February 2006 Archives

So Lloyd is leaving Guardian Unlimited to go back to Yahoo!. From what I've seen over the last few months, I predict that it'll only be about another eighteen months before everyone in the web industry will be working for either Google or Yahoo!

Those fine people at O'Reilly Media (publishers of such excellent books as Perl Template Toolkit) have offered me the chance to write on one of their blogs. I'm now a contributor to their OnLAMP blog and you'll be able to see all of my entries here.

Not quite sure what I'll be covering over there, or how I'll split entries between here and there. I expect I'll work that all out over the next few weeks.

I really don't understand why the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail are suing Dan Brown for using their ideas. Surely if you have a good idea then you'e happy if other people publicise it too.

Maybe they just don't like their work being associated with something quite as trashy as The Da Vinci Code.

Or maybe (and I think this is far more likely) they've realised that their twenty year old book is all a bit embarassing and they would rather that Brown didn't go round reminding people of its existance.

According to Tony Blair writing in yesterday's Observer he doesn't destroy liberties, he protects them. The whole article is riddled with half-truths and reinterpretations of history. Luckily enough Blairwatch have produced a point by point deconstruction of what Blair wrote.

An interesting story from Gervase Markham (who works for the Mozilla Foundation) which demonstrates that the concept of Open Source software is still confusing to a large proportion of the population.

A little while ago, I received an e-mail from a lady in the Trading Standards department of a large northern town. They had encountered businesses which were selling copies of Firefox, and wanted to confirm that this was in violation of our licence agreements before taking action against them.

I wrote back, politely explaining the principles of copyleft - that the software was free, both as in speech and as in price, and that people copying and redistributing it was a feature, not a bug. I said that selling verbatim copies of Firefox on physical media was absolutely fine with us, and we would like her to return any confiscated CDs and allow us to continue with our plan for world domination (or words to that effect).

Unfortunately, this was not well received. Her reply was incredulous:

"I can't believe that your company would allow people to make money from something that you allow people to have free access to. Is this really the case?" she asked.

"If Mozilla permit the sale of copied versions of its software, it makes it virtually impossible for us, from a practical point of view, to enforce UK anti-piracy legislation, as it is difficult for us to give general advice to businesses over what is/is not permitted."

Still some work to do in the advocacy area then :)

The UK Metric Association (no, I'd never heard of them either) are using the 2012 Olympics as an excuse to call for the UK to convert its road signs to the metric system. If it happens (which it won't) it would mean that we, at least, get something positive from the Olympics.

The history of metrification in the UK is long and tortuous. The BBC news story says

The UKMA says conversion of road signs was originally intended as part of metrification when it started in 1965 and should have been completed by 1973.

But it was put on hold in 1970 and never restarted.

I'm pretty sure that this stop-start approach to metrification went far beyond just road signs. I started school in 1967 and from what I remember we were just taught metric measurement at the time. I suspect that's partly because it's so much easier to teach than imperial units but mainly because people genuinely thought that imperial units wouldn't be around by the time we left school. Then in 1970 it all changed (the government changed from Labour to Conservative in the 1970 General Election) and we were being taught imperial units again. But the damage had been done. Having been introduced to kilogrammes, metres and the like it was very hard for me to go back to the confusion of imperial units. Even today I have to stop and think how many ounces there are in a pound or how many pounds in a stone. And I really have no idea how long a mile is or how big an acre is. Whereas there are people both older and younger than me who were introduced to imperial units as soon as the started school and feel completely comfortable with them.

The UK is still slowly converting to the metric system. The currency changed in 1970, all groceries are now weighed in kilograms and you buy petrol by the litre. The only things I can think of that are still generally measured in imperial units are pints of milk and beer and distances. I've probably missed a few.

There's no need for the transition to drag on. According the original plan it should have been over thirty years ago. The Olympics give us a good excuse to tick off another milestone (see what I did there?)

It won't happen though.

This article contains some good advice about getting the most out of an interview. In particular it has some interesting sample questions for the "do you have any questions you'd like to ask me" section of the interview.

• How long does it take from the time someone identifies a need for a new piece of hardware (server, etc) to the time it is connected to the network and available?
• Tell me about the people and processes involved in acquiring a new piece of hardware.
• What’s the most frustrating thing you’ve had to do this week?
• What do you and your co-workers do at work for fun?
• In the middle of a project, a developer identifies a key technical improvement that will have significant benefit but also involves additional cost and risk. What is the process for deciding whether or not to make the change? Who makes the final decision and who else is involved?

