Category Archives: Cambridge

Velib’

Velib

Michael and I were in Paris in July, just a few days after the launch of the Velib’ scheme (Vélo Liberation) – which provided bicycles for public rental at hundreds of ‘stations’ around the capital. We didn’t get a chance to try one, though I’ve used a similar facility in Copenhagen before. The Paris scheme works partly because it was funded and managed by JCDecaux in exchange for control of large amounts of advertising space, and partly because users need to provide a credit card-based €150 deposit to be able to hire one.

Anyway, apparently it’s been a huge success, with 10,000 bikes deployed and people using them for 100,000 journeys per day.

Ken Livingston, are you listening?

There’s more about the scheme here and here, and many other successful operations are running in other cities around Europe.

Ten years ago in Cambridge, of course, we had the Green Bike Scheme, which has passed into local legend – almost into mythology, because even if you lived in the city at the time you might have missed it. 300 unclaimed bicycles from the police pound were painted green and deposited at special stands around the town with the idea that people would just pick them up at one place and drop them off at another. Well, they got the first half right. All of them were stolen within the first day or two. I lived in the centre of Cambridge at the time and never even saw a Green Bike, let alone rode one. The special stands were quietly removed a little while later.

Perhaps, though, in some way, we played our part in the success of such schemes in other parts of the continent, by illustrating how not to do it…

Virtualisation

A while back I thought virtualisation technology was going to be the hot topic of 2006. Well, it was, in certain niche areas, but the momentum is still growing.

Shortly after VMware’s amazing IPO, XenSource, a spin-out from the Cambridge Computer Lab, have been bought by Citrix in a deal worth $500M. And not all of the money is virtual – there’s a good chunk of cash there too.

Many congratulations to my pals there, who will now definitely be buying the drinks next time we meet at the pub.

But this is also a nice challenge to those who don’t believe you can make money from Open Source…

Cambridge Audio Tour

It’s always a bit embarrassing to discover that a friend has been involved in a really good initiative and you didn’t know about it until months later. I was even invited to the launch, but was away at the time.

ShapeWALKS

So I’ve just discovered (sorry, Vicky!) the Shape Walks guides to Cambridge, created by Stride Design and Shape East, and in particular the audio guides, which you can download into your iPod or phone and then stroll (or stride) around the town with a very nicely-produced commentary on your surroundings – especially if you’re interested in architecture.

If you’re feeling a bit less energetic, you can click on their online map and hear the tour commentary through your browser while sitting at home in an armchair.

I went looking to see if Stride had done this for any other towns and found just one more – amazingly, for me, it’s for Ware, in Hertfordshire, where I grew up, and which I now discover I knew very little about despite living there for 15 years.

These are very good; every town council or tourist information office should commission one.

As a slight variation on this theme, a couple of winters ago I found another good way to explore a new place

Karen

John has a lovely post on his blog about Karen Spärck Jones, who died on Wednesday.

She was a good friend. We had a couple of arguments – no, not arguments, debates – which we both enjoyed greatly. She was right more often than I was; sometimes I knew this from the start but it was fun playing devil’s advocate with her.

Some loved her, some admired her, some found her infuriating. But whatever your viewpoint, the world is a duller place for her passing. And that’s not a bad epitaph for anybody.

 

Seeing the light

The sports fields behind the Ndiyo office were floodlit as I walked home tonight.

2007-03-22_18-56-59

(Click for bigger versions – another view here)

Springtime continued

My commute to work is a short walk, past hedgerows like this. I’m a lucky guy.

flowers

Springtime

Extremes of colour everywhere…

Leaves and daffodils

Getting greener

I detect a worrying trend here.

It started when we got the ‘green bin’ recycling scheme, and Rose began pressuring me into recycling everything that could possibly be recycled. I grumpily acquiesced, but am now rather proud of the small amount of stuff in our non-recyclable bin when it’s collected each fortnight.

Then we made a recent decision to start buying organic food when possible, despite the premium prices at Waitrose. This is the modern equivalent of tithing to the church, I guess, but we think of it as one of the little luxuries that you’re allowed when you don’t have children to feed as well!

And now we even have a box of local vegetables & fruit delivered by the nice people at the Cambridge Organic Food Company.

But no, I’m not about to grow a beard, and any Birkenstock representatives considering contacting me as a result of this post should think again. Sometimes, though, this green stuff provides me with an excuse to buy gadgets. Actually, almost anything provides me with an excuse to buy gadgets. That’s another thing you can do when you don’t have kids.

This particular toy is a sensor which clips onto the main power lead coming into my house:

Electrisave sensor

and provides a nice little wireless display telling us how many kilowatts we’re currently using. Just about 1.1, at the moment:

Electrisave display

It can also tell us in pence per hour, or tonnes of greenhouse gas per year, should we so desire. It’s also a temperature and humidity display. Quite sweet. It would take a long time, I think, for me to save sufficient electricity to pay for it, but every little helps… It’s an Australian invention, called an Electrisave over here, and is available in the UK from their site, or, more cheaply, from British Gas.

Cambridge Daily Photo

Somebody going by the pseudonym of ‘Neorelix’ has started a nice blog of Cambridge-related photos.
Thanks to Heidi Tempest for the link.

Woody Woodpecker

We’ve had a colourful visitor in our garden over the last couple of days.

woodpecker

Click for more pictures

Travel Time Maps

Car/Rail travel times from Cambridg
When I was playing with in-car systems at the AT&T Labs, we always wanted to do maps which were coloured according to the time it took you to get to a certain location, or distorted to show time rather than distance. We never got around to it, sadly. Fortunately, Chris Lightfoot and Tom Steinberg did.

They have all sorts of nice variations on the theme, too. The fact that much of it is based around Cambridge makes it particularly interesting for me.

Imagine a collaborative project where everybody is feeding their road speed into a central database and you can get this sort of data in real time, centred on your location, wherever you are. That would be a fun project for somebody…

And has anybody done this for the airlines, I wonder?

Thanks to John for the link.

Cambridge Menus

Any readers in the Cambridge area will appreciate this useful page put together by Samuel Lipoff.

Thanks, Samuel – your efforts much appreciated!

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser