BlogOfTheMoon

Seven Nine Lords a-Blogging

Raj — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 23:58:00 +0000

I heard a discussion on Radio 4's The Week in Westminster this week about members of the House of Lords running a group blog. I was in Norn Iron at the time but I took a note of the the participants and looked them up when I got home. This led me to Lords of the Blog and I was quickly sucked in by some of the material I found there.

Unlike a lot of people, I have a lot of respect for the House of Lords. Not only is it a more civilised chamber than the Commons (it always amazes me that MPs whinge that they get no respect from the public after seeing how they behave in the House; they could certainly learn a lesson from the Lords) but it's vital to our democracy. Although it's not perfect, the Lords is a revising chamber and it has successfully revised and redrafted legislation over the years, improving it no end. Yes we've still got bad law, but think how much worse it would have been without the Lords (in one of the comments in that blog, Lord Norton of Louth states that the Lords makes 2000-3000 successful amendments a year to legislation).

The other vital function of the Lords, in my mind, is its expertise. While the Commons has the elected legitimacy, its members are often jacks of all trades, and masters of none (and, increasingly, not even Jacks, since they come straight into Parliament from political jobs without having any "real world" experience), while the Lords contains experts from all walks of life, from art and science to business and politics. These are exactly the kinds of people who should be in a revising chamber – experts in the fields, who will know when an idea has merit and when it is simply fanciful.

Yes, I'm painting an idealistic picture here, and no doubt the second chamber could be improved, but if we ever do move to a fully elected 'senate' for our second chamber, the term of office must be a long one – another benefit of the Lords is that they are more resistant to lobbying, since there is no electorate to have to please and no chance of being deselected if they vote against the party line.

All in all, I think our second chamber does a damn fine job, and if it's going to be changed, we really need to think very carefully about how it's done. It keeps the government in check, it's full of expertise, it's more civilised and its members are more independent than the Commons. I'll vote for that.

Demise of Paisley and Netscape

Raj — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 23:31:00 +0000

So Ian Paisley is stepping down as First Minister. I'm actually not sure what to make of this. Once I would have been cock-a-hoop about it, since I've always hated the man. But recently I've grudgingly started to if not respect him then at least appreciate the work he's done and the U-turns he's made to enter into power sharing with Sinn Fein. Whether he's done this for the good of the people of the Province, or for personal power is debatable, and maybe even irrelevant, but he and Martin McGuinness have worked hard together to make the devolved administration work. Indeed, they appear to have such a good personal relationship that they've earned the nickname of the "Chuckle Brothers". I worry about Paisley's successor now. If it's someone who's going to be very hardline, playing up to the DUP's hard core, then I think we'll be in trouble. I think we'll just have to watch this one and wait.

Another recent demise is that of the veteran web browser Netscape. I have many fond memories of Netscape, as its version 2 was my first window on the web, in the last months of my school career. I then used versions 3 and 4.x at University and stuck with it during the Dark Days when IE overtook it in terms of usability and features. Netscape 6, when it finally emerged, was a disaster. In fact, everything after Netscape was acquired by AOL was a bit of a disaster. However, the mess of NS6 did lead me to the Mozilla project, and after I got over my fear of the big banners saying that it was beta software, I downloaded Mozilla 0.7 (Netscape 6 was based on Mozilla 0.6 – that tells you how unready it was) and haven't looked back since. Although Mozilla itself has now abandoned the integrated suite that characterised Netscape 4 in favour of the standalone Firefox, the idea continues in the community maintained SeaMonkey project. So rest in peace Netscape, your legacy lives on.

Torchwood season 2

Raj — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 19:19:00 +0000

After a flying start, Torchwood season two seems to have settled down into something much better than season one. The first few episodes of the season proclaimed a series much more mature than the "wheee, we've got a post-watershed slot" tone of season one. It wobbled a bit after its great start but Martha Jones' introduction was pretty good and didn't feel too forced. It also appears to have led to an arc story, with Owen, which is pretty intriguing.

The characters in season two have also changed. They seem much more settled and likeable and seem to be settling into stable patterns, rather than the free for all that there seemed to be to start with.

I feel justified for staying with the series through the worst excesses of its first season. It's maturing, and although it's still got Rusty T. written all over it, things feel less gratuitous this time. Let's hope they can keep it up.

