July 2006 Archives

I should really know better than to read Richard Littlejohn's rants, but they were discussing this piece over on Daily Mail Watch so I was drawn in and now my blood is boiling.

In this article, Littlejohn's subject is the general ghastliness of Britain and how it's driving many of its finest citizens (i.e. Daily Mail readers) to live abroad. One of his main bugbears is (as always) immigration.

You don't have to be a card-carrying BNP neanderthal to worry about the consequences of this sea-change in our society. It is simply impossible to absorb and assimilate this many people from a myriad of cultures in such a short space of time -- that's always assuming they want to assimilate, which in the case of many Muslims they don't.

Neighbourhoods have been transformed almost overnight. Long-standing residents, including -- often especially -- those from the settled immigrant communities, feel threatened. They become strangers in the place they grew up.

They’re not 'racist' -- that hackneyed, catch-all slander levelled at anyone who voices any misgivings about the level of immigration. They just didn't vote for this and weren't told it was going to happen.

So Littlejohn doesn't like all those nasty foreigners moving into the neighbourhood, bringing down the property prices and cooking their strange smelling food. And the worst thing that they do is to fail to assimilate. And what's the solution to this problem. To move abroad. And British Ex-Pats are so well known for integrating with the local culture wherever they live. They never annoy the natives, do they?

And, as usual, the Daily Mail web site is moderating the comments. Currently there are 52 comments - all of which agree with Littlejohn's point of view. None of which point out the obvious glaring irony in his view.

I really wish Littlejohn would move abroad and take all his nasty, small-minded readers with him. But that would be grossly unfair on whatever country they moved to. Maybe we can persuade them all that Israel is a lovely place to live.

Yesterday's little spat about the BBC's weather data neatly illustrates a potential problem with the Web 2.0 "everything is an API" approach.

To summarise what happened yesterday... For some months the BBC have been promising that weather feeds would be available from their Backstage project. But they've been involved in protracted licensing negotiations with the Met Office which means that these feeds haven't yet been released. Yesterday Ben Metcalfe (who, until leaving the BBC a couple of months ago, lead Backstage) discovered that behind the BBC News site's new localisation features lurked access to an internal weather feed. He published this information on his blog and to the Backstage mailing list. Ian Betteridge wrote a stinging attack on Ben for doing this and after a night's reflection Ben has now removed the information from his web site.

It's clear that the feeds weren't for public use and Ben has admitted that he knew that before publishing his links. But I think it's naive of Ian to imply that Ben must have used insider information to work out how to access the feeds. It's something that any reasonably clued up geek with an HTTP traffic sniffer could have worked out in fifteen minutes.

And that's where the problem lies. Or, at least, potentially lies. It's all very well building your web site out of feeds and APIs, but you need to realise that once you're using APIs like that on a public server then there will be curious geeks trying to work out how you did it. And generally succeeding pretty quickly.

It's like the BBC Radio streams. On the BBC site they are accessed using a version of Real Player. This version of Real Player has had some features removed in order to make the rightsholders of the content happy. But the raw links are there in the BBC web pages. Anyone can access them with a little bit of work. The thing that the BBC were uncomfortable about my pages was that it made those raw links too easy to find. So, in the interest of helping the BBC in their negotiations with the rightsholders I removed those links from my pages. But they're still there in the BBC's web pages. Anyone else could publish them at any time.

So by opening up you data in this way, you're also opening it up to abuse. Sure, you can stick terms and conditions all over your site, but that only stops some people. There are a lot of people out there with no regard for legal niceties like that. If it's important that these APIs and feeds are only used by certain people then you probably want to consider putting some kind of technological protection in place.

I think that Ben was wrong to publish the information. But I don't think he used insider knowledge to do it. And I think that the BBC was being naive to think that the information wouldn't get into the public domain very quickly.

The Independent front page today is wonderful. In fact I really can't explain why I still bought the Guardian. Old habits die hard I suppose.

The related story is online here until the paywall drops in a few days.

I haven't fully digested it yet, but there was an interesting-looking debate in Westminister Hall yesterday about plans for a London Orbital Rail Network. I only noticed it because the debate was called for by my MP, Martin Linton (whose constituency includes Clapham Junction).

From I've read so far, a lot of the discussion revolves around whether or not various MPs know where Hoxton and Haggerston are.

I'm going planet crazy here. And Plagger means I can build a new planet in about five minutes. And most of that time is spent working out which feeds to include.

Anyway, the latest one is Planet Westminster which aggregates all of the MPs' blogs that I can find. If you know of any that I've missed then please let me know.

