NTTA should set 75 mph speed limits

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75 MPH speed limit signThe North Texas Tollway Authority (NTTA) can set 75 mph speed limits on much of its road system.

HB 1353, which was effective Sept. 1, 2011, basically says any road can have a 75 MPH speed limit (full text) if justified by TxDOT’s speed zoning procedure. Before then, 75 mph was only allowed in a few, politically-chosen  counties.

This speed zoning procedure generally requires the speed limit to be set at the 85th percentile speed of traffic.

What’s the 85th percentile speed? It’s the upper end of the “flow of traffic”.

Speed limits set at the 85th percentile speeds fully legalize this “flow of traffic”–the speeds of reasonable drivers–and only criminalizes demonstrably unsafe speeds. (more info)

What’s the 85th percentile speeds on NTTA roads?

Texas 121 TollOn the Sam Rayburn Tollway (TX 121), the average 85th percentile speed across the entire roadway is 74.1 mph. That rounds to 75 mph. Virtually all of the tolled part of TX 121 could be set to 75 mph with no hassle.

How about thePresident George Bush Turnpike logo President George Bush Turnpike? Not so fast. (Ha ha, get the pun?) 7 year old data has the entire road averaging a 71 mph 85th percentile speed. But wait, there’s more! 7 years ago, its speed limit was 60 mph! The speed limit is now 70, so the 85th percentile speeds have probably crept up. Plus there’s the new eastern extension, which may have changed traffic patterns. This entire road needs to be rechecked!
Dallas North Tollway logoThe last road is the Dallas North Tollway. It’s surprising:

  • Between I-35E and I-635 has a 73 mph 85th percentile speed! That rounds to 75 mph! It’s debatable if the sag curves under many of the bridges really need a 50 mph advisory speed. If that could be dispensed with, or raised to, say, 60 mph, then you could easily see a 70 or 75 mph limit on the old part of the DNT!
  • Between I-635 and the Collin County Line: 69 mph. This part could go to 70 mph.
  • Between the Collin County line and Sam Rayburn (TX-121): 73 mph, another 75 mph candidate!
  • Between 121 and the northern end: Surprisingly, only 69 mph! So the 70 mph limit there wouldn’t be changed. However, this measurement was taken when the speed limit was only 65. It’s 70 now, so the speed could have crept up a hair. This section needs to be rechecked.

If NTTA strictly followed the 85th percentile rule (which is only fair, since we motorists are expected to strictly obey traffic laws), and didn’t use arbitrary “engineering judgment” to force lower limits, we could see 75 mph limits on most of its road network.*

*A caveat: Because of a pointless, broken program called environmental speed limits, there may be red tape to raising the speed limit on DNT between Frankford Rd. and SRT (TX-121) and PGBT between I-35E and TX 78. None of the rest of the NTTA road system is subject to this program.

Here’s the raw data from NTTA: ORR-2-21-2012. This has the Excel files and strip maps. The Excel files have the speed checks. You’ll use the percentile function to get each location’s 85th percentile speed. The strip maps show where each speed check was run.

Comparing current data to last time period’s data in Postgres

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I have a Postgres table where each row shows the number of traffic tickets written by each city per month.

I needed to show the percentage change between the current and prior month’s ticketwriting. For example, if a city wrote 1000 tickets this month and 500 last month, then I wanted a field in the row for this month to show a 200% increase over last month.

Here’s how I did it.

I first had to create two functions:

-- number of traffic tickets for
-- the given month and city
CREATE FUNCTION traffictickets(
                   cityName CHARACTER VARYING,
                   MONTH TIMESTAMP WITHOUT TIME zone
                ) RETURNS INTEGER
     AS 'select "TrafficTickets"
         FROM raw."OCA tickets per city"
         WHERE "Date" = $2 AND "City" = $1;'
     LANGUAGE SQL
     IMMUTABLE
     RETURNS NULL ON NULL INPUT;

Then I made a short SQL script that referenced this function:

UPDATE raw."OCA tickets per city"
     SET "Change" = "TrafficTickets"::REAL /
        (CASE WHEN traffictickets("City", "Date" - INTERVAL '1 month') = 0
         THEN -1
         ELSE traffictickets("City", "Date" - INTERVAL '1 month')
         END)::REAL;

Viola, now each of my rows shows the percentage change between the current and prior month’s ticket counts! Except there’s a huge problem–the changes aren’t consistently meaningful.

