Southern Rail Strikes Dates

GTR operates the Southern rail franchise in England, which covers several counties south of London. They are currently in a dispute with the RMT and ASLEF Unions over on-board roles and responsibilities.

I work with a number of town centres across the affected region and we are interested in seeing the effect of these actions on High Street performance. To achieve this, I have compiled a list of dates and sources. It will be updated as I gather more information, and I welcome contributions.

Disclaimer: This post was last updated on 6 December 2016 and is a work in progress. E&OE. It may not be current and should not be relied upon for planning or other purposes.

Apr 2016

1100 Tue 26 April – 1059 Wed 27 April
RMT strike, 24 hours – Sources: BBC; RMT Website

May 2016

Postponed 1100 Tue 10 May – 1059 Wed 11 May
RMT strike – Source: RMT Website; postponement notice

Postponed 1100 Thu 12 May – 1059 Fri 13 May
RMT strike – Source: RMT Website; postponement notice

0001-2359 Wed 18 May
RMT strike. Was Fri 20 May but brought forward. Sources: Southern Press Office 1 & 2; RMT switch notice

Brought forward 0001-2359 Fri 20 May
RMT strike. Pulled back from two previous 24-hour strikes. Source: RMT Postponement notice

June 2016

0001-2359 Tue 21 June
RMT strike. Sources: Southern press release; BBC; Twitter

July 2016

* Southern began revised timetable from 11 July 2016

Aug 2016

0001 Mon 8 Aug – 2359 Friday 12 Aug [Sources: RMT announcement and calling-off]
RMT Strike suspended at 2200 on Wednesday 10 August. Southern resumed pre-strike timetable on Friday.

Sep 2016

0001 Wed 7 September – 2359 Thu 8 September
RMT Guard strike on Southern [Source: RMT]

Called off 0001-2359 Wed 7 September
RMT Station staff strike across GTR i.e. not specific to Southern [Source: Southern; RMT calling-off]

Oct 2016

0001 Tue 18 October – 2359 Thu 20 October
RMT strike [Source: BBC; RMT]

Nov 2016

0001 Thu 3 November – 2359 Sat 5 November [Source: BBC]
RMT strike

0001 Tue 22 November – 2359 Wed 23 November [Source: BBC]
RMT Guards strike

Dec 2016

0001 Tue 6 December – 2359 Thu 8 December [Source: BBC; RMT]
RMT Guards Strike

Tue 13 December – Wed 14 December [Source: ASLEF]
ASLEF Drivers strike

Fri 16 December [Source: ASLEF]
ASLEF Drivers strike

0001 Mon 19 – 2359 Tue 20 December [Source: RMT]
RMT Guards Strike [changed date, was 22-24 Dec]

Brought forward Thu 22 – Sat 24 December [Source: RMT]
RMT Guards Strike – brought forward to 19-20 Dec

0001 Sat 31 December – 2359 Mon 2 January 2017 [Source: RMT]
RMT Guards Strike

Jan 2017

Mon 9 – Sat 14 ASLEF [confirmed ASLEF website]

Updates?

Please use the comment form below. Note: This post is not intended for debate on the actions. Comments welcome for date changes, corrections and updates only. All others will be removed.

When IS the Night Time?

Seems like a daft question, but the definition of ‘Night Time’ in a city centre is all over the place. Specifically, this refers to the Night Time Economy (NTE) which businesses and place managers use to measure performance in the evening.

We need a consistent definition to compare like for like, across suppliers and organisations. Here are a few choice notes:

The ATCM Purple Flag scheme defines NTE as between 1700 and 0600.

Retail intelligence company Springboard uses 1800 to 0400.

A recent report from the Greater London Authority describes it as 1800 to 0600.

1700 was initially a little close to working hours for my comfort, but it forms part of the Purple Flag which is a well-known and widely used reference. It seems reasonable to imagine people transitioning from the workplace to night-time destinations (after-office drinks!). Indeed, workers are important contributors to the local economy so very much on town centres’ radars.

The distinction between 0400 and 0600 is likely negligible. It looks like only service and transport workers are typically active this early, and with long licensing hours I suppose there’s little to be lost from measuring all the way to 6am.

It also looks to me, from reading some towns’ NTE strategies, that the emphasis is on early evening. Given that nearly all of these are based on the Purple Flag this looks like a reasonable de facto standard definition.

