eelco.com

Gewaagde titel. Maargoed, dit bericht waarin beschreven wordt dat de files de eerst helft van dit jaar substantieel zijn afgenomen maakte zoveel bij me los dat ik heb besloten het heft in eigen handen te nemen. Als een dagelijkse genieter van alle beslommeringen op o.a. de A12 (mijn referentiekader voor de mate van file) raak je toch nieuwsgierig; er zijn blijkbaar minder files, alleen niet bij mij? Hoe komt dat? Wat zijn eigenlijk files? Wanneer en hoe worden ze gemeten? Wikipedia biedt gelukkig uitkomst. Een file is (over het algemeen, er bestaan vele definities) :

• langzaam rijdend verkeer: verkeer dat over ten minste 2 kilometer nergens harder rijdt dan 50 km/u, maar doorgaans wel sneller dan 25 km/u
• stilstaand verkeer: verkeer dat over ten minste 2 kilometer vrijwel overal minder dan 25 km/u rijdt
• langzaam rijdend tot stilstaand verkeer: langzaam rijdend verkeer over veelal wat grotere lengte met hierin op sommige stukken stilstaand verkeer.

In Nederland is Rijkswaterstaat verantwoordelijk voor het inwinnen van deze informatie voor het hoofdwegennet. Service providers, zoals de VID en de ANWB, mogen deze informatie vervolgens verspreiden. De files worden voornamelijk gemeten door het gebruik van detectie-lussen onder het asfalt.
Hier gaat het natuurlijk al direct fout. Als we met z’n allen niet duidelijk afspreken wat een file is, hoe lang een file is en welke vertraging erdoor kan ontstaan dan is die informatie totaal nutteloos. Daarbij blijkt dat zowel de ANWB als de VID ook nog op andere manieren extra informatie inwinnen om een zo totaal mogelijk beeld over hun definitie van file te bieden. O.a. door de inzet van mensen die zelf file melden. Erg onbetrouwbaar natuurlijk. De berichtgeving is dubieus te noemen; een mooi voorbeeld was laatst op Nu.nl waarbij er maar 2 x 3 kilometer file stond, terwijl het natuurlijk eigenlijk een file van 6 km was.

Hoe telt dit mee voor de totale file beleving in Nederland?

Het is in elk geval zo dat deze informatie vrijwel nooit correct is. Iedereen maakt geregeld mee dat je op een plek rijdt waar op dat moment file zou moeten staan, of erger, dat je in een file staat die niet genoemd wordt. En dat is erg jammer, want daar ligt nou net de oplossing voor het hele probleem.

Eerst even terug naar het begin, het meten. TomTom heeft een veel slimmer systeem bedacht om files te meten. In samenwerking met een mobiele telefoon operator meet TomTom het aantal mobieltjes dat op een bepaald weggebied langzaam rijdt of stilstaat. Niet alleen is deze informatie veel nauwkeuriger (zolang die telco maar voldoende abonnementen heeft) maar het werkt ook nog eens op wegen zonder detectielussen en met een veel hogere resolutie. Een combinatie van beide methoden is natuurlijk het meest betrouwbaar.

Dit frustratiestuk is natuurlijk met name voortgekomen uit het persbericht dat het aantal files is afgenomen. Komend jaar wil ik dat zelf meten; maar dan ook het verschil tussen de diverse meetpartijen. De week-grafiek hieronder wordt elke 5 minuten ge-update met al het laatste file nieuws, uitgezet per meetpartij. Zoals nu al zichtbaar is meet TomTom beduidend meer files dan VID en ANWB. En gek genoeg is er tussen die laatste twee partijen soms ook een substantieel verschil, terwijl ze beiden dezelfde bron hanteren. Informatie voor de VID wordt op gehaald bij nu.nl, voor de ANWB en TomTom worden de meetwaarden direct van de desbetreffende sites betrokken.

De individuele snelwegen, met de verschillen per partij per weg zijn hier te vinden. Ook deze worden elke 5 minuten ververst.

