Monthly Archives: January 2009

OV Chipkaart – following the Dutch

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The OV chipcard is something like London’s Oyster cards. They allow people to use busses, trams and trains all over the country. One of the problems though, is that the Dutch public transport system isn’t nationalised, it’s privatised, meaning there are loads of different companies all over the country.

Anyway, it turns out that not only does the chipcard store all your rides from all these companies, it also allows anyone with a reader (such as the conductors on trains) to see where you’ve been and gone – from stop to stop, across all these companies.

That’s a bit sick in my mind.

Has Palm done it?

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The new Palm Pre looks very awesome: smaller than an iphone, slideable keyboard (I love that keyboard, it’s very very good) and an OS which seems slicker than Apple’s. Other than that it seems to have all the prerequisite bits and bobs, such as wifi, gprs, reasonabley poor camera, gps, bluetooth, 480×320 display.

Contact management is done in Synergy. This polls your contacts from multiple sources (a bit like semantic web), such as facebook, your contacts list, outlook, your calendar, and integrates them in one place.

Apps can be created for the new webOS using just javascript, HTML and CSS.

Windows Tip: Boost Performance by Checking IDE Drive Transfer Mode

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If you’re struggling with decreased performance on a Windows based machine, it’s a simple fix to check to make sure your IDE drives aren’t operating in a slower, ineffective transfer mode.

When fresh from the box—or your workbench— your computer should have had all it’s IDE drives set in Direct Memory Access mode. This is a far speedier method of disk access than Programmed Input/Output mode. The technical side of the two modes is dense but let it suffice: DMA is a the fast and preferred method and PIO mode is the slower method Windows defaults to after having six redundancy checks fail. Things like power outages, doing a hard reset and other disk interruptions can cause these errors. Your Windows box may be operating in the slower transfer mode because mistakenly thinks that your system is unstable or that there is something wrong with your disks. The fix for your computer downshifting into PIO mode is simple. Go to your Control Panel, click on the System icon, open up your Device Manager and pull up the properties for your Primary and Secondary IDE channels. Under the Advanced settings tab you’ll be able to set the Transfer Mode to “DMA if available”. Reboot and you should be in business.

The R Project for Statistical Computing

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R is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics […]
R provides a wide variety of statistical (linear and nonlinear modelling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, clustering, …) and graphical techniques, and is highly extensible. The S language is often the vehicle of choice for research in statistical methodology, and R provides an Open Source route to participation in that activity.

One of R’s strengths is the ease with which well-designed publication-quality plots can be produced, including mathematical symbols and formulae where needed. Great care has been taken over the defaults for the minor design choices in graphics, but the user retains full control.

R is available as Free Software under the terms of the Free Software Foundation’s GNU General Public License in source code form. It compiles and runs on a wide variety of UNIX platforms and similar systems (including FreeBSD and Linux), Windows and MacOS.