I am currently responding to 2 Government public consultations, the Data
Policy Consultation on the form and role of
the Public Data Corporation and the Making Open Data
Real consultation on the “culture of
openness and transparency in our public services”. In this post I copy my
answers to Chapter 4 of the consultation document, on charging for information,
this was the section I felt most able to answer. I omit my answers to the other
questions as I either skipped them or only gave cursory answers. The answers
below are not particularly well considered either, but it felt better to
contribute than to sit back and hope for the best.
Déjà Dup is a simplified back-up tool for
Gnome that lets you use a variety of storage options for backing up your
computer. However, its handling of Amazon S3 is a
little simplistic as it does not let you set the region of the bucket that it
will automatically create for you or use a pre-existing bucket. Amazon charges
based on where data is sent and got from, so if you do not live in the US Déjà
Dup will cost you extra. There is a bug
report of course, but that
does not seem to be getting attention, so below are instructions for a work
around.
The following is a copy of the letter I sent to my MP (Nicola Blackwood, CON,
Oxford West and
Abingdon)
regarding the comments in parliament made by Theresa May with regard to the
anti-cuts protests in
London
on 2011-03-26.
The following is a copy of the letter I sent to my MP (Nicola Blackwood, CON,
Oxford West and
Abingdon)
regarding the proposal for a UK version of the US DMCA take-down notices.
Wireless won’t work out of the box on the Shuttle XS35GT with Fedora 13 because
it does not include a kernel driver for the Realtek 8171 network controller.
The instructions by Bill
Giannikos
for 8172 and 8192se controllers work for the 8171 as well… using the same
driver as in the guide.
The script below lets you scan multiple book barcodes and add the books
directly to your Google Library.
The following is a copy of the letter I sent to my MP regarding the Digital
Economy Bill.
I recently got one of these household electricity display devices things and
being the information fiend that I am I’ve started studiously recording how
much electricity I use. That lead to the obvious question, How much is normal
electricity consumption in the UK. The Internet did not provide me with
reliable and consistent answer to this question, so after not inconsiderable
rooting for information, I derived the answer from the most up to date
available:
My letter to my MP, Don Foster, regarding Clause
152
of the Coroners and Justice
Bill.
For the last few days my eyes have been feeling strained and I’ve had a
constant low-level headache. I’m usually pretty good at knowing what is wrong,
and I was sure that my prescription was off.
A new age has dawned. I have just experience my first trip to Sainsburys during
which I did not once have to interact with a single pathetic meat bag. Truly
the future is upon us. All that is left is for this pathetic meat bag to be
replaced with shiny metal shopper-bot.
I recently visited the United States of America. For as long as I’ve held
opinions on anything, I’ve said that US was somewhere I would be quite happy if
I never visit. I now have to amend that statement. The US is somewhere I would
be happiest if I never visited again.
Steve Culley asked (by email) for my views on an article in the Guardian
titled, I Google, therefore I am losing the ability to think. A related
article, Hits and misses, was contributed by Mansur Darlington.
Why do people insist on naming everything? We seem to have an underlying need
to give things unique names. We do this even for things which are not being
explicitly marketed, are only used within one context and do not have to
compete with other things providing the same function (Although I have just
stated quite a few constraints on what I am talking about there are still quite
a lot of things covered by it). Let me clarify what I am complaining about with
an example:
In the papers and articles I read in the information management realm there
seems to be a great love of stating the obvious. I would like to share some
examples which have had me giggling at my desk this morning:
I live surrounded by information I have carefully chosen to be compatible with
my own beliefs and understanding – I live in an Information Cocoon and without
meaning to be rude, I suspect you do too! It is something that is difficult to
avoid, we have limits on our information gathering capacity in both time and
money so why shouldn’t we spend our time reading only what interests us and the
authors/sources we tend to agree with or trust? The danger (and I don’t use the
word lightly) is that we close ourselves off from conflicting opinions and
facts presented by other sources. By only consuming mutually affirmative
sources we increase the intensity of our beliefs/understanding and further skew
the range of issues and topics we’re familiar with.
I’d like to share some thoughts I’ve had on restricting access to information
(commonly referred to as Intellectual Property).
Be a good citizen and notify your council of graffiti, pot-holes, broken street
lights etc. in your area with Neighbourhood
Fix-It.
I’ve always enjoyed sharing what I’ve enjoyed reading, of my friends most if
not all have probably fallen foul of this tendency of mine through being
offered books or having a newspaper shoved under their noses. Why am I going
into all of this now? Well, for some time I’ve been sharing items using
Google’s feed reader and it only just occurred
to me that there isn’t really any sense in doing it unless I’m going to tell
people about it!? So here is my collection of shared
articles.
I love the various little games that keep getting thrown up in semi-scientific
contexts that show how complex (and at the same time simple) our minds really
are, here is an example I enjoyed:
I’ve been working for quite a while on the launch of a new website for
PhotoSoc.
Over the Easter holiday I managed to find some time to tinker with a few new
features for my website.
In an effort to shrug off some of the stresses of my current design project I
decided to track down a recipe for a cake I’d had before at my Grans.
Spam 2006-03-06
I put a contact form up for my website, so that folk can get in touch with me.
Instead, the sort of people I don’t want to be associated with, started trying
to use my form to send mass e-mails, and spam etc… as a result I had to take my
form down for a little while, but it is now back up, with an extra layer of
‘checks’ added in.
I haven’t been able to devote very much, if any time to my website for the last
few months; the pressures of exams have kept me well and truely under the
thumb. I do, however, hope to make some progress in restoring things to their
proper form within the next two days… fingers crossed that things will go
smoothly and that the requiste energy shall bubble forth, consuming me, and
pursuing these weary fingers into action.
I’ve just purchased a new domain, craigloftus.net, I intend to keep my .co.uk
as well, however, it is currently tied up with the utterly incompetent
easyspace.com.