Planet Afterlife @ Seldo.Net

By at 16:15PM

By at 13:45PM

I AM SO DRUNK. LOLZ!!!!!!!!!! is basically the sentiment of this song. Someone alert Ke$ha she has a new shots partner.

Click here to view the embedded video.

It’s so, so Miss-Shapes (my old lesbian Thursday night party at Ghetto) that it aches that the night doesn’t exist anymore. And it’s much noisier than their most awesome song so far, the mighty Manners.

By trixie at 11:25AM

A big brooding piece of Scottish electro-pop, this is the first offering from Iain, Lauren and Martin, who form new Glasgow band Churches.

By trixie at 09:12AM

A rare moment of sanity.

By at 16:15PM

The charger, which works with any device that has a USB cable, will be available later this year. Stick it in your backpack and never worry about running out of juice on long trips again. The fuel comes in cigarette-lighter-sized cartridges that you can buy online.

By at 12:15PM

You should definitely be full-screening this beautiful video. [via @kyleve]

By at 23:15PM

You may remember him from his brilliant speech on YouTube talking about his two lesbian moms.

By at 21:45PM

A new chip can replace a non-functioning retina and restore a patient's ability to detect light and shade.

By at 16:45PM

Recognizing the denomination of paper money, reading out text messages, telling you what colour a piece of clothing is -- there are lots of things a small portable computer with a camera and GPS can do to help a blind person. Plus, there are accessible versions of things like navigation software that needs to work very differently for a user who cannot see a map.

By at 14:15PM

This being NPR, they're looking for queer subtext, and boy do they find it.

By at 11:15AM

This is heartbreaking and totally out of control.

By at 11:15AM

If I could use words like dope, I’d use it on this

Click here to view the embedded video.

with major thanks to this slice of dreaminess from Michael Franks

Click here to view the embedded video.

By trixie at 10:33AM

I am an obsessive follower of politics. With 189 days left until the US presidential election, I'm in full-on obsessive poll-watching mode.

As usual, you should ignore national polls. The important point is the electoral college. You can see a projected electoral map for 2012, and you can also create your own. My current pessimistic prediction has Barack Obama winning by just 3 electoral votes, hinging on a win in Virginia.

Virginia is one of the four battleground states that are going to matter in this election. The full set, and their current polls, are:

• Virginia - best bet
• Ohio - a possible win
• North Carolina - an unlikely win
• Florida - no chance

Obama won all four in 2008 but this is pretty much guaranteed not to happen this year.

While national polls are almost useless, it is worth keeping an eye on these three:

• Obama's job approval: is he doing a good job? This has been negative for most of Obama's presidency, which is not great but not unusual either.
• Obama's favorability: do you like him? (Whether or not he's doing a good job). Obama's favorability is generally ahead of his job approval. Favorability has typically been a better predictor of electoral success.
• Romney's favorability: another key, because you're unlikely to vote Obama out of office, even if you don't like him, if you dislike the other guy more.

Romney's favorability is currently negative, which is great news for Obama and terrible news for Romney.

By at 14:11PM

Columbia Records are very excited about their new signing, singer songwriter, Bebe Black, but for now they’re staying pretty quiet about her. She’s had a very small amount of online coverage so far thanks to an online stream of a song called ‘I’ll Wait’ but I have no idea what type of artist she is, her background or what her plan is. Her first big exposure comes courtesy of Benga and a song from his new album Chapter 2 called Icon on which she sounds a little like Sia. Benga is of course one of Magnetic Man and producer behind the awesome Katy on a Mission (which you can hear echoes of on Icon.)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Out 3rd June

By trixie at 10:34AM

A world away from the abrasiveness of ‘Love Me’, ‘Black Heart’, the 3nd single from Stooshe has really won me over. Last week they played Future Hits Live, a show I put on in Leeds for work, and completely nailed it. Their vocal harmonies are tight, they look great and seem like really good mates.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Black Heart is a gorgeous swoosh of a motown ballad, and you know what makes it even better? It’s written by Shaznay Lewis (who I hope is also writing for Little Mix!)

By trixie at 08:43AM

By trixie at 17:09PM

Click here to view the embedded video.

See Joyce, except this one is actually Scandavian.

Beatrice Eli is Swedish and demanding love in a big way. Conqueror is dark and moody and comes with some gigantic production. I don’t think listening on my headphones is doing this justice, particularly the gigantic drums surrounding the killer line –  ’I demand that special part – the conqueror of your heart.’

By trixie at 03:57AM

If there’s one thing Rebecca Ferguson perfected on The X Factor, it was the art of standing still. And the new video to her excellent single ‘Glitter and Gold’ proves she’s not lost that talent. There’s so much standing exactly still on the spot that it’s fascinating.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Rebecca Ferguson campaign has been a bit strange. When the album was first released it gained enormous press coverage. She was declared the first ‘real’ talent The X Factor had produced and print journalists went gaga over it. Radio and TV on the other hand didn’t seem that bothered.  I’m really pleased then that we’ve playlisted G&G on our upfront list so she’s finally getting the radio exposure she deserves. Just like the album, G&G is quietly understated, but that chorus has a real kick to it.

Plus there’s an enormous pink glitter remix as well, of course.

By trixie at 06:42AM

So, the Devizes to Westminster race results from this Easter weekend are up on the official site, and using ScraperWiki I’ve done some crude analysis.

Comparing with previous years, there seems little change from last year – the average time was just two minutes and five seconds slower. That compares with over two hours’ difference from 2010, when the flow was much stronger.

The one difference that was clear from 2011 was that the larger tide this year had a greater affect on crews’ tideway speeds, as the steeper line for the last checkpoint speed shows. This may have been offset by lower flows on the lower section of the Thames, however.

Comparing the Richmond crews’ times, it’s clear that although all crews seem to go harder off the start than they will throughout the rest of the course, some go harder than others! On the right of the graph you can also see the effect of an injury, missing the top of high water at Teddington and missing the tide completely for the three slowest boats.

Overall the graph shows there were some great performances for Richmond, but the three retirements after Newbury meant we were unfortunately left with a few less boats crossing the finish line than we’d hoped. Well, there’s always next year.

If you’re interested in more then the full data that I used to generate the graphs can be found in this Google Spreadsheet, and you can grab a report for other boats using the ScraperWiki view.

By wabson at 09:46AM

So, the Devizes to Westminster race results from this Easter weekend are up on the official site, and using ScraperWiki I’ve done some crude analysis.

Comparing with previous years, there seems little change from last year – the average time was just two minutes and five seconds slower. That compares with over two hours’ difference from 2010, when the flow was much stronger.

The one difference that was clear from 2011 was that the larger tide this year had a greater affect on crews’ tideway speeds, as the steeper line for the last checkpoint speed shows. This may have been offset by lower flows on the lower section of the Thames, however.

Comparing the Richmond crews’ times, it’s clear that although all crews seem to go harder off the start than they will throughout the rest of the course, some go harder than others! On the right of the graph you can also see the effect of an injury, missing the top of high water at Teddington and missing the tide completely for the three slowest boats.

Overall the graph shows there were some great performances for Richmond, but the three retirements after Newbury meant we were unfortunately left with a few less boats crossing the finish line than we’d hoped. Well, there’s always next year.

If you’re interested in more then the full data that I used to generate the graphs can be found in this Google Spreadsheet, and you can grab a report for other boats using the ScraperWiki view.

By wabson at 09:46AM

If we were talking typical Talia music a few years ago it would involve a floaty sounding female pop star singing over an electronic track. There would be extra bonus if  the artist was Scandinavian. So when my friend Ben played me ‘Keep The Lights On’ by Joyce a few weeks ago he was confused that I wasn’t that into it. I thought it all sounded a bit 5 years ago and I didn’t really like the ‘Laaaaandan’ accent talky bit, but a couple of listens later I’ve changed my mind – it’s too euphoric and twirly to not like.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Joyce isn’t her real name. Bizarrely it’s a stage name instead of Katherine Fussey. I always think of old ladies when I hear the name Joyce, but she’s a 21 year old Londoner signed to Island Records. This song is a reworking of a Wave Machines song which is pretty similar. Joyce just adds that extra shimmer. Out April 30.

By trixie at 04:41AM

Once you get over this being, well, a bit much, you soon realise that Bada Bing is a tuuuuuuuune! It’s raw, fresh, noisy and grabs your attention. Plus try not singing bada boom bada bing all afternoon!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Bada Bing was Benny’s debut single released earlier in the year in Feb. It marks the start of his relationship with 679/Warners so there’s much more to come, including supporting similarly hyped new US rapper Mac Miller in May.

By trixie at 06:22AM

This hypothetical conversation never happened; Mr. Santorum's answers are an amalgamation of his public statements on gay marriage and civil unions, and most of the replies are quotes from similar contexts. Sources: [1][2][3]

By at 18:28PM

Okay Twitter, it's time you stopped getting a free pass. You have fucked up your interface, and it's time to fix it.

Before we get to the UI problems, let's reiterate the bigger, older problem, captured just a second ago:

This was cute when you were tiny and still getting over early technical mistakes on the back-end, but you're over that now, you've taken over a billion dollars in funding, you are basically CNN's only news source at this point. You can't be throwing 500s anymore, no matter how cute the whale is. But your problems go much deeper now: even when it renders, your actual user interface is significantly less useful and elegant. Allow me to rant briefly about a few issues. While I'm waiting for the whale to go away so I can take screencaps, here's a shot of the old-old Twitter (via):

Problem 1: right-column layout

The new layout puts tweets down the right, and a mish-mash of useless junk down the left. I know why you did this: you needed to increase the amount of attention paid to promoted followers and trends, because that's your business model. I don't care. You are deliberately distracting your users from something they want to see with something they don't care about. This is the wrong way to do advertising.

Problem 2: tweet composition

Can you tell me the difference between these two ways of composing a tweet? This one is accessible from the left nav:

This one comes up if you click the blue button in the top-right:

The answer is: there is none. They are totally different-looking ways of doing the same thing, both accessible from the top of the front page. Why would you confuse your users like that? If you think the top-right button is too hard to find, why is it there at all? If you think it's useful because it stays visible as the page scrolls, why not make the easy-to-see compose box fixed? Instead you have this weird dual-interface solution that reeks of committees and compromise instead of the great, simple design that you started with.

Problem 3: tweet controls

The basic tweet layout is pretty much unchanged since the beginning:

The friendly "posted X minutes ago" has been replaced by the context-free "27m", but that's a tiny matter. On hover, as before, you get some tweet controls, plus the new "open" link:

And here the real trouble begins. This is what happens when you click "open":

My payoff is that the controls jump to the bottom of the tweet for no clear reason, and I get a more exact timestamp. Is that worth a click? Then why is that link there at all? The answer is because if your tweet has more interactions, like retweets and favourites, you get those here too:

But that's an explanation, not a reason. It would be quite simple to not bother having an "open" link unless there was something interesting to show. But instead we have this weird cruft in the name of consistency. Again, it's a small thing, but all these little things are beginning to add up to a UI that isn't cared about.

Problem 4: conversation view

If a tweet is part of a wider conversation, clicking "open" gives you a lot more context, like so:

Display of larger conversational context is a good idea. But there are two issues: first, the back-end implementation sucks. If I respond twice to your tweet before you reply, that second tweet is lost from the conversation. Sometimes you get the whole conversation, sometimes just the immediately preceding tweet. It's inconsistent and confusing.

And the UI is also inconsistent and confusing: two of the tweets have short timestamps, one has a long. The "hide conversation" close the whole conversation, but uses the same icon as "reply" and is right next to it. In the top-right, where you'd expect the "close" button to be in any other context, there's nothing but a timestamp, unless you hover, where you get this:

So now I have controls for this tweet, and also a "details" link which... closes the conversation, in total defiance of its label. Unless you right-click and open in a new tab, in which case you get the details page for a tweet. Why have a link that only does what it says if you right-click? Why can't I get more details of this tweet inline?

Here's how it should work: I'm looking at a list of tweets, and the bottom one is highlighted. If I want to close the list, there should be a close button in the top-right. If I want details about a tweet other than the last one, I should be able to click it. Is that so hard?

Incidentally, there is a close button for the conversation that's correctly labelled. You get it if you hover over the final tweet:

...right where the "details" link is on the other tweets. And it does the same thing that the already-visible "hide conversation" link did anyway. What on earth is the point?

Problem 5: interactions

This one is so obvious I can't believe it's not been fixed already. This is the default view of the (poorly-named) "@connect" tab:

This view is clumsily mixing together two totally different use-cases. The first is @replies: these are frequent, personal, and demanding of your attention. They are high-value. The second is retweets and favourites: these do not require response (good, because the UI doesn't let you respond anyway), and happen asynchronously: you don't care when a particular retweet or favourite happened to any degree of precision -- so why is it in a timeline? Not that Twitter actually tells you when it happened anyway, since the UI batches up reponses:

It's not like there's not a great, usable UI for handling interactions that already exists to model from: Favstar.fm nailed it years ago. Show tweets in the order they happened, batch up all responses. It's not hard.

And as another tiny little thing: if the "Mentions" link lets you filter down to only @replies, why is there no equivalent "responses" link that lets you filter down to only retweets and favourites?

TL;DR

The New New Twitter has dozens of small, irritating design choices and UI inconsistencies. None of them by themselves is worth a whole post, but together they add up to enough brokenness to complain about. I've tried to keep things constructive by suggesting how they should look instead.

The new look has been out for over a month now and there's been no sign of iteration to fix these things. We wouldn't put up with this crap from Facebook. It's time to fix it.

---

P.S. Dear commenters, before you immediately point out the many, many UI flaws in this blog, I reiterate that Twitter has a billion dollars, while I maintain this blog in my very rare spare time. I expect more from them, and so should you.

By at 18:07PM

Charles Babbage, one of the father of computers, once wrote:

I will yet venture to predict that a time will arrive, when the accumulating labour which arises from the arithmetical applications of mathematical formulae, acting as a constantly retarding force, shall ultimately impede the useful progress of the science, unless this or some equivalent method is devised for relieving it from the overwhelming incumbrance of numerical detail.

He meant that one day his computer -- at that time seen as a costly and useless device -- would be not just useful but required to make further economic progress. He was right in all but one respect: he thought that day was in the future. In fact, he was already living in it. Scientific and economic progress have always been limited by the available computational power -- but until quite recently, the level of power available never changed, so the limit was imperceptible.

Now that computing power routinely grows by orders of magnitude, it is easier for us to grasp the idea that we are limited by available computation -- it would be nice to decode genes faster, fold proteins quicker, make more accurate weather predictions. We understand these things will get better, in the same way that Babbage could grasp that calculating logarithmic tables (the primary purpose of computation in the 1850s) would someday be quicker.

What is more difficult for us to grasp is that we are still horribly limited by our lack of computational power. We cannot see how limited until those limitations are lifted. Take, as the shadow of an example, the way that one can browse live online maps from one's phone and already scarcely remember how one got by before that ability. In the future, ubiquitous and mind-bendingly powerful computation will make these tasks seem as divorced from utility and convenience as grinding gears to create logarithmic tables seems now.

Human beings are bad at predicting phase changes. We can predict iteration but not invention, so we write stories about giant spaceships that have wired telephone lines. You have no idea how amazing the future is really going to be.

By at 01:05AM

MG Siegler on Google integrating Google+ into Chrome:

Right now, Google bakes G+ into most Google properties via the black nav bar. This undoubtedly spurs a lot of usage. What if the next phase is to take it a step higher? Go right to the browser itself? ... They already have users logging into Chrome now for syncing, etc. We’re already much closer to this happening than most probably realize. ... From a business and integration perspective, these would ... be smart moves. But they’ll also remind people even more of 90s-era Microsoft. Google has to tread carefully here.

I think most people agree that Google should try to avoid being like 90s-era Microsoft, if only because everybody hated 90s-era Microsoft. But there's a bigger reason than Google's long-broken promise of "don't be evil", which is that this strategy doesn't work. You cannot make a bad product popular by integrating it into a good one; all you can do is ruin the good product.

Microsoft, of course, is famous for this. They integrated their awful browser deeply into their operating system. On the face of it this would seem like a vindication of the strategy: Explorer became the dominant browser for years. But while everybody used Explorer, they'd ruined Windows: Explorer was one giant security vulnerability, leading to a huge decline in public confidence in the operating system, making Apple's locked-down approach more attractive. It was a public-relations nightmare, over and over.