Goals for 2008

Raj — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 20:58:00 +0000

Geek goals, mind. I'm not going all existential on you :-)

While I was at home, without Internet access, I had time to think of things I wanted to do this year. Here's what I came up with.

Compile SeaMonkey. I've used a Mozilla-based browser for years now, and for a long part of that time, I've used nightly builds. These are the result of taking the state of the codebase every night and creating a build out of that. As a result, you're on the bleeding edge, but things often break. This satisfied me for a long time, but you can be even more up to date – pull a copy of the source code, compile and build it yourself. This is the ultimate in currentness!
Build an AJAX "Web 2.0" website. I've had an idea for another geek website for a while now (yes, I know, GBusMaps isn't finished and I've had another idea). I battered this around my head for a bit (and even came up with a database schema which I scribbled down on paper while I was at home), and thought it would be fairly easy. And I thought about doing it the AJAX way (all wooshy, where things happen without having to reload the page). So the idea turned more into an excuse to learn how to make a cross-browser client-side application that could talk to server side web services using XML.
(Maybe) learn a new language. I'm considering Perl, or maybe Python, since it seems to be the new language de jour.

And not two weeks into the year, and I'm already one third the way through my goals. Compiling SeaMonkey from the CVS trunk was actually very straightforward, and I'm typing this entry from my new build. I've even written some scripts to automate the whole procedure and leave me with a normal Windows installer that I can then invoke as usual.

Unfortunately, as I hinted above, things will break on these builds, and not only am I using pre-alpha software but am pulling it at a random time when there's no guarantee that someone won't have checked in something that broke the tree (e.g. in this build, if I middle-click to open a link in a new tab, I just get a bunch of errors thrown at me). But that's not the point. The point is that it's so cool. And also, although I'm unlikely to hack on SeaMonkey myself, it does mean that I can apply patches that haven't made it into the main codebase yet, for testing.

Okay, so maybe I should be thinking about loftier matters at this time of year, but I've never really been one for new year's resolutions, and these projects are all interesting, useful (in a limited way, I admit) and fun.

New year wishes

Raj — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 17:14:00 +0000

Happy new year, everybody! As usual, I've written a retrospective of the year just passed, that's up on my website. I do have goals for this year, but I'll post those later.

Time's arrow flies on
Each season with it's beauty
Enjoy each anew.

Wishing you happiness and good fortune in this new year

Happy New Year.

You know you're in trouble when...

Raj — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 20:33:00 +0000

... you think it's a perfectly reasonable thing to use Vi to edit a text file on a machine where another text editor exists. I knew this MIS lot would teach me bad habits.

DVD authoring

Raj — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I've been looking for some decent DVD authoring software for ages but never found anything that was free and did what I wanted. The other day I found DVD Flick which is not only free, but open source as well. I've played with it for a little bit and have concluded that it does exactly what I want. It's a great bit of software, with a good user interface, does what I want and, most importantly, it works! The release version doesn't do menus, but the beta (available from the forums) handles that with no problems.

On a related note, I've spent ages looking for free software that does this, and now that I've found it, I'm going to pay for it. I like the open source ideal, I respect the amount of work that's gone into it, the fact that it does exactly what I want and because I can, I'm happy to pay for that (and to publicise it on my blog) to encourage it to continue.

Raj — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 15:24:00 +0000

Recently a lamp post sized pole set in great big concrete blocks (to stop people tearing it down, I suppose) has appeared near where I live with a CCTV camera on it. I find this slightly disturbing and a bit creepy. It's a bit odd, since I don't mind these cameras in the city centre or in shops (or maybe I've just got used to them), but having one watching me at the bottom of my street is just unsettling. I keep thinking that someone's going to pull me in and demand that I justify my existence.

On a much happier note, following Stevie and Sacha's news, Stevie has asked me to be his best man. Having known him for a decade and lived with him for almost half that, how could I refuse? Now I've got to come up with a speech. And I can't even recycle the last one, since there'll probably be a lot of people who were at both ;-).

New music models

Raj — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 18:21:00 +0000

Radiohead are trying an interesting experiment with their new album: they're letting fans download the album and then choose how much to pay for it based on what they think it's worth. This is interesting because up until now, the music industry's response to advances in technology has been to sue their customers. It's good to see someone as big as Radiohead try something experimental and different that engages with their audience.