If all goes to plan, I'll be having some technical interviews in the next few weeks[1]. I'll be trying some of them out.

[1] Got work for a Unix/Perl/Database contractor? Give me a shout.

Ben is wrong. Some of us know what leading is.

And I wish he'd stop dropping tantalising hints and just release the bloody thing :)

(Does iWeb have to generate such crap URLs?)

After what I wrote yesterday about the christian influence on education, there's a good article in today's Guardian about how creationism is on the rise in British universities.

In the United States there is growing pressure to teach creationism or "intelligent design" in science classes, despite legal rulings against it. Now similar trends in this country have prompted the Royal Society, Britain's leading scientific academy, to confront the issue head on with a talk entitled Why Creationism is Wrong. The award-winning geneticist and author Steve Jones will deliver the lecture and challenge creationists, Christian and Islamic, to argue their case rationally at the society's event in April.

"There is an insidious and growing problem," said Professor Jones, of University College London. "It's a step back from rationality. They (the creationists) don't have a problem with science, they have a problem with argument. And irrationality is a very infectious disease as we see from the United States."

Yesterday, I focussed particularly on what the christians are doing. But it seems that the muslims are at it too.

Leaflets questioning Darwinism were circulated among students at the Guys Hospital site of King's College London this month as part of the Islam Awareness Week, organised by the college's Islamic Society. One member of staff at Guys said that he found it deeply worrying that Darwin was being dismissed by people who would soon be practising as doctors.

Well, yeah. I don't want to be treated by a doctor who disagrees with the fundemental scientific principles of human biology!

A 21-year-old medical student and member of the Islamic Society, who did not want to be named, said that the Qur'an was clear that man had been created and had not evolved as Darwin suggests. "There is no scientific evidence for it [Darwin's Origin of Species]. It's only a theory. Man is the wonder of God's creation."

He did not feel that a belief in evolution was necessary to study medicine although he added that, if writing about it was necessary for passing an exam, he would do so. "We want to become doctors and dentists, we want to pass our exams." He added that God had not created mankind literally in six days. "It's not six earth days," he said, it could refer to several thousands of years but it had been an act of creation and not evolution.

Someone with views like that should not be allowed anywhere near patients.

And finally, there's this

Most of the next generation of medical and science students could well be creationists, according to a biology teacher at a leading London sixth-form college. "The vast majority of my students now believe in creationism," she said, "and these are thinking young people who are able and articulate and not at the dim end at all. They have extensive booklets on creationism which they put in my pigeon-hole ... it's a bit like the southern states of America." Many of them came from Muslim, Pentecostal or Baptist family backgrounds, she said, and were intending to become pharmacists, doctors, geneticists and neuro-scientists.

It's time that rational people stood up and said "enough is enough!" Where do I sign up to fight the forces of medievalism?

This won't go down well in the blogosphere. Or the podcastosphere. Or whatever it's called.

There were a couple of jokes in an episode of the Ricky Gervais Show podcast about how much money they would have made if they had charged for downloads.

And now. it seems, that's exactly what they're going to do. A second season of shows starts next Tuesday (a week after the previous season ended) but this time it will be hosted by Audible and you'll have to pay for the shows. According to the story on CNET

Audible will charge $1.95 per episode or $6.95 for the season, which will include at least four episodes by the creator and star of television's "The Office." Audible's exclusive deal also runs for a "season three," which will start in the fall.

I've enjoyed listening to the Guardian podcasts, but it's all been getting a bit samey and I don't think I'll be bothering to pay for the privilege of listening to new ones.

It'll be interesting to see if it succeeds though. Will be people willing to pay for something that they've been getting for free for the last three months?

And how do Guardian Unlimited feel about losing the show after putting all that work into building up the audience?

p.s. The title of this story on the Guardian Technology Blog is a little unfortunate. It says "Gervais podcast going paid-for from Guardian Unlimited: Technology". The story is from GU, not the paid-for podcast.

Today I'm mainly quietly seething about illogical and superstitious morons who want to destroy the relatively sophisticated view of the world that we've built up over the last few hundred years. And, no, I'm not talking about muslims (though they certainly fit the bill). In this case I'm talking about christians.

