Political correctness

Now I’m really going off the deep end with respect to what this blog is supposed to be about. But since it is a personal blog, I’m allowed to do that. And it is something I seem to run into more frequently: political correctness.

The trigger for this blogpost is the newspaper of this morning; school changes “carnaval” to “dress up party”, because carnaval is a faith related festivity (Roman Katholik to be exact) and they are a public school.

Really?

Carnaval may be faith related, but it’s not like they are not going to celebrate it. The whole southern half of our country does, Katholik or not, and it’s simply called carnaval. It has to have a name, you know, so people know what you are talking about. Dress up party is what children do, carnaval is something quite different.

By now we’ve changed the name of pastries; “moorkop” became “roomkop” because it referred to someone with a dark skinned head, and yes, it is made with dark chocolate. We’ve undarken black piet into someone with smears. And the list goes on and on. Everything needs to be politically correct nowadays, so that no one can be offended.

There’s a lot of whip-cream inside
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Scheduling things on a Tesla using Azure pt. 4; Google calendar

Having made good progress on the Tesla side of the implementation, it’s time to take a look at how to implement the calendar integration. But first, let’s examine why to use a calendar in the first place. After all, there are many solutions that implement similar functionality, for example using timers (like Tesla does in the car).

Personally, to be honest, I would be totally lost if it were not for a digital calendar. Google calendar to be precise. I forget things, so I register everything in it. Not everything needs to send out reminders, but just not forgetting that my son has his basketball training every Tuesday and Thursday evening, prevents me from making some kind of commitment that will cause conflicts.

In other words: my life is in that calendar. That means also the things I need to get into my car for. So my calendar seems like the perfect place to also administer when I need my car to prepare itself for driving, by defrosting or whatever. And if an appointment changes, I immediately see that that part also needs to change. Like generating documentation from code.

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Scheduling things on a Tesla using Azure pt. 3; the Tesla API

In the previous post we took a look at how the initial just-for-my-own-car implementation was refactored into a version that supported many cars using a database instead of hardcoded values. It also showed that the LogicApp based implementation lost its merrits, and everything was moved into Java code. In this part we’ll take a look at the Tesla API that is used to make the car do things.

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Scheduling things on a Tesla using Azure pt. 2; from one to many

  • Post category:azureJava

Some time has passed since my previous post about fixing the issue that a Tesla does not allow scheduling preconditioning (de-icing) the car prior to a drive in the winter. The original post used an Azure Logic app as its core.

AzureLogic

What you see above is a Logic app for my car only; the first step “When an event starts” is linked to a Tesla calendar in my personal Google Calendar. The “StartHVAC” and “EndHVAC” call out to serverless functions that hardcoded contain the data for my personal car. And the emails go to a hardcoded email address of mine. Totally not reusable, but working.

After publishing that post, people started to ask if they could use the same functionality as well. Ahm, I did just say it was not reusable, didn’t I? But being a good friend, I ventured out and rewrote the whole thing to support multiple calendars and cars.

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Going electric; almost a year in

The ‘going electric’ will be different blogs from my usual beat. Not only because they will not be related (directly) to software development, but also because they are opinionated and personal reports; editorials about switching over to an electric car. They will list my personal joys and annoyances about the switch, but I’ll try to be fair and balanced.

After almost a year of driving electric, I’m about to do the one year look back. And it is a two side one. It really is.

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Post Java 8 upgrade; ignoring the module

  • Post category:JavaJPMS

Java 9 introduced a major change in the way Java programs are written, because of the Java Platform Module System (JPMS). And that is not something you can ‘skip’ by moving to a higher Java version; upgrading your software to any version after Java 8 means you have to deal with JPMS.

That is the reason a lot of companies are still stuck at Java 8, but at some point in the future they and everyone else will need to upgrade. Java 11 is the first Long Term Support (LTS) version of Java, and that seems to be the version of choice for a lot of migrations.

Upgrading my open source project, JFXtras, to Java 9 a few years back was a breeze. I have had more problems with the build tool (Gradle) than with the modularization of the code. But that is because the code is fairly new and already modularized using Gradle (Maven) artifacts. But in the last weeks I’ve tried to upgrade a 15+ years old custom made ERP system to Java 11… That turned out not to be a breeze.

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Going electric; Maxem

The ‘going electric’ will be different blogs from my usual beat. Not only because they will not be related (directly) to software development, but also because they are opinionated and personal reports; editorials about switching over to an electric car. They will list my personal joys and annoyances about the switch, but I’ll try to be fair and balanced.

Charging at home

The whole topic about charging at home is confusing when you do not own an electric car, and to be honest I still don’t get it 100%. You can charge from any 220 volt socket, but that does not charge very fast, because that power group may be shared with other appliances. So at least it would be wise to dedicate a single 16 amps power group to charging your car. A single dedicated group should put about 40 km of range per hour in your battery pack. Some simplified math then tells us that a 400 km pack will take about a full night’s to charge (I know it’s not linear, but let’s keep this simple). And even though that will suffice for 99% of the use cases, 10 hours for a full charge is quite some time…

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Going electric, the model 3

The ‘going electric’ will be different blogs from my usual beat. Not only because they will not be related (directly) to software development, but also because they are opinionated and personal reports; editorials about switching over to an electric car. They will list my personal joys and annoyances about the switch, but I’ll try to be fair and balanced.

Unexpected encounter

So my model S needed to go to the workshop; it seems my headlights were set a bit high (got a lot of flashes and my g/f complained when I was driving behind her), and there is a faint torquing noise coming from the right A-pillar when I drive on uneven roads. First world problems.

But while waiting on the intake on my S, I was asked if I wanted to take a peek at the Model 3. It has been on tour through Europe lately, but I missed the opportunity when it was at my local Tesla shop. So I was quite pleased with his suggestion and eagerly said yes.

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