An Open Project - The Stolen Vehicle Database (SVD)

With bike theft being a daily occurance for bikers in London unfortunately, and the seemingly low level of education riders have on how to secure their bikes and the seemingly low priority bike theft has with the Metropolitan Police, some folks over at londonbikers.com started to talk about a peoples-project that would allow people to register the details of their stolen bike with a view to help if details come to light and to provide some statistical knowledge-base of how, where and when bikes are going missing. The idea being that if we're in control of this information then we can potentially do something about it if we have more information.

There was a discussion about a website that would cater for this over at LB. From the discussion, it became clear that we at LB could initiate the project as we have an interest in it and have the technical ability to do it. We'd even host it and then eventually open the project up to other developers on an invitation basis. LB will sponsor it technically, and if it takes off, we'll look to put it into the public domain ownership wise.

Now for some technical details - I've had some time lately to look into translating the basic requirements into a prototype. There's been a couple of new technologies I've wanted to evaluate for a while now, so the SVD (Stolen Vehicle Database, a working title) seemed the perfect candidate for using them.

The basic functionality I'm aiming for here, is the ability to post up details of a stolen vehicle, including registration details, photos and videos, then to be able to browse and search for vehicles as well as to see maps of where vehicles are going missing from and how, i.e. what security they were using and the like.

The prototype I'm working on uses the asp.NET MVC 1.0 framework for the website as I've worked with this on a large commercial project before to good effect, and for the database abstraction the Entity Framework (EF) talking to a SQL Server 2005/2008 database, making use of the in-development Microsoft Velocity distributed cache (CTP2, 3 coming soon) for domain-object caching in front of the EF DAL.

It's working perfectly so far, with a basic amount of functionality complete. Because this is going to be an open project, I'll look to create public betas that people can evaluate and provide feedback as we go to keep things agile.

If you're interested in working on this project as well, let me know via the comments. There's a lot of scope for a project like this, and yes, we're aware it's been attempted before, but the sites I had a look at are extremely basic, not open technically and either vehicle-type specific of locatio

n specific. I'm looking to concentrate on bikes in London first as a proof-of-concept, then to open it up to other vehicle types and other locations.

As well as a website, it'll have RSS feeds and an API so people can interact with the data and build their own widgets or applications.

We'll need the help of someone who's familiar with the finer points of the Data Protection Act as well, as no doubt there are sensitivities around what data we'll store, but for now I'm keeping it dead simple and only requiring an email address, no other personally-identifiable information. If you're this person or know one, please let me know in the comments.

Asp.NET Types Not Found Weirdness

Because I have to snatch the time I can get to write code due to my workload, the time I get spent in Visual Studio 2008 is prized, but recently for two days I couldn't resolve a problem I had with it and just wanted to pick up the phone to Microsoft and shout at someone.

I'd made a namespace change to a framework class for MP as I wasn't happy with MediaPanther.Framework.Content.Content as a class name. I made the change, compiled to see what code elsewhere I would need to change for this, made the changes and got a successful build. Moving on to something else the website started throwing weird exceptions for type-not-found on some referenced User Web Controls.

Finding that no matter what page or control I tried to reference by type in the website, VS 2008 wouldn't recognise the type, but would build, I thought some weird Voodoo magic was going on. After much throwing of toys out of the pram, I spent some time in the Class Explorer and found that using the rebuild-all on the web-project, I got a whole load of compiler errors to do with the namespace change that I didn't get with the regular build/rebuild menu options in VS. After fixing these compiler errors, the site now worked again.

That makes no sense to me why the compiler wouldn't throw those errors normally, but if this ever happens to you, give that a shot, it may save some hair being pulled out. This was an asp.NET 3.5 app.

GSX-R 1000 Bike Theft & Insurance

Damn, damn damn. I've had some time to cool down now, but at the time I was going crazy for the second time now. Last Thursday at about 4.50pm some scum-bags stole my much beloved and modified Suzuki GSX-R 1000 from outside an office in Olympia. They parked their white Ford Transit van up, uncovered the bike, defeated the security systems, pulled it out of the bike-bay is was jammed into and loaded it into their van.

