy, such as Blue Cheese Pancakes. I felt bad on the second day when I simply couldn’t finish my pancakes due to either my stomach being upset of traveling, or having eaten to much already.

The next day we got up and took a shuttle to the Aran Islands ferry. The bus ride let us gave us a nice view of the country side on the west coast of Ireland (Lots of rock fences). We then took the ferry (on the ocean) out to Inishmore, the largest of the Aran Islands. Here again we chose to walk instead of rent a bike or take a tour. Although we were sore and drained by the end of the day I’m glad we decided to walk. We took our time walking along the high road, taking pictures as we went.















At the end of the road there is a path up to an old fort build on the side of the cliffs. By the time we had reached this point we were worried that we wouldn’t have enough time to get back, so we didn’t actually go up to the see the fort. We returned on the low road taking more pictures. Along the way we ran into some cows

The next day was mostly spent traveling from Galway to Belfast. The trip north along the eastern coast of Ireland was just as pretty as any of our other trips. This particular trip had more rolling hills, I think. We took a taxi from the train station to our hostel. The taxi cost next to nothing. Adrienne was powerfully unimpressed with the hostel. With justification. I’ve never stayed in a hostel before, but I really don’t think this one was particularly nice. However, we successfully slept there two nights with little disturbance and the guy in charge even called us a taxi to take us to the bus station on our last day.

We did wounder around Belfast a little bit, but our time was mostly taken up by the tour to the Giants Causeway and (London)Derry. I took a lot of pictures at the rope bridge, giants causeway and Derry but not many of them were very good. Here’s one of the causeway



And the two ’sides’ of Derry. Note the flags.

The wedding was the day after our Giants Causeway tour. We got up and grabbed a bus to Newry. Conveniently, our room was ready, even though we were checking in early. The wedding went well and was enjoyable. Overall it was quite impressive. Very few of my inside pictures turned out, due to the lighting conditions and lack of knowledge of how to deal with them (or desire to use a flash). However, there are some nice outside pictures.

The day after the wedding we rode the bus back to Belfast, went on a Black Taxi tour and ended up at the airport for our flight to London. The tour took us to both the Protestant and Catholic sides of Belfast and discussed the troubles. We even saw a shop that still had a doorbell and a switch that unlocked the door to let customers in.

Our BMI flight from Belfast to London was very pleasant and a nice improvement over US Airways. When we arrived in Heathrow we worked our way to the Underground and found a tourist information center, where the man gave us a great (free) guidebook with a map of London. We purchased Oyster cards with £10s of fair money and took the tube all the way to our destination. The only complications with taking the tube were the lack of accessibility at the stations (lots of stairs to carry luggage up) and Adrienne was attacked by the gates when her luggage got stuck.

Adrienne managed to find us a affordable place to stay in London. We did get what we paid for. It was better than the hostel, but certainly not special. Basically, we stayed in a dorm room that reminded me of residence at Waterloo, except it had an ensuite and a bit more room. On the day I showered there was no hot water. There was no internet of any sort either. We spoke to a receptionist and to a security man during our stay their and were forced to wonder if the two of them would sum to a single competent person.

We had one day in London and I think we did pretty good for such a short time. We saw St Paul’s Cathedral, walked along the Thames, crossed London Bridge, had a quick look at the London Exchange buildings, went to Oxford Circus and Piccadilly Circus, toured around the Victoria & Albert Museum, saw Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abby and Big Ben. We had completely forgotten about Big Ben and only ended up seeing it because it was right beside Westminster Abby. I took some pictures while it was bonging out 8pm. We don’t know what this building was, but awesome reflection.



And here I succeeded in making it look like the end of the world

Our trip back was not pleasant, and our luggage didn’t make it all the way. We woke up at 5am GMT and successfully took the tube to Victoria station. I returned our Oyster cards and we not only got back the deposit for the cards but also the remaining balance. We managed to just make it for the 6:15am Gatwick express and got to the airport with tonnes of time before our flight. Gatwick was pretty enough, but not well designed. After getting through security there is small two floor waiting area with shops. Passengers wait in this area until their gate is announced. There weren’t many bathrooms and both of the woman’s washrooms on the upper floor had lineups. Once the gate is announced, an up to twenty five minute long trek through empty hallways is required. Adrienne was not pleased with the airport security men carrying around machine guns.

