Up and down like a yoyo
Back in uni, we had a Unix server which (unlike the faculty machines) was available for use by any student. Its name was yoyo, and it was invaluable back when internet access was hard to come by, and official university access was only granted to students studying IT subjects.
Why “yoyo”? There was a hope that it wouldn’t be up and down like a yoyo.
Looks like it’s still around: yoyo.cc.monash.edu.au
Unfortunately, my web hosting has been up and down like a yoyo for the last 30 hours or so. Apparently this was due to a DDOS attack on the web host. The ISP moved accounts over to another host, but delays in the DNS propagation meant for a while some people would see an image of a Lamborghini Wank-5000 (or something) that the server was named after. Most inappropriate, at least for me. They’ve now changed this.
Anyway, this is why my various web sites have been very unreliable for the last day or so. Hopefully things have settled down now.
Update Wednesday night: Turns out this was part of a religious war, a distributed denial-of-service attack on the Athiest Foundation of Australia, which was hosted on the same server, run by Netlogistics.
Up until now, Netlogistics have been pretty good, and the price is good for an Australian-based host. As far as I can tell, NetLogistics did reasonably well with the DDOS attack, with a couple of caveats: the information provided was minimal (I never saw anything on their Network Status page when I looked, though they were quick to reply to enquiries, and their discussion forum was kept up-to-date) and that car image instead of a proper outage message made it looked like the site had been hacked.
Why do people sometimes not revalidate?
From time to time you’ll see someone having a whinge that they got on a tram and nobody bought a ticket or validated one, and therefore they must all be freeloaders. For example these comments on the Herald Sun web site:
On every tram i board, only one person out of the 30 on there actually use a ticket!
– Lindsay of AdelaideWe already have defacto free travel in the city anyway. Hardly anyone validates a ticket on the trams (You might be lucky if it is one in tweny people that validates their ticket).
– U No It Makes Cents of Moorabbin
It’s not actually true. Many people don’t revalidate because they already have a valid ticket, they can’t be bothered, and because they see no reason to go to the effort to do so.
As Metlink said recently at the Train Services inquiry:
Mr O’DONOHUE — Of the 38 per cent of trips not validated, how many of these would be fare evasion?
Mr CAROLAN — On trains?
Mr O’DONOHUE — Yes.
Mr CAROLAN — Our estimates are that fare evasion on trains is a little bit less than 10 per cent of trips made on trains, so that means there are a lot of people who do not validate but who have a perfectly valid ticket. That does not really surprise us. It is an unfortunate characteristic of our system, because we would preferably have everyone validating who should validate. But there are a lot of people who have long-term periodicals; there are quite a few free pass-holders; there are some people with serious disabilities who are not required to validate. The gap is not all that surprising, and a number of those people do not need to validate in the sense of the physical access to the system. We all know that at the city stations you need to validate to get through the barriers, but there are many suburban stations where you do not, so if people are making a journey between pairs of suburban stations where they do not need to activate the barriers and they have a weekly or a monthly ticket, they may not validate.
[Note: this is draft transcript, and may not be 100% accurate]
That was about trains, but it goes doubly for trams, where there are no physical barriers that require a ticket to open. (On the trains, if you haven’t revalidated at your boarding station, your ticket won’t open the gates, if there are any, at your destination.)
It’s particularly true on CBD trams, where the likelihood is that people taking short trips have got into the CBD by public transport, using an already-valid ticket.
Of course officially you’re meant to revalidate on every trip. The theory is it helps them gather statistics on passenger use. As the auto-announcements on some trains say: “Help us to create a better service for you by validating your ticket.”
But it doesn’t actually work that way. If you enter a CBD station, and exit at a station with no gates (which is most of them), they have no idea which line you caught. If you board a tram and revalidate at the Town Hall, they don’t know if you got off it at the Arts Centre or in Carnegie.
All this is why they have people out a couple of times a year with clipboards, manually counting the loads. (This week they appear to be doing the Burnley group lines.)
Besides which, all the information from manual counts, and from AM peak validations from train passengers coming into the CBD (arguably the only time and place on the network where the validation data provides something accurate and useful) didn’t prompt the government to buy and deploy extra trains as patronage grew. Instead they tried to pretend it wasn’t happening, scrapped old trains, and subsequently got caught on the hop and had to buy some back and order lots more.
The problem here is not a lack of statistics.
And under Myki? Ah well, that’s a whole new ball game.
Tags: Metcard, Myki, public transport
17 comments
Cling wrap
Speaking of shopping for cheap alternatives, but preferring locally-made goods: initially I avoided buying the Aldi cling wrap because it was made in China.
Then I noticed all the brands of cling wrap are now made in China, including OSO and Multix, and the one that’s in common use as the generic term, Glad Wrap.
At some stage in the few years, production of my favourite shampoo also moved offshore, from Australia to Thailand.
So I’d like to buy a local product to support Australian jobs and reduced shipping distances for goods, but sometimes you can’t really do it.
Who are these clowns whose Twitter posts get into the paper?
From last Saturday’s Herald Sun Weekend section:
It was sent when we were passing through Kangaroo Flat on the way to Bendigo the other week.
(Thanks for spotting it, onegirlinmelb)
Tags: Bendigo, Herald Sun, Kangaroo Flat, Twitter
2 comments
Twitter highlights part 3
Here, in the interests of data preservation, is the third instalment of my best Twitter posts.
