The missing section of Cycleway 4 has finally opened, which means there’s now a segregated route from Tower Bridge to Greenwich. As we live near the section that was just finished, it’s now a bit easier for me to get onto the route in either direction.

Drivers don’t seem to have adapted to the new layout yet, and motor traffic is regularly backed up on Redriff Road. I imagine that the opposite phenomenon to induced demand will eventually take hold, and people will stop trying to use that stretch if they have the chance.

I attended a “Streets for People Cycling Focus Meeting” at Southwark Council’s offices on Friday afternoon (I was invited because I had filled in their online survey) and shared some of my thoughts about the council’s cycling strategy. I cycled there along Cycleway 4, and ended up sitting at a table with Simon whose back I had seen the previous day in London Cycling Campaign’s video about the newly-opened section of Cycleway 4.

I was very impressed with the people from the council that I spoke to there. I think the cycling plan is being run by people who cycle and who care about cycling. It makes me optimistic.

I also took the chance to bend a few ears about the widespread use of the wrong kind of tactile paving on cycle paths, with reference to the official Department for Transport Guidance on the Use of Tactile Paving Surfaces (PDF). It might seem a strange obsession, but the widely misused corrugated surface is dangerous in the wet, like riding on tram tracks. Ironically, the correct surface (with 50 mm gaps between ridges) is officially referred to as “tramline” but is actually safe, unlike riding on tram tracks.

I put more RAM in the little Lenovo ThinkStation M710q I’m using as a home server. It sometimes becomes unresponsive, but I don’t know why, and there’s nothing in the logs. It’s running quite a lot of services, so upgrading from a paltry 8 GB seemed like a reasonable, simple and fairly cheap thing to try. I added a 16 GB stick to see if it improves things. It hasn’t become unresponsive since then, so maybe. All I can do is wait and see.

I was excited to discover that ConvertWithMoss now does an excellent job of converting DecentSampler libraries into MPC ones. There’s a wide range of both useful and interesting sampled instruments on decent samples and pianobook and I had a fun afternoon playing with some of the distressed pianos.

Its XML parser (which is, I think, a part of standard Java and one that doesn’t respect Postel’s law) is too strict for some of the DecentSampler files, and I had to do a bit of manual XML editing to remove duplicate attributes and close elements on a couple of them. It was easy enough for me, but would be a barrier for many.

We have a start date for our house renovation a.k.a. middle class hell. This is where we spend an awful lot of money to make ourselves temporarily homeless in order to turn our decrepit ex-rental house into, hopefully, a stylish and comfortable home. I’m sure it will be good when it’s over, but until then, it’s going to be awful. Four weeks to go until the start.