Bug in Google maps' support for Eircodes

Ireland introduced a postcode system called Eircode relatively recently in 2015. Controversially it is not possible to map from an eircode to a GPS location without lookup on the Eircode Finder web site. The good news is that Google maps service supports eircodes and does the lookup for you behind the scenes. However, the bad news is that Google has a subtle but significant bug in the way that the Google maps works with eircodes.

The best way to understand the problem is to look at a practical example.

The example I will use is the address "12 Maunsells Park". If you search for this address Google will thankfully translate the address to "12 Maunsells Park, Galway, H91 AVW8, Ireland" where "H91 AVW8" is the eircode. If you ask for directions to this address it will correctly navigate you to the front door.

This is all good. However, the problem happens if you decide to instead search for the eircode  "H91 AVW8" (many delivery drivers prefer to search for the eircode because it is shorter to type and is unambiguous). At first glance this seems to work, because the dot appears at the same point in the map. However, if you try navigate to the point you will run into problems. 

The problem come from the fact that there is a small lane called "Maddens Lane" running behind the property. This small lane is lined with trees and a tall wall - there is no easy way to get from "Maddens Lane" to "12 Maunsells Park". However, since the dot on the map is slightly nearer to the back of the property, Google incorrectly decides that is where you want directions to.

If you route from one to the other Google says it is a 5 minute walk with three turns as you can see from the screenshot below.

This might seem like a minor nit-pick, but the reality of the situation is that people with a property between two roads like this will frequently dealing with delivery drivers ringing up to say they can't find where to deliver their package.

Understanding the problem is easy, implementing a solution is less obvious. One solution would be to update latitude/longitude in the eircode database to put the dot nearer the entrance to the property. However eircode support neem to be reluctant to do this.

Eliminating advertisements in YouTube videos

 YouTube is a great site. It includes an amazing collection of educational and entertaining content. The only problem is that most videos have annoying advertisements. Google realise that these ads are annoying so they offer the possibility of signing up for a premium account, but since the cost of such an account can be over 150 euros per year most people decide to tolerate the ads.

Luckily one of my students told me about a free hack to eliminate advertisements for free. When you play a video on YouTube you will see that the URL is something like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXX where XXX is the unique ID of the video you are watching. If you alter the URL to insert a minus sign - between the t and u in youtube you will be brought to an ad free version of the same video (e.g. https://www.yout-ube.com/watch?v=XXX)

Like all hacks, there are limitations.

1. Sometimes when you try to load a video from yout-ube.com for the first time you will get an error message "cannot locate video". I am not 100% certain why this error occurs. It is probably somehing to do with content caching. However, simply prerssing the "reload" button in your browser (or type ctrl/cmd-R) will solve the problem.
2. When using this service the video will occupy the full screen and so you won't be able to see the "related videos" that you see when you visit the normal YouTube site. Many people will consider this an advantage.

Don't ask me how this works behind the scenes. All I know is the description from their website, but this describes how to use the service rather than describing what happens under the covers. However, I am sorry to say that the site will probably stop working once Google figure out how to block it - there is too much revenue at stake for them.

Paying with your mobile phone - How does it work?

It seems like magic to me that it is possible for me to pay for stuff using my mobile phone.  I am not an expert in payment systems, but this blog post is my attempt to describe what happens behind the scenes to make this possible. Since I have an Android phone, I will describe how it works with Google Pay - I assume that the same principles apply to using Apple Pay if you have an iPhone. 

1. The first step is to register all of your cards with Google Wallet. To make this easy Google Wallet allows you to simply take a picture of your credit/debit card(s) and it will save the card details without the need for you to type in the long card number manually. When you enter a card Google automatically communicates with your bank to ensure the card is valid and not reported stolen.
2. When you are buying some goods or services, the merchant will type in the amount on their point of sale device.
3. Assuming you are willing to pay the amount requested, you first need to pick which one of the stored cards you want to use for this transaction. With android, this is done by long pressing on the power on/off button and then swiping left and right to highlight the card you want. To make it easy for you, Google Wallet will display a small picture of what the original card looks like.
4. Having activated your chosen card you hold your phone within 4cm of the POS terminal so they can use near field communication (NFC) to exchange details of your card. NFC is deliberately limited to only work at such short range to avoid accidentally paying for someone else's purchases.
5. The POS terminal then checks with Visa/Mastercard who in turn contacts the banks which issued the card to verify that you are credit worthy.
6. Occasionally the bank decides that they want to double check the identity of the person making the payment. If this happens, you will be asked to unlock your phone using a PIN code, unlock pattern or fingerprint reader. After this happens you need to return to step 4 above.
7. When payment is successfully made, your phone will display a confirmation message with the last 4 digits of the card used (displaying the entire card number would be aa security weakness).

