Ok, the riots matter. Especially if you’re unlucky enough to have had to face rioters in your district, near your home, or near your business. In fact, the riots and disturbances are full of tragedy, deaths and ruined lives. They are, frankly, horrible.
And strong action is needed to stop it turning into a joyfull rampage for our criminal underclass.
But what they aren’t is some kind of protest. They’re a laugh. If I didn’t have much to lose I suspect I might even find the thrill of a riot quite an attraction. And in areas where there’s possibly not much to do if you’ve got very little money then I can quite understand the fun, the empowerment of feeling that police won’t stop you when they usually do. Thing is, what nobody seems to be saying is that the number of people involved is tiny.
200/816216 = 0.0245%
Here’s a thing – the number of people kicking off in the Liverpool area has been reported as approximately 200. In reality that means anywhere between 50 and 500. But let’s assume that 200 is correct for now. That’s a whole 0.0245% of the population. Another way of looking at is that that 99.975% of the population in Liverpool didn’t feel compelled to smash anything up or set fire to cars. I daresay the proportions around London are similar.
So actually, society functions well for almost everybody in it. In fact, given that 45,000 18-20 year olds are indicted of a criminal offence in a year (sample from 1999) you can see that even the vast majority of young convicted criminals aren’t interested in rioting. The numbers are so small that you can’t say that this is a problem with a consumerist society, a problem with poverty, or a problem with our culture – the sample size is too small. It’s probably just some yobs getting the upper hand on the police and having some fun.
It’s a Policing Thing, Stupid
You can stop almost all riots. All you need are an awful lot of police who aren’t scared to intimidate and bully their way through trouble. It works. Riots are rare in police states, for example.
So we need to ask if we really want brutal police officers? What about when they’re not dealing with a riot? They’re going to be the ones your son deals with when he gives a bit of cheek to an officer after being told off for cycling on the pavement. They’re going to be the ones potentially wading in too early during an otherwise peaceful protest.
We must come to accept that these occasional moments of unrest are, unless repeated again and again with significant economic damage, a relatively small cost of living in a relatively free society. Just as we mustn’t allow the few terrorists with religious agendas to change how we live, we mustn’t allow the few thugs out there to change the way we deal with protest and the way we run our cities.
Of course, the cost mustn’t be borne by the individuals and businesses affected – if our society is to accept this, it must also ensure that nobody is left harmed or significantly out of pocket by this either. We need to be humane and adult about it all.
What we certainly don’t need is to start pressuring our politicians into making some dumb, knee-jerk changes that will take away our hard won freedoms. Let’s take stock, let’s maybe ask for police to be a little smarter in apprehending the rioters, but let’s not give up and change too much.
So, here I am again at Thinking Digital. Only this time I’m no longer driving the seemingly doomed Golf TDI I had last year that did one of it’s self destruction tricks en-route. Consequently I’m not missing out on the workshops here.
In fact, I’m doing better than that – an additional workshop was added for the Monday by Jer Thorp of Wired fame. A workshop on Processing. That, I must say, was a wonderful find. Processing, in case you’ve never heard of it, is a data visualisation tool or sketchbook. It’s a bit old-school, but this is a good thing, generally, because this has the advantage of being relatively accessible. In fact it reminded me of the fun early days of BASIC on small computers.
Simply put, you can easily draw things, and you can analyse data with it. Some was stuff I could do on a Dragon 32 nearly thirty years ago, but with many thousands of times the power – and that means you can do cool stuff in real time. I recommend you look up some of the online Processing materials. You can even try it out without installing anything by using my colleague Robert O’Rourke‘s website, hascanvas.com
During Nancy Duarte’s Workshop
That Resonates With Me!
Then on day two it was a half day ‘off’ which, for me, meant a series of telephone calls with clients while I ensure that work continues as it should. The afternoon, however, brought along Nancy Duarte‘s “That Resonates With Me!” workshop.