It started this morning when for some reason I was reading on Wikipedia about faith-based schools. I was surprised to read how many of them there are in Britain (6,955 christian, 36 jewish, five muslim and two sikh). I got angrier as I read about how the Emmanuel Schools Foundation teaches creationism (or "intelligent design") to its pupils and that the Prime Minister is happy with this. I was reminded of a piece that Richard Dawkins wrote in the New Statesman about his programme The Root of All Evil?. In this programme Dawkins looked at Accelerated Christian Education, a christian school curriculum that is being used in a small number of private schools in the UK. Dawkins wrote this:

One of my TV locations was a London school that follows the (American) Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) syllabus. The day after watching my show, three colleagues told me they had interviewed, for a place at university, a young woman who had been taught (not at the same school) using ACE. She turned out to be the worst candidate they had ever encountered. She had no idea that thinking was even an option: her job was either to know or guess the "right" answer. Worse, she had no clue how bad she was, having always scored at least 95 per cent in exams - the National Christian Schools Certificate (NCSC). Should my colleagues write to Ofsted about ACE and NCSC? Unfortunately, Ofsted is the organisation that gave a rave review to Tony Blair's pet city academy in Gateshead: a Christian school whose head of science thinks the entire universe began after the domestication of the dog.

Then Candace pointed me at this piece about how unacceptable it is to call yourself an atheist in the US.

You can be elected as an openly gay politician in this country, but you can't be elected as an openly atheistic one

That's bloody scary. I know it's about the US and not the UK, but there's a worrying trend for us to follow the Americans' lead in matters like this.

The Today programme this morning contained an interview with "John Henry, a professor of mathematics, who wants to see intelligent design taught in schools". How you can be a professor of mathematics and support something as illogical as intelligent design, I really don't understand.

So it's all very depressing. It's like the Englightenment never happened and we're plunging back into the Dark Ages.

There was one piece of good news, the American Association for the Advancement of Science have issued a statement calling for mainstream religious communities to support the teaching of evolution in US schools. but I can't see it having much effect and I'm becoming less and less convinced that this religious resurgence can be stopped.

The always excellent BBC Four has been excelling itself over the last couple of weeks. First there was the Folk Britannia season which looks at the history of British folk music since the 1950s. Then there was Lefties - a series of three programmes about people involved in left wing politics in the 70s and 80s. And this week they're starting a series of documentaries about climate change.

This is TV as it should be done. This is why I pay my licence fee. Do yourself a favour - watch more BBC Four.

Joel Spolsky has been playing with Ruby on Rails. He's written about some of the problems that he found. This has upset some members of the Rails community.

On of the best points that Spolsky makes is one I've mentioned here before - the fact that ActiveRecord is a horribly crippled ORM system - it seems to have been written by people who are afraid to let their database do what it does best (i.e. deal with data).

Update: As Mike points out below, the article wasn't written by Joel Spolsky, but by an anonymous contributor to the "Joel on Software" discussion boards. Apologies for any confusion caused.

Update: Oh look. these people saw my error and spent an amusing hour or so taking the piss out of me. Glad I amused them so much.

A bright yellow slime mould that can grow to several metres in diameter has been put in charge of a scrabbling, six-legged robot.

The Physarum polycephalum slime, which naturally shies away from light, controls the robot's movement so that it too keeps out of light and seeks out dark places in which to hide itself.

(from New Scientist)

Is anybody else thinking of Daleks?

The Guardian rather overstates the case on the smoking ban.

Parliament, so often maligned and so often ignorantly, has done itself and the nation proud by banning smoking in England.

"Banning smoking in England"? Smoking won't become illegal everywhere in England. Just in public. Which puts it, I suppose, about on a par with masturbation.

(via Tim Worstall)

People who own pubs often complain that a ban on smoking like the one that was passed last night will have a detrimental effect on their business. They say that smoking and drinking are inextricably linked and that if people can't smoke in pubs then they won't drink there either.

I don't think that's true. It's certainly true that the percentage of people smoking seems higher amongst pub clientele than it is amongst the general population. It's also very likely that some of these people (maybe even many of them) will decide to drink at home when the smoking ban is implemented next summer.

I believe that there are a large number of people who would like to visit pubs more often but don't because of the smoke. I know I'd be a more regular visitor to my local if I knew I wouldn't come home with my clothes reeking of smoke. I'm sure that over time there will be no effect on pub takings.

