CVE IDs: CVE-2026-30495, CVE-2026-30496 Vendor: Optoma / Coretronic Corporation Disclosure Date: 2026-02-01 Public Disclosure: 2026-05-02

TL;DR

I'd owned my $3000 Optoma CinemaX P2 projector for nearly four years when I decided 2026 would be the year I started looking at IoT devices. I've got a few IoT things, but I figured that starting with the only Android device (and the most expensive) made sense. Having just read The Kimwolf botnet is stalking your local network, I started by testing ADB Debug- and immediately had root access, on the very first attempt of my IoT-hacking career. Everything they say is true.

The projector was released in September 2020, but runs Android 8 with a security patch level from December 2017 - already 3 years out of date when it shipped. The last firmware update was July 2021 and addressed HDMI issues, not security. It ships with a user-debug build, an 'su' binary, and ADB wide open on the network.

In March 2026, Optoma issued a new firmware that addresses the ADB issue (CVE-2026-30495), but leaves the unauthenticated control API (CVE-2026-30496) exploitable. That update is not pushed through the on-device updater, the version string is unchanged, and the release notes don't mention security, so most owners will never receive it.

Further firmware analysis revealed 5 further probable high or critical vulnerabilities (mostly TLS-related) that I simply haven't had time to submit.

Affected Products

I tested on a CinemaX P2, but based on shared firmware, these models are likely affected too:

Affected Versions

The projector reports firmware version TVOS-04.24.010.04.01 with ro.build.display.id = P1_Lite-userdebug 8.0.0 OPR5.170623.014 TVOS-04.24.010.04.01 test-keys. Optoma did not change this string across the security rebuild, so the only reliable per-build identifier is the Android ro.build.date property, which is not readable once the projector is patched.

Disclosure

An nmap sweep of my LAN showed the projector listening on TCP 5555 (ADB) and 2345 (HTTP). Neither should be reachable without authentication.

I reported both issues to Optoma on 2026-02-01:

• Optoma UK / EMEA via the UK PSTI enquiry form (Ticket #11594)
• Optoma US via the US support portal (Ticket #2033016)

Optoma US acknowledged the same day; Optoma EMEA acknowledged on 2026-02-04 and confirmed they had escalated the report to the relevant team. Optoma US never contacted me, nor responded to my followups, after initial acknowledgement. EMEA did continue to engage.

CVE-2026-30495: Unauthenticated Remote Root Access (CVSS 9.6 Critical)

The projector exposes ADB (Android Debug Bridge) on port 5555 with no authentication required. From there you can trivially su to root. Here you go, just grab your wifi passwd stored in cleartext:

$ adb connect 192.168.1.73
connected to 192.168.1.73:5555
$ adb shell
P1_Lite:/ $ su
P1_Lite:/ # cat /data/misc/wifi/WifiConfigStore.xml | grep PreSharedKey
<string name="PreSharedKey">&quot;REDACTED&quot;</string>

Vendor response

On 2026-03-23, Optoma EMEA notified me that a new firmware build was available addressing this issue. Static analysis of the unflashed image confirms the relevant Android build flags are flipped:

• ro.adb.secure=0 → 1
• ro.debuggable=1 → 0
• persist.sys.usb.config=adb → none

There are several problems with how the patch is being delivered:

• The new firmware is labelled C13.2, the same version string as the known-vulnerable build it replaces. There is no way for an owner to tell from the version number whether they have the patched build.
• The release notes do not mention this security issue.
• The firmware is not offered through the on-device update mechanism. I have checked many times over the years and have never been offered an update; this one is not offered either. Possibly a side-effect of the unchanged version string.
• The updated firmware is published on the Optoma Europe download page but not on the Optoma USA download page as of disclosure. The projector was sold in both regions.
• The updated firmware still ships with the 'su' binary, So the patch only raises the bar for reaching the shell- anyone who gets shell on a patched device still gets root.

The combination of silent release notes, no automatic update, partial geographic coverage, and no version bump essentially means that this remains unfixed for all practical purposes.

CVE-2026-30496: Unauthenticated Remote Control API (CVSS 6.3 Medium)

This isn't as severe as the first one, but there's an HTTP API on port 2345 that allows full remote control - not just reading settings, but changing them:

# Read volume
$ curl http://192.168.1.30:2345/get/Volume
93

# Change volume (no auth required)
$ curl http://192.168.1.30:2345/inc/Volume
94

# Set arbitrary value
$ curl -X PUT "http://192.168.1.30:2345/set/Volume?value=50"
0

# Mute the device
$ curl -X PUT "http://192.168.1.30:2345/set/Mute?value=1"
0

Anyone on your network can mess with your projector settings, including even hammering them to damage the projector.

The API exposes 74 distinct actions across display, audio, power, network protocols, lamp telemetry and more: Coretronic Central Manager API: Endpoint Inventory.

Vendor response

Optoma did not address this issue. The control API is not mentioned in the release notes for the March 2026 firmware and is not closed by the firmware image. Even owners who manually apply the partial patch for CVE-2026-30495 remain exposed via this vector.

Other Issues

Additionally, the CinemaX P2 reports Android security patch level 2017-12-01 and runs Android 8.0.0.

• The device is missing every monthly fix from the Android Security Bulletins since January 2018.
• Android 8 reached end-of-life for Google security updates in October 2020 (one month after the Cinemax P2 first went on sale!)
• The firmware build is userdebug rather than user, signed with test-keys rather than release-keys - Not appropriate for a consumer device.

What You Should Do

If you own one of these projectors, realistically treat the device as compromised if it's ever been on a network exposed to the internet.

1. Disconnect it from the network entirely if you don't need it online - if you only feed it video over HDMI from an Apple TV, set-top box, or laptop, the projector has no reason to be on WiFi or Ethernet at all. This is the only step that fully closes both vulnerabilities.
2. Manually apply the March 2026 firmware from the Optoma Europe download page (or the UHZ65UST equivalent). Identify it by file date (see the CVE-2026-30495 vendor-response section above for why the version string can't be relied on). This closes the ADB vector but not the unauthenticated control API.
3. Isolate it - Put it on a separate VLAN or guest network. The unauthenticated control API on port 2345 is not addressed by any current firmware.
4. Don't use it on shared networks - Hotels, offices, anywhere you don't control the network.
5. Disable network features - If you don't need Alexa integration or remote control apps, don't use them.
6. Block outbound traffic - At your firewall if possible.

Timeline

Technical Details

Full evidence available, on request:

• ADB session logs showing root escalation
• API testing logs showing unauthenticated control
• Network packet captures
• Static analysis notes for the five further high/critical findings referenced in the TL;DR (mostly TLS-related)

AI Disclosure: I used Claude to help with some of the analysis and writeup. Not that I really needed to.

Questions? stefan@whitelabel.org

I've quietly shipped something I'm quite pleased with: Wikilinker, a browser extension that auto-links the top 1,000,000 Wikipedia names on any webpage you visit.

It's a modern rebuild of the Wikiproxy I hacked together in 2004 — same idea, much better execution. The extension runs entirely in your browser, makes no API calls, and uses a bloom filter to pack a million Wikipedia titles into under 2MB.

Available for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari (macOS and iOS). You can also see how it works by trying this Guardian interview with Jimmy Wales through the proxy. Full details on the Wikilinker about page.

Yup, I'm another one of those former-developer exec types who started playing with Claude Code at Christmas.

Probably more than a decade ago, Cory told me off for letting this blog fall off the internet and become yet more linkrot. I always felt a bit guilty about that, but never quite got round to fixing it. But partially inspired by Danny and his oh so sleek ALMNCK, now me and my new codependent buddy Claude Code grabbed all the old posts from the Internet Archive, fixed up the broken links where we could, linked to the archive when we needed to, and basically rather shonkily stood the whole thing up again. So you get a bit of a snapshot of what I was like when I was a whippersnapper. Beware.

We took care to put the articles back at their old urls. I'm justing waiting for the traffic to come flooding in. But yeah, one less dead website.

There's some cleanup left to do, and the plan is to make this into Corpse Reviver - a generic tool for extracting dead blogs from the archive and standing them up again.

Stef

Breaking News

I hadn't even finished writing the FaxYourGP launch blog post when the news below hit the Twitters:

Less than 24 hours after the launch of https://www.faxyourgp.com, the rollout of care.data has been delayed by 6 months.

Well, bloody marvellous. I won't say it was 'us what won it', because we were a small little effort on the tail end of some dogged and fantastic campaigning by others, but I'm glad that maybe we were a tipping point.

So we have 6 months to sort this out. Here's what care.data should do:

- Provide an online, easy to use, secure opt-in/opt-out system, that doesn't involve unintelligible codes, a burden on GPs, or any other obfuscated funny business. You could do worse than reading gov.uk/service-manual to learn how.

- Opt-in rates will be much higher if you explain the benefits and risks of care.data widely, clearly and honestly. This requires proper investment in communicating with the public over the next six months, not just a jumble sale-style leaflet drop.

I believe there are potential benefits to care.data, but they won't be realised without an honest discussion with the owners (i.e. patients) of the most personal data there is. This includes listening to and responding to people's genuine fears, and well as explaining the benefits more clearly.

Once we've figured out if these things are happening, we shall decide whether to pause FaxYourGP.

The story behind faxyourgp.com

16 years ago, in 1998, when Tony Blair had just come to power and the year DVDs went on sale for the first time, I was part of a small group of citizen activists who built Stand.org.uk. As part of that campaign we built a web-to-fax gateway so that people could contact their MPs, who at the time were notoriously hard to contact via 20th century email. Partly, it was a joke: 'haha, MPs still use faxes!'

But it turned out to be quite useful for people, and in 2001, we launched a generic version, faxyourmp.com which in 2005 under the care of mysociety.org evolved into writetothem.com expanded beyond MPs to all tiers of democracy. WTT now facilitates hundreds of thousands of democratic communications each year.

I thought my days of fax-based activism were over more than a decade ago, but imagine my surprise to returning to the UK in January and finding out about this.

Some thoughts and questions about care.data

- Did they really think they could get away with not providing a central opt-out, and that telling people to send code plural9ZZAlpha to their GP would be acceptable, in 2014?

- How can anyone have so little respect for patients or GPs?

- Didn't they know that, if the NHS was subject to the same laws as businesses, the Information Commissioner would never approve this?

- Did they really think that no-one would step up and challenge them on this?

- Or that by pretending that this trivial thing was so technically difficult, they would only make people more worried about care.data, not less?

- These thoughts were our primary motivation.

Some faxYourGP facts:

- It's built on the proven, secure, reliable WriteToThem codebase, which has been delivering sensitive citizen communications for over 10 years. It is battle-proven.

- It really did take us a couple of weekends. I haven't programmed in 10 years, but with a little help from some friends (and the mysociety codebase), it wasn't hard.

- Our main cost is sending faxes. about 4p each.

- We are very careful to not spam GPs. They use their fax machines for critical activities (hilarious though that might be to the rest of us). So we had to alter the WTT code to send only one fax per day, listing all the patients who wanted to opt out.

- We send faxes because it's the most reliable way to reach the largest number of GPs. Yes, that is daft in 2014. We can do email too, once we know the GPs are happy with that.

The first time I touched a mac, I remember as clear as yesterday. It was 1984, I was 12, I walked into Cambridge Computer Store on Emmanuel Street in Cambridge, UK. I was hacking assembler on my ZX Spectrum and playing with the BBC Micro at school, so I knew what computers were and were capable of.

There, at the front, was a Mac, with MacPaint, a keyboard, and this funny little box. I'd never seen anything like it. I moved the box, and the arrow moved on the screen. If I pushed the button on the top of the funny little box and moved it, a corresponding squiggle appeared. I clicked the virtual 'buttons' down the right, and the 'brush' changed. It was a revelatory moment. This was completely intuitive, and changed everything.

I think I drew a willy and walked out of the shop.

[I suppose I should disclaim at the beginning that what I'm saying may not be representative of all African trips. My point is that not all African trips conform to the stereotypes. We weren't adventurers, we were plain and simple independent tourists]

We sat on the banks of the Zambezi river. There were cucumber sandwiches and Pimms. The hotel is an old colonial farm where the farmer murdered his wife in the dining room because he thought she was having an affair with the local priest. They sound an 'all clear' in the morning when the hippos have left the grounds, and we're warned to stay away from the river's edge because of the crocodiles.

It was lovely to stay at, but quite the throwback.

We drove 2550km to get here across 4 countries. We camped wild in Botswana, and stayed at various campsites along the way.

Some fun facts that aren't true about travelling in Africa:

1. The roads are full of potholes. Nonsense: you can drive from Cape Town to Victoria Falls, 2918km, :

Cape Town to Victoria Falls on Google Maps

without hitting a single pothole. (We did the Cape Town to Windhoek leg last year - this year we did Windhoek to Victoria Falls)

The roads look like this...

and this:

and this:

and this:

(there's an elephant in that last pic!)

The other drivers are dangerous. No, not really. Mostly the roads were totally empty (see above), but we found the drivers in Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Zambia to be fine. (the same is NOT true in Cape Town, Nairobi, or Lagos)

2. The police are corrupt and will ask you for bribes. There are police roadblocks outside most major towns, but they efficiently checked our driving licences and destination, and were, without fail, courteous and friendly. No-one asked us for a bribe, intimidated or otherwise acted strangely with us. One policeman in Kasane went well out of his way to help us and make sure we were ok, and I wish I could remember his name and thank him here.

3. Border crossings take forever and are corrupt. Not our experience. There's certainly a tendency for bureacracy that is unusual for a European (or at least one from a Schengen country), but if your papers are in order and you have the right fees for importing the vehicle, you're fine. The border officials we met (at big crossings and obscure ones), were, like the police, courteous, friendly and honest. Here's the paperwork generated by the 3 border crossings:

I wish that I was treated as well by the hostile, rude, officious bastards at Heathrow as I was by their equivalents at Kasanguna or Victoria Falls.

Over the years, Kay and I have driven the length and breadth of Europe, across Patagonia in Argentina/Chile, and also big chunks of the western US. I can't say that I found driving across 5 African countries any more difficult than any of those. The biggest shock for me was how few other tourists there were on the roads, and how empty the amazing campsites and lodges we stayed at were.

I think other people try and play up the african adventurer side of it. Let's be honest, we're not. We're just tourists, but that's fine.

And the the things we did and saw along the way were pretty amazing:

It was one of the best holidays we've ever had, and I recommend you come on down and try it.

I just did an interview with Paul Carr (formerly of the internet), and @sarahcuda on techcrunchtv, about the Kenyan/African tech scene.

