Wesley's Tool-Box

Since buying my own EV back in June 2018, I started to notice other electric vehicles in the city. So the "EV spotting" became a hobby of mine ever since. Including seven that I found in the photos I took between July 2017 and May 2018, I saw a total of 1,030 different EVs up to April 20, 2021. Here are some of the statistics from the data.

As with the internal combustion engine cars, Hyundai is the dominant player. Its two best-selling models, Kona Electric (36.0%, 370 units) and Ioniq Electric (15.0%, 154 units), take up over half of all the cars I came across. In fact, Kona was seen more often than the major models from other big players - Niro EV (11.3%, 116 units), Bolt EV (10.2%, 105 units), SM3 ZE (7.6%, 78 units), and Soul EV (4.8%, 49 units) - which account for only 33.8% (348 units) together. I should note that Ioniq, Bolt EV, and SM3 ZE were dominant early on because they started selling earlier than other models. But Kona (and to a lesser extent, Niro) eventually rose to the top.

Meanwhile, Tesla Model 3 (3.5%, 36 units) and the hydrogen fuel cell powered Nexo (4.5%, 46 units) have been rising in popularity quite recently and are starting to take bigger slices of the pie. EV versions of the signature 1-ton trucks Porter (1.7%, 18 units) and Bongo (1.2%, 12 units) have also started to make a dent. But other than the ones I mentioned so far, I was not able to find other cars in double digits, and that includes the BMW i3 (0.6%, 6 units) in the chart. These "others" make up 4.5% (46 units), which includes rarities like Hyundai BlueOn (first mass-produced battery EV) and Tucsan (first mass-produced hydrogen FCEV).

By looking at the pattern of the license plate numbers with other visible cues, it's possible to infer where the car was registered at without searching the official records. As it was expected, the much of the cars are local, with 41.7% (430 units) apparently from within the city. Cars from the much more populous neighbouring city of Gwangju (1.471 million, as opposed to 116 thousand in Naju) also take out a big chunk, with 29.4% (303 units) of total. Vehicles with rental license plates make up another 8.3% (85 units). The rest are suspected to be from other regions, although some may be local but not yet positively determined.

One thousand is a big number, but the EV market is just starting to bloom. I'll be interesting to see how different the chart will look with another thousand cars added in.

I skipped upgrading the iMac server’s OS to macOS 10.15 Catalina last year mainly due to the removal of 32-bit application support. After a year, the clean-up of obsolete apps was complete, paving the way for the upgrade.

During the preparation, there was a bit of a hiccup with the MySQL database, But putting the data to a new one largely solved the issue and the website ended up loading much quicker. Two minor errors occurred after moving to the new database, which were quickly resolved by editing the configuration file:

1. "Query failed: Out of sort memory, consider increasing server sort buffer size"

Solution: increase sort_buffer_size from the default of 262144

sort_buffer_size=2097152

2. "Query failed: Expression #1 of SELECT list is not in GROUP BY clause and contains nonaggregated column 'blog.multilingual_body.value' which is not functionally dependent on columns in GROUP BY clause; this is incompatible with sql_mode=only_full_group_by"

Solution: remove only_full_group_by in sql_mode

sql_mode=STRICT_TRANS_TABLES, NO_ZERO_IN_DATE, NO_ZERO_DATE, ERROR_FOR_DIVISION_BY_ZERO, NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION

With all the pieces ready I went with the installation of macOS 11.0 Big Sur. It took about an hour and except for a prolonged setup time of the iCloud, things went smoothly.

The Tool-Box.info website has been running on the Apache - PHP - MySQL (APM) solution for the past 13 years. Each component has been constantly upgraded over the years, and recently I decided to update MySQL from 5.7 to 8.0. Once I managed to migrate the database to the new version, I discovered that all the Korean texts on the website came out broken. This was a sign of mismatched character set, so I looked for the exact cause.

First, I rolled back to 5.7 and checked what character sets were being used, using the following SQL query:

show variables like 'char%';

Sure enough, "character_set_database" and "character_set_server" were set to "latin1". Upon checking the database and the tables that contain the website data, their character sets were all set to "latin1_swedish_ci", the default choice. All the Korean texts were being saved to the database in Latin1 format from the very beginning. It got converted into UTF-8 as it was passed to the output, so it looked normal when viewed through a web page. But if you looked directly into the database, it came out broken. MySQL 8.0 apparently decided to output the text in its saved form, unlike 5.7, hence the problem.

