Bikes on Northern Trains

Northern Trains wins today's prize for worst cycle allowance, having made essentially no provision for bikes at all. Mind you, given the age of their rolling stock it would be difficult to argue they'd made much provision for passengers, either.

They win points for having friendly helpful staff but lose them again for turning away a fifth cyclist, ostensibly because there was no more room for bikes.

Overall: 1/10. Extremely poor, must do better.

Bikes on Cross Country Trains

Taking bikes on East Midlands' trains turned out to be a doddle compared to Cross Country, who provide the most appalling bike hangers. Theoretically their trains hold four bikes but the spaces are so poorly designed that hanging even a single bike is a test of dexterity, endurance and strength; hanging two side-by-side is damn near impossible.

And if you had a non-standard bike or you lacked upper body strength you're stuffed.

Overall: 3/10, very poor, must improve.

Bikes on East Midlands Trains

I'm on a five car train, with my bike. There is space for one other bike in the single cycle storage area but luckily I appear to be the only cyclist travelling today.

Reserving the space was easy - you just email the customer service team (it's unclear why you can't reserve a bike space when booking a ticket). Getting your bike to the platform at St Pancras is easy.

Getting onto the train is more difficult because the door is narrow, the train is much higher than the platform and there's a fair-sized gap between train and platform. I suspect many people, especially those with limited strength or heavy panniers, would struggle.

Manoeuvring on the train is very tricky - there's very little space - but securing the bike is straightforward using the straps provided. There isn't a rack the straps are the only things holding the bike in place. Getting your bike out at the other end is similarly tricky.

Overall: 7/10, could do better

iOS 8 : Custom Keyboards

When Apple announced at WWDC that iOS 8 would support custom keyboards I was somewhat underwhelmed. At the time I couldn't see any real benefit and some very real downsides, like the potential for a malicious app to monitor everything you type and send it to a foreign server for nefarious purposes. I was quite certain that I would never consider using any keyboard except Apple's.

And then I found a blog about Smile's new version of TextExpander touch, which includes a keyboard and allows you to use TE in native applications like Mail and Safari and third-party apps like Evernote even when those apps don't support TE's API. Smile say:

TextExpander touch 3, coming on the heels of iOS 8 this fall, includes a TextExpander keyboard which can expand snippets in any app on the iPhone or iPad, including built-in apps such as Mail and Safari.

Prior to iOS 8, only apps which implemented the TextExpander touch SDK could expand snippets directly.

Under iOS 8, the TextExpander keyboard will work system-wide and reliably share snippets with the TextExpander app. The keyboard will also include full VoiceOver accessibility support.

I don't use TextExpander at the moment because it doesn't work with the applications I use in iOS. I'm not yet certain that I would use it in iOS 8 (although it probably makes sense as part of my wider quest to improve my workflow and move away from Windows) but I'm thinking about it. TextExpander Touch is the first keyboard app I've seen that delivers enough benefit for me to consider a switch.

It'll be interesting to see what other developers bring to the party when Apple releases iOS 8 to the masses.

Police want right to see medical records without consent

No. Just no.

Police want new and expanded rights to access medical records and other confidential data without an individual's consent, a senior police chief has told the Guardian. Sir Peter Fahy, the Greater Manchester chief constable, said the extra access to sensitive data was needed to help police cope with growing numbers of vulnerable people.

The Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/aug/10/police-right-to-see-medical-records

Westboro Baptist Church Protesting SF Tech Workers

TechCrunch report:

> The Westboro Baptist Church, the group known for its hate-filled picketing outside the funerals of soldiers and those who died of AIDS, has found a new target – the tech industry. The group plans to picket pretty much every major tech company in Silicon Valley from Facebook to Reddit this afternoon.


Public exhibitions of religious belief often seem a bit weird to outsiders but the activities of Westboro Baptists Church are seriously bizarre (and distinctly unpleasant). Their deliberate misunderstanding of life must make it difficult to function in the modern world; I feel quite sorry for them.