And there are lots of much clearer examples. Yahoo's integration of, well, everything into everything else. You name it: they integrated Mail into the front page, News into Mail, YAP into both front page and Mail, My Yahoo into everything. RealNetwork's integration of so much crap into their media player that everyone abandoned them. More recently, Apple's integration of Ping into iTunes was met with derision and further complaints of bloatware. None of these integrations made the crappy products any less crappy, they just made people abandon the popular products in favour of cleaner, simpler alternatives.

Of course, making use of the popularity of your existing, popular products to boost the popularity of your new product is a sensible strategy: you get a burst of traffic and can reach critical mass fast. But if it turns out the new product stinks, you need to turn it off fast. Google tried it with Buzz and it was a disaster; they tried it with Plus and so far it's been working, because Plus is a much better clone of Facebook than Buzz was a clone of Twitter.

But the shine seems to be wearing off Plus, and they're not turning around the APIs they need fast enough to bring developers onto Plus as a platform, a crucial plank of Facebook's popularity. If they build notifications into Chrome to artificially boost its popularity rather than beefing up the APIs to genuinely improve the product, they'll find they have a revolt on their hands, with users abandoning Chrome.

Hopefully, Google knows better than to make that mistake.

By at 01:03AM

This is my response to the UK Government’s Open Data Consultation, which I submitted via email today.

Although I wanted to respond earlier, I’m glad I waited, as my experience assisting (or at least trying to assist) with data gathering for Gail Knight’s Great British Toilet Map has been pretty instrumental in shaping my views.

Of the three London boroughs I put my query to, one (to their credit) explained that they didn’t hold data on such a thing, another required a legal approval process for re-use which still leaves me with some doubt on the terms under which I can re-use the information, and another for my local borough sadly seems stuck in an ongoing FoI request.

This is the sad reality of open public data in the UK today, that most of it is not open and with large swathes of ignorance among the very people who are the biggest stake holders in all of this – those people who work for local Government.

So here’s my response below – if you have any interest at all in this field or at least an understanding of the benefits that open data will bring, I’d urge you to submit something yourself before the consultation closes at midnight tonight.

–BEGINS–

I am an independent software developer and open data advocate and have been actively involved in a number of collaborative projects aiming to bring the benefits of free and open data to a wider portion of society.

Most recently I have been involved in the Great British Toilet Map a project which seeks to provide a single map of all public conveniences in the United Kingdom. This has involved me making requests for open data from a number of London Borough Councils, a process which I have found extremely difficult and only partly successful despite the trivial nature and very low volume of the data concerned.

In light of this experience I am supportive of the idea that a “right to data” is helpful for citizens, developers, entrepreneurs and ultimately our wider economy and societal well-being. My experience to date has been of public sector organisations with little or no knowledge at all of this important new area of information governance, and with few resources and little inclination to assist those of us who are currently trying, despite the substantial barriers, to develop innovative services which not only create value in themselves but also expose the ‘bottlenecks’ within our public sector. This is a win-win scenario for all parties concerned.

Clearly, there is work to be done to improve this situation. Although I believe education of public sector organisations and those acting on their behalf will help to address the lack of knowledge, I believe immediate and concrete action is needed from Central Government, which also needs to do more to ‘lead from the front’. I hope to provide some further views on what shape this action may take in the detailed response which follows.

How we might enhance a “right to data”, establishing stronger rights for individuals, businesses and other actors to obtain data from public bodies and about public services

A right to data is of vital importance to establishing a vibrant open data ecosystem in the United Kingdom and the associated economic benefits that numerous studies have shown this will bring.

Since such a large volume of data is held at both a national and regional level relating to public services, by public bodies, it is vital that such a right to data applies to all bodies providing services to the public utilising public money, in full or in part.

However such rights must fit in with the current Freedom of Information (FoI) landscape and in particular the Reuse of Public Sector Information (PSI) guidelines which govern how this information may re-used. These alone are not sufficient to provide a “right to data” but does provide a useful and similar example which has been generally successful in its implementation.

Existing FoI legislation provides the broad availability of information to individuals, businesses and other actors and this is also a key requirement for a right to data. However FoI does not adequately address other concerns connected with requesting open data from public bodies. In particular,

• FoI does not encourage the re-use of released information, and in fact most organisations prohibit this without explicit and additional approval. This often in my experience requires a legal review which introduces unnecessary delays and costs. Under a right to data requesters should be granted the ability to re-use the data by default, rather than as an exception. The re-use should not require disclosure of the purposes of the re-use or the intent of the requester, instead the information should be explicitly granted under a standard licence such as the Open Government Licence (OGL). Requesters should have the right to request release under an alternative open licence if required.
• Most often data supplied under FoI is derived data delivered in unstructured formats, even where this exists in a structured form within the organisation. A right to data should shift the focus to providing the full and raw information, with the exception of any personal data that falls under the scope of the existing Data Protection Act. There should be a presumption in favour of publishing the full raw data unless it can clearly be shown that this is not possible (see below).
• It is not always made clear what related data is held by the organisation, or where information has been not included in the response. Organisations should publish an open list of the data held by them internally, for what purposes, and who has access to each system, in order to allow requesters to place suitable requests in the first place.

Although the structures provided by FoI are helpful in allowing citizens access to public data, the limitations above mean that is currently a rather blunt instrument for requesting open data from organisations. The Government must therefore strongly consider bringing forward additional primary legislation with the view of setting up a similar framework for open data, or modifying the existing framework to overcome these deficiencies.

How to set transparency standards that enforce this right to data

Transparency is an end goal of the greater openness which a right to data seeks to deliver. Organisations should understand their responsibilities and duties around transparency, but a greater level of openness should also be seen as a way to deliver increased involvement of citizens around public issues, and greater levels of engagement with the bodies themselves.

Although openness itself is difficult to measure, qualitative measurements of external engagement levels and of transparency in decision making should be used to provide comparisons between organisations.

Within local government although excellent levels of transparency and accountability often exist at the executive level, less is to be found at the departmental level below that, and therefore this should be particular focal point for comparisons.

How public bodies and providers of public services might be held to account for delivering Open Data

The Information Commissioner Office (ICO) guidance provides a useful model for dispute resolution in FoI requests. The process could be similar for the new right to data, providing an option for requesters to request an internal review if they are unhappy with the handling of a particular case, followed by an external review by the ICO should this not be sufficient to resolve the situation.

Although a new body could be considered to police the system and hold organisations to account, the ICO has a great deal of experience in this area already and may prove a more effective – and cost effective – solution.

Penalties should be applicable for organisations which consistently fail to deliver on their expectations, but the design of these penalties should ensure that money is not taken away from the field of open data. For instance, if it is deemed that a financial penalty is appropriate, this money should be channelled into a central fund for other open data projects in the public sector.

How we might ensure collection and publication of the most useful data

Sites such as data.gov.uk act as a useful focus point for coordinating the release of new open data. The Requests section in particular offers a way of gauging which data sets have the most interest around them, but the current implementation contains too large a number of requests, many duplicated, and requires more active management. The ability of users to vote on other requests is key in determining the level of interest, but there is no requirement on the Cabinet Office to respond to requests when they reach a certain level of interest and more generally it is not clear how this list translates into action. This should be rectified immediately.

Although some data may be published pro-actively by organisations on sites such as data.gov.uk, this alone is not sufficient, and therefore the focus must be in giving citizens themselves the right to request any information held by any public-financed organisation as open data.

Since my experience has shown that many organisations today are not sufficiently enlightened in this field, it is necessary to examine the reasons why requests made under a “right to data” could be refused, and to mitigate against these.

Not all public data will be possible to publish in an open and machine-readable format. It may be that data exists in legacy systems which have not been designed with an open export format in mind.

However this alone should not be a sufficient reason for organisations to refuse requests. It may be possible that even where the organisation lacks the expertise or the budget to produce the raw data exports requires, that this expertise exists in other companies or organisations. Indeed, this could be used to stimulate activity in the SME IT sector if the work were offered through a public tender. Voluntary groups may also be interested in helping in situations where the commercial sector is unable to meet the challenge, and their costs could be met through a central fund where funding streams within the organisation are not available.

Only when it can be demonstrated that an organisation has done all it can to extract information from its internal systems itself and that it has also seeked external input and failed to come up with a solution, that alternatives to the original source data should be evaluated, or – where no alternatives are available – that the original request should be refused. Even in those circumstances, it should be possible for the requester to request a review of the decision should any of the circumstances change in the future (e.g. a change in IT systems).

Organisations also have a responsibility when procuring new IT systems to ensure that data is stored in open formats, or at the very least, can be exported in open formats in real time. Organisations should be accountable for this and should be able to demonstrate as part of the public tender process that they have taken this requirement into account for all new systems.

How we might make the internal workings of government and the public sector more open

Greater transparency must be recognised up-front as a key driver of the proposed “right to data”, to ensure that taxpayers are receiving best value for money and that officials are held accountable. Progress on this front should be actively monitored by central government and additional steps taken where necessary to ensure that periodic goals set by Government are met. Timelines for action should be published to allow citizens to further hold those in this oversight role to account.

How far there is a role for government to stimulate enterprise and market making in the use of Open Data

The Government and other public bodies under its control have a clear responsibility to make all public data openly available as the default option. It should not attempt to influence the open data ecosystem which remains at an early stage of development and shows considerable promise that it will develop as a world-leader in the field.

However, Government has a role to play in ensuring that the data itself is made freely available and should prioritise the release of the ‘base’ data which it holds such as mapping and weather information, which is required in order to give context to the majority of the other data sets published.

Lastly, the government can help in the longer term by encouraging the use of open standards by data publishers and in providing more general education and best practice to them.

–ENDS–

By wabson at 10:24AM

This is my response to the UK Government’s Open Data Consultation, which I submitted via email today.

Although I wanted to respond earlier, I’m glad I waited, as my experience assisting (or at least trying to assist) with data gathering for Gail Knight’s Great British Toilet Map has been pretty instrumental in shaping my views.

Of the three London boroughs I put my query to, one (to their credit) explained that they didn’t hold data on such a thing, another required a legal approval process for re-use which still leaves me with some doubt on the terms under which I can re-use the information, and another for my local borough sadly seems stuck in an ongoing FoI request.

This is the sad reality of open public data in the UK today, that most of it is not open and with large swathes of ignorance among the very people who are the biggest stake holders in all of this – those people who work for local Government.

So here’s my response below – if you have any interest at all in this field or at least an understanding of the benefits that open data will bring, I’d urge you to submit something yourself before the consultation closes at midnight tonight.

–BEGINS–

I am an independent software developer and open data advocate and have been actively involved in a number of collaborative projects aiming to bring the benefits of free and open data to a wider portion of society.

Most recently I have been involved in the Great British Toilet Map a project which seeks to provide a single map of all public conveniences in the United Kingdom. This has involved me making requests for open data from a number of London Borough Councils, a process which I have found extremely difficult and only partly successful despite the trivial nature and very low volume of the data concerned.

In light of this experience I am supportive of the idea that a “right to data” is helpful for citizens, developers, entrepreneurs and ultimately our wider economy and societal well-being. My experience to date has been of public sector organisations with little or no knowledge at all of this important new area of information governance, and with few resources and little inclination to assist those of us who are currently trying, despite the substantial barriers, to develop innovative services which not only create value in themselves but also expose the ‘bottlenecks’ within our public sector. This is a win-win scenario for all parties concerned.

Clearly, there is work to be done to improve this situation. Although I believe education of public sector organisations and those acting on their behalf will help to address the lack of knowledge, I believe immediate and concrete action is needed from Central Government, which also needs to do more to ‘lead from the front’. I hope to provide some further views on what shape this action may take in the detailed response which follows.

How we might enhance a “right to data”, establishing stronger rights for individuals, businesses and other actors to obtain data from public bodies and about public services

A right to data is of vital importance to establishing a vibrant open data ecosystem in the United Kingdom and the associated economic benefits that numerous studies have shown this will bring.

Since such a large volume of data is held at both a national and regional level relating to public services, by public bodies, it is vital that such a right to data applies to all bodies providing services to the public utilising public money, in full or in part.

However such rights must fit in with the current Freedom of Information (FoI) landscape and in particular the Reuse of Public Sector Information (PSI) guidelines which govern how this information may re-used. These alone are not sufficient to provide a “right to data” but does provide a useful and similar example which has been generally successful in its implementation.

Existing FoI legislation provides the broad availability of information to individuals, businesses and other actors and this is also a key requirement for a right to data. However FoI does not adequately address other concerns connected with requesting open data from public bodies. In particular,

• FoI does not encourage the re-use of released information, and in fact most organisations prohibit this without explicit and additional approval. This often in my experience requires a legal review which introduces unnecessary delays and costs. Under a right to data requesters should be granted the ability to re-use the data by default, rather than as an exception. The re-use should not require disclosure of the purposes of the re-use or the intent of the requester, instead the information should be explicitly granted under a standard licence such as the Open Government Licence (OGL). Requesters should have the right to request release under an alternative open licence if required.
• Most often data supplied under FoI is derived data delivered in unstructured formats, even where this exists in a structured form within the organisation. A right to data should shift the focus to providing the full and raw information, with the exception of any personal data that falls under the scope of the existing Data Protection Act. There should be a presumption in favour of publishing the full raw data unless it can clearly be shown that this is not possible (see below).
• It is not always made clear what related data is held by the organisation, or where information has been not included in the response. Organisations should publish an open list of the data held by them internally, for what purposes, and who has access to each system, in order to allow requesters to place suitable requests in the first place.

Although the structures provided by FoI are helpful in allowing citizens access to public data, the limitations above mean that is currently a rather blunt instrument for requesting open data from organisations. The Government must therefore strongly consider bringing forward additional primary legislation with the view of setting up a similar framework for open data, or modifying the existing framework to overcome these deficiencies.

How to set transparency standards that enforce this right to data

Transparency is an end goal of the greater openness which a right to data seeks to deliver. Organisations should understand their responsibilities and duties around transparency, but a greater level of openness should also be seen as a way to deliver increased involvement of citizens around public issues, and greater levels of engagement with the bodies themselves.

Although openness itself is difficult to measure, qualitative measurements of external engagement levels and of transparency in decision making should be used to provide comparisons between organisations.

Within local government although excellent levels of transparency and accountability often exist at the executive level, less is to be found at the departmental level below that, and therefore this should be particular focal point for comparisons.

How public bodies and providers of public services might be held to account for delivering Open Data

The Information Commissioner Office (ICO) guidance provides a useful model for dispute resolution in FoI requests. The process could be similar for the new right to data, providing an option for requesters to request an internal review if they are unhappy with the handling of a particular case, followed by an external review by the ICO should this not be sufficient to resolve the situation.

Although a new body could be considered to police the system and hold organisations to account, the ICO has a great deal of experience in this area already and may prove a more effective – and cost effective – solution.

Penalties should be applicable for organisations which consistently fail to deliver on their expectations, but the design of these penalties should ensure that money is not taken away from the field of open data. For instance, if it is deemed that a financial penalty is appropriate, this money should be channelled into a central fund for other open data projects in the public sector.

How we might ensure collection and publication of the most useful data

Sites such as data.gov.uk act as a useful focus point for coordinating the release of new open data. The Requests section in particular offers a way of gauging which data sets have the most interest around them, but the current implementation contains too large a number of requests, many duplicated, and requires more active management. The ability of users to vote on other requests is key in determining the level of interest, but there is no requirement on the Cabinet Office to respond to requests when they reach a certain level of interest and more generally it is not clear how this list translates into action. This should be rectified immediately.

Although some data may be published pro-actively by organisations on sites such as data.gov.uk, this alone is not sufficient, and therefore the focus must be in giving citizens themselves the right to request any information held by any public-financed organisation as open data.

Since my experience has shown that many organisations today are not sufficiently enlightened in this field, it is necessary to examine the reasons why requests made under a “right to data” could be refused, and to mitigate against these.

Not all public data will be possible to publish in an open and machine-readable format. It may be that data exists in legacy systems which have not been designed with an open export format in mind.

However this alone should not be a sufficient reason for organisations to refuse requests. It may be possible that even where the organisation lacks the expertise or the budget to produce the raw data exports requires, that this expertise exists in other companies or organisations. Indeed, this could be used to stimulate activity in the SME IT sector if the work were offered through a public tender. Voluntary groups may also be interested in helping in situations where the commercial sector is unable to meet the challenge, and their costs could be met through a central fund where funding streams within the organisation are not available.

Only when it can be demonstrated that an organisation has done all it can to extract information from its internal systems itself and that it has also seeked external input and failed to come up with a solution, that alternatives to the original source data should be evaluated, or – where no alternatives are available – that the original request should be refused. Even in those circumstances, it should be possible for the requester to request a review of the decision should any of the circumstances change in the future (e.g. a change in IT systems).

