Model Statistics Pages

I’ve just release an update to Carsurvey.org, which displays average review scores for different model, region and year combinations. See the Ford Focus Statistics for an example, and note the warning about not reading too much into these statistics.

A few people have asked me for a similar feature over the years, and if it gets a lot of use, I’ll spend more time on improving it.

To clarify things for those who are interested, the averages displayed are arithmetic means. Whilst writing this feature, I experimented with more statistical language, and other statistical measures, but came to the conclusion that it was best to keep things simple.

The statistics pages are also being used to test a new URL structure.

Compare:

http://www.carsurvey.org/by-region/uk+and+ireland/ford/focus/statistics/

to an old style

http://www.carsurvey.org/countrymodelyear
_UK+and+Ireland_Ford_Focus_2004.html

Forced lower case, slashes instead of underscores, much easier to guess URLs, and all content from a particular region in its own subdirectory.

In case I forget, these changes also apply to the motorcycle and mobile phone sites.

Superchips Bluefin for my Golf GTI

Having owned my MkV Golf GTI for just over two years, I finally plucked up the courage to have it remapped for greater performance.

As I suggested in my original review of the car, the TFSi engine in the GTI is very impressive, but it does lack something above 5000rpm. A remap offered the opportunity to address this without spending a lot of money.

I’m a pretty cautious soul at heart, so when considering a remap, I had the following concerns:

  • The remap should have been sold for some time, and I should be able to find forum postings from people who’ve put some decent miles on their remapped cars without problems
  • Any remap should be conservative, and the shape of the power curve shouldn’t be significantly altered. If I wanted a car with monster turbo lag, I’d sell the GTI and buy an FQ400 Evo or equivalent
  • I’m too lazy to travel far
  • The ability to update and remove the remap myself would be a big plus
  • It would have to be insurable for a reasonable cost

Based on these criteria, I decided to give the Superchips Bluefin remap a go. It ticked all of the boxes above, and came with a 7 day money back guarantee if I didn’t like the result. It supposedly lifts the GTI to about 241bhp, from the original 197bhp.

Delivery was next day, and through a discount from the UK-MKIVS forum, I paid £509, instead of the usual £599. I switched my insurance to Greenlight (also via a UK MKIVS discount), and actually got my cover cheaper (post remap) than I was paying with my previous insurer (pre remap).

Installation was very easy, using the supplied Bluefin handset. The only issue was it takes about 20 minutes to load and unload engine maps from the car; I assume this is a limitation of the OBD-II port on the GTI.

Right, onto the fun stuff, the driving impressions:

Initially I was a little disappointed. Whilst I wanted a remap that preserved the character of the GTI, I was half hoping to be blown away by the car transforming into some sort of Impreza killer. It was definitely quicker, but just a GTI with the volume turned to 11, not some Group B monster.

Now I’ve had the remap for almost a month, I’m far more impressed:

  • Most importantly, I’ve had no issues with the remapped car. No pops, bangs, misfires etc.
  • Low down the rev range, the GTI is very little changed. It’s just as drivable before, and although it’s a little more responsive, it doesn’t spend its time exercising the traction control at every junction
  • Mid range the car feels more muscular. Half throttle is more enough for any occasion, and the tendency of the DSG gearbox to change into 6th at every opportunity in D, is less of an issue due to the extra torque. D has become more like the “brisk mode’ I wanted in my original review
  • The best bit is that 5000rpm to the red line is no longer a breathless zone of restricted performance. The car just keeps on pulling all the way to the redline. The harder you drive, the faster it goes.

Basically this is the GTI the way it should have been from the factory. The wide expanse of power, but minus the iffy top end, and with a new set of running shoes. And it’s still just as usable day to day.

In case you haven’t guessed, I never got round to asking Superchips for a refund.

Airline site update

The airline site has just received a set of minor updates:

  • Tweaks to the page width and layout, to make things work better on 800×600 displays
  • New page footer with  explicit copyright, advertising and privacy policy links

A full rewrite of the Airline site (probably under its own domain) is on my todo list, but I don’t have any timescales for that right now.