As I said, I am not an expert in payment systems. So if I got something wrong please let me know.

The demise of Google Reader and Google Listen

Like many other people I was surprised to hear about Google cancelling two of my favourite tools - the Google Reader service for managing your RSS feeds and the Google Listen podcast player.  Apparently the reason given is that they could not see any way to make revenue from these products, but I would have though that the users of Google Reader would have been a gold mine of data in relation to what feeds are most popular through the number of reads/favourites/shares etc..

I like the simplicity of Google Listen and you can still install Google Listen, but only if you have  saved a link to it (it no longer shows up in search results). I occasionally find that Listen will crash at random times and since Google have cancelled the project they are unlikely to fix it (I wonder why they didn’t Open Source the project like they did with Google Wave),  As a result I have switched to BeyondPod as a replacement. Overall I find it reasonably easy to use - I have paid for the Pro version, but I don't think I really use any of the Pro features so the free version is equally good from my point of view.

Apparently Google Reader site will be shutting down in July, so while there is no mad rush to get off the platform, it is still a good idea to find some other tool to replace it. The consensus on the internet seems to be that Feedly is the best alternative - my initial experiences seem to back up that claim.

Is Google AdSense a lucrative way to earn money?

Many bloggers believe that including Google AdSense advertisement on your site represents an opportunity to earn some significant money that will defray your costs and even provide you with an additional source of income. When I established this blog, I deliberately decided not to include any advertisements because I wanted to make it clear that I was not motivated by potential earnings.

When I registered for Movember I decided to temporarily enable Google AdSense ads for the month. I was partly hoping that this would provide me another way to collect money for the charity, but I was also experimenting to see how much money could be earned from this stream.

The bad news for the Irish Cancer Society is that this did not result in a significant revenue stream. In total I earned 7 euro and 64 cents during the month. Since they don't allow you to withdraw any money until your account earnings exceeds 10 euro, there was very little chance that I would consider giving up my day job and living off my AdSense earnings (in order to ensure that the charity didn't suffer I made a personal donation in lieu).


This experience, matches the experience I had a few years ago with trying AdSense advertisements on the web site of a local soccer team. The earnings from google were negligible, while the club had no problem convincing local businesses to pay several hundred euro per year to have their logo appearing on the web site. Of course, it could be the case that the local businesses are paying above the market rates for the existing advertisements - in fact many of them may be consciously doing this in order to build up good will in the community or to support what they believe is a good cause.

Circles, Friends and Followers

There has been a lot of interest in the recent launch of Google+ social networking service. One of the features that has gained most attention is the fact that  Google+ use the concept of circles to track the relationships between people as distinct from how Facebook uses Friends and Twitter uses Followers. However, many people are confused about how Google+ uses circles so I thought it might be helpful to write a brief explanation.

Facebook was originally based upon a simple model of symmetric friend links, this means that for if Tom is Jane's friend then Jane must also be Tom's friend. It is for this reason that when you add a new friend on Facebook the other person must confirm that they also wish to add you as a friend. This simple model of friendship works well for the friendships that we establish in school (and hence it is a good match for Facebook which originally was most used within a school setting). However, real world relationships are much more complex and hence mode advanced models of social relationships are sometimes needed.

Not all friendships are the same. For example, most people would have different criterion for what they would be comfortable sharing with their work colleagues and what they would like to share with their close friends and family members. For this reason, Facebook introduced a feature called 'lists' where you can divide your friends into different catergories. When you share something on Facebook you can choose whether you want to share it with all of your friends or else restrict it to only the members of a particular list. Since this feature was not originally in Facebook when it launched many users are not even aware of its existence and hence they tend to share everything with all of their friends (and this is the default anyway).

The other weakness in the Facebook friendship model is the fact that it is not necessary true that the people whose updates you would like to read are the same as the people whom you are happy to allow read what you post to the site (Facebook uses your friend list for these two different purposes). Systems like Twitter recognise this difference by implementing asymmetric links that they call 'followers'. By default all updates sent to Twitter can be read by anyone. If I add someone to my 'follow' list it simply means that I would like their updates to appear in my default stream and does not imply that there is any relationship between us. For example, I follow the Dalai Lama on Twitter because I am interested in reading the profound thoughts that His Holiness posts to twitter, but I have no reason to think that His Holiness is interested in reading the boring stuff that I post. For this reason the Dalai Lama has over 2.5 million followers on Twitter, although he doesn't follow anyone.

Google circles are asymmetric links (like Twitter) because you can add anyone you want to your circles and there is no need for them to approve this and/or add you to one of their circles. However, Google circles are not like Twitter follow lists because circles are used to control who can read your updates as well as whose updates are presented to you in your default stream. Everytime you post something to Google+ you are asked to specify which of your circle's members should be allowed to read the update (there is a special group called 'public' that you can share with if you don't care who reads this update).

