Silician Sketchbook

Lunch time is probably not the best time to go to La Nave. Given the generous portions for both appetizers and entres, and the fact that the owner was the sole waiter and one of two chefs, the place strikes me as more geared to dinner.

I was in a large group, which probably aggravated the slowness, but we did have the entire restaurant, I think, so we weren’t inconveniencing anybody else. I’d expect better staffing in the evening.

The one appetizer I saw, the Salmone Affumicato, was about as large as our entre dishes. It was probably meant to be shared, in which case it would have made 2 lunch meals. At least. After finishing my Fusilli Della Nonna, I knew that I was going to be eating light later in the day.

I burned through my margin and arrived slightly late for class Wednesday because someone decided to jump in front of a subway train at Union station. It’s kind of surreal how the TTC is diplomatic about it, calling it an “emergency situation caused by a personal injury at track level.” It’s understandable to not talk about suicide attempts for fear of encouraging them, but everyone knows what it means to suffer an emergency track level injury.

I was actually on the subway sitting not too far from an unoccupied driver’s booth, when the radio erupted, although I couldn’t make anything out. At the next station, York Mills or Lawrence, the driver made mention of a delay due to a “power outage” at Union station.  After a bit of digging, I read that when a person contacts a train, the power is cut so that trains cannot enter the scene until after, um, things are cleaned up, I guess.

Does cutting power imply disabling a block spanning St. Andrew station to Wellesley station? Because when the truth came out, we all got kicked off at Bloor, with the requisite train traffic jam three stations beforehand. They ran shuttle buses between stations, but I opted to take the Bloor-Danforth line to St. George station, where I waited about 15 minutes for a southbound train that would get me to Queen’s Park before turning around at Osgoode station.

Being affected by or being around medical emergencies when commuting is still a dubious novelty. I think I’m quickly becoming hardened against such things, though. Someone tried to die, probably did while succeeding in drawing everyone’s attention posthumously.  I’m just looking at my watch wondering whether the professor will have erased the first blackboard by the time I get to class.

I had to leave Simon Haykin’s lecture on cognitive radio early because I had a certain milestone to meet, and as far as milestones go, this one was the easiest one to get. No homework, quizzes, exams, or committees of professors.

That’s the positive way of looking at it. The more cynical way of perceiving JDE1000H (Ethics in Research) is that of being dragged in for a two hour talk on a late Thursday afternoon on threat of not being able to graduate. Many grad students demonstrated their disapproval by doing their homework, or digging out their laptops and surfing on the campus wireless connection.

Confidence inspiring, right? But at least they may be given the benefit of the doubt, since they were quiet about it. The same couldn’t be said about a few scattered clusters around the lecture hall.

At first I thought, naively, that it was because grad students were a cut above the superset we call undergrads. Obviously, I’ve since revised that notion. Talking in class seems to crop up whenever large groups of people are put together for something not everyone (i.e. most) wants to be there for. It’s just that my grad classes are either small and/or people take learning (or not failing and losing funding) very seriously.

Sometimes I feel that talkers are willfully sabotaging whatever class they’re in by polluting the room with the most banal conversation. The talkers themselves wouldn’t view themselves as malicious, “just bored.” And sometimes, the most damage is caused out of deliberate ignorance followed by stubborn denial.

The lecture hall in the Mining Building has the honour of being the first lecture that I’ve sat in that was built using rows of park benches with slabs of wood bolted on for a writing surface.  If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Simon Haykin is old. Without any estimate whatsoever, finally seeing him at a distinguished lecture last Thursday (in the Mechanical Engineering building) was even more shocking. All I knew was that he wrote digital signal processing books – books that I managed to get by without purchasing because homework questions were posted in full online. I also inferred, from a book I saw sitting on a bookshelf during a co-op term, that he was the expert on adaptive signal processing, specifically adaptive equalizers.

In fact, the subject of his talk was an extension of something more fundamental than adaptive equalization. In his preamble while someone searched for a microphone (which he wound up not needing too much), he talked about how he got into adaptive signal processing in the first place. Adaptive meant flexibility, a robust means of getting a handle on an unknown and constantly changing environment. But adaptive signal processing, like equalizers, just means handling channel conditions. He was going for something much more ambitious: equalizing the channel, adjusting transmission and reception for optimal throughput/spectral efficiency/power, even finding unused blocks of spectrum with which to communicate in.

