The Scenic Route

Current mapping programs seek out the shortest route, either by time (accounting for traffic and speed limits) or distance. Why are these the only options though?

Unless I’m on a strict schedule, I would rather my drive take an extra few minutes, but avoid as much traffic as possible. This makes the drive much more enjoyable.

Additionally, what if I could say I had a certain amount of time and the program would find a route, with back roads, to fill that time, helping me find a scenic route? This would be great for road trips.

Shortest time and distance routing feels like it’s well polished at this point. I would love to see mapping applications experiment with other routing goals to help make our drives more enjoyable and memorable.

A Better .NET Regular Expression Tester

Recently I needed to write a regular expression in C#. To validate it I needed a regular expression tester for .NET. A quick search led me to Derek Slager’s Better .NET Regular Expression Tester.

Simple, yet effective, it supports all evaluation options (e.g. case insensitive), multiple matches and was fast to execute.

We Shall Sail Together

Update: The official version has been released!

In my last post I mentioned how much I loved the sea shanty that accompanied the E3 trailer for Sea of Thieves, but I wanted to know more. I did a bit of searching in the Sea of Thieves forums and sure enough there is already a thread about it. Turns out I’m not the only one clamoring to buy the song.

In the thread, a Rare employee reveals the name of the song as We Shall Sail Together, and implicitly confirms it was composed and recorded specifically for Sea of Thieves. They don’t have intentions to sell it, but have released a clean version on their YouTube channel. will be releasing a clean version (no guns or explosions and full length) through their YouTube channel sometime next week**.**

Until the clean version is released, we get to listen to a live version recorded on the floor at E3. Brilliant shanty, and a great live performance considering they were missing instruments and it seemed quite impromptu.

Sea of Thieves

At E3 2016, the game studio Rare announced a new game they are working on, Sea of Thieves:

Simply put, Sea of Thieves is a game about being a pirate, and everything that comes with that – and it’s a shared-world game where you’ll encounter other crews of players.

Let’s be honest: I don’t know too many people who haven’t wanted to experience the life of a pirate at least some point in their life. This is awesome.

I recommend watching the hilarious E3 gameplay video shared by the team. To say the least, it looks like a ton of fun and I’m looking forward to the release. Unfortunately, there isn’t a release date yet, but I’ll be getting it right away when it comes out.

Also, that intro video and music sets the tone perfectly. I don’t know if the music was custom recorded or not, but I would buy it in a heartbeat.

Update: I found out more information about the trailer music.

RCMP in BC Watching for Distracted Driving

As reported by the CBC, in BC the RCMP are starting to watch more closely for distracted drivers, from a long ways away:

The long arm of the law now has a super-long lens to catch distracted drivers — from as far as 1.2 kilometres away.

RCMP in B.C. are rolling out the powerful new lenses over the May long weekend, aimed at catching drivers texting or otherwise being distracted while behind the wheel.

While they can’t follow a moving vehicle, they will be watching vehicles stopped at intersections. If they see someone is distracted, they’ll take a photo or radio to an officer closer to the intersection to flag down the vehicle.

While the biggest reason for the new strategy is people distracted by cell phones, they will be looking for any other type of distraction as well:

“Putting on makeup, eating a bowl of cereal, reading a novel — we see all sorts of things as people are sitting in traffic,” said Wutke.

Overall I agree with this new strategy. Seemingly every day on my drive to and from work, delays are caused at lights were people are distracted and miss the light change. While less efficient traffic is a problem, those people are also more likely to be distracted while moving. Seeing someone distracted, swerving in their lane at highway speeds is unnerving every time and distraction does result in accidents.

RSS Feeds Live On

If I want to follow a website, I subscribe to their RSS feed with my RSS reader. This lets me easily track which articles I’ve read, sync that read status across devices and have a consistent reading experience regardless of the site.

If you aren’t a power user and have never heard of RSS, you’d be forgiven. You see, when I first started following blogs about 5 years ago, RSS was heartily promoted by most sites as a way to subscribe. Since then, with the ubiquity of Facebook and Twitter, prominent RSS links have often gone away.

Fortunately, even if no link is provided, most blogging engines still publish an RSS feed by default. Any blog powered by WordPress, for example, will have a feed provided at a default path of /feed/, unless the site owner has explicitly disabled it.

