The airport hit a snag Thursday – yet another nationwide glitch in the border control kiosks, the second one this week, following another two weeks ago.
Is the software or the network bad? Are we certain these glitches are not due to external meddling?
The Jeanne-Mance entrance of Place‑des‑Arts metro is closed indefinitely for structural repairs – deterioration from road salt again, as at Saint‑Michel station last year.
I learnt this the hard way today while late for an appointment just outside this entrance!
The city is preparing to cut down some of its biggest trees this month, half a dozen centenarian poplars in Lafontaine Park. They’ve been declared dangerous because of fungal rot that’s weakening major branches. Two more are on the eventual chopping block.
The first line of the CBC story: “Montreal’s La Fontaine Park has some of the city’s oldest trees. They are Carolina poplars that have been around since the 1920s, before the area was a public park.”
I’m pretty sure the poplars aren’t even the oldest trees in Lafontaine Park, let alone all of Montreal. (There are trees on the McGill campus dating back to the 19th century.) And a rudimentary glance at Wikipedia would have shown the reporter that Lafontaine became a park in 1874, albeit under the name Logan Park.
The funny thing is, a related story linked at the bottom goes over the history of the park:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/parc-lafontaine-photos-timeline-archives-montreal-1.3553528
Poplars are notorious for being bad city trees. They grow so fast that the wood is very weak and is prone to breaking.
The article mentions chestnuts and hazelnuts being in the park, but the tree census done by the city doesn’t record any such trees in the park: https://quebio.ca/en/arbresmtl
No, nobody plants those poplars on purpose, but they grow relatively fast, and there are a few massive ones around town.
We used to have more rows of Lombardy poplars, often near Catholic institutions, a European tradition, but those too have died off over the last while.
Yeah when you learn the role these poplars play in the ecosystem it becomes more understandable why they fall down or need to be chopped down after 80-100 years. They’re the first-growing species, they just show up and grow wild, and in a natural environment, when they die they provide nutrients that help the second generation forest.
Go down to the wild shorelines of the island and you will see tons of polars and willows, half their point is to root quickly, fall over, and act as an anchor point for the next generation. They’re super useful for reducing erosion in this regard.
Speaking as mayor of Ville-Marie, Valérie Plante spoke this week against the plan to build a Hydro‑Quebec substation on the Grande Bibliothèque block. But she doesn’t make any alternative suggestions.
(Why don’t they take this building down, create the substation, and reconstruct the building envelope around it? This is a completely secular society, isn’t it?)
Kate, I made that suggestion previously, mostly tongue in cheek. It would be very, very, very funny to see the reaction.
I wonder what will happen to the old substation, once the one proposed is built. Will it be demolished and if so, can’t the land be given back to BAnQ or to the city and transformed into a green space?
Alex L, that’s come up before. I don’t think it would be much of a deal. That bit of Berri is steep and has never been a strolling street, so any green space would likely become an encampment or something like it, pretty quickly.
A Boston Globe writer raves about the Montréal Complètement Cirque festival last year. It’s back again this July.
It’s the same writer who loves our winter. I hope the tourism bureau is working hard on Bostonians.
The city is backing off for now on pedestrianizing any part of Ste‑Catherine Street, although still considering it for the future.
I support the idea of pedestrianizing most of Ste-Catherine but the preliminary designs were not good at all. Super cluttered.
I’m unclear on whether this announcement pertains only to Phase 3 of the rebuild (still in the planning stage) or whether it means plans to formally pedestrianize the Quartier des spectacles is also cancelled. It has been “temporarily” pedestrianized for five years already, to great success.
Interesting to see which files the city is willing to back down on. Has Projet retreated on something of a similar scale? Personally I would’ve used my political capital to pursue this project and maybe compromise or back down on another, like the Camillien-Houde plan.