I'm in Nairobi right now; things are especially exciting at the moment. The Central Business District is chaos ahead of the promulgation of the new constitution on Friday (probably already happened by the time I post this), but there's a whole bunch of really, REALLY exciting things happening:

1. The big mobile  price war. Last week, Zain (now owned by Bharti Airtel), cut their airtime and SMS tariffs to 25% of the previous, causing the other operators to immediately follow suit. In a country where people spend 50% of their disposable income on their phones, this is a huge deal, and will spark another round of mobile phone innovation and usage. The main point here is that lowering the cost of using technology, lowers the cost of failure; as Clay Shirky says, in turn this lowers the risk of innovation. I believe this will have a big impact on my business, Mocality.com, by making it easier for EVERYONE to use us. Compare these two photos of adverts for Orange's tariff, taken on the same day;

The pricing is changing so fast, that they can't even take down the old billboards quick enough!

- (blowing own trumpet) Mocality hit a big milestone this week - we signed up our 60,000th Nairobi business, making us easily the largest business directory in Africa. Most of our businesses have no web presence other than our listing - I'm very proud to have given so many businesses their first outpost on the internet, and thank everyone involved, especially our hardworking Ambassadors and our network of crowdsourcing Agents. We're re-launching our website on the 30th August, now actively open for business.

- Maker Faire Africa is taking place on the 27th and 28th August, here in Nairobi - it'll be an explosion of local tech innovation.

I namechecked a bunch of internet businesses/projects in Africa that I think are leading the way (although this is nothing like a complete list). Since TV is such a crappy medium for delivering URLs, I'll list them here:

- Mocality

- Pesapal

- Kalahari Kenya (disclaimer - sister company to Mocality)

- Ushahidi.com

- The iHub (like the techhub that Paul mentioned, but better) (sorry, Mike :) )

- eatout.co.ke

- jobberman.com

- village telco

- symbiotic

- jobberman - in the interview, some weird mental buffer overflow made me say that they're in India. They're in Nigeria. Apologies.

There's a great tech scene in South Africa, but I have to say, that I think Kenya eclipses it. Mocality's country manager, Josh Mwaniki and I  spent Wednesday giving our SA Head of Customer Service a crash course in Nairobi - Ray was pretty astonished at the variety and density of technology retail (phones, PCs, everything) across the city. Mobile tech (retail, M-Pesa, airtime sales) powers commerce in Nairobi like no where else.

Right, more later, I'm off to the Maker Faire party now.

iBooks and my iPhone/iPad can read pdfs, but iTunes' support for pdfs on the filesystem is non-existent. Adding pdfs to iTunes is a pain. I didn't understand why iTunes.app didn't appear as an option for opening pdfs in the contextual menu. Note: I do not want to make iTunes the default App for handling pdfs - that would  be crazzzeeeeee.

After much web searching, and more than a little help from some Monkeyz, the answer is this.

1. Make sure iTunes is NOT running.

2. Right-click on iTunes.app and choose 'Show Package Contents'

3. In the window that opens, open Contents, then open 'Info.plist' in a text editor

4. paste the following

<dict>
<key>CFBundleTypeExtensions</key>
<array>
<string>pdf</string>
<string>PDF</string>
</array>
<key>CFBundleTypeMIMETypes</key>
<array>
<string>application/pdf</string>
</array>
<key>CFBundleTypeRole</key>
<string>Viewer</string>
</dict>

Finally, Rebuild the LaunchServices Database by running the following incantation on the command line.

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user

now, right-clicking on any pdf should include iTunes in the contextual 'Open With' Menu, so you can add pdfs to iBooks RIGHT THERE:

And people say that macs are obtuse and confusing. pah!

Young Rewired State is a multi-city, multi-day UK event to get the best of young UK coding talent mashing up government data and generally encouraging insightful and innovative trouble-making.

From the site:

"During the first week of August, Young Rewired State will again show what groups of talented young coders can do with Government data. Young developers will spend the week at centres held at businesses and organisations across the UK, working with established tech teams, mentors and visiting experts making apps, websites, games and visualisations.

These will then be played back to an awed roomful of Press, government and interested people on the Friday afternoon in London, with pizza, cake and drinks."

There's prizes too (one of which I'm incredibly honoured to have named after ME ME ME!)

Right, this is the rebirth of my blogging. My first post in at least 5 years, with a new domain and a new title.

Anyone who knows my wife, @kerrching, knows that she's a Apple nut. Also, with a June birthday, she has conveniently positioned herself perfectly for the Apple release cycle. An iPad was inevitable for her birthday, but I knew that if I just delivered a wrapped box, there wouldn't be much of a surprise. Where's the fun in that? So I rang my friends James and Paul, who happens to run the finest chocolate shop in London, Paul A Young Fine Chocolates and said "Could you freeze an iPad in chocolate carbonite, and have it survive?". They weren't sure, but were willing to give it a go.

Additionally, iPads aren't available yet in South Africa, so it had to smuggled over from London, without Kay finding out what was going on.

The prepared product:

Unwrapping begins:

The "I like chocolate, but you gave me 2 kg of it for my birthday, are you a bit nuts? look":

Why don't you pull on that little ribbon embedded in the chocolate?

Realisation!

Revelation:

Acceptance:

Success!!!!!!!!

With many many thanks to all the wonderful people who helped this to happen:

Simon , who waited in line forever at the London Apple Store to source the machine itself.

James and Paul, for successfully performing the carbon-freezing process, and

Karen, who went through a couple of hours of hell trying to explain what was going on to the South African customs people.

Oh, and just in case you're worried: no iPads were harmed in this production :)

Update: 16:27, June 14th

Wow. Well, thanks for all the kinds words, everyone. This ran away a little more than I expected.

Media types: Yes, you can use the photos without permission, so long as you maintain attribution with my name or a linkback, as per https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en_GB

Thoughts on #barcampnairobi/wherecamp

1. Great turnout - over 600 Kenyan geeks and entrepreneurs, with a healthy sprinkling from the NGO community too.

2. Better gender ratio than I've seen at any barcamp in the UK, and any tech event at all in South Africa.

Why is that?

3. If I had a criticism of some of the companies that I see/meet in Kenya, it's that they don't focus tightly enough: "we've built a social network and a classifieds platform and a game and a dating site" - as Erik said about Ushahidi, technology is 5% and people/growth is 90% (the other 5%? luck.)

Without focus, you'll never be able to grow your 5 or 10 sites together. Pick the best, put the others in a drawer and dust them off later when the first is profitable or at least has audience and growth.

4. The iHub is a great space. Lovely combo of good connectivity and informality of setting makes it perfect for the barcamp ethos, better than the eBay offices in London or similar corporate venues that I've barcamped at. This place is going to be great.

5. Loved the positive reception that Mocality got from everyone here. Really great to hear the feedback.

Location:Nairobi, Kenya

Kitten themed packs from MOO

we shoulda done this a longggggggggg time ago.

MOO Stickerbooks.

These are so exciting I can't breathe.

I really must blog more often ;)

Of course, this is the big day I've been waiting for and wanting to write about for the last six months, but even today I manage to get scooped by coates. so I'll leave it to him.

http://www.moo.com- no politics, no data, no worthiness, just printing sexy little cards from your pictures.

I'd like to thank everyone. I'm so excited.

Emma Says:

Congrats the site is great and your product is v. cool. I would encourage you to check out our product Capture Cards www.capturecard.com (we just sell paper so it would be an excellent addition to your current offering) Just imagine having a full color calling card with stickers on the back you could have SOOOO much fun. Let me know if you have questions.

September 19th, 2006 at 6:40 pm

actually a quicktime of a days worth of pictures taken with my 20D at 6 fps..., since the youtube output looked rubbish:

Sophia and James' Wedding

The low quality youtube version, if the above doesn't work for you:

One Response to "My first ever youtube video"

Nick Ludlam Says:

You know, that sort of works!

I'm not sure what's going on with the aspect ratio at times, but when you've taken a series of shots together in b/w, it does give it an arthouse film feel

August 17th, 2006 at 11:25 am

I just got back from a very happy week long trip to the Bay Area, to find that LMS Capital (not getting no googlejuice from me), a property developer, wants to build [London's 12th highest skyscraper across the road from our first floor flat.

Upon arrival, we rushed to see the (4-day long) exhibition that LMS Capital have organised to 'publicise' this proposal. We have until august 17th to object.

Had an interesting conversation with the robot marketing the proposal, in which she responded to my clear distress at having 44 floors of flats staring straight through the windows into my bedroom, with 'don't you want a community in your area?' to which I replied, 'we moved to Hoxton for the community! you think we're so short of bars and community that we need a 140m glass skyscraper to help us connect?'

But I suppose, being a new technology nerdy kind of guy, and someone who has spent a fair bit of time taking things that should be online (but aren't) there, a few things surprise me about the planning process.

1. We got a nice 4 page A4 glossy through the door that doesn't include a URL, not even for this major capital project, not for the company that's building it. Not an address nor a phone number either.

2. Whilst the planning notice from Islington council claimed that the planning info would be available online, there was no URL included in that document either, and I can't find any reference to it online.

If I were the sort of paranoid who'd spent 10 years extracting public information from public bodies who didn't really want me to, I'd suspect, possibly, an unwillingness to use technology to improve the public's access to the planning process. I still have to take a day off work to go and get the detailed reports.

only one thing for it, I guess, better build a website.

We'll start with some pics:

photos from LMS Capital's proposed City Road Estate exhibition

One Response to "I think I now understand how Arthur Dent felt about that bypass"

Tom Says:

Think you'll find those contact details in the darkened cellar of the planning department?.. perhaps in a locked filing cabinet, at the back of a disused lavatory, with a sign on the door saying beware of the leopard...

September 12th, 2006 at 10:05 am

I have a new job, I'm CTO of a new digital printing startup called MOO. We make things. Making things is fun. I'll post more about them later.

One Response to "Right, time to start blogging again"

Becky Caroe Says:

so what's MOO's URL?

August 3rd, 2006 at 11:31 am

Tricia McMillian dead

Tricia McMillian dead

obviously from some (as yet) unpublished edition of the Hitch-hiker's Guide

(not laughing at tragedy, but merely spotting a co-incidence)

I clipped this from a US Airways in-flight magazine. It doesn't say where this delightful institution is, but I'm guessing Vegas.

Check out the dolly's atrociously photoshopped mushroom cloud dress. Celebrating the culture and diverse history of the original Weapons of Mass Destruction. Lest we forget, the United States of America is the only nation to have used nuclear weapons in anger.

Because of christmas, chaos and general technical disorderliness, it took us a little longer than anticipated to get ready, but the Open Rights Group is now ready to let the Pledgers put their money where their typing is and help us get the ORG up and running.

Even if you didn't sign the pledge, please support Open Rights Group. Get in early and be one of the Founding Thousand.

Well done James, Sam, Ben (and everyone who helped deal with my almost blind panic at the end of last year) for getting the thing up and running.

I've been very quiet on the blogging front recently. Something about the autumn, something about being insanely busy on some secretish and some not so secretish projects. Something about being a little bored with writing about the web. I've had an idea for a total reconfigured blog here that I now have the toys to put together properly. Anyway, this is digression.

Yesterday we had the inaugural meeting of The Open Rights Group, and by an amazing co-incidence, we also hit our pledge, so now starts the business of, well, getting down to business.

Since launching one organization a month seems to be too few, I'm also today inordinately proud to announce FarmSubsidy.org. It's a milestone for me in many ways:

- First pan-european political (with a small p) site

- first internationalised site I've built- not finished yet, but we have the capability and the ambition for 8 european languages

- probably did more down and dirty coding on this than anything in years. Which may be why it might be a bit ropey in places.

What does it do?

Farmsubsidy.org is publishing the results of (eventually we hope) 25 Freedom of Information Requests, 1 per EU country. The question is quite straightforward: "Who are the recipients of Common Agricultural Policy subsidies?", in essence, where is all that money going.

It turns out, to some quite surprising places. Who'd have thought that celebrity staff sackers Gate Gourmet would get €670,000 of farming subsidies last year? Perhaps they own the sheep that wander the fields at Heathrow.

There'll be lots more data, more ways to slice and dice, just, y'know more, over the next few months.

Anyway, the idea is that, full and frank and open disclosure is a wonderful thing, and will help the citizens of Europe be assured that their money is being very well spent.

For some quite entertaining bits of bureaucratic squirming, you can read the different excuses that various governments have come up with to justify keeping the data secret.

It seems to be a day for old dogs to wake up.

Since 1998, when I first started researching parliament's online activity, I've been badgering everyone I've ever met who might be in a position to make it happen, to make parliament.gov.uk point at parliament.uk . I blogged about it in February 2003

They've finally done it! parliament.gov.uk

I'd be really interested to see the stats on how many people were trying to use that URL, whether it makes a difference to the traffic.

Nice work, John and Alex!

It's about the 7 year anniversary of the launch of upmystreet, and the Cabinet office has just made the latest of a long line of announcements that they're finally going to pull their finger out and do something like an official version. I always maintained that if the government did it's job properly, UMS wouldn't need to exist, but i doubt this version will be any better than any of their previous attempts (warning: contains some of the most egregiously ugly and wrong html anywhere in cyberspace, including the fabulous message "We have detected that your PC is blocking the presentation of popups on the Neighbourhood Statistics web site. You are advised to enable popups for this site, as it has been designed to make full use of the capabilities that popups can provide." ).

I'm sure Upmystreet's current owners could have cried foul here, if they hadn't abandoned the idea of the site being about local information.

Matthew Somerville and the Mysociety people have surpassed themselves, again.

Placeopedia will take you far less time to understand, enjoy and contribute to than it would for me to explain. Genius.

I pre-registered with Be Unlimited a few months ago, and then completely forgot about it. Then, a couple of weeks ago, I got an email from their MD, Dana Pressman. Dana and I worked on a little startup way way back ago when I was at Virgin and she was at Sapient, (before the boom, before the bust), and I haven't seen her since.

I volunteered to be one of the first guinea pigs for the new service.

It turns out I was not only one of the first, but the actual FIRST. Their very first punter. I think this may make me the first person in the entire country with such a fat pipe, since to the best of my knowledge, the other providers have announced, but not launched, such a service.

Switching providers didn't exactly go smoothly ( the fault of my existing provider shutting off connectivity too soon), but I've heard of people with far worse experiences with established players like Bulldog and BT, and you get a special kind of service when you enter at this stage (Faulty modem? one of our techies will come round later with a new one (and please can we take some pictures?)), but at about 6.30pm last night, I was up and running.

What's it like?

Downstream: 18.6 Mbits/second

Upstream: 1.236 Mbits/second

I didn't think it would make that much difference. But it's actually really bloody excellent. After 20 minutes, I was utterly sold. Especially having decent upstream:

I've been saying for a while now that the providers' models are all wrong. Most businesses (outside of certain media niches) don't need SDSL (any large scale websites are hosted in a datacenter, and not on the office connectivity), but consumers are into P2P in a big way, are uploading massive files to flickr.com and everywhere else. As time goes on, the idea that most consumers are passive media sponges rather than distributors gets more and more broken, by the evidence. Let business have adsl, and give me as much upstream as you can.

We need decent upstream. I hope that Be shake up the market in a big way.