Organisations also have a responsibility when procuring new IT systems to ensure that data is stored in open formats, or at the very least, can be exported in open formats in real time. Organisations should be accountable for this and should be able to demonstrate as part of the public tender process that they have taken this requirement into account for all new systems.

How we might make the internal workings of government and the public sector more open

Greater transparency must be recognised up-front as a key driver of the proposed “right to data”, to ensure that taxpayers are receiving best value for money and that officials are held accountable. Progress on this front should be actively monitored by central government and additional steps taken where necessary to ensure that periodic goals set by Government are met. Timelines for action should be published to allow citizens to further hold those in this oversight role to account.

How far there is a role for government to stimulate enterprise and market making in the use of Open Data

The Government and other public bodies under its control have a clear responsibility to make all public data openly available as the default option. It should not attempt to influence the open data ecosystem which remains at an early stage of development and shows considerable promise that it will develop as a world-leader in the field.

However, Government has a role to play in ensuring that the data itself is made freely available and should prioritise the release of the ‘base’ data which it holds such as mapping and weather information, which is required in order to give context to the majority of the other data sets published.

Lastly, the government can help in the longer term by encouraging the use of open standards by data publishers and in providing more general education and best practice to them.

–ENDS–

By wabson at 10:24AM

Think about a movie that you're downloading via BitTorrent*. Better yet, visualize it using this amazing BitTorrent visualization. Where is the movie stored? Well, on the hard drive of the person who started the torrent. Except they might have left the swarm by now. So instead, on the hard drives of a couple dozen other users. Except none of the ones you're talking to may actually have a full copy of the movie, just the pieces of it you happen to need.

Instead, stop looking at the nodes. They come and go, none of them are vital. Instead, look at the center of the simulation: the mass of bits flying from one node to the next. That's where the movie is. This is the cloud: the real cloud, not the marketing term. The movie isn't on a device, it's on the network, perpetually in transit, stored in the very wires and routers that compose it. And as long as enough nodes exist to bounce it around, it will stay there. Already, there are some torrents that have stayed alive for over seven years, almost from the birth of the protocol. And as the size of the online population increases, the volume of data stored in the real cloud will increase.

Search engines like The Pirate Bay, currently used mostly for purposes of dubious legality, will become the first guides to this new, amorphous universe of disembodied content. Content independent of storage, independent of source, stored in the body of the network itself. No vendor can rent this cloud to you by the hour, nobody can buy it or sell it or control it at all. That's part of its power. That's part of why the real cloud is so very different from the way data has existed before. You don't decide what gets stored on the real cloud: the cloud does, in the ultimate participative democracy. All you can do is feed new things to the cloud and hope it likes it, and provide new tools for getting data in and out.

This is a big deal. It is a phase-change in the nature of data, from liquid to gas. We are only just beginning to see and understand the implications of this transition. Serious research into the real cloud, and tools built around it and on it, are being stunted by the association torrents have with illegal behaviour. But that's going to fade. If you're looking for a blue-ocean field of emerging technology, where you can do new, exciting things and make a big difference, look at the real cloud.

---

* which you obviously don't do, since you use BitTorrent only to legally download free Linux distributions. So imagine a hypothetical movie.

By at 01:59AM

I tweeted a Guardian article the other week, in which John Naughton looked at the Raspberry Pi and it’s potential, along with several other projects, to fix the broken way in which kids are taught about technology in schools.

A key driver of this new tech resistance movement is a desire to rescue kids from the fate that the Department of Education has in mind for them, namely as passive consumers of information appliances and services created by giant foreign corporations. Where governments dream up projects like the European Computer Driving Licence (ECDL), the resistance seeks to grant kids a “Licence to Tinker” – to demystify the technology by providing tools and ideas that enable them to understand how modern networked devices work.

Although seemingly not his own words, John uses the interesting phrase “Licence to Tinker” to describe the laudable idea that children should be taught how to understand technology, rather than merely using it.

The catchphrase is slick, but to me it worryingly implies that you need a licence in order to open these things up, and comparisons with the dreaded ECDL seems hardly likely to inspire confidence in this small revolution.

Fortunately, Emma Mulqueeny, in her blog post on the same topic, comes up with the fabulous rallying call “Teach our kids to code”, also the name of her e-petition, which you really should sign if you’ve not already.

As she notes, there’s a collective responsibility on us all to keep pushing this message. Eric Schmidt may worry about the future of the UK’s tech competitiveness, but “teach our kids to code” shows us the simplicity of the solution to these apparent problems.

Most people would recognise the importance of teaching children how to think critically about a piece of literature, and even writing their own pieces, as well as merely reading it. Yet we don’t do the same with software, which like mainstream literature and journalism tends to be written by a small-ish set of people (at least compared with the overall population) with a certain set of principles, and often an economic interest in doing things a certain way.

We should teach kids to code because it’s essential that they have the skills to examine and question the digital world we now live in, and when they really don’t agree that they can do their own thing.

If you agree with this sentiment, then please sign the petition.

By wabson at 11:03AM

I tweeted a Guardian article the other week, in which John Naughton looked at the Raspberry Pi and it’s potential, along with several other projects, to fix the broken way in which kids are taught about technology in schools.

A key driver of this new tech resistance movement is a desire to rescue kids from the fate that the Department of Education has in mind for them, namely as passive consumers of information appliances and services created by giant foreign corporations. Where governments dream up projects like the European Computer Driving Licence (ECDL), the resistance seeks to grant kids a “Licence to Tinker” – to demystify the technology by providing tools and ideas that enable them to understand how modern networked devices work.

Although seemingly not his own words, John uses the interesting phrase “Licence to Tinker” to describe the laudable idea that children should be taught how to understand technology, rather than merely using it.

The catchphrase is slick, but to me it worryingly implies that you need a licence in order to open these things up, and comparisons with the dreaded ECDL seems hardly likely to inspire confidence in this small revolution.

Fortunately, Emma Mulqueeny, in her blog post on the same topic, comes up with the fabulous rallying call “Teach our kids to code”, also the name of her e-petition, which you really should sign if you’ve not already.

As she notes, there’s a collective responsibility on us all to keep pushing this message. Eric Schmidt may worry about the future of the UK’s tech competitiveness, but “teach our kids to code” shows us the simplicity of the solution to these apparent problems.

Most people would recognise the importance of teaching children how to think critically about a piece of literature, and even writing their own pieces, as well as merely reading it. Yet we don’t do the same with software, which like mainstream literature and journalism tends to be written by a small-ish set of people (at least compared with the overall population) with a certain set of principles, and often an economic interest in doing things a certain way.

We should teach kids to code because it’s essential that they have the skills to examine and question the digital world we now live in, and when they really don’t agree that they can do their own thing.

If you agree with this sentiment, then please sign the petition.

By wabson at 11:03AM

The only skills gap bigger than the one for programmers is the one for statisticians.

The whole web industry is accumulating vast quantities of data and storing it, magpie-like, as if it has intrinsic value, aided by ever-falling prices for storage. But the data isn't valuable. It doesn't mean anything until somebody who knows what they're doing looks at it, sifts through it, and produces a tool that lets others use it to draw valid and useful conclusions.

But hardly anybody does this. Instead we apply the most absurdly basic analyses and build whole businesses around them. We are messing around in the shallows, while the ocean of data gets bigger every day.

If you want to find yourself enormously over-employed for the next decade, learn a bunch of statistics. As a bonus, find a way to fit machine learning in there, but we even have way more people who understand machine learning than understand what it is we should be teaching them.

By at 17:48PM

I tweeted about ORM last week, and since then several people have asked me to clarify what I meant. I have actually previously written about ORM, but it was in the context of a larger discussion about SQL and I shouldn't have confused the two issues. So here I'm going to focus on ORM itself. I'm also going to try to be very brief, since it became very apparent from my SQL article that people tend to stop reading at the first sentence that makes them angry (and then leave a comment about it, whether or not their point is addressed later on).

What's an anti-pattern?

I was pleased to discover that Wikipedia has a comprehensive list of anti-patterns, both from within the world of programming and outside of it. The reason I call ORM an anti-pattern is because it matches the two criteria the author of AntiPatterns used to distinguish anti-patterns from mere bad habits, specifically:

1. It initially appears to be beneficial, but in the long term has more bad consequences than good ones
2. An alternative solution exists that is proven and repeatable

It is the first characteristic that has led to ORM's maddening (to me) popularity: it seems like a good idea at first, and by the time the problems become apparent, it's too late to switch away.

What do you mean by ORM?

The chief offender that I'm talking about is ActiveRecord, made famous by Ruby on Rails and ported to half a dozen languages since then. However, the same criticisms largely apply to other ORM layers like Hibernate in Java and Doctrine in PHP.

The benefits of ORM

• Simplicity: some ORM layers will tell you that they "eliminate the need for SQL". This is a promise I have yet to see delivered. Others will more realistically claim that they reduce the need to write SQL but allow you to use it when you need it. For simple models, and early in a project, this is definitely a benefit: you will get up and running faster with ORM, no doubt about it. However, you will be running in the wrong direction.
• Code generation: eliminating user-level code from the model through ORM opens the way for code generation, the "scaffolding" pattern which can give you a functional interface to all your tables through a simple description of your schema. Even more magically, you can change your schema description and re-generate the code, eliminating CRUD. Again, this definitely works initially.
• Efficiency is "good enough": none of the ORM layers I've seen claim efficiency gains. They are all fairly explicit that you are making a sacrifice of efficiency for code agility. If things get slow, you can always override your ORM methods with more efficient hand-coded SQL. Right?

The problems with ORM

Inadequate abstraction

The most obvious problem with ORM as an abstraction is that it does not adequately abstract away the implementation details. The documentation of all the major ORM libraries is rife with references to SQL concepts. Some introduce them without indicating their equivalents in SQL, while others treat the library as merely a set of procedural functions for generating SQL.

The whole point of an abstraction is that it is supposed to simplify. An abstraction of SQL that requires you to understand SQL anyway is doubling the amount you need to learn: first you need to learn what the SQL you're trying to run is, then you have to learn the API to get your ORM to write it for you. In Hibernate, to perform complicated SQL you actually have to learn a third language, HQL, which is maddeningly almost-but-not-quite SQL, which then gets translated to SQL for you.

A defender of ORM will say that this is not true of every project, that not everyone needs to do complicated joins, that ORM is an "80/20" solution, where 80% of users need only 20% of the features of SQL, and that ORM can handle those. All I can say is that in my fifteen years of developing database-backed web applications that has not been true for me. Only at the very beginning of a project can you get away with no joins or naive joins. After that, you need to tune and consolidate queries. Even if 80% of users need only 30% of the features of SQL, then 100% of users have to break your abstraction to get the job done.

Incorrect abstraction

If your project really does not need any relational data features, then ORM will work perfectly for you, but then you have a different problem: you're using the wrong datastore. The overhead of a relational datastore is enormous; this is a large part of why NoSQL data stores are so much faster. If your data is relational, however, that overhead is worth it: your database does not merely store your data, it represents your data and can answer questions about it on the basis of the relations captured, far more efficiently than you could in procedural code.

But if your data is not relational, then you are adding a huge and unnecessary overhead by using SQL in the first place and then compounding the problem by adding a further abstraction layer on top of that.

On the the other hand, if your data is relational, then your object mapping will eventually break down. SQL is about relational algebra: the output of SQL is not an object but an answer to a question. If your object "is" an instance of X and "has" a number of Y, and each of Y "belongs to" a Z, what is the correct representation in memory of your object? Is it merely the properties of X, or should it include all the Ys, and/or all the Zs? If you get only the properties of X, when do you run the query to fetch the Ys? And do you want one or all of them? In reality, it depends: that's what I mean when I say SQL is the answer to a question. The representation of your object in memory depends what you intend to do with it, and context-sensitive representation is not a feature of OO design. Relations are not objects; objects are not relations.

Death by a thousand queries

This leads naturally to another problem of ORM: inefficiency. When you fetch an object, which of its properties (columns in the table) do you need? ORM can't know, so it gets all of them (or it requires you to say, breaking the abstraction). Initially this is not a problem, but when you are fetching a thousand records at a time, fetching 30 columns when you only need 3 becomes a pernicious source of inefficiency. Many ORM layers are also notably bad at deducing joins, and will fall back to dozens of individual queries for related objects. As I mentioned earlier, many ORM layers explicitly state that efficiency is being sacrificed, and some provide a mechanism to tune troublesome queries. The problem, I have discovered with experience, is that there is seldom a single "magic bullet" query that needs to be optimized: the death of database-backed applications is not the efficiency of any one query, but the number of queries. ORM's lack of context-sensitivity means that it cannot consolidate queries, and must fall back on caching and other mechanisms to attempt to compensate.

What are the alternatives?

Hopefully by this point I've made some kind of case that ORM has fundamental design flaws. But to be an antipattern, there needs to be an alternative. In fact, there are two:

Use objects

If your data is objects, stop using a relational database. The programming world is currently awash with key-value stores that will allow you to hold elegant, self-contained data structures in huge quantities and access them at lightning speed. There's no law that says Step One of writing any web app is installing MySQL. The massive over-application of relational databases to every data representation problem is one of the reasons SQL has acquired a bad reputation in recent years, when in fact the problem is lazy design.

Use SQL in the Model

It's hugely dangerous to claim there is One True Way™ to do anything in programming. But in my experience, the best way to represent relational data in object-oriented code is still through a model layer: encapsulation of your data representation into a single area of your code is fundamentally a good idea. However, remember that the job of your model layer is not to represent objects but to answer questions. Provide an API that answers the questions your application has, as simply and efficiently as possible. Sometimes these answers will be painfully specific, in a way that seems "wrong" to even a seasoned OO developer, but with experience you will get better at finding points of commonality that allow you to refactor multiple query methods into one.

Likewise, sometimes the output will be a single object X, which is easy to represent. But sometimes the output will be a grid of aggregate data, or a single integer count. Resist the temptation to wrap these in too many layers of abstraction, and deal with the data on its own terms. Above all resist the fallacy of OO, that it can represent anything and everything. OO is itself an abstraction, a beautiful and hugely flexible one, but relational data is one of its boundaries, and pretending objects can do something they can't is the fundamental, root problem in all ORM.

In summary (TL;DR)

• ORM is initially simpler to understand and faster to write than SQL-based model code
• Its efficiency in the early stages of any project is adequate
• Unfortunately, these advantages disappear as the project increases in complexity: the abstraction breaks down, forcing the dev to use and understand SQL
• Entirely anecdotally, I claim that the abstraction of ORM breaks down not for 20% of projects, but close to 100% of them.
• Objects are not an adequate way of expressing the results of relational queries.
• The inadequacy of the mapping of queries to objects leads to a fundamental inefficiency in ORM-backed applications that is pervasive, distributed, and therefore not easily fixed without abandoning ORM entirely.
• Instead of using relational stores and ORM for everything, think more carefully about your design
• If your data is object in nature, then use object stores ("NoSQL"). They'll be much faster than a relational database.
• If your data is relational in nature, the overhead of a relational database is worth it.
• Encapsulate your relational queries into a Model layer, but design your API to serve the specific data needs of your application; resist the temptation to generalize too far.
• OO design cannot represent relational data in an efficient way; this is a fundamental limitation of OO design that ORM cannot fix.

By at 17:47PM

You may have heard about Pete Warden's iPhoneTracker, an app that lets you explore the giant trove of geolocation data your iPhone has been collecting since iOS 4.0 (and possibly before).

You may not know that the grid on Pete's released app is the result of his app deliberately aggregating the datapoints to a grid, in order to be a little less creepy:

if you zoom in you’ll see the points are constrained to a grid, so your exact location is not revealed. The underlying database has no such constraints, unfortunately.

But hey, why should he decide how much we want to expose our location? Let's get super creepy! Following some instructions from a clever friend, I made the very simple change required to increase the granularity of the data shown on the map. Before:

and after:

Woah! Neat, right? If you want to try it out yourself, you can follow Nicole's instructions on your own downloaded copy of Pete's source from github, or if that's too much trouble and you trust me, you can download your own copy of the extra-creepy version of iPhoneTracker. I'm not very experienced with compiling desktop software, but this works for me, and I use OS X Snow Leopard, so it will probably work for Leopard OS X too.

Important note: "granularity" is not the same as "accuracy". Your iPhone is frequently wrong about where you are, by up to half a mile or so. So your data points will show on average about where you were, but there will be plenty of random outliers -- which is why I appear to spend so much time swimming in San Francisco Bay, for example.

Enjoy!

By at 17:46PM

When you say "agile", I hear "cargo cult".