But wouldn't it be good if the smoking ban had the opposite to the one that the pub owners are predicting? If pub profits went up as soon as the ban was put into place. What if a group like ASH ran a campaign to get as many people as possible into pubs once smoking is banned. To demonstrate to pub owners that it was smoking that was cutting their profits and that banning smoking was beneficial to their business.

On the night that the ban comes into force, I'd like to see every pub in to country packed with happy drinkers.

What do you think?

Is it really three years since a million people took to the streets of London trying to prevent the Iraq war.

Credit where it's due - this is what reminded me.

I'm very disappointed in my MP this morning. Not only did he support the government in all of the ID card votes last night, but he also spoke at some length in favour of the scheme. In fact he spoke for longer than I have ever heard him speak in Parliament. His speeches are here, here and here.

He should remember that his majority is 163. He only needs to piss off another 82 people...

You can never have too many blogs to read. BlogCode is a good way to find new blogs that are similar in tone to blogs that you already read. More details from Tim Ireland.

There goes the rest of my spare time.

Two years ago I wrote about watching the documentary Texas Teenage Virgins. One of the comments on that post recommended The Education of Shelby Knox as another good documentary on the same topic. Last night it was shown on ITV4 so I watched it.

It's set in Lubbock, the same Texas town as the previous documentary, and tells the story of Shelby Knox. Although Knox is a committed christian (and it's hard to see how anyone growing up in Lubbock could not become a christian) and although she has personally signed the "true love waits" chastity pledge she still believes that teenagers in Lubbock are entitled to a reasonable level of sex education. This doesn't go down well in Lubbock where the official sex education policy is just to teach abstinence. This shortsighted policy has lead to Lubbock having one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the USA.

One of the most interesting parts of the film is the truely astounding level of ignorance shown by Lubbock teenagers when discussing sexual matters. In one case a girl claims that gays never live beyond the age of forty. The source of a lot of this misinformation is local minister Ed Ainsworth who we see running prayer meetings for teens where he tells them the most incredible lies about sex in order to scare them aware. In one scene we see him telling a meeting that a sexually transmitted disease can be caught by shaking hands.

After watching this documentary, you should watch the second part of Richard Dawkin's The Root of All Evil? where he describes religion as a virus. It's clear to me that children should be kept away from any kind of religious influence until they are old enough to make rational and informed decisions about whether or not they want to get involved in the religion. It's only by effectively brainwashing children at a young age that religions continue to gain followers.

I haven't written anything about my health recently, so let's combine that with a little rant about NHS wastage.

The consultant is very happy with the way that the sarcoidosis is going and wants to slowly cut out my steroids. We're doing this by taking 3mg a day for four weeks then 2mg a day and finally 1mg a day. This is compared to the 30mg a day I was on when the steroids were first prescribed.

I'm currently taking 1mg tablets and because prescriptions tend to be in four week blocks these tablets come in packets of 28. So I need 168 tablets - or six boxes.

We phoned my GP last week to get the prescription filled. My wife went in to pick it up. She noticed that the doctor had made up a prescription for 100 tablets - which isn't enough. She went back to the doctor and pointed out the error. The doctor said she was happy to correct it and changed the prescription to 200 tablets. Rapidly losing the will to live my wife decided not to argue and just took the prescription.

So now I've got 200 tablets. That's 32 more than I need. Almost 20% wasted. All because the doctor couldn't be bothered to do some simple arithmetic. Actually she didn't even need to do that. If she had just written the dosage instructions on the prescription, the pharmacist would have done the maths.

I needed six packets. I've got seven. And because 200 isn't exactly divisible by 28, I've also got another little box containing four tablets cut out from another packet. I hope they can use the rest of that packet for other small amounts prescribed by doctors who can't be bothered to give sensible prescriptions.

Oh, and because the prescription didn't contain any dosage instructions, the boxes all have "take four tablets daily" written on them. Not sure where that came from. It's a good job I'm clued up enough to remember what the consultant told me. I'm sure there are plenty of people who would have forgotten that and just taken the pharmacist's word.

(This is me using what limited Googlejuice this site has to get personal revenge)

Last June I bought a t-shirt from SIDStore. It was a nice t-shirt. It had a dalek on it. Here's a picture of me wearing the t-shirt. I was happy with my purchase. All was well with the world.