I have a question though: What should I be using it for (apart from the obvious)? What applications should I be trying? What should I be playing with? Suggestions most welcome.

(I might start with moving whitelabel.org, since I have more domestic bandwidth that its current hosting.)

On the BBC news just now, a report that the British government has sent 40 tonnes of aid to Niger to help the 3.5 million starving people.

(40 tonnes) / 3 500 000 = 11.4285714 grams of food per person.

I don't think there's anything else to say.

I keep meaning to resolve to post more of the endless linux/Mac OS X tweaking and general trouble fixing that is part of my life. Giving back to the community kindathing.

Usually I don't, because the thing takes days or weeks to fix and I'm not good at keeping the right kind of notes as I go along.

This one was quite simple though, and I couldn't find anything useful on either the HP or Apple sites.

I just bought an Airport Express and a HP Laserjet 1022. Setting up the Airport Express and getting it plugged into the existing wifi network was a dream. Then I plugged the USB printer into the Express, installed the driver software from the CD, and it automagically appeared in Printer Setup Utility List. Wow, I thought.

However the Setup utility couldn't find the exact right driver (the 1022 didn't appear in the list), and other HP drivers with similar model numbers were all postscript and produced garbage.

After much googling and fiddling, and a nice but unproductive technical support call with Sean at HP, I went back to basics, and tried the printer straight into the Mac. This worked fine.

So then I tried plugging the printer into the Airport again, and lo, it could now find the right driver ok.

The technological moral of the story, as usual: start simple, and work your way slowly up to complicated.

I hope this helps someone else, because to paraphrase Arlo Guthrie, "you may find yourself in a similar situation" (and I bet 50 people a day do)

Postscript (haha!)

and the iFelix instructions got the box working from Ubuntu using the standard Printer prefs tool in 5 minutes. Hurrah!

UPDATE

The fix above worked fine on a Powerbook running Tiger, but I still can't get my G4 tower, also running Tiger, to see the printer over the wireless at all, only when it's plugged in via USB.

UPDATE 2

The fix above is wrong! I finally figured it out with the help of

this post on Apple's discussion boards

To make it detect the driver correctly,

• from an application, hit APPLE+P to print

  • From the Printer dropdown, select 'Add Printer'

  • choose your Bonjour printer

  It should now detect the driver correctly, and you'll be fine forever more.

  Judging by the Apple forums this is happening with quite a few printers and Tiger and Airport Express

New Statesman TheyWorkForYou award

Originally uploaded by philgyford.

the New Statesman New Media Award for Contribution to Civic Society. This is the third time a site I'm involved with has won this award, after Stand.org.uk in 1998, and faxyourmp.com in 2000. At least I think it was then. My memory of the awards ceremonies is always rather hazy.

So with London losing the best bit of green space in the east of the city to a coach park, and the G8 summi^H^H^Hriot, we might just miss out on this astonishing result. Well done to all the open sorcerers who wrote about, lobbied, phoned, or otherwise protested to help prevent this legislation.

Matthew Gertner and I have collaborated again to bring you a Technorati Greasemonkey script

It queries the technorati database (via a proxy that protects my technorati API key), and adds a block of links to blogs linking to the page you're on. It loads the links asynchronously, which is clever and nice. To make the links visible, click on the little green speech bubble, which appears at the top of every page, once the information is available.

Enjoy.

I have signed the pledgebank pledge against Identity cards, the Home Office's insane scheme to give 10 billion pounds of taxpayers money to the IT industry.

One of the things I noticed during travels round the world was that everywhere else we went, the trains ran on time. Thailand, Argentina, Korea, Tokyo (where if your train is late you get a note to show your boss, I hear), in all these places, a late train would be an event. If you think about it it makes sense; trains run on rails, they have controlled speeds, there shouldn't be any congestion.

In Britain, where trains are so routinely late that punctuality has been redefined as 'within 20 minutes of scheduled time' and even then only around 80% can make it, the people have forgotten that it doesn't have to be this way, and that in the rest of world, including the really poor parts, it just isn't.

I stopped travelling on the London Underground during peak times a few years ago, and avoid it whenever possible. The thought of going through this summer ritual is too much for me.

A while back, on their otherwise execrable website, Transport for London began to publish disruption maps. These are kind of useful, but they don't give one the bigger picture. Very few of us spend more than an hour or two a day down there. Perhaps I'm just unlucky? Is my commute on the worst line? if I bought a house near a Jubilee line station, would I get to work on time more often?

Like all British people with an interest in visualising data, I'm a huge fan of Harry Beck's tube map, even if we ignore it's more obvious flaws ( if the thing is so damn usable, then why aren't the lines named after the colours?). I also love visualisations that move, and so I'm dreamy with pleasure to be be able to combine the two...

Get to the point, stef

15 days ago, I wrote a script that grabs and saves the disruption map every 10 minutes. After

• adding a timestamp to each image with imagemagick

• removing all images recorded between 1:00am and 5:00 am (The Transport for London site is happy to show the tube as fully functioning when it is closed, but I think that's a tad disingenuous)

I compiled them into a quicktime movie.

Remember, "Disrupted lines appear in their normal colour!"

Update: Some people are having trouble with this on XP, but I can't reproduce the problem. Sorry

15 days of Tube Hell in 3 minutes (Bittorrent of the Quicktime)**

(dull old http Quicktime)

Furthermore, I now have a big pile of data upon which to do further visual analysis:

For instance:

The filesize of a colour-free-hence-disruption-free map is 52398 bytes. 469 of the 2165 images have this filesize, and a quick

find . -size 52398c |xargs eog

allows me to confirm that indeed, the

London Underground is disruption free, a remarkable 22% of the time it is running**.

My advice is to go and buy a bike.

(Copyright notice: I didn't have permission to do this. No doubt, again, I'm breaking all sorts of TFL copyright. No doubt, there's an army of teeth-sucking lawyers getting ready to sue me deeper underground than Hampstead station. Don't bother, it was a joke; if you send me a letter, I'll take it down, and you'll have increased the misery in the world by a small amount. Sleep tight.)

The length of time it takes the BBC to do anything online is legendary (still waiting for that email, Pete!, and many people there have expressed frustration over the years, and a temptation to just set something up elsewhere so they can get on with it.

The Newsnight G8 blog looks official enough until you look at the URL, and realise that it's being hosted outside of the nest. Looks like the backstage JFDI ethos has taken hold.

It seems a little bizarre though. One of the BBC's flagship shows resorts to Typepad to get its work done.

Matthew Gertner has taken the wikiproxy idea and run with it. Using an API that I created to do the database lookups (publicly available for all who want to play with it!) he created a Greasemonkey script that adds links to wikipedia entries from any web page you're browsing.

Read all about it

The UK's Parliament website needs a radical overhaul, according to a report by the Hansard Society

No shit.

I hope that if something does come of this, that Parliament comes to TheyWorkForYou and engages us in dialogue about what they could do with the site.

even after the fact:

Upmystreet Conversations wins a Prix Ars Electronica honourable mention.

via Joi Ito

"Like the Creative Archive, for data"

The BBC has launched a new site, backstage.bbc.co.uk that actively encourages people to mash up, remix, and re-invent the BBC's content. This is awesome, not least because my very own wikiproxy gets a mention :), but because it seems to me to mark the point at which the BBC are finally starting to really get the recombinatorial properties of the new web.

'Use our stuff to build your stuff'. Quite. Although as a licence payer, I might argue that this should be 'Use your stuff to build more of your stuff', but hey, I know how long it took to get even here.

This could be the point at which the BBC stops being a merely a broadcaster, stops being merely a publisher, and starts being a tool and a resource for all of us to use.

This could also be the point at which the BBC starts to differentiate itself from the commercial alternatives, by being a proper public service, rather than a publicly funded competitor.

Now, what have they got that we can use on theyworkforyou?

The launch of a load of RSS News Online feeds, under tight licences, would have been an exciting development a few years ago, but frankly now only merits at best a 'you, too, huh?' or possibly even 'Why did it take you so long?', but this could be as powerful as the BBC Model B was to a generation of kids who founded the British games industry.

Enough gushing. Well done, Tom and everyone.

Inspired by Make magazine, I decided to attempt a simple hardware modification on my laptop.

Tool required: a knife

Time required: under a minute

I don't know about you, but I can't remember a single time I've used the CAPS LOCK key on my keyboard intentionally. I do however, accidentally hit about 20 times a day. It serves no purpose other than to generate further presses on the Backspace key.

This simple modification fixes this behaviour, and on my laptop at least, STILL LEAVES IT OPERATIONAL should you ever need it, just harder to press by accident.

Original Computer

Step 1:

Gently prise off the CAPSLOCK key using the knife.

You should hang on to the key just in case you decide you want to sell the computer. In my case, it's relatively easy to clip it back on.

Finished mod:

This has reduced my incidences of puter rage significantly.

The cottage site is based on a theme that I've created called kubrick-CMS, that I intend to make available as soon as a) this election is over, and b) I've shifted whitelabel.org from Movable Type to Wordpress.

The Theme is basically kubrick, but with all the blog-specific stuff ripped out, a simple way to fix the home page to a single section, and stuff that makes it more geared to static sites. Because Wordpress is so nice to use, many people have been trying to do this with it.

About Wordpress

Wordpress is one of the best bits of open source I've come across. It's clean, it has good default designs, a fabulously simple installer, and good documentation. I love it.

It's also in well-written PHP, which should make it easy for a neanderthal coder like me to fiddle around with it.

Except that some programmer needs to get taken back to programming school and before forced to write only comments for a year before being allowed out again.

A cursory grep reveals over 700 function declarations in the wp-includes/ directory. Of these, less than 150 have any kind of legal comment character in the 5 lines previous to the function declaration, and only a handful have a meaningful comment describing what the function does. PHP is a weakly-typed language, so you cannot infer shit without reading the whole damn function.

For any system, let alone one that is supposed to be actively encouraging audience participation, this is beyond stupid. If you worked for me, and you didn't comment your code properly, you'd lose your job.

It's a shame, when they've put so much fine thought and effort into all the other bits, that this should let the product down.

3 Comments »

-

### Martin Geisler Online » Blog Archive » WordPress code quality Said,

May 22, 2005 @ 9:36 pm

[...] d improve some of the things I've described above. Apparently, there are others who agree with me about the quality of the WordPress code. Despite my complains, I [...]

-

### Joseph Scott's Blog Said,

June 6, 2005 @ 6:44 pm

You Don't Have To Be Pretty To Be Successful

I think most people would agree that over the last year or so WordPress (WP) has been successful as an open source project. It's been around longer than that, but it has certainly gained a lot more attention in the last 12 to 18 months. It was...

-

### Alastair Said,

November 6, 2005 @ 8:22 pm

I purposely write code that requires as little comment as possible - if your code is good enough, it shouldn't need commenting.

But perhaps that's because I write in a real language (C) not PHP, which any old moron can write (though not well).

For bloggers, Matt Jones, Ben Hammersley, and Tom Coates, to be doing a bit of spring cleaning. I've been planning to for ages, but not because I was bothered about the design, but because I'd had it enough of Movable Type. I never got my head round the template structure, and the textgif navigation on the admin UI made my hands hurt. It's probably better in version 3, but having used it on a couple of other sites, I've fallen for WordPress in a big way. Switching from MT took me about half an hour, including setting up redirects so there shouldn't be any dead links.

Haven't done any tinkering with the style yet, but I have now got things set up so that I can

• blog a picture straight from my phone

  - post an entry via email

  - start hooking into technorati and stuff in a big way

  So basically I'm ready to start playing with all the tools that everyone was really excited about a year ago.

  Now, off to find a decent, whitelabelish theme.

the best time to switch your blog from MT to WP is 5 minutes before leaving the house to go to the cinema.

on brief hiatus.

NorfolkCottage.co.uk

As a child, it was always the case that if you got my mother drunk enough, after a while she would become a little maudlin and proclaim that all she wanted was a cottage in Norfolk to run away to. Well, it took 30 years, but now she's got one.

It's available to hire, and I just built this little site with wordpress (for the CMS) and Flickr for a little photoblog so my mum can upload photos without destroying everything.

I've also insisted that we get broadband and wifi up there, so that I can use it as my secret hideout.

Are you thinking what we're thinking?

Originally uploaded by smagdali.

seen on the tube this week.

but I just thought this thread on flickr was both funny AND illuminating, forgive me.

Tag police on flickr

If information is a weapon, let's make it a fair fight

Jogi Panghaal said something interesting with respect to the work I did for banner site upmystreet.com; in India, the recently passed Right of Information act has led to the publication of a vast array of local statistics, and this in turn is revitalising local democracy, as people now turn up to public hearings of local bureaucrats armed with knowledge. I'm not sure we ever achieved so much at upmystreet except to fuel Britain's grubby house-price mania, but this is what we had in mind, and it's great to hear that it's working somewhere.

Slums as centres of innovation

Solomon Benjamin, an ex-architect, spoke about the research he's been doing comparing economic and innovative activity in Master Planned vs 'slum' neighbourhoods, and the results are startling.

Solly's PDF presentation

Solly finds that rather than being areas of high unemployment, slums are hotbeds of innovation and economic activity. Small firm clusters with high degrees of specialisation (auto parts, cabling, lighting) exist that create their own capital equipment and machinery, adapt highly rapidly to changing markets, develop highly skilled employees and generate large amounts of cash, functioning largely without access to credit. He then goes on to contrast this with what happens when the master planners clear a 'slum' (often literally giving the land to one of India's large conglomorates like Tata) to build a modern business park full of 'techno coolies' like call centre workers, and that almost all these measures of wealth (distribution), innovation and skills decrease dramatically.

:

Slums that have existing on a site for upto 50 years, can be cleared by the master planners because the do not appear on the 'official' maps. Geography is used as a tool of corporate power against the slum dwellers.

Solomon is quite rightly critical of some of the unthinking assumptions of the GIS crowd, but I believe that if knowledge is a weapon, then this is one battle where the balance of power is redressed by arming both sides, You certainly cannot take geographic knowledge away from the Master Planners, so the only solution is to take it back for ourselves.

Community mapping applications could legitimise these areas by literally putting them 'on the map'.

Finally, Solly says, in the battle between the 'slum' dwellers and the corporate taking over the land, when the resistance is high (brilliant placard: "We want water, not beer") and the usual corporate lobbying tactics fail, then it's time to bring in the **well-meaning middle class activists **to finish the job off. Ouch.

Used in India

• Accompanying the conference was an exhibition entitled 'Used In India' - the theme was the ways in which technology is adapted and hacked in the subcontinent: My favourite examples: The cellphone repair university - because a phone here are too valuable to throw away when they break. It's part of a wider trend: unable to afford (and sometimes it's just not available), support and repair contracts for hardware, backstreet industries reverse engineer the products and create a parallel servicing industry. No doubt this is criminal behaviour in WTO/patent and DCMA terms, but this IPR-free copy/hack culture (called juggard locally) is brilliant.

