Davblog

In which someone you've never heard of writes about things you have no interest in

Posts Tagged ‘tech’

BBC Radio Streams

I’ve just written this over on my BBC Radio Streams page:

I’ve got email from a couple of people saying that the Real Audio radio streams were finally turned off overnight. This means that the few links left on these pages (and any links that you have saved from earlier versions of this page) will no longer work.

I expected this day to come at some point. The BBC really want everyone to use the Radio iPlayer instead.

This does, however, pose a problem for people who where using the Read Audio streams to power internet radios and similar devices. I’m not sure that there’s a solution to this problem, but I’ll have a poke around and see if I can see if I can find a way around it.

Other than that, I’d just like to say thanks for using these pages during the five and a half years that they have been live. When I sat down to hack out a quick solution in November 2004 I had no idea how many people would find the pages so useful.

I’d also like to thank the BBC for the enlightened approach they took to my pages. They could easy have just asked me to close the site down, but instead they chose to turn a blind eye and take my pages as an indication of something that was missing from their site.

Update: I’ve just found this entry on the BBC Internet Blog. The BBC have introduced live streaming of their radio stations to various mobile devices. I haven’t investigated in detail, but this looks like it might be a replacement for the Real Audio streams.

The Political Web

Long-time readers might remember The Political Web, a web site that I threw together at a BBC hack day a couple of years ago.

The site has languished as I haven’t had time to do anything with it for well over a year, but last night I refreshed the database that powers it so that it now contains details of all of the new constituencies and MPs.
I have other plans too (just no real idea when I’ll have time to implement them).

Modern Campaigning

I got in touch with all of the Battersea candidates who aren’t publishing web feeds to ask them if there was anything I had missed. I only got a reply from one of them.

But that’s ok. They’re probably busy. Campaigning is a time-consuming business.

The response I got was marked as “not for publication” so I’m not going to quote from it. I’m not even going to say which of the candidates it was from. But I do want to paraphrase and reply to the main couple of points that were raised as I think they indicate a lack of understanding about digital campaigning that is probably more common than we’d like to believe.

Firstly, the candidate expressed a concern that starting to use something like Twitter would set up an expectation for two-way communication that would be hard to meet. And it’s true, of course, that I really like to see Twitter being used for dialogues rather than monologues. I’ve written about that several times. But given a choice between people using tools in ways I don’t really like or them just not using them, then I’m very happy to lower my standards. And it’s not like treating Twitter as a one-way medium isn’t even an unusual way to use it. Many people use Twitter like that. Here’s Tory MP Douglas Carswell telling me that he sees Twitter as a “RSS feed” – by which he means something that he publishes for people to read rather than something that he uses as a source of information.

Secondly, the candidate claims not to have the time to keep web feeds updated. And I think that just comes back to using the wrong tools (something else we’ve discussed on this blog). If your web site is run using decent software then it will be automatically publishing a web feed whenever you write a new entry. Tie that up with something like TwitterFeed and you’ve got an automatically updated Twitter account too. I know that the people standing for election will not usually be geeks who know this kind of thing but digital communication is important and I would expect that any candidate will be able to find a tame geek to help out with things like this.

The candidate heavily implied that “the old ways are the best”. That time spent knocking on people’s doors was far more useful than time spent playing with computers. And whilst I would never suggest that time spent knocking on doors isn’t useful and important I think that time spent playing on computers is just as important and has the capability of reaching a far higher percentage of the electorate far more efficiently. Imagine if candidates had reached a similar conclusion about campaign leaflets (“oh no, we need to actually speak to the voters – we can’t just leave a leaflet”) or party political broadcasts (“one-way communication can’t work – it needs to be conversation”).

It’s all about getting your message across to as many people as possible as efficiently as people. You might get away with it this election. But by the next one, a candidate who doesn’t use digital communication efficiently will look hopelessly outdated.

The People’s Pamphlet

Update: Ok, yes, we admit it. It was an April Fool’s joke. Well most of it was. I’m not really going to be taking a month off to live in a camper van with Tim and Sim-O (though I’m sure it would have been fun!)

