40_thieves's blog

I came across this interesting article on O'Reilly Radar yesterday about gov.uk, the new (beta-ish) upgrade to direct.gov.uk. It's mostly about how the site was built (yay for open source), comparing with traditional government IT development.

But there's a really intriguing nugget in there - hints of an "idenity services" API. Here's the full quote:

"With regard to API's, our long term plan is to 'go wholesale,' by which we mean expose data and services via API's... We are at the early stages of mapping out key attributes, particularly around identity services, so to be fair it's early days yet."

I'm presuming by "identity services" they mean ways of programically identifying someone's online account as an actual person - somewhat similar to OAuth. In fact, since the development is all about open source, I wouldn't be surprised if they actually built it with OAuth.

This is a really intriguing path for government to take, and I'm pretty sure that I would be controversial... I know for a fact that many (especially in the US) distrust government getting involved in the web and would hate this idea.

On the other hand, this has potential for some really great innovation in Gov 2.0 - the concept of "Government as a platform". What if I was able to sign in to something like my bank account, or something similar with my driving license? Or my passport? This admittedly has some flaws, as there's nothing to stop the government tracking you this way. But, again, some would consider this no worse than Google or some other corporation tracking you. 

I personally can't make my mind up whether I'd use something like this. What I will say is that I think that they should go right ahead and test it out, as the worse that can happen is that nobody would use it... (Actually they'd probably be torn apart for spending "X million pounds on failed IT project")

Alternatively, I could be reading way too much into a single quote and they're not considering anything like an identity API.

(Image credit: x-ray delta one on Flickr)

I'm cautiously optimistic about Michael Gove's reform of ICT to become more like Computer Science. It's deperately needed (and has been for about 10 years) as outlined in these articles in the BBC and the Guardian:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-16493929
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/jan/11/michael-gove-boring-it-lessons

I personally feel like I was massively let down by IT lessons when I was at school. I never felt like IT lessons were remotely fun or interesting - they were typing lessons merely that taught us how to be good worker drones. I was far more interested in science (which I still love), and so I started Biochemistry at Cardiff. I found that this wasn't the subject for me, and started to become more and more interested in the web and it's possibilities. Now I'm studying Web Technologies and I love mucking around with code. I'm extremely lucky to be able to do switch like that, and I'm sure that there's others out there who aren't.

The revamp is great news as it seems to focus much more on creating rather than only consuming, a path that I think has dangerous consequences.

However (you knew it was coming), I'm not convinced about the so called "open source" curriculum. Feels very much like a buzz word to please the geeks, rather than a concerted effort to change across the country. If "schools and teachers [have] freedom over what and how to teach" what's to stop a school that is unmotivated and/or incapable of updating the curriculum from doing so?

 If we're serious about creating a new generation of makers and hackers then the government needs to step up and provide a concrete curriculum. I realise that this top-down approach is very much against the hacker mentality, but I worry that we've neglected technology education for so long that we've lost the skills to teach it. 

I'm also skeptical of how the government will handle this guidance, and only listen to the huge corporations that have pushed hard for this. While we must thank them for bankrolling this change Microsoft, Google, IBM and others should have equal input as (real) open source initiatives and small scale hackers. Raspberry Pi springs to mind. As does Apps for Good. And Codecademy. 

So that's education sorted. Now we just need to overturn the Digital Economy Act and invest heavily in internet infrastructure, and we'll be golden :)

So this is going to be one of those typical "I have a blog, and so I'm going to complain about things" post right? Well yes, but I'm not normally one to write something like this, however I'm extremely fed up of dealing with it.

TalkTalk provides my parent's internet connection, and to be quite frank they're shockingly bad at it. The connection is often glacially slow (they were unable to use iPlayer until a couple of months ago because TalkTalk had some cap that they'd forgotten about, but thats another story) and once every couple of months the connection will simply die. My parent's home is in a fairly rural area, so I'm not expecting a lighting fast connection, however I do expect at least 100% uptime - it's not the middle of nowhere. Now of course, there'd be no problem if TalkTalk were able to fix this quickly and efficiently but - this is a telecomms company - they can't.

Here's what happened just the other day (and I had a mini Twitter rant about it): The connection is down for an hour or so, so my Dad rings up TalkTalk to get it sorted. He's put on hold for about 30 minutes while they "run some tests". No idea why they can't note down his number, run the tests and call him back - actually that's not true, I do know, TalkTalk is charging something like 30p a minute. Anyway, once he gets put back onto an actual person he's told that there's no problem with the connection at all. We've had no internet connection for about 2 hours by this point - it's definitely NOT WORKING! The call centre then has the cheek to ask for £120 to call out a BT engineer (who they're blaming for the problem) - £120 for a problem with their service, that we're paying for! TalkTalk seem to think that by constantly blaming BT for the problem, they can get away with it. And of course, if you ring BT they'll simply blame TalkTalk...

Anyway, my Dad gives up at this point and phones back later. TalkTalk has no record about the previous phone call... He goes through the whole "running tests" thing for the second time, and is again told that he has to pay for a BT callout (though it costs less this time weirdly). Okay, fine, we'll get a BT engineer out. When can he come? "Oh not until Tuesday" TUESDAY?!? THAT'S 4 DAYS AWAY! 

