Toblog

I’ve been quiet recently; many apologies to my few readers. Something which I feel is worth passing on has made me temporarily break cover. Via Sackerson (his followup is worth reading too) comes this entry which I can’t add to as Sackerson has covered it all. It just makes me feel very very sad about the state of politics in this country.

David Miliband, Yesterday in Parliament:

I point out to Conservative Members that every previous amending treaty, Labour or Tory, has been presented to and passed by Parliament. That is our job and we should get on with it.

Interesting this. Is David implying that the job of Parliament is to pass every amendment to the European Treaty? Now, I may be missing the point here, but isn’t the job of parliament to debate and then decide to pass the amendments or not? Isn’t this democracy?

...on recent events on the Internet, Chicken Yoghurt has an excellent jumping off point.

The interesting thing, of course, is that due to Schillings’ actions there are now significantly more people who know about Craig’s book Murder in Samarkand (paperback here) and who will have read his allegations against Usmanov.

Whoops… I don’t think that Schillings will be putting this in their online case history.

I do wonder why fasthosts apparently pulled the whole server account. Did they know it would get this reaction?

[11:29] Ouch. It’s just hit Boing Boing.

[2007-09-26] Double ouch. It’s hit Slashdot now. Yes, Schillings have excelled themselves this time…

I’m sure that comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam were, at one point, considered bad by the Republicans.

Wasn’t the war president buzzword bingo that Bush regaled us with yesterday odd, then?

The Boston Globe mentions this oddity too.

...plus ça change.

A quote found whilst reading the excellent Language Log. Charles Babbage, referring to his conversations with MPs:

On two occasions I have been asked, ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

Our current government clearly still thinks that technology has all the answers no matter the quality of information introduced to it. It is our duty as technologists to inform and educate those that we pay to rule us. Whether they listen or not is another matter.

[09:18] Updated to fix some grammar issues.

So, John Reid has proposed that we force paedophiles to register their e-mail addresses and chatroom names on the sex offenders register. I know, I said I wouldn’t comment on the obvious idiocy of this but it is irresistible.

It isn’t just me that has commented on how unenforcible this idea is. It is typical of this managemental government that they come up with what probably sounds like a good idea to someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Most people, though, when the reality is explained to them will back down. Not so these guys. These guys have such courage and belief of their convictions and understanding that they force through these ideas into law where they will sit gathering dust as the paedophiles use more technology, move around chat rooms, social networking sites, free mail providers and whatever the future of communications holds for us.

I think that it is interesting that these musings of Reid have come at a time when there are rumours of Downing Street using two email systems. Perhaps they can point out to John-boy how easy it is to set up other online identities.

This government came into power before the Internet really hit the mainstream. They have had plenty of time to get used to it and there are some notable exceptions but by and large they have continued to be techno-averse. They have shown on repeated occasions that they can’t manage IT projects, they can’t manage NHS projects and they can’t manage their own departments. These guys need to go and go soon before they manage us into an even greater mess.

All that said the Evil Bit sounds like a great idea, don’t you think?

Notwithstanding the appalling and overused pun in the title, this is a serious post. Yesterday I heard someone (I can’t remember who – being on earlies absolutely kills my ability to see through rage when listening to the radio) use the following phrase in reference to the gay adoption media storm that we currently have:

“No matter how you feel on the matter, it is good that this is giving us a chance to have a proper debate”

No. Shut up. This invariably is said by the party who is losing an argument and is playing for time. The last thing that they want is to have a proper debate as then they would be exposed as the idiotic, hypocritical, uninformed and, frankly, worthless people that they are.

A case in point: How many times have members of our what I hesitatingly refer to as government have used this phrase in the last calendar year?

As for the gay adoption row? Show me valid data that it is a bad thing, and not just:

• some stuff that is based on rumour that you heard at some point.
• and some study that was performed in the 1970s that, by the way you described it, sounds incredibly dodgy¹.
• telling me that being gay is forbidden by some book written relatively soon after events of 2000 years ago and basing every one of your arguments other than the above made up and outdated studies on that.

...and I might listen. Until then please go away.

¹ If someone knows about this study could they let me know – I would be interested to find out about it.

[17:59] edited for overranting – the book in question wasn’t written 2000 years ago.

Since 2001 in England the police were given the power to keep the DNA of arrestees even if they are innocent. This is clearly an insane inversion of many principles of justice that England once used to be proud. My friends know well that this is the sort of issue that turns me into a Real Life Devil’s Kitchen Swearing Ranter. I have, however, decided that this blog is going to be relatively calm and swear word free so you are going to have to imagine me in a state of vein throbbing apoplexy right now.

Until now this idiocy has not encroached into Scotland. Over Christmas the nanny state-ers have well and truly got their teeth into the news agenda. There has also been a call to give children in schools ID cards to prevent them from being forced to hand over their lunch cards. For me the fact that the current system fails in this way is a pretty big implication that it is not well thought out from the ground up. Rather than chucking more money and invasive technology at it perhaps now would be a good time to look at different ways of managing feeding children in school.

Still, I suppose it is good to know that some of the kids actually want to eat school food…

Update 2007-01-05: Bruce Schneier has commented on this too.

We all know what a mess the NHS IT project is in. Billions overspent; one of the major partners currently being investigated by the FSA for suspected “accounting irregularities”; another announcing a profit drop due to the project and then subsequently pulling out. Most recently the government has threatened to scrap the agency in charge of the project”. So much, so known, and yet nothing seems to be being done publicly to fix the project. The press pundits complain about a waste of tax payers’ money and typical government IT project cock ups but I haven’t yet seen anyone put forward a plan to fix it.

In the past, back when the NHS IT project was but a glimmer in the eye of the various consultants that persuaded governments that monolithic IT solutions were The Way Forward I spent a time talking to doctors about their requirements. Here is what I learnt: before government woke up to the enabling aspects of technology the Doctors realised pretty quickly that they could make their surgeries far more efficient. They either looked at off the shelf packages or talked to developers for more bespoke solutions. The Doctors got systems that they and their staff liked with user interfaces that they then got used to over many years. Generally the systems worked the way that they wanted and had specified. Unfortunately the systems didn’t work well with each other and were not compatible with the systems that hospitals and other NHS resources had.

So, how to rectify this situation? I am a great believer in loosely coupled systems which offer many advantages. At this point in the NHS IT Project the large collection of different software platforms that existed should have been seen as building blocks, not a hindrance.

In 2000 Tony decided that the UK should become the best country in the world for e-commerce. This seeded some ideas in my head about how these sorts of large government projects should look. Rather than creating large, monolithic and effectively unmanageable projects, why not ask some technical experts (say, the W3C) about data transfer technologies and then set up a working committee to look at a resilient and extensible data standard for transferring data between medical systems?

Once this standard is produced all government needs to do is mandate its use across all NHS platforms. You keep a free market in software; doctors, nurses, physiotherapists, hospitals, you name it, all get to use the software that they want to use, rather than software that is forced upon them which requires vast swathes of tax payer’s cash as well as retraining. The more technical able would even be able to write their own applications. You also get the benefit of then having created a standard that medical systems can use across the world. Imagine how useful it would be, in the modern travel hungry world, if doctors in foreign countries being able to find out about your medical history if you are unable to communicate it to them for what ever reason.

There are obvious hurdles here but none of them are insurmountable, and a few of them are solved problems in other industries. Here are some of the challenges that this would face off the top of my head:

• Data Security
• Authentication and Access Rights
• Data location
• Data synchronisation
• Data redundancy

IT these days should be about enabling people to improve how they and the processes that they interact with work. Lets work towards that in the most flexible way possible.