Emergency broadcasts

The air is fragrant with smoke, the sky transected with grey. Since last night we have been told to stay at home and defend our house from ember attack.

Bush fires are a fact of life in this area. Back in 1994 my wife was living with her family in another part of this suburb and I was in Canberra, proving updates to the world over Internet Relay Chat based upon television reports.

Now as a resident of the affected area I have a personal interest in how information about the fire is communicated. The nature of media has changed since then and I've got some thoughts about the coverage of the bush fires from a local perspective.

Expectations

We live in the Information Age and as such expect to have access to instantaneous and detailed information about events. The better the information you have, the better you can plan your actions. That is true both for those fighting the fire and those potentially affected by it.

I'm not certain how much information is gathered and available to the fire service from assets on the ground, in the air and in space. It would be interesting to find out. Potentially a lot, but combining that information into something useful for making decisions would be a challenging task.

I can imagine a mesh of sensors on firefighters, fire trucks, drones, aircraft and static assets all sending information back to base to be processed and combined by artificial intelligence. Challenging indeed.

And how to make that information available to the public?

Traditional media

During emergencies we are expected to turn to television, as I did in 1994, and radio for information. I did both but found the experience somewhat disappointing. Being a Saturday night the commercial television stations were more concerned with sports events and the sole free-to-air 24 hour news station, ABC News 24, was primarily filled with non-current news programming or reports on the airstrikes in Syria. This is the problem with being an underfunded national broadcaster, most of your audience are unaffected by regional fires.

Instead you are suggested to turn to ABC Local Radio, which suddenly presents an issue. Who has an AM radio outside of their car these days? I've got an old cassette player downstairs, but if the power went out I'd be in trouble finding any big batteries for it. Most devices run on something smaller.

I still have some FM radios in older mobile phones, though they too are being phased out by manufacturers. Still, it's a pity they don't have an FM broadcast instead. It does suggest I should buy a small AM capable radio, which would have the advantage of picking up the cricket as well!

Fortunately you can listen to ABC Local Radio streamed over the internet, but this takes up valuable bandwidth in emergencies and the infrastructure is more vulnerable to destruction than a distant radio transmitter.

Much as I like the ABC, the other downside of having to listen out for updates over the radio is putting up with their regular programming in between. I just have a different taste to music.

Social media and the Web

The other major source of information these days is social media. Everyone thinks it's something new, but as mentioned above, I was using it back in 1994!

There are useful websites such as the official Fires Near Me and Google's Crisis Map. The issue with the former is the very limited information it provides.

I followed updates from the NSW Rural Fire Service Twitter account, which shared interesting line scan maps of fire areas and videos, and local Facebook pages.

The problem with social media is information pollution. Official updates on Twitter get lost in streams of irrelevant updates from other accounts and on Facebook masses of non-time ordered questions and comments from ordinary (or worse, narcissistic) citizens. There is also the big issue of incorrect or malicious information (so called "fake news") can be inserted into these streams.

There should be an app for that

If one doesn't exist already I'm thinking it would be useful to have an official emergency warnings app for mobile phones. The app would have the following features:

• An ability to detect the user's location or allow them to subscribe to other locations (useful when you are outside the area)
• Emergency push broadcasts (eg imminent tsunami or new fire detected in your area)
• On demand lookup as well as broadcast streaming of updates 
• Interrupt media streams when updates are broadcast, allowing the user to listen to locally stored or streamed music or video without missing updates
• Audio and video output as well as text (user selects).
• Provide maps of affected areas and relevant transport updates.

Maybe there could be a forum or social media component to it focused only on that event, but not sure if that would be necessary or just too much trouble.

Might get chatting with some people at work to see what is already out there and what they think.

Right now the conditions have eased and it looks like we should be able to get a good night's sleep tonight. Even if we haven't as yet been directly affected it's certainly been a good opportunity to consider our disaster preparedness. And many, many thanks to all the emergency services for working so very hard to keep us safe. They are fantastic.

Silicon Vallergy

"Nobody talks about teleports to Japan."

Not true!

Few things give me a headache like tech marketers. Unfortunately my organisation has been invaded by Silicon Valley alumni. You can tell. Long term scientific programs have been cut in favour of short term trendy "research" and "innovation". Apparently, a huge amount of data simply comes into existence in a magic cloud without anyone needing to do the unexciting task of collecting it in the first place.

