Breaking the drought

I haven’t written much for a while, but you’ll notice I’m a bit fixated on road safety in recent times. Sadly for me, the press has been rather matter of fact about reporting the road toll and road safety.

Tada! Lucky for me we have some fine journalism from The Daily Telegraph with a story entitled ‘Trucks speeding on death highway‘! Oh yes, this is off to a good start, no sensationalism here with a headline like that.

The “journalist” (I’ll use inverted commas because, whew, I hope she didn’t do a degree in order to write such fine material) reports that she (or some suffering staffer more likely) spent a couple of hours looking at all the terrible things that happen on the F3 and, of course, its all about SPEED! Except if you read the article, its not the only thing – basically there are bad drivers on the freeway in every imaginable way, but lets ignore that, because they had: (wait for it) a speed gun! And people were speeding! Ergo, speed kills!

My favorite is the assistant commissioner’s quote “Speeding is the biggest killer on our roads, …We see many low-range speeding offences because people aren’t concentrating, but I believe any speeding offence is dangerous.”

So wait ‘people aren’t concentrating’; is this ‘people aren’t concentrating on their speedometer’ or ‘people aren’t concentrating on driving’? There is a BIG difference. Anyone? Anyone? Nope, no clarification; incisive journalism!

Drivers on the F3 seem to have bad skills; they tail-gate, take chances and, yes, speed. But I’ll bet if you picked any major freeway, you’d see the same thing. In fact if you watched a busy intersection, you’d see just as much stupidity on any day.

Its also interesting to note that it seems that this was done on Thursday, 7th January. Now a lot of normal commuters were not driving on the F3 and all measurements were after peak hour when commuters are already at work. Ask most people who do commute and they’ll tell you that most people that do not commute via a freeway regularly have much less skill when it comes to controlling a car properly on the freeway; they don’t leave enough space, they tend not to indicate, they don’t look far enough into the distance, and they don’t anticipate movements of trucks (this is a biggy!) and other cars in freeway situations. They also tend to be in a hurry during school holidays to get to their holiday destination.

As an example to illuminate what I am talking about, some pillock hurt a bunch of people (including a six year-old child) the Saturday after (the 9th January) because he decided to do a U-Turn of the F3 freeway. What is even more amazing is that (if it happened where I think it happened) it was just before there is an exit off the F3 that allows you to loop around and join the F3 going back south.

Again, this is simply useless drivel with the same idiotic tone that means that the real causes of the road toll are never addressed. But hey, it makes a great newspaper headline, doesn’t it?

EDIT (18/1/2010): It appears the journalist was fixated on this for a time. ‘Time to end the killing on our roads‘ is the title of a story our erstwhile reporter filed exactly a week before (along with the ‘RTA saves possums from road kill’ which, unfortunately, she doesn’t blame on ’speeding drivers’ as causing). Possibly the intrepid reporter decided to file these over the holidays by going up the coast to get to the heart of the matter, or perhaps it was a “working” holiday – mid north coast at christmas is very nice, especially if someone else is paying the bills!

More on Road Safety

A while back, I let fly with my opinion of politicians and road safety. One opinion I put forth is that truck drivers are under too much pressure due to deadline. It is interesting to note that there was a short protest by truck drivers about the trucking industry rates and calling for an answer for the National Transport Commission report which showed that low pay and unpaid overtime caused drivers to speed (amongst other things). Now all we need is some idiot politician talking about increasing funding for speed cameras to stop this and things will be back to normal, and they can go back to ignoring the problem.

Living with the iPhone

It’s been a while since i last talked about phones. Some time back, I bit the bullet and bought an iPhone 3GS. It’s probably the best phone I have had and my worries about the lack of physical keyboard have, thankfully, been put to rest; the virtual keyboard is great once you adjust to the nuances of it. It is a fine, fine device, OS 3.0 and above have allowed it to shine. The experience is not all bliss though.

1. Although the app store has been redesigned since I last wrote about it, it is not much better at letting you search; search results cannot be sorted or filtered and because of the perceived money making opportunity cheap, dull and ordinary apps dominate more and more making the quality picks harder and harder to find. I recommend www.148apps.com, appshopper.com and www.appvee.com to help you find some of the new apps worth your while, along with iphone.iusethis.com to see what other ordinary people are using.
2. The calendar app is crying out for some better UI functionality. Swipe functionality in day view – swipe left and right to move days, swipe up & down for weeks – please! Add events by pressing over an empty slot. Move events by dragging them. Add a week view; month view is terrible to use.
3. I bought Files from OliveToast (highly recommended) so I can use my iPhone as portable storage: my very old non-video B&W display iPod allowed me to store files on it for transport (admittedly not via WiFi), so why on earth is this simple feature missing from the OS?
4. Sync hell. I have so many apps now that sync via Wifi (or Web Service) to replicate data between iPhone apps and their desktop counterparts. I want to have them sync every time I plug my phone in, just like Apple’s built-in apps do, why is this not part of the SDK?
5. Voice Control. Made by a man from Texas? It cannot work out what I am saying unless I put on a ridiculous fake American accent (I’m in Australia). I know others in Australia and Europe with the same problem. My cheapo Nokia 3G phone I used to have never had this problem even though it had a slow processor, next to no memory and is 5 years old! Did Apple license the engine from the same company that made the voice dictation/recognition stuff in Vista which had exactly the same problem?
6. Notes – Ditch the stupid font or allow people to change it. Google for this and see how many people want this!

