PHEV Charge hassles

I’m still trying to sort out where we can charge the car – Delia has found a charging point nearby that we can use for a short period to bleed in a little bit of charge – while we wait for the PodPoint at our front door to be fixed. Which might be an indeterminate amount of time, as the PodPoint engineer came out during the week and confirmed that yes, it had been backed into, yes it was defunct, and yes they would need to embark on a complicated arrangement with Berkely, Rendall & Rittner, and Greenwich Council to get it fixed.

We just received the SourceLondon RFID card in the mail, which caused me to google off to find who on earth “Bluepointlondon” are. Which in turn led me to this article at the Financial Times.

The timeline turns out to be like this:

  • May 2011 Boris Johnson ordered TFL to build a network of charging stations across London. TFL coerced the boroughs and councils to install (at their expense) the charging stations, and Boris patted himself on the back for a job well done
  • September 2011 TFL flogged the network off to Bolloré for a total of £1 million, on the understanding that the new owners would pay for the upkeep.
  • The network falls apart because nobody is maintaining it
  • Bolloré believes it’s only supposed to reimburse anyone who makes repairs £500, but the repair costs is higher.

And so it’s a mad merry-go-round. Bolloré aren’t fixing the network they own, because as far as they are concerned it’s someone else’s problem. The manufacturers – PodPoint, Chargemaster and similar – are not maintaining the network because as far as they are concerned it’s someone else’s problem. TFL aren’t maintaining the network because they made it someone else’s problem, but are not sure whose. The councils aren’t maintaining the network because they cannot afford to. Meanwhile Boris Johnson strolls off taking credit for having built a network of charging points to take London into a green future, without actually having achieved anything that works.

Golf Clap.

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.