The UK Today

Well, that's the site upgraded from BlogEngine.Net 1.5 to 1.6. Could probably have gone a little smoother, mainly as a consequence of the new integration of Akismet conflicting with the old Commenter plugin. Still, in spite of sparse documentation, all seems to be okay now.

UPDATE 18:40 Well, according to my ftp client, I'd delete the Extension Manager folder, but obviously not. Logged in to the server and deleted it (again) and this time, fingers cross, things look better.

Tags: bloengine, 1.5, 1.6, upgrade

Social networking is wonderful! Really, it truly is wonderful. Where else can you go to chill out, catch up with gossip from your mates and get pestered by a thousand and one Farmville requests every day? Yup, the wonder of Facebook.

But occasionally it throws up a gem, a priceless diamond amongst a million grains of sand. And these moments make all the Mafia Wars spam worthwhile.

Way back in the dim and distant past, myself and Scaryduck used to hang out at the same tech college in Bracknell, drinking beer, listening to a truly eclectic selection of music and generally anything other than studying. There were also 4 other mates we hung out with, making the infamous 6 who are still banned from parts of Wales (long story, deserves to be told when the guilty have passed on, so in about 30 years or so). After college and university, we all went our merry ways, though some of us stayed in touch, albeit tenuously at times.

The recently I was sent a link to a newspaper article which mentioned one of the old crowd. He was now living an alternative lifestyle amongst the boat dwelling community of Reading. All in all, doing no real harm, and probably a net contributor to society, albeit not in your typical 9-to-5, wage slave, climbing the greasy pole sort of way. Then in chips another member of the old gang, pretty much accusing the boat dweller of still being a waster after all the intervening years. And this is where the irony (or lack thereof) comes in. For our critic is a member of the banking fraternity. Yup, they're climbing the greasy pole in the banking world.

And they're happy to throw accusations of waster at people who chose not to conform to their values.

Waster?

From a banker?

A member of that elite group that so badly screwed the financial system that in the UK alone they had to be bailed out by the state (and effectively tax payers) to the tune of £850 billion. So far. And yet they still receive/claim bonuses. So much for the reality of moral hazard in the banking sector.

So the question is, where are the real wasters? On the banks of the Thames in Reading, or strutting around the City of London with an irony bypass?

Tags: banking, social networking, facebook, irony

data.gov.uk launched yesterday. I was going to blog about it then, but the wifi on the East Coast train from Kings Cross was a bit flakey. Not that I'm complaining; I still think the provision of free wifi on long distance train services is something that should be a madatory requirement for the train operating companies, but that's a matter for another post.

Anyway, back to data.gov.uk, which is, in its own words:

This site seeks to give a way into the wealth of government data. As highlighted by the Power of Information Taskforce, this means it needs to be:

• easy to find;
• easy to licence; and
• easy to re-use.

We are drawing on the expertise and wisdom of Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt to publish government data as RDF – enabling data to be linked together.

Having Tim Berners-Lee's involvement gives the whole project the credibility it deserves. The site gives application and site developers (to name but two) access to a wealth of government datasets ranging from abandoned vehicles to young drivers and accidents in Wales, by way of locations of GPs/surgeries and tidal predictions. This data is going to be a massive asset to comunity web projects, mashups and other such applications.

However, there is a gaping hole in the form of the Ordnance Survey mapping data. The priority should be to open access to the complete geodata set, including post codes, electoral boundaries, etc. Currently Crown Copyright and OS licencing terms block the release of such data, but it is the foundation upon which numerous useful applications could be built. The priority should therefore be to open the OS geo data as quickly as possible. It is, after all, our data.

Anyway, if you're interested in playing with data and applications, go to the site and have some fun. And a closing message for those involved in the site; well done, please don't rest on your laurels, there's still a long way to go.

Tags: data, government, mashup, geodata, mapping, ordnance survey, national statistics

UPDATE 22-Jan-2010 21:50

The PCC petition is currently unavailable. For more information see this post at Bloggerheads.

In the UK the press is effectively self-regulated by a body called the Press Complaints Commission. However history has shown a chronic unwillingness for the PCC to act with any real force. As Nick Davies over at Flat Earth News has noted, over a 10 year period the PCC received over 28,000 complaints regarding breaches of its code. Fully 90% of these were rejected on technical grounds without any investigation by the PCC. Of the remainder a mere 1.6% or 448 complaints went to adjudication, and more than half of these were rejected.

So the PCC is hardly an auspicious body, but what can we do?

Annually the PCC invites suggestions for improvments to the the Editors Code of Practice. This year a group of concerned bloggers have decided to make a submission, the detail of which follows below:

Tags:

Well, if anyone can see this then it look like the initial resuscitation of this blog has succeeded.

I could probably write for hours on the whys and wherefores of the prolonged hiatus in blogging. Put simply, life got in the way or, be more realistic, this blog would have got in the way of life.

But there are still things I want to say and do, so rather than start afresh, I whipped out the tool box, rolled up my sleeves and gave the old site a thorough overhaul. There're plenty of things on the "To Do" list, but a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

So, hello!

Tags: admin