Webkit, KitKat and Deadlocks!

Posted on 17 June 2014 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google

I don’t know what provision Dante Alighieri made, but I’m hoping there’s a special corner of Hell reserved for paedophiles, mass murderers and so-called engineers from big software companies who think there might ever be a justification for breaking backwards compatibility. I suspect that over the past 10-15 years I have wasted more computing effort trying to keep things working which a big company has broken without providing an adequate replacement, than is due to any other single cause.

The latest centre of incompetence seems to be Google. Hot on the heels of my last moan on the same topic, I’ve just wasted some more effort because of a major Google c**k-up in Android 4.4.X, AKA KitKat. My new app, Stash-It!, includes a web browser based on the “Webkit” component widely used for that purpose across the Android, OSX and Linux worlds. On versions of Android up to 4.3, it works. However when I released it out into the wild I started getting complaints from users running KitKat that the browser had either frozen altogether, or was running unusably slowly.

It took a bit of effort to get a test platform running. In the end I went for a VM on my PC running the very useful Androidx86 distribution (as the Google SDK emulator is almost unusable even when it’s working), and after a bit of fiddling reproduced the problem. Sometimes web pages would load, sometimes they would just stop, with no code-level indication why.

After various fruitless attempts to fix the problem, I discovered (Google.com still has some uses) that this is a common problem. In their “wisdom” Google have replaced the browser component in KitKat with one which is a close relative of the Chrome browser, but seem to have done so without adequate testing or attention to compatibility. There are wide reports of deadlocks when applications attempt any logic during the process of loading a web page, with the application just sticking somewhere inside the web view code. That’s what was happening to me.

The fix eventually turned out to be relatively simple: Stash-It feeds back progress on the loading of a web page to the user. I have simply disabled this feedback when the app is running under KitKat, which is a slight reduction in functionality but a reasonable swap for getting the app working… However it’s cost a lot of time and aggro I could well have done without.

Can anyone arrange a plague of frogs and boils for Google, please?

Posted in Agile & Architecture, Android, Code & Development, Thoughts on the World | Leave a comment

Busy Bee…

Posted on 29 May 2014 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google
Busy bee in the Loseley Park gardens
Camera: Panasonic DMC-GX7 | Date: 25-05-2014 15:12 | Resolution: 3274 x 3274 | ISO: 200 | Exp. bias: -33/100 EV | Exp. Time: 1/500s | Aperture: 8.0 | Focal Length: 35.0mm | Location: Loseley House | State/Province: England | See map | Lens: LUMIX G VARIO 12-35/F2.8

I’m sorry things have been quiet on the blogging front recently. I got back from my very restful holiday in Barbados expecting to take some time to find new work. Within two hours, before I could do anything, I had a query out of the blue from an ex-colleague I hadn’t seen for 10 years, and I was back under contract in a couple of days. (OK, technically that qualifies as “some time”, but you know what I mean…) I can’t say too much, but it’s a very exciting web- and service-based initiative in the automotive sector, which is new to me. It’s very interesting, but hard work between learning a new business, sorting out a problem project, and travelling backwards and forwards between the UK and Germany.

Hopefully normal service will be resumed when things settle down, but no sign yet!

Between last weekend’s storms, Frances and I managed to capitalise on the one sunny and dry session to visit Loseley Park. I took the Panasonic GX7 and the Lumix G Vario 12-35mm/F2.8 lens. This is far and away the best “normal” lens I have ever owned. Despite its relatively small size it really is just like a series of high quality prime lenses in a single box, sharp at all lengths and apertures and with vanishingly little aberration, even before processing. If and when I get a Panasonic GH4 the pairing will also provide me with a “rainproof” micro four thirds kit.

Photographing other busy bees at work requires a bit of patience, as they are constantly on the move, and I had my share of blank frames! However when I did get the subject in frame and in the focus zone, the hit rate was fairly high. Even though the 12-35mm is not a dedicated macro lens, you can see individual pollen grains on the bee’s back, which can’t be bad.

Enjoy these, and I hope you are busy enough, but not too busy.

