Freesteel

In about 2 seconds — zip! — a 3 day long train ticket from New York to Los Angeles was purchased for $208. I went with Aidan to a noisy sports bar in Penn Station where his brother was having a beer with a golfing buddy. “Wot de fok’s wrong wid’ you?” he said.

On this train I am going to get some work done. I hope it doesn’t have WiFi.

Meanwhile, back at the hackathon, I spent the day doing PDF parsing. I got lucky. There were 120 documents all identically formatted with lots of numbers in them.

There’s another day of this tomorrow, so off to bed.

It appears that I am in New Jersey for the purpose of assisting somewhat with USA based scraperwiki business.

As I limit my air travel to the bare minimum (for reasons that would be obvious if we were a species that took any notice of threats to its survival), I am staying here for 3 months (till 24 April) using only surface means of transport.

I’d like to meet anyone on my travels in relation to scraping business.

But, more interestingly, I’d also like to meet anyone in relation to CADCAM machine tool work. A lot more of that happens here than at home, I understand. Please get in touch.

Travel plans are NY till 6 Feb. Then I must be in St Louis Missouri on 24 February. No plans have been made to fill the time in between or what exactly happens afterwards.

Because the political process in the UK is funded by donations, people must learn to donate money to political campaigns the believe in, or they get what’s coming — a political process entirely owned by moneyed interests who find they can buy it out for chump change.

So I donated £50 to the Yes to AV referendum campaign at the beginning of the year (largely selected and funded by the Joseph Roundtree Foundation), only to find that they were the most useless bunch of wankers one could ever be stuck with. It was so bad it seriously looked like sabotage. Meanwhile, the No Campaign could pump out more and more lies to its heart’s content, knowing there was no opposition.

Trying to get any idea what the Yes “Campaign” was on about was like talking to a brick wall. There were rumours of their awesome decisions, like not taking any advantage of the free leaflet mailshot and blowing their whole roll on a telephone cold calling system, but today, with the financial disclosures, we have the first peak into what went on.

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My attention has been drawn to a 22 March 2010 Parliamentary publication, London Regional Committee – London’s population and the 2011 Census

From Chapter 3, Preparations for the 2011 Census in London:

The National Address Register

87. We are encouraged by the development of a national address register for the 2011 Census. Such a register is vital for a successful Census in London.

91. We understand that the address register will not be maintained in its present form after 2011, despite the substantial time and effort which has gone into establishing and updating it. Shaun Flanagan of the Cabinet Office told us that when ONS negotiated the contract with the Royal Mail, Ordnance Survey and the Local Government Information House to provide data for the register, a condition of the agreement was that the register would not be re-used, but that any improvements to the data would be fed back to the three providers.

92. The Chair of the UK Statistics Authority has already written to Ministers to make the case for the national register to be maintained beyond 2011. The Minister for London told us that negotiations on the future use of the register were ongoing: “there is no dispute about the importance and benefits of resolving this.” That view was echoed by Keith Dugmore of the Demographics User Group, who described it as a “golden opportunity to produce a definitive national address register and to keep it going”. We were nevertheless disheartened to receive no clear answer from the Government on the issue of lead responsibility for negotiating an agreement.

93. An accurate and well-maintained national address register is an invaluable tool for the 2011 Census, and will be vital for any future exercises to quantify London’s population. We find it barely credible that the address register developed for the 2011 Census at substantial effort and expense is to be abandoned following the Census for reasons connected to the ownership of the intellectual property.

94. We concur with the UK Statistics Authority in recommending that the address register prepared for the 2011 Census be maintained as a public resource. We recommend that the Government urgently seek to resolve any outstanding issues with the maintenance of the register after April 2011, and to provide sufficient resources for its continued maintenance and development.

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Just turned in my Reply to the Response concerning the personal privacy of wasting finite resources and cooking the planet through the operation of unnecessarily inefficient house insulation.

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Following my discovery of two entirely distinct property government databases with their own systems of Unique Property Reference Numbers (UPRNs), due to a “Licensing impasse between Ordnance Survey and National Land & Property Gazatteer”, I was delighted to find out about a new outfit known as Geoplace.

GeoPlace (OC359627) is a public sector limited liability partnership between the Local Government Association and Ordnance Survey. Our vision is to be the recognised centre of excellence for spatial address and street information management in Great Britain.

The hell it does.

Just look at this set of emails between me and the unhelpful help desk on 26 October 2011:

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As part of the deal with the DCLG (Department for Communities and Local Government) to maintain the EPC (Energy Performance Certificate) database, Landmark Information Group Ltd was supposed to invent a brand new database of UPRNs (Unique Property Reference Numbers) for every distinct saleable property in the country. An Energy Assessors would need to look up a property on it when filing a certificate. [Click on the image to read the text in place]

This always seemed ridiculous to me. It was 2006 when these contracts were negotiated. How many government institutions in the country were already depending on an exactly equivalent database? There’s the Post office, the Ordnance Survey, the Land Registry, every local authority who is administering the property taxes, the water company, the electric company, the phone company, the BBC license fee collectors, and all parcel couriers and junk mail distributors in the land.

