Silician Sketchbook

What I thought to be a relative certainty, isn’t. Union station was out of, or not selling, tokens on the way to class and on the way home. Paradoxically, Queen’s Park station was selling tokens so I purchased my allotted five tokens and went to class. Of course, they were completely sold out around 5:30 pm, but so was Union station!

On the other hand, Finch station, which hasn’t been selling tokens at 6:30 pm for a while now, suddenly begins selling them with a ten token cap.

This could be indicative of supply-side problems, or that the TTC is changing high volume sites in an attempt to be fair to passengers while disrupting hoarders. And then there’s the possibility that it’s all dependent on when the staff decide to empty the turnstiles of their tokens.

This was motivated, coincidentally enough, by the TTC website. Scrolling text effectively forced me to use Internet Explorer to get route information, which is sad.

There are better uses for a JVM than scrolling text. I acknowledge that this is the least of the TTC’s issues, but Javascript and Flash have come of age.

I’m on a new system, with Windows Vista (oh noes!), with the latest version of Firefox, and it froze when trying to open this lame scrolling text applet. A JRE came installed, so it was a bit of a head-scratcher as to just why things weren’t working. Mozilla suggested that I install the latest JRE using XPInstall. I tried, that, but it fails with error code 203, which seems to be a pretty common problem. I wound up using the offline installation executable.

After setting everything up, Java applets no longer crashed Firefox; they just refused to load. I tried disabling and re-enabling the JVM through both Firefox and the Java control panel, to no avail.

What fixed the whole issue was the use of a registry patch. It adds an entry that should be present, but despite numerous versions of Firefox, continues to be forgotten by the installer. If you have problems, merge the registry patch first. It’s the most likely cause.

So anyone that has to take the TTC should know by now that there is a fare hike coming in November. While the cash fare will remain where it is at $2.75, tickets and tokens will go up $0.15 to $2.25 and the monthly Metropass price is going up $9.25 to $109. Related to the upcoming increase is attempts by the TTC to curtail token hoarding.

I haven’t been a regular TTC user for so long as to have experienced a previous fare increase, so the first question that came to mind was, Why tokens? They’re priced the same, so there should be no difference, right?

The short answer is, Tickets are easy to print. It’s not in the TTC’s best interests to honour tokens that are purchased prior to previous fare hikes, but short of upgrading every automated turnstile, there is nothing they can do. As an aside, they actually did upgrade the token infrastructure due to counterfeiting and the fact that American dimes did surprisingly well masquerading as tokens.

Tickets can’t be used for automated turnstiles, so they can be refused when presented to an operator. For those stuck with old tickets, there will come a point when the TTC will offer to refund them for their book value, or you can just pay $0.15 in addition to the old ticket [PDF] during a one-month grace period. I think that the optimal solution is to buy tokens now and refund the old tickets later.

If you happen to be a University of Toronto student, good news! A Metropass will continue to cost $87.75 for the rest of the year. For me, however, I can’t justify the cost of a Metropass – discounted or otherwise – for December since I won’t be commuting for a week, maybe two. And so I joined the ranks of would-be token hoarders.

My main entry and exit points tend to be Finch, College, and Queen’s Park stations. From my experience, tokens are only sold during rush hour. Specifically, I see them on sale at Finch around 9:30 am, and at the other stations around 5:00 pm. When I pass through on my way to class in the early afternoon, there is a red sign that says, Tokens are currently unavailable. Please buy tickets. It’s either that, or tokens are sold out (there’s a sign for that, too). Staring out the subway window at stations that have platform-level fare collector booths (Dundas and Queen stations), red signs are also present during the early afternoon.

You’ll be pleased to know that token machines at Finch, College, and Queen’s Park are either:

• Out of order
• Selling one token at a time for the cash fare price of $2.75

Where you can buy tokens in the afternoon is at Union station. I prefer Union because I’m not in a rush to get home. It adds about 10-15 minutes to my commute to class as I’m taking the long away around, but I usually take this path anyway, for reasons I may mention later.

As mentioned previously, token sales are limited to 10 tokens at a time. What isn’t mentioned is that Finch station only lets you buy 5 at a time. There are functioning token machines at Union but they only accept $10 bills and dispense 4 tokens plus change, so unless you’re in a hurry it’s better to just wait in line and buy your 10.

Technology is all about reducing the amount of work one has to do, and yet people continue to insist on re-inventing the wheel. I was/am one of those people.

I still believe in doing things the long, painful, drawn out way, but not as doctrine. Doing things by hand is an educational experience. At first, when I was attempting to recreate the K2 theme in my pages with Notepad, I was learning something about CSS and XHTML. Fiddling with settings to get columns and a decent page layout were time-consuming but fun. That later gave way to copy and pasting template code that I’d much rather prefer to automate. I also lacked an integrated commenting and trackback system, using HaloScan as a crutch. If I wanted to add widgets, well then I’d really have to go to a dynamic content management system. Notepad plus SFTP wouldn’t cut it.

There are many talented and dedicated people who dream of powerful, easy to use, aesthetically appealing, content management systems. Given my experience, they have my utmost respect. And so here I am, standing on the proverbial shoulders of giants. Hopefully useful entries will come out of this.

That doesn’t mean my content management education is at an end. Placing widgets requires a bit of editing to the PHP file. At first I thought it would be as easy as drag and drop using the sidebar editor interface, but those are layout sidebars and don’t correspond to the sidebars that are visually apparent.

I’ll go through some of the old content (admittedly, there’s not much there) and port it over to this journal. As for future direction, I may create a dedicated Skunk Works site to manage my mostly non-existent projects, and the Sketchbook will hold tutorial pages and generally chronicle my musings and misadventures.