TechCrunch: http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/12/westboro-baptist-church-protesting-tech-workers-this-afternoon/?ncid=rss

Google's Self-Driving Cars

Google is moving into low-volume car production as part of its work on self-driving vehicles.

Google is to start building its own self-driving cars, rather than modifying vehicles built by other manufacturers. The car will have a stop-go button but no controls, steering wheel or pedals.

Source: BBC News

This seems like a pretty exciting move, even if the vehicles are limited to 25mph. A self-driving car with no manual operation at all sounds like a great improvement and I'd definitely be interested in buying, renting or riding in one (especially if there were fleets of self-driving taxis available at short-notice in London).

Google have announced that they're now going to be tackling tricky busy city streets rather than the somewhat more straightforward roads they've been operating on till now. This is important for cities like London (or, in fact, almost any city in Europe) where the roads are often narrow and clogged with both moving and stationery vehicles.

One area in particular that I'm keen to hear about is how the system will cope with pedestrians. Not sensible pedestrians who use pavements and pelican crossings, or even drunk pedestrians who stagger along the pavement and occasionally collapse in the gutter. I'm not worried about children darting without thought into the road or slow-moving pedestrians limping slowly across when the cars have right of way. All of these things can be anticipated, managed, handled and once the crisis is over everything returns to normal and the car goes about its business again.

The type of pedestrian which, to me at least, presents the most interesting use case is the chap who, recognising a self-driving car with excellent brakes and computer-fast reactions, simply steps into the road trusting the car to stop in time to miss him. Unlikely, you think? It already happens in London, to a certain extent, on roads that are busy with pedestrians like Long Acre where taxi speeds are already constrained and it's reasonably easy to force the drivers to slow further or stop. Think how much worse it will be when the pedestrians know (even if this "knowledge" isn't, in fact, correct), rather than merely believe, that the car will stop.

The taxis eventually make it down Long Acre and along Wellington Street but it can take a very long time and they're often only able to do it by nudging across pedestrian crossing or through gaps that, strictly speaking, they shouldn't attempt. Will a self-driving car be able to break or bend the rules to make progress through heavy pedestrian traffic? It seems most unlikely.

By my reckoning there will have to be radical change. Roads that are currently open to traffic at all hours will have to be restricted if we are to avoid total gridlock. Zebra crossings, which work brilliantly for pedestrians, will have to be re-thought in areas where there are enough pedestrians to stop traffic completely. Some vehicles, like coaches, HGVs and construction vehicles, will have to be limited by time or location and it's not going to be pretty.

In short, if you're expecting self-driving cars to solve transport problems in inner-city areas, think again. And get ready for some bigger changes.

Possibly the Best Article about Programming, Ever

If you work with code or computers or developers you have to read this article.

My favourite part:

Most people don't even know what sysadmins do, but trust me, if they all took a lunch break at the same time they wouldn't make it to the deli before you ran out of bullets protecting your canned goods from roving bands of mutants.

Genius.  

Air China Business Class

There are two things I want to know about when I fly; 1) are the seats comfortable, and 2) is the food good. On long-haul flights the quality of either, but more likely the food, can vary significantly between legs. For example, the food served on the London-Beijing leg of my current flight was pretty good and even, in some respects, enjoyable. The food so far on the Beijing to Sydney leg is less good.

In what way? The Dauphinoise potatoes were spongy (which ought not to be physically possible), the bread rolls were inedible and the salad was frankly bizarre. Commendations for the cheese, though; who'd have thought there were two such different specimens that both had less flavour than the crackers?

I Ride My Bike Because...

I commute every day by bike. My bike causes no pollution, makes no noise, does no damage to the road and poses no risk to others. Cycling is faster, cheaper and nicer than public transport. Riding makes me feel alive; it keeps me fit, productive and healthy.

Cyclists make our city better; let's build roads that are safe for everyone.