Saul Cozens’ Web Technology Blog

I just used 38 Degrees to tell my MP, Angela Smith (Labour) that I am not happy that the Digital Economy Bill is being pushed through Parliament without proper debate.

I’ll let you know if/how she responds.

Dear Angela Smith,

I am writing to you again regarding the Digital Economy Bill that is currently being passed through Parliament.  I am extremely concerned that this extremely contentious and far-reaching legislation seems to be being hurried through Parliament with no real scrutiny.

This legislation will mean that ordinary law abiding citizens will receive threatening letters from their ISPs and some will have their internet connection cut-off without any proper recourse.

In addition, providers of public Wifi will withdraw their services due to fear of heavy fines because they are not able to identify alleged copyright infringers.  This will mean that thousands of people who use these services in public building, will no longer have the means to access vital information services.

All the while, copyright infringers will be mostly unaffected as the will simply use existing techniques to bypass the monitoring of their activity.

The Digital Economy Bill is ill-thought out and will not protect the interests of our creative industries. I ask you to insist that it is properly debated before it is passed into law.

I look forward to hearing whether you agree that such important legislation should be debated and discussed by you, our elected representatives, rather than being passed into law on a nod and a wink.

Regards

I have been getting gradually more and more angry about the Digital Economy Bill that the UK government are going to try and pass in the next few months.  I have been moved so much that I have used writetothem.com to write to Angela Smith my local MP.

Dear Angela Smith,

Could you please let me know you position on the proposed Digital Economy Bill that was mentioned in the Queen’s speech.

I am extremely concerned that the interested of certain industries are being supported over the interests of the citizens of the UK.

In addition to stifling a communication tool that has the potential to increase community and political engagement, the DEB seems to be attacking democracy itself.

That the bill allows a person’s internet connection to be removed on the suspicion of wrong doing, with no proof required and no right to recourse or hearing in a court of law, runs counter to the long held British tenet of ‘innocent until proven guilty’.

In addition to this, the expected clause allowing a Minister to make changes to the terms of the Bill after it has been passed, without further discussion or debate by accountable and electable representatives is abhorrent.

I hope that you will tell me that you will be voting against this bill when it comes before the House of Commons. I would be pleased if you can tell me that you will speak out publically against it before then.

Yours sincerely,

Saul Cozens

I will post her response both here and on openrightsgroup.org

UPDATE: I have had a response from Angela Smith MP

(more…)

I’ve received an Aspire Acer Revo on Friday and have spent a few hour s so far this weekend installing:

• Ubuntu
• Boxee

Thanks to Liam Green-Hughes fantastic guide, it’s been relatively painless.  I didn’t need to do the crazy-assed graphix driver installaiton either – I just used EnvyNG to get and install the correct Nvidia drivers.

I now have it all up and running and playing music and video from my NAS. My next task is to interface a standard Sky remote control via LiRC and a Nintendo Wii remote via bluetooth.  I can then start building apps on top of the XUL based interface provided by Boxee.

If anyone has any ideas of apps that would be appropriate for a TV based device (either in the home or in an office environment) or any interesting ways in which gestures from a Wii remote could be interpreted, please let me know.

I’m as mad as hell at Check Point.  They’ve managed to turn my MacBookPro into a brick.

This evening I decided to get around to encrypting my MacBook’s harddisk in accordance with our company security standards.  When we bought this first batch of MacBooks we thought hard about how we woud maintain the security standards we have in place for our Windows and Linux based laptops.  We concluded that in order to do this we would have to pay for encryption software (we use an Open Source package on Windows/Linux platforms), but security is worth paying for.

So I followed the instructions and installed Check Point Full Disk Encyption for Mac on my lovely shiny new MacBookPro.  Everything seemed fine and I was happy to see the ‘restart your computer now’ button appear quite quickly.

Unfortunately, 5 seconds after clicking that restart button I was greeting with a console error message:

Couldn’t init Graphic!

FATAL ERROR

Nothing would boot any further.  Eeek!  Quickly I get onto my desktop PC and start googling.  Low and behold there is a known issue with new MacBookPros and Check Point FDE 3.0. It doesn’t work!

Okay – at least it’s a known problem, so there must be a fix available.  After 5 minutes of registering on Check Point’s website to see the solution, I am informed that ‘To view this solution, Advanced access is required.’

So Check Point release a product that silently bricks my MacBook and then tell me that in order to find out how to fix the problem I must pay for a support contract.  Nice!

Maybe I should go round to their house, shit on their carpet and ask them for money to clear it up!

