Car parking spaces

Would whoever the person is who designed the Standard Supermarket Car Parking Space please note. They are not big enough. If you go shopping in America, it is in fact possible for a driver and a passenger to be able to both get out of a car without doing contortions, without bumping the adjacent cars and without doing car park gymnastics to get in and out of your car if you get back from your shopping to find someone has parked badly in the space next to you. If America can do it, we should be able to do it with our smaller cars.

Is there a European Standard for this?

While I'm at it, why are so many business parks built with such woeful public transport and inadequate parking? Maybe someone could do something imaginative like have half the car park allocated for cars with tax discs of £100 or less. That way the gas gusslers can fight it out for the few remaining spaces whilst the greener cars can enjoy being able to park near to where the driver needs to be.

Fake money alert, please take notice

It has come to my attention that there is fake currency in circulation, please see the following story so that you are fully up to date and know how to spot a fake Euro. Ananova - Fake euros being passed off as real.

ID Card sellout

BBC NEWS | Politics | ID card deadlock comes to an end. Well what a load of rubbish that is. You apply for a passport, you have your details entered on the national ID register, but you don't get to enjoy the benefits of having an ID card. All of the disadvantages and none of the advantages. This is progress?

Beyond the spam filter

It seems like the penny has dropped. anti-spam vendors are looking beyond filters and using economics to fight spam. After all there is a lot less motivation to send spam when there is an economic penalty for doing so. Read the article for more info.

Equal rights for male health

BBC NEWS | Scotland | More action needed on male health. Seems perfectly sensible to me if we all want to live in an equal society.

JotForm

JotForm looks like an interesting application, maybe I'll use it on my website.

Anti spam software

I develop anti-spam software in my spare time. Now at 34,000 downloads.

Scottish National Anthem

Scotland The Brave has been played at the recent Commonwealth Games when members of the Scottish team win a medal. Flower of Scotland is played at Football and Rugby matches. The First Minister has suggested that we adopt a single national anthem. We've had this debate before though, various newspapers have proposed it particularly when the Scottish parliament was being established in 1999. For some suggestions, see the Scottish FAQ - anthems page. Might be good to get one anthem if the Commonwealth Games come to Glasgow. Anyone for No Gods and Precious few heroes?

What Tim Berners-Lee would do differently

I am in the British Computer Society and this interview with inventor of the web, Tim Berners-Lee was published by the BCS recently. A good read on what he would do if he had the chance to reinvent the web. Also some interesting insights into where things are going with the Semantic Web.

Want to catch the next wave on the Internet?

From a posting on the Now-Forum ...

I was wondering if there was anyone reading this who is either:

1. Prepared to invest in building a prototype of a novel application/web site or
2. Prepared to work for equity in building the same

This is a technology that a large search engine might find useful to greatly improve the quality of their searches in certain areas. It also empowers content publishers to achieve more with less time and significantly less expense. If successful, it will greatly improve the usability of many websites.

Particular technologies of interest are:

Design and build of a user friendly community based with site with log in features, up to date knowledge of web application development including Web 2.0/AJAX, Greasemonkey, JavaScript, API design. XML, XSLT, Scalable database design, semantic networks, search engine back end algorithms.

Some experience of building user friendly client side applications, especially C++ is also likely to be of use.

Brownie points for those of you who have submitted a digg frontpage story or know what microformats are or have had code published on userscripts.org

E-mail me if you are interested.

Scotland is now smoke free by law

Scotland has become the first part of the UK to be smoke free by law. The law bans smoking in all indoor public places and workplaces, including all bars and restaurants.

Read my submission to parliament on this.

read more | digg story.

Interesting blogs

Tim Berners Lee has a blog

A small victory for privacy

I have argued for a while that we obsess about age. Especially when I speak to reporters, they inevitably want to open a press release with "... Craig Cockburn, xx, ..." where xx is the number of birthdays that I have had. However, the number of times this is in fact actually relevant to the story is pretty much nil. It's no more relevant than my religion or ethnic background, yet somehow they feel this is mandatory information which must be included in the story.

