Nundah Cemetery - a walk on the wild side

We decided that the way to celebrate Australia Day (26 Jan) this year that we would visit Nundah Cemetery, where some of Brisbane's earliest free settlers are buried, some of whom are related to my husband (the Bridges family, just for the record).

It is a relatively small cemetery, but a very densely populated one. There is a ring road through the cemetery, effectively dividing it into an inner island and the outer ring. I don't think there are many (any?) unused plots in this cemetery. The graves are very close together with only a narrow path between every 2 rows, except, of course, for where the graves don't seem to be in rows at all, and some graves are at strange angles, which makes me think that perhaps there were paths but they were later used as grave sites as well. The inner island is almost impossible to walk through towards the back of the cemetery, as it is almost solid graves and in no particular organised layout, so one is leaping about to try to move through without walking on the graves themselves.

To add to the walking problem, there were other obstacles such as trees and bushes that seem to be able to push their way up between cheek-to-jowl gravesites. In particular there were a lot of weeping bottlebrushes, which meant you can to get under the foliage in order to read the headstones. I don't think these are a good tree to plant in a cemetery -- you want a tall non-weeping tree that provides shade without obscuring the graves! It was also a bit wet and boggy in the lower areas by the creek, but fortunately I had learned from past experience and was wearing wellies. However, they did not save me from the cobblers pegs, and my clothes were covered in hundreds of them as I had to push through a number of weed patches to get close enough to read the headstones.

What was also somewhat unusual was the very high density of headstones. There seemed to be more surviving headstones that you might expect for a cemetery of that era. Admittedly there were a few modern headstones on otherwise old graves that were presumably put there by modern descendants to replace a wornout or missing headstone. What many people today do not appreciate is that in the past poorer people used a wooden cross or similar to mark a grave and these often don't survive the years. A carved headstone was a more expensive choice, but these do survive the years better. Today, cremation is cheaper than burial, hence a modern burial almost always has a stone or metal marker, as cost is not the primary consideration. Anyhow, I don't really know why there are so many surviving and legible headstones in the Nundah Cemetery, but there is a local group that seeks to preserve the cemetery so perhaps their efforts have minimised the impacts of weathering and vandalism compared with other cemeteries. Full marks to them if this is so.

The names on many gravestones are familiar, as the names of the earlier pioneer families are reflected in suburb names, streets names etc throughout this part of Brisbane. If you had ever wondered why there is a Rode Road, etc, this cemetery has the answer. For those who enjoy this kind of trivia, the area known today as Nundah was originally known as German Station, as the earliest free settlers in Brisbane were German, and this is reflected in a very high density of German names in the cemetery. Indeed, some headstones are inscribed fully or partially in German.

For the cemetery tourist, there is ample parking outside the gate. The road inside is too narrow to park and still let another car get past. On the other hand, the cemetery is not so busy that you couldn't get away with a short parking stop, if you had someone with walking difficulties. There are some seats around the edges of the cemetery, mostly near the entrance. There is a rotunda with seats and a broken water fountain just inside the cemetery (where you will find a niche wall for ashes). There were toilets but they appeared to be locked. There are plenty of shade trees at the edge of the cemetery but not too many in the middle (just those annoying weeping bottlebushes) so it's a bit hot and exposed for summer visits. There are no cafes or shops nearby, so bring your own catering. The cemetery is close to the bikeway to Toombul Shopping Centre, so you can cycle there easily.

For those of you looking for a particular grave, the best place to start is the Brisbane City Council's Grave Location Search engine:

http://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/BCC:STANDARD::pp=PC_897,pc=PC_899

which is a database that amalgamates all of Brisbane's cemeteries' burial registers. While this is a generally excellent service (thanks BCC!), many of the early burial registers were not well-maintained and this is a limitation in locating many of the earlier burials in this cemetery based on personal experience. You may well find headstones for people in Nundah Cemetery that do not appear in the on-line burial register. So, if you believe someone was buried in Nundah and the online database says otherwise, it is well worth a visit to check the headstones. In an ideal world, the on-line service would be based on both the burial registers and the monumental inscriptions, and also allow people to input information obtained from other sources like death certificates and funeral notices.

Unfortunately, there is no map at the cemetery to identify the various sections and portions, but if you used the BCC database, you should have an aerial map and marker to guide you to the right general area. The cemetery is small enough that you can walk around and inspect every headstone if all else fails (but note my earlier remarks on the joys of walking through some parts of this cemetery). There is no longer a sexton at the cemetery (it is now a closed cemetery), but I believe Pinnaroo Cemetery sexton handles enquires for Nundah Cemetery.

abstract and inherited associations in MOF/UML

One of the best things to come out of the V2 of MOF/UML is abstract and inherited associations.

As a concrete example, lets consider the classes Driver and License. Now it's easy to imagine that these classes might be linked by an association Holds (as in Driver Holds License).

