Truly random | Arron Woods

High speed train time comparison

I must disclaim, I have no real interest in trains, but this is my second nerdy train post on the blog in a year!?

With all this talk of a new HS3 line I thought I’d compare reported operating speeds against average speeds across some of the better known lines. The results are in:

I tried to keep the distances similar when calculating average speeds from stations, but didn’t do too well. The average speed is the length of track from Station A to B divided by timetabled route length.

From	To	Miles	Hours
Tokyo	Sendai	202	1.05
Paris	London	306	2.06
London	Birmingham	116.66	0.83
Paris	Marseilles	466	3

So it would appear the proposed HS2 will operate at speeds of up to 225mph (25mph faster than the Shinkansen) but still be 76mph slower on average.

Invictus

I went to see Invictus last night, a film I wouldn’t usually class as my cup of tea, but as it was based around both SA and Rugby, I had to give it a chance! The film is definitely worth a watch, a great feel good movie, although not that historically accurate.

I looked up the poem Invictus when I got back, the poem Nelson Mandela gives to Francois Pienaar in the film. Although Mandela did have a copy of the poem in his cell, he actually gave Francois an except from a speech by Teddy Roosevelt. Both are great pieces, but I think I prefer the speech. Not sure why the film had to mix it all up, I guess ‘Invictus’ is better than ‘The Man in the Arena’ as a film title.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Teddy Roosevelt

All things go!

Things have been extremely busy over the last few weeks, not had a chance to stay on top of the blog or the plugin. Thought I’d update everyone with some progress.

RB Internal Links

Not had a chance to update the plugin with any cool features yet. As far as I know, the only thing people are waiting on is better language/encoding support. I will get round to this soon!

Work

Works been busy but fun, we’ve just launched a new product. It’s a financial content management system (yes, shameless plug) that accepts fund data in a variety of formats and produces graphs and statistics etc. Its also bundled with the usual suite of CMS features, all tailored to the financial sector.

We’re also thinking of moving offices soon, got our eye on a very nice place not too far away. After this summer the lure of air conditioning in every office was just too tempting. It’s also got its own datacenter which will house our development server nicely!

Play

Just got back from a tranquil week away in the south of France. Got to take the new car with me, was a lot of fun! I took a picture on my phone one morning when we went to get breakfast, came out a little blurry.

Long time no post!

It’s been a long time, a few months in fact! Not had a lot of ‘interesting’ news and been busy with work and other endeavors! I’m trying to decide whether my interest in learning to ride a motorbike outweighs my fear of death… veering towards motorbike.

Anyway, just thought I’d mention a blog that I set up for a friend of mine, using wordpress of course! It took literally 15 minutes to setup – it looks good and I got all the features I needed from plugins – was really impressed. Its at http://www.rachelinkenya.com, as you may have guessed, Rachel is in Kenya.. volunteering at a local Hospital and staying at an orphanage. Sounds exciting!

Found something cool yesterday too, its a wordpress app for the blackberry. Its still in beta but seems to work pretty well. Glad to see people are making an effort to support blackberrys, I was starting to fear an iPhone monopoly! :)You can install it by pointing your blackberry to http://blackberry.wordpress.org/install

Napster UK gets upgrade at last!

I just received an email from Napster mentioning an update in a couple of days and I’m actually quite excited! It was only a week or so ago I emailed them to ask if they’d be upgrading to Napster version 3 any time soon and at the time they didn’t give anything away!

The trouble was, until now, to listen to music I had to boot up windows, which meant my laptop running parallels or not being able to code in Ubuntu.. and it was annoying. Not anymore! Now I’ll only need Windows to synchronise my mp3 player. Hopefully it won’t need flash either!

Here is a screenshot from the email, looks pretty cool.

Napster 3 screenshot