StephenA

Well I'm sure if you flag it up as an issue Nick will look into it ASAP because it shouldn't happen at all.

Nick and I sat in the front cabin of Mintball with my laptop connected via my mobile phone and spent about 20 minutes trying to reproduce it but we failed miserably. I can try putting IE 9 into IE 8 mode and see if it appears then, and I'll try enabling "quirks" mode and see if that makes any difference.

Chris (the owner of mihalis.net) was shutting down old servers and so thats probably why its not there. However the version there was at least 18 months to 2 years old as Nick has not been pushing any changes out to it. Canalplan sits on canalplan.org.uk and canalplan.eu and that's the version that he has been working on. He did try to persuade people to stop using the mihalis.net urls and for people to use the canalplan urls and to save the new url in their bookmarks.

It's been on that url for quite some time - which one were you trying?

I've seen people replace stern tubes and prop shafts with the boat in the water - you just need a very good pump, lots of cloth to act as temporary bungs and a huge amount of confidence/bravado.

They're actually a mix of things including Canalplans own programming language which probably predates RoR

But don't forget that bollards or rings don't mean you can moor there. There are ringed moorings on the Shroppie which Mintball can't get into because at just on 24 inches draft she hits the bottom about 9 inches out as she has a flat bottom but V's can get much closer. So your system needs to know the draft (and hull profile of your boat) if its going to be any help. You don't need Oracle to do it... trust me (I was an Oracle DBA / Developer for 13 years) but you do need a well designed relational design with good indexes on it. Yes it would Canalplan runs on a twin core AMD64 running at 1GHz with 1GB ram with 1.5TB of disc (canalplan uses about 7GB) Its a mix of Sqlite and Mysql accessed through a pile of cgi scripts. The Stats for each place are held in a table which currently holds over 5 million rows and they're compiled on the fly. The server is also running a couple of other websites and a mail server. I know you're being totally tongue in cheek (well I hope you are) but really describing CanalplanAC as "state of the art for 15 years ago" is pretty damned insulting.

Canalplan is like Wikipedia - it is a version of the truth created by its users. So if someone added that as a comment then its there until someone changes it

You could of course just change the number of hours per day ;-) Canalplan really comes into its own when you do complex "can we do this route" sort of planning where manually working it out across multiple volumes of guidebooks or leaping around inside Edwards isn't really practical. It's never ever going to be able to be 100% accurate due to all the variables involved - for example we've taken 4 minutes to get through Wheaton Aston Lock but its also taken us over 2 hours. Steve

Canalplan doesn't support max stay or return window but I'm sure it would be quite easy for Nick to add it - and I've emailed him pointing him to this thread. Steve

First ever lock for me was Middlewich Big Lock. We'd hired from Anderton and were told someone would be there to help us through but they didn't show up. We were supposed to be doing the Langollen but when we got to Hurleston we found it was closed so ended up going back and heading up Heartbreak Hill and Bosley and by the end of the holiday we were "experts" ;-)

Is it actually possible to do 25 knots on the Avon? Even with the boat planing over the surface its not exactly the deepest of rivers.

If you find parts of Canalplan AC slow then feel free to raise an issue and Nick and/or I will look into it as it might either be a coding issue (Nick) or something I can tweak on my server. Some parts (like the Geograph images) can be a bit slow but some of that is down to Geograph. You can turn off a lot of the "extras" like Google maps and Geograph once you've logged on. Also Nick and I are working on a template for browsing on mobile devices. Steve

The other thing about the Severn is the lack of moorings. Worcester has a good length (and some good pubs and some good places to eat) but below there moorings are few and far between and not very big so really if you don't think you're going to get right down in one day I'd be tempted to stop in Worcester on the moorings near the railway bridge and the Racecourse. As Vicky has said the river is Semi-Tidal above Gloucester to Upper Lode lock at Tewkesbury. Spring tides are the big problem but the lockies at Upper Lode will hold you if the tide is going to be going out, because Gloucester wont open their gates because of the same crud that makes navigation a problem

Its a bug - probably caused by something wrong in the data. Nick is not round at the moment but I'm sure as soon as he gets home he'll look at it.