If ticketwriting dropped month over month, the change field will be between 0 and 1: going from 100 tickets to 20 tickets the next month, the change is 0.2. But here’s the problem: if ticketwriting increased, the number will be between 1 and infinity. If ticketwritng increased from 20 to 100, the change is 5. Or if it changed from 2 to 150, the change is 75!

Yikes, I need some way of bringing these positive changes down to Earth.

I think I have a solution: show the change relative to the city’s average ticketwriting over all its years in my database.

I added a new function:

-- average number of traffic tickets written by
-- that city over all months in my table
CREATE FUNCTION averageticketsforcity(
                   cityName CHARACTER VARYING
                ) RETURNS REAL
     AS 'select avg("TrafficTickets"::real)::real
         FROM raw."OCA tickets per city"
         WHERE "City" = $1;'
     LANGUAGE SQL
     IMMUTABLE
     RETURNS NULL ON NULL INPUT;

Here’s the new version of the query:

UPDATE raw."OCA tickets per city"
     SET "Change" = ("TrafficTickets"::REAL -
      traffictickets("City", "Date" - INTERVAL '1 month')::REAL) /
      CASE WHEN averageticketsforcity("City") = 0
        THEN 1
        ELSE averageticketsforcity("City")
      END;

That seems to have fixed it. Now all my values appear to be equally meaningful to each other.

Is Flying Colors Sports’s Great Amazing Race a scam?

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(UPDATE: Flying Colors Sports’s owner Greg Benton posted a response in the comments below.)

Yesterday, my son and I did a family race.

It was called the Great Amazing Race, put on by Flying Color Sports. It’s supposedly a lighter version of the same thing you can see on TV.

It was neither great nor amazing.

It’s presented like a charity:

Here’s a problem: this “charity” has the patina of a loose, for-profit operation:

  • No IRS-recognized charities have names beginning with “flying colors sports” or “active families“. In fact, Flying Colors Sports is an Ohio for-profit LLC that was chartered in 2004. Ohio had no business on record beginning with “active families”. (Search for yourself.)
  • Through Google, I can’t find clear evidence of anything charitable these Active Families 30 or Active Families 60 charities have done, or that they even exist!
  • The event organizer said Akwasi Owusu-Ansah was supposed to attend but couldn’t because he was just traded. Um, no. It was January 15. He had been traded 6 weeks prior, on Dec. 4.
  • Poorly run, disorganized event, especially for something that cost between $30 and $50 per family.
  • No trained medical staff, or if they were there, they were well-hidden.
  • Was run worse than many free Cub or Boy Scout events I’ve been to.
  • Low-quality, sloppy web site with poor poorfreading, like ”Norbuck Par” or “I-365″ (it’s I-635!). In fact, it’s just thrown together with Godaddy’s free Website Tonight tool (see bottom of most pages).
  • The promised race packet was just a green, generic bifold flyer with no useful event details.
  • Credit card data is transmitted with no security and converted to email, which is inherently insecure.
  • No runner identification whatsoever. It’s all on an honor system basis. I could have easily scammed my way into the event.
  • Instead of “8 fun-filled stations“, there were six, and they were silly: 1. blindfolded guide, 2. sponge relay, 3. mummy wrap with toilet paper, 4. golfing a tennis ball into a hula hoop, 5. “hold the football between your legs while you go around some cones” and 6. a bingo game. Yes, the last station is really a game of chance, where you watch slower people get lucky and pass you up! Sure, these were enjoyable, but not $30-$50 per team enjoyable!
  • Purportedly tax-deductible donations are to be sent to the private residence of Donald and Karen S. Helton at 7858 Red Fox Drive, West Chester OH 45069.
  • The company’s headquarters are at the private residence of Gregory L. and Michelle R. Benton at 8270 Miranda Place, West Chester OH 45069.

So what’s the truth? Is there really any charity behind this?

I don’t know.

It could be that this is all legit, and some charity puts on an overpriced, over-promoted, hokey event run by a marketing firm that communicates poorly.