I had a great time at geekup Sheffield last night.  The format had changed from a bunch of presentations (mostly by techies about technical issues) to a much more freeform conversation.  This was extremely succesful and looked a lot like what I’ve been trying to do with my Pub2.0 thing.  So well done Geekup!

In order to seed some interesting conversations, the geekup organiser (Jag) asked a few people to ‘host’ some conversation topics.  Jag asked me to try and start up a conversation about the Digital Britain Interim report recently published by Lord Carter.  I was only too happy to oblige.

So I spent a considerable part of the evening talking to a couple of people (namely Chris and John) about what was right and wrong with the report and its proposals.  I was keen to try and steer the conversation away from widely discussed topics of infrastructure (whether it should be the government’s role to fund our new high bandwidth to the home network, or should it be left to the telcos?) and content (are the proposals in DB for the setup of a ‘copyright police’ simply propping up an outdated business model).

Instead I wanted to discuss one area that Lord Carter’s report doesn’t seem to cover at all – digital services.  I wanted to know if there are any digital services that are big enough that only a government could deliver them, but are not so important that we shouldn’t trust a government to provide them.

The obvious candidate is digital identity services, but that kind of falls into the ‘too important to be trusted to government’ category.  Also, as an evangelist for openID (and other distributed service mechanisms), I couldn’t, hand on heart, suggest that the identity management for an entire nation be provided by a central service (government run or not).

This lead to the statement perhaps government should instead concentrate on setting data interchange standards and service provider certification. The obvious application would be to enable the easy transfer of personal health records from one provider to another, not in some invisible way where any backstreet quack (or pharmaceutical company exec) who has got themselves an NHS login can access my records, but instead  in a way where I could be in control of who has access to my records.  Better even, I can also receive notifications when my records are accessed.

Chris mentioned that he didn’t think that current FOI legislation allows someone to ask an organisation WHY they have their personal data, which may become a pertinant question when you see that BigPharma Inc. have recently accessed your GP records.

Of course, this idea is probably past its best as the Nth billion pound of fund is poured into the big centralised NHS health-care record system, but the principle could be applied to many other areas of personal information: credit records, employment/tax history, benefits, pensions, criminal records/driving convictions.

Not only did we think that setting standards is what government is better suited to than providing services (certainly in IT), but it could also allow for innovation and consumer choice to enter the information systems market and allow the public to be able to control their own data.

Of course after this very interesting and inciteful discussion we then went on to talk about how the record industry is trying to prop up an outdated business model and how all the best songs are written by poor starving artists anyway…

I’m now looking forward to GeekUp Sheffield next month!

I signed up to Suw Charman-Anderson’s Ada Lovelace Day pledge quite a while ago and ever since I have been trying to work out who I should blog about.

You see the brief is to pick a woman in technology that I admire and blog about them to try and provide more women with the role-models, the inspirational figures that they are able to related to, that will encourage them to work with and in technology.

While thinking about why it is that I have so few women in my list of technologists I admire, I recalled how I was first introduced to probably the most influential women in technology ever, Ada Lovelace.  During my first year of my Electronic and Control Systems Engineering degree, I took a course on programming.  Early in this course the lecturer was discussing (very briefly) the general concept of strong typing in languages for embedded systems and mentioned ADA, the language developed for the US DoD.  With glee, he told his audience of impressionable young engineers (a small percentage of who were women) that ADA was named after Ada Lovelace, Charles Babbage’s mistress.

And with that dismissal of the significance of inventing the concept of programming, my lecturer gave a slamming indictment of the perception the contribution women have made to our industry.

So I will do all I can do to counter this perception and let women know that our industry welcomes their participation and I look forward to being inspired by them in future.

Now, I know many women technologists, I have worked with some outstanding women over my years and while I have respect for their knowledge, skills and endeavour, I don’t think I can claim any of them to be my heroine.  To admire these women just on the grounds of their gender would be patronising and demeaning.

I also know of a few women who are industry leaders and influencers, but  I have to confess to being more interested in the things that they do rather than who they are.  Among the few women’s names that have been associated with things that have been inspiring enough for me to research the person behind them is Mary Lou Jepsen.

What I know about Mary Lou Jepsen can be found out from her page on Wikipedia, but her dedication to a project such as One Laptop Per Child, must surely deserve admiration.  The OLPC vision is:

To create educational opportunities for the world’s poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning. When children have access to this type of tool they get engaged in their own education. They learn, share, create, and collaborate. They become connected to each other, to the world and to a brighter future.