Removed review voting

As the removal of filtering by review quality has become a permanent change, I’ve just disabled the ability to vote on the quality of reviews. The votes could no longer significantly affect the structure of the site, so facility has been removed for the foreseeable future. Apologies for not getting round to making this change sooner (I was preoccupied with the recent server move).

Voting in the members area, and to indicate whether comments are on-topic, are still available.

Details of the recent server move

Now the move is pretty much complete, I’ve got a few more details of the move for anyone who’s interested.

Carsurvey.org has been hosted with the same company for about 4 years. They were originally known as Ev1Servers, but were acquired by The Planet, and in my experience, service proceeded to go downhill from that point.

Support used to be good, but a RAID problem and a recent server stability issue were both handled badly, and I decided it was time to move Carsurvey.org to pastures new.

After lots of research, I settled on SoftLayer, who seem to be picking up a lot of disgruntled The Planet customers.

Initial reasons for choosing SoftLayer:

  • Pretty good feedback on forums such as WebHostingTalk
  • Large choice of operating systems, including RedHat Enterprise Linux 5.0 (the old server was running version 4.0, and I wanted to move to the newer version, complete with PHP5 and MySQL 5
  • Huge flexibility in hardware configuration
  • Quad core Xenon processors – these are hugely powerful for the money. The new server has a single quad core Xeon at 2.4Ghz (Kentsfield, Core 2), compared to the old server, which had two single core 2.4Ghz Xeons (the old NetBurst type)
  • Almost any RAID configuration you could reasonably want
  • Very competitive pricing. For the new server, which has a quad core processor, 2Gb of RAM, and 3x 150Gb Raptor SATA disks in a hot-swappable RAID 5 array, it’s costing $279 a month (including various other sundry options). That compares very well to the $348 a month I was paying for the old server at The Planet, which only had two disks (in a mirror; not hot-swappable), and two single core processors
  • Support forums available. I’m always suspicious of companies that don’t dare have support forums

Observations following the move:

  • The Planet have been getting more and more aggressive with their marketing emails (they should do something about their support instead). Thankfully SoftLayer don’t seem to be bothering me in the same way
  • I had need of SoftLayer’s support when I first got the new server. It was OK. Quick response times (unlike The Planet), and reasonable responses, although they took a few attempts to fix an admittedly obscure hardware issue. There’s room for improvement, but SoftLayer were much better than my recent experiences with The Planet
  • The new SoftLayer server has far more sophisticated management facilities than my old The Planet server, including backend VPN access, and full control over an IPMI card, which allows for easy monitoring of the hardware, and KVM console access (useful if you make a mistake while securing your network connections). These new facilities took some time to learn, but the extra security and control were worth the effort
  • I do miss the live text chat with support that The Planet offered. The Planet’s solution was badly implemented, but it’s often easier to use text chat support, than explain things over the telephone. It would be good if SoftLayer could offer this facility

In conclusion, so far I’m pretty happy with SoftLayer. Carsurvey.org is running on a more powerful and configurable server, with reasonable support, for less money than I was paying at The Planet.

UK iPhone Launch

Quick thoughts on the UK iPhone launch:

Positives:

  • The contract is 18 months, not 24 as some had suggested
  • Including the Cloud connectivity is very clever. It partially compensates for the lack of 3G
  • The included data plan fair usage limits of roughly 1400 web pages a day translates to about 0.5-2Gb a month (depended on the web page size they’re assuming). That’s competitive with T-Mobile and 3’s data tariffs

Negatives:

  • The tariffs (£35 to £55) are too expensive, given the phone costs £269 and it’s an 18 month contract. They should have offered £25 to £45, or at worst £29.99 to £49.99
  • No 3G. Despite the WiFi bundle, this is a big deal. Steve Jobs is wrong about the tradeoff they’re making of battery life vs data speed
  • The killer quote was from O2 regarding EDGE coverage: “By launch we’ll be north of 30% and build from there”. EDGE is slow enough. If that coverage is going to be patchy, it means relying on GPRS. Oh dear…

So a bit of a mixed bag, but not enough to tempt me away from my N95. I wait the iPhone 2 with interest

Moving to a New Server

Carsurvey.org and related sites are currently in the process of being moved to a new and better web server.

