Whilst the first Android phone, the G1, has been released on September 23rd and I am beginning to wonder: where are the other Android powered phones? In a year since Android has been announced, we’ve only seen one phone and the second half of 2008 has passed with the claim for ‘phones’. Where are the phones? When are people who aren’t in the US (or more importantly for me, Australia) going to see these even the existing G1 phone let alone any of these other handsets?

Today whilst eating breakfast I saw that the Drupal site I’ve been playing with I broke (that’ll learn me for opening files and accidentally making changes to them, save all not good doh!) so I decided that I would just extract the package over the top and things would be fine. I refreshed the page that I was on (/admin/build/block) and got a charming looking 404 error. Figuring it was just an issue with the extract I retried and got the error again. I looked at the directory and saw that index.php was there so I checked the root of the directory and sure enough Drupal appeared. Part of Drupal’s package is a file named ‘.htaccess’ which is great for the first time that you install, but this file also contains configuration information as well: in this case the ‘RewriteBase’ needed for the fancy URL code to work properly. When I first saw it I thought “well, its a well written .htaccess, I can see that it wouldn’t have any issues” but now I realise the mistake in that thought having to go back and fix up my .htaccess file again.

Progressing forward in the day I returned to work on the voting system again. More features, improvements and fun though I introduced a bug on Friday by adding the postcode search which I quickly fixed up. The other aspect of the system is starting to work properly and I’m getting some sample data in and validating the system. I did have an incredibly strange SQL bug with a non-printable character which I’m not quite sure how it got introduced but managed to work out (yay for hex dumps!). Looking forward I’m going to need to put in a batch detail view so that we can look at individual batches and with any luck it should be done.

Now its time to get through my weekend blogging back log and publish some older blogs!

Ordinarily I was going to avoid blogging on the weekend in the today section but it has been more like a work day so I figured I should anyway.

I spent the day at UQ in Brisbane due to my girlfriend doing her English exams. I thought that I would be able to get back to my Uni using the eduroam network. Sadly it seems that it doesn’t quite work as expected. After a bit of research using my phone and managed to get a mostly working connection but whilst I could ping hosts and the Mac OS X route monitoring tool saw the University of Pennsilvania and even Google being announced it would seem that I couldn’t get out of the network, even by trying to VPN back to my University (I could ping the server but not connect to it). Eventually I gave up and worked in my project instead.

I managed to get two new features implemented and I have so only had to break one of my self imposed restrictions once. I’m not doing as much as I had planned but I’m moving smaller items slowly. Hopefully I will meet my deadline but I may end up taking a few shortcuts getting there. I’ve identified some areas that I’m going to have to do some considerable work but at present the simple aspects of the system appear to be working properly. Time will tell as I expand my testing.

On another more personal note I’m also at Brisbane International Airport sending a friend off and have noticed that due to the rennovations there is a lot more space and tonnes more seating in the lower area. At one point there was more space dedicated to shops than there was for sitting, it really was a sad situation. Having visited the airport semiregularly since 2003, I have seen the amount of seating slowly decrease to the point that it was almost impossible to get a seat in the main mall. Thankfully this has changed for the better. I wonder how long this will last for before it gets replaced with more shops again.

As expected I ended up working on some more voting projects. It didn’t take too long to build up a simple application to handle what we need it to do. For the most part it is read only, so putting it together was only a matter of putting the right files where they are needed. Building MVC apps in Joonla! 1.5 takes a bit more code, more files and a lot more structuring (view folder, model folder, template folders and a few more depending on what you’re building) than the preferred way in 1.0 but it ends up paying off as the requirements of the project change. Suffice to say the app meets the requirements and will be easily modifiable for when they change again on Monday.

The other aspect was going over the Defect Register with the principal engineer for Crows Nest North and working out the feature differences between it and the Main Roads/RoadTek AMMS application. The main differences appear to be that their system uses chainages to locate road segments (ours just has the streets that they’re between which works well in the city but may not scale well outside of the city) and it can also specify the lane. It also appears to have a primitive synchronisation feature which sounds like it works well on smaller data sets but fails on larger sync’s. So when we’re (hopefully) rebuilding the new system we’ll have to add the simple changes (lanes, chainage and precincts) as well as working out how we build distributed offline editing into the system. Nothing like a challenge!

Today was a day of preparations for the election system (requirements came out yesterday after testing confirmed a bug in both Practical systems, one from Jondaryan and another from Crows Nest – each with their own errors the same in nature but with different data) that had become a priority yesterday. We have something like 15 business days left until the election and the requirements daily become increasingly more complex and different. Today’s introduction included adding the ability to determine which one of four states a vote is in (up from two: voted or not) and a new requirement to search and report on electoral roll details. The main application is going to be written in Delphi and is designed to handle the bulk import of data from the barcode scanners. Its also designed to handle the situation with the increasing states of votes. The back end for the system is going to be MySQL and we’re going to place a web front end once the data has been entered into the system so that we can easily report on the information available. I’m probably going to spend tomorrow building the system to handle all of the little things that are required, shouldn’t take me too long to do it all and test that its working.