Agile is a process for managing software development. If you have a great team of smart people who communicate well and trust each other, they can use agile techniques to release lots of small iterations on a software project very quickly. This pattern of software release is often useful for startups. None of this is in dispute.

The problem is that with its rise in popularity, it has been both misunderstood and over-applied. If you have a good software team you can use agile, but if you use agile you will not automatically get a great team. If your team members communicate well and trust each other they can use agile, but if they communicate well and trust each other they could use any other methodology up to and including no fixed process whatsoever, and be equally successful. Agile changes your release pattern, not your people.

Bottom line: great teams produce great software. Great teams using agile release software every two weeks. Bad teams will produce shitty software. Bad teams using agile will release shitty software every two weeks.

By at 17:46PM

As I walked up the High Street in Maidenhead today I was pleasantly impressed to see a small market there, with a greengrocers, deli and crafts stall. It seems to be a growing trend, with a number of Welsh towns reviving or extending their on-street markets.

Among the stalls was an information stand, giving out leaflets (scanned copy of the one I picked up) and information on the new Kings Triangle development, which is being promoted as the solution to the town centre’s current woes.

The improvements are long overdue. Despite being the main pedestrian corridor linking the train station to the town centre the space is currently occupied by a mix of fast food outlets, chain pubs, low-rise offices, the monstrous Broadway multi-storey car park and a load of derelict land.

But as James Farquharson points out in a considered response on his blog today, the plans in their current form are based on the crucial assumption that retail development will provide a panacea to town centre decline, and at a time when analysts predict a continued retail slump for many years to come.

What I noticed, looking at the glossy leaflet, was the new shopping streets on the plan. Besides Debenhams, I wonder who will occupy the new spaces. Perhaps existing businesses will move in from other parts of the town centre, but in that case the development is merely shifting the problem from one place to another.

With the existing commercial centre around the High Street already having a number of vacant premises, a lot of new businesses will be needed not only to fill those but the new premises too. That would mean drawing in a large number of new visitors to Maidenhead, and with Reading, Wycombe and London providing plentiful competition, one wonders to what extent this is possible in reality.

The remarkable thing about all these towns (possibly London aside) is the degree to which they compete with each other, each trying to out-do the others in the quest for growth and economic expansion, but contributing little in architectural merit or in any general character. The same is true of my local area in Ealing, with various developments (some approved, some not) constantly being touted as the magic pill that will stop people heading to Westfield (15 minutes away on the tube) to do their shopping. We’ll see.

As James points out, something else is needed. Ealing at least has a number of green and open spaces at it’s centre which act as a hub for entertainment events, draw people in and above all create a unique sense of community. Maidenhead, sadly, has few of these, and those that it does have are mainly out of the way, separated off from the rest of the town by the almost impassable A4 bypass. Like the Broadway car park, another great 1960s planning failure.

So, back to my starting point. Street markets are on the up, and provide a great way for the entrepreneurial outfits that the Government is trying to encourage to generate revenue, without the long-term commitments of leasing premises and paying business rates. What better way to encourage this at a local level than to create a new space in Maidenhead, a single open space where Maidenhead can define it’s own unique social, cultural and of course commercial heart.

The alternative is a web of near-identical shopping streets, occupied by the usual mix of mobile phone stores, discount stores, fast food outlets and charity shops. With perhaps the odd tree, bit of grass or market stall for decoration. If we’re going to continue on down this route on new developments like this – when more effective and sustainable alternatives exist – then Mary Portis will have her work cut out.

Thanks to Mike Hatfield for pointing out James’s blog post.

By wabson at 12:35PM

As I walked up the High Street in Maidenhead today I was pleasantly impressed to see a small market there, with a greengrocers, deli and crafts stall. It seems to be a growing trend, with a number of Welsh towns reviving or extending their on-street markets.

Among the stalls was an information stand, giving out leaflets (scanned copy of the one I picked up) and information on the new Kings Triangle development, which is being promoted as the solution to the town centre’s current woes.

The improvements are long overdue. Despite being the main pedestrian corridor linking the train station to the town centre the space is currently occupied by a mix of fast food outlets, chain pubs, low-rise offices, the monstrous Broadway multi-storey car park and a load of derelict land.

But as James Farquharson points out in a considered response on his blog today, the plans in their current form are based on the crucial assumption that retail development will provide a panacea to town centre decline, and at a time when analysts predict a continued retail slump for many years to come.

What I noticed, looking at the glossy leaflet, was the new shopping streets on the plan. Besides Debenhams, I wonder who will occupy the new spaces. Perhaps existing businesses will move in from other parts of the town centre, but in that case the development is merely shifting the problem from one place to another.

With the existing commercial centre around the High Street already having a number of vacant premises, a lot of new businesses will be needed not only to fill those but the new premises too. That would mean drawing in a large number of new visitors to Maidenhead, and with Reading, Wycombe and London providing plentiful competition, one wonders to what extent this is possible in reality.

The remarkable thing about all these towns (possibly London aside) is the degree to which they compete with each other, each trying to out-do the others in the quest for growth and economic expansion, but contributing little in architectural merit or in any general character. The same is true of my local area in Ealing, with various developments (some approved, some not) constantly being touted as the magic pill that will stop people heading to Westfield (15 minutes away on the tube) to do their shopping. We’ll see.

As James points out, something else is needed. Ealing at least has a number of green and open spaces at it’s centre which act as a hub for entertainment events, draw people in and above all create a unique sense of community. Maidenhead, sadly, has few of these, and those that it does have are mainly out of the way, separated off from the rest of the town by the almost impassable A4 bypass. Like the Broadway car park, another great 1960s planning failure.

So, back to my starting point. Street markets are on the up, and provide a great way for the entrepreneurial outfits that the Government is trying to encourage to generate revenue, without the long-term commitments of leasing premises and paying business rates. What better way to encourage this at a local level than to create a new space in Maidenhead, a single open space where Maidenhead can define it’s own unique social, cultural and of course commercial heart.

The alternative is a web of near-identical shopping streets, occupied by the usual mix of mobile phone stores, discount stores, fast food outlets and charity shops. With perhaps the odd tree, bit of grass or market stall for decoration. If we’re going to continue on down this route on new developments like this – when more effective and sustainable alternatives exist – then Mary Portis will have her work cut out.

Thanks to Mike Hatfield for pointing out James’s blog post.

By wabson at 12:35PM

I was horrified enough at Ed Vaisey’s terrible sentiments he expressed over Net Neutrality last week, to write to my MP on the issue. Hopefully Angie will be more responsive to letters from constituents than my last MP was. Still waiting for a reply on that one…

The letter’s based on Open Rights Group’s template, but I added my own Tory-friendly additions in bold. Sending a generic letter is better than none at all, but given you’re writing to an individual it’s clearly better to tailor the argument for them.

I’d strongly encourage you to do the same if you care about universal access to information.

Dear Ms Bray,

I am writing to ask you to sign the Net Neutrality EDM 1036 first signed by Tom Watson MP, Julian Huppert MP and Peter Bottomley MP.

http://edmi.parliament.uk/EDMi/EDMDetails.aspx?EDMID=42025

Today the Coalition Government has taken a huge step towards increasing the transparency of Government by announcing the release of all central government spending data over £25,000 for the first time. You may have seen that the Prime Minister has stressed his support for this drive via a video posted this morning on the Number 10 web site.

This is a significant move which will help reduce the waste inherited from Labour and help drive the growth of an information industry which Francis Maude estimates could contribute up to £6bn to the UK economy. The work which his department has done over the last six months is making the UK a world leader in this field.

Last week however, Ed Vaizey, the Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries, stated that the UK will allow Internet Service Providers to decide which websites and services can reach their customers at what speed.

This threatens the idea of free access to information to all. If traffic from established media operators is prioritised above others then this threatens the ability of independent organisations to help government find where inefficiencies exist in the system, using open data. It promotes centralism over localism and diversity in our information instructure and is a backwards step in Britain’s development.

The change – often called removing “net neutrality” or introducing ”network discrimination” has already led to complaints from companies including the BBC and Skype, an Internet telephone company, that their content may be slowed down by Internet Services Providers. ISPs, including BT, Sky and Virgin, provide TV and phone services which would give them a reason slowing down certain Internet services provided by competitors.

The danger is that, while some “traffic management” to prevent congestion may be reasonable, allowing ISPs to do what they want, with no checks other “transparency” to customers, will lead to significant market abuse and loss of innovation on the Internet. New services may not start up if they cannot be guaranteed fair access to UK Internet customers.

There are ways this problem could be prevented. One would be an industry agreement by major ISPs not to discriminate against competitors, such as has been put in place in Norway. Another would be to require “minimum service guarantees” including an Open Internet.

Please sign the EDM, and raise this issue with Ed Vaizey, as the Minister responsible.

Thanks,
Will Abson

By wabson at 06:19AM

I was horrified enough at Ed Vaisey’s terrible sentiments he expressed over Net Neutrality last week, to write to my MP on the issue. Hopefully Angie will be more responsive to letters from constituents than my last MP was. Still waiting for a reply on that one…

The letter’s based on Open Rights Group’s template, but I added my own Tory-friendly additions in bold. Sending a generic letter is better than none at all, but given you’re writing to an individual it’s clearly better to tailor the argument for them.

I’d strongly encourage you to do the same if you care about universal access to information.

Dear Ms Bray,

I am writing to ask you to sign the Net Neutrality EDM 1036 first signed by Tom Watson MP, Julian Huppert MP and Peter Bottomley MP.

http://edmi.parliament.uk/EDMi/EDMDetails.aspx?EDMID=42025

Today the Coalition Government has taken a huge step towards increasing the transparency of Government by announcing the release of all central government spending data over £25,000 for the first time. You may have seen that the Prime Minister has stressed his support for this drive via a video posted this morning on the Number 10 web site.

This is a significant move which will help reduce the waste inherited from Labour and help drive the growth of an information industry which Francis Maude estimates could contribute up to £6bn to the UK economy. The work which his department has done over the last six months is making the UK a world leader in this field.

Last week however, Ed Vaizey, the Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries, stated that the UK will allow Internet Service Providers to decide which websites and services can reach their customers at what speed.

This threatens the idea of free access to information to all. If traffic from established media operators is prioritised above others then this threatens the ability of independent organisations to help government find where inefficiencies exist in the system, using open data. It promotes centralism over localism and diversity in our information instructure and is a backwards step in Britain’s development.

The change – often called removing “net neutrality” or introducing ”network discrimination” has already led to complaints from companies including the BBC and Skype, an Internet telephone company, that their content may be slowed down by Internet Services Providers. ISPs, including BT, Sky and Virgin, provide TV and phone services which would give them a reason slowing down certain Internet services provided by competitors.

The danger is that, while some “traffic management” to prevent congestion may be reasonable, allowing ISPs to do what they want, with no checks other “transparency” to customers, will lead to significant market abuse and loss of innovation on the Internet. New services may not start up if they cannot be guaranteed fair access to UK Internet customers.

There are ways this problem could be prevented. One would be an industry agreement by major ISPs not to discriminate against competitors, such as has been put in place in Norway. Another would be to require “minimum service guarantees” including an Open Internet.

Please sign the EDM, and raise this issue with Ed Vaizey, as the Minister responsible.

Thanks,
Will Abson

By wabson at 06:19AM

My second letter, with hyperlinks. Please feel free to use this as a template to contact your own MPs.

Dear Mr Sharma,

I wrote to you recently outlining my concerns around the Digital Economy Bill currently before parliament.

You may be aware that Harriet Harman MP announced last week that despite widespread criticism of some parts of this bill from across the creative and technology sectors, it will receive it’s second reading on Tuesday April 6, leaving only 90 minutes for the bill to be scrutinised by the House of Commons.

I hope you will agree that this is not acceptable for a Bill that seeks to define the technological landscape of Britain for the next generation. The Bill has undergone considerable scrutiny in the House of Lords and it is only reasonable to expect this same scrutiny from our elected representatives in the Commons.

I see from your web site that you have welcomed Ms Harman to the constituency on more than one occasion. I would therefore ask you to use your influence as the member for Ealing Southall to oppose the Government’s plans to rush through this Bill in the period before the election and that ensure the provisions receive proper debate and scrutiny in a new Parliament.

I am writing as one of 17,000 people who have also written to their representatives on this matter. I am sure you will have received many letters on this subject and I would ask you to take these views into account and make these known with ministers and party managers.

Yours Sincerely,
Will Abson

By wabson at 04:22AM

My second letter, with hyperlinks. Please feel free to use this as a template to contact your own MPs.

Dear Mr Sharma,

I wrote to you recently outlining my concerns around the Digital Economy Bill currently before parliament.

You may be aware that Harriet Harman MP announced last week that despite widespread criticism of some parts of this bill from across the creative and technology sectors, it will receive it’s second reading on Tuesday April 6, leaving only 90 minutes for the bill to be scrutinised by the House of Commons.

I hope you will agree that this is not acceptable for a Bill that seeks to define the technological landscape of Britain for the next generation. The Bill has undergone considerable scrutiny in the House of Lords and it is only reasonable to expect this same scrutiny from our elected representatives in the Commons.

I see from your web site that you have welcomed Ms Harman to the constituency on more than one occasion. I would therefore ask you to use your influence as the member for Ealing Southall to oppose the Government’s plans to rush through this Bill in the period before the election and that ensure the provisions receive proper debate and scrutiny in a new Parliament.

I am writing as one of 17,000 people who have also written to their representatives on this matter. I am sure you will have received many letters on this subject and I would ask you to take these views into account and make these known with ministers and party managers.

Yours Sincerely,
Will Abson

By wabson at 04:22AM

I tried to catch up on Gordon Brown’s surprise appearance today on Number10.gov.uk exclaiming the virtues of ‘superfast’ broadband and the semantic web, but sadly I was disappointed.

The player is not supported by this version of Flash. Please install the latest version…

Reading the transcript, perhaps I needn’t have bothered anyway. Aside from the release of the DfT NaPTAN data (which was made available to OSM some time ago) via data.gov.uk, and a promise to force transport operators to open up their timetabling information when their franchises come up (every 10-20 years) there wasn’t much news on the open data front.

Further justification for releasing data in this way probably wasn’t needed to convince most of the audience, but to illustrate how open data can be used to push the boundaries of innovation, Brown picked a New Labour favourite.

…Independent developers are using the information we’ve published for innovative new websites and mobile phone applications such as ‘asborometer’ – built by one person in just five days. It finds your position using GPS and tells you how many people have been served with an asbo in that area.

ASBOs? Seriously? Surely there must be better examples out there of how citizens have re-used public data to increase transparency, accountability and participation in government?

There was an announcement that @timberners_lee and @Nigel_Shadbolt will he heading up a new institute to study emerging web technologies, although no explanation of why our universities aren’t able to do this themselves (lack of funds, perhaps?). Also a new Digital Public Services Unit is being formed to advise departments on how to ‘transform’ their services for the web, with @Marthalanefox at the helm. Fortunately for her, she gets to keep the word ‘Champion’ in her job title.

The Digital Economy Bill was mentioned only once, in a section defending the 50p phone line tax and emphasising the importance of maintaining a strong regulatory presence in the form of Ofcom, the two parts of the bill most opposed by the Tories. So more electioneering than setting out a future policy vision.

There was no mention of the crippling effect of Clauses 17 and 18 of the bill, which threaten to cut off users and censor free speech on the Internet. The Government can invest as much as it likes in Public Services 2.0, but if individuals, families and businesses are unable to access them because their connection has been blocked then that investment is effectively useless.

So if like the Labour government of the past, you believe that digital inclusion is more important than the BPI increasing album sales in 2011, write to your MP, contact your local paper or make your voice heard at this Wednesday’s protest.

By wabson at 13:55PM

I tried to catch up on Gordon Brown’s surprise appearance today on Number10.gov.uk exclaiming the virtues of ‘superfast’ broadband and the semantic web, but sadly I was disappointed.

The player is not supported by this version of Flash. Please install the latest version…

Reading the transcript, perhaps I needn’t have bothered anyway. Aside from the release of the DfT NaPTAN data (which was made available to OSM some time ago) via data.gov.uk, and a promise to force transport operators to open up their timetabling information when their franchises come up (every 10-20 years) there wasn’t much news on the open data front.

Further justification for releasing data in this way probably wasn’t needed to convince most of the audience, but to illustrate how open data can be used to push the boundaries of innovation, Brown picked a New Labour favourite.

…Independent developers are using the information we’ve published for innovative new websites and mobile phone applications such as ‘asborometer’ – built by one person in just five days. It finds your position using GPS and tells you how many people have been served with an asbo in that area.

