TRUWinnipeg.org

Since June a new group has risen out of the ashes of Citizens for Better Public Transit in Winnipeg (CBPTW).

The new group, headed by columnist Dallas Hansen, is Transit Riders' Union of Winnipeg (TRUWinnipeg).

Where CBPTW failed was in the various values of each of the participants. Some, like myself, wanted LRT. Another wanted extensive subway ala W.A.T.S. Scheme III. A couple of others wanted BRT and a couple of cyclists were satisfied with just basic upgrades to our diesel bus fleet (and they call themselves 'environmentalist'. Shame!)

So last year Dallas Hansen discovered my uwto.org website and wrote an Op-Ed piece in the Freep about the Wilson subway, which has been ignored since the 1960s.

He contacted me in early 2005 and said he wanted to do more to make this particular subway plan for Winnipeg a reality in our lifetimes.

By June he had the idea to start a brand new transit rider group, dedicated to the Wilson plan and mixed-use design for downtown Winnipeg and the immediate city proper.

The truwinnipeg.org domain name and some web space was reserved in July 2005. We have been holding weekly meetings, since that time.

Another Op-Ed piece was written and this included contact info. We had a couple of people from Western Economic Diversification attend our meeting advising us to become a registered non-profit organization and have the Wilson plan updated to today's realities.
This is in the process of happening now, and should be ready by early next year.

By this time next year, the Wilson subway plan will be front page news (again) and will be part of the debate during the next civic election campaign.

Winnie the Shit

I'm from Winnipeg you see, and I have to deal with this Winnie the Pooh stuff all the time. I caught on to the name thing — a LONG time ago.

To say clearly now. I'm NOT a fan of Winnie the Pooh.

The reason is this:

The Winnie character was "invented" in Winnipeg way back in World War I days (1914-1918). The story goes that A. A. Milne's son had seen a brown or black bear at the Winnipeg Zoo and asked what it's name was. The boy said "I think I'll call him Winnie". The father replies "Why is that son?". The boy says "I don't know, just Winnie the Pooh".

Now any half-brained person can figure this out. The boy saw the brown coloured bear, it reminded him of (was the same colour as) shit, and he lived in Winnipeg. He put it all together and you have the character name — Winnipeg the Shit! Kind of sums up our town, doesn't it?

To me, it's really an embarrassment to our City.

And they were going to put a Winnie the Pooh display at Assinibioine Park Zoo. Total waste of money. It could be better spent on a rail-based rapid transit system for Winnipeg.

There's a short story on the Net that proves I'm not the only one who connects the dots. It goes something like this:
A group of kindergartners were trying very hard to become accustomed to the first grade. The biggest hurdle they faced was that the teacher insisted on NO baby talk! You need to use 'Big People' words," she was always reminding them.

She asked John what he had done over the weekend?
"I went to visit my Nana."
No, you went to visit your GRANDMOTHER. Use ?Big People' words!"

She then asked Mitchell what he had done
"I took a ride on a choo-choo."
She said "No, you took a ride on a TRAIN. You must remember to use 'Big People' words."

She then asked little Alex what he had done? "I read a book," he replied.
That's WONDERFUL!" the teacher said. "What book did you read?"
Alex thought real hard about it, then puffed out his chest with great Pride, and said, "Winnie the SHIT"

NVu 1.0 HTML Editor Review

I've been coding HTML since 1996. Now years later when the technology is so much better I find that I can use a WYSIWYG editor like NVu, which is based on the old Netscape Composer from 1996. And if I the editor creates extra markup then I can go underneath and delete the extraneous crap.

What I like in NVu is that it has a great table editor. So if you want to tweak a table you don't have to go searching through all those elements to find the right one to edit. Also if you want to right align a whole bunch of cells, all you have to do is select a range and push the right align button on the main button bar.

But there are things that are broken in NVu that need fixing and some in the NVu community wonder why they are not being fixed. For example since version 0.80 the ToC function works initially, but when you want to delete the ToC or select "Update" it won't delete the "MoZToC" code scattered throughout the document. And if you really screw around with trying to delete it, NVu will literally erase your document up till the last Save, and only keep the portions that are new. So always keep a separate copy of your document in another directory before testing this feature.

