The Pearl GPS-Navigationssystem V35-1 is an incredible 69EUR. It turns out that by replacing the card in its 4Gb slot, you can run practically any GPS map software. Here’s a typically enthusiastic forum full of details.

There are many great things about this great car, but I am finding an increasing number of niggles :

• Poor visibility
  • To the rear while reversing or pulling out
  • To the sides, while parking (the sides are very high, and windows narrow)
• Poor windscreen wiper positioning
  • Visibility to the front corners is mediocre, and this is exacerbated on the front left by the fact that the wipers leave a column uncleaned which is at least 15cm wide. This gets filthy, fast, and really makes it hard to see when parking or taking tight left corners
• Nowhere to store the headrests from the back seats
  • This could be easily accomplished, in a few *clever* ways, but they have done nothing here
• The “intelligent” display is very easily obscured by sunlight coming from behind
• The seats are comfortable, but poor to position
  • High seats make waiting at traffic lights a matter of constantly ducking down to see the colour (at least, for moderately tall europeans). The seat height can NOT be configured
  • The seats do not remember their last position (even my old Daihatsu Cuore did that!) which is a real pain.
• Dirty bum.  The short nature of the car, with its flat behind directly next to the rear wheels, means that it gets *filthy* really quickly
• Poor interior lighting
  • The single “eyeball” swivelling light might make perfect sense in the city, but it’s useless at night in the country side. It illuminates nothing indirectly, so putting luggage in the back is a question of guesswork unless you go around the front and direct the light – which even then is blocked by the tall front seats.
• Hard to control doors… they open beautifully, and are very large, but the only handgrip is near the hinge at the front, making it likely that at somepoint they’ll bang a wall and get chipped. I’ve added some rubber strips to the edges, but the way the door panels are welded makes this preventative step awkward
• The Petrol gauge is not good. It has little “resolution” (only six steps) and it can move up and down between these steps depending on whether you’re travelling uphill or downhill.
• Acceleration, even on a slight incline, is utterly pathetic. This makes overtaking on a German motorway a question of waiting for a downhill, and hoping for a gap in traffic to get a run-up.

There are many advantages which I will list in another post… but these are just things to watch out for… and things which I hope get improved in future versions.

In a nutshell (using Thumb based statistical inference) :

The IQ is 20% heavier, has 20% more engine power, uses 20% more fuel, costs 20% more, cruises 25% faster (160km/h) but with worse mid-range acceleration,  is 100% more luxurious, and 100% safer (construction, airbags, braking assistance etc.).

The IQ is also about 40% more stable to drive (cornering and at speed), but has far worse visibility (particularly rearward visibility) than the Daihatsu, and with its high sides, avoiding obstacles while parking is not always easy.

JSecurity has changed it’s name to Ki.  At first I wasn’t massively keen on the new “Ki” name, but I’ve been thinking about it all day, trying to design a new logo.

Security is about keeping invaders out, pushing them away, blocking their entry…

What can we do with those letters?

Hopefully it takes no explaining. The basic idea is that the K and I are turned into two people. The one on the left is blocking an attacker (“pushing” them away), lifting the attacker off his feet.

Pushing somebody away is probably the most simple, effective and natural defense which exists against an attacker. In particular, the defender is strongly rooted with his feet firmly on the ground, balanced perfectly. This should (cue Whalesong and Jossticks) reflect the fact that Ki is simple and natural to use, while the project has its feet firmly on the ground perfectly balancing the needs of its architecture and users!

The image was made as SVG with the fantastic Inkscape.

I also drew a roundhouse kick which makes an effective K I form, but on the other hand, security in our sense relates more to “denying” an attacker (pushing them away) then knocking their block off.

I’m not sure the new name will help web searches, nor do I think it’s particularly clear what the project is about. I’m also dubious about the desire to extend beyond Java, but there we go.

I didn’t know the term “internet” actually came from France

One reason I’m especially interested in JDBC is that when run as a in-memory database, it will be fast enough for unit tests that run on a proper database (not via EasyMock or somesuch).

I’ve never any database work with Java before, and the first thing I realise whilst getting into this is that the ResultSet object in the JDBC is utterly numpty. The result set is closed, when the statement gets closed (which makes encapsulating the statement in a “query” function hard) and cloning / proxying the ResultSet looks like a fudge.

Time to get to grips with Springs JDBCTemplate methinks. The idea there is to define a RowMapper which then returns a HashMap containing the values you need (although it lacks the fine grain database cursor control of the pure ResultSet at first glance).

I used to ridicule my poor friend Candide (PalaceHotel) about the miserable, overly complex, designed by committee file handling facilities in Java. In the meantime I’ve become quite fond of Java, and he’s just pointed me in the direction of the Apache Commons IO packages for Java (API here). These address just about all the weakness I’ve been complaining about! Cheers Candide!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/feb/01/gaza-food-crisis