  Another idea was that the LED has replaced the role of gemstones, and natural shiny things in Asian religious iconography. I've seen this first hand at a shrine in Vietnam; after a 3 hour trek up a mountain to visit a temple in a cave, the buddha at the top of it was covered in blinkenlights. Well, why not?

I've been thinking about this for a while, but some work I'm doing at the moment with the wonderful WordPress has brought it to the fore. It's simple really.

Blogs makes publishing easy

WikiText makes formatting content easy.

So why has no one written a plugin for WordPress that drops in MediaWiki's wikitext parser so we can all write wikitext in our blogs?

Yeah, I know there's Markdown, and that other one, but wikitext is what I know, what everyone is going to know soon.

Daryl Houston looks like the right person to do it. How about it, Daryl?

I've been obviously having problems with my new phone, a shiny new 'j-lo' 3g nokia 6630. I've been trying to email pics to flickr directly from the handset.

Take picture, send as an email, and it gets about half way through and then dies.

The nice man at Orange technical support tells me that this is because 'you can't send pictures via email from that phone, only via via MMS'

so I said:

Is this an Orange restriction or a handset issue? He said it was because 'the handset ran Symbian, not Windows'

When I asked why the handset, from within the gallery application, gave me email as an option as well as MMS, and when I chose it, displayed a little paperclip logo, and said my email was 423kb in size, and then took two minutes trying to deliver the said message, he dribbled for a bit and then moved swiftly to terminate the call.

So which is it? Have I got a buggy lemon of a phone that doesn't work as advertised, or have Orange instructed their technical support people to blame Nokia for their customer-insulting walled garden policy?

and if it's the latter, who do I have to talk to, to be allowed to use my phone as I see fit?

UPDATE

I have this working now. seems like it was a network issue earlier, because its working like a dream. So it appears I've much maligned Orange in terms of policy, but nul point for having ignorant lying monkeys doing your technical support.

So far I love this phone.

I spent highly productive time comparing Doors8 to various festivals. The rave visuals initially set me off I think.

At the first lunch, I thought Doors8 was The Big Chill . Nicely decorated, very civilised, everyone sitting round in the sunshine listening to nice relaxing music (although there's only so much Gotan Project a person can take, we discovered).

Later that day, as the sun set, the fantastic exhibition opening of Used in India was obliterated in the strongest flash thunderstorm I've seen in a long while. Aha, I thought, Doors8 is Burning Man.

Saturday was a festival in India called Holi, and attendees had their own special Holi brunch, which only confirmed this for me. Quite remarkable.

more pics here

See who you can identify under the warpaint!

More about Holi

I've been on the road doing conferences for the past couple of weeks. Etech first, which I'm sure has been blogged by enough people already. I was talking about Theyworkforyou.com, of course. The thing was fun, but I didn't see much that I thought was truly cutting-edge technology (with the exception of some of the hardware hackers). A lot of stuff was cool applications of what was exciting at Etech a couple of years ago. Theyworkforyou.com, I have to admit, falls into this category (although we did get to roll out a couple of neat new features while we were there - shouts to Matthew!)

Perhaps my expectations were too high for Etech. I had a great time, but found the whole thing strangely flat.

Etech is, even more than most conferences, more about the back channel than the speakers. Actually entirely so. It's slight disconcerting to speak at an event where the speakers occupy the same role as the plot in good pornography: A conference needs to have them, but they are entirely incidental to the action. I've never been a pure MacGuffin before.

Still, the session went well, I thought. It's not easy explaining the evolutionary and random nature of British democracy to an american audience, (especially when you've got James Larsson and his exploding toilets in the next room!) but I think they liked it.

Not much to say about the other sessions that hasn't been covered better in a million other places, so I'll just say: the hardware hackers stole the show, and a few words abotu one session that simply made me angry:

High Order B(ullsh)its

JC Herz' session on military technology. She talked a lot about the humanitarian applications of the technology she was showing; it was all about keeping the boys in touch with each other in the convoy, and getting civilians to hospital, and then demonstrated some tech that was essentially and obviously really clever neat ways of killing people. Be a war whore if you must, JC, but don't pretend it something that it's not. I saw your work, and it reminded of something some friends of mine knocked together about US Military Policy

San Diego to New Delhi (insert ghastly 40 hour journey here)

From Emerging Tech to Emerging Economy -

I had far lower expectations of Doors of Perception 8. I wasn't really aware of what it was when I was asked to speak (thanks Tomfor passing it on), didn't really understand a great deal of the background that I read about it. I'm not a designer, and I often find I don't get designers (or architects for that matter), when they start theorising. I just don't understand the language.

But Doors8 turned out to be the best programmed, most stimulating, eye-opening, technologically interesting, and just damn fun event I've ever attended in a professional capacity. I'll be writing up various bits over the next few days. Quite remarkable. The Burning Man of conferences.

Main differences between Doors8 and Etech.

Etech had internet access everywhere. Getting online at the conference center in Delhi was difficult and erratic (they were installing their wifi network the same week we were there).

Gender ratio at Etech: I'd guess 90% male. Doors8 was 50/50 (possible even slightly more women than men). It's still depressing that technology in the US is such a boys game.

I saw more innovative applications of technology in India - largely I think, because necessity is the mother of invention.

Etech I found extremely cliquey. I met some very nice people (Hi Meg!), and it was good to get to hang out with some people from London that I don't get to see enough of, but much of felt like a big bloggers reunion. This is fine, but Doors8 was amazing for the number of new and really interesting people I met. I think everyone felt the same: by the third afternoon the programme had more or less disintegrated, because people just wanted to sit around and chat about their work and share.

I think Etech next year needs a good shake up, and I'll be posting more stuff about Doors over the next week or so.

I don't think I've ever seen so much activity on the civic activism front, as this week.

recently launched, or launching

• Directionlessgov.com, version 2 - now allows you to compare side-by-side the results from direct.gov. and google, and tracks which links people follow, slowly building a best links database - try 'porn' or 'intermediaries policy' for entertainment

  - TheGovernmentSays.com - Does what DowningStreetSays.com does but for the whole damn machine instead of just the PM's press briefings. RSS, trackbacks, comments, the works. Both of these are projects of the remarkable Sam Smith

  -

  WriteToThem.com FaxYourMP for all representatives!

  - Public Whip's astonishing Dream MP feature

  - TheyWorkForYou.com has been going from strength to strength, adding more of Hansard, links to wikipedia, and today, email alerts, so you can track MPs (mail me whenever she speaks, and key phrases ("fox hunting"). It's linked from every search page, it's lovely and simple and it rocks.

  Here's my optimistic prediction for the upcoming election. All the parties will be busy planning endless viral campaigns and pale imitations of Howard Dean's activity in the US election. No one will give a shit. The public will instead use the internet to ensure they are informed as they never before as to what the incumbent has been doing in there name for the last 5 years.

  My dream is people up and down the nation opening the door to canvassers with a printout of TheyWorkForYou or Public Whip in their hand.

  ## 2 Comments »

  -

  ### Ben Said,

  February 21, 2005 @ 3:16 pm

  Fuck it, I might do my "which party are you" viral Excel spreadsheet after all.

  -

  ### Gavin Bell Said,

  April 7, 2005 @ 2:19 pm

  In fact the canvassers seem to be bringing the printouts to the people....

Faxyourmp.com finally ceased to exist today. The faxing service that originally appeared as part of stand.org.uk waaaaaaaaaaaaay back in '98, morphed into faxyourmp.com in 2000, won a bazillion awards, delivered somewhere in the region of 110,000 faxes to parliament on a budget of a few hundred quid, with source code so bit-rotted and ancient that no-one could remember how it worked (and as long as no-one touched it, it continued to) is no more. We'd had enough, knackered, finished, bored.

However, this is truly excellent news, because it has been replaced by WriteToThem.com, which does exactly the same thing but allows people to contact not just their MPs, but also their Councillors, MEPs, MSPs, London Assembly Members, Welsh Assembly Members, traffic wardens and dustmen all over the UK. It's a one stop shop for letting your representatives know what you think.

It bloody rocks.

It's a MySociety.org project, an organisation slowly proving that despite all the evidence to the contrary, it is possible for the civic activist sector to work with the government and survive, sanity intact.

Well done, Tom, Chris, Francis, Matthew, and everybody else involved.

(I don't count, since my contributions mostly consisted of moaning loudly, but not, y'know, in a good way)

The 'creator of Brookside' has taken it upon himself to try and bully the fansite of one the BBC's best loved kid's shows, 26 years' old Grange Hill, out of existence. I loved Grange Hill as a child, and it's great to see that it's still adored.

Apparently the site had a fine and harmonious relationship with the BBC, but since "Phil Redmond's Mersey TV" took over production of the show, this been replaced with the usual load of cease and desist crap, perfectly aimed to alienate the show's biggest fans. I suspect it's got something to do with the fact that another Redmond company, WankerMedia has recently produced another Grange Hill site, and hates the fact that the fansite is miles better. Or perhaps it's because the fansite doesn't mention 'Phil Redmond' on every single page, I can't tell.

(and I'm not linking to it. They won't be gettting any of my google juice).

Hopefully someone from Auntie can tell 'our Phil' to "leave 'im, Zammo, 'e's not werf it".

In the meantime, there's more of the story here, including details of how to make a fuss.

My first piece of coding for about 7 years, was a runner up in the Technorati developers contest!. How cool is that? The other winners are pretty damn cool too, especially Govtrack/, which is looks a bit like a US TheyWorkForYou.com

6 Comments »

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### why bother Said,

January 9, 2005 @ 8:26 pm

the bbc page appeared but nothing else. should there have been some kind of sidebar on the right hand side?

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### Small Paul Said,

January 10, 2005 @ 9:57 am

Aha, no it didn't! WikiProxy is a sort of mirror of the BBC news website, but with important words made into Wikipedia links.

This fixes an oft-mentioned deficiency of the site, i.e. that it doesn't provide much in the way of links to further reading.

-

### Mud's Tests Said,

January 14, 2005 @ 5:41 am

Stef,

To others who are reading about WhiteLabel and the BBC wiki, if you go to the link below my name, you'll see a write up. There's a comparison line, showing the BBC article before and after including blog comment-links from Technorati.

I rechecked the Wiki. Some blog-comments don't stay linked — my blog-links showed up for a while, but then disappeared.

Congrats, Stef! You got featured in TheRegular [link below, last name corrected ;-) ]... Good luck!

-

### meico Said,

January 26, 2005 @ 9:38 pm

Well... here's trying to post again.

My main comments can be found at my blog: https://www.livejournal.com/users/meico/...

-

### db Said,

January 31, 2005 @ 1:27 am

This has a massive potential for alternative news sites. We could just link key words to alternative explanations.

Is the code available?

Does or can the BBC object?

-

### tim malbon Said,

March 21, 2005 @ 12:25 pm

simon - hi - i can't find any other way to email you. We're a web developer and we're working on an onl9ine music download service called TuneTribe. I think that your WikiProxy would really benefit our site - i am imagining visitors being able to see 'related bloggs' in the left hand menu when they are on a particular artist or album page.

I am not remotely technical - i am a front end person - but can you tell me if:

a) you would be interested in/allow us to use the technology

b) if it is even technically possible

c) if it something that can simply be plugged in - we have a new release going live on 8 April and this would be brilliant to incorporate.

Please let me know,

Many thanks,

Tim Malbon

Creative Director

It's not every day you wake up (admittedly late for a theyworkforyou meeting), and find that in your sleep you've built and launched a new website, and that it must have been you, because it's your name on the press release.

but here it is, Directionlessgov.com

Since I didn't build it or write the release, I think I'd better let the press release speak for itself

About DirectionlessGov.com

For years we've been moaning about the fact that the portal approach

to Government is all wrong. DirectGov

is something like the 5th iteration, introduced to a world where

it's pretty obvious that most people find everything using Google.

But did they learn? Oh no.

So, we've built DirectionlessGov. Our tests show that DirectionlessGov

is much more effective at most common searches than DirectGov.

Whilst full cost data is not available for the first year of

operation, the publicly funded DirectGov has been built from a group

with an operating budget of �4.4m and a team of 39.

At the time of writing, total development time for DirectionlessGov is

approaching 26 minutes, and is reported to be on schedule.

Merry Christmas from all at DirectionlessGov.com

PRESS RELEASE - FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

DATE: 21st December 2004

HEADLINE:: New UK Government Search Portal Launched

The democracy.org.uk collective is proud to announce the launch of the

most effective government search service ever - DirectionlessGov.org

URL: Directionlessgov.com

Using Google and the BBC's freely available search technology

DirectionlessGov is a rival to the publically funded Direct.gov.uk

"We believe that we've built a powerful service, using freely

available search technologies, which beats the official effort into a

cocked hat", said projects spokesman Stefan Magdalinski. "We've been

arguing for years that the public doesn't want or need another portal,

so we've decided to build this site to show them the cheaper, hugely

more effective alternative."

SHOCKING STATS

Whilst full cost data is not available for the first year of

operation, the publicly funded DirectGov has been built from a group

with an operating budget of �4.4m and a team of 39.

At the time of writing, total development time for DirectionlessGov is

approaching 94 minutes, and is reported to be 50% behind schedule.

and all I'd like to add is that Tom Steinberg, Tom Loosemore, James Cronin, Stuart Tily, Matthew Somerville, Ben Laurie, Francis Irving, Chris Lightfoot, Adam Mcgregor, and Desiree Milosevic are all baby-eating crack dealers, and not to be trusted under any circumstances. Merry Christmas everyone!

I loved this thing when it appeared. I had no idea that I would end up friends with almost everybody involved.

You read it here first ...

I never thought I'd be putting a banner on whitelabel.org, but this is important.

faxyourmp.com, the free-to-users, unfunded, unloved-by-parliament, spam-free citizens-to-MPs web-to-fax service that a few of us threw together almost exactly 4 years ago, will deliver it's 100,000th communication in the next hour so.

To celebrate, we've published the latest list of MPs performance statistics

In addition, yesterday we won 'Internet Hero of the Year' from the readers of .net et al, which was nice. There's a word format press release around here, somewhere

Well, that was fun. More traffic than this blog has ever seen, and lots of very nice comments from people, which always gives a fuzzy glow.

- Rather than the expected Cease and Desist, I was invited to go and present to present to News Online! It was interesting; it's not every day that one gets to go and have a moan at the people who built the site you use every day. The audience seemed split exactly 50/50 between people who liked the idea, and those who thought I was the devil's latest physical manifestation. Nevertheless, I predict there will be some very, very exciting developments from News in the near future.

- I should emphasize again: I was not advocating that the News Online should do either of the specific things that the wikiproxy does, but I do believe that the BBC should be more adventurous and open in its relations with the rest of the web; I'm sure they can come up with much better ideas - these were the tools that I had to hand. (although that said, I think the in-text links make their stories MUCH more useful).