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The Achilles Heel

Posted on 1 May 2014 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google
"Reverse Lartigue" at the Barbados Guineas 2014. And no, that's not the name of the horse, although it would be a good one!
Camera: Panasonic DMC-GX7 | Date: 28-04-2014 21:01 | Resolution: 3713 x 2476 | ISO: 200 | Exp. bias: -33/100 EV | Exp. Time: 1/250s | Aperture: 5.0 | Focal Length: 35.0mm | Lens: LUMIX G VARIO 12-35/F2.8

As regular readers will know, I’ve been very impressed with the Panasonic GX7, which is a remarkably capable little camera. It did the bulk of the work on my Morocco trip, and I have seriously been considering whether we have got to the stage yet where I could operate with just a Panasonic system and get rid of the big Canon kit which works well but is so heavy. The main question mark has always been over the Panasonic system’s ability to handle action. Unfortunately I can now confirm that this is not something the GX7 does very well.

As a deliberate experiment I took the Panasonic GX7 and GH2 rather than the Canon 7D and 550D on our latest trip to Barbados. (I did take the Canon S120, which is turning out to be a very capable little camera, but that’s a separate story.) For pictures of buildings and flowers, the GX7 works well, and as already established, in very low light conditions or where a “small” camera has a practical or psychological advantage it betters the large cameras. Then we took it horse racing…

I was prepared for the moderate frame rate of around 5fps, which while slower than the Canon 7D is a reasonable match for most other cameras. The slight lag of the electronic viewfinder was also expected, but is not a major problem and would be mastered with a bit of practice.

Beyond that, however, the GX7 displays two very different failure modes depending on how you operate the shutter.

With the traditional mechanical shutter in use, the cycle is as follows. First the shutter closes, and the camera resets the sensor. Then the shutter opens for the required time, exposing the whole sensor. The shutter closes and the camera reads the sensor, then the shutter opens, and the camera updates the display/EVF, metering and focus. In burst mode as soon as everything is stable the cycle starts again. The trouble is that the autofocus is either insufficiently quick or insufficiently accurate to hold a moving target, and the “miss” rate is very high, exceeding 50% in my tests so far.

The GX7 also offers an electronic shutter mode, in which the mechanical shutter stays open, continuously driving the display, metering and autofocus, and to take a shot the camera resets the sensor, and reads the data after the required exposure time. For some purposes where the subject is essentially static, like an HDR bracket or trying to capture a changing portrait expression, this works very well. However with a moving subject it fails miserably. The problem is that the camera resets, exposes and reads the sensor progressively, starting from the top and working down, and takes over 1/10s to do so. If during this the subject has moved you get an effect I have termed “The Lartigue” as it resembles the “leaning back” look common in action photos from Jaques Lartigue and other early 20th century pioneers of motion photography. Track the subject, which is something Lartigue and his contemporaries could not easily do, and the result is a “Reverse Lartigue” – see example above.

Oh well… I always knew that this would be a stretch, and taking the GX7 to a sporting event was a deliberate experiment with some risk of failure. Also I’m setting the bar very high by comparing with a Canon 7D, which despite being a five year old design is still near the top of the class in this respect. I did get a few decent shots, but the conclusion is that the 7D stays for now, and gets an outing at least when I know the subject is action. What will be very interesting is to repeat the experiment with the new Panasonic GH4. Watch this space…

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Review: Man Up

By Alex Cay

Posted on 29 April 2014 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google

Fun, but a very high body count!

This is a comedy thriller very much affecting the style of Carl Hiaasen. Hiaasen’s latest, the hilarious Bad Monkey, uses almost exactly the same Floridan and Bahamian locations, and reading this book almost immediately afterwards did feel a bit like a slightly distorted echo. It would be refreshing to see some authors writing this style of work but against less stereotypical backgrounds, and I hope Alex Cay does so with his future books.

That said, Man Up! is a good example of the genre, and well worth a read. It zips along at a good pace, with enough plot intrigue to keep the reader entertained, even if some twists are rather predictable, and is regularly punctuated with almost slapstick comedy which made me laugh out loud on several occasions.