Tijd voor een oplossing. Simpel gezegd is er capaciteit (wegen), een capaciteitsbehoefte (auto’s) en daarbij voorspelbare en onvoorspelbare incidenten (voorspelbaar: wegwerkzaamheden, onvoorspelbaar: ongelukken). Ik denk dat er nog altijd voldoende capaciteit is voor de huidige behoefte. De verdeling in tijd is alleen niet optimaal (spits). Het blijkt echter dat veel mensen voordat ze gaan rijden de diverse sites raadplegen om vast te stellen óf ze moeten gaan rijden of dat ze beter even kunnen wachten. Jammer dat die informatie dus vaak incorrect is en deze mensen vervolgens gaan bijdragen aan de lengte van een file. Daarnaast heeft een substantieel deel van Nederland inmiddels navigatiesystemen met de mogelijkheid om via radiosignalen file-informatie te ontvangen. Op basis van die informatie kan een navigatiesysteem doorrekenen of er alternatieve wegen zijn om binnen redelijke tijd op plaats van bestemming aan te komen. Opnieuw jammer dat de fundamentele informatie ook hier incorrect is.

De oplossing? Vanuit overheidswege zorgen dat de file-informatie klopt. Hierdoor kunnen mensen en navigatiesystemen ervoor zorgen dat (snel)wegen beter benut worden (ik vind het prima om vanuit Nieuwgein over Amsterdam naar Den Haag rijden als mijn reistijd maar zo kort mogelijk is en de inschatting mijn navigatiesysteem correct is). Wegen worden veel geleidelijker belast; mensen kiezen ervoor om even langer (of juist korter) te werken als het echt druk is waardoor de files kort blijven en sneller opgelost zijn. Daarnaast zorgen de navigatiesystemen voor een beter verdeling van auto’s en dus ook minder en/of kortere files.

How to acquire a Gphone

I have a serious addiction; i’m Eelco and I am a gadget freak. So when I was in the US a couple of weeks ago I was tempted to buy one of the ‘new’ Gphones (after this I’ll call them G1). At first I was managing my addiction quite well. It also helped that when I was in the T-Mobile store in the Mall at Millenia in Orlando Florida to buy one and one of the T-Mobile sales people started telling me that buying one without a contract was impossible but if I’d pay him $400 cash (according to the signs the G1 would be $299 without a contract) and meet him in the food square at the mall, he would bring me one which would be unlocked. That didn’t gave me a warm and trusting feeling so I declined and went on.

During the second part of my trip I went to the TED conference. This conference is partly held in Palm Springs, CA. At the end of the conference I went to the mall in Palm Desert, found a T-Mobile shop and to my surprise walked out with a locked G1 in a matter of minutes. Total costs: $334 with VAT. Back in my hotel room I started searching online for a method to unlock the G1, which was necessary because my carrier is not T-Mobile and the G1 is locked to the T-Mobile chips and networks. I found this site which at first looked obscure but worked like charm.

The showdown

So which is better? My trusted iPhone or the new fancy freshly unlocked Gphone? Well, let me start by telling that I’ve used the Gphone for about 2 days and am now back to using my iPhone. Why? For a multitude of reasons. First let me explain my primary needs for a phone:

1. It needs to do anything that’s currently – or fast becoming – a market standard (G3, GPS, touch screen, push etc).
2. I don’t want multiple phones, so it will have support my business and personal needs (business being: good e-mail and calendaring support, making notes and a good browser, personal: good SMS interface, games, gadgets etc).
3. CarKit support! I drive a lot and it needs to interface to my car, not only for the actual call but also stuff like sharing the address book with my car.
4. Reactive interface. If I touch an icon, I want it to react.
5. I really want it to be handsome

I like to think that these ‘need to haves’ are not too much to ask for and both phones in some degree comply with this list. But, as I said before, I was back to using my iPhones just after two days. Why? Well I don’t like the way the G1 looks and handles. It has this keyboard that pops out, which might be handy if you’re using your phone to write letters, but for the short messages I use it for it’s a drag. I’m not able to get my phone out of my pocket and respond to a short message without using both hands. Ok, the touch screen solution of the iPhone is not ideal, but easy enough to do most of the tasks I do in an easy and intuitive way. So that’s 1 – 0 for the iPhone. Then comes the camera. The picture quality on the G1 seems inferior to the iPhone. The pictures are darker and therefore less sharp. But a bigger concern is the speed of the camera. When taking a picture the camera takes a couple of seconds before actually taking the picture, resulting in moved or ‘just-after-the-perfect-moment’ pictures. 2-0 for the iPhone of which the camera is far from perfect but at least fast on the shutter.