At some point on our eight hour flight across the Atlantic there was a burning smell. The flight attendants figured someone was trying to smoke in the bathroom, but we never found out for sure. When we arrived in Philiy we had to get our baggage, go through US customs and re-check our baggage. After doing all of this we eventually made it to a room where we found out our flight to Toronto had been canceled. Since there wasn’t enough time before the next direct flight to Toronto we were put on a flight to Montreal. This flight was over an hour late taking off and our connecting flight to Toronto was only an hour apart. The pilot did manage to make up about half an hour in the air. When we finally managed to get off the plane we had twenty minutes to catch our next flight. For some reason we had to go through Canadian customs and security again in order to reach our connection. As a result we reached the gate just as the plane was pulling away. We were re-booked on yet another flight an hour later and did eventually make it back to Toronto. The flight to Toronto was on Air Canada. I’m not sure I know of a word to describe the difference in quality between US Air and Air Canada. Air Canada is hardly perfect, but I will seriously consider them in the future and can’t imagine why I would fly with US again.

Our baggage did not appear in Toronto. We had to speak with a man at the baggage service desk. He told us that once they found our luggage it would be couriered to our house. He also gave us some cool bags containing all the toiletry things you might be missing if your baggage were unavailable. We were very impressed overall with the friendliness and quality of service. After that, we waited around for the airport express and successfully made it back to my condo to sleep.

Now some misc thoughts.

Ireland Weather We think it may be at least slightly overcast all of the time in Ireland. Most of our photos look more gloomy than they should because of this. We got rained on while there, but other than one particular morning, the rain never lasted for a significant amount of time. It seems hard to predict when it will be sunny and when it will be cloudy. The temperature while we were there was always around ‘light jacket’ weather.

Barbed Wire We saw so much barbed wire on our trip. Apparently there are many different kinds. The standard stuff comes with different sizes of barbs. Then there is the giant cutlass barbed wire and the giant spike barbed wire. Also the circular pearl barbed wire. The most impressive wire we saw was on the walls of Buckingham Palace. The walls had a row of giant spike barbed wire followed by several rows of electrified barbed wire. Just in case being impaled by a six inch spike wasn’t enough to stop you from trying to get over the fence.

Coke Coke in Ireland is made with real sugar, and tastes different. Coke in the US is made with corn syrup, and tastes like corn syrup.

This week I had some fun with XSLT. I’ve briefly used XSL and XPATH in the past, but not that much and its been a while. Since what I was trying to accomplish was reasonably complicated it took me a while to come to an understanding about some behaviours inherent in XSLT. I find the generally available documentation for XSLT isn’t very good. Most things give extremely trivial examples without any thought or commentary about more complex scenarios.

My goal was to take an atom feed and transform in into a different form of XML understood by a third party tool. The translation is also provided parameters which can be used to filter out some results during translation.

The first problem I ran into was I wanted to allow a comma separated list as a parameter and break it into a list in my XSL. Apparently string tokenization wasn’t added to XSL until 2.0. I was surprised to find Microsoft’s implementation of XSL only supports 1.0. In fact Saxon is the only library that supports 2.0. This problem was easy enough to get around. I actually had several options. I found examples on Google of how to write a little template that uses substring-before and substring-after to accomplish an equivalent of a string tokenization function. I decided that since my work was just a prototype, there wasn’t much reason to get bogged down in details so I used exsl for .NET to get a str:tokenize extension function.

The second problem I had was that if my comma separated list was empty I wanted to calculate a default value based on information in the document being translated. Basically I wanted something like list = input_list || generate_list. The problem was, Variables in xsl aren’t actually variable, you can only assigned to them when they are created. Variables can be created with inner blocks that have conditionals:

<xsl:variable name="list">
    <xsl:value-of select="str:tokenize($input_list)"/>
    <xsl:if test="not($input_list)">
       <xsl:value-of select="some xpath"/>
    </xsl:if>
</xsl:variable>

But doing this generates an xml fragment. Not a node-set. Node-sets are useful, fragments are not. Another extension exsl:node-set may have solved my problem, but I eventually found a better solution. I didn’t realize that XPath predicates can have any expression in them and the node preceding them will not be matched if the expression doesn’t evaluated to true. So I can do this:

   <xsl:variable name="generated_list" select="some xpath"/>
   <xsl:variable name="list" select="str:tokenize($input_list)[$input_list] | $generated_list[not($input_list)]"/>

I think if I needed a template to generated the default list I’d probably not be able to do this and have to resort to the node-set function.

On Thursday I climb the stairs to the top of the CN Tower. I took 20min to get to the top. Which is exactly what I was expecting, but I think I could have done better. The next day Patrick left for Ireland. Which means that I can finally get some sleep and stop partying or trying to figure out what to do with all his stuff. But it also means that Patrick is gone and life will probably become a bit less interesting. Yesterday evening Matt and I chatted to Patrick (now in Ireland) using skype. Minus the periodic disconnects common to Skype it worked quite well. Patrick even took us on a quick video tour of his house.

