I need a holiday...to get over the holiday or how I didn’t learn to love fuel protests

(Uploaded 20/6/2008 - Written 13/06/2008)

Looking back it’s hard to believe I forgot today was the 13th and a friday. Normally I’m not superstitious but today might just change that.

Nokia Maps

Firstly, as I promised, an update on the Nokia Maps application. Surprisingly it’s pretty good as a navigation aid with one caveat: Although the N95 does hold the GPS signal quite well, when it does drop the phone has a disturbing habit of telling you’re not on a road and that you need to make a u-turn. After a few seconds the phone pulls itself together again and decides that, no, you haven’t lost your mind or joined a rally team and, yes, you can be trusted to continue on your present route.

Otherwise, not bad - definitely usable especially if you have a holder that allows you to keep the phone fairly high on the dash so that it can keep a good view of the satellites. The cup holders in my 2002 Golf seem to work well.... the complete lack of anywhere to hold it in the courtesy 1999 Renault laguna doesn’t work so well..... why the courtesy car... ahh.. read on.

Holiday, celebrate?

We where roughly half way from Poole to our caravan park in Devon when the temperature gauge veered alarmingly from 90 C toward 130 C and then triggered the “STOP! YOUR CAR IS ABOUT TO EXPLODE” message (or at least words to that extent).

Mildly disturbed (especially since the car was serviced only two weeks ago) I checked the state of the mysterious noisy lump that lives under the bonnet but the few sections of the engine that I can understand seemed fine as did the radiator and oil levels.

Since we had taken out the “super, no worries, all problems covered” policy offered to cover guests on the way to the park we thought at least our recovery to the park would be covered. Well, no.

After a few calls we found that, actually, the policy covers reimbursement of expenses in the case of breakdowns but won’t actually move you an inch. Thus came a few calls to the RAC (who have a very helpful bunch of operators - even going as far to keep in touch to let us know when someone would be out) in conjunction with an extremely nice bunch at a hotel (who put up with us being broken down, filling up fluids and hanging around in their car park) - the guys that RAC sent on to us couldn’t have helped more.

Diagnosing a broken water pump (ouch) we expected our week break to be over pending an expensive repair and a recovery home. Well, the repair will probably still be expensive but they did bring out a courtesy car before they took away our car.

After transporting the contents of the car over (no mean feat when you have enough packed contents to entertain a 3 year old boy on and off the beach) and installing the car seat, the first thing that I noted (apart from the fact I’d gone from driving a GTI 1.8T Golf to an aging non-turbo Diesel Laguna) was that I had almost no diesel and still had 76 miles to go.

No problem, I thought. The chap who had low-loaded my car away had told me where I could get fuel so (slightly grumpy by now) we pulled in to the station to fill up (or at current prices to put in a drop of fuel at least) only to find rows of “no diesel” stickers on the pumps. Yes, panic buying had emptied out most of the garages in the area.

Returning to the car (complete with a - by now - overtired and hyperactive 3 year old) we pushed on to see if we could find another station. Luckily we found one and, after another hour or two, arrived at the park.

A total of 196 miles and 9 hours after we left we had finally arrived. On the whole a less than stellar start to the break. Let’s hope things improve...

Nokia maps ... getting version 2 to do anything.

I've foolishly agreed to go with my (far) better half and son for a period of time where no work takes place (I believe this is called a hol-eee-day).

Since it will be in Devon this year (I'm thinking of you lot out there who would doubtless have a better time without my three year old in an aircraft cabin, call me Mr Caring) I'll be driving.

Now, my wife has an unairing sense of direction. She can memorise a map at a glance and find her way to a place she has never been in the dark and whilst it's hailing (whilst driving too) but my good self, well, I can get lost going to the post office.

So, since I have a Nokia N95, I decided to unlock its mapping navigation functions and see what it will do for me. Since my handset had been updated to the version 2 map application and had the latest UK map on it I duely paid Nokia the princely sum of £6 (via premium rate text message) and presto! I had the navigation by car and foot functions available for the next 30 days.

So then I gave it a go. And it was worse than me.

Well, that's unfair, I don't know if its worse than me since it said "Calculating route" and that was it. Sure, the little arrow shows where I am (and locks to the GPS signal quite well) but it did that without paying.

So I took a look on the forums and found that this issue has been ongoing in version 2 of the maps application since 2007 with no obvious sign of being fixed.

After briefly considering giving up before coming to my senses and thinking of my lost £6 I finally decided to update my phones firmware again to ensure this wasn't a compatibility issue. It doesn't seem to have been since nothing seemed to change (apart from the phone loosing all the text messages I had) and the "Calculating route" message stubbornly remained.

Next I downloaded the Nokia Maploader application and removed all map data from the phone and re-installed the uk maps. And, at last, it planned a route. I can now plan routes and the phone seems to be ready to lead me on my merry way. I'm not sure what the issue is but the new(er) map data seems to have been the clincher. Try it if you get the same issue!

