2012

Floods.

Explosions.

Hell freezing over.

And, apparently electric cars in Australia.

Last week I rang Nissan Australia and spoke to one of their reps about when I could buy a Nissan Leaf EV. After all its prominently advertised on their Australian website, and nowhere there does it say that there are any delays in supplying the vehicle.

The context for this is that under the heading "Our Plan for Australia" BetterPlace, the demand side electricity-for-EV's technology supplier says they are "working with the Renault-Nissan Alliance, which will be among the first to introduce EVs". Of course to supply electricity for EV's to help us clean the air, and reduce dependence on foreign oil, Better Place actually needs the actual EV's that people will be driving. So when they say they are working with Renault-Nissan, you could be forgiven for thinking that when they "introduce EV's" that we will actually be able to drive them.

"Sorry", I was told by the Nissan rep, "not until 2012".

I also contacted Mitsubishi Motors Australia. Surely their iMiev, which is being trumpeted as the first EV in Australia is available? I personally think the iMiev is likely to be less car than the Leaf, but without the choice, I was willing to compromise. Here we are in 2010, the battle has been won, EV's are here right? Well, EV singular - the iMiev is here, at least, eveb if the Nissan Leaf is not.

As you would expect, there is enormous global demand for this vehicle, and consequently, availability of the i-MiEV will be somewhat restricted for a time. In response to strong demand from the local market however, Mitsubishi Motors Australia Limited (MMAL) has negotiated to secure a limited number of i-MiEV vehicles for Australian release.

Mitsubishi's rep went on to say that these cars are only being released to fleet buyers, and in 2011 they plan to release cars to the public. I will believe it when I see it.

Why?

Think about where are the cars that are being produced to satisfy this "global" demand going: Japan.

There is much evidence that the profits to be had in their home markets for Japanese EV makers are much greater counting in all factors including government incentives for clean vehicles that don't burn foreign oil.

Japanese auto consumers are also more tech-savvy, and more open to compact cars with advanced features. Why take the risk on markets like Australia, and the USA who are too dumb to even understand an electronic accelerator pedal. Hint: its not cosmic rays interacting with your pedal, its your foot.

However even tho' the manufacturers don't want to ship their cars here, they are not afraid of using their vapourware vehicles to hype their clean car image on their websites. All the while continuing to sell the gas guzzling, road hoggers that we follow the Americans in buying up by the ton.

A footnote about the Nissan Leaf promotional machine - I was contacted by phone by Nissan in October, and offered a chance to test drive the Nissan Leaf at the All-Energy Conference in Melbourne. Unfortunately I was just about to fly internationally for work, and could not take them up on their generous offer to pay all my own costs to appear in Melbourne with 2 days notice.

Had it not been for the international travel I would probably have taken them up on their offer - but it smacked to me of a failed PR effort, since I was aware that they had been running a competition on their website with very similar prospects. It made me wonder if perhaps they had not gotten a lot of entries.

Nissan, Mitsubishi, and others - wake up and smell the profits. People don't want flash websites and broken promises - we want the actual cars. We want clean air and better tomorrows.

And we don't want to have to wait until 2012.

Qt Dev Days 2010

Held at the ginormous San Fran Airport Hyatt hotel, it was a great event for getting amongst Qt hackers both in & outside Nokia

DevDays Coming Up

Long time, no post.

Been working wayyyy too hard, on the linux conf (see previous post) and on work - leading up to the Qt Developer Days!

I have two presentations I'm delivering - click on the image in the margin left or on this link to have a look at the DevDays program.

One of them should be a fairly standard spruicking of the QML/3D pitch. If you haven't heard of it yet try youtube for Danny's great video.

The other one had me guessing for a while - Stunning Mobile Applications - what are they exactly? So I have written a little demo to provide me with some source material.

Both presentations will be up on both programmes - Munich in a couple of weeks (11 October) and San Francisco in early November - so I have four speaking appointments altogether.

I am looking forward to letting my hair down after it all I can tell you. :-)

BrizVegas hosting LCA in Jan 2011

Great excitement - we're hosting the hugely popular grass-roots Linux conference linux.conf.au in my home town of Brisbane, Australia in January 2011.

The linux.conf.au conference does the rounds of cities in Australia and New Zealand, and was last in Brisbane in 2002.