This is Radiohead's first album outwith their former record company, EMI, and I can't help wondering if this is going to set a trend: as soon as their contract expired, they jumped ship and went independent. Could this be the beginning of the end of the record company as we know it? I guess it depends very much on the success of this experiment, but it's certainly one that I'll be watching with great interest.

End of a Department

Raj — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 14:45:00 +0000

On Friday 14th September, my former department, the IT Education Unit at the University of Glasgow was formally no more. We've known for several years that changes were afoot, but the University's processes were so slow that by the time that they finally caught up with us, we'd given up on them and thought that nothing would ever change.

It was in the spring of this year that we got formal notification that the department would be closed down. At this point, no mention of the staff was being made, although the "functions" of the department – primarily student IT training – would be taken up by other units in the University.

After some intense negotiation by both ourselves and our union we finally got (what seemed to me like grudging) acknowledgement that steps should be taken to try and ensure that staff were redeployed rather than just fired. After what seemed like an endless series of meetings with HR and management, we persuaded them that we were still the right people to perform the function that they were starting to recognise was still much more important than they had believed.

However, during the process, I commented to my head of department that I would be interested in being redeployed to Management Information Services, since they develop and maintain pretty much all of the University's important corporate information systems and is the closest thing to a "software shop" that the University has. My HoD duly noted this and said that he'd contact the head of MIS. In the mean time, I was (having more or less given up on our PDP system after having been told that it wasn't going to be taken up) tidying up and refactoring my flagship application: ObSys, our course application and management system. ObSys is one of the oldest applications that I had developed at the ITEU, and was creaking a bit at the seams. Although there were no changes at the user level, I changed a lot under the hood to make it more maintainable in future.

A couple of weeks later, I had a series of meetings with people in MIS, to discuss my skills and what I could bring to the department. This was a turning point for me, since it cemented the idea of working for these guys rather than going to the Computing Service, which is where I had been angling for before. I also brought this up in my meetings with our HR manager and he noted it as a formal preferred choice. A couple of weeks later (we're now into the end of June), most of the department (which consists, at the time that all this is happening, of five members, down from our dizzy heights of double that, when we were expanding like mad) got letters from HR formally offering us redeployed posts. I was to be redeployed into MIS, but to be spending a portion of my time maintaining ObSys, since it would be required for at least another year, and most of my colleagues were redeployed into the Computing Service to continue their work on the IT Literacy Programme (now renamed IT Training for Students), taking on other duties as required. This didn't happen for only one member of the department, and he opted for early retirement.

The department theoretically continued to exist until the middle of September, as final administration work was carried out to wind it up, but all the staff, bar the one who opted for early retirement, left at the start of August (or as soon as getting back from holiday, in my case) to move to their new roles. Hence, I've been ensconced in a turret in the main building for just under a month now. I've been given a small project to start with: rewrite the car parking permits administration system (and no, I can't get you a permit) to introduce me to the department and its working practices. The people all seem nice, although I still can't remember faces and names yet: after working in a department of five people, moving to a department with over forty is a pretty huge leap. They are awfully keen on documentation though: I spent two weeks writing requirements, use cases and specifications before I got to write a single line of code, but it's all to the good of my personal development, I suspect.

What I miss the most in my turret is the camaraderie of my old colleagues. We were not only a very close knit team, but over the six years that I was working with them, we became close friends. We knew each others' foibles, could wind each other up (I could sell them TBD!) and we could wile away long teabreaks with conversations ranging from politics to art to the current fortunes of Partick Thistle, to someone's favourite Doctor Who episode to economic theory to music. Not that we're losing touch altogether, of course, we've been having regular lunches to keep in touch, and I still talk to some of them for work.

Six years is a long time to work anywhere though, and ITEU was my first job. I have a lot of fond memories from that department. Rest in Peace, your legacy lives on.

Impossible Dreams

Raj — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 22:18:00 +0000

I've just discovered that Impossible Dreams by Tim Pratt won this year's Hugo Award for best short story. I think this is fantastic – this is far and away my favourite of the nominees this year, it's just a brilliant story. If you haven't encountered it yet, you can read it at Asimov's Science Fiction or listen to it on Escape Pod. It's a fantastic story and it deserved the recognition.