The other thing is that NVu behaves just like most other WYSIWYG editors in that it adds extraneous HTML code in places that you don't need them. For example when I was working on a table recently, it added style="align="undefined" in more than a few cells, therefore adding to the download time for slow Internet connections.

If the authors of NVu can fix these errors then it can creae a really nice HTML editor for those who don't want to learn the underlings of the markup language.

Creating SGML CALS Tables in WordPerfect

I've been experimenting with creating tables using the CALS Table Model as HTML for about a month now.

Since the DocBook CALS Table Model is basically the same, except for a few things like in DocBook rows start off with a element and cells are referenced by an element, they're basically identical.

So I tried this in WordPerfect's SGML editor, and it didn't do a thing, until I came back the next day after closing down the program. However it started the table on the next page, instead of the current one.

When you have WordPerfect's SGML editor in Table mode, there is a toolbar that helps in formatting and styling cells.

I need to experiment more before I were to put up a better document on how to do this on my SGML/XML page.

— not rendering in Konquerer

The mdash entity symbol doesn't render in Konquerer, but does in all other browsers. Instead it outputs a hollow square box.

Rapid Transit Effect on Economy

Metropolitan Toronto: The Transit/Development Connection
388.428 M265 1987 Metro Toronto Urban Affairs Library

From Page 1:

Metropolitan Toronto saw more new construction between 1954, when the first subway opened, and now, than wa previously in existance during the first 120 years of incorporation of the City of Toronto. Since the formation of Metropolitan Toronto the rapid transit system has played an important role in determining the location of aproxmately $30 billion in new buildings - $10 billion along the north-south subway and $20 billiion adjacent to the east-west line. A conservative estimate for the dollar value of future growth in Metropolitan Toronto where rapid transit will be a major factor is $20 billion to the year 2001.

From Page 9:

Almost everyone directly involved in planning the future will agree that rapid transit is a prerequisite for orderly growth and development. They recognize that rapid transit has a profound impact on local and national economies. Transit attracts new development and new business, increases property values and tax revenues, boosts retail sales, generates jobs and improves the quality of life.

SGML CALS Table Model in XHTML

I discovered recently that the CALS Table model is used for tables in HTML 4.01 and XHTML. This is most useful for their original purpose in marking up tabular data, like uwto.org - Transit Facts

This means that <thead>, <tfoot>, and <tbody> have been part of the HTML standard since 1999.

<table>
<thead>
</thead>
<tfoot>
</tfoot>
<tbody>
</tbody>
</table>

A couple of years ago I redesigned my uwto.org site and reformatted any pages that used tables for layout purposes to one using CSS 2.1 stylesheets.

Now that we have CALS stuff to use, I've been experimenting a bit with it. For example, with CALS you can define a header area using and when that table is printed and flows past one page, the browser printer engine willl automatically reprint all the column header and footer labels on each page. This is similar to how you can "lock" a column or row in a spreadsheet and scroll through while leaving the headers in place.

I've also experimented with the <colgroup> and <col> related tags. They're supposed to allow formatting for alignment of numerals. It works in IE 6 but surprisingly not in the more HTML standardized Mozilla/Firefox browsers. Someone posted a hack that uses Javascript but I'd rather not get into programatic ways of displaying web documents if I can help it, excepting a CMS system.

There is a long-standing (7 yrs.!) non-implementation bug report filed as BugZilla #915

Manitoba Hydro Tower

Manitoba Hydro announced this week that demolition has now started for their downtown office tower.

They said the reason why demo didn't start earlier (it was slated for February) was that they didn't want to make a mess of the street while the 2005 Juno Awards were being held.

Install Problems with OpenCms 6.0

I'm still having problems installing OpenCms 6.0 onto WindowsXP. Why can't the group programming this software include a handy/easy self-install script (setup.exe) like common programs do today?

