Bluish Coder: pitcairn

Visiting the Pitcairn Island Petroglyphs

2012-06-20T12:00:00+12:00

The night before my last day on Pitcairn Island I was asked what areas of the island I hadn't seen that I'd like to before I left. I mentioned "Down Rope" where the petroglyphs can be seen. The petroglyphs are markings at the base of a rockface at an enclosed beach. The markings are thought to be made by pre-european polynesians. To get to there you have to go down a steep path cut into the side of the rock. Parts of it are only about a foot wide and it's a long way down. The yacht taking me back to Mangareva was scheduled to leave at 9am the next day so I didn't think they'd be much chance of seeing it. Shawn, one of the Islanders, offered to take me down at 7am if I was keen and I agreed.

The sun was rising giving a nice morning sky as we were on our way to the Down Rope track via quad bike. In the pictures below you can see the steps leading down at the top of the path. Further down shows the view looking down onto the beach where Down Rope leads. That's Shawn, the Pitcairn guide, who led me down. Without him I'd never have found the path. The beach you can see from that view is the one in this image.

This area of Pitcairn had the only sandy beach that I saw on the island. The other areas were pretty rocky. There were the usual Pitcairn crabs that I'd seen down Tedside while fishing, but also a type of crab that lives in a shell which I hadn't seen before.

An idea of the scale of the cliffs at the bottom can be seen in this photo with Shawn walking ahead of me. They towered above. At the base are the petroglyphs. They are carved into the rock and indented, which you can see when looking up close. To make them easier to find the outlines have been painted which is why they are white and clear in the photo.

The way back up was a bit easier on the nerves, probably because I didn't need to look down, but harder on the legs. In that photo you can see the steps in the rocks on the right - not for the faint of heart! Further up you're clinging to the rockface, then onto slippery banana leaves, and finally back up the top. It was a great experience and I'm glad I was able to fit it in before I left.

This is a republish of one my [pitcairn news](http://www.pitcairnnews.co.nz/120620.html#downrope_and_petroglyphs) articles about my trip. Re-posted as I've been writing about my Pitcairn trip here also.

Pitcairn Island and Slow Internet

2012-05-29T12:00:00+12:00

While I was visiting Pitcairn Island I got to experience what the internet is like for areas where fast broadband speeds aren't available.

I wrote about the internet setup on the island in my post about leaving for the island. I found while I was there that many modern websites just failed to work. I was unable to use Gmail's standard interface. It would almost never complete loading. When it did successfully load it wouldn't work. Requests would time out, and the page would just hang waiting for the results of background HTTP requests. I had to use the fallback 'Basic' HTML interface. This actually worked quite well and was usable.

Facebook was mostly usable but again background HTTP requests would often time out and fail. This would results in parts of the interface becoming unusable. The initial load of the page took minutes. I was rarely able to upload images greater than 80Kb in size - they'd never complete. Facebook's major win was that everything is integrated on the site so I wouldn't have to attempt loading any other major website to do chatting, photo sharing, etc. It'd take all day if I had to visit a dozen sites to do things.

Twitter was painful. Visiting pages with individual tweets took an age to load due to the size of the data being transferred. Sending a tweet out would take a long time with no obvious indication to the user that anything was happening - was it taking a long time or had it just failed?

I found using text based tools running through an SSH connection to a remote server to be more usable than the web browser in some cases.

Most issues I had with sites seemed to be the result of:

XMLHttpRequest's failing and the site not gracefully handling the failure. The user never gets informed of it and they're left waiting for a long time wondering if things are working.
Making dozens of HTTP requests on page load due to individual JavaScript files, CSS resources, third party widgets being loaded, etc. The latency of the satellite connection on the island makes this much worse than just the slow speed of the connection.
Large images on pages. I remember reading a Hacker News thread about WebP where someone commented that an extra 10-20% on image compression doesn't matter in the modern world of high bandwidth availability. Pitcairn has taught me that this isn't true everywhere - every byte counts.

These things can be hard to test for. Simulating low bandwidth/high latency connections is a chore and I doubt many website developers do it. Simulating failure of resources loading is also tricky - it probably never occurs during development so the failure path never gets tested.