The central character is a sports agent, and in this case was dealing with ice hockey. In Britain this is very much a minority sport, and the copious ice hockey references and terminology in the first couple of chapters put off at least one reader I know. Keep going and once the real action starts the sports context is no longer such an issue, but if the author wants the widest readership this is something to watch in the future.

I liked the writing style, and was impressed by how Alex Cay had captured the nuances of dialogue for the English characters versus the American ones very well. On a slightly more negative note he has adopted a habit of writing for emphasis One. Word. At. A. Time., which is rather off-putting, and I’d suggest trying to find a smoother alternative.

The book is populated with a range of interesting characters, but in many cases you don’t get to learn much about who they are, or how they have got to where they are, and a bit more background would work well. There are no “supermen”, and a number with very real mental limitations, but almost all the men are enormously well provided in the trouser department, which seems to destroy the good judgement of several otherwise single-minded female characters. I did like the animal characters, including two homosexual bull mastiffs and a shark nick-named Elvis!

This is a tale of stupid wealthy people, corrupt spies and incompetent hitmen, and a large helping of sex and violence more explicit than some other books in this genre is unavoidable. The high body count is actually quite comical, but be prepared for some writing which is not exactly “family friendly”.

Overall I enjoyed the book, and I look forward to reading some more of Patrick Finn’s adventures in the future.

 

Finally, I’d like to say a big thank you to the author Alex Cay for providing a review copy of this book in Kindle format. I do most of my fiction reading when travelling, and it’s really annoying that most publishers and review commissioners, notably and inexplicably including Amazon themselves, still insist on providing review copies in hardcopy form. Thanks to Alec for doing the right thing.

Categories: Reviews. Content Types: Book, Crime / mystery, Fiction, and Humour.
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Review: Resistance

By Owen Sheers

Posted on 26 April 2014 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google

A Fascinating but Disturbing Alternative History

This is a fascinating book, although its title and blurb are rather misleading. I was expecting something along the lines of a Welsh Defiance (the story of the Belorussian Otriads which successfully battled the Nazis behind the Eastern Front), or Secret Army, but in reality the “Resistance” of this book’s title is most notable by its almost total absence. This is in many ways a much scarier story, about how a German invasion of Britain might have succeeded, but I understand totally why the author didn’t choose instead to call it Collaboration.

At one level, this is a masterful and almost believable re-telling of the progress of the Second World War with a completely different outcome, reminding us how many of the key points individually turned on the narrowest of margins provided either by blind fortune or inexplicably poor German decision-making, both of which could easily have been reversed. How, for example, D-Day could have been scuppered by poor weather, or a single effective German spy operating on the right part of Britain’s South Coast. With only a couple of such reversals the Britain of the story leaves itself open to a successful German invasion in 1944.

The bulk of the story is then a study of how war-weary British communities and German soldiers progress, as much through pragmatic accommodation and grudging acceptance as overt surrender or collaboration, to some form of settlement. As a study of human behaviours in hard times it’s excellent, but it’s empathically not a stirring tale of derring-do. The book also ends with the disposition of most of the central characters left open – I would have preferred a more definite outcome, but that would perhaps have closed things down where the book deliberately tries to portray sources of ambiguity.

The story focuses on a small farming community in the Brecon Beacons, between Abergavenny and Hereford, an area with which I have strong family connections, including a great Aunt and Uncle who farmed in a small valley in the Beacons, very like the central community. As such I very much enjoyed the portrayal of so many places I know. I have even drunk in the only pub which gets mentioned by name!

The author, Sheers, is primarily a poet, and his writing paints a very expressive verbal picture of the land, the events and the people of the story. My usual taste in fiction is more focused on action, but accept the style of the book and you will be fully absorbed by this story, even though it is not a comfortable one.

Categories: Reviews. Content Types: Book, Fiction, Historical novel, and History.
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My First Android App: Stash-It!

Posted on 10 April 2014 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google

After a couple of months of busy early morning and late night programming, my first Android app has finally been released. Please meet Stash-It!

