Updated: Never — Philip's Blog

Frank's iPhone developers are stupid! post on Planet Grep today made me a little grumpy.

Stating that iPhone developers are "stupid" because they target a restrictive environment is a bit blunt. Further suggesting that all their problems would magically go away if only they'd write "web applications" is criminally short-sighted at best.

While I'm happy to accept that some aspects of "web development" are "real programming" (and I have great respect for some of the people who identify themselves as "web developers"), I'm not so happy with the implication being made that "web development" has somehow obsoleted or replaced what has traditionally been considered as "real programming".

Frank seems to feel that all the things people want to implement natively could just as well be expressed as "web applications". I beg to differ. "Web applications" may be a reasonable choice for applications involving the manipulation of data in some way, but they're inherently unsuited to many other things.

The iPhone provides a lot of interesting hardware in a fairly compact battery-powered package. I can easily see people imagining things for it to do which Apple did not intend it for. Asserting that "web applications" could be used to implement all these things suggests a very unrealistic worldview.

I don't see "web applications" being used for interrupt handling or DMA or for that matter anything that involves networking on any level beyond the payload of a TCP stream. While those low-level things can conveivably be driven by "web applications" on the presentation layer, perhaps even down to the session layer, something underneath still needs to "be there".

It must be incredibly frustrating to target an environment which only allows "blessed" code to run, especially if the requirements for blessing are not all technical and the organization responsible for the blessing has commercial interests in not blessing code it deems to be threatening in some way.

I'm not very impressed with the "stupid" label being applied to people who can motivate themselves to target such restrictive environments and by extension to everyone who is (still?) not writing "web applications".

Android-based phones use a lot of databases in the sky to determine where people are. Not only does it use tower information, it also uses information from nearby access points. Presumably, Google has a small army driving around all over the world, noting access points it finds. Maybe they're the same people who also take pictures of every building they see?

Today, my phone suddenly decided that I was in Beijing. Strange, I thought. I had no recollection of getting on a plane, the air was breathable and the people around me didn't look particularly Chinese. Indeed, there was overwhelming evidence that I was not in Beijing.

A short while later, my phone decided that I was in Brest. The one in Belarus, on the border with Poland not the one in France, or the one in Germany, both of which are at least in the same timezone as where I really am.

From Beijing to Brest in under ten minutes and yet, I don't think I went through any wormholes. In fact, I was quietly sitting at my desk near Antwerp.

Highly entertaining.

Of course, the building I'm sitting in contains an unusually high number of access points. Usually more than fifty, sometimes more than a hundred. Have Google's location soldiers been a bit too thorough collecting data near factories where wireless access points are built? Or do the databases get confused when you give them too much data? No idea. I don't think the databases or the source code used for location are publically available.

There are a number of interesting drawbacks to the phone thinking it's in the wrong location. It gets the weather (very) wrong, but I can look outside to know what the weather is like. It also helpfully adjusts the clock to its perception of local time. This would be annoying if I used Google Calendar or a similar application which (stupidly) keeps times for events local to where you add the event to your calendar, rather than local to where the event will take place. Certain websites also feel they should speak to me in a different language (and in this case, different scripts too).

Unfortunately, while you can tell the phone not to use wireless location at all, you can't tell it that you want GSM location but not WiFi location. While WiFi access points move around (possibly quite a bit) between manufacture and deployment, GSM location is a bit more deterministic.

Because the access points may move again, there's probably not much point in reporting the access points and their real location to Google. It would be much more useful to have the option to selectively disable sources of location information with more granularity.

I am realistic (cynical?) enough to know that turning location detection off probably adds zero privacy benefit to compensate for the reduced functionality (getting the right time as soon as you get off a plane, for instance) that I just leave it on.

If you're on the run for agents of an Evil Repressive Government, the first thing you need to do is ditch your mobile phone. Buy a new one (cash) if you really need to call someone. Or use a pay phone.

A couple of weeks ago, I cycled past a sign on my way to the station stating that there would be "significant" traffic problems as they closed a crossing for repair. Of course, the sign didn't mention how these works would impact train schedules or the ability of cyclists to cross the tracks.

I sent an email off Infrabel, who supposedly maintains the rail infrastructure, and got no fewer than three emails back to tell me that my query was important to them and that I was assigned a "file number". Very useful.

More useful was the fact that my questions were actually answered the next day by a very thorough Infrabel employee (with a title like "arrondissementschef", you presumably have to be thorough) and all was well: trains would run as usual (note that this does not imply "on time") and cyclists could cross the tracks.

This morning, I received yet another email noting that my "file" was still open. Uh...

• My question was very thoroughly answered
• Why would I still be interested in the impact of roadworks between 30 October and 8 November on 17 November?

I guess the answer email just didn't cite the file number.

Now if only the trains could run on time for a change...