I'm curious if a combination of the newer web standards could help in some of these areas. Could the offline application cache be used by sites like Facebook and Twitter to more aggressively cache the non-changing scripts and user interface portions of the site for example.

On the positive side, less time on the internet meant more time enjoying the island.

Back from Pitcairn Island

2012-05-21T12:00:00+12:00

I'm back from my Pitcairn Island trip. Originally I was going to be on the island itself for two days but I ended up staying there for almost three weeks. It was a fantastic trip. The island was beautiful and the people living there were very welcoming and friendly. Pitcairn Travel did a great job organising each step of the trip and I'm glad I got the opportunity to spend more time there than expected.

I'll post more about my trip once I've settled back from travels a bit, but in the meantime I've put some photos on Facebook:

I have a lot more and will sort through them and upload in the coming days.

Travelling to Pitcairn Island

2012-04-11T12:00:00+12:00

From Sunday 15th April through to 29th April I'll be mostly offline as I take some leave to visit Pitcairn Island, one of the remotest inhabited islands with a population of about 50 people.

My first stop is flying from New Zealand to Tahiti where I spend a couple of days, then I fly to Mangareva on the 17th to board the Xplore sailing yacht for the approximately two day trip to Pitcairn. I spend a couple of days on the island itself, then return on the Xplore back to Mangareva, followed by flying back to Tahiti for a few more days.

The trip was easy to organise through Pitcairn Travel. Longer trips are available than the one I'm taking but none are scheduled at this time of year. Assuming this trip goes well I hope to go for longer, and maybe to the other Islands in the Pitcairn group, in the future.

Why Pitcairn? Pitcairn is the island that was settled by the Bounty mutineers. My grandmother was born on the island and through her I'm a descendant of three mutineers (Fletcher Christian, John Mills, Ned Young and their Tahitian wives are my sixth great grandparents). I'm looking forward to visiting the Bounty monument in Tahiti and the Bounty plaque on Pitcairn.

Electricity is available on Pitcairn for about 10 hours per day which limits laptop/gadget usage time. Luckily I plan to spend as much time as possible exploring the island, weather permitting.

I'll have internet access while in Tahiti but I suspect access to be a bit hit or miss on Pitcairn. In the past internet access was available by sharing satellite internet that was provided by a United States Geologic Survey station on the island. A description of the setup is available here.

Later the Pitcairn Island Government arranged their own satellite internet capability. Recently speeds have been improved to 512 kilobits per second - shared amongst the approximately 50 people on the island. Costs for residents of the island are around $40 per 400MB of usage from what I hear. I would imagine that if someone wanted to regularly access the internet there for work they'd require a dedicated satellite internet connection just for that (Something like Pactel's VSAT internet maybe). I'll be sure to do a later post on what using the modern web is like in this part of the world.

Anyone in the area of Tahiti, Mangareva or Pitcairn, let me know, I'd be keen to meet.

Bounty Day 2008

2008-01-28T13:55:00+13:00

I flew to Wellington on the weekend to attend the 2008 Bounty Day celebration.

Bounty Day is a chance for Pitcairners and their descendants to get together to remember the burning of the HMS Bounty. In January 1790 the Bounty mutineers arrived at Pitcairn Island and had to decide what to do with the ship. Matthew Quintal set fire to it on the 23rd of January 1790. It burnt to the sealine and sunk into the depths of Bounty Bay. Every Bounty Day a model of the HMS Bounty is burnt in memory of this event.

This years model was made the day before and looked great! There was a talk by George Fergusson (the British High Commissioner to New Zealand and Governer of Pitcairn), the traditional tug of rope war between the men and woman, sports, a race to remove the insides of a coconut in the traditional manner, and photo's and videos of Pitcairn playing. The Bounty burning was performed, with everyone singing "Sweet Bye and Bye" while it burned. This was followed by lots of Pitcairn food.

If you have a browser that supports the <video> element you can see a video below of the burning. Otherwise you can download the bounty_burning_2008.ogg file directly.

I caught up with a lot of friends and family and it was a great day with Wellington turning out some fantastic weather for it.