So there I was stuck in a meeting with an ex-Yahoo marketing "guru" and entrepreneur.

He was "taking us on a journey" in our quest for "followers". Or some such crap. I was busy wondering how anybody could speak so many words yet say so little.

At the same time he spruiked Zeetings, some Web presentation/conversation web application he had some connection with. What I found telling is that as soon as he stopped using it, so did we. Not a compelling piece of technology then.

Marketing dude asked us for some words to describe the venture.

"How come nobody is talking about disruption?"

In the best moment of the day, somebody piped up that it was because the organisation has been in a permanent state of disruption for the past 5 years and everyone (barring the consultants) is sick of it. Disruption is a dirty word, we said.

And so the tide turned in the meeting, with the more forceful techies and researchers taking control and the only one paying attention to Mr Marketing was his offsider. We actually got some real work done figuring out practical requirements rather than meaningless aspirational buzzwords.

I still got a headache.

Why you think I hate Microsoft

Every popular, or once popular, operating system has its fans. Who doesn't know an Apple fanboy (or fangirl), with their fervent agreement with every utterance from Steve Jobs and now Tim Cook? Or the Linux freedom fighter, for whom a command line equals "desktop ready"? There are even those that can't let go of their Amiga.

But there is another group who are surprisingly not as well recognised. Surprising, because theirs is the most popular opeating system of all, at least as far as personal computers are concerned.

I'm talking about Microsoft.

Let’s be clear about something. I use Microsoft products and have done so for decades. My desktop computers all run Windows, including my work laptop. I used to program in Microsoft BASIC and more recently (though somewhat reluctantly) in C# and .Net. I've maintained Web servers running IIS and even used FrontPage. At work we use Outlook.

Microsoft do make some good and useful products. But in geekdom Microsoft has traditionally been seen as the Evil Empire, to be distrusted and opposed at every opportunity.

So it has come as a shock to find people jumping out of the woodwork to vigorously and publicly defend Microsoft products from criticism.

Fair enough, you say. If they make good products then they should be supported. However, a closer analysis of the defenders' arguments actually illustrates the flaws in Microsoft's traditional strategy and why it has been losing market share.

Yes it is cloud-based allrite, but the fact that you can use it simultaneously across multiple devices with proper version control, op-locking, etc. puts it miles ahead of iOS. Google's services are okay, but as 90+% of the corporate desktop uses Microsoft Office I don't bother with it.

And yes, SharePoint is an incredibly helpful suite if used appropriately. Poor user practices and system implementation does not make it an inferior product. But hey, you could always use TRIM or some other form of EDMS if you're prepared to put up with the pain and lack of mobile support.
SKay, December 11, 2015 
Microsoft Lumia 950 XL phone review: different, but not in a good way

The above comment illustrates very well the issues.

1. The comment author assumes that the only corporate environments matter and that only Microsoft is suitable for enterprise environments.
2. They blame the user for not using the product properly rather than the usability of the product.

SharePoint is my tool of choice for revealing the true corporate Microsoft fan. We once did a competitive evaluation between intranet content management systems and invited representatives from Microsoft to pitch SharePoint. They arrived terribly cocky, assuming their product was the best and couldn't be bothered to answer the questions we'd sent them, dismissing them away as "You would need to program it"rather than providing them out of the box like the eventual winner did.

I've used SharePoint at work. It's had gaping usability, standards compliance and systems maintenance issues, yet the Microsoft fans insist that it's suitable for something other than a document sharing platform. Even then it's a version dependent pain compared with, say, Google Docs. Even Microsoft themselves don't seem to love it so much any more.

Now that Internet Explorer has won the browser wars.

That was a quote from a course I attended around three years ago about building websites using .Net. It wasn't true then and it certainly isn't true today (even Microsoft are dumping IE for Edge), especially with so much browsing done on non-Microsoft phones.

But the true Microsoft fan can't see that anyone would seriously use a non-Microsoft product. Their world is the corporate world of centrally managed systems where everything is Microsoft. They seem to struggle to acknowledge that there other enterprise players. After all, in their minds, who would use an Oracle database when SQLServer exists? There is a blindness to alternatives.

This course was funny in that it taught web application development from the perspective of a desktop application developer. They thought web pages should look like and act like Windows desktop applications.

Ha ha. Why would you make something that ugly?