The other winners can be found here and you can read the other nominated stories here.

Damn fine short stories

Raj — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 12:45:00 +0000

I've finally (just about) caught up with the Escape Pod archive and I thought I'd share some of my favourite stories from this wonderful collection of short stories. It took quite some time to narrow the original longlist down, but here are my favourite stories from the archive, along with links to the stories themselves so you can listen to them yourself.

EP017: The Life and Times of Penguin, Eugie Foster: This was possibly the first Pod that made me fairly emotional, with a hint of a tear in one eye by the end. It's the loveliest tale of balloon animals that you could imagine. It's also read by Mur Lafferty, who has become one of my favourite EP readers.
EP020: The Burning Bush, Jennifer Pelland: The Burning Bush shows how God gets a message across in the 21st century. It's about exactly what you'd expect in this smut-filled age, and it's hilarious. It mightn't be the most artistically brilliant piece of work but it completely fulfils Escape Pod's mission of publishing fun SF stories.
EP022: Don Ysidro, by Bruce Holland Rogers: This is a quiet and fairly thoughtful piece about a death ritual. No action or even much of a plot, but it was one that was life-affirming and left me with a pleasant fuzzy feeling afterwards.
EP027: Union Dues - Iron Bars and the Glass Jaw, EP049: Union Dues - Off White Lies, EP062: Union Dues - The Baby and the Bathwater and EP080: Union Dues - Cleanup in Aisle Five, by Jeffrey R. DeRego: The Union Dues series is very well put together with excellent writing and very human characters. These stories are set in a universe where people with superpowers must join the "Union" (or be sent to a village in the middle of the Arctic to live for the rest of their lives unless they change their mind) and live apart from the rest of society in "Pyramids" that are effectively a nation within a nation. The stories are all from the heroes' point of view and how they cope with the pressure of their work and of a nation that fears them as much as it respects them. Excellent stories, all of them.
EP028: Your Corporate Network and the Forces of Darkness, by Lucy A. Snyder: Another story that's not going to win awards for art but is really fun. What if there really was a ghost in the machine (or at least ancient gods and demons)? What kind of people would sysadmins have to be to look after the networks of this world? Another one read by Mur Lafferty (and someone else, but he doesn't have as nice a voice :-)).
EP047: Poet for Hire, by Sue Burke: Another of the really fun stories. What if a poet's words really had power? Another story read by Mur Lafferty.
EP051: Is You Is / Is You Ain't?, by Michael Canfield: A strong story of an adult mind trapped in a baby's body, told in the form of his autobiography.
EP055: Down Memory Lane, by Mike Resnick: A haunting story of a couple, one of whom comes down with a senile dementia and the lengths to which her husband will go to for her.
EP066: The King's Tail, by Constance Cooper: I don't know why I enjoy this little story so much but it's fun, it's moving and its set in a nation of pacifists trying to resist invasion without breaking their principles.
EP073: Barnaby in Exile, by Mike Resnick: Resnick certainly knows how to tug on heartstrings and this story of an educated ape left me with a very large lump in my throat by the end. A beautiful and moving story.
EP078: The Shoulders of Giants, by Robert J. Sawyer: I like this fairly hard science fiction story about a sleeper ship travelling to colonise another planet and what they find when they get there. I'm sure I've read this before somewhere, maybe in an anthology, and I find it a great story of the human spirit.
EP082: Travels With My Cats, by Mike Resnick: Yet another Resnick story, this one won the 2005 Hugo award and it has the familiar Resnick writing strength and emotional power. This time a boy buys a book about a woman who travels the world with her cats and finds the woman coming alive.
EP090: How Lonesome a Life Without Nerve Gas, by James Trimarco: A touching story about a sentient war helmet who's more patriotic than the soldier who wears him.
EP093: {Now + n, Now - n}, by Robert Silverberg: A nice story about, not exactly time travel but using future and past echoes of yourself to manipulate the stock market. It's also a fine love story, although the central cause of conflict is mildly annoying, but I like it for the clever use of time manipulation.
EP095: Blink. Don't Blink, by Ramona Louise Wheeler: A harsh story of a murderer who opts for a shorter sentence by allowing himself to be manipulated by nanotechnology into becoming a living rescue vehicle, sent out to save lives and other disasters, allowing his body to be reshaped as required for the job. The end was a bit abrupt but apart from that it was a moving story with a sympathetic protagonist.
EP100: Nightfall, by Isaac Asimov: When I first found out what story they got for episode 100, I just sat around grinning and thinking, "Dude, you got an Asimov", and a damn fine story at that. This is about twice as long as the normal EPs at just under a hour and a half, but it's worth it. It's real classic golden age stuff. It has its issues: it has strong-jawed scientists oblivious to the world when they get into their work and its treatment of women is pretty much just as breeders, but, when you get down to it, the story is the Idea. Characterisation didn't really come into it, and I don't mind that, I'm a fan of that sort of golden age stuff where the Ideas came above everything else.
EP101: The 43 Antarean Dynasties, by Mike Resnick: Another Resnick. The man is a really, really good writer. This one tells the story of an alien tourist guide showing an obnoxious human family around the sites of his city, long after the golden age of his civilisation has ended.
EP105: Impossible Dreams, by Tim Pratt: I think this is my favourite EP to date. It's a wonderful Hugo-nominated story of alternative universes, romance and movies. Very geeky, very fun and lovely. Highly, highly recommended. This makes me wish I had registered to support the 2007 WorldCon just so that I could vote for it.
EP111: Mayfly, by Heather Lindsley: Read by my other favourite reader, the Word Whore, this is a memorable story about a family who really have to live in the Now.