For those overseas Brisbane is around an hours drive north of the Gold Coast holiday beaches and is a balmy 30 degrees C (around 85F) in January. So bring your bathing suit. :-)

Yours truly is on the organising committee for lca2011 and we've been toiling away to get the website up and running; and to put together the Call for Papers.

Both went live last night. Whew.

This years conference will have all the things that have become part of linux.conf.au, like the mini-confs (I'm lca2011 mini-conf organizer), tutorials, and talks. There'll be some great keynote speakers, and the fun Free and Open Sources community vibe.

The conference will be hosted at QUT in Gardens Point, and some functions will be at the Brisbane Convention & Entertainment Center on the other side of the river.

Of course there's lots more work to do yet, but we've hit a milestone and things are looking good.

Onward to 6 months time and January 2011 - see y'all then in Brisbane.

Th!nk Test Drive

From Th!nk Test Drive

I'm in Oslo, Norway at present and got an opportunity to test drive the wonderful Th!nk city car. This car is all electric - not a hybrid, using no fuel of any kind - and produces zero emissions.

Down at the Aker Brygge area - a redeveloped wharf district teaming with locals and tourists, numbers swelled by the Eurovision Song Contest being held here - a number of car vendors had their wares on display.

I spoke to Amelie of Rohneselmer who was standing next to a pair of Th!nk City cars - one red and one black, and was offered the chance for a test drive! Of course I said yes! A work colleague, who luckily knew the streets better than I came along for the ride.

Amelie took me to the nearby park and handed me the keys. Like any modern car, it had a remote for the rear hatch and for the doors. Also on there was a mysterious silver key that I was later to discover to be very useful.

The start sequence got me first time - unlike the Prius where you simply turn it on, the Th!nk has a traditional key-lock, and you turn it like a petrol car to a spring-loaded ignition position, until the car has powered up, then leave the key to return to the drive position.

After that bit of difficulty mastering the powerup sequence, I was off. The wharf area was chock full of twisty streets, cobbles and hazards, crossings and gotchas - the light, nimble Th!nk went exactly where I pointed it, and with no gear shift to worry about I was able to quickly negotiate my way onto some broader streets.

Here the cars pep really showed up the gas guzzlers, leaping away from the lights before the neighbouring BMW's and Vovlo's. Its smaller size meant that gaps were easy to take, plus a great turning circle, and very good visibility out the copious glass made me feel confident around the city streets.

Soon we found our way into a lot of small cobbled streets with sidewalk cafes, and families out enjoying the city. It felt great to roll down the window, and quietly and cleanly roll along with them, while smelly noisy gasoline cars really didn't seem to belong here.

Then out onto the civic streets again - where I wanted to try out charging. The test car only came with one charger - I suspect that any Th!nk owner would have a number. The stock one looks suitable for a garage and has a control unit that allows for stowing the cords around it, plus some controls and indicator lights. It looks as tho' it could either mount on a wall or lay on the floor.

After some early showers the weather had fined up, and the charging set up was quick and painless to set up. If you were going to be parked for some time, then an all weather charger would probably be needed. Other cars seemed to just have a plain cord that ran straight from the charging bollard to the cars socket.

The highway speed was something I did not get to try out, but Amelie tells me its good for highway speeds without any trouble.

The range question was asked. The current model had a sodium based battery, but newer cars are coming out with a Lithium-Ion battery chemistry and a claimed 160km range. These cars are just becoming available and are priced at 244,000KR, around $48,000 Australian dollars. This is the extra cost of the longer range batteries which come fully paid up - not a subscription or lease model of purchase.

However in Norway you have set against that purchase cost, a huge range of incentives thrown in by the local authorities - who despite being an oil producing nation are keen to see their cities clear of pollution.

As the driver of a Th!nk City EV in Oslo you get:

• free parking in city and other parks
  
• free charging at public charge points
  
• reduced and free taxes, registration and charges
  
• free travel on the ferries
• toll roads, bridges and so on are free
• use of bus, taxi and transit lanes

And of course you never have to pay for petrol ever again! Plus you're saving the planet and making the air easier to breathe.

As their logo has it "Green means go!".

I want one - maybe two!

The Giant iPhone

The iPad - Apples new giant iPhone - doesn't display Spammy flash websites, and that is a problem, how?