The other thing I did today was prepare the groundwork for one of my other research projects to prove feasibility. It looks like at the preliminary testing stage that things are going to work properly, its going to take a bit of time and effort to get things up and running but it looks like it may yet work. With any luck I’ll get some more time to look at it tomorrow though I’ll probably end up looking at road defect maintenance software as well as voting software, yay! Fun for the whole family.

Today I managed to get my first cut of the working backup system into the Joomla! trunk with the task system support. It hasn’t been fully put through its paces and the backup SQL plugin doesn’t appear to be working properly though the other plugin, the table copy one, is working properly which is good. It hasn’t been put through the full sequence yet of a task set but I’m hopefully I’ll look at it over the weekend.

What was more fun was spending time trying to get Drupal to play the game as a Joomla! component. It seems that different PHP apps have different approaches to handling paths. CiviCRM (and PEAR) for example rely on the include_path being set properly which usually stuff them up when you can’t set those variables for whatever reason – or the location they are isn’t in the path. I’ve seen issues with CiviCRM because you can’t set the include_path to what CiviCRM wants and the system just falls apart. Not so good. Drupal does things differently, relying that the bootstrap file is in the right folder. CiviCRM being cross platform (standalone, Joomla! or Drupal) can’t rely on Drupal’s technique because as soon as the entry point is in a different directory, it breaks. So I ended up rewriting Drupal’s include and require statements so that they didn’t use “path/to/file” or “./path/to/file” (they aren’t consistent about it either which is annoying) and made it use the Joomla! style of doing things. Joomla! when it gets started defines a bunch of constants that you can use to build file paths and be assured that they’re correct. Its done in one place so it only has to be changed there and the entire system can be shifted without include or require statements breaking horribly.

So I first tried doing global search and replaces and that didn’t work well and then ended up trying to manually find and replace entries. I managed to get the system through various levels but eventually gave up after a few hours and not having it work properly still. The final error was something about not finding some random menu function – annoyingly Drupal uses include statements instead of require statements and gaurds items with file_exists functions which makes it almost impossible to track down where a file isn’t being included properly and thus causing an error. I think I’ll need a different approach to solving the problem. To end things I decided do a clean Drupal install and follow through their module tutorial for something new and different. I’m not quite sure I agree with things fully even though I’ve gone through it and it seems to work in a primitive way.

I spent the majority of my morning working on getting Joomla! 1.5.8 released due to issues with the package builder. The first was more an issue with people not being patient enough and the next was an issue with the Xserve we’re trying to setup to be a build and test server. My older Linux box stepped up and faithfully albeit slowly built the final packages. From here Anthony did the rest of the work uploading the packages, tagging and finalizing the release.

From here I headed off to TRC and spent the day taking apart a dead Maxtor OneTouch and recovering it’s drive (which was still good, the USB controller must be dead) as well as trying to find a replacement for our road defect register. I thought that there was something that was going to work but it looks like investigating things that it isn’t going to work. Another project is born.

Another day passes with nothing interesting to report. I spent some more time working on getting the task system to work focusing on issues arising from having tasksets within another. The main reason this is important is that the backup framework will create it’s own taskset for each instance and potentially the backup adapter will create it’s own task set. In the case of the SQL backup adapter it already uses the new data load framework to provide the restore functionality. This system also uses tasks to provided the ability to handle large data loads without timing out. Cool eh? The problem is that we start layering each of these tasksets so we need to ensure that we return the previous taskset so that it can resume properly. I think that I have everything set up in a way that will work properly so I just need to code up the individual pieces and get them to work. It’s just a lot of little pieces.

I must admit reading the article this morning on Slashdot about how Microsoft is building their own “App Store” really did sound of Microsoft copying yet again. Now I don’t believe that everything Apple has done is necessarily new or unique, they’ve got their own photocopiers somewhere but you have to wonder after Steve Job’s WWDC keynote comparing features of Vista to Mac OS X you start to wonder where Microsoft is really innovating. A lot of its infrastructure to be honest is copied from previous implementations and there rarely appears to be something new coming from Microsoft. When I look at the Vista desktop is a mashup of what I have available from Compiz Fusion on Linux, parts from Mac OS X and some parts from a Sun research project called ‘Project Looking Glass‘.

But if you look at an old Gizmodo article you’ll see that Apple have been cheeky for a long time now, even suggesting two years before Vista’s release date that Tiger was it. Funnily enough by the time that Microsoft got around to releasing Vista for retail in early 2007, Apple had already released Tiger in April 2005 and was on its way to Leopard already releasing a beta of it at WWDC2006 and a feature complete edition for WWDC2007, releasing later in 2007. Apple haven’t stopped there and are already releasing betas of Snow Leopard at WWDC2008 with new and interesting features, some of which copied themselves and some interesting approaches at doing things as well as interoperability features including primitive Exchange support.