Presenting WikiSearch

Raj — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 15:11:00 +0000

In an attempt to penetrate the mysterious insides of Mozilla and its descendants, I've written a simple extension for SeaMonkey and Firefox which lets you highlight some text on a webpage and search for it using the context menu.

Install WikiSearch ~~0.2~~ 0.3 (WikiSearch homepage) for SeaMonkey 1.0+ and Firefox 1.0+.
Note: although untested, WikiSearch should also work with SuiteRunner builds.

Edit: Fixed incompatibility with ContextSearch extension and bumped version number to 0.3.

Mad conviction overturned

Raj — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 09:45:00 +0000

According to The Register, the teacher who was convicted (for forty years) for displaying porn to children has been granted a retrial. This trial was completely shambolic (original story) and has been deconstructed in detail here and here. This was a case of people who failed to understand technology combined with a degree of fundamentalism and extreme prudery combining to make a mockery of justice. It just goes to reinforce my view that nobody should be allowed anywhere near a computer without having some sort of basic training first.

Death by a thousand cuts

Raj — Sat, 05 May 2007 14:50:00 +0000

I wish I had something insightful or witty to say about this case, but I don't, other than shaking my head sadly.

Chemical Weapons

Raj — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 17:41:00 +0000

An article by a former bomb disposal officer about the classification of chemical weapons as WMD got me thinking. I don't actually know that much about chemical weapons and they generally do scare me, so I was glad of a bit of debunking by someone who knows what he's talking about.

I'm wondering what people think about the suggestion that chemical weapons shouldn't be classed as WMD. It's something that I was initially quite sceptical about, but the article was persuasive. The comments suggest that they should be classed as such because of their capacity to cause fear in the populace, and their capacity to linger beyond just a single explosion. Ultimately, though, if this article is accurate (and I've got to have that proviso) it seems to me that a fear of chemical weapons has outweighed their actual capacity for causing mass destruction, certainly in any proportion to nuclear weapons.

I'm still afraid of biological weapons, though.

Politicians talk!

Raj — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 08:35:00 +0000

Nowhere but Northern Ireland would that headline be considered unusual, would it? All I can say is that it's about bloody time, but I do have some sorrow that it's not the more moderate parties that are in those seats now.

On a related note, is it just me, or are the media bending over backwards to rehabilitate Ian Paisley? When push comes to shove, he's still a bigoted scumbag, religious nutcase and rhetorician of the worst kind.