I was aware of software defined radio around 2002, right around the time when Haykin began a serious push for research in the area. SDR is only a means, though, and at the time was the domain of amateur radio for improving reception of narrowband voice or simple digital transmission. Cognitive radio, which was the case that he was making that afternoon, is a more general concept. How one goes about it, through hardware, software, or a mix, is implementation details.

The lecture was all about why cognitive radio (and cognitive radar), and some of the projects ongoing at his lab in McMaster University, so the whole thing bordered on non-technical. I had to leave before he got to the last part.

In his view, the holy grail of cognitive radio is to have the transceiver learn, through feedback of channel conditions and frequency use, in something almost like how humans learn, the implication being that our brains are like Bayesian systems. My interpretation is that through continuous learning, the transceiver can figure out if there are users around, or what kind of noise is corrupting which parts of the spectrum, and select modulation, bandwidth, transmit power, and forward error correction as appropriate. The US army has long been grappling with implementing such a flexible system under the JTRS.

He paraphrased Nokia’s CEO as saying that, in the next 10 years or so, wireless communications networks, 4G and beyond, will take place on cognitive radio platforms. That’s compelling, but pretty ambitious especially from a mobile terminal’s point of view. Cognitive radio will likely be achieved by more software than hardware, but overall both will be thrown at the problem in large quantities, the implication being that power consumption goes way up all else being equal. Mobile cognitive radio boosters are betting on advances in battery life (massive capacitors, miniature combustion engines or fuel cells) as well as extremely low power transistors that can deliver the same or better switching speed compared to today’s fab processes (carbon nanotubes?).

I continue to follow SDR to some extent, not because of the benefits in being flexible, but for the reasons that I think FPGA’s are cool despite being a bit clunky and generally inferior to full-custom ASIC design: both lower barriers to entry.  A combination of SDR and FPGA technology enables something like GNU Radio, which enables people to build their own ATSC tuners.  Sometimes the hardest part in doing radio signal processing is getting an infrastructure to do radio signal processing.

There are some things that maybe should be said, but aren’t for fear of being attacked by an emo high school kid.

This afternoon’s bus ride was held up for about 5 tense minutes as this guy argued with the driver, using such creative arguments like flawed logic, false generalizations, and profanity, over why he should be allowed on the bus with a student ticket. The driver parked the bus and radioed TTC security, and waited. The guy simmered throughout the stand-off, finally leaving the bus after failing to argue briefly, swearing as he did so.

That was about the only right move he made, as he would have likely been fined for much more than the cost of an adult fare, once a TTC officer showed up.

I can empathize with his situation, but I draw the line at committing a serious offense like harassing TTC personnel. I once attended summer classes downtown (I hesitate to call anything in the city a camp). I got dropped off at Warden station, and had my block of student fare tickets in hand, and for the first week and half or so, I walked through the turnstiles under the auspices of a smiling old man after I had dropped my ticket into the fare box.

Things changed once the smiling old man was replaced with a stern younger man with glasses, square jaw, and trimmed beard, not unlike this guy. That was entirely coincidental. It’s just what I remembered, and that was a bit of a traumatic experience so I deem my memory more credible than it usually is.

Description aside, he was the one responsible for locking the turnstile, and he ordered me to pay the adult fare because I didn’t have student photo ID. Now here’s where my situation diverges with the guy on the bus. First, I didn’t lose my head. If anything, I was confused, not looking for a confrontation. Second, I had change in my pocket. The guy claimed that he was a student and therefore had no money. I was 11 or 12 at the time, and I had change at least.

I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. I could make up the difference between a student ticket and an adult (cash!) fare, but he was now down a student ticket, which was $1.40 before the fare increase, and with no means to make up the difference. I would also be freaking out, no doubt, but is there any point in getting belligerent?