At this point the alarm went off (why only then I have no idea, though I have my suspicions), I looked out the window, saw what was going on, bolted out the office and gave chase as they casually drove down the road at 30mph without a care in the world.

An emergency 999 call left me feeling deflated as the operator was clearly not that concerned and only took my vehicle details when I prompted her. Was she even going to ask? Who knows. Apparently the details of the van were circulated to local units. Perhaps by pigeon-post. The one thing I did get out of the operator was that the van was known to them. Presumably for similar crimes.

All this was on the night of a staff party, so plans ruined, I had to go to the local Police station to give a statement to someone who gave no indication that anything would actually be done about this crime. Forget the fact we're talking about a high-value vehicle which has had about £20,000 spent on it, the only thing said after taking down the details was if they were to find it, would I like to pay £120 for the privledge of having it recovered.

Nearly a week late, I've heard nothing from the Police. You'd have thought a special vehicle crimes unit would have contacted me on the night or since, but no, not a whisper.

This raises a serious question in my mind, i.e. why exactly do I pay a considerable amount of money each month in taxes when I receive nothing in return? Anyone can take a statement and file it away so it's never seen the light of day again. This is not a service worth thousands of pounds. This isn't to say anything bad against individual officers as I know of quite a few that do a great job, but a management/planning problem.

On top of this, insult to injury is added in the form of insurance. Everyone I've spoken to who isn't a biker seems to think that it's okay, the bike was insured. No, it's not okay, as I won't get my money back. The insurance company will never pay out the value of the bike and when I got to replace the bike with something new, they will raise the premiums so much that it will rule out being able to afford it, which raises another question, is it even worth me claiming? At this moment I think not. I want a new bike, but I won't pay £3,000 for the privledge of insuring it.

This seems like madness to me. Why am I the one who gets penalised when I've done no wrong-doing? Vehicle insurance is based around risk and blame. I'm not to blame, and I sure won't be parking a bike anywhere near where the last one went missing, so there's no risk, but yet I will still be penalised. This is without logic. The only people who gain here are the thieves as they know the Police just don't do anything about it.

I may do some more research on the insurance issue and write an article for LB as there's clearly something very wrong about this situation.

I've put a £2,000 reward out for the safe return of the bike. The hope is that this might rattle some cages and cause some people to talk.

Details of the van and my bike are up on LB:

http://londonbikers.com/news/10550/stolen-our-gsx-r-1000-k5-heavily-modified-can-you-help

I've had the bike for four years now and done everything I've wanted on it. I've modified so much of it that really the only standard items left were the frame, tank and wheels. I've ridden it around Europe, thrashed it around nearly all the circuits in the UK and some in Europe. It's been a great experience. If this is the end of the ride for the phenominal K5 1000, then so be it. There'll be more bikes, but right now I've got to spend my evenings and weekends freezing my hands off trying to get my DRZ-400 running again so I can commute and get off the buses!

Hosting Migration

We're migrating londonbikers.com from our current hosting provider in the UK to a new one in France that we use for Moto Professional. The old host's hardware is getting long in the tooth now and we're incurring more and more bandwidth costs each month as the site grows, so we're upgrading, and moving out!

Our current host has served us well for the last three years, but they've had some bad down-time that at one time lasted for three days with no compensation, then they had their customer detail database hacked and that caused a huge headache with a load of password/username changes that ensued, so we're glad to be moving to somewhere more professional.

The new hosting platform is still Windows Server 2003 based, but we are increasing the number of servers used, so there's more redundancy and capacity, then on top of that we're also moving from MS SQL Server 2005 to the new 2008 version. We've had problems getting 2008 running in our development environment though which is slowing things up, but a couple of our smaller logging and reporting apps are already running off of '2008 on the new hosting platform.

