New Year in Keswick

Most years I spend New Year in the Lake District with a walking club and this year we were at Hawes End, an old Victorian house on the Western shore of Derwent Water near Keswick. I got a lift there with my friend Jane and her two kids and we arrived on the evening of December 28th. Hawes End is run by Cumbria Outdoors and has beds for 50 people – we managed to fill it with about equal numbers of kids and adults. It was self catering so there were volunteers to coordinate each day’s food which included a cooked breakfast, packed lunch and hearty evening meal.

I was expecting it to be cold and windy so I had packed lots of warm clothes, crampons, ice axe, goggles etc. The first day four of us set off walking from the centre to do the Coledale round. The footbridge across Newlands Beck had been washed away in the recent flooding so we had to detour through Stair to reach Rowling End. Visibility was good and we make decent progress along Sleet Hause, over Causey Pike to Sail and then Crag Hill. Descending Crag Hill was a bit of a slog through deep snow and we decided to head straight for Coledale Hause rather than do the detour onto Grassmoor.  Due to high wind and blowing snow we also decided to miss out Hopegill Head and made straight for Grizedale Pike where we we found ourselves in cloud for the first time. It was a bit grim up there so we descended quickly to Sleet How where the wind eased off. The rest of the decent was OK apart from the icy paths as we came down into Braithwaite – not quite treacherous enough for me to bother putting crampons on though. Due to another bridge out we had to return via Stair which was a bit of a trudge, it was dark by the time we got back to the centre.

The next day I set of with a large group of adults and kids for a widdershins circumnavigation of Derwent Water. When we reached the Borrowdale Hotel we headed up to Moss Mire in order to avoid walking along the road but once there I joined a breakaway group aiming to reach High Seat at 608m and then Take in Bleaberry Fell on the way to Keswick. Once we were up on the open fell we found ourselves struggling into a strong headwind and there was a lot of blowing snow again. It became increasingly difficult to look ahead (I had neglected to take my goggles) so we found ourselves stumbling though deep snowdrifts. Somehow we found the summit where there was a reasonably sheltered place to eat our sandwiches. Since it was now becoming difficult to even stand up in the wind we decided to abandon the rest of our route and descend straight back down to the Borrowdale Hotel with the wind at our backs. From there it was quicker and more pleasant to go back round the lake the way we had come rather than completing the circuit via Keswick.

Retreat from High Seat

On New Year’s Eve I went for a lower level walk with Jane. We stopped in Keswick for a coffee and then headed up Latrigg. Serious walkers tend not to bother with it because it seems so insignificant next to Skiddaw but it is actually a really nice hill with excellent views. The last time I had been on Latrigg was in the late 1970s with my parents and it was interesting doing it again after all those years. From the summit we headed roughly East down to Brundholme, crossed the Gretna over the old railway bridge and made our way to the Castlerigg stone circle. We walked back into Keswick via Castlerigg and fortified ourselves with a hot chocolate before doing the last leg back to Hawse End.

We had the centre booked till Jan 2nd but Jane needed to get home and wanted to leave fairly in the morning so I wasn’t going to be able to do my traditional New Year’s Day walk, or was I? There was a full moon in a clear sky so after dinner I decided to head up Cat Bells which is about 450m. I took my crampons with me and set off about 11pm aiming to reach the summit by midnight. The moon was so bright I didn’t need my head torch and there was very little wind. The path was icy so when I reached the summit I immediately put my crampons on ready for the decent and then waited for midnight. The surrounding snow covered mountains looked amazing in the moonlight and within a few minutes I started to see fireworks going up from Keswick and surrounding villages. With crampons on it seemed to take no time to get back down to the centre for a night cap. So technically I got my New Year’s Day walk after all.

I would have liked to stay longer but there will be other opportunities. There are more photos in my Keswick 2009 flickr set.

T-Mobile Staff Sold Data

Just over a year ago I reported on how someone called me on my mobile phone when my T-Mobile contract was about to expire and tried to trick me into switching providers. It seemed like T-Mobile must have sold my data, otherwise how would anyone know when my contract was expiring?

A spokesman for T-Mobile has confirmed that staff passed on millions of records from thousands of companies. So the mystery has been solved, and I hope the people involved get their comeuppance.

Climate Camp

I wasn’t really planning to be involved with the Camp for Climate Action this year, but when the Big Green Gathering was cancelled I changed my mind and decided to go along to Climate Camp Cymru. I arrived by train in Methyr Tydfil on the Thursday and cycled up the steep hill to the camp which had already been established near Ffos-y-Fran, a huge opencast mine on Merthyr Common. There was a police car opposite each of the two entrances to the camp but they were friendly local cops who were not searching anyone or otherwise making any attempt to discourage visitors. The camp was fairly well established with about 100 people on site. I took on organising the tat tent which is where I also slept (I don’t generally take a tent to these things). By the weekend numbers had increased to about 260 and the camp was running very smoothly. I will end my report there and just refer you to a fuller account on the Bicycology blog.