Here's the problem. Whilst tecchies will labour the point and keep bashing away at problems like this (if for no other reason than £6 is still two pints) no one else is going to bother. Sure a TomTom is going to be around £100 and a phone is always with you but your average phone user is just not going to dedicate 3 hours to resolving this kind of issue even assuming they have a PC (none of the Nokia software used here runs on the Mac or on Linux) with internet access nearby.

I also recently saw someone running TomTom on their N95 8GB and it was wonderfully easy to use and fast. The problem? They had to have a bluetooth GPS receiver too since the software couldnt use the N95s' internal GPS unit. I believe this is under development - it may even be part of the work that's supposed to bring TomTom to the 3G iphone.

I have to say I love the concept of Nokia Maps, it just seems to need more work to fully integrate it into the phone and I'm still not sure of the pay as you need it navigation model. But, for now, it seems to be working so I'll see if it gets us from Poole to Devon and back before I make up my mind fully.

Of old games and old gamers

I'm a subscriber to LoveFilm (no, not those kind of films... and you have a dirty mind). If you haven't heard of LoveFilm before it's one of the new generation of on-line rentals where you pay a fixed amount every month and they send you a movie DVD or (as in this case) a game disc from the list you maintain on line.

There's nothing new in the DVD side of this, we've been using them for years since they were Screen Select but we recently added a couple of PS2 (yes, I know, I know) games and the first came through. It's the old first edition of Burnout and it's great fun (as all you hard core gamers already know).

With a goal of driving, well, like a maniac really its a great release after games that want you to drive against the clock and with perfect driving lines. Driving at 130MPH the wrong way through a tunnel and trying not to ram the oil tankers, you find yourself torn between the goal of completing the level and seeing the massive crashes you can cause (and replay in slow-motion) to see if you can make the high score table for insurance costs.

So, yes, it's great fun. Luckily I found a "pre-owned" version in Game over lunch time for the princely sum of £3.99 so I can send the LoveFilm disc back and still revell in destruction, no ASBO required.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a muscle car to try to hurl around harbour city without ramming into a lorry (or maybe I will and play the crash in slow motion)

Cheers to Scotch on the rocks 2008

Well, it's all over for another year.

Scotch on the rocks is a phenomenal conference for all things Cold Fusion (or, for reasons that will become clear) CFML.

The conference itself sets out, well, in their words:

Scotch on the Rocks, established in 2005, is a conference based out of Edinburgh, Scotland concentrating on all things ColdFusion. Incorporating keynotes, technical sessions and tutorials, as well as the most innovative and successful ColdFusion experts and companies, Scotch on the Rocks is a must-attend conference.

(For more information go take a look at their site here, go on I'll wait here...)

Dumm, de dummm. Oh! Hi, interesting eh? Well, I'll tell you it was. Very interesting.

Firstly, the conference sets out to give delegates access to very important people in the world of CFML. With speakers from Adobe, Railo and the Blue Dragon steering committee as well as CFML stars such as Ben Forta, Sean Corfield, Mark Drew and many, many more, there was something of interest available in every session but the real joy of this conference is the interpersonal availability of the speakers. Before, during and after each session the speakers were available to go over details or adjuncts to their points, something that just doesn't happen in some conferences.

The whole event has a terrific energizing effect on attendees which is bolstered by a great sense of fun (both in and out of the bar).

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Railo goes open source with Jboss


Yup, for those who don't know yet both Blue Dragon and Railo are both are going to be (or are offering already) open source CFML engines.

This is a big deal to those of us who'd like to be able to offer solutions to clients who just can't (or won't) invest in licensing costs for Cold Fusion. That's not to say CF isn't brilliant, sessions on the use of AJAX proxying in CF8 showed just how fast prototyping or generic administration areas can be built in this system.

Open Blue Dragon and Railo will both give a huge boost to the community in being able to leverage CFML over other established "free" offerings such as .NET, ASP (assuming you have a windows server in place) and PHP.

Whilst their first open source incarnations won't offer some tags (cfdocument - PDF generation among others) at first, this is fundamentally a licensing issue and investigations into open source alternatives and options are already being explored.

Additionally, it will be down to us CFML evangelists to tell Open Blue Dragon and Railo what we think will be of most use or (and here's a radical thought) to get involved, push these open source versions, contribute to the development effort (especially if you are a Java coder), help with the documentation effort or why not just download Open Blue Dragon (you can get jetty packages or even a pre built VM image) and try your applications on it?

Sadly, after a great 3 days and a post-conference get together it's nearly time to trust myself to FlyBe and leave Edinburgh for another year so, I suppose, I'd better crash for the night.

I attended Scotch last year and I can say that it was bigger and better this year and I can't wait to see what those guys pull out of the hat next year.

Here's a big thank you and well done to everyone who put so much time, effort and sheer dedication into Scotch for another year, cheers to you all!

I've got some images up from the conference on flickr here.