Monthly Archives: December 2009

Politics, Transport

Dreaming of a White Christmas?

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This year was the first white christmas I have ever experienced. Looking around the area things all looked pretty much like your average greetings card picture (or the atypical English winter depicted in The Holiday), so we got some nice pictures of the church thanks to Richard Owen who brought his camera along with his shovel. By the 24th it was just about possible to get around, but back on the 21st December, most people around here were wishing for anything other than a white christmas, indeed for many of them getting home would have been a bonus.

I was somewhat lucky in that I can see the main road from my office, so as the snow fell and the traffic grid-locked, I stayed put. In fact along with about twenty other stranded staff I was shouted dinner by our chief executive and a couple of other directors who were also stuck in the office. By about 8:30pm, in Camberley at least, the roads were clear and I could head for home. Whilst the snow levels increased as I headed into Berkshire, the roads were passable enough for me to make it home in about an hour.

Others were less lucky. The wife of my cousin who works in Reading and lives in Amersham had a hellish eight hour journey through the areas with the biggest snowfalls. Similarly several friend who work up near Oxford had five hour journeys as again the motorways ground to a halt. Locally there were several accidents on major routes leading to traffic slowing to a halt, and trapping the gritting trucks in the jam. The situation in Basingstoke actually made the national news.

Needless to say, this has produced the other staple of a winter event in Southern England, moaning about the local councils failing to keep the roads clear, and numerous comparisons with other countries like Germany and Canada, that don’t grind to a halt in the snow.

First off, it is worth comparing what happens in a country like Canada with here. Yes the local authorities are better set up for dealing with snow, and indeed they have more equipment on standby ready to keep the roads clear, but the important thing to note is that the local drivers are properly equipped as well. It is common practice to fit special winter tyres to the cars, whereas it is unheard of in the UK – pretty well everybody was sliding around on all season or summer tyres – check out this YouTube video for the effect that winter tyres can have. Also once you get stuck, most British drivers are ill equipped. In Canada many drivers will have an emergency kit in the car, certainly Beth when she lived in rural Canada would travel in winter with a warm change of clothes in the car, a shovel to dig the car out in an emergency and a bag of grit to improve traction if needed. If you told most Brits that they needed that, they’d think it laughable, because you don’t get weather like that in England. Needless to say that is exactly the same reason the local councils don’t spend vast amounts of money on equipment that could sit largely idle in between major snow events like we had this Christmas.

It is also worth mentioning, that even in Canada they get disruptive snow fall from time to time, and they can’t deal with everything. What happened around our area last week was after an initial fairly light fall of snow on 21st the forecast was for sleet, which fell initially as rain, and then turned to snow. The problem with rain is that it washes away the grit that is put on the road, if that then freezes, and then snow falls on top you get what we got on 21st – a layer of ice with snow on top – treacherous even with good tyres and experienced drivers, let alone with most UK cars.

But I’ve been in Canada in similar conditions.

One winter trip over to Alberta it rained on the Tuesday, froze overnight and then snowed on top, leading to precisely the same sorts of conditions as we had – a layer of ice covered by snow. It was chaos. The local news swapped between pictures of chaos across Calgary, with removal trucks stranded by sheet ice, multiple accidents on the major roads, and hauled up the council staff responsible for maintaining the roads who tried to explain how they’d done their best, but there was nothing they could do. Even several days later when we headed for the airport many roads weren’t clear of ice despite the road crews working around the clock to clear it. A trip that would normally have taken us three hours took over six.

The moral of the story is that snow and ice causes chaos, even to those most experienced at dealing with it. Sure the UK could invest much more money in snow clearance, and they could mandate that all drivers fit winter tyres for the winter, but when it comes down to it, most people I’m sure would consider it not worth the money, whether out of their own pockets directly in buying a second set of tyres for their cars, or indirectly through the increased taxes to pay for the equipment. And even having spent all that money, there will still be the occasional times like this last week where however much grit you use, and however much the councils try to clear the roads, things will still grind to a halt.

General, Politics

Hearing Baby 2.0

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After tweeting that I was going to hear Baby 2.0, thanks to the sheet ice on the road, Beth went on her own to the surgery, and I only got to hear the recording.

However they do say that live is always better than recorded, and that was what we got today, with the first specialist appointment at Frimley Park. After the complications with gestational diabetes Beth had to have an appointment to get booked in for two glucose tests, the results of which will determine how many more appointments and ultra-sound scans we will have during the rest of the pregnancy, and ultimately when baby 2.0 is born. The due date is officially 14th June, but if the diabetes returns, as it is expected to, the birth will be induced early.

Having said that, it does look like the trips to the hospital will be a little bit less of a hassle as after leaving early to take account of the usual vast queue to get into the chaos of the hospital car park, we got in really easily, and even got one of the big spaces that make it a lot easier to get Lucy in and out of the car. At first I thought it was just that it was the time of year, but it turns out that it wasn’t only that…

As far as possible we’ve always tried to get morning appointments at the hospital, because you can usually get into the car park – although it’s often busy, you can usually get a space. In the afternoons it has always been absolute chaos, with the queue for the car park stretching out onto the road outside. The problem has always seemed to be around the couple of hours of visiting of an afternoon. Aside from one or two exceptions, all the hospital visiting is in two blocks, one in the afternoon and the other in the evening, so in the afternoon you have visitors cars and patients heading to clinics all competing for spaces. According to the sign coming into the hospital today they seem to have finally taken heed of the problems, and afternoon visiting is only available on the weekends, during the week visiting is limited to the evening only. We’ll have to see whether it helps as we go through this pregnancy.

