National Library of Australia Cafés Reopen

Greetings from the National Library of Australia in Canberra, where I am delighted to report the NLA Bookplate and Paperplate Cafes have reopened. They closed in mid November, due to the commercial provider ceasing trade. The Wombok salad is back on (and better than ever) at the Paperplate Café, the less formal of the two, downstairs opposite the map room.

I have only had a coffee so far at the more formal Bookplate Café upstairs next to the NLA foyer (and with stained glass windows). The new management appear to have avoided the mistake of messing with the menu, but have done some redecorating. There are two large sets of dark wood bookcases, one full of antiques, such as typewriters, an old voltmeter and a plug-board from an analogue computer. If visiting Canberra, this is a good spot to stop, rest and eat. One catch is that the Federal government is now charging for parking in the parliamentary triangle area, so visitors also have to pay for parking when visiting the university (I avoided this by catching the Number 3 bus).

Purple Pickle Cafe Website

The Purple Pickle Cafe is located at the sports centre of the Australian National University. As I teach web design at the ANU I was asked to do a quick check of the web site:

• W3C Markup Validation Service: 7 Errors. These are minor errors, which can be easily fixed. They would not stop the web site from being viewed, but might cause problems with some mobile browsers.
• W3C mobileOK Checker: 21% This is a reasonable result for a web page not specifically designed for display on a mobile phone. However, given that there is a high use of mobile devices on campus (and free WiFi provided over much of the campus), it would be worth increasing mobile compatibility. Some problems reported by the test are also no mobile specific, such as "The CSS style sheet is not syntactically valid CSS".
• Accessibility test: The TAW accessibility test reported one Priority 1, One Priority 2 and no Priority automatically detected problems. This is a good result. The two problems are easily fixed, by adding ALT text to the logo and correcting the nesting order of the headings.
• Without styles: With styles turned off the page displayed as one column of text and was still usable.
• Message conveyed: The web page clearly states what it is about: a cafe located at a university in Canberra. The page is clearly aimed at catering for events, not casual diners. But it would be useful to include the street address of the cafe and a link to a map. While the page mentions "Australia" it would be useful to include the word "Australia" in the address, to clearly indicate where it is.
  
• Products: The first item on the menu is "Morning and afternoon tea". Clicking this displays "There are no products in this group". This is a confusing message. It is suggested that there be something offered here or the customer is likely to think the cafe doesn't do morning or afternoon tea.
• Checkout: The web site offers a reasonable shopping cart facility for ordering catering. While I did not try all functions, this looks usable. The option for creating a purchase order is a useful addition for those ordering corporate catering.
• Contact: The page lacks a contact section. The telephone number is provided at the bottom of the page, but a place where other contact details are provided would be useful. An email address or text query form would be useful.
• ABN: The web page should display at the bottom the full legal name of the business and the Australian Business Number (ANB) should be provided with the contact details.
• Visability: A Google search for "cafe ANU" returned the Purple Pickle Cafe web site ninth in the list. This uis a good re4ault as there are several other cafes on campus. In addition, the first page was the ANU Sport & Recreation Association mentioning the cafe with a link. It is suggested the association be offered a better photo of the cafe, which looks stark and deserted on their page. The fourth link was to my own travelogue "National Museum of Australia by Bicycle".

ps: The Purple Pickle Cafe opened shortly after I joined the ANU and is across the road from my office, so I have lunch there most days when at the University. The Cafe has outdoor dining under trees at the collocated entrance to the Gym, which I was reminded of when visiting Delphi, seeing the ancient gymnasium where the philosophers discussed education, under a tree by the Stoa. But the modern cafe, like the modern university, is partly online.

Cybercafes in Mapusa

Getting Internet access proved more difficult in India than I expected. The village has a pulse dial telephone system which I was unable to get to work reliably with my PC. The GSM mobile phone signals don't travel well through the 500 mm thick iron stone walls and steel barred windows of the houses. So far I have not been able to configure the GPRS of my phone with the local system. So I had to visit one of the numerous and cheap cybercafes.

Avoiding the more expensive tourist enters near the beach, the market town of Mapusa has old inexpensive ones. The catch is the low speed (about 1.2 kilobytes per second). The service is good, with staff able to supply blank CD-ROMs and a burner equipped PC. My web page looked okay on the slightly fuzzy 12 inch CRT screen.
In the photo, note the cybercamera, Dlink router and a bell (for summoning assistance) on top of the screen. I was able to plug my laptop into a spare port on the router, but this was so slow as to not be worth the effort.

An alternative for householders is that TaTa (a conglomerate which builds trucks as well) provide a CDMA fixed wireless service. The householder gets an LG made desk phone (LG LSP-350) which has a antenna on the back. They can connect a PC using a serial port or USB at up to 153.6 kbps. The handset also has a battery for power failures and SMS facilities. There are also GSM desktop units available which can be plugged into a standard phone handset.

Software Engineering, Locomotives and Cafes in Sydney

On Friday I visited Steven Bleistein and the Empirical Software Engineering Research Program team at National ICT Australia (NICTA).

NICTA is a Federal, State Government and university project with a lot of money (in Australian terms) for research, education and commercialization. NICTA is based at the Australian Technology Park in Sydney, the site of the historic Eveleigh Railway Workshops. In the past I have written how this is the ideal environment for promoting Australian technology.

It is the 150'th anniversary of railways in NSW this is where many of the locomotives where made. I walked into the ATP past a Crane Tank Locomotive through the foundry, which is now a working museum used for metal sculpture. Further on were IT exhibits and events, where I bumped into the local member of parliament, Kristina Keneally."Empirical Software Engineering" seems a tautology, but a quick search of CiteSeer shows the sort of thing Steven and his colleagues do. They are working out how to build IT systems which will be useful to business.

The ATP is on the edge of the gentrification of inner Sydney, with old warehouses being turned into apartments and cafes. The NICTA people confirmed the Creative Class theory that "build a cafe and the technologists will arrive", by taking me to lunch at Cafe Sopra located above the Fratelli Fresh.