Of course, as I bought the t-shirt over the internet, I gave my email address to the vendor. This was (I assumed) purely so they could sent me email relating to the purchase of the shirt. At no point did I sign up for them to start sending me marketing email. I never sign up for marketing email and always make sure I've unchecked that checkbox on any web form I fill in.

Everything continued being well with the world until early this year. At that point I got an email from SIDStore trying to convince me to visit their site and buy more t-shirts. I deleted it. And then a couple of weeks later I got another one. This time I replied to the email. I asked why they had taken it upon themselves to start sending me these emails and told them that I didn't want to get any more. I got no reply other than another similar marketing email a couple of weeks later. I replied again asking once more to be removed from their mailing list. I should point out that none of their messages contain any details on how you might unsubscribe from their mailing list thereby breaking one of the basic rules for bulk email.

Of course, my second email was ignored too. And this morning I got another marketing email from them. So I'm going to assume that my email to them is being ignored for some reason and am forced to take alternative action. Stage one is this post. I'm hoping that this will get on the first page of a Google search for "SIDStore" and people will see that SIDStore use dubious onlne marketing tactics - sending marketing email to people who haven't requested it and not removing people from their mailing list when asked to.

SIDStore make nice shirts. I was very happy with the one I bought from them. But I won't buy from people who send unsolicited commercial email. So I won't be buying anything else from them until they remove me from their mailing list and explain why I was put on their list and why my previous requests to be removed have been ignored.

I strongly suggest that you do the same.

To summarise: SIDStore are spammers. Don't deal with them.

Update: Success. Currently this is the fourth second hit for a search on sidstore. I ♥ Google.

Channel Four have launched a new comedy show called The IT Crowd. It is about the IT support group in a large company and is therefore of interest to geeks everywhere.

The most interesting thing about it is that the episodes are available for download from the web site before they are broadcast. Unfortunately Channel Four have chosen to use Microsoft's nasty proprietary WMV format for the downloads. It would have been nicer if they had used something a bit more open, but it doesn't really matter as most modern Linux-based video players will handle WMV without any problem.

Or, rather, they handle standard WMV without any problem. Yesterday Channel Four put the third episode on their site and they've started using some kind of "digital rights management" on the file. None of my Linux video players will handle it. I just get either an interesting abstract pattern or a blank screen. I tried it on Windows and the Windows Media Player said that I needed to install a "security update" in order to play it (I like that - they want me to install an update that enables them to control how often I can watch something so they lie and call it a security update!)

I assume that if I install this update then I'll be able to play the file, but only for as long as Channel Four say that I can. They want people to watch over the internet, but not to be able to store a copy of the file locally. I don't know why they bother. There will be unencumbered copies of the programme available on bittorrent within hours of broadcast on Friday. All they are doing is pissing off people who might otherwise be in the show's core audience.

And what do I think of the show? It's ok. I'd download it and watch it every week if it was easily available. I'm not going to worry if I miss an episode. It's not that good. It's certainly not anywhere near as good as Cory Doctorow seems to think.

Update: I was wrong on one thing. The bittorrents have appeared before the show has been broadcast. Looks like someone has broken the DRM.

It's about time for another look at some basic mistakes that people make on the internet. Today we're going to be looking at URLs. It's important to design a useful URL scheme for your web site. The easier your URLs are to understand, the more likely it is that people with share them with their friends.

The basic premise behind all of these ideas is that by making it easier for people to link to specific parts of your site then they will link to your site and will bring you more visitors. Of course this means that you'll be encouraging people to visit your site using routes that don't bring them through the front page. Some people have a problem with that. I believe that sites that don't encourage that flexibility will slowly lose visitors to sites that do.

Domain names

We'll start with the first part of a URL - the domain name. I'm not going to talk about registering a domain, I'll assume that you've already done that. But how is your web server configured? Do you insist that people type 'www' at the start of your URL? And if so, why? There is no good reason why a visitor should type those extra three characters (four including the dot) each time they want to visit your site. It's very simple to configure your web server to respond to both names.

Memorable

A good URL is memorable. If you have an article about sheep farming that has the URL http://your_domain.com/sheep_farming.html then people will be able to find it more easily than if the URL is http://your_domain.com/0,,1704174,00.html or something like that.