This must be one of the most important technology projects that could be undertaken in a World where the divide between the connected and the non-connected is widening and being connected brings both the opportunity for self-fulfilment and economic independence.  Access to information allows people to educate themselves in the absence of anybody to teach themselves, to trade in a renewable resource that they have in abundance, their intelligence, and to add their contribution to the entire world of understanding and knowledge.

Mary Lou Jepsen, was the Chief Architect and driving force behind the OLPC project and was pivotal in getting numerous large corporates to participate in it.  Without her, the World would be a poorer and less equal one.

It’s actually been over  a year since I attempted to get loads of Sheffield web people together to chat about web stuff.  So, after numerous proddings by Chris, I have set a date for the first one of 2009.

The format is simple, there is no format.

It’s a completely unstructured social event.  Turn up, eat, drink and talk to people.  Talk to people you know and to people you don’t.  Talk about the web, talk about the weather.  Whatever.  I’d really like it if you’d blog/tweet/email what you talked about (or what you can remember).  But whatever.

Rather than being the rather elitist and snobbish affair that it has been previous (yeah, right!) I decided this time to make it an all comers event.  If you know of anyone who’d like to meet up for a drink and a chat about web stuff, please point them at upcoming.org.

After checking for conflicts with other local web events, I’ve set the date for March the 26th, and I see no reason not to meet-up at the Devonshire Cat again.

Please use upcoming.org to state whether you’re likely to attend as, if the numbers go crazy, I might have to warn them we’re coming.

I just thought I share something with you…

Have you ever noticed that if you fold a sheet of A3 paper in half it is the same size as a sheet of A4.  This fact is what implies the aspect ratio of ISO standard paper (A3, A4, A5, etc).

If a piece of A4 has long and short sides sides of a and b respectively and a sheet of A3 has long and short sides c and d respectively, and the aspect ratio of A4 and A4 is the same, then:

a/b = c/d

and the long side of A4 is the same as the short side of A3:

a = d

and the short side of an A4 is half the long side of and A3:

b = c/2

so, substituting:

d/(c/2) = c/d

(d^2)/(c/2) = c

(d^2)/(c^2) = 1/2

d/c = 1/√2

so the ratio of d/c (the short to long side) of A3 (and therefore any ISO paper size) is 1/√2 or approximately 0.707

I don’t know why I find this interesting, but I thought you might too.

FOWA Dublin 2009

This is a shameless plug for FOWA Dublin 2009.  By putting this logo on my blog, Carsonified say they might give me free tickets.

It’s shameless because I have no shame in promoting the FOWA events after attending and really enjoying FOWA London 2008.

This crazy train of thought started after our company had a Christmas outing to the local Laser Quest.  As a bunch of geeks, plenty of people were working out the technology and one person, Pip, just said in passing ’surely we could make it better by applying some new technology’.

That was enough to set my brain working.  Being a web-ish person, I immediately starting thinking about how to extend the Laser Quest experience online.  To me half the fun of the event is reliving the game in the pub afterwards.  Working out who shot who and boasting about the excellent move you made on the opposition base that no-one saw.

So why not fit each and every player with a accurate location sensor, track their movements throughout the game and upload the data to the game computer with the shot/hit data.  This means that you could replay the entire game, who was where and where shot where made.  the game can then be replayed online in the pub (who doesn’t have a smart phone) or in the office the next day!

What technology needs to be in place to achieve this:

• First, the existing gun/vest packs need to record the time of kill shots not just the shooter and count.  I’ve no idea whether different system do this or not.
• next we need some kind of location tracking technology.  It needs to work in an enclosed spaces (with lots of walls), be lightweight and low power and be able to track to an accuracy of about 1m at a rate of perhaps 1 sample/second.

I had a bit of a look around at some tracking technologies, but found none that fit:

• rfid is very low power, but I believe that it is also very short range.  I’m not sure if that is true of active RFID as well as passive.
• GPS doesn’t work well indoors, particularly in basements with no windows
• Wifi based tracking looks promising, particularly as wifi transponders are pretty cheap.  However, they work on signal strength difference to mulitple wifi beacons.  This might mean it works less well on a small area.
• Bluetooth seems to be based around proximity location rather than triangulation of actual position.
• RF fingerprinting, which infers position from the the pattern of RF signal received by multiple beacons.  It requires that the system ‘learns’ room before it can determine position.  I’m not sure how well this would cope with multiple sensors and a complex layout of perpendicular walls (with windows).

Of course, any solution must be cheap enough for the Laser Quest arena operators to invest in.  By the look of Sheffield’s Laser Quest arena, this price threshold is pretty damn low.  I’m thinking open source software and hacked consumer hardware will be the way to go.

Anyone else got any thoughts?