Funnily enough, her resonate analogy was the one bit that didn’t work for me. She used the peculiar patterns of salt as it’s vibrated on a plate as a way of showing how different people can resonate with your message in different ways. It’s interesting, but I feel that people don’t work that way. People can, however, be like salt – you know, small, hard, square and bad for your health. So perhaps she had a point.
BUT – I’m picking. Because truth be told it was a fascinating workshop that helped me to see through the clutter of my presentations and to find ways to understand my audience and find ways to connect with them. The simple exercise she gave will help me improve my presentations – of that I’m sure. I just have to make sure I put them into practice.
The Rest
The rest of the conference is more classically organised, with the usual talks, networking and information overload. In the evenings there’ll be the usual entertainment. Already I’ve been better at avoiding alcohol than last year – I’m remarkably sober tonight. This is a Good Thing.
Highlights, I suspect, will be Jer’s talk (always visually amazing – check out his Vimeo feed) but the rest I’ll have to report on later.
I wandered a little…
And saw some architecture that may be interesting…
Like this great doorway.
Why, that’s nice of you! Desk at Gateshead College.
Drawing my audience. Not sure if ET turns up often
I recently saw in the book “Just My Type” by Simon Garfield a poster by Beatrice Warde, the famous American born typographer who spent much of her career in the UK*. There seem to be many variations of typesetting for the poster, so I’ve no idea if she designed one herself or if it was simply something that printers liked to produce.
But I quite liked the idea of a strong message to visitors of a print shop that what went on there was important. So why not the same for an office of web developers and designers? What we do carries great potential, it is world changing, and we facilitate amazing things. Why shouldn’t we as an industry have something similar to help trumpet our cause? And where better to start than a classic set of words by an eminent typographer?
I’ve set this in Gill Sans Std rather than Albertus of the original I saw, but perhaps there’s a better typeface?
I’m not happy with this quick draft just yet, but wanted to put the idea out to see if it would fly. Comments please!
With a hat-tip to Beatrice Warde
* Enough, in fact, that I believed she was British until the helpful comment below informed me otherwise.
In 2000 in the UK, the Freedom of Information Act gave us all the ‘right to know’ what our public bodies were up to. We can ask for information about a huge range of items, and it’s a great idea. Information should, in my view, be as open and transparent as possible.
But there’s a problem.
It’s become easier and easier to make FOI requests, for example using sites like the excellent http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/
I like this. I like efficiency. I like speedy, easy to use systems.
But what I don’t particularly like are some people.
Let me explain. People, in general, tend to be quite nice, harmless, and socially aware. But a significant proportion, perhaps 20%, are best described as spoiled, selfish, mean… you know what I mean. And that’s an awful lot of people. In our population of 60 million or so that means there are 12 million not especially nice folk around. A smaller proportion, perhaps a million, will be genuinely unpleasant*.
So, what happens when a large number of people can easily make requests to the FOI that are, to all intents and purposes, selfish?
This is what happens, each set from just one user:
In each case the requests pertained to commercial information. The diesel misfuelling question is by Nick Panchaud, who a quick bit of googling for the term “Nick Panchaud diesel” reveals him to be commenting around the place promoting the Diesel Key, a device to prevent petrol hoses being inserted into diesel vehicles.
Natalie Davis and Keith Griffiths are harder to track down conclusively due to their more common names, but the requests they make would only really be of interest to commercial organisations, so I’m rolling with it.
What’s happening is that at least some people are making multiple FOI requests for commercial gain. Yet there’s a massive cost behind all this. I decided to do a little bit of FOI requesting myself. My question? How much did Nick Panchaud’s requests cost you to service?
I only asked three public bodies (let’s not build up the costs here!) and two responded ( http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/user/david_coveney ) giving costs of £87.63 and £50. Not much of a sample size, but let’s roll with it – it may be representative. Given that, you can see that to fulfil Mr Panchaud’s research it has cost public bodies as much as £41,900. Money that has come out of tax payer’s pockets.
If we assume similar costs for those other requests I’ve listed above (it may be quite a bit more: http://www.scotland.gov.uk/News/Releases/2010/11/12143737) , we’re looking at potentially another £87,700. So three people with commercial interests have sucked over £100k from our economy.