This often isn't an easy problem to solve. In my experience all commercial Content Management Systems produce horrible URLs (which is why most newspaper sites have horrible URLs) and most blog software isn't much better (I realise that the URLs on this site aren't at all memorable - I have plans to improve that).

Simple

Part of being memorable is making your URLs as simple as possible. A good example of not doing that is Amazon. The URL for any product on Amazon is very simple. It looks like this http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0596004761. The only bit that changes is the number at the end which defines the particular product that we are looking at.

So far, so good. That's the URL as you need it if you want to pass it on to someone else or to link to the product. But Amazon never shows you that URL. It always adds some tracking information to the end of the URL. So Amazon URLs always appear more complex than they need to be. Of course I don't expect Amazon to take this advice and change the way their systems overnight. This seems to be a good example of a company that is soe successful that they can ignore good practice whenever they want.

Other good examples of overcomplex URLs are often found on mapping sites. Try searching for a postcode on Multimap. I just got a URL back that containing 13 parameters. It looked like this (I've inserted spaces so that it wraps):

http://www.multimap.com/map/browse.cgi?client=public &search_result= &db=pc &cidr_client=none &lang= &keepicon=true &pc=SW129RW &advanced= &client=public &addr2= &quicksearch=sw12+9rw &addr3= &addr1=

A bit of experimentation revealed that only one of them was necessary:

http://www.multimap.com/map/browse.cgi?pc=SW129RW

Which of those two would you rather send to a friend?

Permanent

If you want people to link to your pages then you need to give them fixed places to link to. A few years ago I was trying to discuss a particular news story with some friends over email. The site in question (and I can't remember what it was) had ten news stories on its front page. The newest story was always http://some_news_site.com/news1.html and so on through to news10.html. As a new story was published, all the existing stories had their URLs changed. It was difficult to hold a conversation about the story. It would have been impossible to link to it in a blog entry.

Not all permanence problems are so obvious. Some news sites have free access to stories for a few days after they are published but later move them behind a registration screen (or require payment). Others move stories to a different location after some time. If your content isn't always available at the same URL then people won't link to it. Of course, some newspapers might see that as a advantage.

That's not to say that you shouldn't also have transient URLs. It's perfectly acceptable to have a latest.html link which always points to your latest article. But each article should also have a permanent URL and it should be easy to find out what that URL is.

Hackable

(And I'm using "hack" in the positive sense here.)

If your URLs reflect the structure of your site then people will be able to navigate round the site by editing the URL in the location bar of their browser. For example if /news/uk/politics/blair_resigns.html is the URL of a particular story, then /news/uk/politics should contain a list of current UK political news stories and /news/uk should contain a list of UK news.

One side-effect of this is that you need to work out all possible URLs that someone might try to visit and put something in place. You can't assume that people will only visit URLs that you publish. In the previous example you might not ever publish a link to /news/uk but you still need to put some kind of content there as otherwise anyone trying to visit that URL will get either an error page or (probably worse) a list of files in that directory.

Anchors

It's always worth adding internal anchors within your page so that people can link to specific sections of the page. For example, all comments on my blog have their own anchor so that you can link to them.

Frames

Only one thing to say about frames - don't use them. The URL for a frameset refers to its initial state. Once you've clicked on something and changed the view, it becomes impossible for someone to construct a URL which will bring someone else back to that exact view.

This is part of an occasional series of articles about basic internet technologies. The previous articles in the series are Basic Password Handling and Basic Bulk Emailing.

I've signed up for the public beta of 30 Boxes the web calendar system that everyone seems to be talking about.

It looks very pretty but seems to have one major flaw. I can't find a way to import data from another source. I have a .ics file which I've been using to store my calendar for the last few years. It's been updated by a number of different applications over the years (currently I'm using Mozilla's Sunbird). I certainly don't want to type in all of those events again. In fact, thinking about it I'd much rather keep my calendar data in my .ics file that lives on my server. But I'd like 30 Boxes to be able to subscribe to that file so that other people can see my calendar (or, at least, the parts of it that I want to share with them).

So that's two features that 30 Boxes seems to be missing - the ability to import from an external data file and the ability to subscribe to a calendar which is stored elsewhere.

I'm sure these functions are on their way, but it seems a bit strange to launch without them. They seem pretty fundemental to me. Without these functions 30 Boxes is useless to me and (I suspect) most serious users.