The sheer unadulterated drivel being spruiked about the iPad is unbelievable.

Can I just say - you idiots out there ranting and raving that the iPhone doesn't have flash - here's a word for you guys - STFU.

You other guys calling it a computer - get off my lawn, leave this to the adults.

And others saying Jobs/Apple is saying its a netbook killer - where exactly? Who is saying that because its not in your article anywhere!

The iPad is a mobile device. Its a giant iPhone. It is all about what it does not have.

You hold it in one hand, and read e-books, the web, and your email. Its not a computer. Never was intended to be a computer.

Its just some new gadget that Apple made, and like their other stuff its designed to be simple, easy to use, and to limit its scope so that it performs very well to its price point. End of story. Its not a cancer cure, or a faster-than-light ship.

It comes with cut down versions of Apples office apps, keynote and so on so you can render a powerpoint or an excel file, but you'd be completely insane to try to edit one on the device.

The iPhone doesn't have flash. Ergo, the iPad doesn't have flash.

It was never going to have flash. If you like some other gadget, go and freaking well buy that instead!

Oh wait - that's right no other mobile device actually does flash!

The HP Slate you say? It's not here is it, and when it comes - with its 5 hour battery life, half that of the iPad, it will be dead on arrival. Play flash on that guy and you'll be lucky to get 2 hours out of it. If HP sell one Slate for every 10 iPads I'll be amazed.

Niche devices like Nokias lovely N900 (disclaimer - I work for Nokia) they have loads of power, and can render flash sites in the installed browser. But most of those, like the N900 are not available in all places, and are expensive. The N900 is a phone for geeks, and I'm talking more than being a power user: you need to be a linux geek to use this awesome thing to its full potential.

Android phones fall into the same category as well - many can theoretically render flash, but like the N900 doing so makes battery life pathetically short, and the phones become unresponsive and brittle as glass. Plus these devices have a long long way to go before they're a contender against the iPhone for market share.

So what is it about Flash?

Flash is a nightmare to implement on mobile devices - that is the core business reason why Apple didn't put it on their mobile devices, pure and simple. In webkit every flash item on a page becomes its own top level window, and consumes massive resources. Dropping Flash, and some other "too hard basket" items is why Apple engineers were able to deliver an iPhone that kicked the ass of every other phone vendor.

I work for Nokia, who make great products. They have an incredible coverage of the features required by demanding buyers, for example road-warriors with their voice-dialling and other advanced stuff.

The iPhone came out and had none of this stuff, and yet it went totally viral. Everyone wanted one. Why? Because it was simple and easy to use. The people that needed those advanced features - the tiny fraction of them, went and got those phones - Blackberrys, our high-end Nokias. The rest - basically everyone, since those power-users were a tiny percentage, got iPhones because the smooth easy to use UI made them feel empowered, instead of intimidated like the UI's on the high end business phones.

All those other vendors are scrambling to play catch up right now, and the reason is that stuff that was too hard, that made the device difficult to use, performed badly or was just plain too costly in terms of both development and bill-of-materials to put on the device - guess what - Apple didn't put it on there.

And what's more do people really actually want or need flash? Yes, I hear a lot of journo's and whinging slashdot types harping on about it, but who wants it on a device? I would love to hear what it is that you actually want to use it for.

If I had an iPad and it did have flash, then I would have to go and install a flash blocker. If I ever do buy one, guess what - I don't have to bother. But if it did, I would be wanting more than a blocker - I would be wanting someway to remove all support for flash from the device because its insecure, changes formats & versions every season, and most of all because it sucks the life out of the device.

You can't watch video's on iPhone because "75% of videos are flash"...? Well right on the home screen of the iPhone there's a YouTube icon and I have played a ton of videos using that - guess what it works just fine. People are working around flash, because of all its problems and that 75% or whatever it really is will be trending to zero very fast.

And another thing. The so called "hype" about the iPad.

You guys complaining about flash, you are the same whining tech journo's who were second guessing every last detail of the iPad even before it had a name, and cranking out articles speculating about what its feature list might be; then a week or two later complaining about the "hype of the ipad".

Do you know who hyped the iPad? It was you guys! Apple didn't do anything more than it had ever done - wheel out Steve Jobs and make a couple of press releases and videos. There were no superbowl adverts, no blimps or marching bands, Apple did nothing that qualified as hype in my book.