But the wiki really exists. And we really want your help to create a pamphlet that we can distribute to the voters of Mid-Bedfordshire.

I expect that Tim and Sim-O will also be coming clean about now. Here are the full details from Tim.

Hopefully you’ll have seen this morning’s posts by Tim and Sim-O about our new project aiming to bring the politics of accountability to the good burghers of Mid-Narnia. Their MP, Nadine Dorries, is famous for avoiding questions that she doesn’t want to answer so we’re going to to our best to ensure that the Mid-Narnians get the answers they deserve during the election campaign. Tim is in charge of high level strategy, Sim-O has sorted the wheels and I’m the project geek.

A project like this has a few interesting challenges for a geek. Firstly I had to hack a GPS system so that it would guide us through the back of the wardrobe. But secondly, and more importantly, I had to come up with a wiki.

“A wiki?”, I hear you cry, “What would a political campaign want with a wiki?” And I’m glad you asked. Because I’m going to tell you. You see, this isn’t just any old political campaign. No, this is Politics 2.0. We’ll be using the power of Social Media. We’ll be crowd-sourcing some of the campaign’s contents [Is that enough buzzwords, Tim?]

We all have our own ideas for what questions Mad Nad should be answering. Personally, I’d like to ask how many foetuses she saw ripping holes in their mothers’ stomachs whilst she was a nurse. But we need to realise that what’s important to us might not be import to the people of Mid-Narnia. Hence the need for the wiki. This afternoon we’ll be throwing it open for people to suggest questions for Ms Dorries. Once we have broad agreement on the contents of the “people’s pamphlet” we’ll lock the page and print copies of the pamphlet to be distributed in Narnia.

But a wiki is a dangerous thing. Particularly on a contentious subject like this. We need to be sure that everyone who contributes is doing so constructively. So we’ve put some measures in place to try and minimise the amount of vandalism. We’re using a standard installation of MediaWiki to which we added the Confirm Accounts extension. This means that only registered account holders will be able to edit the wiki. And we’ll only being handing out accounts to people with confirmed email addresses. So if anyone starts being stupid, we’ll know exactly where to send our strongly-worded emails of rebuke.

However, it seemed to me that this might not be enough. And late last night I had another idea which I was up until 3am implementing. I’ve written another extension which increases security even more. Now you’ll only be able to edit the wiki if you have a webcam attached to your computer. And the webcam will take photos of you whilst you are editing. The photos will be uploaded to a secure server in Switzerland where they will only be accessed in case of a dispute over the authorship of particular changes. I’m sure I don’t need to emphasise the importance of remaining fully clothed whenever editing the wiki.

Still a few wrinkles to iron out – but once I’m happy with it I’ll be releasing the source code under an open source licence.

Looking forward to seeing some of you in Mid-Narnia over the next few weeks.

End of an Era

I’ve had a home internet connection for quite a long time. Originally I used Compuserve (I’m not too proud to admit it) but I’m pretty sure that I had switched to Demon before the beginning of 1995.

At the time there weren’t really many other options to choose from if you wanted a real internet connection (as opposed to the gated communities of services like Compuserve or AOL). For a “tenner a month” (plus VAT) you got a pretty much unfiltered connection to the net, a little bit of web space and as many email addresses as you wanted. Just about anyone who was connected to the net at home at that time used their service.

For fifteen years I stayed with Demon. It was partly a habit and partly a kind of badge of honour. It didn’t prove conclusively that you were around near the start of the UK’s home internet usage, but it might be seen as a bit of a hint. I moved to ISDN with them and, later, to ADSL (and now ADSL+).

But at some point in that fifteen years the company changed. The company was sold to Scottish Telecom (now Thus) in 1998 and I think that it all started to go wrong soon after that. Over the last couple of years, there have been a few extended connectivity outages when it’s been impossible to get through to anyone in technical support in order to find out what’s going on. It’s a bit galling to hang on a phone for an hour listening to a recorded message suggesting that you check their web site – when you’re trying to tell them that you have no internet connection.

After the last such outage, a couple of weeks ago, I finally decided that enough was enough. I called them to ask for a MAC and took my business to Be.