And before anyone mentions the importance of visitors, and how inconvenient it will be to only have evening visiting, I am well aware of that, but short of building a bigger car park, or introducing park and ride – especially with parking charges for hospitals looking like they will be abolished, it is more important that patients are able to park.

Computers/Technology, Programming

Ensuring WCF Correctly Reports Errors

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This is another one of my note to my future self posts, that might be useful to somebody else, so skip past if you don’t know what WCF is…

Anyway, if you’re still here, I’ve spent the past day or so trying to track down a problem in some WCF code. Essentially the problem has been that whilst I have been out of the office over the last week, we’ve had a change propagate through to our development server which has caused problems with some of our existing services, specifically some code where one service needs to make a call to another service running on the same machine to finish it’s work. To do this it needs to pass through the Kerberos ticket that the initial service has received, and whilst up to now it has been quite happily doing this, now it has stopped and instead is getting the credentials for the underlying windows service passed.

The problem was made a lot harder to diagnose by a little WCF gotcha whereby the error that is generated is overwritten when the calling code tries to dispose of the service object. Damien McGivern has an excellent post describing the problem and giving a solution, however it didn’t quite meet our needs, as we sometimes need to specify an endpoint when creating the proxy object.

To get around the problem, I adapted Damien’s code slightly creating an extension method taking an object of type TService rather than creating the object within the method, so the method can be used as follows:

new RelationshipServiceClient().UsingService(service => ... );

Whilst it doesn’t actually solve the mystery of why our server started mishandling WCF calls, it did at least give us a bit more clue!

Apple/Mac, Computers/Technology, iPhone

The Problem for Nokia

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This morning, Robert Scoble, who is currently at LeWeb in Paris published this picture to his Flickr stream.

It is a shot taken by him of the audience, and is the answer to a simple request, for people to hold up their iPhone – just take a look at the full sized shot and count quite how many there are.

Back before the iPhone launched, Nokia and the other big players in the market were bullish. The mobile phone market largely consisted of largely similar devices, and Apple coming in with something that didn’t conform to what everybody else was doing wasn’t going to make an impact was it? They seemed to think that doing it different meant that the iPhone wouldn’t sell – everybody had been doing the same thing for years and the consumer would stick with them.

From a personal point of view, I had spent years being largely dissatisfied with what the established players had been producing. I’d bounced back and forth between Nokia handsets, Sony Ericsson, and even a Motorola handset at one point, my general feeling is that despite promising much, they’d generally failed to deliver, with annoyingly quirky user interfaces, buggy firmware, and a generally frustrating experience all round, hence why I’d ended up changing phones pretty frequently. The best mobile device I’d owned was still the venerable Psion 5mx…

When I eventually got my hands on an iPhone, it proved to be a game changer – finally someone had actually managed to produce a mobile phone that was nice to use, and one that was a reasonable substitute for a desktop web browser. With the later addition of applications it became even more of a useful device.

The impression I get in tech circles is that I am not alone. At a couple of tech events I’ve attended recently by far the largest number of people had an iPhone – people who had been die hard Nokia fans, or had developed Windows Mobile apps for years had bought one, and weren’t planning on switching back. Now the numbers being used by non-techie friends is impressive, and the competition is struggling.

Check out this article in the Independent about the effect on Nokia, or this article about the recent Sony Ericsson Saito problems, with both the rise and rise of the iPhone, and the other new kid on the block Google Android it’s going to be very interesting to see what the second decade of the twenty-first century will bring for the old market leaders like Nokia…

The iPhone users at LeWeb originally uploaded by Robert Scoble.

General, Pictures

Baby 2.0

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First thing this morning, pretty well fresh off the plane from Canada, Beth had an appointment at the hospital. This is a picture of the reason – Beth is pregnant, with the baby due sometime in late May or early June next year.

Anyway, all three of us took a trip down to Frimley Park Hospital, which is where Beth has opted to go once again, and we sat and waited. Lucy is not surprisingly at her age, not really clued up as to what was going on. She had some fun playing with the toys in the waiting area, however moments before being called in for the scan she decided she was hungry and was signing both “milk” and “more”. Whilst the dimmed lights and images on the screen distracted her for a bit, her thoughts turned pretty quickly back to food.

Her new brother or sister seems to have already developed the same skill at dodging the scan operator as Lucy in that the operator had to chase around a bit to get the measurements, and the pictures she managed to get are not the clearest. In the pictures the baby is positioned with the head to the left, and on the third image you can just about see an arm in front of the face. As with Lucy, the subsequent scans should be clearer, again as with Lucy we’re expecting quite a few scans as having been diagnosed with gestational diabetes last time it is thought quite likely Beth will develop the condition again.

Following on from the scan, Beth also had a blood test, and then from there is was time to make the next scan appointment for twenty weeks (we have a consultant visit for the diabetes test later this month).