Finally, the data also points to a broader definition. I have a couple of counters in areas specifically designated as NTE strongholds (i.e. streets with pubs and clubs). Taking Fridays as an example, there is a small rise between 1700 and 1800, peaking at 2300-0000, before falling by 0400. Other areas tend to mix NTE and commuters, so more difficult to see.

 

On CHAR, Unicode and String searching

As part of my wifi project, I need to store the hashed MAC address of devices so we can run analysis and gather daily figures. We use MariaDB, based on MySQL, for this particular application. There are various tables used for this, and all JOINed by the common hash.

When I first put the system together in haste, I used VARCHAR(20) as it wasn’t obvious at the time which route we’d go down, or how things would be processed. You can be a little more wasteful with VARCHAR as the storage space is n+1 (where n is number of chars), so the field shrinks to suit. Fixed strings using CHAR always pre-allocate a fixed space, so are less flexible.

Roll forward a year. Things have grown very fast, and we’re starting to see performance limits being hit, and storage space becoming an issue, so it’s time to review the schema.

 

Now we know the maximum bytes for any hash will always be four. They can be smaller than this (depends on application) but eight is the limit.

So, CHAR(8) would seem a reasonable way to store eight bytes in hex. If you’re screaming about INT/BLOB/VARBINARY storage, I’ll come back to that in a moment…

Issue one – UNICODE

First problem is that, if you use a multi-byte charset like utf-8, CHAR is potentially much worse than VARCHAR. As a fixed field, CHAR must allocate the maximum space for all supported Unicode characters, so three bytes are reserved for each character (MySQL utf8 doesn’t support supplemental unicode characters, so three is the limit).

Compare to VARCHAR, where the field size is dynamic and therefore grows according to the characters in use. For anybody using straightforward Latin characters, this needn’t be more than one byte per character.

In the case of utf8, VARCHAR can be far more efficient than CHAR.

If you’re only using basic characters or storing hex values in CHAR, explicitly set the latin1 character set on this field:

ALTER TABLE `mytable` MODIFY `col` CHAR(8) CHARSET latin1

Issue two – Comparing CHAR and VARCHAR

As I was testing this I converted some tables hoping that the comparison would be fairly straightforward, but it seems there’s a big performance hit when comparing a VARCHAR field to a CHAR field (possibly not helped by charset differences). I was seeing queries slow by a factor of 50+ in some cases.

SELECT a.id, b.category from a inner join b on b.fk=a.id

(fk is a varchar; id is a char – both contain the same string)

This is easily solved by explicitly setting a cast on the VARCHAR field, thus:

SELECT a.id, b.category from a inner join b on CAST(b.fk AS CHAR(8) CHARSET latin1)=a.id

Performance will be drastically improved. I believe this is due to the order and type of string comparison going on, and this addition explicitly converts all the potential strings up-front and avoids doing it on an ad-hoc basis.

Next steps

Performance is now much better, but this is still a fairly wasteful way of storing four bytes. The advantage is that, for debugging, it’s easy enough to test queries and investigate issues without having to deal with binary fields.

In terms of efficiency, the next step might be to switch to an UNSIGNED INT, which is allocated four bytes. This is readable in query output, and can be passed in the browser without too much fuss.

I suspect INT and BINARY also have further performance gains. I haven’t tested the overhead, but I suspect the collation (the system of testing equivalence in characters) is adding some work to string comparisons – none of which we need here.

I need to test further before using UNSIGNED INT, and the update process is marginally more involved as the field needs to be converted and modified.

Right now, the performance is back at decent levels, so this is probably something to park for a while!

 

 

 

Reporting Data with Daylight Savings Time

At the end of October it’ll be time to put the clocks back. We’ll get an extra hour in bed to compensate for the hour lost at the end of March, and the bi-annual tradition of media articles asking whether we should ditch the whole thing will run again.

For anybody dealing with dates and times, daylight savings can be a pain. If your job involves managing computers, you might well keep everything in UTC (/GMT) to save headaches. This is also sensible advice if you deal with multiple time-zones. By sticking to UTC, you avoid the annoying issue of living out the same hour twice one morning somewhere in Autumn.

In city centres, retail and business, our data is very much dictated by local time, not UTC. If the shops open at 8am, it will be based on local time. Work starts at 9 sharp, even if your previous night’s sleep was rudely shortened by sixty minutes.

