Now this is useful… a searchable site with RSS feeds and email alerts of all central government press releases – TheGovernmentSays.com There have been rather too many times I could have done with this. Thanks Sam Smith and crew.
It's a relief to finally hear that there will be wifi on Brighton to London trains and stations along the way. It's been a very long time coming – being stuck at Victoria station without wifi has been feeling increasingly weird considering the wonders one can get at other train stations let alone airports, cafes, universities, hotels etc.
In fact I think I may have unintentionally beta-tested this a while back. I was doing something or other with my Powerbook just as we pulled into East Croydon station. I noticed that I hadn't turned Airport off which can be a battery drain. Just as I clicked the menu I noticed a wireless network. Curiosity led to me connecting and it worked – free wifi! Something to remember next time I'm stuck in East Croydon, I thought. Imagine my astonishment when the connection held strong as we pulled out of the station all the way to Victoria. I was so gobsmacked I mentioned it to a few colleagues none of whom had any such luck and neither have I since that day.
Unfortunately it will be a T-Mobile paid-for deal when it goes live properly. Which is ok except that T-Mobile charge their phone subscribers more per 15 minute unit than ordinary credit card users – doesn't seem right at all.
So much happening all of a sudden…
The ID card bill passed through its House of Commons vote – here's the straight-laced report from Kable. Richard Allan, the LibDem MP, has a great post on the bill including how Blair calling a general election could through a “wash-up” procedure automatically pass the bill. Uh-oh.
Richard has been busy in Parliament… During a liaison committee meeting with Blair he got Tony to admit he was a technophobe, didn't know the address to Directgov and couldn't recall when he last met his head of e-government. Oops. Transcript here, search for 'Allan' to get to the juicy bits
Finally the good people at MySociety (including Chris Lightfoot)have launched the sequel to FaxYourMP.com called WriteToThem.com where you can easily contact your local councillors, MP and MEPs. It's very impressive and easy to use – well done guys.
The legendary organist Jimmy Smith has died. This is very sad and yet another legend I've missed out on seeing live before they moved on to the great jazz club in the sky. You've got to respect any artist who in his 70s comes out with an album called 'Dot Com Blues'. It's a fantastic album. At our old offices I used to play it LOUD on the weekends and people from other offices would drop by not to complain but to ask who was playing. Jimmy was a great talent who almost single-handedly pioneered the Hammond organ through the years.
43 Things is a pretty neat webite – it's a collaborative life goal setting tool. It's hard to explain so go play. The wonderfully named Robot Co-op built it with the help of the folks at 37 Signals who make the wonderful Basecamp. All well and good… then it emerged that, according to Salon, the Amazon refugees who had started the Robot Co-op were actually funded by Amazon.com. This is a bit like how A9.com came into the world but even more subtle. Robot Co-op have responded in their blog claiming the Amazon investment came late in the day. Who knows but it's very interesting what Amazon is up to. Their main site has stagnated design-wise but their other investments are blossoming. What are they up to?
Two people I met today were bemoaning their new mobile phones. Both had moved from Nokia phones but one had stuck with Nokia while the other was on Sony Ericsson. Their troubles stemmed from new user interfaces which they were struggling to cope with. What really struck me was that both noted how the 'old Nokia' phones were much better. Nokia isn't really losing marketshare because other phones are so much better… it's because their phones are so different now – there's no real benefit in sticking with Nokia as the phones work differently from your old one. If you want to upgrade to the latest technologies the other phones look better and often are technologically slightly better. The market is wide open for someone to establish an easy, memorable and long-lived interface which will grow as phones do.
In other news Google have released their astonishing Maps service (in Beta of course). What's so incredible is not that they've left off the rest of the world but the whole thing is HTML/Javascript based and darn usable! Goodbye Java applets, imagemaps and other such cruft – hello fast and easy maps – you can even drag the map around with your mouse. Extraordinary.
Finally I've been dealing with an urge to buy a computer game. It's been ages since I last played a game.Coming off watching 24's third season on DVD my trigger finger feels itchy. Is their some subliminal programming going on?!? I really dig the Tom Clancy-inspired games such as Rainbow Six, Ghost Recon and Splinter Cell (which I haven't played yet). I don't have time to play games but the temptation is there… I can't believe that there isn't a game version of 24 – a realtime game would be brilliant fun to play (with a pause and save option obviously!) I am in the Mac time warp of games so options are limited so perhaps 24 – the game, is in production. Well Splinter Cell it probably is then…
UPDATE: BoingBoing pointed me to an excellent analysis of how Google Maps works
It's strange but I just got off the phone with the third person in as many weeks who couldn't open a PDF file from me but Word documents were ok. What kind of strange world is it when Word documents are more compatible than Portable Document Format files are?!?
Am I missing something? Are corporate IT people preventing PDF readers from being installed? When one lives in a MacOS X world PDFs just work everywhere, I guess I've been spoilt.
Now this is remarkable… Michael Meacher, the Labour MP and former environment minister, has penned a detailed and coherent column strongly arguing against e-voting in the UK. He even rejects the fabled pro-turnout arguments we've so often heard recited in support of e-voting. Is the tide starting to turn?
In celebration of the Government Gateway’s 4th anniversary Alan Mather has posted a look back on how the Gateway came to life.
The Gateway’s birth was controversial to say the least. I made my own contributions to the fuss through my work with LinuxUser magazine, especially the Gateway to failure article [PDF]. By making a Freedom of Information request (scroll down to see request and response) I managed to squeeze some information out of the Government but also got shouted at the next time I went to visit the Office of the e-Envoy. Ah well… I did get my first mention in NTK and The Register!
Let’s be clear… the Gateway works and four other countries are using it. I can’t judge if it does or doesn’t lose messages – Alan claims not a single message has been lost by the system. Of course there could be more features, better usability and so on – there always can be. For a Governmental IT project, once the initial Compaq mess was cleaned up, the project was fairly successful and there are millions of registered users.
The issue in my mind still is that for a project so fundamental to the future of all e-government interactions things should and could have been done differently. An Open Source, collaborative approach with community buy-in would have been a more citizen-centric way to proceed. And this isn’t a pipe dream – Estonia have taken just such an approach for the development of their digital identity scheme. Governments build hospitals, schools and technology for the people who empower authorities with votes and money. An understanding and respect for this should be evident throughout the life of our government’s IT projects.
Jason Kitcat 