By default Google+ shows you all of the updates you are allowed to see from any of the people in any of your groups, but you can also click on a circle name to only show updates from people who are in that circle. Therefore in order for you to see a particular update it will be necessary that you have added the person who posted the update to one of your circles and it will also be necessary for you to be a member of one of the circles that the person posting the update chose to share it with. Hence the logo shows intersecting circles.

Cross Posting from MyTracks to DailyMile

As I wrote before, I find that the My Tracks application from Google is a very useful and easy to use utility to use for tracking my running training. Howver, I have noticed that many people I know seemed to be using an application called DailyMile to post details of their exercise activity on Facebook.

This integration with Facebook seems to be great fun and it allows people to give and receive motivational messages, so I decided to register for DailyMile myself to see how it worked. When I started using it first I was surprised shocked to find that people are expected to manually enter details of the routes that they run. It struck me that there should be an application to automatically upload GPS traces to DailyMile, but when I asked a few friends nobody knew of one. However, my asking sparked a colleague Ben Hardill from IBM's Hursley lab to take on the challenge of building such an application. It only took him a few days to get it working and he describes his progress on his blog.

He has not yet officially released the application, but he asked me to be one of the Beta testers. It works brilliantly, with one limitation which means that you must use a regular DailyMile account rather than logging into DailyMile with your Facebook credentials. This bug is caused by a limitation in Daily Mile's implementation of OAuth rather than a limitation in Ben's code and in any case doesn't bother me, because I don't have any significant Daily Mile history to worry about abandoning

The existence of this application provoked me to go for a run this morning before work just so I had something to use to try out the application. I am glad to say that it worked great.

Where are the readers of this blog located

I think Google Analytics is a really great tool. I have enabled it for this blog and it allows me to find our all sorts of interesting facts about the people who visit the site. For example I recently was looking at the data for what countries the visitors to the blog are coming from. The darker colours indicate countries from which more visitors came.

I was not surprised to see that 41% of the visitors came from Ireland. The next most common country of origin was the UK (24%) and USA (15%) which wasn't surprising either. However, I was surprised to see how widely dispersed the visitors were. I have visitors for virtually all of the world apart from Greenland, and some countries in Africa, South America and Asia which might not have many internet users. Another notable exception was China which I suspect could mean that my site is blocked by the Great Firewall of China. I doubt if any Chinese censor has read my blog and found it objectionable, but perhaps all blogger based sites are blocked.

Starring on Google Street View

A few years ago my brother and I hired out a cruiser and spent a week cruising with our families on the Shannon. When we were passing through Carrick-on-Shannon with our hired cruiser we spotted one of the Google Street view cars in the vicinity. I made a mental note of where I was when I spotted the car and when Street View was initially launched in Ireland I tried without success to see us on the site. The important point to know is where were we when the car saw us, not where were we when we saw the car.

However, I was browsing randomly on the site the other night and I happened to spot us appearing clearly as you can see from the screenshot below. You can click here to see us live on the web, but it is normally quite hard to find us because if you move to the position either left or right of this exact position there is no boat in the river. It seems that google selects images from multiple passes through an area, and we only appear in one of the passes (if you look carefully you can also see someone taking a picture of the Google Street View car).

In all modesty I must say that we look very good, but it would be hard to recognise us if you didn't know exactly who was on the boat at the time (I was driving and am partly obscured from view). You might think that it is extravagant for a recently appointed mayor to be driving such a fancy cruiser, but I must admit that it was only rented from Emerald Star. Hopefully the local Bord Failte office will be sending us payments in reward for the great way we are advertising the amenities of the area.

What is the big deal about net neutrality

The debate about net neutrality is quite a heated one at the moment. This recent article from sociaclmedia.net explains why many of the original innovators behind the establishment of the internet think that it is important that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are forced, by law to respect the neutrality principle. However, many other people would argue that the exact definition of net neutrality is not clearly enough defined to be incorporated into law and having too much government regulation is a bad thing. These people argue  that it would be better to allow companies maximum freedom to innovate in meeting their customer's requirements and that market competition will solve most issues.