As long as RSS feeds continue to be published, I’m OK with the status quo of many sites not advertising it. At this point, the market has decided that RSS won’t be a mass-market success as a consumer-facing feature¹ — it’s just too fiddly for the average user — but the power users out there that love it, like myself, can continue to use it at no cost to the site owner.

However, on this site, there’s a link to the RSS feed in the sidebar, prominently visible. RSS feeds live on.

OneCore to Rule Them All

Peter Bright at ArsTechnica has the detailed and fascinating story on how Microsoft came to have a single kernel for all Windows devices: OneCore. So far, Microsoft is the first in the consumer operating system space¹ to achieve this feat:

Microsoft can now credibly speak of having one operating system (with Windows 10 as its most familiar branding) that can span hardware from little embedded Internet of Things devices to games consoles to PCs to cloud-scale server farms. At its heart is a slimmed down, modularized operating system dubbed OneCore. Windows 10, Windows Server, Xbox 10, Windows 10 Mobile, Windows 10 IoT, and the HoloLens operating system are all built on this same foundation.

It took a long time to reach this point. Along the way, Microsoft built three major operating system families, killed two of them off, and even reorganized the entire company. In the end, all that action was necessary in order to make building a single operating system practical. Apple and Google will probably do something similar with their various operating systems, but Microsoft has managed it first.

This is an incredible feat, particularly that this was accomplished while still maintaining Microsoft’s sometimes extreme levels of backwards compatibility.

OneCore comes with initial benefits for Microsoft and third party developers; however, consumers will reap the benefits indirectly in the long term:

Perhaps the biggest gains, for both developers and users, come from unexpected new platforms. When the first work on MinWin was started, nobody could have imagined that one day HoloLens might exist. But with the OneCore platform, adding support for this new hardware becomes relatively straightforward.

The past decade has been an incredible period of technological innovation, with the next decade looking just as bright as all of the technology companies fire on all cylinders. I can’t wait to see and be a part of what comes next.

How The Navy SEALs Prepare For Extreme Cold Weather Survival

Indefinitely Wild has a fascinating look into the “Rewarming Drill”, performed by Navy SEALs to prepare for extreme cold weather survival:

The troops would drop their packs on the shore and march ahead fully clothed until they were neck deep in frigid water. For 12 minutes they shivered until John gave the order. With their clothes sopping, violently shaking, they emerged from the cold lake into colder air.

It’s absolutely incredible how they recover from their swim, and a true testament to the value of having the best equipment in the worst conditions:

“With a great clothing system there’s no need to carry extra layers,” John says. “It should be able to perform as a symbiotic system in the most uncompromising situations.

Site Statistics with Matomo

Since moving to WordPress, I’ve been wanting to add some form of visitor statistics to my site. This proved more difficult than I expected, though, due to some strict requirements that I had:

• The data has to be self-hosted, to ensure that I know how it is used. I will never provide collected visitor information to a third party willingly.
• I have to be able to respect the privacy requests of my visitors, such as the Do Not Track setting in browsers.
• I have to be able to anonymize the information as much as possible. While I want to know aggregated information, I have no desire to know and be responsible for the detailed specifics of my visitors.

With those three requirements, many common services, such as Automattic’s JetPack and Google Analytics, were ruled out as there is no option to self-host the data or visibility into how anonymized the data was.

Recently, I stumbled upon Matomo. From their site:

Matomo (formerly Piwik) is the leading open-source analytics platform that gives you more than just powerful analytics: free open-source software; 100% data ownership; user privacy protection; user-centric insights; customisable and extensible.

Matomo ticks all of the boxes, and even a few I hadn’t thought of, such as having a mobile app and being open source. It even has complete WordPress support through the WP-Piwik plugin.

It respects the privacy of my visitors through a variety of methods, including:

• Honoring Do Not Track requests.
• Having an option (which I’ve enabled) to anonymize all IP addresses, allowing me to see the country a user was from but no more.

As of Saturday, June 4, 2016 I have enabled site statistics for this site using a self-hosted Matomo instance. If you would like to opt out of statistics for this and other respectful sites¹, enable the Do Not Track setting for your browser.

Update January 10, 2018: Piwik changed their name to Matomo; I’ve updated this post and links accordingly.

Civilization 6 is Coming

Yesterday I found out that Civilization 6 is due to be released in October, 2016, and it looks great so far. I stopped playing Civilization after Civilization 4 to recover some time, but I may get back into it this fall as it’s just so good.

I’ve included both the official trailer, as well as a game play video, with commentary, below.

Trailer:

Game play video with commentary: