So, here we have a Home Office who are failing in the management of an existing task:

Trial judge recommends the offender should be deported on sentence completion. Home Office makes a formal decision to follow that recommendation, then fails to carry it out.

(Note that the judge recommends that the offender be deported, not be considered for deportation. HMG's description is spin.)

Rectifying this requires the Home Office to simply be better at keeping records and communicating between its various Directorates (ie Prison Service tells Immigration that someone's coming to the end of their sentence. Immigration turns up on release day with a plane ticket and a taxi to LHR).

Not rocket science, is it?

But in a desperate attempt to get ahead of the headlines, Ol' Jug-ears decides that what is needed is not better implementation of existing legislation (which is more than adequate - Home Secretaries already enjoy the broadest of discretions to deport people who are non-conducive to the public good), but new, more draconian legislation.

Again.

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Mulley managed to get his hands on a list of Eircom's DSL-enabled exchanges, and asked if I could work some Google Maps mojo on it.

Update: then he sent me a list of all the exchanges, not the 35% which are enabled. We've just fixed that.

This is a screenshot of the resulting map, with a 4km-radius circle drawn around each of his points.

If you're extremely patient and don't mind your browser either crashing without warning or complaining a lot about how long the Javascript's taking to execute, you can see the Google map it was snatched from here, and there's also a version with the circles enlarged to 5km.

I prefer the 3km version because it's more accurate. Outside that radius any connection you'll get will be rate-adaptive and is not guaranteed beyond 128kbps - which hardly counts as 'broadband' in my book. If you can get it at all.

You can see that, basically, if your telephone area code doesn't end in a 1, it's a crapshoot.

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With apologies to la Hewitt for the title.

To start slightly off centre, this week saw two major scope increases for the National ID scheme (conveniently after the legislation has passed):

1. The NIR is to function as a complete population register with cross-functional data sharing that far exceed the stated strictly limited circumstances mandate. As previously predicted by the Fiend, myself and others, this is child's play once you have foreign keys to all the government's databases stored on the Register
2. Contrary to previous promises, the Card is to store your medical info. So as well as the inevitable Civil Liberties problem here, every provider of medical services is going to need the Card Reading Kit (previously estimated by the Home Office as £4k - £6k plus connectivity for each reader workstation. Whose budget is paying for this? Can't imagine the Dept for Health is jumping at the idea.

So I'm beginning to think that maybe the best way to keep tabs on the population isn't to give each of us an ID Card, but instead to lock the lot of us up in a secure location, and then HMG will know exactly where we all are. Oh, wait...

Continues below the fold »

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This Guide to Chile seeks to give advice to travelers visiting our beautiful country. I encourage you to leave open questions on the comments so I can have ideas on what to write new pieces on. We’ll start by some basic tips. General Advice: Learn some Spanish before arrival. I once met a couple [...]

Two sides to the same story: Linspire are releasing a freely-available, freely-distributable, community-led, Debian-based Linux distribution (sound familiar?) to be called Freespire. Linspire’s edge is that they will distribute non-free drivers, such as for nVidia or ATi graphics cards, as part of the core distribution, and not from optional repositories a la Ubuntu.

Jono Bacon, who is on the Leadership Board of Freespire, is genuinely excited about Open Source and distro diversity, and I’d trust his opinion to be as unbiased as possible. Meanwhile, Pamela Jones over at Groklaw is characterising Freespire as Satan’s Distro. Yes, binary non-free, non-open drivers are Bad. But think about the first thing a new user of Ubuntu does — and when I say user, I don’t mean an average Linux geek, I mean a Joe Bloggs user, a wants to read e-mail and buy stuff off Amazon user — is to look for ways to play their MP3 collection, or watch a DVD, or go to a website with Flash, or listen to BBC Real streams, or … You see my point? The Ubuntu forums are littered with requests to just Make Stuff Work™. This is undoubtedly the market Linspire is targetting, and it is a market.

Is Jono wrong to be associated with this distro? Is Pamela right to vilify it? I’ve no doubt that while Freespire is a noble effort by a company well steeped in commercialism, it’ll survive with a niche of its own; not a huge niche, but a cult following nonetheless. Ubuntu is a steamroller of a distro with a strong ethical community. Freespire just won’t have the momentum to keep up. I really don’t know what Pamela is worried about.

Note that this isn’t SquiggleOS, the original attempt to create a free version of Linspire which began under the same name. SquiggleOS has now been abandoned in favour of Freespire development. Also note that SquiggleOS lead Andrew Betts is a Leadership Board member too.

A smile exchanged on the street must be worth a million. What are the chances of a stranger catching...

Between the ages of 8 and 15, we lived in a town just outside London called Epping, known to all Londoners as the farthest-flung station on the Central Line.

Apparently Epping's famous if you went to school in Germany because the canned family in the learning-English text books lived there.

My mother, and her entire extended family, all live in a town six miles from Edinburgh City Centre called Musselburgh. I spent at least two months every year there throughout my formative years, which is why I can turn on a solid East End of Edinburgh accent at will - something which freaks people out in a pleasing manner.

My Latin teacher, who not only taught then-Captain Muammar Khadafi to speak English while in the British Army (yes, Khadafi speaks very good English, and that's how I know), also previously worked in France teaching English to secondary school students. He informed me long ago that the reason he'd heard of Musselburgh was that it was where the family in their text books lived.

I'm expecting any year now to find out that Italians learn English from text books which feature a family who live round the back of Ned Kelly's in Willesden. Or maybe that Spanish textbooks go on at length about the Mardyke.

Meanwhile, I find this all mildly unsettling for reasons I can't quite put my finger on.

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What I want, when I write a poem, is no more than this: that it be preserved in some...

I got pinged with a friends list request last night on MSN Messenger (although I use Gaim to connect to the network instead of Microsoft’s crappy ad-laden client) from someone I added years ago. I hadn’t heard from them for a while and I think I’d deleted them since Gaim reported I wasn’t on their friends list. Then this request last night made me think, “cool, Alex is back online again with theaddressheused@hotmail.com“, so I added it back without a worry.

Then this morning, I got this:

(12:02:42) simon aka calcium . P's . Going to melbourne, 20-26th april: whos this
(12:03:39) neuro@msn: i dunno, who’s this?
(12:04:06) simon aka calcium . P's . Going to melbourne, 20-26th april: simon, who are ye

(12:04:14) neuro@msn: ah, so you’re not alex then
(12:04:24) neuro@msn: bit strange
(12:04:30) neuro@msn: feel free to remove me from your list then

(12:04:43) simon aka calcium . P's . Going to melbourne, 20-26th april: who are u
(12:05:11) neuro@msn: someone who knows someone who used to have this hotmail address
(12:05:32) neuro@msn: i got a buddy list request for this address last night

(12:05:51) simon aka calcium . P's . Going to melbourne, 20-26th april: what are u on?, this emal is new
(12:06:10) simon aka calcium . P's . Going to melbourne, 20-26th april: u added me
(12:06:17) neuro@msn: someone else had theaddressheused@hotmail.com before you

(12:06:23) neuro@msn: looks like they let it expire
(12:06:30) simon aka calcium . P's . Going to melbourne, 20-26th april: no
(12:06:38) simon aka calcium . P's . Going to melbourne, 20-26th april: no they didn’t

(12:06:51) neuro@msn: roughly when did you register this address?
(12:07:07) neuro@msn: if you don’t mind me asking
(12:07:22) simon aka calcium . P's . Going to melbourne, 20-26th april: um, 6 months

(12:07:34) neuro@msn: yeah, someone else had it before you
(12:07:42) neuro@msn: i’ve had this address in my friends list for years
(12:08:21) simon aka calcium . P's . Going to melbourne, 20-26th april: wtf, u can’t just let someone use an old email addy, for this reason

(12:08:40) neuro@msn: if you don’t login to hotmail for 90 days or something, they expire the address
(12:08:44) neuro@msn: read the t’n'c’s
(12:09:24) simon aka calcium . P's . Going to melbourne, 20-26th april: yeh, that doesn’t mean someone else can use it

(12:10:12) neuro@msn: dude, accept this fact that someone else had this address before you
(12:10:18) neuro@msn: feel free to delete me from your friends list
(12:10:20) neuro@msn: i’ll do the same

(12:10:31) neuro@msn: it’s just a misunderstanding, these things happen
(12:10:53) simon aka calcium . P's . Going to melbourne, 20-26th april: nah they don’t you got my email from someone
(12:11:10) neuro@msn: paranoid much?

(12:11:14) neuro@msn: i have *no* idea who you are
(12:11:29) neuro@msn: beyond the fact you’re simon, aka calcium and you’re going to somewhere in australia at the weekend
(12:11:36) neuro@msn: and that’s from your nick

(12:12:18) simon aka calcium . P's . Going to melbourne, 20-26th april: don’t talk to randoms
(12:12:18) simon aka calcium . P’s . Going to melbourne, 20-26th april has closed the conversation window.
(12:12:22) simon aka calcium . P’s . Going to melbourne, 20-26th april logged out.

… sigh.

This about wraps it up for Britain, then.

The major labels have just jumped from "you can't have a webcasting license at all unless you're also on AM or FM" to "if anyone outside the territorial UK can heatr you we'll sue your tits off".

Words fail me. I'm also obliged to mention that this represents a complete reversal of everything. Up until now they've only been interested in where you're based, not where your broadcasting station or your listeners are.

Now, not only can you not legally send audio to anyone outside UK, but you also still can't broadcast to overseas people by publishing your output to (say) Shoutcast and paying commercial rates for it.

Four things spring to mind.

First, that the Big 5 policy on internet radio is that they want to kill it by any means available.

Second, that their methods are a restraint on trade. They're offering entirely different terms to different radio stations based exclusively on what they use for transmission.

Third, that five groups acting in concert to restrict competition in the radio market for their own financial benefit represents, in this case, a vast number of criminal acts on the part of a large number of people under UK and European anti-trust legislation. They're restricting trade and pricefixing both, and five groups and 20-odd labels with at least two representatives each are involved. That's at least fifty possible criminal indictments right there, collectively worth nine figures in fines.

Lastly, yet another huge opportunity for Ireland which we're missing. At some point, will someone please tell someone about how much feckin' money we can bring in if we open up geodata, create a fair and legally-protected environment for internet radio in a country which uses the Euro and speaks English, commit ourselves to making use of the world's largest source of wave energy off the west coast?

The UK never stops dropping the ball these days and Ireland, in turn, never misses an opportunity to fumble the catch.

It's enough to make a person run for office.

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Everyone's talking about the addition of satellite imagery.

Nobody seems to have noticed that (unlike yesterday), its world doesn't abruptly end in Labrador anymore.

The front page now centres by default on Ireland if you're coming from an obviously Irish IP address.

This, I'm told by People Who Know, is part of an ongoing integration with Whereonearth.com's data, which Yahoo bought late last year. The kicker for us is this: Whereonearth was in possession of an Irish geocoder.

It's coming. Slowly, but it's coming.

In the meantime you can still use a crude hack which gets you to within about 200 metres of your target.

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Organic Veg Bed I, originally uploaded by Martin Burns.

Yeah, it's only 3 veg beds, but it still makes me feel like a farmer.

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How far behind the UK is with More4, I don't know anymore-- but DON'T click on this link if you're watching The West Wing on RTE One because it talks about an episode you'll not be seeing for several more weeks.

It does, however, mention that Martin Sheen is about to enrol as an undergraduate at NUI Galway. (Yes, you did see him get an honorary doctorate from NUI Maynooth last week on the news.) Well, I think it's interesting.

Also:

Not long ago, he said, he was approached by Democratic Party representatives from his native state, Ohio, to see if he would be interested in running for the United States Senate after he left the show. Though he would have had little trouble drafting a campaign platform — he is a fierce opponent of nuclear power and the war in Iraq, and a champion of human rights — he turned them down.

"I'm just not qualified," he said. "You're mistaking celebrity for credibility."

Love that guy.

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...in times gone by, you have asked my opinion on which computer to buy. Regardless of your previous experience with malware of many and varied kinds, and your need for easily configured systems which rarely if ever go wrong, you have consistently and steadfastly ignored my considered opinion of Buy a Mac, usually citing a need to keep some ridiculously outdated piece of software (Wordstar for DOS? Hello?) and retain access to your old files.

Now, leaving aside that there are plenty of Mac solutions that read old WP formats, or even run Windows programs (albeit a bit slowly), these were always just the excuses of the fearful.

So to these fearful friends and relatives, if you really need the comfort blanket of Windows, its security holes, its virii, its botnets, its rootkits and so on, you can now wean yourself off it slowly. Buy a new MacMini.

But what about my Spyware? I hear you cry? Well worry not - if you really want to run Windows XP on that shiny Intel Mac, you now can, with BootCamp.

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But for my referer log I probably wouldn't ever have found out that Eddie Hobbs linked to my Eddie Hobbs T-shirt.

Perhaps someone can tell me if the Afternoon Show really did do an interview with him while wearing one, as they phoned to tell me they would.

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I've been playing, again, with Drupal's built-in aggregator.

A couple of weeks ago I set up this site for Tom Steinberg of mySociety in order that he can maintain a Kibo-like omnipresence in the blog world.

Yesterday I started making a radio job-finding tool on this site.

Read on for details.

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I've decided to take a break from posting for a while. There are some personal things happening that I need to focus my attention on, and this place is a too much of a distraction to handle right now, so I'm putting it in stasis.

Hopefully I'll be back at some point.

OK, now that the Lords and Tories have caved, and given in on the worst aspect of the ID Card scheme (guys, we told you all along: it's the Register that's worrying, not the cards), we start thinking about the next step.

Naturally, the best thing to do is to simply refuse to be registered. But if you want to have foreign holidays (and my job means that keeping a passport is not optional), this won't work forever. My current passport runs out in January 2010 — just after compulsion for both Register and Card comes into force. So I'm currently debating whether it's better to hold out entirely until then, or 'arrange' a little accident for my passport earlier, even if that means being entered onto the Register.

However, what we could (and probably should) do is remember the lessons of the Poll Tax campaign. Leaving aside all the cost and technology arguments for a moment, registering the entire adult population by 2010 is going to be fearsomely difficult to actually implement. It's just too many people to get through a relatively small number of centres. Not only are there new registrations, but if you move house, get married/divorced, change appearance significantly or lose/damage your Card, you'll need to register that change.

So let's 'help'.

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Thanks again to everyone at the IASummit 2006 for the wonderful reaction to the upcoming envents in Chile and the encouragement expressed. Several people showed interest in traveling to present, we’re currently accepting submissions, we’re especially interested in case studies, stories of local experiences, and we’re also especially interested in incorporating women, so far we only [...]