Today was the day of the change. My Demon connection vanished in the middle of the afternoon and when I got home we got the new connection working.

I do feel a bit nostalgic. It’s been years since I used the dave@mag-sol.demon.co.uk email address or the mag-sol.demon.co.uk web site, but it’s strange to think they’re both completely dead now.

One change though. It appears that Be don’t have a Usenet service. I could sign up for something like EasyNews – but, to be honest, it’s quite tempting to just forget about it. I think it’s been almost ten years since I really had an interesting conversation in a newsgroup.

Is there anyone out there still using Demon? Why?

Building Web Sites is Easy

The geek shall inherit the Earth. But the semi-geek won’t be far behind.

Back in April I wrote a piece about MPs’ web sites. I came to the conclusion that a large number of MPs have web sites that are over-complex and therefore cost more money to build and maintain than they should have done. They also fail in supplying basic functionality to users (for example, many have invalid web feeds) because they are often written from scratch by people who don’t really understand the web. I made the point that a real geek would have not written a new system, but would use some of the excellent open source or hosted services that are available.

I was reminded of this at the Open Tech conference in July[1]. There were a few talks that touched on this issue. In his “10 Cultures” talk, Bill Thompson discussed the differences between the geeks and the rest of the world and how the rest of the world is becoming dependent on the geeks. Immediately after Bill, Ben Goldacre’s talk touched on many of his usual subjects (the dearth of good science journalism and the lack of scientific literacy in the general population) before coming back round to echo some of Bill’s themes. Ben knows what tools he needs to build in order to fight his battles effectively and he knows that he’s not geek enough to build them. He therefore put out a call for a “geek posse” to help him to build the tools that he wants.

Both of these talks got me thinking about the geek/non-geek divide, but it wasn’t until I saw Will Perrin and Fran Sainsbury’s talk “Spread the Web” that I started to draw comparisons with the MPs’ sites that I’d written about earlier. Will and Fran talked about the problem of organisations who paid for expensive web sites many years ago and who are now left with a hard to maintain system that doesn’t give them a good presence on the web. This is exactly the same problem as I had recognised, but in a far wider context. It’s not just MPs who spend too much money on crap web sites. Anyone can do it. And many organisations do. Will and Fran aren’t hard-core geeks, but they know enough about WordPress and other similar systems to help organisations to replace their nasty old web sites with some newer and simpler which works.

Two weeks ago Lloyd Shepherd wrote about how he had set up a web site for his wife’s school using WordPress. Like Will and Fran, Lloyd is no geek (as he freely admits) but he knows enough about the technology to identify the best technology for the job and wrangle it into a web site which is probably more usable than the majority of school web sites. In his article, Lloyd asked why more people don’t do this and a really interesting discussion followed in the comments.

So here’s what we know:

  • There are many organisations out there who want web sites but don’t have the technical knowledge to decide how best to do it.
  • Many of these organisations (schools, charities and local groups would be good examples) are short of money.
  • The most effective way for these organisations to build web sites is often by using tools like WordPress and Drupal.
  • The IT professionals that most of these organisations approach for advice don’t seem to know about these solutions and end up proposing expensive proprietary monstrosities.
  • You don’t need to be total geek to build these sites, “semi geeks” like Lloyd, Will and Fran are perfectly capable of doing it.

I think that the problem is that knowledge of the WordPress or Drupal approach is pretty sparse outside of the geek (and semi geek) circles that I and most of my readers move in. Even most of the IT industry still seems unaware (or, perhaps, untrusting) of these open source solutions.

I don’t have a solution. I’m just pointing out obvious problems here. I suppose there’s some kind of education gap that needs to be filled. I’m considering asking my local council if I can run some kind of “building web sites” evening class to try to spread this knowledge.

But I think we also just need to offer to help. Do you know a cash-strapped charity or local school that could do with a bit of help rebuilding their web site? You don’t need to be an expert. This stuff really isn’t hard. And you’ll be helping to make the world (well, the web at least) a better place.

If you’re not a hard-core geek can you become a semi geek?

[1] I said I’d discuss it in more detail later – I didn’t expect it would be almost three months!