When I got back from Wales I spent a few days sorting stuff out and then it was time to think about the London Climate Camp. Again I wasn’t planning any major involvement but I did want to join the regular monthly London Critical Mass and I suspected it would end up at the camp so I took a sleeping bag and bought a one way ticket to London on the Friday, expecting to stay perhaps one or two nights. I knew by then that the camp had been successfully established on Blackheath and some people rode down from there with a soundsystem with the intention of leading the Mass back to the camp. That is exactly what happened and just as it was getting dark a cheer went up as about 200 cyclists pulled in to camp after struggling up Blackheath Hill.

There were already a lot of people on site and I made my way to the Bicycology tent to dump my stuff and meet the rest of the crew. I am not sure how many people were on the site over the weekend but it must have been a couple of thousand. I didn’t go to many workshops or meetings but spent a lot of time networking and running the Pedals soundsystem. I also taught some bike maintenance, fixed a few bikes, explained pedal generators to a very bright young kid who was keen to build one himself, helped strip down an old blender to make a pedal powered smoothie maker etc. I also took Pedals on the kids parade round the camp with Jess Gold who lead a few songs she had taught them. After a couple of circuits the parade left the camp and made its way to Greenwich Park for a picnic.

As with the Welsh Camp there seemed to be almost no police interference, which was a welcome change from the ridiculously violent and oppressive policing seen at Kingsnorth and Climate Camp in the City. It is shame Ian Tomlinson had to die to make the police back off and reluctantly grant our fundamental rights to gather and protest. In fact a police car did pull up when we started tying banners to the bandstand in Greenwich Park on the kids picnic but they called in to ask permission to intervene and were denied. Basically they were under orders to let us do whatever we wanted.

The only negative thing I experienced during the camp was a run-in with Tranquility on Tuesday night. We set Pedals up in the London tent for a gig with a band called Sandweaver. We had been messed around all day with conflicting demands and we delayed the gig to accommodate a quiet acoustic band which had been rescheduled in the main marquee at short notice. So it was after eleven when Sandweaver finally got to play their set and when they finished we wanted to put on a few tunes. We knew power-down was supposed to be at midnight but it was the last night of the camp, and there was still amplified music coming from the main marquee, and we had been delayed for ages through no fault of our own, so we thought we could get away with playing for another half hour or so. About twenty past twelve a masked woman barged up to the soundsystem and demanded that it be turned off – not at the end of the track but immediately. I reached for my torch so I could look at the mixer and for some unknown reason she tried to grab it out of my hand, something which might actually be classed as assault. We shut the system down at the end of the track and it was only five minutes after the sound went off in the main marquee so I don’t know why she was so bent out of shape. I was told she was from Tranquility, which is supposed to resolve conflict – Hostility more like it.

Apart from that everything was good. I stayed on Wednesday to help take down marquees etc and then did a 2am to 6am gate shift. On Thursday morning I helped dismantle the water system and then decided to cycle home to Hatfield. I went through the Greenwich foot tunnel and joined the tow path on the Lea Navigation. Somehow I got lost a couple of times and it ended up taking me about five hours to get home, sustained by nothing but foraged wild plums. I was actually coming down with a cold as well so when I finally arrived home it was all I could do to drag myself upstairs and collapse into bed.

Big Green Picnic

Prompted by police sabotage of the Big Green Gathering Des Kay, aka Professor Kayoss created a Facebook group to promote the idea of picnic in Regent’s Park on what would have been the final day of the festival. I signed up straight away and on Sunday I made the trek into London. The meeting point was at The Treehouse Gallery, an excellent project that is well worth a visit (go soon though because it ends on September 6th). I was one of the first few people to arrive and numbers steadily grew throughout the afternoon so that by about five o’clock there were probably about forty people gathered by the lake (as well as all the other people who were just visiting The Treehouse Gallery). There was some discussion about the events leading up to the cancellation of the BGG, whether people who had bought tickets would be getting their money back, and whether Mendip council would be sued for ruining children’s summer holidays and jeopardising the livelihoods of hundreds of traders. There is little doubt in my mind that the police had made a strategic decision to shut down the festival at all costs, primarily due to the planned presence of certain direct action focused environmental campaigning groups. No use crying over spilt milk though, and the majority of the afternoon was spent eating and socialising or just chilling out by the lake in the sunshine. I was having such a good time I ended staying till about eight o’clock before cycling back to Kings Cross and catching a train home. Big up to Des for getting it together, Matt for the tunes, and to everyone else who turned out.

Update – The Guardian published an article by George Monbiot on the subject of the BGG cancellation, see The Busybody State.