Now, we might have a number of subclasses of Driver, such as CarDriver, TruckDriver, etc. And some corresponding subclasses such as CarLicense, TruckLicense, etc. Now the intention here is that CarDrivers Hold CarLicences and that TruckDrivers Hold TruckLicenses.

Back in the bad old days of MOF/UML v1, there was no easy way to express this intention. The association was between Driver and Licence and hence it was perfectly OK for CarDrivers to hold any kind of License. The only way to prevent it was to introduce an explicit Constraint which enumerated all the allowable combinations.

The alternative was to introduce a number of separate associations between CarDriver and CarLicense (call it CarHolds) , and TruckDriver and TruckLicense (call it TruckHolds), and so on. But the drawback here is that the general concept of drivers holding licenses is lost in the fallout. The only way to recover it is to introduce a derived assocation between Driver and License and define it to be the union of the CarHolds and TruckHolds and so on.

Fast forward to having abstract and inherited associations. Now, we can make the Hold association between Driver and License abstract, and then we can have an inherited concrete association between CarDriver and CarLicense, and another one between TruckDriver and TruckLicense and so on. This implicitly restricts CarDrivers to holding CarLicenses, but still also us to talk about holding a license in a general sense.

Admittedly you still have to define all of these associations, but because of the inheritance relationship, the model as a whole becomes a lot more scaleable. It becomes possible to define the model just consisting of high-level classes and high-level associations and then refine parts of the model progressively. This helps the documentation of the model, particularly if you are using graphical representations of your model.

You will find using abstract/inherited associations does alter your modelling style, and that it does involve a bit of a paradigm shift when you are modelling. But try it and see, I think your models will be more readable and more modular.

Root elements in models

One of the best pieces of advice that I can offer the novice modeller is this:

Always have a "root" class that every other class in your model inherits from.

Often this class will be abstract, and often it will not have any properties or any associations. This may make you ask, why bother? My answer is this. It represents that the thing is within the universe of discourse of the model.

There seems to be a tradition of naming this class "XyzElement" where Xyz is the name of your model, but feel free to do as you please in this regard.

One of the main uses for this root class is to work with your model as the subject matter of some other model. For example, you might want to implement some kind of versioning system. In which case, you might like to link the versioning information onto your root class for inheritance into all your other classes. Or you might wish to have some association that relates things in your model to things in someone else model.

When I have ignored this golden rule, sooner or later I find myself going back and creating this root element, so save yourself the grief and do it from the outset.

paypal - now in AUD

I have to say that Paypal constantly improves its service. Within the last few months, they have allowed fee-free transfers (for amounts over $150) to Australian bank accounts, and now they are offering Australian dollar payments as well.

This is a stark contrast with the average Australian bank which increase their fees and charges with monotonous regularity.

Of course, Paypal doesn't pay you any interest, but then I would challenge you to find an Australian bank that will let you accept international and credit card payments with no up-front cost and the low transaction cost that Paypal offers.

I know there are WWW sites out there with some horror stories to tell w.r.t. Paypal, but my experiences as a user for the past few years have been very positive. Admittedly, I would not ever leave vast sums of money lying around in a Paypal account, as I think you have to be realistic -- if anything goes wrong, you are kissing your money goodbye most likely. So with the fee-free transfer of A$150, there is no reason to keep more than A$150 in my Paypal account, so therefore I can control my risk to be between $0 and $150 (average risk $75) which seems a pretty fair deal for the convenience of Paypal.

Admittedly, reading the horror stories, I do have some doubts about how genuine some of the complaints are. A lot of the complaints do seem to relate to Paypal closing or suspending accounts of people who violate their terms of service (having multiple accounts beyond the basic one personal, one business rule) etc, which one assumes was motivated to try to avoid fees and so forth. So, I don't have a lot of sympathy for people who tried to rip off Paypal and then found Paypal didn't like them any more!

However, there does seem to be a more legitimate class of complaint relating to people whose paypal accounts are frozen when paypal suspects some kind of fraudulent activity, which includes payments being made using a stolen credit card. Understandably, the account holder who has the misfortune of receiving a payment from someone using a stolen credit card can legitimately feel aggreived that paypal treats them like a suspect and freezes their account. But paypal's concern is that people who steal credit cards apparently do set up paypal accounts in order to launder stolen funds via paypal, and so they are suspicious of any account holder receiving funds in this way. So, having your account frozen because you are a victim of a payment made with a stolen card seems to be one of the risks you just have to accept with Paypal -- hence the importance I guess of not leaving vast sums in your account.

There are some competitors to paypal but they all seem to offer less and cost more than paypal. I notice bidpay will no longer accept Mastercard -- no idea why, but that's surely a pretty dumb move on their part given the number of Mastercard users out here. And if all those Mastercard buyers move away, so will the sellers.