While this move is in progress, some of the features of the site may not be available, such as adding new reviews and comments, and the members area. Once I’ve switched everything across, it may take up to 24 hours for your browser to start using the new server instead of the old one.

Apologies to everyone for the inconvenience. More details on move to come in a future post (once I’m happy  the move has been completed successfully).

Disappointed in the iPod touch

For me, Apple’s new iPod touch is like selling a Ferrari for $20,000, but only installing a fuel tank with a 2 mile range.

It’s such a great device, but the lack of Bluetooth kills it dead for me. I wouldn’t mind, but it’s such a silly omission.

Living in England (rather than San Francisco), the world outside my house isn’t blanketed by free WiFi. If the iPod touch had Bluetooth, I could connect it to the web via HSDPA through my N95. Without that feature, Safari on the iPod is only useful within my home.

I’m heartbroken that Apple have come so close to a must have device, but have blown it for the sake of a cheap Bluetooth chipset. And it’s not as if there’s a partner like AT&T to blame.

p.s. If you just want a media player, or you live in San Francisco, get your order in now and join the inevitable waiting list

Upgrading my Mac mini Core Solo to a Core 2 Duo

For almost 2.5 years, my main desktop computer has been a 20 inch iMac G5 (1.5Gb of RAM), running Mac OS X Tiger. It’s been a great machine, but for quite some time I’ve been struggling with its relatively slow CPU and the 20 inch screen.

I’ve been dreaming of a new Mac Pro with OS X Leopard, dual Harpertown processors (8 cores in total), and a 30 inch screen. No such beast has yet materialised, but I was starting to get desperate. Then I came up with a plan:

  • Remove my Mac mini from its home in the living room (to be temporarily replaced by a laptop)
  • Upgrade my Mac mini from a 1.5Ghz Core Solo, with 1Gb of RAM and a 60Gb disk, to a 1.83 Ghz Core 2 Duo, with 2Gb of RAM, and a 160Gb disk
  • Use the upgraded Mac mini as my new desktop (with my Dell 2405FPW monitor), and sell my old G5 iMac
  • Upgrade the Mac mini to Leopard on release
  • When Apple release a new machine that I want, return the Mac mini to my living room, with the benefit of its upgraded specification

So far the plan has worked out very well, and some interesting points emerged from the experience:

  • I opted to install the Intel T5600 processor. I wanted a Core 2 Duo as they are 64bit (unlike the Core Duos), and seem to perform significantly better than the old Core Duos. The T5600 supports Intel VT, unlike the slower T5500, and the only thing it misses is the slightly larger caches on the faster Core 2 Duo chips. Apparently this has a negligible effect on performance. Also, at 1.83GHz, I was comfortable that heat wouldn’t be an issue
  • Mac minis are not designed to be opened. It’s the most fiddly PC building job I’ve ever done; I managed to break a thin plastic cable clip, and didn’t manage to get things working again (with the aid of insulating tape) for several hours. I’m never opening the Mac mini again
  • The upgraded mini feels much quicker than my old G5 (it’s supposed to be twice as quick, but it feels like more than that). Even the GMA950 graphics card isn’t a problem for me. Expose runs beautifully, and that’s my main graphics heavy application. I no longer feel in a hurry to upgrade to a Mac Pro
  • The mini is super silent as a desktop. It can be heard, but only just
  • My Dell 24 inch screen is much nicer than the 20 inch screen on my old G5. Maybe I don’t need a 30 inch screen after all?
  • Two days before I rebuilt the mini (but after I’d ordered the parts), Apple upgraded the Mac mini to Core 2 Duos, with the lower specced machine using the same T5600 processor as I chose for my upgrade. So my machine is almost an official specification. And the entire cost of the upgrade (including £75 on eBay for the processor), was about the same as Apple would have charged to upgrade their new base Mac mini to 2Gb of RAM and a 160Gb hard disk (I went for a Hitachi disk, in case anyone is interested)
  • Being an Intel machine, I now had the option of running Windows in Boot Camp or virtualised. More on this in another post, but in brief, this is a killer feature for me
  • Moving your files and preferences to a new Mac is a much nicer experience than migrating between Windows PCs. Just copy across your home directory, and that’s pretty much it