So I became a bit disturbed by the increasing number of websites which were making this information mandatory. The Third Principle of the Data Protection Act concerning excess data for the purpose seems to have passed by such sites. Forthcoming legislation to outlaw age discrimination seems to be the cause. Rather than recognising that age is irrelevant and not asking it, agencies seem to be going into reverse and making it mandatory to ensure that they aren't discriminating based on age. The contradiction is that if they aren't supposed to be discriminating based on ethnic origins, race or religion why is this information still optional? Clearly any such statistical gathering, to be in line with the 3rd principle of the data protection act, must be relevant and not excessive for the purpose. If it is really necessary to gather info on age, then this must be volunteered and also an approximate age range is sufficient. The main problem with submitting age, name, address and so on via a form is the great majority of sites do not use a secure page to do so. If you wouldn't submit your credit card details on an insecure page, why would you want to do so with the exact info that someone comittting identity theft would love to get their hands on?

I am pleased to say that my lobbying on this matter has caused the Department of Work and Pensions to review their guidance in this area. Whilst not perfect, you can now read the amended guidelines on their website here.

The Budget

So Gordon Brown announced in today's budget that certain cars will no longer have to pay the beaurocratic nightmare that is car tax. I'm still looking forward to the day that my points in July 1998 regarding car tax get taken on board by the government. Car Tax is a nightmare, particularly so when last year I bought a car that had previously been owned by a disabled person. Due to the nightmare of car tax, I couldn't buy the car until someone made a special trip to Glasgow to change the tax rate on the car. How much beaurocracy do you need to just pay the full rate applicable for an able bodied driver?
For goodness sake just get rid of this nonsense and all those irritating TV adverts at the same time. Collect the tax through petrol taxation and have an MOT/insurance disc instead (like Ireland). It's far more effective and safer proving that your car is MOTsd and insured every time your take it on the road than only having to prove it once to go through the car tax beaurocracy.

A new search for Scottish Accommodation

A new search facility for Scottish Accommodation has now gone live here http://www.visitscotland.com/advanced/

The most comprehensive Scottish accommodation search on the Internet.

Freedom of speech contradiction

Historian who denies holocaust goes to jail

and

Press digs in over freedom of speech re Islamic cartoons

Am I the only one who notices the apparant contradiction here or does freedom of speech only apply with regard to some faiths and not others?

A morning teaching Gaelic

Following on from the "Gaelic in English schools" campaign in the West Highland Free Press last year, I contacted one of the primary schools in West Lothian suggesting they include some Gaelic to the children. They felt it would be useful to do this as part of Scots week. So I took a morning out from my day job today and spent it giving a few hundred children an introduction to the languages, some phrases, songs, history and customs etc. The day went very well and one approach I took was to first off highlight Gaelic words they were using every day (placenames, personal names) and didn't realise it and also various words in English of Gaelic origin (e.g. Pet, Trousers), as well as the more usual Ceilidh, Glen etc and what they originally meant. The day went very well with some children coming up to me after school and saying "ciamar a tha thu". Another child said that they had wanted me to stay for longer.

One unexpected mnemonic was "Martian lad" for "mar sin leat". In any case I have put the material online here incase anyone else might find it useful:
http://www.siliconglen.com/craig/gaelicintroduction.doc

It's more aimed at the upper ages of primary school but the songs went down well with the younger ones, especially the puirt a beul.

Something like this could form a useful model for rolling out across more English medium in schools in Scotland, to counter the widespread ignorance of the language.

Craig

Prince2

Started a three week Prince2 course today. Being a bit busy at the moment what with that one and also a 7 weeks course in being a better manager at Napier University Business School. Both courses kindly funded indirectly by those nice folks at Google.

Courtesy title madness

I wrote to National Savings and Investments, querying why the courtesy title field on their website was mandatory when a large number of people elect not to use one. I know this by designing websites and looking at actual data submitted by visitors through webforms. I said to them that I would prefer not to use one.

Their reply back opened with "Dear Mr Cockburn..."

I guess they missed the point. :-)

For a more detailed argument read Courtesy Titles.

15 years - Scottish events in London

The Guide to Scottish Events in London celebrates its 15th anniversary today. Latest copy available here