- People generally HATED the wikipediarise-everthing-plugin idea, drawing a comparison (that hadn't occured to me) with Microsoft's atrocious and doomed Smart Tags. There is a major difference: the plugin would be user controlled and have an toggle in the toolbar to switch on and off rather than being foisted on you by the evil empire, and the links sold to the highest bidder.

- The Lazyweb kicked in: Gina Trapani wrote a much more generic API version that will wikipediarise, well pretty much anything. Much nicer code, too

- Tim wrote a couple of nice bookmarklets: javascript:void(location.href='http://www.whitelabel.org/wp/wikiproxy.php?url='+location.href)

[use the whole line]

I was trying to make a clickable bookmarklet link with javascript that could be saved via a right click, but the either the comment thingy wouldn't let me do it or I just couldn't figure out how to do it.

Here's another bookmarklet to do a Wikipedia lookup on a word or phrase, such as a proper name:

javascript:Qr=document.getSelection();if(!Qr){De='';void(Qr=prompt('select or enter word, name, or phrase'+De+'\n(case sensitive, no quotes)',''))};if(Qr){Qr2=Qr.split(' ').join('_');location.href='https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/'+escape(Qr2)}

[use the whole thing with a single space between the text from each line instead of a line break]

It replaces embedded spaces with an underscore (this also works with the All Music Guide). You just highlight what you want to try to look up and click the bookmarklet or click it without highlighting and then enter whatever you want to look up in the box that javascript pops up - note that Wikipedia is case sensitive.

John Peel Dead

John Peeldead.

stuff like this doesn't usually upset me.

I first heard John (1978)

My granny gave me a small orange portable radio for what must have been my seventh or eighth birthday. I used to listen to it every night as I fell asleep (I didn't grow up with enforced bedtimes), and without realising listened to the birth of Punk. I liked the song "I hate babysitters" - which spoke passionately to a matter of import for my 7 year old heart, but mostly it passed me by, although it was definitely better than Radio Luxembourg.

Roll forward ten years (1988)

John Peel, one night, after school, plays the record that changes my life. Right there, "Stakker Humanoid", by Humanoid, more or less destroys my interest in all the records I own already, at a stroke. What was that?

Roll forward sixteen more years (2004)

Heard him DJ at the Big Chill this year. As an antidote to all the soporific Zero-7 dross everywhere else (the Big Chill is a lovely way to spend a weekend, but not for the music), he plays the hardest set I've heard in years.

Ending, of course, with Teenage Kicks.

Which I expect will be number 1 next week.

(footnote: Radio 1 is playing its equivalent of Mourning Music. They've played Teenage Kicks twice in 30 minutes, and then the rest is shoegazing bland miserable indie wank shite. Anyone SERIOUSLY think this is what he would have played? can we have some diversity please?)

Don't get me wrong, I really like BBC News Online

News Online has decided to start linking to other news sites.

News Online is the most trafficked site in Europe, easily the most successful new media venture the BBC has produced, but to my mind has failed to really innovate since launch. They've added clutter, an RSS feed or two, but it's still flat news articles with a few video clips, using hyperlinks only for navigation, much as CEEFAX use 3 digit numbers. News Online is exactly what I would expect as a baseline from any news site, commercial or otherwise.

News Online doesn't engage with its users, it doesn't provide tools that allow me, the licence payer, to slice and dice their stories, and by refusing to link from its body text, it fails to understand how hypertext works.

Also, with its conservative link policy (I can't show you an example of the news stories where the tech described above is working, because the links get removed after 2 days, because they might break), that only connects the BBC to established brands, it snubs the wider web, the great teeming mass of creativity. Patrician is not authoritative. Aloof is not respected. Conservative and fearful is not engaging. The gap between the BBC's utterly laudable self image and ambitions and delivery could not be any clearer than at News Online.

Finally, by not really allowing user interaction or commenting, News Online forces that debate and activity away from its site, and out onto the wild wild web.

I've known many people at the organisation since its very earliest days. There's some incredible talent and ideas, and from what I hear, an equal amount of frustration at how difficult it is to get these ideas to fruition.

Finally, while its good to see that the BBC is responding to Graf and engaging more with outside partners, didn't he precisely exclude daily updating content (p77) (warning: pdf), as the one thing that the BBC wasn't to do deals on (presumably to encourage the BBC to engage with small players rather than simply buying feeds).

update: I'm told that the development of these links isn't anthing to do with Graf. My apologies.

So that's my background ramble done with, here's the meat.

Since I attended Euro Foo Camp last month, I realised that my time at Upmystreet had turned me into too much of a manager, and that (since I have a lot of free time and not enough work) I would start writing code again. So I bought a book on php, and started to work. In the last month I've also been inspired by meeting Jimmy Wales of wikipedia.org which precisely illustrates how the collaborative, great unwashed web can create more value than 'authoritative' institutions.

My first project for 8 years aims to demonstrate a tiny fraction of what a more open News Online could be.

It's a proxy for the site, that does the following things:

- retrieves a page from News Online, and regexes out "Capitalised Phrases" and acronyms. It then tests these against a database of wikipedia topic titles. If the phrase is a topic in wikipedia, then it's turned into a hyperlink

- uses the technorati API to add a sidebar of links to blogs referencing the story. Now you can see who's talking about the story from the story itself

- as a bonus, my code breaks that bloody awful ticker. I'm not fixing it.

- because that's how links should be, my links are underlined.

- reduces page bloat by about 10% by stripping acres of whitespace.

No doubt, I'm breaking all kinds of copyright and being incredibly naughty doing this, but it's just a toy, and if they really want to sue a licence fee payer, well, I guess I'll just have to take it down.

the News Online wikiproxy

(good example of it in action:

Creepy man wants to lead bunch of nutters)

Source is available as a text file

Comments and criticisms, especially on my ropey code, happily received.

work offers even more so.

Next up: trie-based mozilla plugin to wikipediarise THE WHOLE WEB

Opening up the theyworkforyou.com development wiki

One of the things we wanted to share when we did theyworkforyou.com was not only the whole of parliament, but also the details of how we did it, so that people can also have a go, muck in, or just laugh at us.

Of course, that took far longer than we planned, but having released the source code, we should open up the wiki too.

We don't like wiki spam, so it will remain passworded, but anyone who wants a browse can tuck in at the theyworkforyou.com wiki

username: theyworkforyou

password: n0vemb3r (n-zero-vemb-three-r)

(dissemination is fine, but please don't post the link with the login details embedded in the url)

My favourite bit is this: the very first sketches that Tom and I did over a pair of Stellas on a train on the way back from suffolk back in summer 2003

( Click on the images to see the real page)

[

](https://www.theyworkforyou.com/mp/?pid=10547)

and

[

](https://www.theyworkforyou.com/)

I'm involved, with William Heath from Kablenet, in this little group blog project: Idealgovernment.com

What it's trying to do is gather views and constructive positive action pieces, that William will eventually collate, distil, and then has arranged to go and present at Ian Whatmore (the new Whitehall CIO) at the end of October.

The submissions so far are pretty good I think.

Who knows what may come of it? I don't, but I like the approach: rather than wait for government to commission yet more research, let's throw a load of ideas at it whether it likes it or not.

Have a look, and please donate a short contribution, and pass it on to anyone else you think might like to.

I posted a while back about Matthew Somerville and his Accessible reworking of the ghastly Odeon site (warning: contains a full frame interstitial, AND a javascript re-implementation of the BLINK tag. no kidding). Well, in this situation, companies can take two approaches. You can act like an old company, get heavy with the Cease and Desists and legal threats, or you can take the criticism on the chin, engage with the person who's pointed it out to you, and act like a modern company.

Odeon have gone for the former.

If it had been me, I would have immediately hired the guy.

(instead of recruiting him for a non-profit :) )

Just the kind of publicity I wouldn't want as the company was put up for sale.

It's three weeks after we launched theyworkforyou.com, and I finally have time to write an a proper entry about it.

As well as a providing a decently searchable, accessible, commentable, trackbackable, RSS-able, and shareable version of the parliamentary record, the site is intended to perform another function; to inject as much of hansard into google as quickly as possible. It is designed to be easily navigable by the Googlebot, who should find all the pleasure and nourishment it needs within the site, and be able to reach all content.

So how well are we doing?

to track it, I've extracted all the lines from the logs with 'Googlebot' as a referrer:

Googlebot's activity on theyworkforyou.com

This gives raw visit data for the bot, but the bot could visit the same content chunk several times, so I wrote a little script that strips out duplicate hits for the same page.

deduped page requests from the Googlebot

In summary, google has indexed (almost all) MP pages, all glossary items, and is making steady progress through the Written Answers and debates.

These stats are updated daily.

www.exxonsecrets.org

Another piece of genius from Josh On, who's got a strange love of using flash when html will do. Nevertheless, this time, all the information and links are there in html format behind the movie.

How Exxon pays for climate change skeptics

Shocking, and important.

We arrived back, and our wondertenant, Stu, said that the wireless ADSL gateway had been playing up, and for the last month or so, had been declining everything but dull old port 80. So I logged onto https://web.archive.org/web/20010808083144/http://www.eclipse.net.uk's ticketing system to find this:

There appears to be an unsecured wireless ADSL gateway running on the above IP address. There is no WEP in use, and we are able to connect to the gateway and browse the web via the gateway. This was discovered during a routine wireless sweep of our own network. The signal is weak but reliable at Old Street, in central London. Subsequently your account has been placed in a restricted configuration to prevent further abuse. Please secure the gateway using WEP so that only authorised access is allowed.

Please contact Technical Support when you have cleared the issue so the restrictions can be lifted.

If a personal wardriving visit from your sysadmin to check that your network is secure isn't customer service, I don't know what is.

stef

So after 8 months away (San Francisco, Chile, Argentina, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, China, and Korea again), we arrive home in about a week. We're qualified (although frighteningly inexperienced) sailors, and I do feel an awful lot more sane and relaxed and ready for the fray than I did a year ago.

seems like nothing much has changed. The government has launched a new portal, upmystreet have added a few more much-needed advertising slots (is there actually any data there, anymore?), and the BBC has redesigned their homepage. Business as usual...

And there's a new strangely exciting top-secret stealth project in the wings...

oh, and I need a job.

So I'm still travelling, but I've been doing some work for a video conference company. It's a strange business, sitting here remotely working (in a cybercafe in a huge Bangkok mall) for a company who specialise in remote working. But it has opened my eyes to the fact that many many people fly all around the world for business meetings, when actually the tools now exist and really work in thousands of cities that mean you just don't have to.

And I hate flying for business

Still it's actually strangely nice to be exercising my work brain.

yeah, I'm a hypocrite.

For those who know my views on car ownership (if you own a car, you are a bastard who should be taken out and run over), the following may seem a little, erm, inconsistent. well, suck me.

Intro

There are several decent explanations on the web of how to buy and sell a car in chile.

Rather than duplicate all that advice (which we followed, and worked perfectly), I'll just add the following supplementary notes. But READ THIS FIRST, or the following will make no sense.

1. We looked at all the parking lots in Bulnes etc, but ended up (after a good recommendation from some fellow travellers) buying from a dealership called

Automotriz Las Condes. I can recommend them for the following reasons:

• Throughout the whole process Pablo and his colleagues were incredibly helpful (see below), way beyond the call of duty.

  • They offered to buy the car back for 15% less than we paid for it, and kept their word.

  • They handled all notarisation and tax paying, making the transaction a lot simpler.

  • If your spanish isn't so good, we felt it was better off to go with a respectable dealership than try and negotiate with the sharks on Avenida Vespucio

  Further notes on the RUT

  Your temporary RUT is valid for 3 months, and during this time the proper one (a little orange piece of cardboard) should be sent to your address in chile (in our case, Scott's place). But you also need the RUT to sell the car. In our case, the lady in the SII office that issued the RUT got the comuna (district) in Santiago wrong when keying the address on the computer, so it never arrived.

  This was almost a disaster:

Since duplicates RUTs can only be issued by the office in the comuna of residence, but the mistaken address could only be corrected by the office that issued the original RUT, it took 3 trips to 2 different SII offices (and conversations with 15 different bureaucrats) to sort this out, and the guy from Automotriz Las Condes took most of a morning off work to help us. In the end, no-one could fix it, and someone just gave us a second temporary 3 month RUT. Chilean bureacracy is quite an experience. Check the details when you get your RUT, and look after it carefully!

Paying for your car

Buying a car in Chile is a hard cash transaction. If you are drawing the money on a credit card, check AT THE BEGINNING that your credit card issuer will allow large cash advances. Egg, in Britain, have a 500 UKP per day limit. If drawing the money from ATMs, there is a 390,000 peso limit per transaction, and whatever daily limit you have also applies (so you can withdraw more than 390K by visiting several ATMs)

Others have reported success with an over-the-counter cash advance (try Banco Santander in Paseo Ahumada), but despite multiple phone calls to my bank in England, and hours in the bank, we couldn't get this to work (the bank in Santiago kept saying the request had been refused, but my bank in england claimed the authorisation request (for large amounts, this must be a phone call) never came through. Some mismatch between chilean and british banking procedure seemed to be the fault. We spent a whole morning trying to make this work without success. Remember also, that Chilean banks close at 2pm.

In the end we just hit the ATMs daily with both our cards, but we were delayed 4 days just drawing cash. If we'd started drawing the money when we started looking for the camioneta, we'd have been fine.

To 4WD or not to 4WD

A significant percentage of the roads in Chile are unpaved. Argentina also. While many unpaved roads are perfectly ok in a 2WD drive car, many can get distinctly dodgy, especially when the weather gets bad. If you can possibly afford it, I would get a 4WD, because then you'll never be worrying about whether you should have done or not. Peace of mind.

Getting a mechanic to check out the car

We were in a hurry, so we didn't bother to do this, but if I was doing it again, I would definitely do so. The camioneta was fine (and we clocked up 15K Km in 3 months), but there were a few things that we didn't spot that needed work later. We spent about 500 pounds on repairs in total.

International borders

I've seen it reported elsewhere that foreigners cannot take their chilean cars into Argentina. This is complete bullshit. We crossed the border many times with no problems whatsoever. At the border you have to show the Padron (document showing your ownership of the car), and there's a form to sign (with multiple copies for different bureacrats on exit and re-entry), but the temporary Padron is fine, and there were no problems

Selling your car

Selling the car to a dealership is (unless you have a disaster with your RUT like we did) a simple transaction that takes about an hour. After signing the contract (and leaving 8 copies of your thumbprint on it), we were given a cheque that we could cash at a downtown bank (in pesos).

However, if you are continuing on your travels, you probably don't want several thousand dollars in cash in your pocket. I've heard of people getting the money paid back onto their credit cards, but we wanted to get the money into our bank account in England.

This kind of international transaction is called SWIFT. You need to get a SWIFT number from your home bank, and some other details.