Although these things are annoying, I’m still firmly of the opinion that it is the best thing currently out there.

Fix that API!

Sometimes things in the Windows API just don’t make a lot of sense. Look at the Windows Performance Counter API. To me this just seems badly broken.

I understand in some cases the need to run collectors with minimal overheads for very performance sensitive information, which entails installing a performance counter definition as Administrator and then you can publish your data without running as Administrator (I think), but the implementation is awful.

In version 1 of the API, you would create a Performance Extension DLL and an INI File defining the data. This DLL would use IPC to communicate with your app and retrieving the performance data. I assume this was superceded in Vista because the DLL was in the Windows System directory, which was seen as bad. Or maybe it was the requirement to write good IPC code which a lot of people suck at.

In version 2 of the API, you now set up a manifest defining the data and generate template code for the collection which is run from a thread injected into your application. Now the manifest idea looks alright on paper, but the recent massive ATL security hole should have taught people to not generate boilerplate code and put it in their application if possible.

.NET does a great job covering a lot of this ugliness up, but in unmanaged code writing collection code is downright awful.

On top of publishing, you may want to consume counters. Again in .NET it is easy, but in unmanaged code its pretty awful (for a downright mind-blowingly terrible experience, try using the registry directly). But, and its a big but, you cannot read performance counters unless you have special privileges. What? Why, why, why?

It probably comes down (again) to implementation. calls to the registry (or WMI for v1) to collect performance data call your collector (I’m guessing here) inproc. What other reason could there possibly be for restricting this?

So what am I trying to solve here? When publishing data, I need to get the data to the collection point, either by IPC or through some safe exchange across threads. When collecting I need to get the data from the collection point (I don’t care how) via a well-known API.

Why not provide an IPC mechanism to the system that allows this exchange to take place quickly and easily without jumping through hoops (lets disregard just how awful the collection code needs to be)? Wrap it in a new API (for both collection and consuming counters using a central system); .NET APIs wouldn’t need to change much just replace code some in the back, PDH could probably interface with it. What about backwards compatibility? If the old APIs still work, then existing tools will still work (even remotely!). Then, encourage users to use the new system (write a compatibility service for any older OS from XP and up and you have 99% coverage!).

To sum up, if you have restrictions based on implementation details, a .NET layer so thick it’s practically a reimplementation of the functionality on top of your functionality, a “helper” library that is still painful to use (PDH I’m looking at you), and a raw API that hurts when you use it; it’s broken; totally and utterly broken.

If you can’t fix the API without fixing the implementation, fix the implementation. Given the amount of work that happened in the .NET framework to cover this rubbish up and the fact that it was heavily modified during Vista, it’s downright mind-blowing that no-one has tackled this problem.

Road Safety

The road I travel down has been in the news lately. Firstly, some scaffolding fell off a truck closing the entire F3 freeway southbound and injuring some people. Then, the very next day, a family died after a truck hit their stationary car in a lane of the freeway late at night. It’s sad, a bit of a mystery, but things like that do happen occasionally. What got me angry was the NSW opposition roads minister’s ridiculous remarks on the same day that, to paraphrase him, ‘more police were needed to catch speeders‘ on the F3 thereby making everyone safe. Given that the causes of these accidents were something falling off the truck and cars stopped in the middle of the road, there is nothing in either of these accidents to show that speed was even a minor factor, so why on earth would that be your response? Cause its the easy answer, that’s why.

Now, I’m unsure how many times he has traveled down the F3, but I have done so almost every work day for eight years. This is such an amazing over-simplification of the situation it is just not funny. Yes people speed along the F3, but people speed in Sydney as a whole. Why?

Well for the start there is the disgraceful public transport due to a lack of investment over a long period of time, not to mention the chronic traffic congestion (due to lack of… you get the picture). Let’s make a mention of the lack of jobs outside relatively few hubs inside Sydney, and no real hope of a decent, professional job outside of Sydney.

I travel a fair distance to work every day, including a lovely stretch along the Pacific Highway at Wahroonga, just off the F3, where the traffic jams up because of a several kilometers of a continuous School Zone (I have no problem with school zones, but this one is ridiculously long and runs outside of much more than schools). Once the traffic jams up like this, it does not break up easily again. This does (and will always) make people rush, speed and take chances.

In addition, outside Sydney the main highways have large sections under roadwork (for long required upgrades) which put pressure on truck drivers to make time up on the clear sections. This makes truck drivers drive more aggressively.

In all, the opposition could have made some great points about road safety, investment in transport infrastructure and oversight on transport companies to ensure drivers are not pushed to speed and take chances. Instead, they parroted the current government’s simplistic message that speed is bad. Gee thanks for that.