Academic Freedom

Raj — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 17:35:00 +0000

Apparently the University of Glasgow put gagging clauses in some redundancy deals it made during the recent round of voluntary severance. Apparently it was just a small number of staff, but this worries me considerably. Commercial confidentiality, I can understand (I don't like it, but I can understand it), but this order contains a "non-disparagement" clause, stating: The Employee agrees that he has not and will not make or otherwise communicate any disparaging or derogatory comments whether in writing or by spoken word and whether or not they are considered by the employee to be true, concerning the university. So in exchange for a huge wodge of cash (about £100,000), you agree not to say anything nasty about the university, even if you consider it to be true. Now, for a hundred grand, I have to say that I'd be very tempted myself, despite my principles! The newspaper article implies that the clause was there to prevent whistleblowers, which, as it points out, is ironic since our current rector Mordechai Vanunu is one of the most famous whistleblowers in the world.

I would like to discuss this further, including the university's attitude to criticism and the direction that it's taking under current management, but I'm not going to. Given past reaction of employers to blog posts by their employees about their workplace, I don't think it's worth the risk. I will, however, note that higher education in general is becoming more commercialised and businesslike. I don't like this intrusion of the business world and the marketplace into education. I don't think that they mix well with the idea of learning for the sheer pleasure of it, or research only for the betterment of the species. But then, I've always been an idealistic kind of guy.

On another note: apparently I've been spamming LiveJournal again. Apologies to everyone who reads this blog through their LJ friends list. I got "upgraded" to New Blogger today when I logged in, despite explicitly asking it not to, since I thought something like this might happen. There's nothing else I can do but apologise, which I do unreservedly.

Oh dear goodness, no!

Raj — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 13:11:00 +0000

It appears that the family of Ian Paisley are having a film made about his life. That this bigoted scumbag gets this recognition makes me very angry. He's got to be dealt with, but this is more attention than he deserves. And Liam Neeson trying to attach his name to the project removes any vestiges of respect I ever had for him.

Tony Blair, with a full head of hair...

Raj — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 20:03:00 +0000

I don't know how long this will stay up, but do listen to it if you get the chance. The Condensed History of Tony Blair, a decade in 15 minutes, written by one of the founder members of the Reduced Shakespeare Company is really rather hilarious.

Escape Pod

Raj — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 19:30:00 +0000

I've been meaning to blog about Escape Pod for some time, having been pointed to it by Kenny. It's an excellent science fiction podcast, broadcasting science fiction and fantasy short stories, along with film and book reviews and the occasional "flash" story – a very short story just based around a single idea, which can be very good. All the stories are available to download as MP3s under a Creative Commons licence and it's completely legal. The site pays the authors and most of the stories are reprints from the big American SF magazines (Asimov's, F&SF etc). I've listened to a lot to the stories and the quality is generally high. I've also have downloaded the entire archive for my MP3 player, providing me with over forty hours of listening goodness. I highly recommend giving it a shot.

Blair's ID card response

Raj — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 10:24:00 +0000

As one of the 28,000 signatories to the e-petition against the introduction of ID cards, I got this response from the Prime Minister today. Reading it didn't only not convince me to his point of view but made me despair that he understands the facts himself. The Register has done a fairly thorough debunking of the response, with more detail from NO2ID. They put it much more succinctly than I could.

Lego walrii

Raj — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 19:13:00 +0000

I've actually been meaning to post this since Christmas. Big Ginger Dave went to a lot of effort using Lego Factory to create a Lego walrus for me (link – the first one is Dave's). It was fun to put together, although I had to download the Lego Factory software and the model and use that to figure out how to do it! Even with that, it took about two hours to assemble one of them; I haven't got around to the second yet ;-). Just one note of annoyance: the Lego software seems awfully buggy and has one of the worst UIs that I've ever seen. Avoid it until at least the next major version.

Several 2007 related things

Raj — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 19:31:00 +0000

Firstly, happy new year! Secondly, I'm back in Glasgow and it's good to be back. It's quiet and generally relaxing at home, but I do miss this fine city and the lovely, lovely people that lurk in it. And thirdly, my review of 2006 is up on my website for anyone who's interested. Fourthly, I finished the 50 book challenge for 2006 and did an awful lot better than I was expecting, so huzzah!

More data creep

Raj — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 13:27:00 +0000

It seems that the Digital Switchover (Disclosure of Information) Bill is quite scary from the analysis over at SpyBlog. Lots of details seem to be unnecessarily included. Details of aliases, partners and employment status all seem totally unnecessary, and the complete lack of mention of data protection safeguards is worrying. This seems like ill-thought out and unnecessary legislation.