Because this is a very rare transaction in Chile, it can be quite difficult to get it organised. Citibank in Paseo Ahumada did this for us, but (again) it took a couple of hours to get all the details right, and the forms processed. Also, a SWIFT (sic) transfer takes about 3 weeks to appear in your home bank. A technological wonder of the 24hour, globalised banking world, I'm sure.

In summary

Having your own car is a fantastic way to see Chile and Argentina, and is totally doable. Chilean bureacracy can be slow, and a little complicated, but Chileans are fantastically helpful to foreign visitors and you can get your way through it even if your spanish is bad/non-existent, like mine.

But be prepared for things to take longer than expected, and have patience. It'll take at least a week in Santiago to buy your car.

Pictures

Oh yeah, if anyone's wondering why I've been quiet recently, it's because, after the pain and misery that was the final 6 months of Upmystreet, Kay and I decided to take some time off and go travelling. We'll be back in June, and hopefully then I'll have lost some of my cynicism, regained a little enthusiasm, and be ready to do something new.

see you then.

stef

(on the way to being) very, very good indeed.

a tubemap with walklines

That well known former playboy and drunkard, Matt Jones, reminded me

that I something to write.

Bugzilla.mozilla.org recently got upgraded, and they added a feature so obvious, useful, and simple that we should all be kicking ourselves that it is not a standard.

They've added accesskeys to their horrendously complicated form

which is good, but more than that, they've adopted the Windows standard

of underlining the accesskey letter in the label. (it's much easier to

explore this on bugzilla than for me to explain it -try hitting ALT + an

underlined letter on the horrendously complicated form

so bugzilla's accesskeys are unobtrusively labelled (for those who don't

need them) but discoverable, and on-the-page for those who do.

Suddenly I can keyboard navigate that horrendous form as easily as I do

Word, instead of being limited to thousands of presses of TAB/SHIFT+TAB.

Now, you could apply this beautiful device to any site.

You could even write a proxy script, similar to betsie, that adds

accesskeys and appropriate underlining to any page on the web:

If the first letter has already been used, try the second. If that's

been used, use the first anyway (since accesskeys cycle (I hope), the user just

has to hit alt-x twice to reach the second link)

And for extra points, you could make that script augment any image links

with their ALT-tag (as a link also), thereby enabling Find As You Type, even for sites with stupid giftext.

This might be icky on some sites, but it'd be a lot less icky than what we mouseless have to deal with now.

And if you did that, the world shower you with love, because you would

have made it a far more accessible place.

so what did happen to that Lazyweb, then?

[bear with me on this one... my tongue is slightly in my cheek]

my friend James thinks this is weird:

Google Calculator

Well, it is, and it isn't. When I looked down that list of features that google has;

stockquotes, addressbooks, calculators, maps, translation, yadda, yadda,

I suddenly thought, fuck, this is like yahoo, except that instead of inducing link-blindness with endless feature clutter, Google has just taken the universal search box idea to an extreme. Google now is (or is well on the way to being) a goddam portal.

and then you think about a bit more, and you realise what that search box really is:

Google is a bad unix shell. A one line, no history, no file completion, no filesystem, /bin/googlesh, shell*, into an OS with a limited set of moderately useful utility commands. More like the interface you'd get on an embedded device like a coke machine, but a shell nevertheless.

and then you run into problems, because what google is now losing ( and the bane of all command line interfaces) is any kind of discoverability for all these new functions. I'll never remember half those features, because there are few visual cues to tell me they're there, and I can't be arsed to remember anything. If I could remember stuff, I wouldn't need sites like google.

So the most apparently usable site on earth is turning, before our very eyes, into the kind of obfuscated user-alienating unfeature-rich environment we've been running from all these years.

The geeks just wouldn't let us get away that easy, would they?

• one for Matt Webb, I reckon.

2 Comments »

-

### Tom Said,

August 23, 2003 @ 12:05 pm

So presumably what you want to do is:

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=man+google

T

-

### James Redin Said,

July 4, 2005 @ 9:28 pm

You may also be interested in this keyboard interface I wrote in JavaScript for the Google Calculator:

https://www.xnumber.com/google_calc.htm

Try:

2M6T52 + 3T6

by using the [H] [T] [M] keys.

Any feedback or suggestions will be appreciated.

Thanks!

https://web.archive.org/web/20031202000446/http://useitorloseit.cjb.net

You know, I've never understood why Jakob has a such an anti-following.

I mean he's a bit of a zealot, but I don't see what's wrong with that, and it's the kind of position you end up in when you have to bang your head against a wall of of steaming shit all your life. It's what happens when you spend a few years trying to build websites that interface with parliament, or government, to pick an example close to home.

The only explanation I can come up with is that he makes you feel stupid, particularly if you're a designer who just turned out some piece of flashtastic dogcrap for the client^H^H^H^H^H your portfolio, and hurtfully for your ego, the client suddenly comes in shouting and waving a copy of Designing Web Usability.

But he only makes you feel stupid because you know, in your heart of hearts, that he's right. He never says anything radical, or offensive, simply right. Get over it.

2 Comments »

-

### Matt Said,

August 13, 2003 @ 6:26 pm

He's not even that inflexible or zealot like actually - jared spool is far worse! Jakob just seems to have become the poster child for the offended design community

-

### Matt Robinson Said,

August 14, 2003 @ 2:25 am

I guess what galls us designers is that Jakob's idea of usable design is so visually unappealing. No one likes to compromise their creativity to attain intangible benefits, especially if a well designed, but ugly site design means the client turns your bid down in favour of someone else's flashy, harder-to-use site. This is of course, not Jakob's fault, but he's a handy target for the designer's own inadequacies, as you suggest.

Trying to satisfy the needs of your client (pretty pictures) at the same time as satisfying the needs of their clients (usability) is what being a good designer is all about. Good site design is about more than just graphic layout, it's about structuring information, and writing clear English, as Jakob is right to point out. However, Jakob's line seems very much on the usability side with little concession that really, there's usually some compromise involved if you want to get paid.

:However:

Obviously open-government sites and their kin (including, I suppose, Jakob's own eye-itching, gaudy site) are an exception: no one expects these sites to look lovely, but they do expect to want to find what they want without hassle.

I'll also cheerfully admit that most web designers apparently don't listen to Jakob enough, given the state of most sites these days.

I wish that Alan had comments enabled in his blogso that this felt a bit more like a discussion than lobbing bricks over the wall.

[

Domain Name Envy](https://web.archive.org/web/20030803090349/https://www.diverdiver.com/2003_07_29_diverdiver_archive.html#105951408792594590)

I'm sorry, Alan, but this is just totally wrong. And as I've said before, indicative of the problem at the heart of UKOnline (and gov.uk in general) - too much focus on the structure and heirarchy, and not enough on the user's needs/wants, , or activities.

Study after study after study has shown that

1. People do use guesswork as a primary means of discovering domains. I've seen it in every single usability study I've ever been involved in. I saw a piece of research only last week in which 55% of respondents said they did it.

UK Government may see a different story in their logs, but this is because of the lack of intuitive domains. This does not mean that people choose to only use search engines, but that you force them to.

2. Even if people discover a site initially via a search engine, it's important that they are memorable for the second, third, and fourth visits. Because then, they don't have to go to a search engine, and you've saved them a lot of effort. Habituation and discoverability. Will and clue (sorry mate)

3. We agree: Long domains are bad. Long domains are bad precisely because they involve too much typing. You can't have it both ways: either people only use search engines, and the domain length is irrelevant, or people do type them in, and so it is important.

More grist to the mill

• How many man-days are lost each year, simply because anyone trying to contact an individual in .gov.uk has to remember to stick ".gsi." or ".x.gsi" in the domain? I know I get it wrong every single time I compose a mail to a civil servant, and I'm a bloody geek with 5 years of dealing-with-govt pain under my belt. Somebody once told me that this wasn't fixable. Because domain forwarding is an esoteric technology, uh-huh.

  -

  Google turns 157 references to parliament.gov.uk, almost all as mistakenly though intuitively typed URLs. Some of these _ are actually on parliament.uk itself!_ How many people a day type it into their browser? Why is goverment policy "get lost, you ignorant user?"

  - test it for yourself: take a look at ukonline's own weblogs, and see how many have 'open.gov.uk' with a null referrer, indicating that someone's typed it in.

A nice piece on filtering the right way

I've been on the edges of at least 2 movie-listings site projects in London, UK where we have about 150 screens within 30 minutes of what the americans so quaintly call Downtown.

It's a source of continual frustration to me that these sites continue to be exact ripoffs of printed listings, when they could do something much more useful -

The most typical cinema planning question in London is

"What are all the movies are showing within my reasonable travelling radius starting at about time X?"

It is sometimes "What is the nearest place showing 'The Matrix Reloaded' ?"

Cinema chain brand managers egos notwithstanding, it is never " Warner Village is the only cinema I like, what is on there?" (the most universally supported browsing mode)

I gave this idea as a present to Tony Ageh a while back, so here's hoping the beeb may do something with it...

Followup: since I didn't make what I meant clear enough, I'll try again. This is what I want a cinema listings site to ask me:

Enter your postcode, and the time you want to go, and it returns results, ranked by distance of the cinema showing the film, with the film name and start times on the same page filtered within some plausible margin (2 hours) later than the start time I've chosen.

"I've decided to go the pictures with that sexy girl, kay, at 8pm tonight. What are all the films we could go and see?"

Virgin.net's was better than most, James, but still pretty woeful, since (as I remember), the emphasis was on on cinemas, not movies. And you didn't use postcodes, so when I lived in Kennington, it used to fail to offer me any of the 60 gazillion West End venues that were only 15 minutes tube ride away, but did tell me about the cinema in Tooting, that I'm never going to visit.

Here's Alan, apparently advocating that government rips off UpMyStreet

"The killer applications for online government... three, a single place where you type your post code and everything you need to know about anything that concerns you and the area is displayed - this is a combination of what upmystreet did so well, the ONS Neighbourhood statistics site I talked about the other day, your local authority site (for information on when rubbish is collected, what your local schools are up to) and other sites (like Hometrack or the Environment Agency's flood warning site)."

It's not a combination of what UpMyStreet did so well with some other stuff, it is exactly what UpMyStreet did, or would have done, or does, if

a) the government had been remotely co-operative in providing usable information, or dealing with us in a timely, decent, manner. (more on that later)

b) We hadn't been too busy trying to stay alive (more on that later)

I've read the press release ( it's here, somewhere) that ONS put out regarding Neighbourhood Statistics. It reads exactly like Upmystreet's used to, except they have to say "Down your way" instead of Upmystreet. I've also heard that the Home Office is planning an Upmystreet rip off site too. I'm also old enough to remember the day Tony Blair announced UKOnline, where 'people would be able to access all their local information, accessible by [you guessed it!] postcode.

Answer me this:

- Will the various government departments creating these sites agree to provide the data to external parties in a timely, helpful, manner?

- How will you ensure a level playing field, given the huge financial clout of government itself, not least in that whenever ONS put out a press release they get many column inches of news coverage

Or it's all fishing licences over again, isn't it?

(actually, I'm not so worried, because government's build-sites-by-committee approach will never produce a site that captures the imagination)

Oh yeah, and I glad to see you've finally cottoned on to the problems with the government's domain naming. I'll give you the answer for free: alias them all, so that ordinary users can find them. Peasy. just do parliament.gov.uk while you're at it.

Ooh. I seem to have my anger back.

I wish people did things like this more.

Accessible Odeon

Matthew Somerville has recreated the official Odeon site, but made the damn thing accessbile, quick and usable, rather than the vomit stain than Lateral produced. Jon Bains has been doing this long enough to know better, and the catalogue of unusability on the Odeon site is well up there with the worst of the web. What gives, Jon? HTML still too difficult for you guys?

It'll be interesting to see whether Matthew gets sued, or what should happen, hired.

I keep meaning to do something similar with www.parliament.uk. Sure, they are now compliant enough to get their W3C kite, but it's a classic example of how ticking the accessibility boxes does not a usable website make.

If the Hansard search wasn't broken (as usual) I'd post a detailed explanation.

I suppose since I'm unemployed I should pull my finger out.

Someone should print out this article and staple a copy to the head of every .gov.uk webmaster. pdf is an abomination on the web.

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030714.html

ahh, Jakob, I've missed you.

I've been on the interweb ten years. Actually it's a little bit longer than that, but the following is the earliest recorded instance of a stefpost that I can find. Note the uncynicism and politeness of the style, coupled with an inability to understand the use of the Subject: field, and wonder how long that lasted.

I've celebrated with at least 10 hours sleep (and only a few minutes on the the infernal machines) a night, every night this week.

Date: Fri, 14 May 93 18:23:59 +0100

From: zccaj19@ucl.ac.uk (Mr Stefan Magdalinski) Message-ID: 9305141723.AA22156@link-1.ts.bcc.ac.uk

hello, 3 things; 1 I was having trouble with my 16-bit DMA under windows on on AMD 386DX with AMI BIOS but I fixed it by fiddling with the 'Advanced Chipset setup' on the BIOS setup prog. If anyone else is having trouble, try setting the following options; AT Bus clock=SCLK/8 DMA clock select=SCLK I hope this helps someone out there 2 could one of you electronic wizards post a bitmap picture of the circuit for the midibox somewhere cos I can't understand these text versions at all (I think they're getting scrambled along the way) Cheers. 3 (I'm Sorry) Has anyone got X-Wing by LucasArts to work with SBOS without slowing the game down loads? bye Stefan Magdalinski (sunny ol' England)

(from https://web.archive.org/web/20030703142043/http://www.peteweb.com/mpoli/SOUND/GRAVIS/TEXT/V3N45.TXT)

I was made (along with the rest of the former senior mismanagement, and anyone who'd been there less than a year) redundant from Upmystreet on Monday.

It's a strange feeling. Actually, no it isn't. I feel tired, and an overwhleming sense of relief. Which is exactly what I expected.

good luck to her new owners.

I give you, Mr Yoz Grahame

for services to Musickind.

Obituary

This is so sad. Debbie was one of the first people I met online, when she used to hang out on the VT100-based nightmare that was Delphi Internet Services, my first internet job, back in 1994.

She was startling bright, fun, and hilarious. I never realised that she would only have been 17/18 at the time.

a terrible tragedy.

4 Comments »

-

### Tim Leung Said,

May 17, 2003 @ 4:32 pm

Debbie's column in the Palmtop Magazine was the biggest reason I kept subscribing it. She was the "insane" counterpart to the overly serious world of computers, and I love her ravings and rantings. Never realized she was that young... I hoped she realized the joy she had brought to a lot of people, and that it is some kind of consolation in the time of her illness. May she rest in peace.

-

### Peter Said,

May 29, 2003 @ 5:40 pm

Thanks for the comments. She did know how much people enjoyed her work, but never bragged about it. We're all going to miss her special brand of 'insanity', but she's left so much material, I'll be laughing for years.

She never slept much... now she can have the rest she deserved.

