Flyers Once More
Jul0
Recently my graphical-cobbling-togetherness skills have been requisitioned by The Lincoln Company (Basically the performing arts department at Lincoln) to design their publicity for this year’s run at the Edinburgh Fringe. If you’re up there, go check some of them out.
An Expenses Problem
Jun2
Everybody within Britain who isnt living under a rock knows all about the MPs expenses cock-up, but for those of you not graced with coverage Ill summarise:
MPs in the UK have been claiming a variety of things on their expenses which common sense would suggest you shouldnt really claim for. Things like dry-rot treatment for second homes, large-screen TVs, duck houses and in one case a donation to a collection at church service. Amazingly, nobody seemed to notice this – not MPs, not the accountants they employed (and sometimes claimed for) and certainly not the fees office – until a request under the Freedom of Information Act sought to release details of what MPs were claiming for. Shockingly enough MPs and even the Speaker of the House made moves to block this request, eventually culminating in a release where numbers would be included but not details of what was being claimed for.
Fortunately for the country somebody leaked the entire list to the press, who promptly set upon it, published it, and upturned the entire MPs expenses system.
One key thing which has been seen again and again is MPs saying that they accidentally claimed for something and would of course repay the money. Another common theme has been that claims were errors of judgement, and that again MPs would of course repay the money as an apology. The thing that I dont understand is that nobody has spotted that several expenses claims were obviously bollocks. If a claim was a mistake then by definition it shouldnt have been claimed for, and if it shouldnt have been claimed for then the fees office should not have allowed it.
MPs have been banging on about we need a change of culture and there should be new regulations, but it seems strangely coincidental that this need for a change of culture and new regulations happens at the same time that the public take their first look at some of the crap which has been claimed for and decide almost unanimously (sorry Mr. Fry, I agree that everybody fudges their expenses at some point but not everybody fudges their expenses to buy a flatscreen TV with public funds, tries to stop details of that claim being made public, then apologises and says it was a mistake when trapped in a corner about it) that its just not on.
Heres an idea which I saw elsewhere and cant remember where (somebody remind me and Ill attribute it) – make all expenses claims automatically public and submit them to a publicly-visible clearing house as open data and let the public watch for unacceptable things. Were obviously better at it than the fees office.
More Poster Power
May0
Here, for your delectation, are another couple of posters I’ve cobbled together. One for a school variety performance thing, one for an production going on in Lincoln. Unlike the previous ones made in Inkscape, these two are thrown together in Apple’s Pages.
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- Summer Nights
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- Weepie
Standards of Space Exploration
May0
The BBC is carrying an article about Russia keeping its ISS modules in orbit after the station’s decommissioning, to form the basis of their new outpost. The basic idea is an excellent one – the modules are likely to still be working, so why go to the hassle of sending up a whole new set of modules when the existing ones will do the job until replacements are needed?
Trouble is, if the Russian segment of the ISS is detached prior to de-orbiting then the ISS is left without any propulsion and with no means of making a controlled descent. Bits of it will probably burn up in unwanted parts of the atmosphere and land in peoples’ cups of tea. Obviously this is not a good thing. Fortunately Europe’s Automated Transfer Vehicle will have enough thruster power to steer the remnants of the ISS around the sky should the Russians wish to take their bits and scarper, but there’s a major flaw in this. The ATV can only dock to the Russian segments of the station.
Call me naïve, but is it really outside the brains of the three biggest space exploration organisations in the world to have organised a common standard for connecting one thing to another? The entirety of the ISS was built from scratch anyway, the space shuttle needed an adapter fitting anyway, so why not just standardise all the docking rings and make life easy?
Politics. Sigh.
iPlayer on JANET
May0
In my recent post about BBC iPlayer and the fact that PAVCON was abysmally bad at streaming I promised to do a comparison of the network where I currently reside against the behemoth that is JANET. For those who don’t know JANET is the network behind most academia in the UK, and is blazingly fast.
Well, I finally remembered to do this test whilst I was in the labs today, so here are the results.
iPlayer on JANET
I think that should suffice for watching TV. A curious fact though is that the PCs provided by the university are woefully underpowered for actually watching HD TV, lacking sufficient clout to actually decrypt and render the stream at any more than a couple of frames a second.
So, it looks like the way forwards is still beefy broadband and my laptop. bring on the new house in July.