But it’s also possible that this is only a for-profit enterprise. If that’s true, it would be shameful. They would be getting undeserved free labor, and they would pretty much be pocketing money from families’ charity budgets.

Either way, participants deserve the truth, and they deserve something better than a brief, sloppy event for $30-$50, and taxpayers deserve for a charity to be organized properly, with IRS recognition.

Google Maps API V3 geocoding with SharePoint 2010

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This explains how to show addresses in a SharePoint 2010 list on a Google Map.

This article is based on Kyle Shaeffer’s Plotting Your SharePoint 2010 List Data on a Google Map. The main difference is I upgraded his method to Google Maps API V3.

Here’s how it’s done:

Create a list

Using SharePoint Designer 2010 (free download!), open your SharePoint site and:

  1. Under Site Objects, click Lists and Libraries.
  2. In the Lists and Libraries tab, click Custom List.
  3.  Enter MyData and press OK.
  4. Click on your new list, then select Edit list columns in the Customization section.
  5. Add a Multi Lines of Text field using the Add New Column button at top left:. Name it Address.

Create data view

Still in SharePoint Designer 2010:

  1. Click Site Pages under Site Objects on the left:
  2.  In the ribbon at top, select Page > ASPX. Name your new page map.aspx.
  3. Click on the new page, then click Edit file in the Customization section. If asked to open the page in advanced mode, click Yes.
  4. Make sure that Design or Split are selected at bottom. From the menu at top: Insert > Data View > MyData

Now you’ll see your data in a table in the page.

Add the JavaScripts

You’ll need to reference two script libraries: Google’s Maps API and jQuery.

Find the opening <form> element in the source code. Right after it, paste this code:

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/js?key=AIzaSyDfiyRU8FAP90FYUp9rujok-x8-CVD7_Z4&sensor=false"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
 
<div id="map_canvas" style="width: 98%; height: 400px"></div>
 
<script type="text/javascript">
// set up the basic map object
var latlng = new google.maps.LatLng(34.603885, -4.626009);
var myOptions = {
	zoom: 2,
	center: latlng,
	mapTypeId: google.maps.MapTypeId.ROADMAP
};
var map = new google.maps.Map(document.getElementById("map_canvas"), myOptions);
 
// this is used for geocoding
var geocoder = new google.maps.Geocoder();
 
function codeAddress(address, theName) {
    geocoder.geocode( { 'address': address}, function(results, status) {
      if (status == google.maps.GeocoderStatus.OK) {
        var marker = new google.maps.Marker({
            map: map,
            position: results[0].geometry.location
        });
      } else {
        alert("Geocode was not successful for the following reason: " + status);
      }
    });
}
 
// this is called with body's onload to pull addresses after the page is done loading.
function initialize() {
	$("tr.ms-itmhover").each(function(i){
		codeAddress($(this).find('.ms-rtestate-field:eq(0)').text(), $(this).find('.ms-vb-title:eq(0) a').text());
	});
}
</script>

Replace API_KEY_GOES_HERE with your own Google API key. Don’t have one? Get it at https://code.google.com/apis/console/. Be sure to get a Google Maps API v3 key! v2 is deprecated.

Now you need to add an onload attribute to your body tag to fire off the initialize function:

<body onload="initialize()">

Viola! You have a map that dynamically pulls from the below list!

Caveats

The initialize method works by scraping from the rendered HTML. It’s finding every tr with class ms-itmhover–which is what is produced by the data view you inserted above. Then within each of those trs, it finds:

  • The first item with class ms-rtestate-field and gets its text contents. This will be your address.
  • The contents of the a tag within the first element with class ms-vb-title, which is the title field.

You’ll have to do JavaScript surgery if you change fields in a way that alters this. For example, if another multi line text field displays before your address, you’ll have to change .ms-rtestate-field:eq(0) to .ms-rtestate-field:eq(1). Or you’ll need to alter the XSLT behind the data view to produce some other classes or code.

Also, because this uses JavaScript to scrape the screen’s contents, you must deliver the data list in the page . It doesn’t have to be visible–you can make it invisible with CSS. If you don’t want the data to be on the page, you’ll need to use more sophisticated techniques, possibly some kind of AJAX.