ASBOs? Seriously? Surely there must be better examples out there of how citizens have re-used public data to increase transparency, accountability and participation in government?

There was an announcement that @timberners_lee and @Nigel_Shadbolt will he heading up a new institute to study emerging web technologies, although no explanation of why our universities aren’t able to do this themselves (lack of funds, perhaps?). Also a new Digital Public Services Unit is being formed to advise departments on how to ‘transform’ their services for the web, with @Marthalanefox at the helm. Fortunately for her, she gets to keep the word ‘Champion’ in her job title.

The Digital Economy Bill was mentioned only once, in a section defending the 50p phone line tax and emphasising the importance of maintaining a strong regulatory presence in the form of Ofcom, the two parts of the bill most opposed by the Tories. So more electioneering than setting out a future policy vision.

There was no mention of the crippling effect of Clauses 17 and 18 of the bill, which threaten to cut off users and censor free speech on the Internet. The Government can invest as much as it likes in Public Services 2.0, but if individuals, families and businesses are unable to access them because their connection has been blocked then that investment is effectively useless.

So if like the Labour government of the past, you believe that digital inclusion is more important than the BPI increasing album sales in 2011, write to your MP, contact your local paper or make your voice heard at this Wednesday’s protest.

By wabson at 13:55PM

Turning into a political week, this one. With the Digital Economy Bill threatening to to take us back to an analogue age (oh, the irony), I’ve penned a letter to my MP highlighting the widely-held concerns that the Government look set to try to ram the thing through during wash-up.

If you’re reading this and you wish to continue using an open Internet where freedom of speech is not threatened, I would strongly urge you to do the same.

Virendra Sharma MP
Ealing, Southall

Friday 19 March 2010

Dear Mr Sharma,

I am writing to you concerning the Government’s Digital Economy Bill, which had it’s first reading in the House of Commons this week.

I have been following the passage of this Bill as it has progressed through its various stages in the Lords, and as a technologist myself I am mindful of the significance of the Bill in it’s potential to improve the way in which Britain uses information technology to it’s best advantage in an increasingly global and competitive age.

Like many others who work in the profession however, I have been alarmed by some of the clauses in the Bill, which seek to impose penalties on Internet users who are alleged to have engaged in copyright-infringing activities, with no legal recourse or right of appeal through the courts. This is especially concerning as recent cases in the news have highlighted the inaccuracy of methods used to identify wrongdoers.

Although there are many legitimate concerns around issues such as copyright and intellectual property which the Bill rightly seeks to address, in it’s current form the Bill risks damaging our economy by imposing unnecessary additional monitoring burdens on organisations as diverse as hotels, libraries and universities who provide Internet access, as well as the Internet Service Providers themselves.

As the member for Ealing Southall I hope you will appreciate the deep divide in access to technology that exists within our constituency. The Government has declared it’s intention to tackle such inequalities, but many of the provisions of the Digital Economy Bill will only hinder this, by increasing the cost of Internet access for families as ISPs seek to recoup the costs of monitoring users’ on-line activities, and others choose to stop providing public access altogether.

Further debate and scrutiny of the bill is required within Parliament to ensure that innocent families are not targeted or feel threatened by a flawed identification process, and that the cost of accessing information technology is not driven up unnecessarily in the current economic climate.

I would urge you to resist efforts by the Government to rush through this legislation before the General Election without the full oversight and scrutiny of the normal Parliamentary process, and in particular to vote against Clauses 17 and 18, which threaten to take us backwards, rather than forwards in our use of technology to improve the lives of local people.

Yours Sincerely,
Will Abson

By wabson at 06:02AM

Turning into a political week, this one. With the Digital Economy Bill threatening to to take us back to an analogue age (oh, the irony), I’ve penned a letter to my MP highlighting the widely-held concerns that the Government look set to try to ram the thing through during wash-up.

If you’re reading this and you wish to continue using an open Internet where freedom of speech is not threatened, I would strongly urge you to do the same.

Virendra Sharma MP
Ealing, Southall

Friday 19 March 2010

Dear Mr Sharma,

I am writing to you concerning the Government’s Digital Economy Bill, which had it’s first reading in the House of Commons this week.

I have been following the passage of this Bill as it has progressed through its various stages in the Lords, and as a technologist myself I am mindful of the significance of the Bill in it’s potential to improve the way in which Britain uses information technology to it’s best advantage in an increasingly global and competitive age.

Like many others who work in the profession however, I have been alarmed by some of the clauses in the Bill, which seek to impose penalties on Internet users who are alleged to have engaged in copyright-infringing activities, with no legal recourse or right of appeal through the courts. This is especially concerning as recent cases in the news have highlighted the inaccuracy of methods used to identify wrongdoers.

Although there are many legitimate concerns around issues such as copyright and intellectual property which the Bill rightly seeks to address, in it’s current form the Bill risks damaging our economy by imposing unnecessary additional monitoring burdens on organisations as diverse as hotels, libraries and universities who provide Internet access, as well as the Internet Service Providers themselves.

As the member for Ealing Southall I hope you will appreciate the deep divide in access to technology that exists within our constituency. The Government has declared it’s intention to tackle such inequalities, but many of the provisions of the Digital Economy Bill will only hinder this, by increasing the cost of Internet access for families as ISPs seek to recoup the costs of monitoring users’ on-line activities, and others choose to stop providing public access altogether.

Further debate and scrutiny of the bill is required within Parliament to ensure that innocent families are not targeted or feel threatened by a flawed identification process, and that the cost of accessing information technology is not driven up unnecessarily in the current economic climate.

I would urge you to resist efforts by the Government to rush through this legislation before the General Election without the full oversight and scrutiny of the normal Parliamentary process, and in particular to vote against Clauses 17 and 18, which threaten to take us backwards, rather than forwards in our use of technology to improve the lives of local people.

Yours Sincerely,
Will Abson

By wabson at 06:02AM

I finally got round to completing some responses to the Ordnance Survey Free consultation being run by DCLG, which closed yesterday. Not that I like to leave things to the last minute, of course.

When I first signed up to the data.go.uk beta last year it was a pretty basic site and was password-protected. There’s been some amazing progress since then, but there is still work to be done in persuading public bodies like OS that they should provide their data on equivalent terms to the datasets already released.

I got an out-of-office auto-reply, which apparently constitutes acknowledgement that I’ve officially had my say.

Question 1: What are your views or comments on the policy drivers for this consultation?

As the Cambridge Study shows there are clear social drivers for releasing many of the ‘unrefined’ products. As noted, there is clearly a cost associated with making this information more widely available and in order to ensure that benefits are maximised it is essential that the OS engages with external stakeholders before determining the format and licensing applied to released data.

I strongly disagree with the suggestion that contributors to the mapping data should be charged in order to update geographical data, since this may act as a disincentive for providing this data which is so valuable for ensuring OS maps are up-to-date.

Question 2: What are your views on how the market for geographic information has evolved recently and is likely to develop over the next 5-10 years?

The arrival of the Internet as a mass distribution channel has fundamentally changed the way mapping information is accessed and has the potential to greatly increase accessibility to this data for a wider variety of purposes at a low cost. Therefore the changes that have occurred in the last few years have changed the way in which mapping data is consumed.

Although this trend is expected to continue as licensing changes accelerate the usage of data, the next 5-10 years will see bigger changes in the way mapping data is collected as the Internet moves from a model of mass publishing and consumption to a more collaborative model. This second model is generally referred to as Web 2.0 and heralds significant changes for any organisation involved in the collection and publishing of information.

Groups such as OpenStreetMap (OSM) provide a good example of this model in a cartographic context. OS should increasingly look to leverage external groups and individuals such as this in the collection of data if it is to lower the cost of data collection, which could offset any short-term loss of revenue caused by the proposed licensing changes.

The goal of OS from it’s conception was to provide a comprehensive set of mapping data for the United Kingdom and crowd-sourcing models such as this have the potential to significantly widen this coverage to cover the entire globe. Such a database would not be possible for a single organisation to put together, but the distributed nature of contributors in OSM has allowed previously poorly-mapped countries such as Haiti to be surveyed to the level of detail required to conduct relief operations, at zero cost.

However, in order to allow contributions from diverse organisations to sit alongside each other in harmony, changes are needed to allow a more permissive licensing arrangement.

Question 3: What are your views on the appropriate pricing model for Ordnance Survey products and services?

Generally, the existence of any price-based model for providing access to OS products acts as an inhibitor to innovation and maximising the use of those resources, since it not only limits their availability to those with the necessary financial capital, but also (even where a low price is charged) places additional restrictions on the reuse of products in order to ensure that future revenue streams to OS are not compromised.

The dilemma presented is therefore how to provide free access to OS data on reasonable terms, while continuing to retain a profit-making function in order to recoup the substantial costs of maintaining that data. Therefore in the short term at least a differential pricing model may provide the best way forward for all parties involved. Such an arrangement might perhaps provide free access to certain ‘raw’ datasets while continuing to charge for others, providing free data to any non-commercial entity while continuing to charge profit-making entities, or a combination of the two approaches.

Question 4: What are your views and comments on public sector information regulation and policy, and the concepts of public task and good governance as they apply to Ordnance Survey?

The regulations outlined provide a broad overview of the legislation affecting public sector bodies such as Ordnance Survey who produce data in the course of their day-to-day activities.

Increasingly regulations such as the IFTS are focussing on how maximum benefit can be obtained from this data through re-use by others. Since this affects data which has been collected using finances from the public purse, in my view this even places a moral duty on OS to make the collected data available to the entire public audience on a non-discriminatory basis, regardless of their ability to pay or otherwise. But the clear pragmatic argument is also made that wider re-use will produce larger incomes as innovative uses of data allow new businesses to succeed, who will in turn pay their own taxes and business rates.

On the question of Governance, a larger role in driving OS policy should be given to external stakeholders in the organisation such as those using the data. This could take the form of an elected advisory council, who are able to make their own recommendations to the board.

Question 5: What are your views on and comments on the products under consideration for release for free re-use and the rationale for their inclusion?

Providing access to gazetteer, boundary and postcode data is essential as no authoritative nationwide database exists at present to provide this information on an unrestricted basis for re-use by others.

Raster data should be provided at the outline level, as given the many different ways in which raster views may be generated from different data sets and layers, it may be preferable for OS to leave the diversity of such content to be defined to the marketplace. Provided that the raw data is available, others will be able to produce their own raster versions as required.

Question 6: How much do you think government should commit to funding the free product set? How might this be achieved?

In the short term, Government should commit to the necessary capital required to compensate for any short term fall in licensing revenue from Central or Local government departments. This can be justified by the reasoning that the extra costs are being offset by savings within those departments, and due to the reduction in administrative overheads would likely provide a net saving overall.

Government should also, as the sponsor of these changes, commit to providing any required funding to aid with the transitory period, such as new IT systems required to host the data.

Given the current economic situation, any costs met by Government should be costs that can be demonstrated will be paid back later down the line, either in savings in other departments, or as efficiency savings within OS itself.

Question 7: What are your views on how free data from Ordnance Survey should be delivered?

It is essential that the data is made available in open formats as electronic files in order to allow re-use by the widest range of individuals and organisations. Where a choice exists between providing information in a widely-used proprietary format and a lesser-used but open format, the open format should be chosen since it represents a lower risk to the publisher and ultimately will enable greater choice on the part of the consumer.

Data may also be made available in other formats such as DVD and a reasonable charge could be made for such formats.

As stated, it is essential that the OS engages with external stakeholders before determining the format and licensing applied to released data.

Question 8: What are your views on the impact Ordnance Survey Free will have on the market?

Providing some or all of OS’s data under a free license may affect other suppliers who have previously relied on such data being available at a premium only. However, Ordnance Survey, although still the dominant supplier in the UK market, is not the only supplier and other lower-cost or free data sources such as Google Maps, Bing and OpenStreetMap are already ushering in these changes and will continue to do so, regardless of what action OS may take itself.

Question 9: What are your comments on the proposal for a single National Address Register and suggestions for mechanisms to deliver it?

A single National Address Register is currently needed in order to ensure level access to address data by all individuals and organisations. Address data is becoming fundamental to many localised services being delivered via the Internet and many of these services do not have the means to pay for the currently available commercial alternatives.

At present access to this data is available only from a single commercial supplier and significant limitations are places on it’s re-use. It is not appropriate for such a valuable asset to be in the sole control of a single commercial entity with few safeguards to ensure that access is made available on reasonable terms.

Question 10: What are your views on the options outlined in this consultation?

A wide variety of options have been presented, but it is disappointing that no consideration has been given to the benefits to OS of making data more widely available, such as the increased ability for local residents to report changes to the physical landscape in their area or even to modify features themselves.

Question 11: For local authorities: What will be the balance of impact of these proposals on your costs and revenues?

N/A

Question 12: Will these proposals have any impact on race, gender or disability equalities?

N/A

By wabson at 08:06AM

I finally got round to completing some responses to the Ordnance Survey Free consultation being run by DCLG, which closed yesterday. Not that I like to leave things to the last minute, of course.

When I first signed up to the data.go.uk beta last year it was a pretty basic site and was password-protected. There’s been some amazing progress since then, but there is still work to be done in persuading public bodies like OS that they should provide their data on equivalent terms to the datasets already released.

I got an out-of-office auto-reply, which apparently constitutes acknowledgement that I’ve officially had my say.

Question 1: What are your views or comments on the policy drivers for this consultation?

As the Cambridge Study shows there are clear social drivers for releasing many of the ‘unrefined’ products. As noted, there is clearly a cost associated with making this information more widely available and in order to ensure that benefits are maximised it is essential that the OS engages with external stakeholders before determining the format and licensing applied to released data.

I strongly disagree with the suggestion that contributors to the mapping data should be charged in order to update geographical data, since this may act as a disincentive for providing this data which is so valuable for ensuring OS maps are up-to-date.

Question 2: What are your views on how the market for geographic information has evolved recently and is likely to develop over the next 5-10 years?

The arrival of the Internet as a mass distribution channel has fundamentally changed the way mapping information is accessed and has the potential to greatly increase accessibility to this data for a wider variety of purposes at a low cost. Therefore the changes that have occurred in the last few years have changed the way in which mapping data is consumed.

Although this trend is expected to continue as licensing changes accelerate the usage of data, the next 5-10 years will see bigger changes in the way mapping data is collected as the Internet moves from a model of mass publishing and consumption to a more collaborative model. This second model is generally referred to as Web 2.0 and heralds significant changes for any organisation involved in the collection and publishing of information.

Groups such as OpenStreetMap (OSM) provide a good example of this model in a cartographic context. OS should increasingly look to leverage external groups and individuals such as this in the collection of data if it is to lower the cost of data collection, which could offset any short-term loss of revenue caused by the proposed licensing changes.

The goal of OS from it’s conception was to provide a comprehensive set of mapping data for the United Kingdom and crowd-sourcing models such as this have the potential to significantly widen this coverage to cover the entire globe. Such a database would not be possible for a single organisation to put together, but the distributed nature of contributors in OSM has allowed previously poorly-mapped countries such as Haiti to be surveyed to the level of detail required to conduct relief operations, at zero cost.

However, in order to allow contributions from diverse organisations to sit alongside each other in harmony, changes are needed to allow a more permissive licensing arrangement.

Question 3: What are your views on the appropriate pricing model for Ordnance Survey products and services?

Generally, the existence of any price-based model for providing access to OS products acts as an inhibitor to innovation and maximising the use of those resources, since it not only limits their availability to those with the necessary financial capital, but also (even where a low price is charged) places additional restrictions on the reuse of products in order to ensure that future revenue streams to OS are not compromised.

The dilemma presented is therefore how to provide free access to OS data on reasonable terms, while continuing to retain a profit-making function in order to recoup the substantial costs of maintaining that data. Therefore in the short term at least a differential pricing model may provide the best way forward for all parties involved. Such an arrangement might perhaps provide free access to certain ‘raw’ datasets while continuing to charge for others, providing free data to any non-commercial entity while continuing to charge profit-making entities, or a combination of the two approaches.

Question 4: What are your views and comments on public sector information regulation and policy, and the concepts of public task and good governance as they apply to Ordnance Survey?

The regulations outlined provide a broad overview of the legislation affecting public sector bodies such as Ordnance Survey who produce data in the course of their day-to-day activities.

Increasingly regulations such as the IFTS are focussing on how maximum benefit can be obtained from this data through re-use by others. Since this affects data which has been collected using finances from the public purse, in my view this even places a moral duty on OS to make the collected data available to the entire public audience on a non-discriminatory basis, regardless of their ability to pay or otherwise. But the clear pragmatic argument is also made that wider re-use will produce larger incomes as innovative uses of data allow new businesses to succeed, who will in turn pay their own taxes and business rates.

