Virgin and Children travelling alone: Not bad policy, bad implementation

So if you're an Australian reader you would have heard the controversy recently when a male passenger was asked to move so that he wasn't sitting next to a pair unaccompanied minors. There are heaps of stories floating around in the media about it at the moment and it's even made headlines in the US. So basically they have a policy that unaccompanied minors shouldn't be seated next to males, with preferences given to having an empty seat next to them, then to have a woman. Now, for sure it is stereotyping males, but as with many such rules like this it is based on statistics. This is the same reason the Red Cross asks so many questions and eliminates people that have travelled to the UK etc. You'll probably find that the reason Qantas won't comment is that they also have the same policy.

Now, whether you disagree with the policy or not we can (probably) all agree that it was handled a little badly. This policy should be one of those silently enacted policies. That way minors are protected and no one becomes offended. By this I mean that better management of the seating arrangements tied into the booking system would mean that the policy could be enforced but it not be obvious to any passengers. I believe that the system already records when you make a booking that it will be an unaccompanied minor, so that part is covered. The next part is the seating arrangements. If it hasn't been arranged prior to boarding then simply issue them a new ticket. As every frequent flyer will tell you getting a last minute seating change is not uncommon. In this case, a last minute change for "operational reasons" to the gentleman's seating probably wouldn't have raised an objection. If you need move them to an exit row or something so it seems like an "upgrade". Ideally this would of course occur much earlier, say before the person even tried to select a seat, by marking the seats as unavailable on the booking system.

So my view is, good policy, bad implementation.

iOS 6 Wifi Plus Cellular

So apparently Apple as introduced a "Wifi plus Cellular" option for data in iOS 6. The idea is that data can be sourced primarily via Wifi but if Wifi is spotty it can be backed up by using the cellular connection as well. While this idea sounds great I am not sure how well it will work in practice. Firstly, how many applications are designed to take advantage of such redundant connections resolving to different IP addresses and the like. Unless the switch over is transparent and instantaneous, more time may be lost with flipping and application recovery than is gained by the dual channel feature. Ideally I'd like to see the feature go further and say bind specific applications to either Cellular only, Wifi only or both. Consider the situation where you are using your phone for work, you'd like your work emails to come through immediately but you're probably not too concerned if Facebook updates slowly in the background. Secondly it will be interesting to see how the carriers respond to this, there are lots of efforts underway to push users off the RAN and onto Wifi, this setting will ensure that a user on Wifi still consumes cellular resources beyond those required for voice termination. This is particularly a factor in networks where voice is still circuit switched but data is packet switched.

Syncing any existing folder to Dropbox/Google Drive/Sky Drive

I am a big fan of cloud storage. I've used Dropbox for documents and Sugasync for work for quite a while. They are both great but with the recent addition to the family I decided it was about time to start backing up my photos in the cloud as well. I've currently got somewhere between 25 and 30 Gb of photos on my computers and this exceeds the free storage limit for Dropbox, even if I do maximise my referrals (click here to sign up and earn me more space please :) ). Thankfully I managed to dredge up my (poorly named) Hotmail address from the dark ages (I think I signed up in '97!) and score a 25 Gb Skydrive account I am not sure if the offer still exists but you get 7 Gb just for signing up). Unfortunately this still wasn't quite enough space for all my photos so I had to sign up for Google Drive as well to get enough storage overall.

The downside of these tools (except I might add SugaSync) is that they create a folder on the drive and everything in there is synchronised into the cloud. This is great as it is quite simple, but it is a pain if you want to maintain an existing folder structure, such as the storage hierarchy for all my photos. On *nix you'd simply create a symlink or two in the newly created folder pointing to the existing folders you want to mirror and be done with it. Unfortunately it is not that simple in Windows world, NTFS (the file system used by newer versions of Windows) does support the idea of Symbolic links through something they call junctions, but it is not available by default. Fortunately, there a a few programs out there that can be used. After a bit of poking around I found a few different programs and ways to go about it. Starting from this blog post which has a good description of the nitty gritty, I also found this question on SuperUser to be helpful. In the end I installed Link Shell Extension which adds handy options in the contextual menu and works in both XP (where I tested it) and Windows 7 environments.

Once it is installed you need to pick your source folder right click on it and select "Pick Link Source" then you navigate to your SkyDrive/Google Drive/Dropbox folder and select "Drop As.." then "Hardlink clone" if you are dropping a single file then "Junction" should work. "Hardlink Clone" ensures that all the underlying folders and files are linked as well.

Now I am slowly uploading the files to their various destinations and maintaining my file structure at the same time!