Update: Lloyd finds exactly the same problem with 30 Boxes before going on to talk about another of my pet hates - US companies who try to impose their illogical date format on the rest of the world.

I spent an hour or so this weekend working out my exact latitude and longitude so that I could see the Google Maps photo of my house. Now it seems I may have wasted my time as there is a margin of error in Google's co-ordinate system.

Lloyd pointed me at the Register story. Here's a map showing the error. If I remember correctly, the meridian follows the thick grey line down the centre of the brown roof in the middle of the main observatory building.

Slightly behind the curve I realise, but I have finally read Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. I was very close to not bothering with it as I found the last two books in the series very boring. But given that there were only two more books to go, I decided I'd give it a chance.

I'm glad I did. It's a lot better than the last book. It's still far too long and could probably be half the size if Rowling had a decent editor, but I didn't find myself contemplating giving up on it as I did with The Order of the Phoenix.

There was one area where the padding was painfully obvious. Rowling has realised that her characters are sixteen and seventeen and therefore they should start taking notice of the other sex. Now Rowling is a few years younger than me and the interaction between the sexes that she portrays would have been considered outdated when I was a teenager. I'm sure it's laughable to sixteen year olds now.

I realise that Rowling has a slight problem here. Her readers haven't aged at the same rate as Harry, Ron and Hermione. I think there are probably a very small number of sixteen and seventeen year olds reading the books. Most of Rowling's readers are four or five years younger than that. So that means that she can't really go into detail about what Harry and Ginny got up to behind the bikesheds. But in that case, I think she would have been much better off just leaving the subject out completely. The way that the characters interact ("ew, look, they're snogging") and, in particular, the way that Rowling writes about Harry's feelings for Ginny are completely unrealistic (and, yes, I full understand the irony of calling for more realism in a book about wizards).

Rowling writes about relationships in a way that appears to be forty years out of date. And by doing so she removes a point of familiarity for her potential readers. I'm not saying that all teenagers live their lives like characters from Junk or Doing It, but I think that Melvin Burgess is much closer to the truth than Rowling is.

Earlier today I was at an internal company presentation about MySQL 5. There seemed to be a lot of fuss made about new features like stored procedures, triggers and views. Features that I was using in Sybase in 1992. Without features like these you don't have a database - you just have a few datafiles which you can query using a language that looks a bit like SQL.

It's nice to see that MySQL is finally getting these features because it still seems the be the default database that is offered with a lot of web hosting packages and it would be good to have these features available to everyone.

Of course it'll still be a couple of years before many hosting companies start using this version. Many of them are still using version 3.23.from 2003.

And then there's the whole problem of persuading programmers who are used to MySQL into using these features.

Two scenarios.

In the first you have spent a nice day out with a group of friends. Many of you took interesting photos which have all now been uploaded to Flickr. It would be nice to easily be able to find all of those photos and perhaps automatically create one URL that will show them all.

In the second scenario you've been out taking photos of some tourist trap. You've uploaded your photos to Flickr, but you'd like to see if anyone else was there taking photos at the same time. Or maybe six months ago before a particular building was knocked down. It would make it easier to find coincidences like this.

In both cases you would need to match photos on two kinds of data, the location of the photo and the time that it was taken. In the first case, you'd also want to filter the matching photos so you only get photos taken by your friends.

Flickr knows which photos are taken by your friends. That's not a problem. And all digital cameras include the date and time data attached to each photo. And Flickr has access to that information. Of course this relies on the clock in the camera being correct and ignores any timezone issues.

It's the location information that is interesting. Of course in the future we'll all be using cameras that contain GPS units so that data will be included in the photo data in the same way as the time currently is. But tha'ts still a few years off and I want this system now. There are already standards evolving for "Geotagging", but doing that manually for every photo would be incredibly painful. There are people who carry a GPS with them at all times and can get this information by comparing the GPS data with the timestamps on their photos - but I'm not one of them. And I can't see that procedure getting mainstream acceptance.

So I suppose we're left with using the existing tags. Most people seem to tag photos with some kind of location information. But in most cases it's probably not precise enough. And, of course, different people use different formats for their tags.

Anyway, this is just a braindump from an IRC conversation. The original idea came from Candace. If anyone knows of any experiments going on in this area, then I'd love to know about it.