For this reason, when we (meaning I – my company) report on city centre figures, we use local time. It keeps the peaks and troughs of the day in order. If we used UTC, it would be harder to compare a July day with a November day - they’d be off by an hour.

We also store data in local time, mainly because of the complexities involved in constantly switching between UTC and local time. It’s a minor issue, buts adds time to every query and makes the underlying system more complicated. Some might store in UTC, and convert. However you do this you’ll still need to decide what to do at 2am at the end of October, when time steps backwards.

Springboard

For some useful observations, I needed to look for high-traffic places with a decent night-time economy. These are from Heart of London (West End):

heartlondon-springboard

First observation is that all the times appear to be based on local time. The general peaks/troughs appear to line up irrespective of daylight savings time. Sunday is shown in grey on these charts.

There’s not a lot to go on here, but March 2015 looks like a straight line between 1am and 3am. March 2014 has a data point in the non-existent time, but there’s a noticeable drop. By comparison, October (where we live 1am-2am twice) seems to have a bump at 3am. This is also what I saw in the 2014 data – not shown here.

Given that there’s data in the March 2014 slot, I wonder if this is being accommodated in Springboard’s stats – and if they’re similarly compensating in the early hours of October’s backwards step.

Highways England

Looking elsewhere, Highways England publishes traffic data across its network on a 15 minute basis. They also use local time – again, this makes sense as traffic demands are dictated by the clock.

In March, they simply skip over the non-existent time. 1am to 2am is missing in the data, so for one day per year there are 23 hours’ worth of records.

In October, there is something weirder. The hour is repeated, but the data is inconsistent. This is the traffic data on a section of the M25 over October, with 1am-2am counted twice. Time Period shows the end of the 15 minute section as measured; the last column shows the number of vehicles of a given length over this period.

he-october

It looks like the sensor has managed to send something across throughout the affected time, but the data is largely missing. Interesting that the time period reports as :59 seconds only in this highlighted period, and for the two records where this doesn’t happen (01:44:00 and 01:59:00) we seem to have data. I wonder if this is a bug of some kind.

Conclusions

These are the two main data suppliers I have an interest in, but it’d be useful to gauge feedback from elsewhere. This is a tricky issue. The ultimate goal is to show something which is meaningful to the reader, but we need to do this in a way that does not affect comparisons at the hourly level.

In one way this is a fairly moot point. The volume of traffic at 2am on an out-of-season Sunday is likely inconsequential for many. However it does raise an interesting challenge for reports and figures, and is just one of many subtleties to consider in this sort of analysis.

Final thought: is it possible that the change in daylight savings time actually attracts people?

MariaDB Indexes on DATETIME and DATE functions

Quick note in haste, but important for me to remember.

SELECT * FROM table WHERE DATE(`period`)='2016-09-05'

is orders of magnitude slower than

SELECT * FROM table WHERE `period`>='2016-09-05 00:00:00' AND `period`<'2016-09-06 00:00:00'

where `period` is an indexed DATETIME field. The former uses an assortment of WHERE and INDEX clauses; the latter relies on the INDEX and uses a RANGE search, which is much faster.

554 Message not allowed – Headers are not RFC compliant[291]

If you get this message when sending emails to Yahoo addresses from PHP, it’s quite possible the subject line is being duplicated and this is causing your email to be rejected.

PHP’s mail() function takes a Subject as a parameter. It also accepts a custom list of headers. The mail() function seems to always append a subject header irrespective of the contents of the custom list.

So, if you have the Subject already defined in your custom headers, PHP will add another. This is not RFC compliant, and Yahoo has a particularly strict checker for incoming emails (most other mail servers seem to ignore this, as far as I can see).

Take the Subject line out of your custom headers, make sure it’s in the mail() call itself, and the mail should send (assuming no other issues….)

Huawei E3131

It seems like I’m having mixed success with devices at the moment. To be fair, this one isn’t a product mismatch but a manufacturer issue, and thankfully seems fairly easy to get around.

This post is as much a personal note/reminder as anything else. If anybody needs detailed notes please drop me a line 🙂

The Huawei E3131 has been a pretty good 3G modem for the Raspberry Pi. After a bit of hacking about, it lights up and connects to the Internet.