Police Shut Down Big Green Gathering

I was one of about 15,000 people looking forward to spending five days in the Mendip Hills at the annual Big Green Gathering. I was going to be there as part of a ten strong Bicycology crew and we had put considerable time and effort into planning for it. A license had been granted back in June but the event was cancelled at short notice yesterday after Mendip District Council threatened the organisers with a High Court injunction.

Update – although I have seen nothing about this on the BBC, at least the Guardian is covering the unfolding story.

Gratuitous Flash

I had occasion to look at the website of the Hertfordshire Local Access Forum and since I am running ClickToFlash I immediately noticed the gratuitous use of flash for navigation buttons. Hovering over a button revealed an uninformative filename like “button13.swf” and I had to load the flash to see what it was supposed to do (button 13 was actually “FAQ”). They got their site built for them by a company called AMIVA (UK) Ltd and I have suggested that they contact them to ask for a more accessible site, referring them to the Department of Communities and Local Government Website Accessibility Policy.

Open Tech 2009 Report

On Saturday I went into London for Open Tech 2009 at ULU. By the end of the day I was suffering from information overload so rather than hanging around I went to Camden Lock before heading home. Fortunately I made some notes, which I am going through now.

For the first session I was in the Main Hall where someone from the Space Hijackers (Robin I think?) gave an overview of what they are about and described some of their escapades. The session continued with an excellent talk by Heather Brooke about her part in exposing MPs’ expense receipts to public scrutiny.

I moved to Room 3E for the second session, which was a triple bill. First up was Paul Downey with a talk about the politics of standards. Then Francis Davey explained why our Internet liability laws are broken. Finally there was a really interesting talk by Charles Armstrong about a new, lightweight legal structure for community groups called One Click Orgs. I spoke to Charles after his talk about the possibility of getting a group I am involved with to participate in the beta stage of the project (it is still in alpha at the moment).

After lunch (which I bought at nearby Planet Organic and ate in Gordon Square) I went to the Upper Hall for another triple bill. Peter Murray-Rust talked about a project called “Is It Open?” which is pushing for open data in science. Jordan Hatcher then spoke about a new share-alike licence for data and databases which is being adopted by OpenStreetMap. The session was due to finish with a talk on OpenStreetMap by Steve Coast but he didn’t show up – perhaps he got lost:-) If you are interested in these sort of issues then check out the Open Knowledge Foundation.

I stayed in the Upper Hall for the fourth session, a presentation titled “Web of Power – what’s next after politicians?” by Richard Pope and Rob McKinnon, who were influenced by a book called Who Runs This Place? by Anthony Sampson. The basic point was that MPs are by no means the only people who wield power in this country – what about corporations, bankers, political parties, the media etc? Having access to MPs’ expenses is all well and good, but we need the same sort of transparency with all these other groups and organisations. Websites referred to included Help Me Investigate, The Straight Choice (Live Election Leaflet Monitoring Project), freerisk (freeing financial data and risk modelling) and Companies Open House.

After the break I went back down to the Main Hall where Gavin Hall kicked off by talking about the persistence of information on the web. He was followed by Gary Gale speaking about location and privacy. Gary works for Yahoo! and contributes to their Geo Technologies Blog. He strongly advocated that your location should not be exposed by default and mentioned Fire Eagle several times. To end the session, Gavin Starks of AMEE gave a presentation titled “Your Energy Identity”.

For the sixth and final session of the day I stayed in the Main Hall for a continuation of the previous session, in which someone from AlertMe was supposed to be talking about automated energy saving using their smart energy and home monitoring system. It turned out they weren’t there to give the talk, so a woman whose name I don’t recall stepped in to give a general talk about the need for smart meters.

So that was about it for the day. I obviously missed a lot of stuff because there were at least three separate sessions going on at any one time, but even so, there was still rather too much for me to take in. I exchanged email addresses with a few people and have various things to follow up on. I don’t know whether there are plans for Open Tech 2010 but if it happens I will probably attend again.

Election Followup

After voting in the elections on June 4th I headed straight off to Amsterdam so I have only just got round to blogging about the results. In the East of England region we ended up with exactly the same distribution of MEPs we had before – 3 Conservative, 2 UKIP, 1 Labour and 1 Lib Dem. Looking at the number of votes for each party, Labour was the big loser, dropping from 16.3% to 10.5%. However, none of the other main parties benefitted significantly from Labour’s loss – Conservatives gained 0.4%, Lib Dems lost 0.2% and UKIP were unchanged. The BNP managed to increase its share of the vote from 4.4% to 6.1% but the Green Party made the biggest gain, up from 5.6% to 8.8%, narrowly missing out on a seat.

