CanadaJim's Blog

They’ve been talking about bringing in turnstiles on the skytrain for years and years but the cost of building turnstiles was more than what they expected to save from stopping evasion, so it never got past the planning stages. It looks like they are now bringing them in. I think many people were surprised that the Canada Line didn’t have them, especially as you can see some of the smartcard readers already sitting in Canada Line stations which begs the question: if they haven’t decided on a company to implement the system yet, who made those ones?

I’ll probably be alone with this opinion, but I quite like having no turnstiles, I put it in the same category of paying for a meal after you’ve eaten at a restaurant. It’s treating you like a responsible adult who won’t cheat the system, and people generally behave based on how they are treated. I would be sad to see turnstiles brought in, because it would remove that unique aspect of public transit in Vancouver, however I can understand their reasons behind doing so.

Now that Fight-HST have an actual table on their site showing progress, I decided to process this data to generate a nice bar chart, visible here: http://canadajim.slowblog.com/fight-hst-graph/

The Liberals have more in common with the Tories than New Labour. New Labour’s big brother nanny state is effectively authoritarian, which goes completely against Liberal ideals. The conservatives support individual achievement, and inherently, the liberal freedom that that entails. They both want to scrap ID cards, which to me is a huge step in the right direction.

I think the Conservatives and Lib Dems can form a good Libertarian government, People-Centric Liberalism without the humanist ideas that in reality don’t work on a large scale (see illegal immigrant amnesty for example.)

Took me a while to figure out this one, using bits and pieces on the internet about installing Windows XP from USB sticks, so I figured I’d make a quick write up.

Windows Fundamentals is fantastic as an OS on older systems or systems with slower hardware. In my case, I used it on an early Aspire One with a painfully slow SSD.

1. Mount to WinFLP ISO using Virtual Clone Drive or extract the ISO to a folder with 7zip or WinRAR.

2. Launch PEtoUSB v3.0 (Download)

3. Use the following settings, but change F: to the mounted WinFLP iso or the location you extracted the files:

4. Click Start and wait for the drive to format and copy the files. You may experience formatting errors with any drive larger than 2GB, I currently don’t know any solutions for this, so try to use a 2GB drive or smaller.

5. Download BootSect.exe and put it somewhere easy to access from the commandline, such as on C:\

6. Launch the commandline and execute the following command:
bootsect.exe /nt52 X:
Where X: is the path of your Flash Drive.

Now you should have a USB Bootable Windows Fundamentals setup! If using an Aspire One, or any system with a slow HDD, be patient during the install, it does take a long time. After install if you want to speed things up, I recommend converting it from NTFS to FAT32 using a program such as Partition Magic.

I wrote this little app to quickly provide formatting using Unicode Characters. If you don’t have unicode support they’ll just appear as squares, but if you do it should all work fine!

Download Stylebook (229kB)

To use, simply enclose text you want in italics in backslashes ( \ ), bold in asterisks ( * ) and underlined in underscores ( _ ). Click convert to formatted text and you can then select the text in the output window and copy and paste it into your facebook status, or any other unicode compatible application that might not support formatting.

Wow. UK elections get less and less inspiring every year it seems. What choice is there? Labour, who have screwed over anyone actually doing any labour, instead encouraging people who would be doing lower level jobs to just live on benefits. The Conservatives, who despite their name telling us they aim to “conserve”, and effectively preserve, want to bring about “change”, and the Liberal Democrats, who I might have seen as viable previously, can no longer, since they’ve become obsessed with Carbon emissions, green jobs, and would probably do absolutely nothing to correct the nanny state.

Despite being here it is actually possible for me to vote in the election, but quite frankly I want nothing to do with it.

Obligatory first post! For some time I’ve been having things pop into my head that have made me think I should start a blog and share with the world. So here it is. I’ll try and post helpful bits and pieces of technical stuff I’ve found out as well as things related to the metro-vancouver area in which I live.

I’ll also share photos I’ve taken as well as music I’ve made, so hopefully there will something most people can enjoy on here.