Luckily for my parents the problem fixed itself on Sunday, so my Dad wasn't left high and dry (he runs his business from home). I'm simply amazed that TalkTalk treated us so badly - the total denial that there was any problem, the cheek of charging £120 for a problem with their service, the complete lack of records (they were asking about our router - a router which was provided by TalkTalk only a few months ago), not being able to send an engineer for 4 days. It's quite incredible that they can get away with this, so that's why I decided to call them on it in this blog.

I emailed my Dad about this post and he came up with a few questions for TalkTalk:

• When phoning to register a fault, why is it necessary to be held on the line for at least 30 minutes each time while they go on and off line for several minutes at a time, "running tests".  i.e. why can't they just note down the fault, allow me to hang up and then call back when they have something to say.  If an engineer is required then that can be arranged then.
• Why does it take 4 days to get an engineer to call from first reporting the fault?
• Do they not have a policy of refunds & compensation while services are discontinued?  Their call centres don't seem to know and suggest calling a different number.
• Their call centre operatives don't seem to care or believe it's TalkTalk's responsibility when a fault occurs.  They seem more concerned at getting my agreement to pay BT's engineers call out fee should the fault be caused within the house than accepting that the problem is at their end.  My contract is with TalkTalk, not BT, so why do they give the impression that it's not TalkTalk's problem.
• Why don't they keep a database of previous calls and a record of caller's equipment etc - every time you need to go through a whole series of questions giving the same answer every time.  For instance, what router am I using?  Well if they looked at their records they would see that it's the one they supplied a few months ago, the last time I had problems with the broadband.

For the record, my parents are probably now going to switch to BT. Good job TalkTalk...

UPDATE (20/09/2011): My dad emailed me an update which I've posted below

"TalkTalk engineer turned up this morning (interestingly he quoted £50 if they found a fault in our house).  As I knew all along, there wasn't as we have renewed all the telephone wiring, sockets and router already only for BT to point out that the fault all along was at TalkTalk's end due to the speed being throttled on some computer somewhere.

So having established that there is no fault at our end, the TalkTalk engineer has escalated the fault to a higher level (admitting that the BT engineer should have been called out in the first place!)

This is all despite the broadband coming back on on Sunday!"

Cross posted from my Kandersteg blog. For all of my photos, check it out.

So that's it for another summer, I'm back at home getting bored and wishing I was still in Kandersteg. I loved every moment of it, from working on the glacier to meeting a whole bunch of new friends. I've picked out some of my favourite photos from the whole season

(download)

Click here to download:

untitled-qgtnEGiGfvzErGsrucla.zip (18.92 MB)

I'm super lucky to have got the opportunity to have done some really fun and rewarding jobs while in this amazing place - working with groups who've never even seen a glacier, getting up to the Frundenjoch, hiking and climbing on my days off, getting a chance to show the other staff how awesome SnICE is, my group 1st Finch visiting and generally just hanging out with some really cool people.

I don't want to sound like an Oscar winner, but a few thanks are in order - firstly to Tom and Matt for giving the job in the first place! To Jemma, Kim and Mick for being the best SnICE team ever, and finally to all the rest of the Summer 2011 Staff for simply being awesome - I'm gonna miss you guys :)

I've got everything crossed hoping that they'll need my help in the winter, for the ski weeks because I loved that so much last winter. And after that, I'm not going back next summer (probably) but I'll be back sometime in the future....

Thanks once again KISC, you've been amazing.

Cross-posted from my Kandersteg blog

I'm super excited to say that in just under a week, I'll be back at KISC :)

I'm gonna be working as a Snow & Ice (SNICE) Guide, which means that I'll be taking groups up onto a couple of glaciers to get geared up with crampons, ice axes and ropes. We'll be teaching some basic glacier techniques - jumping over crevasses, ice axe self-arrest, crevasse rescue - some ice climbing and trekking. I tried it out last summer and I've picked a few of the best photos:

(download)

Click here to download:

back-to-the-steg-oEbEonhEylfaejGfttnm.zip (7.16 MB)

I absolutely loved trying it last year, and can't wait to do some of the expeditions I didn't get a chance to do. I'll be staying overnight in mountain huts a lot, which is great, and I'll be working more with other staff which will be awesome!

I really can't wait to get out there especially as a whole bunch of my friends from last summer have also got jobs, and I'll get to see them for a whole 2 months :D Plus, my scout group is coming to stay for 2 weeks, so I'm getting a few days off to help out with their programme.

As I did last summer (and in the winter), I'll be posting photos here and writing up what I've been doing - hopefully I'll do that more this time! But I won't be online as much as I am now - my tweeting will definitely drop off (relief to some!) - hopefully I'll pick up on @replies and emails.

7 days and counting...

I wrote last month about making science into a open-source software project, which discusses the pros and cons of using forking and "bug-tracking" for academic papers. Much of what I was trying to describe is a GitHub for science, a concept that @marciovm has blogged about recently. 

I've been using a Chrome extension called Ghostery for the last couple of weeks and I just wanted to write a quick review on my thoughts so far.