Hyping the iPad - it was done by the tech press - Apple didn't have to lift a finger!

By the way - I hope you like my bargain basement graphic of the iPad. Its scrawled on a napkin in my hotel room as I travel for work. Home grown right here.

Unlike the idiotic tech press who recycle Apple's own images just as they moan and whinge about Apple. They bitch and complain at the same time as they live and breathe for every next product that Apple makes.

The iPad - its just another crappy Apple device that doesn't do very much at all, but does it so well that everyone will buy it and meanwhile everyone else thinks they have to implement flash as a way to compete.

Here's my tip to you - forget flash if you want to stand any chance against the Apple line up of mobile devices.

East Anglia Scientists Exonerated by Inquiry

The inquiry led by Lord Oxburgh found that there was no evidence of scientific malfeasance in the actions of the East Anglia Climate Research Center (CRU). Professor David Hand, another member of the inquiry, said that the CRU scientists were to be commended for high-lighting the degrees of uncertainty in their results.

This result was after an extensive inquiry covering 20 years of CRU's work, done by an independent panel - in fact Lord Oxburgh is a former head of Shell. If there had actually been a climate-gate, a smoking gun, it would have been found - but none was.

Oxburgh commented that the scientists were ill-prepared for the limelight they were placed under, and that if anything they were naive in their handling of the exposure. The panel also commented that while newer statistical methods could have been used its doubtful this would have changed the results.

Claims that they manipulated data or tried to hide facts have been destroyed. Those claims - generated by a disgraceful smear campaign unfolding from some stolen emails - provided by persons unknown - have done their damage to the climate change effort that had been galvanized throughout the world by the IPCC report. Now that the claims made by those in possession of the emails have been shown to be false, its sadly the case that the speeding comet of climate change still heads toward our earth and the advice of scientists on how to fix the problem has been foiled by the dirty tricks brigade.

We already know - as discussed in previous articles on this blog - that the oil companies and others are quite capable of mounting bogus conferences and using other tricks from the arsenal of fake science employed by the tobacco companies while they fought against the scientific evidence that smoking kills. Who was behind those stolen emails? We'll likely never know, but we do know who benefits don't we.

Of course the sensationalist headlines timed perfectly for the world climate summit in Copenhagen at the end of 2009 will not be retracted.

All this is part of a general retrograde anti-scientific trend amongst not just our politicians, but society at large with the result that television shock-jocks, right wing fundamentalist preachers and peddlers of magic crystals and horoscope readings are to be trusted more than science. This is at the core of our ghastly treatment of third world countries when it comes to vaccines and other urgent medical aid, and also to the role of genetically modified foods in curing world hunger - eloquently discussed in a recent talk by Michael Specter.

I will name this science denial. We have a word for it: ignorance. Wilful ignorance. Its the ignorance of the idiocracy, and its the ignorance of pseudo-science and fundamentalist religions, that spout tripe such as new earth creationism.

Science has error-bars - well understood measures of how significant scientific evidence is, and how much confidence we can have in it. This is the "uncertainty" referred to by the inquiry panel, and highlighted by CRU in its report to the IPCC. When the scientists of CRU and then of the IPCC interpreted the data for their reports it is the sum total of centuries of experience in the scientific research that they relied apon. So called "uncertainty" is just grist to the scientific mill - once the error terms are quantified, scientific judgements can be made with great confidence.

Like the issue of the Himalayan glaciers non-scientists grasp hold of a few words and figures and due to lack of scientific expertise leap to conclusions that they are ill-qualified to make.

Its like a doctor telling a 45 year old man that he has 3 years to live, and instead it is discovered a mistake has been made and he has 6 years to live instead. Listen to the advice our doctors and professors are giving us - they are the only hope we have. The message is that the Himalayan glaciers are under imminent threat - we had better make good use of the extra time that any incorrect figures may have given us. If we say "you were wrong" to the scientists and believe that allows us to sit on our hands we are completely missing the point of their warnings.

Climate change remains as dire as it always was - we cannot keep doing what we have been doing and expect the world we leave for future generations to look like the one we inherited.

But even more importantly we cannot live in a world where progress on medicines, health, food, transport and in fact the quality of life of all, is held back by ignorance.