Jonathan Stott

So we’ve finally moved into our new offices at work. And quite swish they are too! I even get my own whiteboard to write stuff on, as well as a desk next to a window so that I can get real fresh air. Of course, there’s loads of stuff still to sort out - I haven’t worked out the tea situation yet and I think we are going to have to decide on a rota for biscuits for the development team (otherwise we will all grind to a halt!).

The main difference for me is the commute. It still takes about the same amount of time but instead of getting the bus or walking to the old office at Southampton University I have to take my bike and cycle to the new office. At least it will get me some much needed exercise!

At the same time as moving office we also shuffled a couple of servers into a new data centre. This was a bit more stressful than I’d anticipated - we had to fix a non-existent networking problem on one of the servers and make sure they were configured for the new network. Then there’s the hassle of some stuff that was still referencing one of the servers by IP address (bad!)… I was still at the data centre after 7pm on Friday - a time that no self-respecting sysadmin would expect to be at work! Luckily most stuff went without a hitch, even though it did take us rather longer than expected to work out how to install the servers in the racks. And more importantly, all the disaster plans that I wrote in case the van with the servers was rear-ended on the M25 or hijacked in Basingstoke weren’t needed!

Anyway - I need to go and sort out those blasted TPS reports…

So I’ve been trying to get back into the swing of doing the corrections for my Ph.D. thesis this weekend after being ill for a while. I’m pleased with what I’ve managed to get done so far but I’m probably only about half-way through with the corrections.

There were nearly 200 corrections after my viva back in January - some of them were rather fundamental and a lot of them have required a lot of re-reading of the literature. I’ve also had to add new references in to quite a few places to reinforce what I’ve been saying. As a result, the whole thing is now some 60 pages longer than when I submitted it! This is mainly as a result of having to expand in some detail pretty much all of the background chapter as I had misjudged the amount of detail needed when I was discussing existing research. Hopefully an extra dozen figures and 20 pages will help!

Hopefully it will be finished by the end of June. I really don’t want it to drag on any longer than that and spoil another summer. I also need to make sure that I am finished in time for the graduation ceremony in November!

Just one week ago, it was snowing!

Yet this week it is lovely and sunny!

Something I didn’t expect I’d see after moving to Bournemouth!

I don’t know when I’m likely to see snow on a beach again!

I splashed out £1932 at the end of December to get a season ticket for the trains between Bournemouth and Southampton. Seems a lot all in one go but it works out significantly cheaper than running a car just for the sake of getting to work and back.

I had previously been spending £10.10 a day on return tickets and the service had proved very reliable for the time I was using it between April and December last year. In fact, I think the longest delay that I had in all that time was 10 or 15 minutes.

Since I got my season ticket though, that’s all changed! In just the last fortnight I’ve had to endure two and a half hours of delays. First a train broke down just outside Bournemouth fouling the line. Unfortunately this was on the morning that I was going to Canterbury for the viva voce for my PhD! Not a good start! Yesterday, a broken rail at Brockenhurst meant that there were no trains running to Southampton all morning. I had to wait 45 minutes for a bus which then took an hour to get to Southampton rather than the half an hour that the train would take. And this morning the guard for my train went AWOL and was “delayed” for 20 minutes!

Last month my journey home on two successive days was screwed up by someone jumping/falling in front of a train at Hinton Admiral and by flooding at Sway.

Sadly, with a season ticket you don’t get any compensation on these delays until you renew. If I’d bought tickets on the day I would have been entitled to refunds on the price of my ticket for at least the problems with the broken down train and the broken rail.

Hopefully things get better soon! I don’t really want to be leaving an hour earlier than usual just in case things go pear-shaped :-/

Google Maps has had the ability to add and share extra content in the form of mapplets. I’ve recently added a mapplet that allows you to add a layer showing the elevation contours that have been on EarthTools.org for the last year.

Add the EarthTools.org Elevation Contours mapplet.

I have been adding new coverage for the contour layer for the last few months and most popular areas already have good coverage. I’ve also recently updated my data for Canada meaning much better coverage with fewer void areas and coverage above 60 degrees north. There are now something like 700,000 tiles covering seven different zoom levels and I am adding about 20,000-30,000 more tiles every week.

Bournemouth Borough Council wrote to everyone in this small area today to get our opinions on some highway improvements that they are planning for the road outside the flats where I live.

Manor Road in Bournemouth is a nice road lined with pine trees, but there are a deceptively large number of people living in the area because of the prevalence of large blocks of flats. The junction at the western end of Manor Road where it meets Gervis Road seems to be quite dangerous - I have seen at least two accidents here caused by shunts in the last few months.

The council are planning on taking action though. The proposal out for consultation at the moment involves making the westernmost part of Manor Road one-way and realigning both junctions with Gervis Road. The proposal also includes two new zebra crossings, one on Manor Road opposite Marchwood (number and another by the Gervis Road surgery. Right turns into Manor Road from Gervis Road by the St. Swithun’s Roundabout will be blocked by a new central island, including a refuge for pedestrians to cross. Finally, the proposals add a segregated cycleway/footway along Manor Road where it becomes one-way.

The proposals look very good from a road safety point of view. My only concern is that the realignment of the junction at the entrance to our block of flats is likely to cause disruption. It’s certainly good that the council are keen to hear our opinions.

I needed to be able to get the format Strings to use for the current locale so that I could pass them to a third-party API that I was using in Java. While the third-party API used the correct format for the current locale, it used the short form of the date rather than the medium form (difference in the UK is that the short form is 18/10/07 and the medium form is 18-Oct-2007). This was a bit of a challenge and required looking at the Java source code for the SimpleDateFormat class. In the end I worked out a solution, but it’s less than simple and probably isn’t future proofed. It works for Java 6 though:


ResourceBundle rb = LocaleData.getDateFormatData(Locale.getDefault());
String[] dateTimePatterns = rb.getStringArray(”DateTimePatterns”);
String datePattern = dateTimePatterns[DateFormat.MEDIUM + 4];
String timePattern = dateTimePatterns[DateFormat.MEDIUM];
System.out.println(datePattern + ” - ” + timePattern);


There must be a simpler solution, so let me know if there is!