SW12 Social Network

One of the themes I picked up on at this year’s Opentech conference was that of local social media. More and more people are using open source tools to build local online communities and this movement seems likely to grow. I was particularly impressed with the work that Will Perrin and friends are doing over at TalkAboutLocal. I confess that Lloyd had mentioned the project to me some months ago, but I had forgotten about it until I saw Will speak at Opentech.

I’ve written about my interest in local sites before. You might remember me introducing Planet Balham and Balham Twits. I still think that both of those sites are useful, but they aren’t very interactive. What I wanted was something that the local community would find more useful. I spent a few hours playing with Drupal. I think that Drupal would be a great tool, for building local sites, but I didn’t have the time to spare learning how to get the best out of it, so in the end I went back to an earlier experiment.

A couple of years ago, I used Ning to build a simple social networking site for Balham. At the time I didn’t have many local contacts so the site atrophied through lack of use. But this lunchtime I went back to have another look at the project.

And after only twenty minutes or so of fiddling, SW12.org was ready to go. The great thing about Ning is that it has all of the standard social networking features already available as modules that you can just drop into the site. As a start, I’ve picked a pretty standard-looking set of features (user profiles, blogs, disscussion forums, photos and videos) and have seeded the site with a few entries of my own. I’m sure things will grow and change if the site becomes popular.

Through my other web experiments (particulalry through Balham Twits) I’ve made contact with some Balham-based internet users, so hopefully this time the site will get a little more use. I’m planning to put in some work to promote it locally as well. Even if it means dropping leaflets through every door in Balham (ok, perhaps I won’t go quite that far!)

It looks to me as though Ning is a great way to get a social network site up and running really quickly. I expect I’ll be using it again for other similar sites in the future. If you’re thinking of doing something similar then I recommend talking a look at it.

And if you’re in or around Balham, please join up to the site.

Opentech Overview

[Update: Details of this year's Opentech conference are at ukuug.org/opentech]

Yesterday was the annual Opentech conference. I’m going to have some more to say about it in some detail over the next few days, but those thoughts are still peculating so in the meantime here’s a list of the talks that I watched.

Community and Democracy in Hijacked Space

One of the Space Hijackers talked about some of their projects. If you haven’t heard of them, they are the people who drove a tank into the G20 protests. Their protests sound like a lot of fun.

Does FOI work? You bet! – Heather Brooke

Heather Brooke told the story of how she used the Freedom of Information Act to finally get details of MPs’ expenses out of the House of Commons. It was a long and complex story and Heather made it very interesting.

Digital Engagement – Richard Stirling (Cabinet Office)
Open Government Data – John Sheridan (OPSI)

Two civil servants talking about how the government is making more and more data available to the public. They were asking people to take the data and build interesting applications with it as the more applications built, the easier it is them to persuade people to release more data.

Opening Up Government Data: Give it to us Raw, Give it to us Now – Rufus Pollock (Open Knowledge Foundation)

Rufus Pollack of the Open Knowledge Foundation replied to the previous two talks explaining where he thought the government’s current efforts are falling short. They need to do more, sooner and they need to get the licensing right – the more open the license is, the better.

10 Cultures – Bill Thompson

Fifty years on from the original, Bill Thompson updated CP Snow’s “Two Cultures” talk for the twenty-first century and turned the title into a geek joke. Thompson’s main point was that the people making the big decisions in the UK all hold PPEs from Oxbridge and know next to nothing about the opportunities that digital technologies can bring us. We need more geekery in the halls of power.

Beyond Bad Science – Ben Goldacre

Ben Goldacre’s topic dovetailed nicely with Thompson’s. If people were better educated in science then there would be less excuse for the appalling science journalism that we currently suffer from. Goldacre went on to talk about the bloggers who are doing sterling work revealing the dangerous science stories that the mainstream media aren’t covering and suggested some tools we could build to help them to work together more efficiently.

The Guardian and the Ian Tomlinson story – Paul Roache

Paul Roache talked about how the Guardian dealt with the Ian Tomlinson video. Normally an exclusive like that would have been held back for the next edition of the paper. In this case they took the unusual step of putting on the web site first. This gamble seems to have paid off. Over the next day or so, the video was responsible for 20% of their web site traffic.

