I don’t think I’m going to ruin Christmas for daisy if i talk about her present here. but if you want the surprise of not knowing you don’t have to read on

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It’s really just a PR stunt, but Liverpool vision has been complaining today about how google’s images of Liverpool are around 5 years old, and show Liverpool with loads of waste land when in fact it’s redeveloping like crazy and now has…. well.. loads of holes.Without going into the technicalities of the fact that google has to get images of the entire planet, so five years probably isn’t that bad. If I was Liverpool vision I would have done two things before complaining.

1. Waited until Liverpool was a bit more than a couple of big holes. what’s the use in updating the pictures of wasteland from space into big holes with cranes in them… from space.
2. Updated my own web site. As the register has pointed out, you should maybe get the 10 or so pictures on your own website sorted before you complain about google having the odd old picture in a couple of million.

Sometimes You don’t realise how good a company is at something until you change to another one.

When we initially bought thejumps.co.uk. I did a load of research into domain hosting companies, and based more on reputation than price we went with 1and1 internet, who are one of the largest web hosting companies in the world. the package was OK but after a year or so, we started to miss the little extras (like database support), which were holding us back from doing some of the cool stuff (like the family tree, and changing to wordpress). So i went out and looked for another host.

This time I admit I looked more at price than reputation although I did find people saying good things about compila, the company we are now with. However, after 4 months I don’t rate them much. Our website isn’t anywhere as near as stable. It appears that while you upload files the website can stop responding (and no this isn’t our internet connection). they ‘forgot’ to renew the domain last week, and had to be prompted to do so, and it turns out the other two domains we have that we got so our some of our friends could have nice email addresses weren’t even set-up properly as part of the transfer.

I’m very close to ditching them even though we’ve paid for the year and moving to someone else. Looking back 1and1 internet we’re fantastic the servers we’re fast and we never had any trouble with the site, the only problem is they aren’t that cheep if you want database support (in the UK anyway). their cheapest plan with database is over ?120 a year! (we are currently paying less than half of that). Easyspace who are another big company can do it for around ?42 but currently have a hidden charge of ?17 if you ever want to move away from them! I disapprove of hidden charges.

We never did fully rant about the fingerprinting of school children.
Even ignoring the fact that the data isn’t as safe as some schools say it is, and the fact that who can access the data isn’t as tightly controlled as the schools like to think it is, it’s still a stupid¹ idea.

The one thing that really got to me, is how we are sending the message to children that personal data isn’t that important. The argument of ‘it’s only for the library’ just underlines this. I mean not that being worse than China shames us any more but in Hong Kong they’ve put a stop to fingerprinting children because it infringes on the child’s privacy.

Anyway, there’s now a report out saying that all these databases are ‘harming children’, because shock horror, people aren’t actually taking the time to understand what the data is telling them, and just acting on it anyway. So social workers are taking children into care, because they don’t actually understand what they are looking at.
I could go on, but it’s still early in the day, and I don’t want to get all wound up for the rest of it. So for those less technical people in the audience i will leave you with this description of encryption by the headteacher who described the fingerprinting of children as just a bit of fun.

“The actual thumbprint image is not stored - the software calculates a huge number from the image, and it is the image itself which is stored, not the fingerprint.”

If I was only worried about someone stealing the school computer, that might put my mind at rest. I agree with the information commissioner we’re not sleepwalking into a surveillance society, we are already there.

¹ This issue gets me so wound up, It’ brings out the best reasoned arguments in me.

I surf the internet a lot; probably far to much but we will worry about that another time. Most of the time it’s the same old same old. nothing really new, a take on something you’ve already read. a photograph you’ve seen from every angle at least twice, but every now and again I see something on the internet that make me go wow.

Some nerdy things are just plain impressive like seats3d a company who do nifty seating plans for stadiums (like the Boston garden), but mostly they’re just wow someone has taken this to the logical extreme and done it well.

What’s a real wow moment are things I’ve never seen before, like a ‘new’ (different) way to multiply. Now yes some people say it’s the same principle as “long multiplication“, but still it’s a different angle, and one my education appeared to be sadly lacking (and I’ve got an A’Level in maths too).

Of course we don’t do multiplication by hand any more, we have calculators, excel, and my favorite google. I mean who doesn’t need to know the speed of light in fathoms per lunar month?