And, yes, I should really do something to stop all of my planets looking exactly the same. I'll think about that over the weekend.

Given the number of planets that I'm building, I wonder if I should have registered a domain name that had some connection with Magrethea...

I've been thinking about the kinds of things that I can do with Plagger and I've realised that it can solve a problem that isn't really much of a problem at the moment but that can only get worse.

I write in a number of places. Only this morning, I started a Vox blog. I've been using Feedburner to combine some of my RSS feeds into one handy package, but it's not very flexible. Plagger, however, gives me all the flexibility that I need. I can aggregate everything that I want into my own "personal planet" and republish a combined feed.

So that's what I've done. I've set up planet davorg which aggregates a number of my web feeds. I'm sure I'll be adding more over the coming weeks. Of course I don't really expect anyone to read that web page - there are RSS and Atom feeds, and even an OPML file. I'll point my Feedburner site at this new feed tonight.

Oh, and this is the first project that I've put on theplanetarium.org - the new domain I've registered for all my feed aggregation experiments. I've already got a few more ideas...

I've just noticed that the Odeon web site has had a major redesign and now appears to work without any problems in Firefox. When did that happen?

The BBC have plans to make their web site more "Web 2.0" over the next few years. The recent Reboot competition was part of this initiative.

Now, they're trying to pin down exactly what they mean by "Web 2.0". In order to help with this, they've started a discussion on the Backstage mailing list. There doesn't seem to be an official web archive of the list, so you'll have to make do with this rather badly formatted one from mail-archive.com.

It's an interesting discussion that has already covered a lot of viewpoints. Other organisations who are planning to go down a similar route could probably get a lot from this discussion. Kudos to the BBC for talking about this in public.

I got an invitation to try out Vox this morning. So I'll be writing some posts over there for the next few weeks.

Tussauds closed the London Planetarium closed recently and over the weekend the Guardian reported on its replacement - a show about celebrities called "the Stardome"[1]. One phrase rang particularly true for me.

"It's a no-brainer," said Nicky Marsh, marketing director of the waxwork attractions. And, in several senses, she was right.

I despair.

[1] Do you see what they've done there - you can still see "stars" in the planetarium.

A version of Shozu has been released for Series 60 version 3. Amongst other things, that means that I can now use Shozu on my Nokia N91. This is good. I never really got on with Lifeblog.

There are rumours that Tony Blair might be about to face his Anthony Meyer moment. This could get interesting.

A nice rant by Kate Bevan in today's Guardian technology supplement. She's fed up of going into corporate clients' offices and finding that Internet Explorer is the only browser available. Firefox has been available and stable for 18 months. Why do corporate IT departments still insist on forcing IE onto their users?

So being dumped in front of a computer that insists on using IE is a nasty shock. For starters, only the beta of the very newest version - IE7 - uses tabbed browsing. Command-click on a link in any other version and it opens a new window. One office I regularly work at deploys ancient iMacs running a five-year-old operating system. Open more than two IE windows and it crashes. Bashing the keyboard or mouse won't work - you have to go nuclear and pull out the power lead.

I have plenty of sympathy. IE is the corporate standard for my current clients. In fact I've recently learned that downloading and installing Firefox might be considered a sacking offence as it's not on the list of approved software. But I'm prepared to take the risk as asking someone to develop web applications using IE constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. But developing on Firefox for users who are going to be using IE has its own problems. I've lost count of the number of times I've written something only to find that it doesn't work in IE.

Memo to corporate IT departments: Get Firefox installed. You know it makes sense.

Over the last couple of weeks, Martin Belam has been reviewing the search functionality on UK newpaper web sites. He has now published his conclusions. The article also links to detailed individual entries on each paper surveyed.

Some of his findings are quite surprising. Papers who aren't seen as particularly web-savvy did well in some areas.

The Daily Mail and This Is London, for example, were the only sites to colour code search results in tune with the site's colour coded navigation. I felt this worked really well, and contributed to my verdict that the Daily Mail's search engine result listings were the clearest of all the newspaper sites that I tested.

And also

The Sun offered several pieces of information in their search results page that were unique - an article word count, and the code of the edition and page number within that edition of where the article first appeared in print. Of these I felt only the former was of much use to the casual user.

All in all a very useful piece. And one that deserves to be widely distributed.

Reminds me that I was planning the review the quality ok UK newpaper RSS feeds. Must get round to that one day...

Syd Barrett has died.

