The jZone

East Sussex County Council have really excelled with a recent bit of road planning.

They have introduce a new “Sustainable Corridor” between Peacehaven and Brighton in order to:

• Increase bus patronage
• Prioritise bus traffic
• Reduce congestion
• Reduce pollution

Sounds a damned good idea! Quite admirable objectives. However, the implementation of this plan is far from being flawless.

For a start, the majority of the new bus lane between Rottingdean and Peacehaven only goes in one one direction, Westbound, so it does indeed speed up many journeys into Brighton for the buses and taxis. However, the same can not be said for motorists, who now find that their commute times are even longer than they were before!

Furthermore, as a Saltdean resident there are other changes that disadvantage the motorist.

Longridge Avenue is one of the major arteries leading in and out of the heart of Saltdean. The roads to the East of Longridge Avenue only allow traffic to turn to the West when joining the A259, and similarly, traffic on the A259 is only allowed to exit onto these roads when Westbound. As a result of the mini-roundabout at the intersection of the A259 with Longridge Avenue being replaced with traffic lights, traffic can no longer effectively perform a U-turn to travel back to access these roads, and is forced to travel up Longridge Avenue. The queue of cars waiting to turn up Longridge Avenue now impedes traffic from moving along the A259 in a Westbound direction if more than a couple of cars are in the queue. In addition, there is more congestion along Longridge Avenue itself, which is notorious for people double-parking on either side of the road.

As a result of the Longridge Avenue problems and the additional congestion along the A259, you see more traffic using the residential streets between Saltdean and Rottingdean, especially for motorists who are not Brighton bound, and need to use the Falmer Road to gain access to the A27 and A23. There are a limited number of routes to cut through to Rottingdean, and property prices on these roads is sure to fall in light of the additional traffic they will be forced to bear.

In addition to the congestion, the lanes for motorists and buses are all to narrow, and I am sure this is going to lead to an increase in the number of minor accidents that occur along this stretch of the A259. There is a likelihood of more serious accidents during the morning “rush” hour too, with congested and near-stationary Westbound traffic sandwiched by the fast moving bus lane and the unhindered Eastbound traffic.

“Just use the bus!” I hear you cry. Ironically, as reported by The Argus, the managing director, Roger French, of The Brighton & Hove Bus & Coach Company is quoted as saying that some bus journeys have been delayed by up to 45 minutes as a result of the changes, and he has called for the return of the mini-roundabout.

Also, buses do not help people that need to travel beyond Brighton & Hove, who are forced to use the Falmer Road at Rottingdean.

The changes are not likely to be good for local businesses in Peacehaven either, who will now find that traffic that used to be able to park on the A259 is no longer able to, potentially forcing more people to travel.

Sadly, I have also noticed that the number of vehicles using the bridle path across Telscombe Tye from Telscombe Village to the A259 has increased considerably, most likely as a result of people trying to avoid the congestion. It would certainly be a great pity if this unspoiled area was destroyed by these changes. In some cases, I have witnessed vehicles driving directly over the Tye rather than on the rather rutted bridle path!

All in all, the changes introduced have been an unmitigated disaster, and show a complete lack of understanding by East Sussex County Council when it comes to all aspects of traffic management.

The cost of this programme was budgeted at £1.8m, and the “Sustainable Corridor” will eventually run all the way from Brighton to Newhaven.

The true cost will be measured as being much higher, with falling property prices, failing businesses, longer commute times, and increased pollution.

Well done East Sussex County Council.

More Information

• A259 Brighton to Newhaven Bus Corridor
• A259 Brighton to Newhaven Bus Corridor Detailed Plans
• A letter to The Argus: Lanes could be end of the road for businesses
  
• A letter to The Argus: Compromising motorists’ safety
• A letter to The Argus: Misery on the coast road

Just a quick update on the vagrant cat that we’d been giving board and lodging to for the last two weeks.

The cat is apparently called “Jack”. The owner’s had seen one of the posters we’d left in one of the vets in the area, and had excitedly rang lostcatsbrighton.org.uk, who contacted us.

After a quick couple of phone calls, I drove Jack back round to his owners who live about a mile and a half away.

I’m so glad we have been able to reunite Jack with his owners, the pesky little tyke!

I’ve noticed recently that the blog had been attacked a couple of times, with hackers being able to gain administrative access to WordPress.

Fortunately, they didn’t do any harm other than posting or adding links. I suspect that the attacks were purely automated attacks exploiting known vulnerabilities. Things could have been a lot more unpleasant.

Anyway, as a result, I decided it was about time that I updated the blog to the latest version for the security fixes it now has in place to guard against these attacks. Hopefully this will keep the blog safe for a little longer.

All I need to do now is convert my old theme…the default WordPress theme looks so… default.

