My rumour report has now been confirmed with a Silicon.com report noting the OPDM's cancellation of the notice to tender for suppliers. I can find no mention of the news on the ODPM or DCA websites…
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Not On The Label
I regard myself (rightly or wrongly) as fairly clued up on issues to do with the environment, food quality, globalisation and all that. I've read Naomi Klein's No Logo, George Monbiot's superbe Captive State, Noam Chomsky, Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation and many more. I'm an active member of the Green Party as well as on and off I've been involved with Friends of the Earth, the Soil Association (the pre-eminent organic association) as well as Greenpeace. I've watched the documentaries on TV as well as, of course, Super Size Me.
None of these prepared me for The Guardian's Felicity Lawrence and her book Not On The Label. What's unique about this book is how it comprehensively addresses food safety and quality, migrant labour, environmental degradation, globalisation, quality of life, health, culture, urbanisation and much more. Precisely and cleverly these huge issues are woven together so that one minute the reader is considering 'fresh' ready-made lasagne and the next they are wondering at how frozen food has higher nutrient levels than many 'fresh' items. Next thing one is in the packhouses learning how employment law is dodged to let supermarkets buy prepared fruit and veg at absurdly low prices with no contractual commitments. The list goes on.
Truly we are in serious, serious trouble as a society. I don't really know where to begin – but the book is a good place for you all to start – save me typing the whole thing verbatim in my fervour. I've already filed a LinuxUser column heavily influenced by my reading of the book.
Really it comes down to bread… I love baking bread but I haven't been that satisfied with my results. I was waiting for my wife and slipped into Borders, dangerous territory for a book lover. I, by pure chance as I leafed through a shelf of books, came upon a chapter purely about bread in Lawrence's book. Holy crap. Bread is made in a really sick way these days. And I think the problem with my bread is the use of 'Quick Yeast' which doesn't develop the dough properly over time. The book was bought and now I'm more furious than all the Soil Association and Friends of the Earth magazines ever managed.
What's just so incredible is that I've been feeling a very strong dissatisfaction with British society, food, bread and so on… I've been chatting about this with people for quite a bit but the feeling has got so unbearably strong recently. This book was just the straw that broke the camel's back, I have to change things now.
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TomTom GO 300
My brother-in-law is an HGV driver. He's just come over to the UK to start working here and he doesn't really know his way around the rounds. He could manage with maps, he did around Eastern Europe, but he wants to make a good impression with his new employers.
So he went out and bought a TomTom GO 300, and who was I to stop him? Obviously I had to test it for him, just to make sure it worked, you know how it is.
I'm very very impressed. It's very, very easy to use; totally multi-lingual and utterly cool. The 3D view is perfect – the road you're on just sort of continues ahead onto the screen which shows your position at just the right angle. There's something very cool about cruising around a junction at night (there's a gentle night vision colour scheme, natch) watching your arrow zoom down the road – of course I was watching very carefully as I was driving (cough).
It's truly simple, just enter your destination postcode and you're off. If you get lost, which I tried intentionally a number of times, and the TomTom doesn't get flustered. It recalculates your route and just tells you to take the next appropriate turning – there are no demands to make immediate U-turns nor does the polite person inside give up in exasperation.
I love that it's so portable, easy to fit in the car and it shows where the nearest petrol stations are! I'm always looking for a pit stop with only fumes in my tank.
The TomTom can also be connected with a GPRS mobile for live traffic and weather info, I haven't tried that but it sounds good. You can also update and expand the the TomTom through its USB link, or through the SD card for storage. My brother-in-law wanted to load up a Polish voice on the TomTom so I dutily fired up my PowerBook. I wasn't expecting much joy, every other device like this has never worked with a Mac straight up – I've always had to find a hack or give up.
But lo and behold the little beauty worked like a dream, mounting on my Desktop like any other storage device. Wonderful.
Can honestly say that this gadget is very close to being perfect. Sure a bigger screen, longer battery life and all that would be nice. But really at this price point I couldn't expect anything more.
The incredibly positive reviews on Amazon are justified.
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Keeping it simple – for tax
I’ve often had conversations, inspired partly through the Green Party’s citizens’ income policy [PDF], that governments would be better off with simple one-rate benefits payments and one-rate tax levels. Gordon Brown has been much criticised for all the various credits he offers on the basis that they’re so had to actually apply for few needy citizens really benefit. Complexity is the enemy of having a cheap government, helping citizens understand where their money goes and it is also the enemy of preventing fraud. Every wrinkle or exception in the tax-law is potential loophole to be exploited.
So I read the following with great interest in What’s Next (which I can highly recommend):
Flat tax idea
In 1994 Estonia became the first country in the world to adopt what is known as a flat tax system. This is essentially a system where there is just one rate of tax – in Estonia’s case, 26% for all individuals and companies. There is no schedule of rates and no exceptions. The idea proved so successful that seven other countries in Eastern Europe have introduced the idea and an eighth (Poland) is considering it. Critics who said that that the idea was unworkable have moved on to another objection, namely that it is unfair because it is not progressive (ie, everyone pays the same). However, while the amount is fixed there is nothing stopping countries applying a threshold (ie, exemption amount). The advantage of a flat tax system is its simplicity. Everyone knows how the system operates and administration and compliance costs are minimised. In the US the cost of running and regulating the tax system is estimated at between 10% and 20% of total revenue collected. That’s a sum equivalent to 25% to 50% of the US budget deficit.