Meanwhile, people will continue to die and nothing will be done to stop the root causes of this, because both sides of politics cannot (or will not) identify the root cause of the problem and spend money on it. Rather than solve this, instead they concentrate on gathering fines from drivers who speed and can tell everyone they are fighting the problem while making more money for the coffers. Much cheaper, the important thing is the illusion of action because actually doing something costs money.

Slacker

I’ve been slack lately, but not much in terms of technology has been happening on my radar. I wanted to write some stuff on the fatal truck accident on the F3 freeway on the 20th but there’s too much opinion in my thoughts involving truck drivers, transport companies, unions, government, etc that I don’t feel like justifying.

More Mobiles!

A while back, I wrote about the phones I was thinking about. Since then, a couple of phones have risen on my radar, mainly thanks to CTIA in Las Vegas.

The Palm Pre does look good, I’d like to see exactly how snappy it is in real life; but the target feature set looks great.

The Nokia N97 also looks nice — feature set is great but a bit overkill. Who needs an FM transmitter in a phone?

Surprisingly, the Sony Ericsson Idou looks nice and runs Symbian. It would need to be simply amazing to change my opinion on SE phones.

The Samsung Omnia HD looks amazing as well (also runs Symbian).

I’ve given myself a deadline of mid year to decide (post next iPhone, post Pre launch).

Music Players

My iPod is dying all of a sudden. This is terrible as I have gone through the process of ripping ALL my music to MP3; Classical, Jazz, Rock, you name it: this is a ton of music and I love having it accessible like that. I don’t have a CD player any more, just an iPod cable connected to my stereo; Purists may gasp but I really don’t notice the degridation to tell you the truth.

It is making clicking noises intermittently and sometimes will not keep playing music or even start. This seems to be iPod Click of Death syndrome in its first stages. I’d like a new music player but I’m not wedded to the iPod to tell you the truth.

The requirements are that the replacement must be simple and small, must play unprotected AAC (yes I buy off the iTunes store sometimes) and MP3 audio and must store about 50 Gb of music. It needs to easily connect to stereo equipment and it needs to have software for the mac.

Sad to say, I’m having trouble finding a non-iPod alternative. The Zune (don’t laugh) looks promising once you get past the “urban” branding bollocks but being Microsoft they are stubborn about releasing any Mac software for the thing and it talks a proprietary protocol that is encrypted meaning that Linux and Mac users will never be able to use it. This follows the trend of Microsoft not understanding consumer electronics (hello Windows Mobile!).

Some of the other players around look good, but flash-memory based players max out at about 16Gb and a lot of players don’t support AAC (strangely). I must say I’m not sure why you would bother with a dedicated player with such small capacity; most mobile phones have microSD card slots that you can shove music on and play through headphones quite happily (my Nokia supports MP3 and AAC); I can understand iPod shuffles and alike for exercise but the larger items make me scratch my head.

iPhone 3.0

It’s good the see Apple’s beta of the iPhone 3.0 OS has added some overdue items, like MMS, Copy & Paste, turn-by-turn GPS navigation and A2DP stereo bluetooth. This looks like a good improvement over the previous release.

It makes me hopeful that the next iPhone (June?) will have some good things to give me a reason to finally buy one. I’ll put up with the App Store problems gladly if it is worth it.

Advantage is nullified

As a disclaimer, I must say I’m somewhat of an Apple fan even though a relative late comer. I own three Macs (my oldest Mac is a PowerMac G4), and three iPods. I have been seriously considering buying an iPhone for some time now. That said, I have to question why Apple can make an appealing idea turn into an unappealing one. Take for example the iPod Touch/iPhone App Store…

Following the success of the iPhone App Store, other manufacturers are falling over themselves to emulate it, including Microsoft and RIM. The App Store originally was a huge attraction to me, and as a programmer, I might be tempted to dip my toe in the water of creating something and putting it up there (I’m far too lazy for my own web site).

But the App Store is inundated with lots of useless rubbish and copycat apps, its hard to see which apps are really good and functional. Existing App Store developers are having the same problem. Take some time to read the App Cubby blog, particularly this post as its a well written, succinct description of the problems faced by committed App Store developers.

Now while I see this as discouraging, the standards which Apple use for the App Store seems random and arbitrary. They banned an update to popular twitter application (it was already on the store!) because it may provide access to profanity on the internet. The outcry from the huge user base meant that this decision was reversed; but how many apps are banned for this kind of ridiculous reason?

At the same time, there are a ridiculous number of “fart” apps (upwards of 50 when I did a search for them term in the AppStore; the things I do for science…) and innumerable variations on the theme. Could we ban these on the simple criteria that the world has enough fart apps? In short, the “standards” for the App Store need to be set so that useful applications are encouraged and useless piles of rubbish (especially ones that copy other useless piles of rubbish) are consigned to the flames of oblivion.

Now, a presentation on App Store downloads and usage rates was given by Pinch Media where the numbers are pretty clear to me; ALL apps are used by less than 5% of users 1 month after download, initial drop offs are pretty dramatic and continue at a slow rate past that – free apps fare worse unsurpringly.

All this says to me is that the App Store may be good for Apple, but a flawed model for consumers, and deeply flawed for developers interested in producing quality software.