On the question of Governance, a larger role in driving OS policy should be given to external stakeholders in the organisation such as those using the data. This could take the form of an elected advisory council, who are able to make their own recommendations to the board.

Question 5: What are your views on and comments on the products under consideration for release for free re-use and the rationale for their inclusion?

Providing access to gazetteer, boundary and postcode data is essential as no authoritative nationwide database exists at present to provide this information on an unrestricted basis for re-use by others.

Raster data should be provided at the outline level, as given the many different ways in which raster views may be generated from different data sets and layers, it may be preferable for OS to leave the diversity of such content to be defined to the marketplace. Provided that the raw data is available, others will be able to produce their own raster versions as required.

Question 6: How much do you think government should commit to funding the free product set? How might this be achieved?

In the short term, Government should commit to the necessary capital required to compensate for any short term fall in licensing revenue from Central or Local government departments. This can be justified by the reasoning that the extra costs are being offset by savings within those departments, and due to the reduction in administrative overheads would likely provide a net saving overall.

Government should also, as the sponsor of these changes, commit to providing any required funding to aid with the transitory period, such as new IT systems required to host the data.

Given the current economic situation, any costs met by Government should be costs that can be demonstrated will be paid back later down the line, either in savings in other departments, or as efficiency savings within OS itself.

Question 7: What are your views on how free data from Ordnance Survey should be delivered?

It is essential that the data is made available in open formats as electronic files in order to allow re-use by the widest range of individuals and organisations. Where a choice exists between providing information in a widely-used proprietary format and a lesser-used but open format, the open format should be chosen since it represents a lower risk to the publisher and ultimately will enable greater choice on the part of the consumer.

Data may also be made available in other formats such as DVD and a reasonable charge could be made for such formats.

As stated, it is essential that the OS engages with external stakeholders before determining the format and licensing applied to released data.

Question 8: What are your views on the impact Ordnance Survey Free will have on the market?

Providing some or all of OS’s data under a free license may affect other suppliers who have previously relied on such data being available at a premium only. However, Ordnance Survey, although still the dominant supplier in the UK market, is not the only supplier and other lower-cost or free data sources such as Google Maps, Bing and OpenStreetMap are already ushering in these changes and will continue to do so, regardless of what action OS may take itself.

Question 9: What are your comments on the proposal for a single National Address Register and suggestions for mechanisms to deliver it?

A single National Address Register is currently needed in order to ensure level access to address data by all individuals and organisations. Address data is becoming fundamental to many localised services being delivered via the Internet and many of these services do not have the means to pay for the currently available commercial alternatives.

At present access to this data is available only from a single commercial supplier and significant limitations are places on it’s re-use. It is not appropriate for such a valuable asset to be in the sole control of a single commercial entity with few safeguards to ensure that access is made available on reasonable terms.

Question 10: What are your views on the options outlined in this consultation?

A wide variety of options have been presented, but it is disappointing that no consideration has been given to the benefits to OS of making data more widely available, such as the increased ability for local residents to report changes to the physical landscape in their area or even to modify features themselves.

Question 11: For local authorities: What will be the balance of impact of these proposals on your costs and revenues?

N/A

Question 12: Will these proposals have any impact on race, gender or disability equalities?

N/A

By wabson at 08:06AM

The other night I went to my first real unashamedly political event, a session organised by the “progressive conservative” bright blue (so new they’re yet to appear on Google) at the British Library, discussing the role of education in 21st century Britain.

The event deliberately went back to first principles on education, focussing on why we bother to send people to school/college/university in the first place, then going on to look at how we need to change our current approach. Hence the title, above.

The speakers really made the event for me, especially as Toby Young’s presence on Newsnight last week had motivated me to put down my own thoughts on the matter.

It must be said that Anthony Seddon generally out-shone Young in terms of stage presence, but the former came across much more so as someone who really wants to make a difference, rather than one who simply offers a critique of current policy.

The two were united in their criticism however, with Young pointing to various studies which have shown how measures such as social mobility (which, if nothing else, education should surely aim to improve?) have painted a worsening picture over the previous 50 years, and Seddon lambasting targets and exams in encouraging a sort of herd-like behaviour, where all effort is focussed on the short-term goal of achieving the best score, rather than in maximising purer academic performance.

As the arguments were developed further, the point was made that the education system focuses too heavily on teaching children to recall facts, rather than to develop the sort of critical thinking and logical reasoning required in today’s fast-moving world. PSE in particular was noted as form of indoctrination, where pupils are taught item-by-item what is right and wrong, rather than being given the chance to decide this for themselves.

There were disagreements between audience members and the panel and at times between the two speakers themselves over how best to formulate an overall educational policy and how to measure it’s outcomes, but there was almost universal agreement that the current system which has served us so well for the previous century is now looking increasingly out-dated, and that despite the personal interest of two PMs and many more high-profile education ministers, the massive investment made over the last few years have not delivered the improvements hoped-for.

The argument was therefore presented that another approach is needed. Seddon was particularly critical of policy for deliberately excluding parents from the education process, arguing that schools and parents must be in line with each other and that a failure to bring the two sides together causes alienation reduces the sense of belonging. Young’s school, if successful, could change this.

As Seddon surmised at the end, we are all common stakeholders in the process of education. We have all been educated, and many people have or may in the future have children who will go through the same process. Current circumstances provide a once-in-a-generation chance to get things right this time, and so now is the time to act.

By wabson at 13:06PM

The other night I went to my first real unashamedly political event, a session organised by the “progressive conservative” bright blue (so new they’re yet to appear on Google) at the British Library, discussing the role of education in 21st century Britain.

The event deliberately went back to first principles on education, focussing on why we bother to send people to school/college/university in the first place, then going on to look at how we need to change our current approach. Hence the title, above.

The speakers really made the event for me, especially as Toby Young’s presence on Newsnight last week had motivated me to put down my own thoughts on the matter.

It must be said that Anthony Seddon generally out-shone Young in terms of stage presence, but the former came across much more so as someone who really wants to make a difference, rather than one who simply offers a critique of current policy.

The two were united in their criticism however, with Young pointing to various studies which have shown how measures such as social mobility (which, if nothing else, education should surely aim to improve?) have painted a worsening picture over the previous 50 years, and Seddon lambasting targets and exams in encouraging a sort of herd-like behaviour, where all effort is focussed on the short-term goal of achieving the best score, rather than in maximising purer academic performance.

As the arguments were developed further, the point was made that the education system focuses too heavily on teaching children to recall facts, rather than to develop the sort of critical thinking and logical reasoning required in today’s fast-moving world. PSE in particular was noted as form of indoctrination, where pupils are taught item-by-item what is right and wrong, rather than being given the chance to decide this for themselves.

There were disagreements between audience members and the panel and at times between the two speakers themselves over how best to formulate an overall educational policy and how to measure it’s outcomes, but there was almost universal agreement that the current system which has served us so well for the previous century is now looking increasingly out-dated, and that despite the personal interest of two PMs and many more high-profile education ministers, the massive investment made over the last few years have not delivered the improvements hoped-for.

The argument was therefore presented that another approach is needed. Seddon was particularly critical of policy for deliberately excluding parents from the education process, arguing that schools and parents must be in line with each other and that a failure to bring the two sides together causes alienation reduces the sense of belonging. Young’s school, if successful, could change this.

As Seddon surmised at the end, we are all common stakeholders in the process of education. We have all been educated, and many people have or may in the future have children who will go through the same process. Current circumstances provide a once-in-a-generation chance to get things right this time, and so now is the time to act.

By wabson at 13:06PM

Last year Christian think-tank Theos argued that because most of us know the Easter story, therefore most of us literally believe in the Easter story.

From the same people who brought you this unfathomably crap interpretation of their own, agenda-ridden research, now comes a sparkly new survey on the public attitude to evolution.

Or so say rubbish science journalists who didn’t even bother to look at the research, blindly trotting out their own version of the Theos press release all round the internet today.  (You’d think science journalists would be the one kind of journalist most likely to do their fucking job and go and look at the so-called science, but no.)

The research never actually asked people a fair, balanced question about their belief in evolution, defined simply as a process of natural selection.  Oh no.  Do you want to know what it actually asked them?
What the actual survey actually asked about evolution was two separate questions, one on “theistic evolution” and one on “atheistic evolution”.  The latter definition and question read:

Atheistic evolution is the idea that evolution makes belief in God unnecessary and absurd.  In your opinion is Atheistic evolution: [and then the choices]

Just confusing the two separate issues of a/theism and evolution was obviously going to result in weird answers from the start, especially since they don’t even bother to spell out simply what the actual theory of natural selection says or associate it with either view.

Moreover, when people were being asked to assent to “atheistic evolution” they weren’t just being asked to assent to evolution-minus-God, they were being asked to assent to the view that evolution necessarily implies that there was no God.

Now, I think that evolution is true and I think that belief in God is unnecessary and absurd, but I still might well have said that “Atheistic evolution” as defined in this survey was probably not true, because I don’t think that one does necessitate the other.  Evolution has nothing to say about the origin of the world, for example.

Answering this survey, I might well have been waiting for a third, good, neutral statement of evolution before I plumped for it.

Worse still is the interpretation which Theos then puts on this already flawed data.  Having found probably even lower levels of general assent to the theory of evolution than we should want and expect – and would get if we asked better questions – they go on to conclude (in their press release) that the hopeless confusion we’re all is the fault of atheists:

Unfortunately, he [Darwin] is being used by certain atheists today to promote their cause. The result is that, given the false choice of evolution or God, people are rejecting evolution.

“Darwin has become caught up in the crossfire between creationists on one side and certain public atheists on the other. It’s a battle in which everybody suffers.”

That’s right.  Who’s to blame for Creationism and ID?  Is it the proponents of Creationism and ID?  No.  It’s atheists!  And why should we blame the atheists, Theos?  Well, because they conflate Darwinism and atheism giving people a false choice between the two, says Theos. Oh, right, I get it, exactly like your survey cleverly demonstrates by doing exactly that?  Um, yes, yes that’s what we, um, intended, says Theos.

Of course, there are a whole bunch of reasons why Darwinian evolution is associated with atheism.  This isn’t a story about evolution getting “caught in the crossfire” between warring fundamentalist theists on one hand and marauding atheists on the other, as if Richard Dawkins (doubtless the intended ring-leader of the “public atheists” mentioned) has single-handedly warped a theory which was otherwise neutral with regard to God.  The reason evolution is associated with atheism is because prior to Darwin the church said quite emphatically that God created the Earth and all living things in seven days.  During the bronze age!  Religion got caught with its panda’s thumb up its giant red arse on this issue, forcing them ever since to either dig in and become full blown fundamentalists, or to pass off centuries of previous heretic-burning as a crazy, mistaken, drunken game, because they didn’t really literally believe in Genesis, no, no, it was an allegory all along.  For something.

The dawn of evolutionary theory is the great naturalizing moment of the last two centuries.  It completely reversed the way we had to think when trying to explain the construction of living forms.  It blew away the need for design, and a designer, previously the greatest single argument for the existence of God, with an idea of simple beauty and devastating cogency.  Atheists didn’t manufacture a wargame here – if anything it was the vicious response of religionists in Darwin’s own time which show exactly why so many people regard evolution as literally bringing the riddle of life back “down to earth”.

But none of this means that when you ask people about evolution you should imply that they have a choice between “theistic evolution” and “atheistic evolution”.  That’s just bollocks.

Theos is basically attempting to do exactly what it pretends not to be doing.  They are accepting that it’s not okay to be a biblical literalist, but also trying to blame anyone who expresses both atheism and evolution for other people’s confusion and ignorance, thereby leaving “theistic evolution” as the only option on the table.

Well, no, damn it!  We must be free to express the fact that evolution leads us to thinking about life in a naturalistic way, without being branded some kind of intellectual warmongers.  Being free to say that evolution is part of our atheism is like saying that Galileon cosmology leads us to thinking less anthropocentrically about the nature of the universe; and like saying that Newton leads us to think that maybe there is a coherent underlying structure to the universe, which is not interfered with by capricious deities.

Theos point the finger.  But they are the ones shamelessly playing games with science.

By Bob at 16:17PM

So, I have now moved to London.  I started moving in a few weeks before Christmas, and now I live here in Highbury, just round the corner from Boris Johnson apparently, and right in the corner of Highbury Fields.  Which makes my flat sound grander than it is.  I live in just one room.  But it’s a nice room with wooden floors and I have a large kitchen (big enough to have a dining table and sofa in it) which I share with three friendly housemates.  My own room is too hot.  The stupid underfloor heating seems to be on all the time whatever I do with the thermostat.  There’s a door right onto the kitchen so I sometimes get disturbed at night if someone wants to make a curry at three o’clock in the morning.  And there’s something else.

There’s something else lurking.  Like a living thing.  But alien. There’s something else in the room.

It is electricity.  Static electricity everywhere.  Far, far too often I become a sort of involuntary, miniature Thor.  In a particularly powerful shock which I was half-prepared for I could actually see the white bolt of electrons discharging as I touched my chair leg.  I get shocked from the wardrobe door handles and the door into the room and from my chair.  The other day I somehow even took the charge with me all the way to work and electrocuted a colleague.  But by and large it only happens in the room, and only this side of Christmas, not before.
So I am trying to solve the puzzle like a sort of rubbish, less-motivated Columbo.  I have done careful research by reading the page “Static electricity?? HELP” – a veritable compedium of advice compiled by the delightful Mamasource.com (”Connecting  moms in your community”.  Don’t laugh. This is a valid source of scientific advice.  And getting electorcuted every five minutes isn’t unique to child-bearing women.)

Now, according to “Static electricity?? HELP”, multiple factors may come into play in the build up of electrons about my person. Footwear, synthetic clothing, synthetic carpets, dry air, dry skin…

The first thing I thought was that possibly the slippers I got for Christmas were causing the problem, perhaps rubbing on the carpet;, except that I don’t have a carpet, I have a wooden floor, and even when I remove the slippers and walk barefoot I still get shocked.  I thought perhaps that the wheels on my chair were generating static somehow as I slid about the room; but switching to a stationary chair has not helped – in fact I just seem to ground myself on its metal legs all the time.

I have not tried rubbing my clothes with a damp cloth ever half hour!  But then, I change my clothes on, well, almost a daily basis, and this seems to have no effect.  The fact that the heating is on all the time means the room is hot and therefore presumably too dry — and I’m sure this must be exacerbating the problem.  But I have tried drinking lots and lots of water to keep my skin hydrated, but this just means that I get shocked on my way to the bathroom.

I have been wracking my brains to think what else is new, what else could have started the static build-up since Christmas.  And only one thing remains.

Over the Christmas break I got lazy and let my facial hair grow.  My goatee has expanded into a face-girdling bear mask.  It’s still quite stubbley, but this means it’s all bristles and fur, not unlike a synthetic carpet!

Could it be that the furriness spreading outward from my chin is somehow rubbing on, like, the really dry air and generating all the static?  Every bristle a miniature lightning rod?

As Sherlock Holmes wrongly said, ”When you eliminate the impossible, whatever you have left, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

Anyway, I need to solve this riddle soon before I accidentally discharge my unwanted superpower into my computer and wipe out my harddisk.

By Bob at 11:01AM

The most amazing thing about the Atheist Bus Campaign is that, by and large, the internet has responded good-naturedly.  Obviously, there are lots of critical comments, and even outright nasty comments.  But given the topic (religion versus atheism) the ratio of good comments to bad comments is astoundingly positive.  You’d expect the nasty to comments overwhelm the pro comments, but they really don’t.

What is the case, though, is that – both back in October when the British Humanist Association re-launched the Atheist Bus fundraising appeal, and today now the buses have officially hit the roads – many, many people comment on use of the word ‘probably’ in the phrase “There’s probably no God”.

A few people comment that they like the ‘probably’, because it’s a bit funny-sounding and casual and not quite as churlish as the alternative: “Fuck off, there’s obviously no God”.  However, most of web 2.0 commenters are critically-thinking freethinkers and (god bless ‘em, I’m one of them) we’ll stick our two penneth in whether you like it or not, and there’s a valid philosophical point to be raised that since all knowledge is ultimately conjectural anyway, we shouldn’t have to qualify every metaphysical statement…  Yadda yadda yadda.
But there’s another category of ‘probably’ criticism, perhaps even the most dominant strain in the Atheist Bus-commenting culture-virus.