I’d just like to thank my colleagues Bill and Tom for defining this new pattern:

Sarcophagus Pattern
Intent

Provide a unified interface to a preserved, unspeakable horror that cannot be purged for sentimental or compatibility reasons. Sarcophagus is similar to Facade, but carries the implication that the box should only be opened in the presence of police, necromancers, or others familiar with the dealing with dead things.

Sarcophagus defines a higher-level interface that prevents the contents of the tomb from eating the brains of living. This can be used to simplify a number of despicable interactions and nightmarish dependencies into a single interface.

See also
Facade Pattern, Mediator Pattern, Adapter Pattern

Origins
Inspired by Tom during discussions of [removed to protect the authors]. Defined by Bill.

From the “Online Etymology Dictionary”: sarcophagus
“stone coffin,” 1601, from L. sarcophagus, from Gk. sarkophagos “limestone used for coffins,” lit. “flesh-eating,” in reference to the supposed action of this type of limestone (quarried near Assos in Troas) in quickly decomposing the body, from sarx (gen. sarkos) “flesh” (see sarcasm) + phagein “to eat” (see -phagous). The stone sense was the earliest in Eng,; meaning “stone coffin, often with inscriptions or decorative carvings” is recorded from 1705. The L. word, shortened in V.L. to *sarcus, is the source of Fr. cercueil, Ger. Sarg “coffin,” Du. zerk “tombstone.”

My Drupal installation was playing up, and its too memory intensive on the host I run it on, so I thought I’d give Wordpress another try.

So, I’m just in the process of converting the site, which has been made significantly easier using the post I found on vrypan.net.

Now all I’ve got to figure out is how to rebuild my previous style with the minimum of effort, and work out what to do with posts that contain Textile-like mark-up.

One thing I have immediately noticed is how much more responsive the site now appears to be.

Floyd Marinescu has just published a free short book on InfoQ that I think all software developers, java developers in particular, should read.

It is a short, succinct explanation of Domain-Driven Design, and takes us back to the basics of application design using a domain based approach.

Far too often, Java designers and developers spend too much time worrying about “how” to build an application, with far too much focus being placed on the technical aspects. Floyd’s book re-introduces the domain driven approach, focusing on “what” to build.

Java’s complexity (ironic for a language that was striving for simplicity) is the reason why so many Java developers have such poor focus. Using a simpler language (Ruby anyone?) allows the developer to focus on the “what” without having to worry about the “how”.

Unfortunately, Java’s complexity is here to stay. Which is why I think it is so important to stress to developers that they shouldn’t lose focus on the “what”.

I’m addicted to Second Life.

If you haven’t heard of it, Second Life is a virtual world. It is *not* a game. If anything, it is closer to being a cross between 3 dimension chat and 3 dimensional web. It is a place where you can build a virtual home, invite your virtual friends round, and have a virtual party with them.

The great thing is, Second Life is a blank canvas. You can build want you want in it, and program those objects using the Second Life scripting language to give them behavior. This makes it the perfect virtual environment, allowing me to express my creativity in my down time.

It is also fascinating how some real life companies have begun to leverage Second Life, and you are now beginning to see a cross over between Second Life and Real Life businesses.

If you visit, send an IM (instant message) to my avatar, “Electro Spark”.

I have blogged about Java and caching of DNS once before.

It looks like the peeps over on Java Lobby have run into this common problem too.

There are a couple of ways around this problem that dont involve restarting all of your Java network based applications.

There is a property that can be set via java.security.Security, “networkaddress.cache.ttl”, that sets the poll interval (in seconds) that Java will use before refreshing a cached DNS name.

To set this value, you just need to include the following snippet somewhere in your code:

bq. java.security.Security.setProperty(”networkaddress.cache.ttl” , “60″)

There is a second property, “networkaddress.cache.negative.ttl” which is pertinent too. This property sets the poll interval used for unsucessful DNS lookups.

You can set both of these properties to zero, which will disable DNS caching all together.

In addition to these settings, there are two internal system properties that can also be used, but depending on your VM, these may or may not work.

“sun.net.inetaddr.ttl” & “sun.net.inetaddr.negative.ttl” correspond directly to the two previously mentioned properties, but are System properties rather than Security properties, so they have the advantage of being configurable via the command line, or centralised with other application properties.

There is a useful page over on the Sun Java site that discusses all of the available Networking Properties. It is well worth bookmarking.

This is a great quote, that all project managers should heed:

Once I learned the very hard lessons of how to be a leader instead of a manager, I fully embraced the idea that a successful team was one where people of varying skills had the opportunity to fully demonstrate their talents. At the same time they could count on the different skills of others to help them be more successful than they could have been by themselves. That’s a mouthful, but it served me well.

I’ve created a new photoblog, where, unsuprisingly, I’ll be uploading just the odd photo or three.

I’ll still be posting images on flickr, but will try and just post what I consider to be my very best to the photoblog.