Show all Sitecore Active Directory users

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I manage a Sitecore installation that’s integrated with an enterprise Active Directory.

We have over 11,000 accounts in our Active Directory. I needed a list of the Sitecore users, who are only a small percentage of the 11,000.

We have nothing in Active Directory that sets them apart, like group membership.

We architected our solution so that users are never assigned directly to items; users are members of Sitecore roles, and we assign Sitecore roles to items. All I have to do is rifle through all my Sitecore roles.

So how do I find my users? It took a little C#. Here’s the core code:

var roles = Sitecore.Security.Domains.Domain.GetDomain("sitecore").GetRoles();
foreach (var role in roles)
{
    foreach(var roleMember in Sitecore.Security.Accounts.RolesInRolesManager.GetRoleMembers(role, false))
    {
        if (roleMember.AccountType == AccountType.User)
        {
            var userObject = Sitecore.Security.Accounts.User.FromName(roleMember.Name, false);
 
            // only adding SMU domain users
            if (userObject.Domain.Name == "myActiveDirectoryDomain")
                AddUserToList(userObject);
        }
    }
}

This gets all Sitecore domain groups and extracts all users who are a member of my corporate domain. Of course, you’ll replace myActiveDirectoryDomain with your own domain name.

I created a separate AddUserToList method to handle adding these items to a Dictionary:

private void AddUserToList(User user)
{
    if (!_users.ContainsKey(user.Name))
    {
        _users.Add(user.Name,user);
    }
}

After the core code runs, you’ll need to code your own stuff to spit out what’s in the dictionary.

Here’s what I used:

foreach(var user in _users)
{
    var row = new TableRow();
    OutputTable.Rows.Add(row);
 
    row.Cells.Add(new TableCell { Text = user.Value.Profile.UserName });
    row.Cells.Add(new TableCell { Text = user.Value.Profile.FullName });
    row.Cells.Add(new TableCell { Text = user.Value.Profile.Email });
 
    if (user.Value.Profile.FullName.Length == 0)
    {
        row.CssClass = "alert";
    }
 
    var rolesCell = new TableCell();
 
    foreach (var role in RolesInRolesManager.GetRolesForUser(user.Value, false))
    {
        if (role.Domain.Name == "sitecore")
        {
            rolesCell.Text += "
 " + role.Name;
        }
    }
 
    rolesCell.Text = rolesCell.Text.Substring(7);
    row.Cells.Add(rolesCell);
}

Note that I already had a Table named OutputTable on my ASPX page.

Tadaa! The result is a list of all my domain members who are Sitecore users.

Hiding Active Directory user IDs from WordPress author slugs

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I recently set up a corporate WordPress blog system. With the Active Directory Integration plugin, users can sign in with their corporate ID and password.

But here’s a problem: each blog post has a link to the author’s profile. That profile’s URL includes the user ID. The corporation’s security standards say we can’t expose user IDs to the world, so the author profile URLs have to be sanitized.

It took a while to figure out a solution, but the end result is reasonable.

I found this post at StackExchange’s WordPress site. Adding the first two code snippets (below) to the end of wp-config.php tells WordPress to use the user’s nickname metadata to construct the profile URLs:

add_filter( 'request', 'wpse5742_request' );function wpse5742_request( $query_vars )
 
{
 if ( array_key_exists( 'author_name', $query_vars ) ) {
 global $wpdb;
 $author_id = $wpdb-&gt;get_var( $wpdb-&gt;prepare( "SELECT user_id FROM {$wpdb-&gt;usermeta} WHERE meta_key='nickname' AND meta_value = %s", $query_vars['author_name'] ) );
 if ( $author_id ) {
 $query_vars['author'] = $author_id;
 unset( $query_vars['author_name'] );
 }
 }
 return $query_vars;
}
 
add_filter( 'author_link', 'wpse5742_author_link', 10, 3 );
function wpse5742_author_link( $link, $author_id, $author_nicename)
{
 $author_nickname = get_user_meta( $author_id, 'nickname', true );
 if ( $author_nickname ) {
 $link = str_replace( $author_nicename, $author_nickname, $link );
 }
 return $link;
}

But wait, there’s more!

