Category: Technology

Things Technological

While they waited and listened in awe…

Erect and sublime, for one moment of time,
In the next, that wild figure they saw
(As if stung by a spasm) plunge into a chasm,
While they waited and listened in awe.

Benighted PodPoint Gill-Hank is now standing proudly and boldly erect!

Yes indeed, workers from Berkeley were out over the last few days hauling the corpse upright and repairing the pavement to keep it that way. Not, of course, that the unit actually functions.

When quizzed by Delia, the workers told her they had been instructed by Berkeley to make it look better…

Gill-Hank Progress

After pestering as many as people as I could, publicly, via Twitter by posting links to my previous, I finally have somebody admitting ownership of the unit:

Dear Mr. Robert Hook,

Following your message on Twitter regarding the charge point located at Cadogan Road West, please be advised that we have been reporting this charge point as faulty to Pod Point.

Unfortunately, the charge point has still not been repaired as you have rightfully highlighted.

As a result, we have decided to remove this faulty charge point and install a brand new Source London unit. We are currently working with Berkeley (which you also mentioned in your message) to have the new charge point installed as soon as possible.

Should you have any further queries, please feel free to respond to this message.

Kind Regards,

—-
Thanks for using SourceLondon.
Your SourceLondon customer service

I have of course asked if the other two units will also be repaired or replaced, and asked for some indication of what “as soon as possible” means. I am getting a little tired of “As soon as possible”, as I’ve been hearing it for almost two months.

The Saga of Gill-Hank

Imagine, if you will, that you have arrived at a large and reasonably luxurious hotel, with a heavy bag in tow. The bag is not too much of a nuisance, it has wheels and so you can drag it along, but you sure wouldn’t want to have to carry it upstairs. You check in with reception, and head to the two lifts to go up to your 10th floor room.

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Phun with PHEV

Well, that escalated quickly. We went from thinking in November/December that we needed a solution for carrying more kit around than would fit in the Panda, to driving away from Portsmouth on 11th March in a brand-new Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV, paid in full (mostly from some money I had sitting in Australia, hoping the $AUD would be worth something some day).

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Maven releases with Git

I’ve started to put various snippets of code up into GitHub, partly because they may be useful to other people, partly so that they are more accessible when I do not have my personal laptop with me. Yes, Virginia, I could put it all on a USB stick (and I probably will), but that poses another problem of keeping that content up to date. And I’m not keen on sticking my stick into random and unpredictably unhygienic places.

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CSS3 Oops.

Revising my resumé as part of an overall overhaul of my site, I realised that the presentation on mobile devices was not very good. Fortunately since I last did anything major, CSS3 has become widely implemented, so Media Queries are now an option for degrading onto smaller screens. To my pleasure it did (eventually) just work, but I’m embarrassed to say that I spent a good hour wondering why it was not initially working. It would have helped if I’d remembered that CSS files are read from the top down…

On a side note, I’m quite disappointed in the behaviour of the Safari ‘responsive design mode’. While it does allow quick switching of window size, as far as I can tell apart from tinkering with the user agent string it does not register as a mobile device from the point of view of CSS. I’m hoping to find a better way of designing against mobile, because it’s definitely suboptimal to push changes to a server just so that I can test them on the phone.

Robots. They are coming to take your content.

I am in the process of revising my site, and discovered for whatever reason that I had an empty robots.txt file present. I know it is only a voluntary ‘standard’, but as far as I know all the major players do respect it. As the overwhelming proportion of users use a search engine that respects the standard, it does form a useful way of shaping what shows up in the general public eye.

I can never remember the syntax though, so for your reference and my recollection – http://www.robotstxt.org

Addendum: I was not familiar with the semi-standard for site maps so I’ve added that as well to see what the effect will be.

Addendum:Ritta Blens has pointed me to another very useful tool for testing the structure of a robots.txt file: https://www.websiteplanet.com/webtools/robots-txt/

(Mobile) Weapons of Choice

Like any other code-worrier, I have a ton of applications on my (i)Phone, ranging from “things that look shiny but are useless”, through “things that I use once a year”, up to “indispensable and every-day”. Out of interest I’ve tried to work out what apps are the once that fall into the latter category, apps that are essential to getting my work done and which contribute strongly to the sense of never being out of the office.

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ORM?

It’s rather annoying that in 2015 the ORM (Object-Relational-Mapping) problem is still tedious to deal with. While in general terms it is a solved problem – JPA and Hibernate and similar frameworks do the heavy lifting of doing the SQL queries for you and getting stuff in and out of the JDBC transport objects – there does not seem to be any way to remove the grinding grunt work of making a bunch of beans to transport things from the data layer up to the “display” layer. It remains an annoying fact that database tables tend to be wide, so you wind up with beans with potentially dozens of attributes, and even with the best aid of the IDE you wind up fiddling with a brain-numbing set of getters, setters, hash and equals methods and more-or-less identical tests.

I would love to suggest an alternative – or build an alternative – but this remains a space where it feels like for non-trivial use there are enough niggling edge cases that the best tool is a human brain.