A Possible Solution
FOI requests are costing the country millions. People like our Nick Panchaud above are not using the FOI system in the spirit in which it was meant to be used. Consequently they are costing us a fortune and we need to find a way, in these difficult times, to slash those costs.
I propose a change to the FOI system that makes all requesters pay a small fee. It doesn’t have to be a lot – perhaps £10 each. That would stop the scurrilous and wasteful requests, whilst still keeping the system open for those with a real purpose for the information they seek. Even commercial researchers. Obviously it should be reviewed in time – it may need to go up, or down, but usually people are economically quite selfish and they’ll consider more carefully the requirement.
I know this post is likely to disappear in the noise and won’t get much traction, but this has been bugging me for a while now and I had to say something!
* On the upside, there’s 600,000+ geniuses (depending how you measure it) floating around, so maybe they balance out. Then again, perhaps 20% of those geniuses are evil geniuses. In which case that’s 120,000 evil geniuses in the country. That’s a lot.
My colleague James has been extending the threaded comments plugin that I use(d)* on this site. It’s available from http://svn.wp-plugins.org/spectacula-threaded-comments/trunk for those of you with SVN clients, and for download and easy installation from WordPress.org and Spectacu.la within a few days.
If you wish to test it out, feel free to comment here…
It adds a quote button for content (try selecting some text here and see what happens!), an extending comment box, so if you like people to write long comments they’ll find it easier, and a quote button for comments. These features all enhance the WordPress commenting engine and make it easier for your community to engage with you.
A proper release after final testing and updates is due in a few days.
* Still a good plugin that we use extensively – but on this site we designed something custom. Better that way.
I’ve started writing this post in Amsterdam airport…I’m on my way to Arica in Chile where I’ll be (hopefully) burying my father, Chris, who died on the 19th of July. I say hopefully not because this is something I’m looking forward to but because I face a number of legal and monetary issues with the hospital where he died.
So, the backstory….
Chris Coveney in 1986
My father was born in 1944in Liverpool. He had a childhood disrupted by his father’s death while he and his mother were travelling to join him in post-war Frankfurt. At the age of 4 (I believe – this needs checking) it seems that this had a somewhat traumatic effect on his life. Whether it would have worked out any differently if his father hadn’t died so young is hard to know. It seems he never really bonded with his rather quiet and gentle stepfather, John.
John was one of those people that sadly get little praise in life…he didn’t have a rapier wit, good looks or intense charm. His predecessor, it seems, did. But he did do his best to provide a stable and comfortable environment for my father and grandmother (I later lived with them at different times of my life.)
Yet it seems that my father inherited his father’s flaws (a taste for women, good times and risk taking) without some key strengths (a disciplined and intellectually rigorous upgringing in particular) that would have helped my father excel. He was certainly charming, good looking and intelligent.
Family Life
My father, to the best of my knowledge, had three children… myself first, David, in 1969, Miguel two years later, to his first wife Ruth, and Maria in 1981 to his second wife Ann.
It’s fair to say that neither marriage went well. To paraphrase my mother:
He was a drinker with a vicious temper and a long arm. He couldn’t understand the word no.
There are other things I’ve learned recently which I won’t share…but the picture was of a man who couldn’t take his responsibilities seriously and, when confronted, would lash out at anyone around.
The Consequences
I’m going to skip forward now to 1985… by this point my father had been divorced twice and no longer had custody of any of his children. He’d kept me close for years, but even I tired of his temper, his constantly failing relationships and the occassional humiliation of a beating. It’s a curious thing about being smacked around by your father…the physical pain is nothing. It’s the betrayal of trust that hurts and damages you. No parent should resort to violence when faced with the annoyances of raising a child. Nor, of course, should a child ever survey a trashed kitchen following violence between their parents. Ever. I could go into the reasons why violence breaks out in domestic settings, but that subject deserves better than I can give right here.