Next: business use. Like I said before my business usage of a phone is mostly for checking e-mail and calendering. At the office we use the Google Apps infrastructure for our e-mail and calendering. The G1 supports this in a very elegant manner, when setting up the phone it asks for your credentials and everything is setup automatically. Using push technology the G1 is always up-to-date and new appointments or e-mail popup when they’re being set. (Note: The G1 only supports ONE Google account. If you also want to add your private account you’ll have to do that trough a different application. Unfortunately this is against one of my prime directives). Until last week the three infrastructures the iPhone supported with regards to push and sync technology was Apples Mobile Me, Yahoo Mail and Microsoft’s ActiveSync for syncing to a Microsoft Exchange setup. Last week Google introduced the possibility of syncing your iPhone over the air with Google’s calendar and mail using Microsoft’s ActiveSync technology. However it doesn’t really feel like push to me, drains the battery and feels to much ‘duct taped’ yet to be fully trusted. So 1-2 for the G1. The interfaces of the mail and calendar applications are a completely different story. The Gmail, mail and calendar applications on the G1 won’t win a useful-interface-design price; they’re not intuitive and look dreadful. A big contrast with the iPhone which is very intuitive on these points. 3-1 for the iPhone.

Next: the differences in OS and community. Apple uses a scaled down version of it’s OSX while the G1 is using Andriod, a cutdown version of Linux. Android applications are written in Java (It will probably do more but the API I found is for Java development). The iPhone’s apps are a little more ‘native’; they’re written in Objective-C and use a virtualisation layer which enables all kinds of API methods, but much less than which is available on the G1. Basically the G1 will perform a little slower and will use a little more memory when running apps. Problems on the iPhone can however result in much larger problems, like a complete crash of your phone. Looking at both API’s I think that the learning curve on developing apps for the iPhone is much steeper but will eventually lead to faster application development. However, I’d like to give the G1 a point for the openness of Android, it’s API and – something the iPhone is really lacking – background processes: 2-3 for the G1.

Both systems offer an easy way to download new apps. iPhone uses it’s appstore while the G1 has the Google market. The bad thing about the iPhone’s appstore is that it is highly restricted. Apple uses it’s right extensively to moderate the availability of applications in the appstore. For example applications competitive to Apple’s apps won’t be allowed into the store. Google uses a more open approach; many applications are allowed in the store. That’s another point for the G1 (3-3). However the Appstore has much more applications than the Google Marketplace. One more point for the iPhone (4-3).

4-3 is not a bad score, but I’d like to give the iPhone one more point which the G1 doesn’t deserve and that’s for beauty. So the iPhone wins with a 2 points difference : 5-3.

Future
The 5-3 score for the iPhone can be explained: Android and the G1 are newer products so there’s less customer experience and feedback. Also Apple just has a way of making beautiful intuitive products.
At the end it’s my guess that Google will be dominant on the OS side of the phone market. Apple is not learning from past experience (or might still hang on to the same philosophy). By making Android available as many phones as possible Google will gain more momentum and a much broader platform. Because of the openness of the platform it’s easy to customize it in any way possible. This is also a risk, making a perfectly integrated hardware and software platform is hard to do when making a system for a multitude of hardware platform.
In the future we might end up with Google’s Android based phones that are famous for their blue-screen-of-death lockups.

Last week I was again privileged to attend another marvelous four-and-a-half days of ideas, innovation, design, empathy and fun at TED. Last year the conference was held in Monterey, CA with a simulcast setup in Aspen, CO. At that time I was invited to join the gathering at Monterey and enjoy the sessions down there. This time the venues changed; the primary event was at Long Beach, CA (Beach) while the simulcast was at Palm Springs, CA (Mountains, Desert). I was a guest at the Palm Springs venue which was beautiful (check my video here) and about 28 degrees celcius, which is quite important when coming from a cold country like the Netherlands.