First off, he was obviously in the wrong. What do the rules say? TTC Student Discount Card, or get the heck out. The driver kept pointing to that very sign posted on the bus and said, “I need photo ID.” The guy kept gesturing angrily at his high school student card and claimed that this was somehow valid ID. Learn to read. Never mind that the high school in question isn’t even a Toronto high school, but a York Region high school, neither kind of student card is issued by the TTC. Toronto high school students should, in theory, get a TTC issued discount card themselves. As an aside, the same driver later allowed a Toronto student to board when he showed his student card, so there is some hypocrisy involved.

That he had previously paid a student fare with his non-Toronto high school student card “like a hundred times” (yeah right) and thus it is perfectly legal is fallacy number one. I’m sure people have exceeded the speed limit on hundreds, thousands of occasions throughout their lives, and have never been caught. That doesn’t make it legal, either. The guy was probably capitalizing on the fact that drivers were either nicer than the one he encountered today, were too busy to check his card, or were just ignorant of the rules themselves.

“All you bus drivers are the same.” I don’t understand this. If all previous bus drivers encountered let him get away with breaking the rules, and this one didn’t, they are clearly not all the same because we have found a counter-example. Stop spewing trash already. I wasn’t the only passenger staring at him with a “Need a tissue?” expression.

Ignorance of the law is no excuse, but it turns out that York Region students can, in fact, get a student discount card. This is progress because way back, I didn’t even go to a high school, let alone a Toronto high school, so I wound up buying tokens. In retrospect, I should have just bought child tickets, even if I did look a little tall for an elementary school kid. Maybe my birth certificate could substitute for photo ID that no elementary school would issue? Who knows. The past is in the past.

What would I do in that situation? If I knew about as much as that guy did, I’d probably try the same argument with the student card, minus the yelling and profanity. Knowing what I know now, I’d have added that York Region students can also pay student fare, and have the driver radio an inquiry if he insisted on TTC issued ID. If the answer was “Nice try”, that’s game and I’d have to leave, minus $1.40. But the ticket was already in the collector box so there was nothing more to lose, except my pride.

Of course, knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t even be in that situation. I’d have gone down to Sherbourne station or to the temporary facility in Richmond Hill and gotten my discount card. The $5 fee is recovered in several two-way trips.

(Title from one of the TF2 Soldier’s trash talk lines)

What time was it? 1:30 PM or thereabouts. It was drizzling somewhat and there just happened to be a streetcar going in the right direction (a rarity) so I took it to College and Yonge. Outside of College Park, on the southwest corner of the intersection was an ambulance, and on the way into the subway station, I heard someone say, “Move to the right. Move to the right, please.”

A man on a stretcher was being pushed by some paramedics, surrounded by some police officers, a firefighter (maybe), and a man in a maroon TTC uniform. The man on the stretcher may have had an oxygen mask on him, I’m not sure. I didn’t feel compelled to stare.

“Is he alive?” a man asked to no one in particular.

“I don’t know,” quipped someone in the group.

I would think that, at least at that moment, he was alive, although it might just be that he can’t be placed into a body bag until pronounced dead by a coroner. I don’t know the answer to that, but I do think I would be weirded out by the notion of passing by a dead man on my way home.

A few weeks before that, I was on my way home, having gotten on the subway in rush hour at Queen’s Park and gone round the loop. Approaching College station, I overheard something on the driver’s radio about a possible heart attack victim. At the station, a small crowd had gathered, presumably around the victim. One of the passengers boarding said, “Poor guy.”

The only other subway incident that I was in the vicinity of occurred at Queen’s Park station in the early afternoon. As I was going taking the north entrance into the station, a woman was telling everyone that the station was closed, that “someone jumped in front of the subway.”

Police surrounded and denied access to the station’s turnstiles, and when I surfaced on the south side of College street, there were two ambulances, some firetrucks and police cars outside the westbound streetcar stop. At the eastbound streetcar stop the same woman was telling others that the station was closed, adding, “Usually they do this during rush hour.” I boarded the streetcar and headed to College station.

On the subway, a public announcement informed all users of the Yonge-University-Spadina line that, due to a “track level personal injury” at Queen’s Park station. the entire University branch between Spadina and Union was shut down. Note that track level is not the same as platform level.

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.