Stuart Pile retained his County Council seat for the Conservatives in Hatfield South with 1,577 votes. Colin Jeffrey managed to pick up 233 votes for the Green Party but ended up in last place, 50 votes behind the BNP candidate who doesn’t even live in Hatfield. The Conservatives now dominate Hertfordshire County Council with 55 of 77 seats and the Lib Dems have 17 of the remaining 22, with Labour reduced to a paltry 3 seats. Deirdre Anne Gates won South Oxhey for the BNP with 29.2% of the vote and Ian Brandon won Callowland Leggats for the Green party with 36.0% of the vote. Here is the County Summary from HertsDirect.

The Pirate Party received 7.13% of the total Swedish votes, which will result in one seat in the European parliament, two if the Lisbon Treaty goes into effect. For more general election coverage check out this BBC special report.

Rant About Website Logins

This is a post I have been meaning to write for some time. It is an attempt to summarise a lot of frustrations with the way websites handle creating and using personal accounts. I am talking about all sorts of websites, from petition sites to banking to video sharing etc.

I am not complaining here about the fact that many websites require (or strongly encourage) you to create an account. I understand the desire to be able to use a website without registering, and that option should always be available if appropriate, but sometimes I want to create an account and there is no option to do so. For example, I fairly regularly sign petitions at petitions.number10.gov.uk and I have to enter my details each time I do so, and there is no way to view all the petitions I have signed. Being able to create an account could solve both those problems.

I have created accounts on close to one hundred websites and it is a pain managing them all, but some are worse than others. So what follows is a list of my pet hates:

• Websites where there is no obvious place to log in, bbc.co.uk for example. What if I want to log in to change personal details, or just check that my login still works? There is no obvious place to do so and I don’t want to have to spend ages searching the site to find a place where it asks you to log in.
• Websites where there is no obvious way to log out. What if you are logged in and you want to check how the site appears to someone who is not logged in? Yes you can search your cookies and find the appropriate one to delete but that is a pain. Sometimes you can find a hidden logout button but why not make it obvious? Of course it is often because they don’t want you to log out in case you forget to log in again, and they want you logged in all the time so they can gather the maximum amount of data about you. Text saying “If you are not Joe Bloggs click here” is no substitute for a clear logout button – I am Joe Bloggs, I just want to log out.
• Logins that don’t work with my Keychain. I am a Mac user and I find the Keychain functionality very useful – but it only works with about 70% of websites I use. There are two types of not working. In some cases I never get the option to save the username and password in my Keychain. Far more annoying though are the sites where I get the option to save the details and I say yes, but then when I log out and try to log in again the details are not retrieved. This has happened a lot with www.bt.com for example. During the login process I seem to get redirected all over the place to complex URLs that don’t match the URL saved in the Keychain. Facebook has been another culprit.

My advice to designers who are working on websites where users can create personal accounts is to always have an obvious way to log in or create an account and, if the user is logged in, an obvious way to log out. Furthermore, make sure that the system works with the Mac OS X Keychain (or whatever the equivalent is on Windows and popular Linux desktops).

One final point. OpenID has been touted as a solution to the authentication problem and companies have been jumping on the bandwagon with press releases announcing that they are enabling OpenID support. In general they are doing nothing of the sort! Microsoft, Google, IBM and Yahoo! for example all say they support OpenID but what they really mean is that you can use your credentials from their service as an OpenID but you can’t use your existing OpenID to log in to their service. If every company followed their example then OpenID would be of no benefit to anybody whatsoever.

Euro Profiler

The EU Profiler claims to allow you to “Discover your position in the political landscape for the 2009 European Parliament Elections”. I just tried it and am not sure how useful it is. Based on your answers to a number of questions (many of which present what I consider to be false dichotomies) it positions you on a plane with the horizontal axis being socioeconomic left vs right and the vertical axis being pro vs anti EU integration.

It put me as moderately left (about the same as the Liberal Democrats) and very marginally pro EU integration. My closest matches seemed to be the Green Party and the Conservatives – I was somewhat more pro EU than both, and about half way between them on the left-right scale. In fact I will be voting Green and if I had a second choice it would be the Lib Dems.

Interestingly Labour is shown as being slightly more right wing than the Conservatives – what distinguishes them is that Labour is very pro EU whereas the Conservatives are slightly anti EU. The two really strongly anti EU parties are the BNP and UKIP, but whereas the BNP are shown as being neutral on the left-right axis, UKIP are significantly further to the right than any of the other parties represented.

So what are we to make of this? The profiler seems to suggest that someone who is strongly anti EU but not right wing should vote for the BNP, which clearly does not present the full picture! I hope people realise this and don’t give their vote to a bunch of fascists.

I will be voting Green not because of where they lie on either of the axes, but because of their position on environmental issues and personal liberty (they are the only party that has come out in favour of ending marijuana prohibition).