And now we’re seeing Microsoft push forward their plans for “Windows 7” which from all accounts appears to internally think that its Windows 6.1 (you can Google for comments on the general confusion on which Microsoft appears to determine that this is version “7” of their product as well as people doing the maths and not finding ‘7’ as the number). With any luck we’ll see Snow Leopard and Windows 7 come out at around the same time and we can do a comparison between the two without much difficulty.

The other day I visited a site that may not always be visited by many uni students, I went to the site of the Reserve Bank of Australia. The RBA is the institution in Australia that sets our cash interest rate which impacts on various items, notably the cash lending rate (e.g. the rate that banks charge you interest on their loans) which is typically a few percentage points higher than the policy interest rate. Its not quite the same and banks whilst always increasing the interest rate haven’t necessarily been reducing the interest rate as well. But todays gripe isn’t about the banks lack of morals when it comes to money – its about the other item that appears on the RBA’s home page: the inflation rate, or “CPI”.

For those playing at home who aren’t familiar with HECS/HELP, heres a quick primer on how it works. Once upon a time university education in Australia was free, surprising but true. This was a long time ago, about the same time as the present set of politicians were getting educated. And then it progressed to be that students wouldn’t get free education but they would be given a loan interest free that would get paid back to the government based on their tax return. This effectively meant that above a certain point you got taxed at a higher rate and that went towards paying your debt. Nifty, not ideal but not entirely horrible. The Howard Government in part of its many University related reforms decided that they would charge interest on this loan, using CPI to index it. When this was introduced it didn’t sound too bad. CPI was relatively low, 2% to 3%, and the cash interest rate was comparatively high, 6% to 7+%. So it didn’t seem to bad.

Fast forward to now and we’ve hit an economic crisis. Inflation is now 5% and the cash interest rate is at 5.25%. Keep in mind that banks are at present loaning at around the 8% mark up to 9%. It would in fact be interesting to see if the CPI retained its position and the interest lowered even further making CPI higher than the cash lending rate, but that much is pure speculation. However why does this matter?

Well whilst the Student Guild’s are bleating in pleasure that the Labor government is going to give them back their cash cow so that they can spend it on useless things again. Now I have nothing against the employees of said Unions/Guilds, my sister is in fact one and the people who work at my uni refect are also awesome, they just don’t offer me anything valuable. Take for example a bottle of coke, that is 20 cents cheaper out of the vending machine up the hall a little bit from the refect than it is to purchase from the refect. The vending machine itself is 10 cents more expensive than driving down the road a little bit to the bakery and considerably more expensive than buying it from the local supermarket. Part of this I can understand, but when I was a member of the union forcibly and had to pay $40 per subject (comparatively not too bad) the fact that I then have to pay for food that isn’t competitive is a bit of a blow. Keeping in mind that at my university the Guild has manage to remove any external provider and is the sole provider of sustenance on campus controlling the two coffee shops (one under the library and another near the book shop), having a club facility (coffee, alcohol at night, food during the day) and the main refect – after all of this it is still more expensive. Vending machines are a bit more complicated but seem to strangely compete with the Guild which leads me to wonder who exactly controls them. But I digress, whilst they bleat about wanting money and how they won’t squander it (some fees were as high as $600), the Government is also talking about the ability to defer this extra fee to HECS/HELP as well and nobody seems to care that the interest rate on said loan is in fact increasing.

It proves perhaps most to me about how pointless and useless the union system is that they make so much noise about getting money from the universities and not about ensuring the good of their potential members. My Guild didn’t act in my behalf and provided no tangible service which meant that I had no issues leaving them. Turned out that the university ended up propping them up anyway, so they didn’t lose much but at the end of the day they were next to useless. What I found most interesting was that when voluntary student unionism was being introduced they complained that the sports fields would be overgrown and unrulely. Funnily enough I felt that the university was an academic location and not a sporting facility so if the grass grew a little too long on a sports field then so be it, people then will need to train at home. And in this single moment it encapsulates all that was wrong about the Guild.

I keep going off track here, but my problem is of course the fact that the Student Unions don’t do a lot to support their students and expect so much of them. I’ve heard nothing about the fact that CPI has doubled and thus the loan’s interest rate has also increased.

Perhaps nobody has realised what is happening yet because they haven’t looked at their tax yet or seen the increase in their interest. Perhaps next year they will see it and then there will be some noise, though I doubt. It’d be nice to at least go back to the last iteration where the government sponsored the education of its people and they had to slowly pay it back with no interest incurred. Perhaps I’m complaining about nothing, but wouldn’t you be worried if the loan you signed up for had doubled its rate and the prospect of getting a job was drastically reduced?