Stash-It! responds to an odd side-effect of the difference between the iOS and Android security models. On the iPad, there are a large number of applications which offer an “all in one” approach to managing a group of related content. These are a bit frustrating if you want to share files transparently and seamlessly between applications, but there are times when you want to manage a group of files securely, and then the iOS approach is great.

Android is the original way around. The more open file system and component model encourages the use of specialist applications which do one job well, but it can be a challenge to keep related files of different types together, and hide them if you don’t want private client files or the like turning up un-announced in your gallery of family photos!

Stash-It! tries to plug this gap, by providing an “all in one” private file manager, tabbed browser and downloader for Android. You can get all these functions independently in other apps, but Stash-It! is the only one which brings them together in one place. It’s the ideal place to keep content you want safe from prying eyes: financial and banking records, health research, client documents. I suspect a few will even use it for a porn stash, but that’s not its only use! 🙂

There are built in viewers for most common image and movie formats, plus PDF and web files, so you don’t have to move these outside the application to view them. However when you do need to use an external application Stash-It! has a full suite of import and export functions to move your files or open them with other applications.

It took a while to design the security model. Stash-It! encrypts the names of files so that they can’t be read, and won’t be visible to the tablet’s gallery and similar applications, but the content of your files is untouched, so there’s little risk of losing data. Hopefully this strikes a sensible balance between privacy and risk.

Even if you’re not too worried about privacy Stash-It! is a great place to collect material related to as particular project, with all your different file types and web research in one place. You can bookmark web links, but also positions in video files or PDF documents. Web pages can be saved intact for reference or offline reading. Again you can do a lot of these things in separate apps, but I believe Stash-It! is the first one to bring all these functions together where you might want them.

I’ve got a lot of ideas in the pipeline to improve it further, but its now time to test the market and see whether I’ve spotted a gap which needed plugging or not.

Take a look and let me know what you think!

 

Here’s the Google Play Page. You can also read the helpfile.

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The Concert for Jon Lord

Posted on 8 April 2014 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google
Deep Purple Mark 3.5 + orchestra giving "Burn" some wellie!
Camera: Canon PowerShot S120 | Date: 04-04-2013 20:41 | Resolution: 3785 x 2524 | ISO: 800 | Exp. bias: 0 EV | Exp. Time: 1/25s | Aperture: 5.7 | Focal Length: 26.0mm

Last Friday we attended a wonderful concert celebrating the life and music of the late Jon Lord, “musician and gentleman”. This unique event filled the Royal Albert Hall, both in front of and the stage, which as befits the man who dedicated himself to merging orchestral and rock music, was largely filled by an impressive 80 piece orchestra, with only a small space at the front for the soloists and rock musicians.

After a few emotional introductions, the concert started with the first movement of the Concerto For Group And Orchestra, which led into a first half entirely devoted to Jon’s orchestral music. The highlight was undoubtedly a stunning rendering of Sarabande. The last time we saw Jon Lord was at the Sunflower Jam 2011, when he did a spine-chilling version with a solo violinist. This was quite different, as conductor and musical arranger Paul Mann used the full power of the group and orchestra at his disposal, and re-cast Sarabande as a rolling battle between the strings, and everyone else.

The second half followed a very different vein, with a focus on Jon’s rock music. Things got off to an excellent start with Paul Weller re-creating The Artwoods and running through a couple of their rocking 60s numbers – which I have on 8-track cartridge! Next up was the music of Paice Ashton Lord. Ian Paice and original bassist Bernie Marsden were supplemented by Don Airey, and a young Irish singer, Phil Campbell, who did great justice to the lyrics and vocals of the late Tony Ashton.

