Free public transport in Melbourne? Maybe.....

Over at The Age is a story about yet another IT disaster when it comes to developing a new electronic ticketing systems for Melbourne.

Passengers face $500m ticket chaos talks about the 15 month over due 'mkyi' system still being MIA and the old MetCard system being about to fall over. They can't get any new machines for the slightly expanding network and some spare parts aren't available anymore.

Time to stop wasting money on ticketing systems and make public transport free.

It will never happen because the politicians are scared about having to spend a lot more money on expanding the transport network. The logic behind that is that if it's free, we all pay for it and therefore all suburbs deserve the equal service.

Now that would be progressive green politics, carbon friendly and just think how much closer the whole community will become from more BO on even more crowded trains...

Did you know the control system Metrol for the Met in Melbourne dates back from the 70's, it's why they can't increase the frequency of the network at least until when the new one, cough, is meant to go into service in 2010

Mapguide 2.0 Released - PNG8 Goodness

I have really enjoyed helping test on the new Mapguide 2.0.0 Release, it's a bit slower than the previous release, but that's not so much an issue if your caching everything heavy using tiled maps.

One of the new features is support for PNG8 images. You can configure the tile service to use PNG8 in the serverconfig.ini under the [TileServiceProperties] Imageformat parameter, the header comments don't mention it yet, here's my patch.

It would be nice in the future for the tile format to be configurable in the Map Definition per Base Layer Group, rather than a server wide setting.

Here is a True Marble Tile using PNG8 (36.98 kB)



The same tile as a 24 bit PNG (135.26 kB)



You can barely visually tell the difference, basically there is loss of detail of a black shadow next to the coastline, but there is 100kB difference in file size per tile.

That adds up to well over 1 MB saving per map, depending on you map size. That's 1GB over 1000 page impressions for a page containing this map. That is a huge improvement ! I will investigate later the savings for non-raster tiles

There is also the Fusion framework for doing flexible layouts which also includes the Native Mapguide Layer support for OpenLayers which rocks!

How to kill a well hung Windows Service

I was doing some beta testing today with Mapguide RC4 and Gdal, playing with the True Marble imagery and i managed to crash the windows service in the stopping state.

BTW, True Marble is a colour corrected version of NASA's satellite imagery, have a look it's quite cool.




Anyway back to the hung stopping service. This is really soo frustrating especially as on Windows Server 2003 you will get an access denied if you try to kill the service process via task manager or pskill type tools.

You can always do the three finger windows salute, but there was an Oracle backup running and I just wanted to keep playing beta (besides rebooting is so 1990's). So i googled the problem again and this time i found a solution

ZeroWave: a powered TaskManager which has an INSANE mode which managed to kill the process off :)

The phrase "very friendly graphical interface" for something which lists PID's and Executable names, that's one i hadn't thought of before.

Usual disclaimer, you can seriously render things broken doing this

Mapguide 2.0 - AGG versus GD Renderers

Using the AGG Renderer ( New default in MG 2.0 )



Using the GD Renderer



Here is the same layer using the different renderering engines in Mapguide 2.0. The main difference between the two is that AGG does sub-pixel rendering which give smoother lines, whereas GD is pixel level.

The AGG lines feel a bit too thick to me, they are line thickness one for a polygon boundary. Even for a straight line in the middle of the map, it's just to thick (That's SA/NT border in Australian for those aren't so familiar with Australia.) The src data is 29 MB so there is a fair amount of generalization being done but hey that might be the reason for the thicker lines.

GD is the same as earlier Mapguide Releases and is still available via changing the Renderer value in the server/bin/serverconfig.ini file.

I like the darker smoother stronger feel of the AGG lines, but i think they would be better if they were maybe 1/2 to 1/3 thinner. What do you think?

These are rendered from SDF's exported from Oracle using FDO2FDO which is now work again in Mapguide 2.0 RC4. Generally everything is working well since installing it an few hours ago, next up i will upgrade my java libs with Coldfusion 8 and do some more testing API wise.

Sydney Road street party this weekend

It's that time of year again :)

From Brunswick Mus...

http://www.brunswickmusicfestival.com.au/

PicLens, coolest firefox extension ever!

Just read about this over on http://planet.mozilla.org/.

Allan Beaufour has just blogged about PicLens which is an amazing 3D picture viewer.

Once you install it, every image (on sites like picasa, facebook, myadspace) gets a little play button when you hover over the image with the mouse, click it and you jump into this amazing 3D film strip which you can use to explore through the images...

Install it, (you have to allow the site to install) and the jump over to my photo's on picasaweb, go into an album and press the play button to explore

Anchors can make great web bookmarks

One of the more useful sites for TV listings in Australia is yourtv.com.au. I have a bookmark for their page with the what's on now and next view view.

if you compare the results, you can see why anchors (the '#pageTitle' below in the second URL) for a more friendly bookmark

If you compare http://yourtv.com.au/guide/index.cfm?action=nownext
with
http://yourtv.com.au/guide/index.cfm?action=nownext#pageTitle, you'll see the TV guide opening up at the start of TV guide, instantly readable without scrolling down thru half a page of ads and headers.

One a related note, the introduction of HD in Australia is, well, stupid. There is no good reason 10HD isn't broadcast in digitial via SD.

Complicate that with tv listings that don't display 10 and 10HD next to each other so you can see when there is different HD programming (there's a lot of overlap, etc).

F2F in RL

Japanese Scientific Whaling Explained

At least there's one thing i can agree these days with Peter Garrett about! Sadly as a species we tend eventually to get things right, sometimes it's too late.

St Kilda Festival this weekend!

It's on again, not that the St Kilda Fest website is really so useful. Not to get back on my soap box, but it took me ages to work out that next Sunday 10th of February is the main day where St Kilda becomes one big crazy street festival?

The bottom of the page is not exactly user friendly, as it ignores a lot of what we have learnt about web page layout in the last decade or so! Where is the nice single page program for music in a printable PDF? The site looks ok, but really is rather 1990's when it comes to usability.

One thing you won't find there is anything bout dance music as far as i could tell.. I do miss the old Earthcore stage down at Katani Gardens on the Foreshore.. Then again i did miss seeing the HOODOO GURUS at Meredith

But never fear if you like Electronic Music, there is hope as found in my Inbox this morning!

SO! There is Dance Muzik @ St.K fest, this sun 10 feb!

St. Kilda Festival Dance Party

The Big Red Bus and Funktion One presents....

Join us on Sun 10 Feb; 11-11pm, in the lush garden of FUBAR;
16 Belford st, St.Kilda (btwn Acland & Barkly sts)
where a Funktion One sound system will be made the most of,
by some of Melbourne's finest underground dance DJs.


View Larger Map

From world tribal beats to progressive trance and psychedelic sounds,
we promise you that this will be the best place to be at St.Kilda Fest this year.

Great food and a great bar selection plus comfy couches in the sunny garden
- what more could you want!

11am andycan
12.2 Mixta X
13.4 U_One
15 Chunky
16.2 bEan
17.4 Tony Loucas
19 Cacophony
20.2 Menno
21.4 Orpheus

thanks Brad for the email, I'll be there!

BTW: There's a St Kilda Fest Facebook page as well