Joey, they should listen to you. As DeWolf says, pedestrianization around the QdesS has generally been well accepted, but every time Projet touches Camillien‑Houde it’s proven to be red hot. They could maybe do a little traffic calming up there but otherwise leave it alone.
Thanks, Kate. I see it more as the benefit of whatever it is they want to do to the mountain will be very small; that road will never be a fun hiking path, especially when MAMELs have free rein. And the opposition – even if it’s opposed to the idea more than the specific plan – is pretty widespread. Whereas making Ste-Catherine more pedestrianized will, IMO, create way more benefits and, actually, fewer perceived costs. It’s not as if Ste-Catherine is useful as a thoroughfare, it’s mostly gridlocked – why not get those cars out of the way?
A lot of these projects would take a while to show their benefits, but be quick to show their pain. Politically it doesn’t make sense to start them during an election year. I guess it shows which community PM cares about not getting on the bad side of.
@Nicholas, do you think PM is trying to get some things going really quickly so that they can’t be easily undone – presumably because they aren’t optimistic about the election?
azrhey 09:27 on 2025-04-11 Permalink
My knowledge dates from 2009-2011 but at the time I was working at SITA as tech support for airports all through America… I was specialized in Bag Tag printer, but was trained in most other systems… Airport computer systems work on spit and prayer most of the time. Double that for kiosks as they were a “newer” system that just got added on top the rest. I had to learn the basics of Fortran to solve about 75% of the problems and then escalated when it became too complex. Some things were just … “god knows, but it works”.
I remember in Dorval Air Transat hd/has a number of check-in counters. the same setting, the same equipment, exactly the same models of everything… the odd ( or maybe even, it was a long time ) numbered counters, the printers ONLY worked with a parallel port , the even ones worked both with parallel port and USB A port… why? WHY? Nobody knew… it worked that way… don’t look at it too hard or it might stop.
So airports… it’s a mess and I doubt they’ve fixed it since I left. When we mentioned it to our director he used to say “you think this is bad? you should see Atlanta, most of the printers work, but the user needs to click “printer not found” warning every time before it prints the baggage tags. IF we try to fix it the prints stops working” Nobody alive knows why…..
So yeah… airports… old code, cold machines… lots of silent prayers…
walkerp 10:16 on 2025-04-11 Permalink
Really appreciate some of that background azrhey. It’s interesting because they did put in that new self-check baggage hardware. It looks very modern and sleek and mechanically is quite impressive. Does not surprise me, though, that the software that ties it all together is archaic and kludgey.
Kevin 10:29 on 2025-04-11 Permalink
All software is kludge upon kludge, newer systems built on older systems that are never replaced, they just get more accretions, with updates and revamps forgotten because the person working on them was laid off or got a new job elsewhere.
I spend all day working with two computer systems that were created in the mid-90s, one built in-house that managers and IT have talked about replacing for the past 15 years — and all they’ve done is add a different interface that periodically fails. (I just use the old interface every day, and ignore the message that’s been displayed for several years that the system will soon be turned off.)
Blork 12:15 on 2025-04-11 Permalink
After working 30+ years in the software industry, I agree with azrhey and Kevin. According to a number of IT people I know, the entire banking system is built like that.
This is one of the reasons why it’s so hard to roll out things like healthcare database systems and whatnot (and why doctors still use fax machines). Nothing is ever built from scratch; it’s always a matter of kludging together disparate kludgy systems.
MarcG 12:40 on 2025-04-11 Permalink
Relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/2347/
Joey 14:05 on 2025-04-11 Permalink
And yet the DOGE assholes think they can transform the entire US government into some built-on-the-fly AI system. Turns out they need to learn COBOL, a programming language so out-dated that one of its leading programmers was Art Garfunkel’s deceased brother, Jerry.
Blork 14:59 on 2025-04-11 Permalink
I learned programming by doing COBOL on punch cards!
Ian 16:01 on 2025-04-11 Permalink
Air Canada’s booking engine was running on COBOL.10 years ago and may be still.