Spaced Out :: 02 2007

We all know that inflation increases the actual cost of a product over time, whilst the relative cost (to, for example, earnings) remains the same. Well are you interested in the relative cost of items at two different dates? Do you really want to compare two prices and see which is the more expensive? Well the website Measuring Worth allows you to do this for the US$ or UK£ from 1800 to the present day.

Relative cost isn’t an exact science and, in fact, you need to measure price increase in some way. There is no ideal measure and, as a result, the website calculates relative prices in five different ways: retail price index, GDP deflator, average earnings, per capita GDP and GDP. They all converge on somewhat similar values, but can (and are) different.

I visited the Ben Cruachan Hydroelectric Power Station (440MW) some years ago and noted from the display that the total cost (in 1966) of the project was £13M (and a dozen or so deaths). Sounds pretty good, especially in comparison to the Dinorwig Pumped Storage System (1728MW) which cost, in memory serves me right, about £1.2B (1983). Of course we not only have inflation, but the further confounder of decimalisation. Anyway, doing the calculations from the completion dates dates and, in comparison, Ben Cruachan cost ~£100M. OK, thats still a fair way short of £1.2B, but it does generate considerably less electricity and, of course, is not a like-for-like project. Anyway, its a good illustration of how raw figures can really illicit the “wow” factor when reality is something else.

Those interest in the IT side of blogging will have noticed I use Blosxom for my blog. This is a remarkably lightweight (in size) Perl script that dynamically builds all the pages and makes the RSS feeds available. It is template driven with all content simply text files held within a folder structure. However it is an extremely capable system, easily portable across servers and extensible through plugins. The plugins I currently use include Blosedit, breadcrumbs, atomfeed, calendar, feedback, find, flatarchives, foreshortened, menu, moreentries, seemore, truncatez and writeback. The beauty of these is that you can get exactly the look and feel you want. Sadly development of Blosxom has ceased, but there is plenty of information over at the Unofficial Blosxom User Group and the project itself has now been moved as an open source project to Sourceforge.

I have been extending my mp3 collection of late by ripping some more of my 400 odd CDs. I should say that I buy all the music I am interested in as albums (CDs) and subsequently rip them for listening too; I’m not a fan of illegal copying (or, for that matter, Orwellian DRM schemes dreampt up by money grabbing music executives. No one in mind… Sony).

Anyway, if you look carefully at the CD-audio specification you will realise that it is very different from PC based media. Principally in that the are no sectors and no error correction. In essence your PC will not know what is where on a CD which makes the accurate ripping of CDs quite a challenge. The main software I use for ripping is called Exact Audio Copy and it approaches this problem in two ways. Firstly it analyses your CDROM and works out how it operates. Secondly, it works on the principal of repeated samples; if you copy a “sector” of the CD twice, they should be the same. If not, then there is a read error. EAC also plays CDs, burns CDs, links to freedb for track information and many other “niceities”. Its also small and can run from a USB stick.

EAC has recently added in support for a AccurateRip. This extends the idea in EAC to a social network through the use of check-sums. Once a track is ripped, create a checksum and upload that to an online database. When someone else rips a track they can compare their checksum to the one in the database and, if they match, it is probably a good rip. The more checksums submitted the greater the accuracy. And it all works rather well.
doesn’t come with any encoders so you need to grab these yourself. Lame is probably the best open source encoder and you need to download binaries for Windows. You can then use either the DLL or standalone EXE file. I go for the former as it is quicker and easier, but hasn’t got the same flexibility, I set EAC to rip at 96k/bit stereo CBR. I tried listening to a variety of bit rates at both CBR and VBR and this was fine for me. It only gets used on my Palm so this offers a good trade between file size and quality.

AccurateRip is principally designed to work with dbPowerAmp, but is also supported by EAC. It only comes as an installer and you need to point it at your EAC installation directory where it sticks one DLL file. Unfortunately if you have already installed dbpoweramp before some funny things seem to happen to the registry and AccurateRip within EAC will always give the error “This key disc cannot be used for offset detection.” In this instance you need to need to delete all registry keys for AccurateRip (by searching through the registry) and then try it again. Should work fine then!

Following on the theme of Neogeography, it is worth pointing out that great strides have been made amongst non-GIS folk in the realms of Web2.0 in order to “spatially enable” our internet experience. The likes of Mikel Maron (of Worldkit) have brought location to the forefront of websites, such that places like Flickr now fully enable location in terms of meta-data. There is no better demonstration than through the use of GeoRSS. Machine readable feeds (a.k.a. RSS) are great for looking at website updates and also displaying spatial data. So much so that it is now rapidly becoming a full format and is even fully supported by software such as cadcorp.

Anyway, the main thrust here is that this is a machine format. What about standard readable formats? Well XML is the obvious route, but its not really a web format yet. The next step back from this is therefore markup within HTML that support location. And this already exists in the form of microformats; a structure of tags that add semantics (meaning) to the content of a web page in the same manner that XML does. This markup is embedded in the page for utilisation by the web browser. Its early days yet, but some interesting things are now being done with microformats. On the spatial front, most notably Grease Route, a Grease Monkey script (for Firefox) that parses a page for spatial microformats (notably either the address or location tags) and then offers a location map or route via MapQuest. Have a click on the globe icon (dynamically appended by GreaseRoute) on my webpage next to my department address.

There seems to have been much written on the recent train ticket price increases. Whilst some fares remain protected (to an extent), others do not. To take the route I travel, for example, a day peak return ticket in to London costs £22 and, in fact, remains unchanged. To Surbiton it used to cost £22.40 and has now risen to £26. A staggering 16% rise. Changes like this simply cannot be excused and the Labour government has done a pretty poor job of maintaining a balanced rail system. Yes, since privatisation we have new trains, mostly punctual trains and, generally, a better service (although try telling that to people traveling on First Great Western). However the single biggest sticking point has been the HUGE cost this has entailed. Someone really needs to unravel, in simple-speak, what is actually going on. We have had large increases in train passengers, apparently large increases in road travel and rapidly rising costs. I appreciate that it is difficult to absorb rapid increases in passenger numbers but it really doesn’t seem to be handled very well. And in the middle of all this we have Labour sitting, looking very smug. And it is ironic that the face of “integrated transport” (NOT) in the UK has been John Prescott; I can’t imagine a worse public image to present…