Because I arrived early I subscribed for one of the pre-conference safari rides (great opportunity to meet new people. If you ever go to TED, be sure to be a day early and catch one of those trips. Don’t fall for the “you should not wear flip flops because of the scorpions”, we did not see any scorpions, snakes or any other animal that tried to attack us). The next day the conference started and it was great. During one of our many “pool party’s” which are excellent events to meet new people and share ideas, people started asking me what the difference was between the ‘main thing’ at Long Beach and the experience at Palm Springs. So for people that want to attend TED but are unable to decide to which location to apply for I’ve created a summary of the differences that came across. Please note that this is the way I’ve experienced it, and that I might differ a lot from other experiences.

Ted@Longbeach is the main thing therefore most of the ‘big’ speakers are in that location and when they are speaking you’re actually there to experience it. No matter how much effort goes into the experience being shared with Palm Springs (and the TED crew do put in a lot of effort, more on that later) nothing beats being in the same room as the speaker / performer. But.. imagine 10 different kind of couches, seats and ‘beds’, high quality screens and a HD satellite uplink from Long Beach. Meanwhile a continuous supply of food and beverages (we should have one of those Google Café’s in our office) keeps you from getting hungry or thirsty. I’m not sure about the actual location (since I’ve not been at Long Beach) but the Riviera at Palm Springs is very nice. Though some of the other TEDsters and myself were thinking of joining the pool pleasure while attending the conference; what about screens at the pool?

The biggest difference between PS and LB are the TEDsters themselves (assuming the people at LB are similar as in Monterey). Among the LBTedsters are speakers, philanthropist and famous actors / artist. People that are well accomplished in life and (generally speaking) very set on their goals and purposes. Events and chats amongst attendees are somewhat more formal. Ideas need to be well considered and talked about but as soon as people are motivated they’re willing to put in a lot of energy. At PS the ambiance is much less formal. Many people show up after the conference at the local pool parties, discussions are very energetic and everybody gets involved. Friendships are being formed easily and just after a day most people know each other (this is of course also because PS only has 400 people while LB has over 1200).

To summarize, I think idea creativity (thinking of new ideas and have your ideas tested) is something that happens a little more with the people at PS while the folks at LB (again all in general) are more about the actual implementation and possibilities. If you ever get the chance of visiting TED, apply to Palm Springs the first year. Gather ideas and meet (new) people to test and elaborate on them. Then apply for Long Beach to get your idea going. Either way, it’s not an experience you’d want to miss!

I used to love playing those old (now retro) style games. You know, those point-and-click adventure games like Day of the Tentacle, Larry, Monkey Island, Police Quest, Kings Quest, Loom, Freddie Pharkas, Full Throttle and lots lots more. The graphic quality was good (i really love the cartoonisch style), nice music and excellent gameplay. Next to the adventure games there were really good level based games like The Lost Vikings (this game was really terrific), .. (ok, i was more into the adventures).
Yesterday i was checking the Apple App Store and saw the kind of games that are being sold for the iPhone today. They’re just like (or actually not as good as) the games i mentioned above. Although game engines (like Lucas’s SCUMM) are available for the iPhone (but unfortunatly not in in the App Store) almost all of the above games are still licence restricted so technically you’re not allowed to play them unless you’ve bought an orginal copy back in the early 90′s. This is a request to all the SIERRA and Lucas Art like companies out there, either sell your games online for a dollar so we can play them on our iphone (which is a brilliant platform for these kind of games) OR drop the licence and contribute to the world!
Same goes ofcourse for all the brilliant games (more important, gameplay) created for the C64 and MSX systems in the 80′s.