The power in the southern half of city place went out last night. I haven’t herd what the causes is or how long it took to get it working again. When I went to bed some but not all of the buildings had been restored. Also 5+ firetrucks decided to congregate at the buildings without power at one point. Then they left.

Last time Adrienne was here we managed to beat our recent walking record with an approximate distance of 15km in one day. The internet suggests that theoretically if we were to spend most of an 8 hour day walking (instead of slacking off by spending 3 hours watching Watchmen) we could probably manage 40km. The internet also tells me that means we could walk across Canada in less than a year. The world is big.

Patrick is leaving. He’s been giving away all his stuff and having parties and giving away more stuff. I don’t know how he can always have more things to give away, but he seems to. I received all kinds of kitchen things and shirts from him. Along with a large assortment of miscellaneous things not worth mentioning. He’s going to sleep on my couch next week and leave the day after we climb the cn tower.

Speaking of the cn tower. I managed to climb to the top of my building (35 floors when you accommodate for the missing ones) in 4min 5s. The tower is apparently 3.6 times larger than my building. I’m going to aim for a time of 20 minutes but hope to do better.

Now its time for pictures. A while ago I played with the Google native client. Here’s me playing Quake in my web browser.

I’ve also been thinking I should document the work I did for Patrick and Toni’s wedding website. I set up a bunch of open source web applications for them and modified them to all have a common header. I also created the main wedding site, basing it off a the css from a WordPress theme. The graphics were created by Toni.

The wedding site

The blog

The photos site

The forum

The wiki (Content created by Matt)

Today I got my taxes back. That’s 9 business days from when I filed them, a new record. Time to go stimulate the economy. Except normally I put my tax money directly into my rrsp so I don’t have to contribute as much during the year. Some of the money is also going to go toward buying Patrick’s computer. Money which he is promptly going to leave the country with and spend else where.

Also, I’m so sick. Symptoms suggest the flu. Not pleasant, but getting better. At least I can think more than sleep today.

Today I was tasked with finding out why our installer’s cancel message box used the old windows theme. I looked into it and saw we were using the MessageBox function as I expected. I looked at the documentation for the MessageBox function and didn’t find anything about themes. I tried to find another method of creating message boxes and didn’t find anything that made sense. So I truned to Google. After a bit of searching I found two suggested solutions to the problem.

Basically what I need to do was add to the manifest for my application. (Even though my application is just a normal win32 application.)

<dependency>
   <dependentAssembly>
     <assemblyIdentity 
       type="win32"
       name="Microsoft.Windows.Common-Controls"
       version="6.0.0.0"
       processorArchitecture="X86"
       publicKeyToken="6595b64144ccf1df"
       language="*"
      /> 
   </dependentAssembly>
</dependency>

There was also some talk about calling InitCommonControls(). Once I knew how to solve the problem I search for a while longer and eventually found an MSDN article. My favourite part is where it tells you to call InitCommonControls() and pointns you at the documentation, which says not to call the function because its obsolete and does nothing.

Last weekend we played killer bunnies. I forgot to blog about that. And before Killer Bunnies Matt fed me yummy chili. Also, I filed my taxes. There’s still one tax document from TD that I’m expecting but I’m tired of waiting and I know what its going to say. I find it strange that in this modern day of computers and the internet that there is any reason we need to wait for documents at all. But oh well.

This week I lost some sleep but acquired many things from Patrick. Including his couch. Matt came along to help and we let it down in the middle of the Spadina bridge for a bit to relax and watch the traffic. Its too bad we didn’t have a camera.

This weekend I logged into my “e-pass” account with the government of Canada and it told me that my return has been processed and I will be getting my money back on Thursday. That’s crazy. Actually logging in was sort of difficult. Their list of supported browsers is stupidly ridged. It used to be that if you didn’t have a supported browser they let you through anyway. Now they won’t let you log in. Firefox 3 isn’t supported, and Firefox isn’t supported at all on the mac. What’s up with that?

I talked to someone at the mac store today about my cracked macbook case. They said they would replace the case, even if it wasn’t still under warranty. I just need to make an appointment, bring it in and they’ll have it back to me in 2 days. Not so bad.

Lately I’ve been putting a lot more effort into writing. I have so many ideas built up its hard to concentrate on one thing. There’s one idea that I just made up recently which I started working on at Union while waiting for Adrienne. I’m also trying to come up with an interesting programming project to complement my writing efforts, but as usual I’m finding that very hard. Maybe I just won’t really ever be able to work on my own projects while I am employed as a programmer.