Why build another one?

The explanation is given in footnote 7 of page 29 of the Home Condition Report Register & Associated Services – Services Requirements Specification:

What’s remarkable is that this EPC database procurement was going on at the height of David Blunkett’s Identity Cards rampage. For years his fevered imagination was gripped by the technocratic merits of issuing unique computer processable identity number for every man, woman and child in the country to the extent that he continued to push it against rising unpopularity, mounting impracticality and rapidly inflating costs.

Did it not occur to anyone to notice that there was this related, far easier problem to tackle in the form of the government databases of places where people live? You’d think that one ministerial phone call and the threat of an order based on the PSI Directive would have sorted it out immediately. By now we could now have a totally available system for linking all house data together that would be as efficient as car license plate numbering. But we don’t.

The rest of this Services Requirements Specification document contains much else that is extraordinary. I will mine it for more blog posts in the future.

HP has a history of buying worthless corporate software outfits that have gone well past their sell-by date. A few years ago they bought one of the UK government’s worst IT providers, EDS, and with it gained a £709million liability in the form of a compensation payment to BSkyB, because Rupert Murdoch, unlike the UK government, actually insists on getting his money back from a company that has “fraudulently misrepresented itself in a salespitch”.

This year HP bought another extremely crappy software company called Autonomy for billions of dollars, long after the world had learnt at great expense that they had no technology and were just a bunch of hot-heads.

I’ll just quote you the press release on the matter from Oracle:

Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch continues to insist that Autonomy was never ‘shopped’ to Oracle. But now at least he remembers and admits to meeting with Oracle President Mark Hurd and Doug Kehring, Oracle’s head of M&A, this past April.

But CEO Lynch insists that it was a purely technical meeting, limited to a ‘lively discussion of database technologies.’

Interesting, but not true.

The slides Lynch showed Oracle’s Mark Hurd and Doug Kehring were all about Autonomy’s financial results, Autonomy’s stock price history, Autonomy’s Price/Earnings history and Autonomy’s stock market valuation. Ably assisting Mike Lynch’s attempt to sell Autonomy to Oracle was Silicon Valley’s most famous shopper/seller of companies, the legendary investment banker Frank Quattrone. After the sales pitch was over, Oracle refused to make an offer because Autonomy’s current market value of $6 billion was way too high.

We have put Mike Lynch’s PowerPoint slide sales-pitch up on the Oracle website

Oracle.com/PleaseBuyAutonomy

with the hope Mike Lynch will recognize his slides, his memory will be restored, and he will recall what he and Frank Quattrone discussed during their visit to Oracle last April. Yesterday, the Autonomy CEO did not remember having any meeting with Oracle. Today, he remembers the April meeting and inaccurately describes how it came about and what was discussed…

One thing that makes a company valuable is that it is able to get away with delivering consistently bad value to the customers.

Here is the slide where they detail the money they make by locking-in the customer into buying all their over-priced extras. Once this has happened to one part of an unsuspecting business run by people who don’t know enough about IT, the rot then spreads with the “decision to standardize” the rest of a business into Autonomy’s incompatible products.

I am on the case because of the BBC contract with Autonomy to make Democracy Live when the CEO Mike Lynch was on the board of trustees.

For me, it is not the waste that bugs me, so much as the way this business model actively suppresses and discourages good software in its place. A loud mouth with nothing to offer but who has got the money needs to make it his business that there is nothing else out there which can prove itself equivalent or superior.

Well someone has got to do it, and I doubt any journalists or other BBC staff have actually gone to the trouble to investigate the quality (or lack thereof) of their bought-in Autonomy/Blinkx speech to text video searching engine which they have wired up to the Parliamentary feed and then mis-sold (for the purpose of avoiding any form of accountability) as journalism.

As you know, I have a case about this piece of work with the Information Tribunal, because I’ve got to find out to what lengths they went in order to deliberately avoid using the free, reliable, substantive, authoritative, useful and content-driven structured XML feed of parsed-from-Hansard that is in the back system of theyworkforyou — when they instead chose to commission this shoddy piece of fundamentally flawed technology that serves no purpose and viciously wasted a very real opportunity for parliamentary publication excellence.

What I did was search for the word “Liverpool” in on the site, and then exhaustively identify all the hits that they had against the video against what was recorded in Hansard. (The Hansard transcript, as you should know, is edited to improve the grammar and clarity of the spoken word.)

Here’s the page you get back of the main debate in which “Liverpool” appears:

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I have been on the case of the Energy Performance Certificate database for a long time. This is a European mandated scheme for rating houses on the market so people can know if they’re buying a gas-guzzler or not.

Or, to put it another way, if you invest money into insulating your home and making it more energy efficient you should expect its value to go up, even if it looks exactly the same as all the other houses in the street (even though the changes are invisible if they are not solar panels).

I am in pursuit of the bizarre determination that the EPC database constitutes private personal information.

I am also looking at the company that has been contracted to run the database, Landmark Information Group Limited. First, I asked for the contract.

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