The day before the day before yesterday, which in this timezone would be monday, we went to SeaWorld Orlando. I always love SeaWorld. It’s a clean and beautiful park with marvelous dolphin and killer whale shows. The only thing I don’t get is all the Budweiser stuff (I know the park is owned by Anheuser Bush, but that doesn’t really makes it logical to add all the beer stuff to an sea based theme park).
We went with our good friends Quintijn and Nadine. Quintijn is ofcourse the guy I did LasVegas2Miami with and Nadine is his girlfriend. They’re on a trip from Orlando to New York and since we rented a (big, small seems to be impossible here) and they wanted to see a bit of the Orlando/Tampa area we figured it would be fun if they’d stay with us. Quintijn is the anti-christ of theme parks, he really dislikes them just for what they are (he’s a really weird guy; loves clothing, shoes and stuff like house decoration. Hates theme parks, but loves cars and sports). But, he said he actually liked SeaWorld and that he proved it by staying at the park for more than 4 hours We (Kyan, Marloes and I), being total Orlando-based-themeparks-lovers, ofcourse stayed until the fireworks (which is 9pm).

Below is the footage i’ve shot from that day. It’s a bit crappy, i’ve got Final Cut Express on my laptop, and my laptop has only 120gig of diskspace. Since the content is in 1080i HD format, this is both nearly enough on the cpu/memory and diskspace side. I’ve shot all of it on my Sony TG3E. Have Fun!

Update: It seems Vimeo won’t allow embedded HD. So you should see the video here (which is the HD version).

A little clip with my son having fun in the car here in Florida!

I’ve promised updates but, so far, none we’re needed. We’ve had some rain and wind here the last night (nothing bad though, not much more than what we in Dutch would called “een stevig buitje met wat wind”. Apart from the clouds, the weather is fine. No rain since 5 in the morning and the temperature is fine. Supposedly Fay is going to boomerang back over Florida. As it seems not this part (Polk County) though, so we’ll only be experiencing some rain or at least clouds. If something exciting happends i’ll get back here.

As said before, we’re enjoying our vacation in Florida.. however, There’s this nasty storm coming along which is causing a lot of wind and flooding. For people from the Netherlands, who are used to nothing in this regards, this storm is quite exciting. Currently nothing much is happening at this time (just a lot of rain and a little wind), but on our trusty channel 9 Bay News they just told that flooding will be quite severe in the Polk county (which is the county we’re in). They’re using the Doppler 9000 and the VIPIR radar systems to predict the follow up on the storm. They just told that the storm might boomerang back when it gets to the atlantic.

Anyways, we’re doing some monitoring of our own using the Sony TG3E (for high definition imaging) and the Sanyo Xacti VPC-CA65 for outdoor imaging (SD). Below is our first clip @ 18:05 Florida time. Stay with us as this story develops further.

It has been a while since my last post. Sorry about that. Since a couple of days my son, wife and me are hanging out here in Orlando Florida. We’ve flown with Lufthansa. First we had to go to Frankfurt then a direct flight from Frankfurt to Orlando. The flight was great, mostly due to the fact that our son (who’s 2 years and 3 months old) was behaving wonderfull.
I’ve flown with (for me a lot of) different companies lately so i’ve come up with this little table (comparing Delta, British Airways, KLM and Lufthansa) which shows my experience. These experiences are based upon the luxury i’ve had to be flying business class. When compared to economy nobody wins, Singapore Airlines is the biggest winner of them all (like i said to a KLM hostess, Singapore Airlines Economy is much better than all of the business classes below). They’ve made a 23 hour flight to Australia feel like a 2 hour flight.

FYI: Since i get airsick easily eating on a plane is not my favorite thing to do. So that’s why i do not like those specially created Chef’s dinners with all the fancy cooking stuff. I love this in a restaurant but that’s because in a restaurant it is served fresh. At a plane, it needs to be conserved which kills the taste and makes everything smell like catfood (sometimes it tastes like that too). Pizza was invented for this reason, that’s why Delta is my friend. You might wonder how Singapore Airline fixed this for me? Well, i told them i didn’t wanted the food and after telling the reason why they made me a fresh salmon sandwhich (they had a chef cooking for the people in first class). This is how you make friends

So, back to Florida. We’re in a wonderful house, so wonderful in fact that i didn’t want to keep it from the world so below is a video of the whole place (the video is in Dutch).

It seems the most important of the Amazon’s webservices are down. EC2 (the Elastic Computing), S3 (storage) and SQS (the Queing service) are all reporting red on CloudStatus. Hope it comes up soon and i’m very curious about the cause.