Nick (who is having problems logging on) asks can people who were suffering problems to try it again. I've not been able to reproduce the error at all but I guess he must have found something. Steve

Canalplan relies on Javascript, not Java. Internet Explorer's version of Javascript has problems that other browsers Javascript engines don't (for example I had to recode a block of code for a Wordpress plugin just to get it to work on IE when it worked fine on every other browser I could lay my hands on) I'll try to reproduce the error myself (I don't usually use Vista and IE8 because Vista takes about 2-3 minutes to boot up compared to 51 Seconds for Linux) and work with Nick, when he comes back off holiday, and see if we can work out what the problem is, but as he's said its a problem that isn't unique to Canalplan and its IE barfing out on the site and not the other way round. Steve Edited to add: Some digging round suggests that the "Adobe PDF Link Helper" plugin thingy seems to be behind a lot of these sort of errors. Also to check if it is an extension causing the problem start ie from command line using iexplore -extoff Finally : MS provide the following utility to debug IE issues like this: http://support.microsoft.com/gp/pc_ie_start

Yes they do - the long term plan is that canalplan.org.uk will take you to Canalplan with the UK set as the default waterways set and canalplan.eu will take you to Canalplan with the canals and rivers of Europe set as the default. As the for the speed bug it might be something odd with IE8. Steve

Been a long time since I worked in a boat yard... fond memories of some of it, and not so fond memories of other bits (like doing pump outs).

There are some good moorings in the cutting just south of Wheaton Aston lock, and some round the 3 mile marker post at the bottom end of the Shroppie. Coole Pilate moorings are pretty good too - and the rings carry on quite a way beyond the wide grassy area with the BBQ racks. Most of the Shropshire Canal Society moorings are pretty good. Market Drayton has a lot of moorings but they can be very popular. This actually allows me to plug a feature in Canalplan AC - the "how good is this spot as a mooring" which allows you to vote on how good a mooring place it is. At the moment it doesn't actually make any difference to the planning but the idea in the long term is that the planner could suggest stretching or shrinking a day if there was a really good mooring at the end of it.

There are memory corruption problems on the server for the main site which is why it was taken off line. But I understand the problem might have been fixed so I've reminded Nick about opening it up again. The version on canalplan.eu and canalplan.tty.org.uk is a completely re-written version running under a 64bit O/S and using a backend database to allow much more dynamic data editing. On the old version if a place was added it couldn't be used properly until Nick rebuilt the data structures, on the new version the minute one person adds a place its available to everyone. Also you can add text for places, and vote on their suitability for moorings. Some of the features in the old version are not fully implemented on the new version but don't forget that Nick does this as a hobby and with a full time job and a family sometimes things take a bit to get done. The new version also supports waterways in mainland Europe too (but there isn't a lot of data there yet)

Many years ago we followed, in the early morning mist, a boat along the Middlewich branch towards Cholmondeston Lock. It didn't matter how much we slowed down or sped up it stayed the same distance ahead of us and there was no noise from it. We just accepted that we'd be stuck behind it going up the lock but when we got there the lock was empty and dry and there was no sign of the boat. I suppose it could have turned into Venetian marine but there was no sign of any activity and we were close enough to it that we'd have seen it. We never saw it turn, we just became aware that it wasn't in front of us. Fortean Times had a write up the other month about the Man Monkey which hangs round High Bridge in Grub Street Cutting

The server the primary site runs on is "not well" so Nick has probably redirected everything over to the development site, or will be doing.

And, I might have missed it along the way but the L&L is wrong as we seem to have lost the Bridgewater in its entirety

It really depends on what the weather has been like, two years ago it was pretty impressive. But normally during the summer you'll get a few inches to a foot or so of fresh on it and it might slow you down going up and make it "fun" going down but its not really a problem.