The focus then moved on to Deep Purple Mark 3/4, firstly with an orchestral version of Soldier of Fortune, then with the arrival of original bassist and backing vocalist Glenn Hughes, Bruce Dickinson joining on vocals, and a second keyboards slot filled by Rick Wakeman. This set included the ballads This Time Around and You Keep On Moving from the under-appreciated post-Blackmore album Come Taste The Band, for which Hughes and Lord obviously shared writing duties, but the crescendo was Burn. This was a great choice – a true Purple anthem which we will never hear from the current Glover/Gillan line-up, it showcases Hughes’ falsetto vocals which are undiminished from the 70s, and it has two organ solos, one each for Wakeman and Airey… Add an enthusiastic full orchestra and, I swear, the Albert Hall’s enormous pipe organ, and the sound was felt as much as heard.

Finally, the stage re-filled with the current Deep Purple line-up. They started their set with a couple of more recent tracks, including their own tribute to Jon Lord, Above and Beyond. They then got stuck into a selection of more classic tracks. Some, like Black Night, were played straight by the band, but appropriately most were re-cast to exploit the orchestral musicians. The two which particularly stick in my memory are Perfect Strangers, with the haunting riff perfectly suited to a large string section, and a unusual but very effective version of Lazy, with the lead guitar part played largely by a violin!

The culmination of the evening was an “all hands” version of Hush, featuring the full orchestra and for which many of the other solo musicians were invited back on stage. With more than 10 rock musicians and almost 80 orchestral ones this threatened to lift the Albert Hall’s famous roof, and clearly great fun was being had by all. Those who have criticised Jon Lord’s attempts to merge rock and orchestral music could not have been proven more wrong.

All in all, a fitting tribute to the great man.

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Getting Ahead of the Curve – Final Update?

Posted on 1 April 2014 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google
Picadilly by the light of the video wall, Canon S120 wide open with both aperture and zoom
Camera: Canon PowerShot S120 | Date: 08-02-2013 17:07 | Resolution: 4824 x 3015 | ISO: 250 | Exp. bias: 0 EV | Exp. Time: 1/100s | Aperture: 1.8 | Focal Length: 5.2mm

When I purchased my Panasonic GX7 on the day of release, I did expect there to be a slight delay in getting software support (see here), but I got frustrated when no fewer than three versions of Capture One came and went without it.

However my patience has finally been rewarded with V7.2.1. This not only delivers full support for the GX7, but has also dramatically upgraded the support for my equally new Canon S120. This produces RAW files which at the wide end of the zoom have very dramatic geometric distortion, so strong it was impossible to correct manually, but in the new version the built-in C1 support corrects them perfectly, with neither geometric nor chromatic aberration evident even at pixel peeping levels.

While I’m still slightly peeved about the time it took (a grand total of 6 months!), I’m very impressed with the results.

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Scarily Bad

Posted on 30 March 2014 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google

Reversing the scarily effective performance of Google Now, I just had a dangerous experience with Google Voice Typing. I attempted to make a note in a busy café with a lot of background noise. After I stopped talking it sat and tried to take in some of the other sounds as well, and then tried to parse what it had heard.

The result: one four letter word, a colloquial term for excrement! That’s not what I said…

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RIP Google Currents

Posted on 18 March 2014 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google

Regular readers may be aware that I became very fond of a Google app called Currents. This took RSS-enabled news feeds, and presented them as attractive “magazines”. For feeds with significant image content (like most of the photography blogs I follow) Currents did a remarkable job.

Beyond making news reading sexy, Currents delivered two other pieces of distinct value: an easy to read default two-column layout on larger tablets, and a “stack” widget which allowed you to quickly swipe through the day’s news, aggregated chronologically, and click through to read the items of most interest.

However, I am writing this in the past tense. Currents is no more. An “update” a couple of weeks ago quietly moved my feed list over to the execrable “Google Play Newsstand” and uninstalled Currents. The replacement is clumsy, with none of Currents’ visual flair. An uninspiring reading experience is exacerbated by a useless widget which removes the brilliant former “flip through” capability.