The first batch (black cover in the photo) I bought worked as follows:

IMG_20151003_154035A network interface appears on eth1. The Pi gets an IP address 192.168.1.5 and the modem appears as 192.168.1.1. The modem has a mini web server which can be interrogated to control & get information about the connection.

The latest batch (white ones) work as follows:

Network interface is now on 192.168.8.100 and the modem is on 192.168.8.1. The web server still works, but it has some kind of basic security mechanism built into it, so you need to get a token first.

The original device had a USB id of 12d1:14db; the newer ones have a USB id of 12d1:14dc

So, not only has the IP address/local interface changed but there’s a new security mechanism involved. Time for some extra work!

Useful links

http://tjworld.net/wiki/Huawei/E3131UsbHspa

http://www.3g-modem-wiki.com/page/Huawei+E3131

Update: Looks like it validates the Referer field, perhaps for cross-site protection – I set it to http://192.168.8.1/html/index.html and requests work now.

Raspberry Pi Wifi Dongle on Amazon

Slightly annoyed to discover that my most recent batch of USB wifi adapters, sold as “for Raspberry Pi” are not quite compatible.

For my various wifi projects, I’ve been buying up lots of little wifi adapters. All are labelled in the same way “USB Wifi Adapters for the Raspberry Pi – By New IT”. It looks like they’re all based on this from supplier ‘New IMG_20150927_095541IT’ (whom I’ve no reason to believe are involved in the issues here).

The first few batches worked exactly as I wanted. Plug and play.

The most recent batch has, however, been an entirely different story. They’re simply different.

The picture shows two USB devices. On the left is the most recent, non-working device. On the right is the working device. The most notable difference is the ‘802.11n’ label is on a different side for each.

What’s the difference?

It’s all in the internals. Despite there being hundreds of wifi products they’re all based on a surprisingly small number of variants.

The working version is based on a chipset from Ralink, the RT5370. This works out of the box for the Raspberry Pi, seems to be a good performer, and – crucially for me – supports monitor mode (so it can act as an access point too).

The problematic version uses the Ralink 8188 (RT8188) chipset. This doesn’t have full support in the Raspberry Pi, and frankly it’s been a pain in the backside to work with. I have a box full of old USB wifi dongles; most seem to be based on RT8188 and never really had much luck with them.

It’s possible to get them up and running, by compiling special drivers, but frankly it isn’t worth the effort and I’ve had lots of memory leaks and other issues with them.

Be careful what you buy

So, back to Amazon. It seems that some devices sold as ‘for Raspberry Pi’ are in fact not ideal – and take a lot of work to get going. This shows up in the reviews as it looks like a few people have been stung.

The whole thing isn’t helped by Amazon’s peculiar supplier system, where it opts for the cheapest supplier based on the product you choose. It looks like one or two suppliers have these RT8188 chips and are selling them under the wrong label – no idea if intentional or not.

Thankfully it’s fairly easy to pick the right supplier. Make sure you choose ‘New IT’. I’ve just ordered another four devices from them and they work fine, straight out of the box, for the Raspberry Pi. Yes, they’re a bit more expensive but they work!

Now to decide whether it’s worth my effort negotiating Amazon’s support line and sending the two dud devices back…

Visual Studio/ASP.NET Code Behind

I’m going to need to remember this, as it runs slightly counter-intuitive to what I was expecting (although makes sense).

Code compiled in App_Code is available globally, so any other piece of code can reference it.

Code compiled in code-behind (i.e. the .cs files ‘behind’ ASPX pages) is only available to its corresponding ASPX page unless you explicitly reference it.

This can be done by adding the following to the ASPX page:

<%@ Reference Page="......link to .aspx" %>

One to remember.

Wifi Visitor Counting

It’s been a little while since my last post about visitor tracking, and some updates are long overdue.

The good news is that it’s ready to launch, with lots of interest. This has been a challenging project in many respects, and I’ll be documenting the various aspects shortly.

Initial results are very promising. We’re seeing figures that have never before been seen; stats and information that were until now completely invisible. It’s thrown up issues, about data transfer, privacy and many other factors.

Privacy is a huge issue for me – there are lots of companies that (in my mind) are far too aggressive on this issue – so expect more on this as I continue to share my work.

It’s exciting stuff, and I’m keen to share my experiences and thoughts for others. Stay tuned!