Peter (Debbie's Dad)

-

### natalie clift Said,

June 19, 2003 @ 3:01 pm

I never knew Miss Barham, but after reading an article in the daily express about Debbies life, I became shocked and felt like I ought to do something to help others with the condition. I truly belive that Debbie was a extreamly talented lady. It seems as though she filled many people's life with happiness. I send my love to all her friends and family. x x x

-

### Faye Said,

November 29, 2003 @ 11:11 pm

Debbie was my cousin... I've just been googling for links concerning her and this came up. It's amazing to see how she touched so many people. She lived with me when she was 16 and first came to London...she was writing for the BBC during this time, so amazing. She's been a major inspiration for me...she achieved so much through her determination...mm.

I suppose it's an indication of my unfamilarity with doing moving pictures on the interweb that I produced a hideously overlarge file for my demo. Combined with the fact that we were rushing like crazy so that Dory could get home to Oskar, and in time for Tom to take the stage. Thanks to Nick, here's a more sane quicktime, and a torrent if you're that way inclined.

QuickTime (10.2 Mb)

Torrent (10.2 Mb)

Juno Records

this site is brilliant, but I don't want to spend 4 hours a week sittting in front of a browser listening to MP3 clips. I want to spend 4 hours a week listening to mp3 clips on the bus on my ipod.

so someone needs to take this site, and start scraping it so that the the song titles are written into the ID3 tags, and you can download them all at once. What would be the best way of doing this?

what would be even better: Shazam is a service of godlike genius, but it soon becomes apparent that they generate their signatures by ripping compilation cds. If it's been on a CD, chances are they'll have it, but you can stand in a club all night tagging every track, and draw nothing but 9p blanks.

What's the minimum length of track that Shazam needs? If Juno and Shazam started to make sweet mp3 lovin', Juno would get increased sales for all their stock that Amazon will never touch, and Shazam would break out of their mainstream ghetto, and start being stratospheric in their brilliance. I might even forgive them for txt-spamming me.

Words on sticks, and flyby navigations have never really been my thing- the metaphor is wrong for most information sets, and the interfaces that have generally been created for these things border on the the criminal (the onscreen joystick and accelerator buttons of one VRML browser I saw still makes me shudder- it was like trying to navigate riding a virtual kids tricycle). Doom demonstrated that the problem (as many people claimed at the time) was not one of using a mouse+2 buttons to navigate a 3d space with total freedom, but simply that the interfaces were lousy.

So it feels a little weird to be posting movies of people using a website here. However, it is the key idea of Upmystreet Conversations that it two axes of geography and one of time, so animations of activity developing over time is a comfortable way of conveying information about what's going on. But that doesn't mean it's a navigational metaphor.

A disclaimer first: Adam worked really hard to get this working before the deadline (My^h^h Tom's EtCon session, and so it's a very rough cut. We haven't yet been able to give it the level of Tufte care that we would like, so forgive the absence of key, title, legend, scale, and supporting information (like an outline of the UK). We're sorry. It'll be better later.

A disclaimer second: This is a 2 minute hi-res avi file screencapped (via the excellent Camtasia Studio from the OpenGL application that Adam wrote. There's some loss, and the original app is beautifully smooth.

A disclaimer third: it's a 23Mb file zipped. I'm going to hell, where I shall have all my physical senses reduced to 28.8K baud for eternity. ETCon people! can you share it locally somewhere since James pays for all the bandwidth. or dump it on your favourite peer-to-peer network.

Upmystreet_conversations.avi (23Mb zipped, I'm really sorry)

Explanation:

• In the first section, white crosses are the starts of threads, and red crosses are threads that start but never get a reply. You can see the outline of the UK slowly develop over time, and how posting density follows population density closely, with greater activity in London, the Northwest, and the Glasgow-Edinburgh corridor

  • The second section repeats this, but this time, the points have a 'half-life', so they fade away after time. This view gives a clearer indication of activity at any one time- it's not hard to see how bursts of activity correspond to flamewars, etc

  • Detail of section 2, zoomed into the Greater London area

  • In this view, rather than each post being plotted, each thread is plotted as a polyline. Each separate Conversation on the board is assigned a random colour (colour distinguishes, but doesn't convey intrinsic information). Conversations isn't threaded, so the lines don't bifurcate, but if a conversation bounces repeatedly between two users, it will be drawn more heavily

  • A detail of 3 on an inner London area

  And finally, I'd like to say a huge fucking-hell-you're-incredible to

  Dan

Dorian

Tom

Adam

Matt

and everyone at Upmystreet

for making my stupid ideas work better than I ever could have imagined or made them. May the recruitment vultures discover this site and make you which beyond your wildest dreams.

Especially Tom.

stef

The twisty-turniness of events, or in fact the way two things with apparently no causal connection can conspire, from six months out, to exactly collide at the worst possible time, means that I'm not delivering my session at ETCon. I think I can safely say that no gig in my professional life (and it's been a bit of a rollercoaster) made me more excited, and so at this point, more disappointed. Gutted, as they used to say round these parts.

The good news for attendees is that Tom Coates is delivering it instead, and it's going to rock.

and I suppose it just means I'll have to think of something new for next year.

There's simply not much I can say at the moment, and the masterwork on Content Non-management Systems I've been preparing doesn't seem very compelling right now.

is all the kind words. Not just from our users,

but from the press, the Guardian, and BBC News. oh, and New Media Zero

and from a load of webloggers everywhere.

but, as ever, NTK does it best.

It's dark times, but they do make a difference.

Anyway, I was hoping that my next post would have been a bit more upbeat, so here's something like it was, anyway.

Upmystreet has 665,000 unique users. Not your common-or-garden we-picked-these-out-of-webtrends users, but yer ABC audited this-many-people-really-in-january-2003 users. Looking at nearly 9 million pages of central (and more importantly) local government data and information about them and their ~14 immediately neighbouring households.

it awes me. When we first conceived the demo in the attic in Maiden Lane, the idea was that the government should publish all this data they had that people had paid for, had a right to, and could use. But even we thought that it would be the usual activists, lobbyists, and civil rights suspects that would do it, not more than half a million people every month.

The other thing we have, that we've never really been able to shout about enough:

A digital TV service (for all Sky's 6 million households), that automatically picks up their postcode from their box, and displays contact information for 23,000 council services, across 468 Local Authorities, allows them to email said council service providers, contact information and results for their (26,000) local schools, further education, and local transport info. Oh, and it's extensible by anyone who wants to, to provide additional services behind.

government on digital TV. everywhere, now.

Buy my baby, please

We've just added the geourl META tags (GeoUrl.org) to every page on Upmystreet

Story here. The Disability Rights Commission is going to target 1000 sites for Accessibility compliance. Can't find anywhere that says which sites they'll be testing, but I'd stick Woolwich's atrocious online bank and Nat West's even worse one on there. Come to think of it, I'd put the Disability Rights Commission themselves on the list for this atrocious bit of textgiffery and javascript rubbish. Oh yeah, and they have some supposedly 'easy read' pages that require a plugin to hear some audio, doesn't work in mozilla, doesn't include anything like the same content as the rest of the site, and is exactly the sort of disabilty ghetto I was complaining about. D'oh!

Anyway, built by Reading Room who have some nice words to say on the subject but mostly prove that theory (W3C, RNIB) is worthless compared to practice.

stefrant out

For a long time, people have heard me going on about being able to plot Upmystreet Conversations on maps, and there was an article in Guardian Online today where I'm still going on about it. I rapidly got very disappointed with the quality I could get out of the supposedly professional GIS software I was using, and so I've been talking with my incredible friend Adam, who thinks in OpenGL faster than normal people do in english, about ways in which we could do this properly. I think the final app will be truly awesome, and that's going to remain under wraps til ETCon, but he sent me his first pass this morning.

Each Conversation is plotted in a different colour. At this level of zoom, you don't get to see much of the local activity, but I think it still looks pretty cool.

Over at www.mbites.com there's an articleon why Cre@te Online had to close. I don't know much about the vagaries of the publishing world, and obviously the dotcom downtown couldn't have been great, but the biggest problem with Cre@te (sic. ugh) was that it was devoted to a flashtastic idea of web design that has been steadily proven to be garbage since 1995. I was featured once in a round table on digital TV. That was OK, I generally like doing these things. But the attitude of the magazine was summed up by the fact that we had to have this discussion in a professional photography studio being professional photographed by a guy who kept telling us to shift position to get the right angle.

All style over content. It was the only issue I ever read, but another article was a supposedly serious piece on whether usability was important or not. In 2002.

A magazine that plain wrong just had to close.

And as for "Where are [web] creatives going to showcase their work now?"

Hmmm... on the web perhaps?

A few months ago at Upmystreet we commissioned a screenreader user to review the site and tape his experiences of doing so. It's an interesting process, and really drives home how ticking checkboxes and following guidelines is a very poor way to really deliver accessibility.

We have implemented most of the recommendations he made, but some points still stand out really clearly:

- screenreaders read punctuation out loud.

'stef's going down' is stef-apostrophe-s-period going down

whereas

'stef is going down' is as is. Basically this means that informal speech can be very painful.

- Although Adrian deliberately slowed down the screenreader for my benefit, it is still a very slow way to browse.

In the same spirit of openness and community improvement that lead to the BBC's still sadly not-html BBC Accessibilty report, I've got permission from the boss to publish an extract (4Mb, about 15 minutes) of it. If people make this available via whatever is their p2p filesharing app du jour, I'll be quite happy.

I hope people find it useful.

An, um, interesting article on Spiked Online on social software. I'm sure it'll get properly dissected elsewhere, but it makes some statements about Upmystreet Conversations that could do with some clarification.

- "The key idea behind social software is that by using technology we can reinvigorate interest and participation in the democractic process"

[

No, it isn't](https://web.archive.org/web/20030209041342/https://web.archive.org/web/20030801101101/https://www.blackbeltjones.com/work/mt/archives/000472.html). As one can tell from the name, it's software that facilitates social interaction. There is a strand of social software that in interested (and sometimes optimistic) about possible political applications.

- "Putnam's thesis, which has found many followers, is that our social fabric is being eroded by by destructive market forces. The argument goes that as we no longer live and associate together in the same way, the potential to participate in the political process is diminished."

No, it isn't. Putnam's thesis uses political participation as one of a broad range of indicators to support the thesis that the level of social interaction in a community is THE key influencing effect on an even broader range of measures of individual wellbeing. I find it hard to imagine how one could misunderstand this, unless one had not actually read the book.

- Upmystreet Conversations has been deliberately built as a neutral platform on which people can discuss whatever they like. I'm not a social engineer, either in the Marxist or the New Labour sense, but everything I've built has been guided by the belief that the wonking classes deliberately exclude and assume the stupidity of the population in a way that is entirely unjustified. To snipe at Conversations because it is "full of hot air about local pubs, clubs and organic food" is just snobbery. This is exactly what we wanted people to be talking about.

I have personal hopes that some Conversations may lead to some collective activity that improves local life (but after 8 weeks, as Zhou En Lai once said, "it's too early to tell"). But I'm much more interested in people banding together to fix the broken paving slabs down their road, or start a bridge club, or just have a drink. Because that's where the real action is.

- "An Upmystreet press release assures us that we have the most in common with people 'who live close by.' Forget the idea of sharing commonality along ideological or political grounds - it's what's going on in the hood that matters most." This statement is undoubtably true, as the marketeers know better than most. Upmystreet Conversations is not intended as a replacement for other forms of communal or political activity, but it does attempt to approach it from a different viewpoint. That's all. We don't want to stop you from going to your Socialist Worker meetings or Conservative Club, but we try to give you place to interact with your neighbours that is less threatening than going round and knocking on their door.

- "The real consequence of the discussion around social software is the cheapening of participation" I used to wonder/worry about this. But I've had three years of real, practical evidence that it's not true. I wonder what evidence Martyn has for his assertion? The corollary is also interesting- If reducing the barrier to entry and letting the plebian hordes join in reduces the meaning of political debate, shouldn't we be raising the barriers higher? Denying the unemployed the vote? Perhaps homeowners only? Perhaps we could restrict it to a specially selected group of properly qualified wonks and lobbyists.

- I'm glad that he read our press release. I wish he could have used the contact details to ask us about Conversations. The fact that he didn't leads me to suspect that the article is that oldest of online social interactions, the good old-fashioned troll. In these days of blogging, probably still the easiest way for someone who isn't getting much to draw attention to themselves.

I look forward to a hearing from you, Martyn.

Yesterday was again, yet again, our busiest day ever. As in, we delivered 1/60th of our total fax traffic ever. And we're still standing. Like I said, or keep saying, it's not about millions of pounds, or huge sparcs, or Loudcloud, or Broadvision. it's about will, and clue. (although obviously having Cronin involved helps as well).

Today will be busier, so I may well be eating my words, but I hope not.

And the radio today made me feel sick to be human.

something matt wrote about how much better search is when it's clued up to context a bit more reminded me of something on amazon.com during the enormous binge I had yesterday. On upmystreet.com we carry the postcode across the tabs - it's the same key being used to tap into different verticals of data. It seemed a bit of an odd idea at first, but I think it's becoming a standard UI metaphor. Certainly yesterday, the fact that amazon dropped whatever your query was whenever I switched tabs was tedious.

As many have now noted, The BBC have published an excellent report on Accessibility

It's excellent for many reasons, being comprehensive, inclusive, and methodologically sound. Obviously, I also think it's excellent because Upmystreet gets a High Compliance rating, but I like the fact that it includes dyslexia as a disability that websites should cater for, almost always forgotten.

The report has a very interesting table on page 29, which although they don't explicitly reach this conclusion, supports a policy Upmystreet has adopted in our projects since launch. The table lists the effect of various Accessibility improvements on various disabilities (visual, motor, dyslexia, hearing, etc), and has a column for 'no disability at all' - and * every adaptation is either neutral or beneficial to able-bodied users as well*

What does this tell us?

• That accessible web design is good web design

  - That sites should not have a 'text-only' or Accesibility ghetto.

  - It's a total win-win - better design for all, lower cost of maintenance and no worry about version creep or updating

  -

  For me, the text-only version is like a pub that, instead of catering for people of all capability, has a dingy bar in the back specially for people in wheelchairs. It's lazy and it's wrong. Web designers should do their jobs properly in the first place.

  Also, it's great that they've published it. I'm sure the BBC commission tons of excellent work on licence-payers behalf (apart from Eastenders) that gets read twice and then consigned to the vaults. Let's see more of it.

  Now, I hope that with all the resources they have over at Bush House, they can allocate some htmler to take it out of pdf because it's a shame that such a fine document gets ridiculed for being in an inappropriate format

  ### Addendum

  Duh. I left the punchline out of this piece: I suspect that the BBC News Online redesign actually performs worse against their own guidelines than their old one.

Register parliament.gov.uk and point it at www.parliament.uk.

