I’ve spent the past week out in Miami for ApacheCon, and thought I’d share a few things.

Getting there

We flew direct out of Heathrow on BA. Eight hours in cattle class world traveller is never going to be a fun experience, but BA do lay on a decent quality and quantity of food and drink even in the back. Getting through US Customs was a bit of a pain, but even though the automatic system diverted us for extra review, it didn’t take very long (obviously we’d applied for our ESTAs and had them approved before going).

America

It’s worth reading up on US tipping culture before going (and noting that you need to write the amount on the bill when they bring it if you’re tipping by card). I’d not been to the states before, but with that knowledge pre-consumed, it was all pretty much as expected. The Americans are a lot more patriotic than us, and have their flag all over the place, including at the airport and some impressively huge ones hanging off buildings. On average, I found the customer service and general standard of friendliness higher than in the UK.

120v

American sockets put out 120 volts, not the 240 we’re used to in Europe. Every device I took with me was labelled as coping with either, and did, but it’s worth checking the label before you plug it into an adapter.

Money

It’s worth looking up the sales taxes for the state(s) you’re visiting – be aware that, often, none of the prices you see quoted will include them.

Chip and pin is present in some places, but a lot of retailers are still using the old magnetic stripe, meaning they can wander off with your card and come back with the receipt for your payment (Monzo works everywhere as you’d expect, and it’s handy to have a card you can load just-in-time and see instant notifications for when the security is rather slacker than in the UK).

Uber (yes, I know, contentious stuff) Just Works if you’ve got an account created in the UK (and if the city you’re visiting is covered, of course). They may have a sketchy reputation in some quarters, but it’s damn useful being able to set up your work card and charge taxis directly to it without having to faff getting a receipt from the driver and claiming it as out of pocket expenses. Indeed, armed with this capability, cash was barely necessary for the whole six day trip.

The event

I’ve been to ApacheCon in Europe twice before, but not to the US. I got the impression there were a few more people and tracks of talks than we had in Seville last autumn. The standard of the speakers was generally very high (I hope I didn’t lower the average too much) and there were an interesting bunch of vendors giving out swag and potentially useful information about their products and services. We also did some good networking and had lunch every day with what one of my colleagues aptly titled “POIzone”, a bunch of Apache POI and Tika commiters, several of whom I met in person for the first time.

My talks

I did three talks, one on Containers: Not Just For the Cloud? (Slides, video), one on Apache POI and the challenges of working with a 16 year old Java codebase (slides) and a lightning talk on a recent side project (video – starts at 2:41).

All in all, a fun and educational week, but some jet lag to overcome before getting back to reality on Monday.

So I’m out in Florida for ApacheCon, and it’s been a really fun and useful trip so far. But it got off to a shaky start. After over 8 hours in a tin box flying from London, we get to the hotel in Miami, check in – mercifully brief – and do our best to stay awake until 10pm local time before crashing out. We arrived a couple of days before the conference proper, so plenty of time to adjust.

Picture the scene: 4.30AM local time, the rasping sound of someone sawing wood as I adjust to Florida time.

> Bzzzzzzzzzzz < > Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz <

Hello?

Hello, sir. Are you aware your credit card was used in America?

Would that be the same “America” that I filled in the “notify overseas travel” form on your website for a week ago?

…

At the end of this three minute conversation, I was £3 poorer. Thanks EE.

The truly tragic thing about this exchange (apart from HSBC’s inability to interface with their own systems) is that, back when I was at school (over 10 years ago), I remember reading a piece in PC Pro by Jon Honeyball about this exact situation. He talked about wanting a phone system smart enough to look up his diary in Outlook and tell the caller “it’s 4.30 AM local time where David is, press 1 to wake him up if it’s desperately urgent, but beware of his reaction”. Ten. Years. Ago.

What’s even worse is that this almost exists. Andrews and Arnold have some really cool products including the ability to port your 07 UK mobile number to their VOIP service, which includes the fabled time zone announce feature. OK, so it doesn’t integrate with my calendar, but I’d be quite happy to script that or just set it manually for trips like this one.

So why haven’t I ported my mobile number to their service? It would allow me to use SIP to pick up and make calls over the internet when abroad (this works surprisingly well using WhatsApp, so the bandwidth does exist), cutting out horrendous roaming charges, as well as having the time zone announce and other features.

Unfortunately, there is one crucial piece of the puzzle missing which makes me reluctant to go VOIP+Sip2Sim for my mobile: by default, SIP sends passwords in plain text (updated after twitter conversation with RevK) using a challenge-response and a digest, which feels more vulnerable than simply using TLS on the signalling. This is just about bearable on a fixed-line home or work internet link, but feels risky on a semi-public WiFi network like the conference one here (especially considering the potential financial consequences of a leaked set of VoIP credentials).

AAISP, please fix it so I can drag my mobile number into the 21st century.

I’ve started cycling to work regularly again, and got myself a helmet camera. This is one of those annoying areas where there are cheap items made in the far east, or very expensive items made by more recognised brands. There doesn’t seem to be anything in between.

So, I took a punt at the cheaper end, and here it is:

As you can see, the only part of their fixing accessories I used were two velcro straps; the camera feels most stable and doesn’t un-balance me when it’s strapped tightly to the middle of my helmet.

So, what do the videos look like? Here’s a thrilling clip of my commute yesterday morning:

I had no idea I moved my head so much when cycling, but it’s not bad quality – certainly good enough to get a number plate in the unpleasant event of someone cutting me up or knocking me off. I might try it on the handlebars next.

Needless to say, the camera does not claim to have any night vision at this price, but on lit streets, it’s possible to make out registration numbers of most overtaking cars if you step through the footage frame by frame.

Configuring it involves a txt file which it writes to the SD card, but once you’ve set the date and time, there’s not much else to worry about. The battery doesn’t last very long, but it only takes a couple of hours to charge over USB, so not bad. The inbuilt microphone just picks up wind noise when any sort of motion is involved.

Obviously, the £40 cost of the camera is then bolstered by buying the biggest micro SD card you can afford. At 90MB per minute of footage, it soon fills up. The way it records in chunks (maximum 10 minutes each) is a bit silly, but there are plenty of tools on Linux to concatenate the chunks together again.

I’ve been a long-time user of K-9 mail on Android, but the combination of the dreaded doze (“syncing disabled”) bug and various bits of clunky UI persuaded me it was time to move on. AquaMail, on first impressions, is rather nice. It lets me set the Archive folder, and can Archive things in a couple of taps. It also has a better approach to folder management, not showing the entire list in most places, but rather the folders you’ve actually used. Well worth a few quid for the pro version.