I feel that this software has good potential, but is ??? because not enough people resources are put towards it. It has the potential of Mozilla/Firefox, Apache, etc...

One shouldn't have to manually configure Environment Variables and use RegEdit to set up other varibles. Not everyone can and should be doing this.

Anyways, so far I have:

1. JAVA_HOME to C:\Java\js_2.4.1.07
2. CATALINA_HOME C:\Program Files\Apache\Tomcat 4.1\
3. CATALINA_OPTS d ....
4. Edited Windows Registry to add and modify two items
1. Item 1
2. Item 2

Tha's it for now. The problem is that Tomcat and OpenCMS need to be set to ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) character set, and this should be done when OpenCms is installed.

Maybe if I bug the developers enough.

Error in OpenCms Install

I tried installing OpenCms on WindowsXP tonight. I got the Tomcat program installed. Tomcat complained of an error, and therefore I think that OpenCms won't install properly.

It could be because I have two Java systems installed 1.4.2 and 1.4.6 I need to have just the one available.

I want to get this working. If only the OpenCms people had an install script for XP to make it easier.

Starbucks in Starbuck

Why is there no Starbucks Coffee in Starbuck, Manitoba?

Water, Water Everywhere

I've been tasting the different brands of distilled water produced locally and elsewhere. I've also tasted Superstore's filtered water.

I have a few comments that relate to this...

1. I like the un-taste of Alpine Distilled Water, which is produced right here in Winnipeg.
2. I also like the taste of another brand of distilled water, by ....
3. Superstore's 6-stage RO (Reverse Osmosis) water is tasty, almost distilled-like, if it isn't.
4. Life brand (Shopper's Drug Mart) Distilled Water. Tastes great. But... from the Winnipeg perspective it's trucked 2000 kms to get here from southern Ontario. Not a good thing for the environment. If I was living in metropolitan Toronto this wouldn't be an issue. One thing I like about the Life Brand water is that it creates ice spikes when you make ice cubes from it - meaning the water is the purest you can find.
   

There are a few other waters that I'm questioning though, because I've had a bad jug or whatnot:

1. World of Water DewDrop Distilled Water. I bought a gallon of it this past week and it definitely had an aftertaste to it. Sort of aluminum metallic. I'll give it another try and see if it's any better.
2. Pepsi's Aquafina brand of "pure" "demineralized" water. I sensed beforehand that this is probably just like "spring" water, like Coke-Cola's Dasani. The bottle I bought was from SDM and it had the taste of plastic. I took two sips and threw the rest away.

Workshops vs Town Halls

You know, after re-reading the "Target Workplan" for the Task Force I see that they are going to do it TransPlan style rather than Murray's New Deal style. To wit:

Step 2: City Wide Public Consultations
Purpose:

To determine the Public's views and attitudes towards Transit generally and Rapid Transit for Winnipeg.

Process:

• 10 Public Workshops
• Public Interest Group Interviews
• Questionnaire for Interest Groups and Organizations
• Website Feedback Page

Starting January 2005

They're workshops, not town hals. I guess that means the Task Force has already decided what they're going to recommend this coming Spring.

I participated in the TransPlan 2010 "workshops" in the mid '90s and I can tell you that I find them less democratic than using "town hall" meetings as a model. Why I say that is that in the workshop model, you have 6 or more people at several tables. The facilitator will give brief introductions to that phase, then will instruct those at the tables to work on a compromise plan -- in this case for rapid transit for Winnipeg. Yet, what happened in the TransPlan case is that the people who put TP2010 together were, largely from the pro-highway Streets & Transportation Department.

I want this Rapid Transit Task Force to be different. I think almost everyone would agree that last year's town hall meetings on "the New Deal for Winnipeg" is the way to go. It let's people speak directly to the panel, and not to a chance group of people at a table, who may have vested interests in *not* building rapid transit. Who's to know that one of us could be sitting next to a highway planner (from the province?) who doesn't want rapid transit here.

Is it too late to change the direction of the Task Force and hold 10 Town Halls instead?