Now you have to get a proper value into the nickname field. Active Directory Integration makes this easy. In this plugin’s settings, go to the User Meta tab and enter this into the Additional User Attributes field: mailnickname:string:nickname. You’ll may need to replace mailnickname with your own Active Directory user attribute if it isn’t appropriate for you.

That’s it. The next time a user logs in, the nickname field is updated, and all future profile URLs for that user will not have a user ID.

Skepticism of the law

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I’m not a Lawrence Lessig fan. He’s too radical, but he still had a great quote last year:

…I am a little surprised by the respect that non lawyers typically give the law. Because lawyers’ view is one of constant skepticism. We constantly ask and demand of the law that it explain to us: How does this make sense? And we never presume that we happen to have a body of regulation that makes sense. We always examine. Where it does make sense, we say good for the law, and we encourage people to follow it. But where it makes no sense, our perspective is that the law needs to be changed.

He only encourages obedience to laws that make sense. Later he wrote “Stop believing, stop listening, stop deferring. Feel entitled to question this system.”

(Getting Our Values around Copyright Right, EDUCAUSE Review, March/April 2010)

This is refreshing. Usually, I see the paintywaist viewpoint, that all law deserves to be obeyed just because it exists.

No!

Law is just an approximation of right and wrong. It’s often off.

Americans were once required to return slaves, but it was never wrong to ignore this law and help slaves become free. Similarly, suppose 75 mph is safe on a road. 75 mph is illegal if the speed limit sign says 65, but it’s not wrong.

Educause: Outsource the Transactional, Keep the Transformative

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Educause’s recent Outsource the Transactional, Keep the Transformative complements my recent article questioning the value of IT projects.

In my article, I said that work  easily expressed as a classical/waterfall project probably has less intrinsic business value. This includes stuff like routine infrastructure and commodity services.

The Educause piece has a graph showing how Pepperdine University rated the value of its in-house IT services:

(Click the image to see the full size.)

Sampling of services with lowest value or transformative potential, mostly the stuff of process or where classical/waterfall projects are normative:

  • Windows administration
  • Security
  • DBAs
  • Help Desk (outsourcing this is the theme of the Educause article)

And services with the highest value or transformative potential, the stuff of agility:

  • EIS functional (basically business analysts)
  • Portal
  • Technology & Learning Team
  • University Planning (basically enterprise architecture)

I chuckled at security’s inclusion in the least value segment. Security has always lived in a halo of insecurity; their value is in what didn’t happen. How do you express that? Regardless, you’d be crazy not to have a good security team.

How about the rest? Does this mean Windows administrators, DBAs, help desk staff, etc. should quake in their boots?

Depends. In the near term, I don’t see a sea change, but I also don’t see growing opportunities for work on the bottom left of the graph. Long-term, the outsourcing question is “when”, not “if”. And until then, the value of work on the bottom left isn’t intrinsic; it’s measured by what it enables the people on the top right to do. If the bottom lefters aren’t helping the top righters, they are nailing their own coffin.

Once the outsourcing begins, I’d hope that it results in either:

  1. Equivalent position at the outsourcer. I saw a university do this when it outsourced its trades department (HVAC, plumbing, landscaping, etc.). If you enjoy the trade, this can be good; you’ll probably have more growth opportunities versus pigeonholing with an employer where your trade is ephemeral. This is already happening to pure-play programmers, too, but that’s a subject for a different day.
  2. You get reassigned within the original employer. This is what Pepperdine did (see bottom of page 1 of this). But–and this is a big but!–it’s only going to work if you’re versatile and able. If you’re a one shot wonder, have little skills depth, or find it difficult to adapt, this could be the beginning of a downward spiral.

So what to make of this? Two things.

First, if your job is routine, process-driven, or involves a lot of waterfall projects, you may not be high on the business value ladder. These positions will be scrutinized. Make sure you are versatile enough to merit and survive reassignment.

Second, watch what’s going on around you. Where are you, your immediate coworkers, and your department headed? Is the cliched “writing on the wall”? Sometimes, you need to be proactive and transform yourself up the business value ladder.

Transformation, agility, and business value are the future of IT. Process and waterfall’s share of that future is declining. Be prepared.