SERIAC 2010 in Chertsey

I’ve attended SERIAC (the South Eastern Region Industrial Archaeology Conference) for the last three years and enjoyed it every time. It’s also very good value at £12.50 for a day of talks that invariably span the whole field of industrial archaeology but remain understandable and interesting. This year it’s hosted by Surrey Industrial History Group at Chertsey Hall in Chertsey on Saturday 24 April. The programme is online; all the talks look genuinely interesting. Hope to see you there.

Subsections in Textpattern

One provocative omission from the excellent Textpattern CMS is subsections. I don’t know why it was omitted (probably just because it was out of scope when Dean Allen sat down to write TXP). Now that there’s a codebase, fitting in subsections is slightly tricky. There’s a need to adjust the way that URL rewriting works and there’s also a need to rework the section admin form. I could really do with having this sorted and I have started to scope it out. If somebody would like to sponsor the work let me know ’cos I haven’t got time to do any more for nothing.

Yes, I have investigated what’s out there. It is not good enough, I’m afraid: for one thing, it is susceptable to break with every minor point release. Something better is needed.

Web fonts talk online

The text and the slides for the talk I gave last night at London Web Standards are online.

In the talk I gave suggestions about how to get started with web fonts which are still a bit of a mess. I’ve also cited a lot of very helpful information on the net so you can get much more detail on the topics I covered. I’ve also stuck the html, css and js test files I used on there. Comments and corrections most welcome.

Running 14k, sterling

Just need to get this off my chest.

I’m self employed, work pretty hard: no holidays, no luxury, no TV. I do have a car but I walk, cycle or train it when I can. I keep the heating low and shop in the most meagre fashion. I’ve got two pairs of presentable trousers. It’s not just long habit, this miserly behaviour, it’s become necessity — don’t ask me how or why but I always thought I was doing the right thing recording income and expenditure and meekly handing the numbers to HMRC.

So a tax bill for £14,076 hasn't made me feel particularly well loved. It’s about half of a really good year’s net income for me (and about three quarters of this year’s). Suffice to say it’s far, far beyond what I can afford.

The moral of this is don't do your own tax return unless you know what you're doing. Regardless of whether I can crawl out of this one, the ongoing corrosion of tax has cramped my style for far too long. It hasn't made me happy, it hasn't made me productive, it's just given me grey hairs.

Thats all, cheers.

Call/response on climate monitoring station records an opportunity for open data?

Nature’s editorial of 2 December called for various measures to make it easier for climate scientists to produce the analyses that are used to model the world’s climate. These underpin the current thinking on the probability and effects of a warmer climate in the near future, and the essential ingredient is data. According to the editorial the data is subject to international agreements on its publication. So it is good to see an announcement from the Met Office on 5 December to the effect that data from 5000 temperature monitor stations should be available from ‘early next week’. The agreement has been influenced by the World Meteorological Organisation, the UN’s weather body.

To a layman, the two obvious questions are how accessible, and how useful, this ‘subset of the full HadCRUT record of global temperatures’ will be.

The Digital Economy Bill: a letter to Lord Puttnam

Dear Lord Puttnam,

In response to the proposed Digital Economy Bill, on 25 November you said:

'I also add a broad welcome to the proposals that throw a spanner in the proliferation of online piracy.' [1]

I agree that legislation is appropriate in an area that is forming an increasingly significant part of our working and social lives.

I also strongly support the concept and practice of copyright as a pillar of the economy, although I reject the somewhat natural urge to extend the terms. I support copyright because I know that it gives me the ability to allow people to benefit from my work under the terms of permissive licences (thus ultimately benefiting myself), and because I recognise that unregulated copying will undermine a creator's ability to support themselves -- which ultimately means that our society in its current economic form will not be able to create new and original work in any field.

But I feel that to describe the proposals for curbing piracy [the distribution of material subject to copyright without permission] as 'throwing a spanner' is about the best that can be said for the accuracy and effect of the proposed Bill. From what I have read it seems as though there will be very damaging outcomes from the application of its clumsy provisions, but ones which may not harm the offenders at all.

Perhaps your statement tacitly acknowledges that the Bill in question needs much more work in this area. I would urge you to take a look at some of the objections listed by the Open Rights Group before you decide [2]

Yours sincerely,

Ben Weiner

References:
[1]http://www.theyworkforyou.com/lords/?id=2009-11-25a.377.5&s=digital+economy+speaker%3A13699#g417.0

[2] http://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/2009/write-to-the-lords-today

Lord Puttnam, former film maker, is deputy chairman of Channel 4.

Edit: reformat due to abysmal HTML from Blogger :-(

Web fonts podcast

I respond loudly and with vigour and some inaccuracy to quiet questioning from Garrick Van Buren.