The new hardware is a huge step up from what we had. We were running on Intel P4 systems with 2gb ram and non-raid hard-drives. The new machines are quad-core monsters with 8gb of ram each and a proper multi-terabyte raid storage solution. We also get a major bandwidth upgrade from our current 100mbit connection to an unlimited 1gbit/1000mbit line which will save us a good amount of money and allow us to grow without concern.

We haven't moved the site over yet as we've had some difficulties getting the site to run on the new 64bit platform. There's some minor code-changes required and a recompile but we're mid-project and I'm loath to stop that just to pull the current live source out and work on that instead.

The move should be done in time for Christmas, which when done, we can look forward to a nice performance boost for LB, with decreased page load-times.

Resurrecting the blog

I'm resurrecting my blog. It's been a long time since my last post, and not too long ago I took the whole site offline whilst I thought about what to do with it.

Instead of inain personal ramblings which I'm sure nobody wants to read about (my friends can suffer this via Facebook), I'll write about my work with Media Panther and other things that interest me and I have an opinion on. Invariably this will be software, other technological developments or events in person.

For those that don't know, Media Panther Network (Media Panther Ltd) is something I founded and work on with my business partner, Tasha Crook. Media Panther Network (MPN for short) runs two websites currently; londonbikers.com which is hugely popular online magazine and community for the motorcycle world, as well as Moto Professional which is a new service, supplying the media and racing industries with high-quality professional photography which can be found, bought and downloaded quickly and simply via the website.

Whilst doing many other things, I also head up the technical development of MPN, planning the strategy , design and implementation of the two current sites plus more we have planned and are working on.

Currently all our sites run on the Microsoft ASP.net/SQL Server platform, though we have one new site planned that will run on PHP and MySQL, though still under IIS6. This site will be sensitive in nature, but I'll talk about it in time.

This is just a simple post for now, I'll write more soon. We've got a lot of things on the go at the moment so I'm sure there'll be no end of subject material :)

Final Countdown

For the last few months, the time I have available for developing has been spent on the relaunch of the londonbikers.com site I work on. There's a huge (from a technical perspective) effort to renew the content management system, the galleries, new features and overall appearance of the site. It's been a long time coming, but I think it should be here in about a month or so.

A lot of things are coming together and we'll see a load of new features on the LB site over the next few months, but as soon as this project is done, I'll be straight onto another project we've got planned. I can't say any more on this as it's still in the conceptual stage, but from a developers point of view, it's juicy and shouldn't be a behemoth like the LB one.

Operations wise, LB is now consistently pumping out about 100k unique readers a month over the winter period, which is impressive considering bikers generally run out of steam and have nothing more to say about biking over the winter months and that the site is running only on word-of-mouth promotion. Traffic should surge over the next few months as the weather heats up and the new site gets promoted, both physically and online.

More extensive racing coverage is planned for this year, with agreements in place with Dorna. Our photojournalists are itching to get out to the meets now that we've secured full access for entire seasons rather than by running things on an ad-hoc basis. This has taken a lot of work to secure and the photographers have invested in some seriously professional equipment. I can't wait to see the miracles they perform!

The team's growing, the weight is being distributed, but we're looking for a partner to come on board and help us take this ship to the next level. If you have investment and/or business development interests and experience, then please, speak to us, there's a hugely passionate team here looking for the right person to join us and create something truly special in the motorcycle space. We also need *nix/.net developers for a number of stand-alone projects that we've got planned... These won't be volunteer roles, so if you're curious, speak to me.

Development

It's been a long time since I've posted up, mainly because my spare time is completely maxed out with trying to juggle the needs of my day-time job, my relationship and the work I do for londonbikers.com. This year has been reeeeally busy, with a huge range of experiences had, stuff that should really be useful over the next year or two as we try and take things to the next level with LB and a few other projects we have planned.