I know that there are noble, historical reasons for the separation of the legislature and the executive, but I also know that 99% of the population do not know, and should not have to care. For me, the way this is handled is like a microscosm of all the issues surrounding e.gov.

Jargon, knowledge, and technicality creates an unnecessary barrier to entry for the vast majority of the citizenry. It's not deliberate, but it's not thoughtful either. It is discouraging and elitist. But there's an even better solution: register parliament.gov.uk, and point it at a page that *explains * the historical reasons for the separation of the legislature and the executive, with a link at the bottom to http://www.parliament.uk.

Then you're educating, connecting and providing access.

I bet: parliament.uk would see a +50% jump in traffic the day this was implemented.

Incidentally, the same is true for nhs.uk, and I could see situations with Nhsdirect where that delay could be life-or-death critical.

If someone in government could write me a letter authorising this, I could have it fixed in 48 hours (since upmystreet can register domains on behalf of clients)

I love mozilla. I love mozilla for the following reasons among others:

1. Type Ahead Find, now renamed Find As You Type, but it's so damn cool it doesn't really matter what they call it. Cool, because it makes browsing 10x faster for non-mouse users like me (and ex-mouse users like you), and way cooler, because it makes little text-gif-labels unnavigable (and you can't use the ALT text, because it's not visible, and there are often good reasons for the ALT not to match the image text), and therefore exposes them for the lazy, dimwitted abominations that they are.

It turns the most important factor in browsability for accessibility users (text links, text content) into a speed bonus for every user, and once it appears in IE, the textgif is dead in weeks. I've always believed that accessiblity design and good web design are the same thing, which is why accessibility ghettoes like the one that BBC News Online uses to justify abandoning their previous quality, are a mistake.

2. Since I spent 20 minutes training its spam filters a month ago, I had maybe 2 spam, from about 50 a day. No false positives at all, and those 2 were ones where I had to stare hard at them to figure out what they were..

I'm trying to resist bad temptation though: it's much easier to classify a mailing list (or friend!) you're no longer interested in as spam, but that's just lazy, and if we all do it, the network will just clog up with mail that _ nobody ever gets to see_

So I've had this idea to make mozilla even better.

I've actually had this idea kicking around at the back of my head since I worked in a design studio years ago and watched the paintmonkeys trying to learn keyboard shortcuts in Quark.

Keyboard shortcuts are way better (faster, less likely to cripple you) than other WIMPs elements, but they have almost zero discoverability. I've got endless lists of keyboard shortcuts for various apps pinned around my desk, but I still don't know enough.

What I would like to do:

** Add a hook into mozilla's event queue, and for every appropriate user action, if that user action has an associated shortcut, display that shortcut in the status bar.

**

It's beautifully effective:

It allows me to always look in the same place for the information, rather than having to read the A4 sheets pinned around the walls. Now it only takes a glance to learn.

It's always to hand: if I know I'm going to repeat an action 5 times, I can do the first one via the menu, and the next 4 via the keyboard. just like that. Furthermore, I can then happily forget then, knowing that the cost of discovery is going to be low next time.

I've bugzilla'd it, but I'd quite like to have a stab at it myself. My coding skills are pretty rusty, but I used to be able to do it, and this can't be that hard. The hard bit is trying to figure out where to start.

Where would one tap into the queue?

How does one write to the status bar?

I've got the book, I'll start there. This might have been a job for the lazyweb, but it looks like it doesn't scale.

Oskar

As close as I will ever get to being an uncle

Oskar

6 lbs 12 oz, 19.02.2003

and I think this means that I've won a bet with someone from my teenage years but I can't remember who.

Danny has the scoop

but I have no idea why we're protecting the RSPCA or their Communications DirectorJohn Rolls

I mean, these are supposed to be an experienced, responsible, mature, campaigning organization, who bugger up parliament with SPAM, exploit the goodwill of the volunteers who spent the week trying to keep the service up and running, and then say they have to speak to their lawyers before apologising.

And then I visit their website and they have a campaign to ban fireworks.

(I wanted to write about something much more interesting today as well)

Disruption is Normal

What's wrong with this map? nothing, until you look at the legend:

'Disrupted lines appear in their normal colour'

Not sure whether that's

a)an illogical bit of Tufte-baiting undesign

b) sad, resigned pragmatism on the part of some put-upon designer at Transport For London

c) just the truth

I'm glad I walk to work

no doubt I'll get some ridiculous cease and desist for publishing this picture

More on parliament

If it were remotely funny, it would be very funny. But it's not, it's sad.

No-one owns or manages the parliament.uk domain

and more parliamentary email stats here:

MPs call for anti-spam rethink

stef

The facts about FaxYourMp.com

A few events have coincided to make me want to scribble about faxyourmp.com, not least because those involved never get round to saying it about themselves. The triggers:

• We shall almost certainly deliver our 50,000th fax in the next 48 hours (2003-02-04)

• This week, the grandly-named Parliamentary Communications Directorate imposed obscenity filtering on MPs email (apparently without consulting MPs themselves) and claimed that a tidal wave of almost 1000 obscene messages had been trapped in a week. That's an average of 1 filthy mail per MP per week, which makes one wonder what the problem was.

• That faxyourmp.com's submission (WORD, sorry everyone) wasn't mentioned in the preliminary response report of the e-democracy consultation (PDF, sorry everyone).

Anyway, here's the story:

Since its launch in November 2000, FaxYourMp.com, has demonstrated that almost all of the claims made about the difficulty of e-government and e-democracy are untrue. Some boasts:

The service has delivered almost 50,000 faxes from constituents to MPs

• Marketing spend to date: 0 GBP

• Marketing to date: 1 Press Release sent to friends, (December 2000)

• Awards to date: New Statesman Overall Merit 2000, New Media Age Best Use of the Web, endless gratitude and praise from citizens and parliamentarians alike.

• The service has stringent automated checks in place, and we do not ever allow form letters. In this regard we are the most responsible and responsive mechanism by which MPs may be contacted. We have caught and stopped several attempts by companies to abuse the service.

• While we do not respond to every email, we make serious efforts to aid all users who are having difficulty using the service.

• 67% of our users report that they have never contacted their mp before, dispelling the suggestion that we simply lower the barrier to entry for the already politically engaged. We are bringing mostly new participants to the debate.

• We are the first organisation to measure MPs responsiveness and performance in a systematic way, applying the same performance criteria to them as are applied to government departments. Performance: not that good, although some shine.

• If an MP requests it, and can demonstrate that they have a working, responsive email address, we will use that instead of their fax number

• hardware: a couple of old PCs

• budget: less than 3000 GBP and the donated resources of our helpers, which amounts to a few hours a week each.

• abuse rate: we estimate that less than 1% of faxes are abusive or inappropriate, based on the samples we see via feedback or bounces (we don't read the messages).

But what's your point, stef?

I believe that Faxyourmp is the leading e-democracy tool in the UK. We demonstrate daily that almost every single one of the excuses and apologiesfor the slow development of e-democracy in the UK are due to a lack of will, inertia, and inability to take notice of either best practice online, or select appropriate solutions. I don't blame individuals (as everyone I've every encountered in the civil service or parliament has been well-intentioned, dedicated and hard working), but we make it plain that this stuff is trivially doable.

Furthermore, while many MPs will happily tell us what a great job we do, we find that our attempts to offer our service to Parliament, or to contribute to the e-government debate are ignored. Not even rebuffed, just ignored. I am naturally a conspiracy theorist, so I suspect that while no-one wants the bad publicity of shutting us down, only the electorate would be upset if we just went away quietly.

I personally think that Parliament should take on the job of enabling access to a technology that achieved ubiquity in 1982, rather than spending money censoring constituents' email.**

We don't need money (and don't accept it from the many citizens who offer), but it is wrong that the delivery of basic democratic services (try explaining why FYMP exists to a citizen of any other western democracy) falls to unpaid geeks. We would offer whatever consultancy was necessary to handover the system, but will only do so when confident that the system will be run to the same high standards that we (ok, Owen) have achieved. It only takes a few hours a week. For a fraction of the cost of some of the current consultation, or another thinktank report, another worse-than-before website redesign, Parliament could have our service.

One of the most heartening aspects of the service has been the letters that constituents write. Almost without exception, the letters they send MPs are reasoned, well thought out, not always perfectly spelled, but often insightful engagements in civic society. Far from the image of a disaffected and disengaged electorate, we see a mass of people who've discovered that they can effectively participate in democracy- if artificial and archaic barriers are not put in their way.

I can't be the only one who sees the irony in the fact that in the week that we celebrate 50K faxes served, the people whose job should be doing what we do for free** are still trying (feebly) to raise barriers against the citizenry.

There's a dramatic mindset change that needs to happen over there, because, if you will not give us greater democracy, we will simply take it from you.

Finally, those numbers from the PCD make some interesting reading:

900 blocked in a week. So the 659 MPs get a torrent of **1 or 2 ** rude emails per week.

Now, let's say that MPs email is no more rude than the internet at large (them being representative citizens and all), and make a generous guess that 10% of email is spam.

this would suggest that MPs are drowning under a constituency workload of about 15 emails a week.

So the number of faxes we deliver is of the order of 10% of the total electronic traffic from constituents. Not bad for an unsupported free service run by geeks.

I'd like comments and/or corrections to these numbers. If you've got better stats, let's hear them.

Alan Mather's blog

e-gov @ large

makes fascinating reading, despite the title torturing the language in two different ways so beloved of the Civil Service. Sensible, rational, intelligent writing from the other side of the e.gov/e.democracy fence, and I disagree with almost of all of it.

It's a shame he doesn't allow comments on his blog. I wonder why not? I intend to respond to some of his comments here when the RSI eases up a bit, but a comment forum would be better.

I put this here because my next post says nasty things about it, and I wanted to explain that the phraseology used is rhetorical rather than personal. Let's debate!

Entitlement Cards Consultation

So the sleeping tiger of uk-crypto-privacy-online-civil-rights, Stand.org.uk has woken up for one last (again) battle with the Home Office.

I can't add anything to what they say. Have a look, and have your say. Because this stuff is desperately important.

should be fun few days

Guardian coverage for Conversations

so Mike Butcher wrote a very clueful piece for The Guardian today, which is always nice. Somehow managed to omit a URL from the print, but that's probably a subbing error ;)

Still reeling in shock that Ben Hammersley managed to write a whole piece on Friendster, discussing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, but somehow not mentioning that the last time someone tried to do this it was a total failure.

I don't see Friendster doing any better. It's just filling up my inbox with calls to action that I don't want or need, and while it is kind of functioning in a connecting way now, I don't think it's going to scale. Apparently I've already got a gazillion friends, and I only admitted having 3. so how and why can I care about these other folk?

trackback

so I was having a conversation with bloody Jones, about how complicated, rather than simple, blogging and the web had become. I said it was because MT and it's ilk are all badly designed shit, filled with obscure terminology, and anti-features.

And this is a shame, because after all the hype about publishing for everyone, the geeks have, yet again, fucked the platform so no-one human can use it.

I'm an unashamed populist. If my mum can't use it, if a complete web novice doesn't get it straight away, i've failed.

And the Trotts, and all these people writing more endlessly self-referentially feedback mechanisms for staring up the arse of your referrers, are failing too.

Why do we keep making the web harder instead of easier?

anyway. I said that 99.999% of people didn't and shouldn't give a fuck about Trackback. It was a throwaway line, but I thought I'd see if I could validate it:

pages on google: 3083324652

google hits for trackback: 500,000

% google hits that are trackback: 99.984

close enough for me.

anyway this week I found out that I'll be speaking at The O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference about Upmystreet Conversations which cheered me up.

This is stuff that's been on my mind for a while, but has been brought** to the front by the launch of Conversations on Upmystreet.com

Britain is pretty unique in the world in the way that its postcode

system is structured (as far as I know - are there others?)

For foreign readers: The country is divided up into

124 Postcode Areas eg. WC* ***(194000 households)

and further subdivided into Postcode Districts (2858, WC1A *, 8200 housholds) and Postcode Sectors (9461, WC1A 1, 2500 households). The last

two characters are then allocated non-contiguously within the sector,

giving about 1,700,000 full postcodes with an average of 14 households

in each. Postcodes churn over time, so these figures may be slightly out of date.

There's more history here if you're interested.

Upmystreet only works because a full postcode provides an easy to

remember, short, easily typed, and in urban areas highly localised key for any kind of geographically variant data. This allows it to be very accurate demographically, and statistically, while not violating a user's privacy.

In the US, where a 5-digit ZIP covers about 100,000 households, a ZIP is pretty useless for doing UpMyStreet, and especially Conversations. There's a nine digit ZIP, but hardly anyone uses them, and they identify an individual abode, so they're not good from a privacy perspective.

Nevertheless, there are potential issues, and I have come to believe these effects will become more serious over time. A postcode doesn't identify an individual, but a postcode + almost any other piece of information about a person** can do. For instance, a postcode + a first name is, even if you've got a common first name, almost always enough to identify an individual.

Here's an example of postcode-based abuse that's already happening. We all know of cases where someone moves into a new flat (often a first time buyer, especially someone buying into a rapidly gentrifying area, or an ex-council house) and suddenly finds themselves refused credit for the first time in their lives. The story given is usually that the flat had a previous bad creditor, but the truth is that the postcode has been classified as uncreditworthy.

Furthermore, the credit risk will have been calculated from a range of demographic factors, not necessarily actual bad credit history. The individual is penalised for the bad behaviour of people statistically like them.

I used to think that the situation in the UK, compared to the US, was much safer, because we had the Data Protection Act, and because we could key anonymously on postcodes, but building Conversations showed us how important it was to teach users to protect their own privacy, and that they can still be quite vulnerable when they talk about themselves.

For this reason, we take steps to obfuscate both a user's home location, and the location of nearby posts, but additionally the first rule we added during our beta test was that it was a violation to reveal personal details (particularly the postcode) of

another user.

a game to play a game: not only googling for postcodes, but see if you can pinpoint a friend with a firstname+ postcode. It doesn't work that well at the moment, but I bet it will in a few years.

stefan EC1Y 8**

paul Says:

very nice. look forward to reading more when i'm not so hungover. good one.

January 1st, 2003 at 5:43 pm

Things I've learnt about Movable Type

in the last day:

- All the default templates were designed by the people who did the Autostyles in Excel and this is not a good thing

- The best way to get MT up and running is to install it, copy the stylesheet from www.tomski.com, and then keep deleting styles until you get something decent.

- I've learnt another reason why GIFTEXT is evil: mozilla's typeaheadfind is a godsend to the keyboard-navigation-bound like me. and it doesn't work with giftext. Since mozilla can't tell when the ALT text matches the text on the image, or even if there is text on the image, it's screwed.

- Last time I tortured HTML personally, CSS wasn't supported.

and I think things were better. Expect this site to get more and more H1 + blue links as time goes on.

- Actually, I 've just realised that if I copy all the links off the side of Tomski too, excluding the brood, that also completes my linkblock.

many muchly text