The solution proposed by many of the Korean blogs that had a similar problem was to alter the character set of the affected databases and tables in the following manner:

ALTER DATABASE data_database CHARACTER SET = utf8mb4 COLLATE = utf8mb4_unicode_ci;

ALTER TABLE data_table DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8mb4;

ALTER TABLE data_table MODIFY COLUMN title VARCHAR(255) CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_general_ci;

And also, add the following lines under [mysqld] in the MySQL configuration file (my.cnf):

collation-server = utf8_unicode_ci
character-set-server = utf8

Sadly, all this did not help one bit. Upon further analysis, I arrived at the conclusion that the underlying data was still in "broken" form even if the settings had the character set changed. The data itself has to be rewritten in UTF-8, so I needed to dump the database and reload it in the correct character set. First, the dump:

mysqldump -u root -p --default-character-set=latin1 data_database > dump.sql

The "default-character-set" flag was set to "latin1" to ensure that the data is dumped in its originally saved character set. In the dumped file, I changed all the "latin1" strings into "utf8mb4".

Now I simply had to restore it back, but the "Specified key was too long; max key length is 1000 bytes" error prevented me from restoring some of the tables. I tracked the problem down to the limitation of the MyISAM database type. Because the "VARCHAR" data type for a column needs 3 times more space for UTF-8 than Latin1, the character set change caused the key length to exceed the 1000-byte limit. With InnoDB database type, it was 3072 bytes by default since MySQL 5.7.7.

Because of this, I changed the database type mentioned in the file from MyISAM to InnoDB. So why was it set to MyISAM in the first place? It was because Full-text index was not available for InnoDB at the time of the database creation. It was enabled in 2011 with MySQL 5.6.

With both the database type and character set changed in the dump file, I restored the database like this:

mysql -u root -p --default-character-set=utf8mb4 data_database < dump.sql

I could now see that all the Korean text appeared correctly in the database. It would also look right on the website if I kept the changes to the my.cnf file mentioned earlier. Finally, I migrated the database to MySQL 8.0 again, and ran the "mysql_upgrade" command. Everything was working as intended, and I no longer needed the changes to the my.cnf, so those were removed.

Long story short, initial database settings from 13 years ago almost held me back from upgrading to the newest MySQL version, but all of them are now fixed.

The venerable Mac mini 2012, which took over the job of the server from the iMac 2008 in February 2013, showed signs of its age two months ago, refusing to boot due to corrupted Fusion Drive. I was able to remedy the problem, but I thought it may be a good time to move over to a new system. Seeing that Apple has not updated Mac mini in three years (and frankly, the 2014 edition was not an upgrade many had hoped for) I decided to return to using an iMac.

The iMac 21.5" 2017 was able to smoothly take over the Mac mini last month, but for some reason the system came equipped with macOS Sierra (10.12) instead of High Sierra (10.13) which was already a month old at the time. So I applied an extra caution and checked carefully that the apps I ran were compatible before manually upgrading. Finally, I made the switch to High Sierra today. It seems everything is functioning as expected.

One of the sore spots in using an Apple device (iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch in particular) in Korea was the Apple Maps. Sure, you could use the natively developed map apps from the likes of Kakao or Naver, but regular apps using map function generally resort to the default Apple Maps data, leading to sub-par experience.

This had largely to do with the lack of map updates. When Apple Maps initially launched in September 2012, map data for Korea was sparse at best. It then received a major update in March 2014 that looked more complete at a first glance. However, delving into details revealed that the actual map data was from around latter half of 2012. This was clearly evident for Bitgaram City as you can see above. Roads weren't completed until 2013, and Apple Maps had much of the major roads missing.


Interestingly, there was another map update for Korea in April 2015. It showed all the major roads in Bitgaram City, as well the street of Juwol-ro in Gwangju that was completed in early 2015. This meant that the map was quite up to date at the time, but you could see it only if you were outside South Korea. The Korean server for the iOS Apple Maps that sends the data to users within the borders never received the update, leaving the Korean users with severely outdated map for several years. The screen caps shown here were made while I was on a trip to Mongolia a few months ago.

I actually asked Apple's technical support about this issue back in June. Sadly, no resolutions came out of this even though the staff did acknowledge the problem. Then, out of the blue, Apple Maps received yet another major update for South Korea yesterday afternoon. The new map data was fairly recent - judging from the building data, it seemed to be from early to mid 2017.


Speaking of which, yes, there were now outlines of most of the buildings. This didn't exist for South Korea before this update. The building data also contain height information, which enabled this nice flyover-style view of the map in 3D. With the updated road and building information, I felt that it finally became good enough for in-app uses, such as location-based arrangement of photos in the Photos app. With a few more feature additions and beefing up of POI data, it should be good enough for stand-alone uses as well.