Not all the experiences were good, but they still taught me valuable things about how stuff work and how things can be better handled. Developing a website that has aims to be The portal for biking in and around London as well as the focus for an online and offline community has been a huge challange, both in terms of using the time available as efficiently as possible and constantly re-evaluating how things are and should be done.

We're working flat-out on a new version of the site that will better display and promote all the content available as well as bring new functionality that will hopefully change the way people think about biking and their every-day lives. This new functionality will be released in stages, with the first major release being devoted to the new appearance and layout. The new site will make it much more 'sticky' and allow us to better target the London audience, i.e. make it more relevant, and if all goes to plan, sexier as well!

A huge problem we've had is in building a team to work on the site and take it to the next level. We desperately need people willing to help put news into the system, write original news stories/articles and attend events as a photo-journalist. It requires a big team to make this happen and currently we're doing this with one person dedicated to the editorial and the contributions of field photographers and the odd contribution from other volunteers. Attracting motivated people is the biggest part of this problem and one we've yet to be fully successful at. This is something we'll be attempting to address shortly.

My DR-Z 400 is still off the road after the engine was blown up whilst in the care of my beloved girlfriend. The engine has been replaced but is still in a few pieces. I've not had the motivation to rebuild it for a long time due to lack of space to do it, but now I've moved house and have a garage to work in, all the parts needed have been delivered, with more parts than I thought necessary, as I seem to have lost a load along the way of it being in other peoples care, stripped, moved, moving house then rebuilt. I've got all new bodywork for it, so it's going to have a new look as well. All I have left to do is to finish removing the paint from the tank, spray it, then reassemble the clutch, put the casings on, replace the completely dead battery and get an MOT!

Impatience, persistence and frustration

I thought you were supposed to become more chilled out as you mature? That's what I was lead to believe anyhow. I've become excited at the prospect of buying a cool new bike jacket off ebay that will keep me warm and dry over the coming months, except that it's been nearly a week and a half now and it still hasn't turned up yet. I'm so impatient with new purchases, that it boils my blood when I don't get the items swiftly.

To compound the issue, I bought a Sony Vaio FS215S (1.8ghz/100gb/g6200 gfx/512mb ram) laptop for business use, and that too is taking a long time to come through. I thought I was being clever by purchasing it online, NO. I should have just gone to a Sony Shop in person and walked out with it and paid the extra, just so I could have ti then and there. Accessories for this laptop seem somewhat light, which is dissapointing considering nearly every other Vaio in Sony's range has a wealth of enticing slip bags and other nice looking items. I ordered a basic looking slip-case to accompany it from the Sony Style website, except they ship from Belgium and the UPS tracking information is very depressing, watching it bounce around desolate parts of the Belgium and Britain, with me sat here crossing my fingers that UPS will actually be able to deliver it to me (they failed the last three times).

On a more positive note, LB is developing nicely behind the scenes, we're working on many plans for next year, and I'm concentrating on software development right now, to better the site so that we can market it to a wider audience. Stickers have proved very popular, with us selling out of one colour, but more will be on their way once we've finalised the official LB logo (a competition will be started to help drum up ideas).

I'm working on a full category-centric directory system for the LB site, which will allow people to submit entries and have them listed with a full range of details. It'll be fully searchable by keywords, meta-data and browsable by category navigation. The idea is to provide a resource that will allow bikers to find a particular service, or event easily, and draw people to the site who might not initially find it attractive to them.

A few friends and I went motocrossing recently, on our more green-lane orientated enduro bikes and had a great day out, with all of us getting into the swing of things and learning to catch some air on the jumps. I can't wait to go back, though it'll have to wait a short while I think, as the DRZ has been lent out lately and the engine has gone pop! Apparently the ring-seal has gone. It's being looked at by a friend, though I hope it's just the seal that needs replacing and not the whole top-end, or re-boring of the cylinder.. who knows. Quite upset about that, but then again it's the reason I have two bikes, so I always have a backup if one is off the road for whatever reason.