Opening up the Guardian – Simon Willison

Simon Willison talked about the Guardian’s Open API and Data Store. He also introduced the crowd-surfing application they wrote to process the MPs’ expenses details once they were published.

Spread The Web – Fran Sainsbury & William Perrin
Local web beyond the hype – William Perrin

Two linked talks about how the internet can help organisations and communities to communicate. The first talk was about the number of organisations who have paid stupid sums of money for a proprietary web site that they find too hard to update and how in many cases a simple WordPress site would be far better suited for their purpose. In the second talk William Perrin talked about using simple sites (again, WordPress or a similar technology) to bring communities together. This is an area I have a lot of interest in.

4iP – Public service tools for empowerment – Tom Loosemore

Tom talked about 4ip, a Channel Four initiative to support innovative digital projects. Tom listed half a dozen or so interesting projects that they have already supported.

Just before Tom’s speech there was a slight change of plan as Sir Bonar Neville Kingdom spoke to us. The text of his speech is now online. I highly recommend that you read it.

A fabulous conference as always. My thanks to all of the organisers. More thoughts on it over the next few days.

Thunderbird and Exchange

This morning a friend was complaining on Twitter about using Evolution on Linux to talk to his company’s Exchange server. Evolution is the default answer to the question “how do I talk to Exchange from Linux”, but my past experience has been much like my friend’s – it’s really not a very good answer.

I suggested Thunderbird to him. In my opinion, Thunderbird is the best email program out there. It’s been my email program of choice for several years. It will happily work with Exchange to receive and send email. Googling for “thunderbird exchange” will bring back lots of useful results.

But Exchange isn’t just about email. There’s a whole calendaring system there too. Evolution supports that, but (by default) Thunderbird doesn’t. There is, however, a way to get your Exchange calendar into Thunderbird using a rather circuitous route. Here’s how I do it.

Firstly, you need the Lightning add-on for Thunderbird. Lightning adds calendar features to Thunderbird. You can create events and get alerts when they are about to happen. You can even subscribe to external calendars as long as they are in a standard format. Unfortunately, Exchange calendars aren’t in standard formats. So we need some kind of intermediary.

The intermediary I use is Google Calendar. In fact I use Google Calendar as my definitive calendar. Every other calendar application I use reads from or writes to my Google Calendar. And Thunderbird (or, rather, Lightning) is one of the applications that interacts with it. Google Calendar writes calendars in the correct standard format, so Lightning will read a Google Calendar out of the box. But we can get cleverer than that using another Thunderbird add-on called Provider. Once Provider is installed, communication between Lightning and Google Calendar becomes two-way. I can add events either in Lightning or in Google Calendar and they will turn up in both.

There’s one final step. We need to synchronise our Exchange calendar with Google Calendar. And Google have a product that does just that. It’s called Google Calendar Sync. With this installed, your Exchange calendar is automatically synchronised with Google Calendar regularly. So now we can edit our calendar anywhere and the new or updated events will show up in all of our calendars. I’ve even noticed that invitations to events from other Exchange users show up in Lightning – but I haven’t tried replying from there yet.

There are two things I don’t like about Google Calendar Sync. Firstly, it has to be running on a PC running Windows which is connected to your Exchange Server. So it’s not a solution that will work whilst you’re (for example) out of the office with your office PC switched off. Secondly, it will only sync with your main Google Calendar. I would have liked to have a separate calendar for work events (and it’s only work events that come from my Exchange calendar), but that doesn’t seem to be supported yet.

And there are a couple of caveats with Lightning and Provider. If you’re using a Beta test version of Thunderbird 3 then the standard Lightning and Provider downloads don’t work with it. There are nightly builds of them both available, and the version of Lightning that I tried worked fine but Provider still didn’t seem to work. I expect that situation to change quickly over the next few weeks as the Thunderbird 3 launch gets closer.

A year ago I was really disorganised. I never knew what I was supposed to be doing. Settling on Google Calendar as a definitive place to plan my life was a really good idea. At least now, I know which meetings I’m missing.