Unfortunately this is not the first such aberration by Google. It’s less than six months since they killed off both the Reader app (maybe not such a great loss) and the sadly-missed iGoogle (which ironically was killed off allegedly because most users prefer Google’s tablet apps!) Now they are forcing us towards a dreadful replacement for the best of those apps, and I’m not happy…

This also comes on the back of various screw-ups regarding Chrome: the ready plain-text disclosure of stored passwords, the broken scrollbars, menus spaced ridiculously widely on normal PC displays. I could go on, and on, and on…

The arrogance of Google’s developers appears to be exceeded only by their stupidity or blindness to the faults in their “improvements”. When they deign to respond to a torrent of public displeasure, they do so by claiming that it’s our fault for not understanding the brilliance of their ideas, not by listening and responding to customer feedback.

I really don’t understand why Google are behaving this way, but it does seem that having emulated Microsoft’s successes of the 90s, Google are now determined to repeat their mistakes of the noughties, breaking compatibility, destroying things which worked well, and systematically driving customers into the arms of competitors. Apple might get away with treating customers with disdain, but Google have neither their shiny hardware nor the fans’ love for the blessed St. Jobs.

For now I’m sticking with Android and probably Chrome, but I’m genuinely interested in making sure the market starts to develop high quality alternatives, before Google rip their remaining carpets out from under us. If you know of a proper non-Google replacement for Currents please let me know.

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What Do I Mean by "Agile Architecture"?

Posted on 4 March 2014 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google

A little while back I was approached by EITA Global, a global provider of on-line training, and we have now agreed that I should present for them a webinar entitled "Agile Architects, and Agile Architecture". The current plan is for this run on 8th April. I’ll keep you all posted with any changes.

As part of my preparation, I decided to do a literature scan to see how this topic may have moved on since the last time I did some significant work on it, a couple of years ago. I have to say that based on my initial research I’m not that impressed… I don’t know whether to be flattered or slightly perturbed that AgileArchitect.org comes up squarely at the top of a Google search. There are a few decent web articles around, although most are several years old and I’d seen them before. The Google search also turns up several dead links.

Amazon turned up a couple of loosely-related books, and the most obvious candidate appeared to be "Lean Architecture: for Agile Software Development" by James O. Coplien and Gertrud Bj�rnvig. I’ve now read a couple of chapters, but my first impression is not very favourable. I may be rushing to judgement, in which case I’ll apologise later, but the book seems to somehow equate "architecture" with "code structure" with "project structure", which isn’t right at all, missing a number of the most important dimensions of any true architecture.

This led me to ask myself a very basic question. "What do I mean by ‘Agile Architecture’?". In Coplien and Bj�rnvig’s book they seem to answer "an architecture which facilitates agile development". That may be one definition, but it isn’t mine.

I think the confusion arises from the difference between "agile" applied to a process (e.g. software development), and applied to a product. In the former case, the Agile Manifesto undoubtedly applies. In the latter, I’m not so sure. I think that for a product, and especially its architecture, the primary meaning of "agile" must be "able to respond to change". The larger the change which can be handled quickly and cheaply, the more agile the architecture. An architecture which has been built in a beautifully run agile project but which needs new code the first time a business rule changes is fragile, not agile. The system which can absorb major changes in the business rules without a single line of code is genuinely agile. The integration architecture which allows multi-million pound system A to be upgraded with no impact on adjacent multi-million pound system B, or which allows the company to be restructured just by re-configuring its services, is the most agile of all.

I’m slightly worried that "agile" may have become a "reserved word", and this "architecture in the large" definition may run counter to accepted practice. Is that right, or am I reading too much into a few examples?

Posted in Agile & Architecture, Thoughts on the World | 4 Comments

That Was Quick…

Posted on 1 March 2014 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google
The Beech Avenue near Kingston Lacy - Mono version
Camera: Canon EOS 7D | Lens: EF70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM | Date: 28-02-2014 14:55 | Resolution: 5184 x 3456 | ISO: 400 | Exp. bias: 0 EV | Exp. Time: 1/30s | Aperture: 10.0 | Focal Length: 180.0mm (~291.6mm) | See map | Lens: Canon EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM

OK, here’s the black and white version. A couple of interesting challenges here. To get enough contrast I had to take the yellow component in the mix right down to zero, and also go for a much “darker” look overall (as otherwise the white patches of lichen on the trees were overwhelming). What do you think?

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