November 12th, 2007
Introducing the Marseille Figs
the extraordinary Mr Dorian McFarland, and his 3 piece big band, the Marseille Figs have released a proper cd, and it gets a rather lovely review at roomthirteen.com. Read all about The Dirty Canon, by the Marseille Figs, and then buy it at amazon. It’s being released on my birthday. surely not a co-incidence.
August 10th, 2007
Look! Kittens!
we shoulda done this a longggggggggg time ago.
July 19th, 2007
MOO Stickerbooks launches
These are so exciting I can’t breathe.
I really must blog more often ;)
September 19th, 2006
MOO launches
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.
August 15th, 2006
My first ever youtube video
actually a quicktime of a days worth of pictures taken with my 20D at 6 fps…, since the youtube output looked rubbish:
The low quality youtube version, if the above doesn’t work for you:
August 4th, 2006
I think I now understand how Arthur Dent felt about that bypass
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
July 19th, 2006
Right, time to start blogging again
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.
February 16th, 2006
Trillian dead
obviously from some (as yet) unpublished edition of the Hitch-hiker’s Guide
(not laughing at tragedy, but merely spotting a co-incidence)
January 19th, 2006
Possibly the most tasteless advert I’ve ever seen
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.
January 14th, 2006
Open Rights Group taking subscriptions
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.
December 1st, 2005
new site: Farmsubsidy.org
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.
September 22nd, 2005
Woo! look! Parliament.gov.uk lives!
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!
September 22nd, 2005
government to launch postcode-based local portal
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.
September 13th, 2005
retrofitting geodata to wikipedia
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.
September 1st, 2005
I just got 24 Mb broadband!
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.)