I don't claim to be an expert in this area. I am mostly in favor of network neutrality principles, but I do see some merit in both sides of the argument. Here are my thoughts on the matter:

• Market forces  can only be relied upon when there us genuine competition in the market. I am lucky enough to live in an urban area of a well developed nation, so if my home broadband provider started to place any unreasonable restrictions on my network link I would not hesitate to switch to one of their competitors. However, I know that many other people are not so lucky and do not have any choice about whom they get their internet service from. 
• Whenever a company has monopoly on providing such a vital service, it is only right that the government should impose rules about how the service should be delivered. 
• In addition, any company which places restriction on how their network is used should make this information visible to customers before they sign up because many companies tie new subscribers in to long contracts and it would not be fair it the consumers don't learn about the limitations on a service until after they sign-up.
• One of the topics in the debate is whether or not it is acceptable for certain companies to pay extra to ensure that their traffic gets priority delivery. 
• Personally I think that if companies are willing to pay extra for a premium service then I don't see any reason why companies should not be allowed to provide this service so long as they don't do this by downgrading the service to the regular customers below what they had paid for.  
• Of course very few ISPs currently provide any guarantee about the level of service. If you use a site like speedtest.net  to test the actual performance of  your internet link, you will see that you rarely get the speed of link that you though you paid for. The speed advertised by the ISP is normally the maximum theoretical speed of the link. 
• I think that ISPs should be forced to advertise the average or minimum speed offered. If this was done, then they could be allowed sell premium services to companies so long as this did not cause the service to their normal customers drop below the agreed level. 
• Another topic of the debate is whether mobile service providers should be forced to follow the same network neutrality standards as regular ISPs. I understand that it might be expensive to build a mobile network which is capable of delivering full unrestricted internet service. 
• I don't see any problem in allowing companies to try build a profitable service that is attractive to customers with limited disposable income (an increasingly large market segment) by providing devices which are capable of accessing only a limited number of sites/services. However, it is important that people know exactly what they are buying and therefore the companies should not be allowed to advertise that these devices have an internet connection.

Maybe some of my opinions are naive. I would love to hear what other people think.

How can I trick Google into accepting my money?

I have been the proud owner of an Android phone for the last year or so. I have installed and used many free applications and because of the large range of excellent free applications I never felt the need to purchase any paid applications. However, when I saw that Bike Doctor application got a very good review on the London Cyclist blog I decided it was time to open my wallet and purchase this application (after all the price of £2.99 could be considered good value if it eliminated  a single trip to the bike repair shop)

According to this announcement it should be possible to purchase Android applications in Ireland since the start of October and indeed I was able to see it in my Android Market, but when I went to pay for it Google refused to accept my credit card. A colleague told me that this is because Google Checkout refuses to accept credit cards that are registered to Irish addresses Does anyone know if there is any way to trick Google into accepting my money?

Is there anyone out there who can explain why it might make sense for Google to refuse to accept money from a significant market where it has several thousand employees and which is home to its European headquarters?

The Talbot Hotel relocates from Wexford to Leitrim

I am a big fan of Google maps and normally it is fairly accurate, but when it gets things wrong it can sometimes be wrong in spectacular ways. For example, I was recently browsing the Google Maps and looking at Carrick-on-Shannon in Leitrim. I was surpised to see the Talbot Hotel marked in beside the Quay because this is a well known Hotel in Wexcford over 280 km away. I am not sure who created the listing page, but it is quite detailed with lots of pictures and even almost hunded reviews. I feel sorry for the poor tourists who book into the Hotel based upon the good reviews and then find themselves over 3 hours driving away from the Hotel's real location when they come to check in.

Is it possible to call the Google Street View cameras back to take a nicer picture?

There was much excitement recently about the fact that Google Street View finally released their photos for Ireland. It was a few years since the photographs were taken and the delays were explained by the fact that there were concerns expressed by the privacy implications of people's pictures appearing and they needed to semi-automatically blur any faces accidentally captured.

Naturally I decided to have a look and see how my own house looks on Street View and although I don't think it looks too bad, I was a little disappointed to see that the hedge in the front garden was clearly overgrown. As a matter of fact the hedge in question has since been removed and I wondered if there were any way to possibly call back the Google Street View cars to take a new picture of my now tidier front garden?

For me it is not a big deal how my house looks to casual browsers, but I can imagine if a business premises had spent quite a considerable amount of money to renovate their premises they would not be  happy if people using Google Street View were still seeing the older un-renovated view. Perhaps there might even be a business opportunity for someone to go around taking professional photographs showing off a business premises at its best!

Is Google Wave the next big thing?

There seems to be a lot of excitement at the moment about the release of Google Wave. Unfortunately I did not get an invite so I didn't try it out myself. I read an excellent review on Lifehacker. So I have a good idea of how it works (although it is complex). I think that there are several great ideas implemented in the Google Wave product. However, the major issue that will stop its adoption is the fact that everyone involved in the wave must be using Wave.

I know you might think that this is an obvious restriction, but that need not be the case. Gmail was a radical overhaul of the mail interface. Although I am a big fan, I would never have switched over if I could only send and receive email to people also using Gmail.

I think Google needs to give some consideration to a mechanism to allow non-Wave users to participate in a Wave (e.g. by receiving email summaries and being able to contribute by sending email to a special address to update the wave.).