Microsoft has a long history of making stuff ups with regards to the Internet and the Web. Rather than stick to agreed third party standards they subverted them with products that produced ugly and bloated code that only worked properly in Microsoft products. I have had enough of trying to fix Microsoft Office and FrontPage generated HTML to last me a lifetime.

You see, Microsoft has traditionally been the enemy of interoperability. You want to use something outside of their environment? You always run into some barrier they've erected, some proprietary extension that is required to do what other products can handle almost seamlessly.

To be fair I think Microsoft has been changing under Satya Nadella and embracing a lot more openness and standards, but many of their supporters still seem to be stuck in the old ways. To a Microsoft fan it's your fault if you want something different. It's the Microsoft Way or the Highway.

Me, I like the highway. It's more scenic, usually cheaper and full of interesting things to explore and learn from. And if the diehard Microsoft fan gets in the way? There's always an alternative route, they just can't see it for themselves.

Alex and computers

Scratch

I was rather pleased to see Alex playing with Scratch this morning. It's a free Flash web tool designed for kids that enables them to write programs by connecting a variety of elements together. I think it's quite good for teaching kids about loops and logic.

I have also installed Microsoft Small Basic on his machine, though it might be a bit advanced for a six year old. Not for long, though.

Alex is rather obsessed with computers and is very comfortable using them. Right now he's very proud of his ability to change the desktop background in Windows 8. He also made his own slideshow movie with Movie Maker and another with YouTube.

The obsession can be rather funny though. He may be the only person who like Ctrl-Alt-Del and typing in passwords, getting rather upset that you don't have to do it this way for home machines, unlike enterprise systems at school and work.

He also wanted Word and PowerPoint. Unwilling to shell out further money for both until he actually needs them, I installed LibreOffice instead and told him that it was the latest version, newer than at school (him being used to this with Windows 8.1 instead of the school's Windows 7) and that's why the icons are different.

I must get him on to Linux as well. He prefers the iPad to his Windows 8 convertible laptop/tablet, but the reason I chose the latter is that it runs Adobe Flash, which a lot of educational websites, including Scratch, still require.

Unfortunately, the Microsoft Parental Controls are an annoying pain to use, though still beneficial when it comes to learning what not to click on.

What I really need to get working on is controls on YouTube to prevent certain useless topics from being displayed (e.g. EvanTubeHD, adult reviews of toys and endless computer game commentary). There's so much else that's educational or creative that could be watched instead.

I think back to reading my parents' 1950s medical textbooks, full of grotesque diseases largely unknown due to vaccines and antibiotics. Now Alex watches the highly educational Operation Ouch on ABC iView and can tell us the most remarkable medical facts. I'm quite envious actually!

Mod_speling gotcha

I recently had to migrate a large chunk of content from a Windows server to Linux. Linux's file system is case sensitive, Windows is not, so I ended up with a lot of broken links. A solution is to use Apache's mod_speling. I only wanted to use the capitalisation capabilities of mod_speling, not the spelling variations. I enabled the module, which is off by default, and entered the configuration in the virtual host conf, the site conf, the .htaccess file, but nothing seemed to work.

The trick was that you need both options to be on, not just CheckCaseOnly. So for capitalisation only you would put the following in your .htaccess file.

<ifmodule mod_speling.c>
    CheckCaseOnly on
    CheckSpelling on
</ifmodule>

A new host for allrite

For over a decade I've used Ilisys to host my allrite.net and allrite.com.au domains. Price rises finally meant that it was no longer economical to continue to host with them and I consolidated my domains with Webfaction, who have a very developer friendly setup.

Migration was quite a painful process, mainly for the fact that I had so many files on the old site. I did a lot of culling. Many of the tools were written in old versions of PHP and are now superfluous so there's no point in rewriting them. I discovered the site must have got hacked at some stage with a trojan lurking somewhere on the site. I'm not surprised, the site was neglected and I know there were security issues at one stage before I locked it down further.

Ilisys has been involved in a few mergers and consolidations and it's sad to see how the service seems to have declined since the early days. I waited almost an hour on the phone for some support and got a bad IP phone connection when I finally got through. Used to be simple to call the knowledgeable owners when they were based in Western Australia and get a familiar and friendly response.

I'll have to do more with the sites now, though sometimes it's not fun to continue your day job at home. Back to work.