July 2008
What’s this? From the man who brought you Myki (Peter Batchelor) comes a new coal-fired power station, the day before Garnaut reports?! 10:09 AM Jul 2nd, 2008 from web
Umbrella self-destructed, top flew off. At least the trains aren’t crowded, thanks to school holidays. 8:23 AM Jul 8th, 2008 from txt
Did a press conference with a bunch of other transport bods to some media in an otherwise empty room. 11:08 AM Jul 8th, 2008 from txt
At Sidetracked entertainment. While the kids all play laser force, the adults are all over Galaga and air hockey. 11:41 AM Jul 10th, 2008 from txt
They’re here! On the streets and in the shops! PILGRIMS! Being nice! 6:57 PM Jul 13th, 2008 from web — this was ahead of World Youth Day/week
Eddington submission in, with seconds to spare. 5:05 PM Jul 15th, 2008 from web
Getting utterly massacred by my sister in Scrabulous. 8:59 PM Jul 15th, 2008 from web
Two grown women on train discussing how they have no idea if Ireland is connected to the rest of Britain. 9:13 AM Jul 17th, 2008 from txt
Read more
Tags: Twitter
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The FKN line is stuffed again
From time to time I’ll rant on Twitter about the FKN (Frankston — it’s an official code) line being stuffed.
After a few months of pretty good performance right around the rail network, the past week has seen a marked decline. Pulling together info from Connex’s Twitter feed and SMS alerts, and excluding a medical emergency or two:
Fri Oct 9th: 6:08am and 8:06am Bentleigh to City, and an express all cancelled
Mon Oct 12th: 8:47am and 9:09am Bentleigh to City, and an express all cancelled
Tue Oct 13th 8:29 am: Minor Delays – Cranbourne, Pakenham and Frankston lines: citybound (equipment fault). Delays up to 15 minutes
Wed Oct 14th: 8:17am Bentleigh to City cancelled
Thu Oct 15th: 8:31am Bentleigh to City cancelled
Fri Oct 16th 8:03 am: Line Suspended: Frankston line between Frankston-Cheltenham (power supply fault). Buses replacing trains, major delays
Something every weekday. Other lines have also suffered, everything from cancelled trains to some less-busy lines repeatedly running short trains, to line suspensions.
Remember, the impact from any little incident has big flow-on effects. A single cancelled train can disrupt a thousand people directly, and thousands more in the following trains. A line suspension disrupting a dozen trains is about the equivalent of shutting down a 3-lane freeway for an hour.
So what’s going on? Dunno. But here’s hoping they lift their game pronto. I’d rather a smooth service than a paltry free Daily ticket at the end of the month.
As I write this the FKN line is still suspended south of Cheltenham due to power problems, and some people are stuck on trains in the affected section. I’m heading in for work late today, and fortunately I’m north of that point. Still, it should be an interesting ride in.
(The car is periodically showing a warning light and being a little sluggish too. Maybe the transport gods are angry this week.)
PS. The ride in was pretty smooth. The 10:06am train was on time and not crowded. Either things are back to normal, or everyone’s still stuck south of Cheltenham!
And here’s a good quote from Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, on the importance of reliable train services: “Every time your train is stuck inexplicably in a tunnel, every time a service is cancelled, the experience is not just eroding your quality of life. It is eating away at our city’s global competitiveness.”
Tags: trains
8 comments
Selling shoes
So, those very nice but badly sized Ecco shoes I bought a couple of months ago… I’m finally selling them on eBay:
I bought these shoes recently. I wore them a couple of times and then realised I’d made a huge mistake: I had got the wrong size. Could I return them to the shop? No, not really – there’s now a teensy bit of wear on them – not noticeable under normal conditions, but enough to make them no longer “as new” for the purposes of returning them to the shop. Trying inserts didn’t work for me, so I’m selling them here.
They retail for about $200, so I’ve learnt an expensive lesson: make sure the shoes fit before you leave the shop.
Nice though the shoes are, they had a compatibility problem with my feet. Sigh. Hopefully someone wants them.
Last week I did in fact finally find a pair of sneakers that I like and that fits properly: a rather nice pair from Geox, which are much more similar to my old favourite pair of Eccos than anything Ecco sells now. And they fit.
So, if you’re a Euro size 44 (Aus 9 1/2), please buy my shoes.
Update: Sold for AU $78.69!
Tags: eBay, shoes
4 comments
A day on the trains
It occured to me that a lot is going to change in public transport in the next few months. Connex is on the way out, to be replaced by MTM trading as Metro. Metcard will be phased out in favour of Myki. And right across the network, there are infrastructure projects going on.
So I decided to capture some of the here and now, at least on the trains. Here’s how 350,000 or so people will spend at least part of their day today.
There’s a zillion train videos on YouTube. At least in part, I was trying to capture something different — not just trains going by, but what’s seen by the passengers.
It’s not intended to be exhaustive. The footage was captured on my travels over the last couple of months, which the eagle-eyed will notice is pretty much confined to the southeast (at least on weekdays, which is when this was all shot).
The timestamps are accurate — which is why some parts of the day are missing. I’m rarely up and out early, which is why there’s nothing before 8am.
The footage was all captured on my Nokia N95 phone camera. It’s not a terrible camera, but neither is it a proper video camera. There are noticeable glitches, particularly when a large object goes past fast horizontally — the trains don’t really skew like that as they go by. (Though arguably that looks quite cool.)
Will be interesting to see what this all looks like in a few years. No doubt some the same, some different.
Tags: trains, video
8 comments