Ref: The Economist (UK) 16 April 2005, ‘The flat tax revolution’. http://www.economist.com
Those final figures should be enough for even George W to take notice.
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About time…
“We are very much aware of the widening range of browsers used by our customers, such as Firefox and Opera,” said Carl Mawson, the head of e-communications at the Department for Work & Pensions, on Wednesday. “We aim to address this, so that our Web sites work in as many browsers, and on as many platforms as possible.”
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2006 e-voing pilots cancelled
A pretty good source has told me that a little birdie spoke to them from within Government. My source was told that the proposed 2006 e-voting pilots will not be happening. Furthermore even though the appearance was that Government had called for suppliers to apply to participate in these pilots, the invitations were in fact never sent out.
When observers first heard that the government was going to be inviting suppliers early this year many were pleased that finally a sensible timetable was being adopted leaving plenty of time for suppliers to get ready for whichever election they were allocated. I hope we don't see a u-turn on 2006 with a rush on suppliers in January.
The next lot of elections will be the locals in 2007 so expect pilots then. The concern is that without any funding from pilots the smaller (often better) e-voting companies will struggle to survive, let alone develop their technology any further.
In the meantime responsibility for e-voting is switching from ODPM to the DCA and we're still waiting for the new framework for voting to emerge…
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Skype Video – it’s real
I'm at Cal Henderson's Building Flickr workshop, which is fantastic… I've met old friends from my time at Warwick University and two incredibly eager Estonians from Skype – the fact they were both wearing Skype t-shirts was a bit of a give-away.
They're so excited about Skype it's incredible… they showed me Skype Video in action and it's good. Not iChat AV good but still really neat and clear – I'm looking forward to it. One thing though, they won't say if the Mac will be supported, they only showed it to me running on Windows. We shall see… Interesting times for IM.
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An open messaging future?
Today's tech news leaves me hopeful about VOIP, instant messaging and their ilk. This makes a nice change as I've been increasingly frustrated by trying to get all the different things working together.
I use Adium which is really very good, better than Proteus which I used previously. Adium is more stable, less of a resource hog and easier to configure. Still it does choke on MSN group chats and of course doesn't support all the voice or video chat of goodness of iChat nor the world of Skype.
iChat is 'sweet' in that Apple-good way but I just have had no joy in getting anything more than audio chat with a fellow Mac-toting iChat user. With my father-in-law using WindowsXP and AOL's AIM I've had no audio or video joy despite my shelling out for a decent Logitech camera.
Skype also is great for what it is, cross-platform, quality voice chat. I find the software a bit clunky and the user lookup patchy. But it does work and dialling out is cheap and fairly good. Still only some people have Skype and no other software can work with Skype's encrypted P2P protocol.
So I face having Adium, iChat and Skype open to make the most of all my contacts and communication options – eugh – I hate all those open windows, especially when Skype on the Mac is such a monster.
So it's intriguing and positive to hear that Google's new Google Talk messaging/VOIP system is built with open standards from Jabber. I'm so happy to see Jabber technology being widely used – it's about time… And Google are really serious about this, they happily show all the clients that will work with their network. No arms races to crack the protocol as we see for MSN.
Call it coincidence but on the same day Skype announced (but didn't release) SkypeWeb and SkypeNet API which promise to finally open the Skype walled garden to the web and other applications.
It's looking good – how or will Yahoo, MSN and AOL respond?
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Open Source turnaround
E-Government Bulletin are reporting that Central Scotland Police, an Open Source on the desktop pioneer, are going back to Microsoft. Wonder what the real story is… ???
Supplier Turnaround: Central Scotland Police, one of the first UK
public sector bodies to pioneer the use of open source operating systems on staff desktop computers when it switched them to Linux in 2000, has made a surprise about-turn and swapped some of them back to Microsoft Windows technology after signing a three-year contract with the IT giant. Microsoft cites greater compatibility with partner organisations' systems as among the reasons for the U-turn: http://fastlink.headstar.com/cscot1
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Working in Basecamp
For the last few weeks I've been living in Basecamp, the web-based project management system that has been a bit of a hit in the new media world. Some thoughts…
Using a web-system I do miss the speed and richness of a desktop application, no matter how much Ajax goodness they throw in. But they more than make up for it with the benefits – access to the project info from anywhere and good communication.
Once I get my clients over the initial hump of their desire to shoot off emails left, right and centre we start to see the real benefits. Basecamp allows everyone to see what is going on. It also provides live, searchable documentation as problems are solved and reported. That's saved my bacon numerous times already.
Good-bye email attachment version hell – say hello to online file sharing with Basecamp's file tab. The todo lists, milestones and messaging are all godsends. It does take discipline though, you need to write copiously on the system to keep the value there. You also need to think carefully about who to include on threads. But it really really pays off.
Two things I'm learning:
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Transcribing phone calls and f2f meeting notes, in summary, onto Basecamp is valuable but takes a lot of time and discipline. If you don't do it you end up with big gaps in how things are progressing.
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Instant messaging is the black sheep in working on Basecamp. There's really no connection between the two. Copying and pasting your chat history doesn't look right (too many typos, smileys etc). So I end up reviewing my history and posting todo items etc as needed. I don't know what I want exactly, I just know I want Basecamp to do more with my IM. Anybody?
So for the moment I feel like my life is a Basecamp todo list. Which is hard work but in a good way – my energy is going into doing stuff and less into sorting out who said what when in which email. Hurrah.
Jason Kitcat 