Numerous articles (just one example) are not merely offering a philosophical objection to ‘probably’, but outright crowing over it, implying that anyone who supports the campaign must be a wavering, quavering agnostic of the most wishy-washy variety.  Journo bloggers and commenters all over the place are writing to the effect that use of the word ‘probably’ beams a glaring light through the thin veil of our bravado; even as the slogan was concocted somewhere behind Ariane Sherine’s omni-smiling face, she must have been telepathically absorbing the doubt and existential angst of every hedging heretic and every iffy infidel up and down the land.  So the detractors argue.
This is of course tosh.

As Richard Dawkins has pointed out, if he uses language – with reference to religion – which is less harsh, less personal, less cutting, less rhetorical, than the kind of language you can read all the time in trashy magazines, restaurant critics’ reviews, political debates and so on, then he is nevertheless reprimanded for being a hateful miser who doesn’t understand basic human emotion. He regularly receives far harsher, more personal, more cutting, more rhetorical counter-attack against his relatively nuanced criticisms than his words could possibly deserve.  Religion engenders a peculiar kind of wailing pedantry against us (happy millions of) non-conformists.

Snide attacks against the word ‘probably’ in the Atheist Bus Campaign are another example of this language which – because it happens to be remotely critical of religion – is held to an absurd, pedantic standard, by people who know better under almost any other circumstances.

Allow me to demonstrate.

Imagine, for example, an analogous criticism made against the Alpha Course’s latest adverts.  These were run all through 2008, at least across London, far more widely than the Atheist Bus Campaign will ever reach.  These adverts asked, “If God did exist what would you ask?”
Now, I can imagine lots of criticisms of these adverts.  Like “Why did you leave a big, white, empty space underneath which was ripe for hilarious graffiti, you muppets?”

But imagine for a moment that someone, somewhere, made the following criticism of this advert.  Imagine (it will be difficult, but try) that they might mean this criticism seriously:

“Ooh, looks like they don’t really believe after all!  Ha ha, their faith must be fading away.  Look! – their slogan is in the interrogative form!  They must be seriously doubting themselves.  Ha ha… I am so clever.”

I think everyone – whether inclined toward being an atheist bus passenger or an Alpha Course attendee or anywhere in between – would recognise such a criticism, immediately, for the infantile, pointless pedantry that it was.

“If God did exist…” is conditional.  “There’s probably no God…” is qualified.  Other than this the entirely comparable in terms of being a kind of staged equivocation.  Given the context of mass-appeal marketing, it should be blatantly obvious to anyone why that is the case.  Only the latter slogan, though, is lumbered with the cuckcoo criticism that it is actually a signal of failing confidence.
Not that the bus campaign should really need defending from the rather sad, weird criticisms of ‘probably’ that have dogged it, nevertheless here’s the best statement I’ve seen – from Ariane Sherine herself – of why ‘probably’ makes sense, and what might be hoped for from greater public understanding of the humanist position.

By Bob at 18:16PM

My third blog at the Worcester News is all about how daft the annual spate of new stories on the topic of Christmas being banned is.  How this myth persists and gets re-invented every single December — despite the millions of fairy lights bedecking thousands of buildings, the tons of wrapping paper taped around billions of pounds worth of presents, the millions of Christmas turkeys consumed around most dinner tables in the UK — is beyond me.

By Bob at 08:14AM

America

Britain

In triumph, and redeemed, American has united behind a president whose race differs from the majority of Americans, a president who promises change, and who does not hide his intelligence or his power. Inspiring.

We, in Britain, have got behind an old man who can’t dance.

The legend that is John Sergeant rivals Robin Hood for his anti-authoritarian riposte to Aunty Beeb.  Armed only with his lack of coordination and an expression perpetually hovering between bemusement and curmudgeonliness, Sergeant has single-handedly (or two-left-footedly - haha) unmasked the charade that Strictly Come Dancing is strictly about dancing.

It has actually been quite a success story.  A warm story.  The public conspired, depending on your view, in order to support the weaker contestant, or because they recongised something of their own flawed dance steps in the old duffer, or even because they wanted to make a national TV program less saccharine by forcing upon it an arse-backwards plotline so surreal that Monty Python could have invented it.

But there are always left-fielders, and some commentators are just more lateral-thinking than others.  One in particular has been lateral-thinking about the John Sergeant voting pattern so long and hard, that his opinion now originates from somewhere near the planet Mercury.

According to Justin Thacker, “Head of Theology” at the Evangelical Alliance, if you voted for little Johnny, then you are a selfish egotistical relativist who hates God and rejects the whole concept of objective truth!

“How does Justin Thacker know my innermost secret motivations?”, I hear you ask.  Well, Justin Thacker has a very good argument.  First he asks why people would possibly vote for Sergeant.  Justin Thacker knows it can’t be because Sergeant is a “soap star” nor because he’s “good looking”, because Sergeant is neither. (Bloody nice of you, Justin.)  Justin Thacker rejects that it could be Sergeant’s “wry sense of humour” or his “certain charm” or even “the great British tradition of supporting the underdog”.  No.  It can’t be any of those things.  Justin Thacker knows the best theory is that people wanted to “spite the judges”.  Okay… And do they want to spite the judges because the judges were mean to people?  Or because it would be a bit of a joke to get one over on them?  Oh no, Joe-public, I’m afraid not.  Your spite runs much deeper than that, and you know it.  And Justin Thacker knows it.  Listen to Justin Thacker.  Justin Thacker has privileged access to what you were really thinking:

The reality is that in our individualistic, consumer-driven age, the reigning Zeitgeist loves individual autonomy over public authority. We can’t bear the notion that there exists some external, objective standard against which things should be measured – whether in respect of dancing or morality or anything really. Rather, we want to be King, and all authority must rest with us. So, we get to be the arbiters of what’s true or false, good or bad. The idea of being held to account by some absolute standard is one that rails deeply against our current mode of thinking. Hence, we reject it whenever we can. It’s not necessarily that we think the standard is a bad one, we just hate the idea of there being one at all.

Watching TV with Justin Thacker must be a really fun night in.

Sounds about right, though, doesn’t it. You probably didn’t realise at the time, but you voted for John Sergeant because you hate the concept of truth! It’s so obvious now.  When you picked up the phone you were thinking; “Objectivity? Correspondence theory of truth? Pah! I’m going to vote for John Sergeant.  That’ll show them theologians, trying to force their concept of a mind-independent external reality on me.”

Justin Thacker’s most wise inferences know no bounds.  Believe it or not, the following sentence directly follows the above quoted passage:

Given this, it’s no wonder that the Christian gospel has a hard time being heard.

Yep, God hates the nation getting together to watch people doing lovely dances, because it exacerbates their hatred of objective truth, and the Bible is objectively true, and if they stay in watching light entertainment together as a family then people will miss their Saturday night Bible classes, damn it.

If Bruce Forsyth would only lead us in prayers at the start of each episode that would be fine, I reckon - but every week Justin Thacker tunes in and… no, still no worshipful obedience to the Lord.  Who does Bruce Forsyth think he is, an entertainer?  All this light-hearted community of enjoyment is antithetical to Justin Thacker’s God.  God would rather you read Leviticus at the weekend. Because it’s objectively true. Justin Thacker knows.

There’s no build up to this next complete non sequitur by the way.  You might not be able to see how it follows from the previous statements, but Justin Thacker is better able to grasp the subtle logical connections between things than you are:

For whatever else it is, it [the gospel] involves humbling ourselves before the creator of the universe and acknowledging that he is Lord, not us, that he is the only Rightful Judge. The problem for us, though, is that on that day when we stand before him there won’t be any public popularity vote to rescue us. Simply the Judge and us.

Is it me, or does the leap from Stictly Come Dancing to the FEAR OF GOD THAT YOU WILL EXPERIENCE ON YOUR OWN PERSONAL JUDGEMENT DAY BEFORE BEING CAST INTO THE FIRES OF HELL, imply that Justin Thacker might be taking it all a little bit seriously?

Justin Thacker obviously knows all about “public popularity contests”, of course.  Himself a true fisher of men, he insults pretty much the entire country. You don’t like Justin Thacker’s Truth? Then you must hate all truth! And this abstract philosophical hatred of truth controls you even when you’re watching Strictly Come Dancing.  Next you’ll be telling Justin Thacker you liked Bagpuss when you were young!!!  Justin Thacker won’t like that.  Justin Thacker is horrified.  There were no cats in the Bible, you bloody infidel.  And that means that every time you watched Bagpuss, that was another nail in Baby Jesus’s crucifix.

This whole pile of crock, coming from the “Head of Theology” at anywhere, is insane.  I mean actually mad.  I mean, just for starters you have to admire the take-out-my-brain-and-mash-it-into-a-loaf-of-unleavened-bread craziness of the twin line of reasoning that Thacker’s argument is based on. Firstly, that the judges on Strictly Come Dancing are in themselves comparable to The Literal Arbiters of Objective Truth, and the British public (consciously or unconsciously) think of them exactly that way.  Secondly, that the Lord God is merely the divine analogue of a judge on a Saturday night entertainment show, basically just passing out aesthetic condemnations on the inhabitants of His universe (”Hmm, your day was quite productive, mortal, I really believed your heart was in it, but you only managed one small charitable act, and hardly a pirouette in sight the whole day. 3 out of 10.”)

Some people just hate a feel-good story — in this case about how the public can unite behind a bumbling old man — if that story doesn’t even remotely involve Baby Jesus.  Justin Thacker’s mind boggles; however comical or warm the story may be, if it doesn’t have Baby Jesus in it then how could it possibly not be EVIL?  (I wonder, by the way, how many of the Sergeant-voters were Christian?  On Thacker’s argument you’d expect the good Christians, who all value truth so much unlike the rest of us, to vote diligently only for the best dancer. Because of course it would be un-Christian to feel, you know, what’s that word, compassion, for the contestant who dances like someone’s inebriated granddad.)

Judgement Day:  For your atrocious theology, your plain bad manners, and for having no sense of rhythm, Justin Thacker you are awarded… 1 out of 10. You are the weakest theologian, now please leave the house.

By Bob at 08:12AM

So, I’m technically homeless.

Well that’s not quite true.  In fact, it’s even worse.

I am now “living with my parents”.  It’s just like Failure to Launch, except my version is called Limping Back to Port.

Actually that makes it sound much worse than it is.  Housemate Suzie and I were both looking to move out, so we ended the tenancy in Worcester and I simply haven’t found some place to actually go and live, yet, so I’m only temporarily at the ‘rents.  Also, when I’m at home, I’m cooked for and mum does all my laundry.  So it’s pretty nice really.  Well done, mum.

Anyway, I’ve been commuting from Worcester to London at the start of each working week for eleven months now.  So despite the return into my life of the pleasant homecooking and the big TV in the nice middleclass village, I’m still scrabbling through the online services looking for a livable-in room in London.  I’ve seen a place with a carpet so stained it looked like a colony of rabbits had been left to breed and urinate all over it, before being individually crushed, their corpses subseqently rubbed into the threadbare weave.

I also found another place which was lovely (no dead-rabbit carpets), occupied by the live-in landlady and her sixth former son, and I decided to accept it.  But then the live-in landlady said she had reconsidered the situation; I would have been their first male lodger and she felt anxious about it.  On hearing news of this disappointing retraction, my temporary housemate/mother tried to console me.  She said:  “Oh.  Never mind.  She was probably just worried about paedophiles.”

There are no words.

In other news… Shortly before all this, 10 days before our year one anniversary, in fact, the girlfriend and I broke up.  Not for any of the normal boring reasons (loss of love, irreconcilable future plans, having an affair with some other woman’s avatar in Second Life, etc etc) but because she went travelling, and — part of me still can’t believe this is even true — she is now somewhere in the lower reaches of the Himalayas.  A lot of friends have said how sad or difficult this must be and how they can’t even imagine how horrible and tragic it must be.  You know, helpful things like that.  But I think — I hope — that we both have something of a bit of a “humanist” attitude toward it.  We only have so much time on the earth and being oriented towards an impossible goal — trying to pretend that a relationship is a relationship when you’re thousands of miles apart for months on end — probably isn’t going to help anyone.  We were great.  Things were good.  And there is always change.

Anyway, this all adds to an overriding feeling of the surreal I have at the moment.  Two weeks ago I was personally ranted at by a B-list celebrity (a household name) who said some awful things I can’t repeat.  It wasn’t a nice experience, but it was a fairly unique experience!  Yesterday I gave a talk to the South Place Ethical Society telling them rationalism isn’t what they think it is.  It felt great to dig out some of my Karl Popper, and tell them that in trying to justify what they believe they were actually terrible rationalists.  I love confronting people with the counter-intuitive consequences of Popperian rationalism.  And I’ve been living on couches and in “pods” half the week for nearly a year.  I’m more comfortable living out of my rucksack than most people are sitting in their front rooms.

Life is strange, is what I think I’m saying.  But I’m sure it will settle down a bit once I find a place to live down here and actually go back to the same place in the evening once in a while.  I love change, but if everything changes all the time it’s very difficult to focus on anything.

By Bob at 13:25PM

There’s nothing intrinsically sinister about the title above, but probably a lot of people would interpret it somewhat negatively.  It illustrates the point that too much fear can make harmless situations overly suspect.

Last week a self-described “old man” wrote a letter to the Worcester News about how he felt about being suspicious in the park.

When my wife Joan died in the spring of 2006 we had been together for more than 62 years. One of our joys since moving to Barbourne was a stroll in Ghelevelt Park looking at wildlife and children playing on swings or splashing around in the paddling pool enjoying innocent fun.However, since becoming a widower, the park has now become out of bounds for old men like me. Why?

It has become very uncomfortable to sit in the park and enjoy the ambience of the place, owing to the weird knowing looks I get from young mothers with children.

I wrote back.

H A Kendall’s story is very sad (September 29) and he is honest and brave for speaking out.

Obviously, we must accept that diligence is due whenever we consider adults with responsibilities over children, and anyone taking advantage of any vulnerable person is to be abhorred.

But due diligence has been greatly over-inflated if a widower cannot sit in a park without receiving accusing looks. If the parents Mr Kendall mentions cannot imagine any reason beside sexual predation for why an old man might want to sit in a park, then their imaginations have been horribly warped. There is a climate of fear which affects not just old men in parks, but younger men, teachers, passers-by, even relatives of young people.

On a train last week a girl of about five started talking to me. I think the presence of my Nintendo DS broke down the social barrier!

Perhaps some of the looks we received across the carriage were, in part, due to surprise that two strangers should hold an open conversation on the tube at all, let alone an adult male returning polite enquiries from a child who is unknown to him. But that doesn’t fully explain the prolonged glares and my own absurd, fleeting sensations of danger.

Parents should worry about their children, yes.  Concern is understandable, yes, especially in a climate where sexual predation and sexual abuse are discussed more openly.

But people should realise that, in a sense, nothing sexualises children more than if we are constantly thinking of them as the potential victims of sexual predation.

Also… the music debate rumbles on, in the hideous form it has reached.

By Bob at 08:41AM

This increasingly unfocused, largely-syndicated-from-the-Worcester-News, hotchpotch mind-dump of a blog that I call Bob: Popper’s Troll-man Thing, now has a little brother over at — you guessed it — the Worcester News website.

See Bob’s Worcester News profile which should come complete with a short bio some time soon. My first post is “At Somerset House” and here’s a short extract:

I’ve never liked crowds. It’s not that I’m claustrophobic. I just hear “crowd” and I picture grey-faced suits stacked up on escalators closer than dominoes. Or I feel the crushing collective narrow-mindedness of a Nazi rally. And there’s something so sycophantic about a throng of gig-goers gyrating at the feet of some short-burning star, something so obsequious even about fans at a public lecture gushing as they line up to get their hardbacks John-Hancocked by the latest, greatest celebrity intellectual.

I had wanted to coin the term ‘celebrillectual’ for the end of that sentence but it didn’t quite fit.  There were no other hits on google for it though, so I really did invent it.  So I’ll coin it here instead: ‘Celebrillectual’. There, I just coined it.  It means anyone a bit famous for being at least a bit clever, but how famous/clever are two cumulative factors so that if you were really clever but only a celebrity to a particular niche then you could still be a celebrillectual, while if you were very famous but not really very clever then that could count, too.  But obviously some times these thigns go up and down together, where people are only a bit famous (for exampel if they’re only famous in the UK but not the US then that’s rubbish) and also they’re only clever in a narrow or not very academic way.  So at one end of the scale you’d have, like, Carol Voderman, Trevor McDonald, and Johnny Ball. Then up the top there’s folks like Salman Rushdie, Richard Dawkins, Noam Chomsky.