(I bet I'm not the only person to use that title for this story)

I suspect that it's about time I dragged myself up to date and bought a digital video recorder. My first thought is to buy a new PC and set up MythTV on it. But it'll cost quite a lot to get a quiet enough PC with a large enough hard disk, and it looks like digital video recorders can be as cheap as a couple of hundred quid. So that looks like the cheapest route.

Which leaves me pondering what to buy. I want something with as many features as possible for my money. And, for obvious reasons, it's essential that whatever I buy works with NTL cable television.

So where's a good place to get reviews an in-depth technical information about digital video recorders? Is there a web site? Or a magazine? Or am I lucky enough to have a reader who's an expert in this area?

Any advice will be much appreciated.

Over the last few months I've been shuffling a bit of credit card debt around in order to avoid paying interest on it. If you've ever tried this, then you'll know the first rule of credit card shuffling. It's "never buy anything else with a card that has an interest free balance on it". The reason for this is the way that credit card companies allocate the money that you give them. They use it to pay off your interest free balance. Only once that balance has been fully paid off do they pay off any other charges on the card. So if you use the card to buy other stuff, then you can't pay off those purchases until you've paid off the interest free balance. And all the time you're racking up more interest on those purchases.

I've had a credit card with Egg for some time. Now most credit card companies use interest free balance transfers to entice new customers to join them. So it was nice to hear that Egg offered interest free transfers to existing customers. Any balances transfered to your Egg card during the anniversary month of your joining Egg are interest free for five (or is it six?) months. My anniversary month was May, so I cleared the card and in May I transfered a balance onto it.

The first surprise came when I checked my account later and found an extra "balance transfer fee" listed on the statement. Of course this was mentioned in the small print and it's my fault for not seeing it, but I can't help thinking that it would have been polite if at some point during the transfer process it had said "there will be a transfer fee of £xxx - do you wish to proceed?"

But that was only the start. Earlier this week I got my June statement. And was surprised to see a small amount of interest had been added. I contacted Egg to ask why and they told me that the transfer fee didn't form part of the balance transfer and therefore wasn't interest free.

Remember the first rule of credit card shuffling from above. It seems that Egg's interest free balance transfer comes with its own built-in "extra purchase". There's no way that I can pay off the transfer fee without paying off all of the transfered balance first. It's a classic catch 22 situation. Either I pay them the interest or I pay off the transfered balance - thereby losing the advantage of having an interest free balance transfer.

I should point out that the amount of interest is tiny. Over the interest free period it will amount to less that £10. But that works both ways. Lots of people that take up this offer will be confused by having to pay interest on an "interest free" balance transfer. And Egg will have to take the time to explain to them where the interest charges are coming from. And many people will, like me, feel vaguely cheated by the explaination. Is that extra £10 really worth enough to Egg to counterbalance the bad service they are giving their customers. I'm not really minded to give them much more of my business in the future. I'm sure other customers will feel the same.

If they had just included the transfer fee in the interest free balance then the offer would have worked as customers expect and no-one would have complained. But no, they'd rather have the tenner and a few pissed off customers.

You need a permit to do everything in America. You even need a passport to buy a drink. But interestingly you don’t need one if you wish to rent some guns and some bullets. I needed a 50 cal (very big) machinegun. “No problem,” said the man at the shop. “But could you just sign this assuring us that the movie you’re making is not anti-Bush or anti-war.”

Jeremy Clarkson writing in the Times about filming in the US

This is very cool. An article in Wired features a member of london.pm

Some DJs spin vinyl or twiddle fader knobs. Others write subroutines in C++.

A new brand of music maestro is turning programming into performance, eschewing turntables for a compiler and a mind for syntax structure. "Livecoding" practitioners improvise using Perl or homemade programming architectures to build compositions from the ground up, replacing instruments and samples with raw code authoring before a live audience.

Alex Maclean, a U.K. livecoder and art student, said he traded in his guitar when he found he could be more creative with code than with strings. He touch-types using Perl at raves and dance clubs, creating a unique visual and musical experience. Sessions with drummers, MCs and other livecoders can be reminiscent of traditional free-jazz improvisation.

Remember last year when Tony Blair was defeated on plans to increase the time that suspects could be help without trial? He wanted 90 days but a compromise which "only" doubled the time to 28 days won the vote.

Well, it looks like the Home Affairs Committee have decided to re-open that particular can of worms. They are saying that the "28-day limit may well prove inadequate in the future".

Don't you sometimes wish that when bad ideas are defeated, they would just stay defeated?