It will probably be quite a long time before my Worcester News blog has anyone classify me as a celebrillectual.  In fact it probably disqualifies me because even if I was really, really famous in Worcester, I’d have to be very, very clever to compensate for my relative lack of fame.

By Bob at 08:10AM

The vivisection debate rumbles on.

Obviously, in between trying to develop medical technology via vivisection, scientists should wherever possible work toward replacement development processes.  There is a complex cost-benefit equation, here.  How much time can we spend speculatively developing new ways of testing and developing medicines without non-human animal test subjects, when any such effort may be at the cost of actually developing cures right here and now?  Assuming that greater and greater theoretical understanding, computer modelling and so on, could eventually replace all animal testing, that’s great.  But right now that’s not the reality, and I don’t want to die of something potentially curable, because rather than using vivisection now we held off in order to develop a theoretical model, when actually tests which killed some mice might have achieved the same results.

I don’t get how people who are against vivisection can cite, as someone in this ongoing newspaper debate has cited, the study of human corpses as one of the viable alternatives to testing on animals.  I’m not denying that autopsy is sometimes a good way of understanding a disease.  But the point is that there would be many more human corpses to study if animal testing was stopped today.

Anyway, here’s today’s letter in the Worcester News, unedited text below.

Apparently, despite being subject to continual assessments of efficacy and benefit, and despite being conducted under multifarious laws and codes of ethics ensuring rigorous review, the truth is obvious to H Handy (Letters, 8th September).  Vivisection is “archaic” and completely unnecessary.

In saying so, Handy contradicts three independent enquiries in the last five years (the House of Lords Select Committee, the Parliamentary Animal Procedures Committee and the independent Nuffield Council on Bioethics) which all found that animal testing was scientifically sound and worthwhile.  (Despite this, anti-vivisectionists continue to call for “an independent enquiry” as if none had ever taken place.)

The Nobel Prize for Medicine has been awarded to researchers who used animals 71 times in the last 103 years.  Is the Nobel Prize committee hellbent on rewarding fruitless and unethical research?  H Handy must think that they are.

Handy asks us to imagine all the pain that laboratory research animals endure.  And allow me to agree that we must indeed accept this.  Just as surely as we should thank the veterans of just wars, just as we should be aware that each turn of the ignition key brings flooding and destruction ever closer, we should be aware that many of our medicines and medical procedures come to us at a terrible price.

But if H Handy can ask us to imagine the animal suffering again, I must ask one more time that we summon in our minds the would-have-been suffering and deaths of millions of people from, for example, smallpox if it had not been eradicated by 1979 (300-500 million died before 1979 in the 20th century alone).  Multiply out that hypothetical unnecessary suffering by the numerous other diseases and conditions cured or alleviated through animal research, far sooner than they could have been by conducting all research via human autopsy and the like.

No one said animal research was an intrinsic good in its own right.  No one said it was flawless (no research is). But vivisection is, by far, the lesser of two evils.  And that makes its pursuit an ethical imperative.

One final point.  H Handy is right that research animals themselves never (or only very rarely) benefit by the research.  However, it is worth pointing out that animal testing has resulted in numerous drugs and procedures which are used routinely by veterinary surgeons, day in and day out, to the benefit of pets, farm stock and wild animals the world over.

By Bob at 07:24AM

Remember the Bishop of Worcester basically saying that music pretty much gets its power from his favourite god?

Apparently, “the Bishop of Worcester is perfectly entitled to state that music (especially the one [sic] played in cathedrals) brings us closer to God.”

Which is of course true - he is entitled to say that.  But that’s completely besides the point, isn’t it.

Some people can’t stand any criticism [Worcester News, 3 September 2008, unedited version]

At the moment it seems like every time someone hears a criticism they don’t like, rather than either taking it on board or offering a counter-argument, they instead react as if someone is trying to actually ban them from holding their view.  It seems to be a defence mechanism.  People would rather say, “Hey, I have every right to my opinion,” than to actually think about the criticism offered against their opinion.

John E Iebole (August 22) notes that “the Bishop of Worcester is perfectly entitled to state that music (especially the one [sic] played in cathedrals) brings us closer to God.”

I didn’t say the Bishop wasn’t “entitled” to say anything he likes.  I’m not a censor.

But there is a world of difference between having the right to say something on the one hand, and being right in saying it on the other!

The Bishop had said (August 13) that “music has the power to move human beings deeply because it speaks … of the God who created us.”  I expressed that his statement felt to me like an over-confident gardener erecting a fence across a public footpath.  Music is a near-universal aspect of the human condition and associating it with monotheistic beliefs which we do not all share is a kind of metaphysical territorialism.  In other words, I said I didn’t like what the Bishop said.  In didn’t say he wasn’t “entitled” to say it.  Basically, Mr Iebole simply failed to address my points in any way.  Rather (probably without realising it) he simply threw up a completely irrelevant decoy about “entitlement”.

One further point, Iebole says he sensed “some anti-Christian barbs” in my letter, then he points me at the Bible!  Again, this kind of attitude seems to be nothing more than an attempt to shut down honest debate.  Just because I make a criticism of something a Bishop said, does not mean I’m “anti-Christian” in some kind of prejudicial way.  We hear much worse, much more personal criticisms than mine made in other domains (politics, theatre reviews, school playgrounds) all the time.  It is only the domain of religion which is so protected from debate that even a mild rejoinder is insinuated as a kind of hate speech.

That’s one thing I’m afraid you’re really not entitled to: you have no right to be protected from perfectly legitimate criticism.

This prompted a reply from one Linda Roberts who, frankly, I think just didn’t really read what I said.  So I wrote back again, published today.

Misunderstood for the second time [Worcester News, 15 September 2008, unedited version]

For the second time I am misrepresented with reference to the Bishop of Worcester’s comments on music.

Linda Roberts (10 September) believes “the Bishop of Worcester is correct in saying the playing of sacred music in church brings us closer to God.”  Well, okay, but this was very clearly not the part I objected to.

What I objected to was the further implication that all music, whether designated “sacred” or otherwise, derived its power from God.

Roberts also says I should “temper my views” and my “ways of expressing them”.  This is unfair.  Yes I was voicing a criticism (a mild philosophical criticism at that!) but unless you think religious representatives are exempt from criticism this shouldn’t be a problem in itself.  And if my words seem harsh, it’s probably just that religion is so often protected from normal standards of commentary.

Finally, Roberts expresses sadness that I “cannot experience” mystical feelings induced by church music.  Ms Roberts, there’s really no need to feel sad for me. Different musical genres appeal to different people, and there is probably plenty of music that I appreciate, even profoundly, which you would appreciate less.

By Bob at 13:15PM

Down the other end of that wire, madam

People often ask me: "Rik, why on earth do you buy all that rubbish from the Oxfam bargain bin?" But that's another story.

What I want to talk about is when people ask me "Rik, where does a guy like you listen to music from these days?" After all, when you're an ex-teenage rave freak, used to work as a student DJ, have more than a passing interest in all things synth, and own a Jive Bunny album without shame, where do you go to satisfy that nagging urge for new music?

Well, the answer is that for a while, I didn't. Instead, I revelled in the warm neon glow of Radio Nigel. With the help of Nigel (run by a bloke called - wait for it - Steve), I rediscovered the 80s.  Contrary to those "party classics" that immediately spring to mind, there's actually a lot of "forgotten" 80s music out there that's actually not terrible. Martika, anyone? The Other Ones, New Order, Wang Chung, Murray Head, The Assembly? I could go on, but I'd rather you tune in.

And slowly but surely, you make your way back into the land of the living, to find artists like Rex The Dog, Tepr, datA and Trademark keeping the dream alive, albeit with a 21st Century twist. (Who knew that the Human League were still touring, by the way? Blimey.) But where can you, the poor impoverished reader, find and listen to all these people before buying an album or three? Simple. Pig Radio is your friend. Merely visiting their website will guarantee your face is flushed magenta with excitement, and that's even before you wrap your ears around the eclectic mix of new new things that burst forth from their playlist.

Finally, I know I'm about a year late, but this has been making me smile all week. Whatever happened to the Hardcore Cleaning Sensation?

By at 18:24PM

Wait... what?

(This isn't the blog post I was planning to post, but I thought I'd throw this up while it was fresh in my brain.)

This is the second time recently that someone I know has remarked about how Thunderbird is worse than Outlook Express. It was an odd enough coincidence that I thought it worth a quick mention.

Now, I've used a fair few mail clients in the past - Pine (mmmm) and Netsc(r)ape Messenger, for example - and I used to be an Outlook user, of both the Express and "proper" flavours,. Conversely, I was glad to see the back of it. The Express version felt fragile and flaky (not to mention its Swiss cheese-like nature), and the full version was too enterprisey. I just wanted to do email - surely it's not too much to ask! (Eudora at the time wasn't free.)

Mozilla Mail was my next stop of choice, and it struck the balance far better for me. It was, however - like the Mozilla Suite in general - suffering a bit from the all-in-one clunkathon syndrome, and you did get the impression that it could have been more, well, alert, and generally a bit better than Netscape Messenger. Mozilla had the same idea, and smashed it all into bits, which brings us circuitously to Thunderbird.

I like Thunderbird mainly due to it's Ronseal-like qualities. Simply, it's a solid, no-nonsense mail client. It reads mail and newsgroups*, and it does it well. Since version 2 in particular, it's had decent filtering and search capabilities, and it's uncluttered and responsive. It even integrates with Google Mail so you can avoid using their hideous web interface.

What is Thunderbird "actually quite poor" at, then? Well, it's not crap at reading mail, that's for sure. It is quite poor at having flowery email templates. (As a rule, I don't use HTML email, so that's fine by me.) Against Outlook, integration with other services is poor. There is an integrated Calendar plugin, but it's not finished yet. But then again, the same goes for the free version of Outlook, and there's no changing that at all.

Steve mentions a "memory leak" which I thought sounded interesting, so I left my copy of Thunderbird running for a while. It's been sitting there for quite some time at around 82MB (I've got some big .msf files), and it doesn't seem to be going anywhere. Thunderbird for sure has a larger memory footprint than Outlook Express, but I'm not yet convinced it leaks memory in the same sieve-like fashion that Firefox does**.

So... thoughts? What else is Thunderbird rubbish at? No doubt there's more, but I'm not awake enough to remember. Comments appreciated!

*If anyone does that any more, that is.

**Yes, I know that's not really a memory leak; it's the tab caching being enthusiastic.

By at 22:31PM

It's going to be a busy month, really. Turnmills is closing down, so I'm off to see Mr Ferry Corsten play there in a couple of weekends time, accompanied by a plethora of people named Steve. It should be pretty good, but there's always the problem that the headliner DJ is always on at about 4am, by which time you're invariably too shagged out to stay awake, let alone dance enthusiastically like a loon.

Also, I'm going to be leaving these urban shores to head back to the balmy rural paradise of home during the Easter weekend, which should make for a nice break. I have a fair inkling that what I'll be doing will include at least this:

Mix in some Six Nations matches, a birthday lunch or two and some mates visiting from back home, and suddenly the old Moleskine is practically brimming with appointments.

Right, I'm off to do some late-night flat-scrubbing. If I get back in time, I'll blog about some of the software stuff that I've been looking/hacking/swearing at recently.

By at 19:32PM

Dragging myself kicking and screaming into 19th Century computing

I'm writing this blog entry from something really quite shiny. Yes, after all this time, I've finally bitten the bullet and bought a new home PC. A completely new one, rather than my usual tactic of cobbling together any old electronics to produce some semblance of a working system, replacing any item that's completely knackered with one that's merely slightly broken.

Now, for the first time in a long while, I'm the proud owner of a PC that:

• Has a PS/2 keyboard socket that's not inexplicably broken and doesn't prevent the mouse from working when anything's plugged into it
  
• Has a soundcard that doesn't arbitrarily stop playing sound and crash the whole system
  
• Is running an Operating System that doesn't date from 1999
• Doesn't have all of its drives held upside-down in using gaffer tape
• Can reboot without randomly losing at least one harddrive when starting back up
• Doesn't have a non-working floppy drive stuck in it because it won't come out
• Has a proper case that's not fallen to pieces, or been dropped countless times
  
• Doesn't have the speed and urgency of a snail in treacle
  

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the future.

By at 13:52PM

...to see you, nice

After all this time, I've finally got past the stage of just thinking about blogging something here to actually doing it. Quite an achievement, considering the size of the interim period in which I've done, frankly, bugger all.

For the first time ever since this site started, for example, I didn't wish all my friends Merry Christmas from here on Shinypixel. So for that I apologise, but then again given the amount of texts that I sent out over Xmas and New Year, I don't think I missed many people. (If I did, then... bugger.)

To continue in the usual vein of posting stuff that I've knocked up, here's an extremely rushed flyer for something that I produced in December:

Now, the more astute among you might have noticed that the 14th December wasn't on a Saturday, nor the 15th on a Sunday. How could a stickler for perfection such as myself make such a stupidly obvious mistake (and not notice until a whole day afterwards, no less)? Cast your eyes toward the right-hand side of the flyer, and squint a bit. If you still can't read it, then here's a translation: Flyer whipped up the morning after the office party by a seriously hungover DJHC.

And damn, was it a good party.

Before I bid you adieu, with fleeting yet teasing promises about exciting events to write about in future - that flashy-looking CD compilation in the top-right corner of the page, for example - here's an excerpt from some code which I'd written last week late at night, forgotten, and found again just moments ago before deciding to write this blog:

// Any one X needs at least 7 Ys to work as my extremely
// dodgy code doesn't seem to work with less. No idea why.
// Maybe it's because I'm coding it at 2 in the morning while
// listening to Phil Collins.

// *sigh*

See ya around!

By at 17:20PM

Back to the Old Skool

I've finally managed to get some free time. Well, free enough to start blogging again anyway. As luck would have it, there's another Hardcore Lives! day-long online beats-fest on to keep me company. I'd recommend that you tune in too if breakbeats are anywhere near your cup of tea.

The pbligatory lovely flyer - as designed by PennyCrayon alter-ego - is spammed below.

Click for a larger flyer, and here's that link to tune in again, just to rub it in a bit.

By at 08:13AM

More Sunday-night noise

Keeping the Photoshop fingers in business in my spare time, here's the latest Hardcore Breaks/Old Skool/Jungle night I've done a flyer for:

By at 10:03AM

Like the infamous Norwegian Blue, I'm only sleeping.   Summer's traditionally that time where you're meant to be outside enjoying things rather than sitting inside plumbing the depths, pouring your innermost thoughts into some tiny text box and its perpetually blinking cursor.

So yeah, maybe next week when I've got some free time I'll wipe off the dust and clear out that backlog of blog drafts I've got lying around.  

In the meantime, these guys are great. 

By at 05:37AM

Let's party like it's 1994

I'm going to be spending some time listening to this all-day old-skool and nu-skool extravaganza today. It features some of the most popular DJs from the new hardcore breaks underground scene that I've mentioned before, and is likelt to be more exciting than most Sunday afternoons, for sure.

If any like-minded individuals fancy stopping by and joining me on IRC or just the stream, please do!

(Click image for a bigger version)

By at 08:14AM

Must try harder

As Seldo noted last night (and I was too tired to blog about), Safari has been released for WIndows. Shame it doesn't work - it does this on both of the PCs I've tested it on...

Ideas? 

By at 04:59AM

I hate having colds. That is all.

 

By at 06:09AM

By at 07:12AM

Corporate video in "actually amusing" shocker

By at 08:18AM

A darn good read, if that's your sort of thing

Here's a little something that I've had a small hand in (full credits are here, though I'm not on them). It's a fanzine that's currently being distributed with new releases and orders being taken in the burgeoning Hardcore Breaks music scene.

"Hardcore Breaks? Whazzat?" I hear you cry. Basically, it's a revival of the breakbeat-lead hardcore sound of '93-'95 (before it went all 4-to-the-floor and descended into shitness), except with 21st Century production values, a huge sack full of Old Skool samples and a friendly scene attitude.

Apologies for image size, but as a bonus you can read it straight from the blog.

Some related links if the idea of nu-old-skool gets you pumped:

• Hardcore Lives!
• hardcorebreaks.com
• nu-rave.com (yes, I know... but it's not that nu-rave... don't mention it)

By at 09:10AM

Last night I dreamt that I was singing All Around My Hat with Maddy Prior (from Steeleye Span) while chasing her runaway shopping trolley around a Sainsbury's car park.

Just as the shopping trolley disappeared under a car (!), Cliff Richard appeared from the sidelines and began singing a song entitled Knickers Between Us. It's probably just as well that I woke up as he started.

What could it all mean?

By at 08:33AM