Since 1971 my father had been working his summers as a tour guide in Oostende, Belgium. This suited him fine…a steady stream of giddy girls on holiday, few responsibilities, and plenty of nights out left him, it seems, relatively contented.
South America
By this point my father, always a keen lover of all things Spanish, had started to spend his winters in South America where he could travel around enjoying himself whilst maximising the money he earned in his Belgian summers.
This was actually a fairly calm period… I lived with my grandmother and rarely saw him. Generally I did enjoy his company, but there was always a nervousness over when he might kick off but, in general, he seemed to have mellowed.
Unfortunately, in 1987, everything changed again. I was living with my grandmother and had done reasonably well in my A levels. I’d gained a job at ICI on a trainee developer program. For me, at least the future looked good. However, like all good things in my life there always seemed to be trouble waiting for me.
Loss
Just a couple of weeks into my new job, my grandmother was diagnosed with lung cancer. Her decline hadn’t been pleasant to experience and before she was diagnosed she’d been struggling with shoulder pain that left her crying until the doctor could come and give her a shot of painkillers. Eventually it became too much for both of us. She was booked into hospital in a few weeks time… but that was too far away. I learned then a painful but valuable lesson.
The doctor could do nothing to have her admitted more quickly. I visited the hospital. No, they could do nothing either…it was a non urgent case of painful arthritis. Yet it was all too much to bear…I was in tears when a male nurse took me to one side and explained something…
They’re letting you look after her. She’s dependent on you. You want to know how to get her into hospital quickly? Refuse. Just tell the doctor you’ve had too much and you’re moving out.
Basically, I was going to have to play poker with my granny. But I went straight from the hospital to the doctor’s surgery and insisted I saw him. Three hours later, an ambulance arrived.
The next day they discovered the pain was caused by secondary metastasis (I think that’s the correct term, I’m writing this on a plane). She had advanced lung cancer that had spread through her body. She had less than a week left.
There was a dull, hollow ache inside me. I wasn’t close to my mother since I’d not lived with her for 14 years and besides, her and her new family had moved to Spain two years earlier – something that at the time had left me less than impressed.
I had my friends, Linda and Peter especially who were wonderfully understanding. And that weekend, my father’s summer job finished and he was able to arrive.
So he signed over everything. It was down to me to deal with the estate. There wasn’t much there, to be honest, and a lot of debt.
My father had his tickets for South America booked a long time earlier…in this time air travel was still relatively expensive and inflexible. I later learned that airlines usually aren’t so bad in cases of bereavement. I think he could have changed flights.
But he didn’t and just a few days later he was gone. Two days after that I buried my grandmother.
What’s crazy is that in all this I even managed to redecorate the lounge in time for the funeral, thanks to my friend Linda. It was important that in death everyone saw the best in my grandmother…
Losing Trust in Everyone
Soon after the vultures were circling…I couldn’t take over the mortgage or I’d have to pay off all debts, and I couldn’t get a new mortgage at such a young age and such little credit history…especially on a shared ownership house like this.
You see, what happens with a debt secured on property is that you hand over all rights to the lender. If you fail to keep up repayments the lender can take possession. The lender will then sell it. If a profit happens to be made then that’s great for the lender. They keep the money.
In fact, some even have a policy of quick repossessions during a buoyant market.
In retrospect I believe I was badly advised. But lacking support just trying to hold down a job and simply live right was enough to occupy me. When I was evicted from the house I lost my faith in society, my parents (sorry Mum…but you later won it back, so that’s ok, trust me) and everyone except my friends.
The council couldn’t help – I was told a single male would be at the bottom of the waiting list for social housing.
I didn’t want my fathers’s help and, by the dubious measure of taking out a loan to pay the deposit on a tiny studio flat, I had a place to live. While this was happening my father was made redundant from his summer job and announced he was going to stay in South America.
Having discovered financial wizardry I even managed to buy myself a niceish car I couldn’t afford on credit. Life had been hard, but now, I felt, it was improving.
Two months later I received a letter from my father asking for help – he said he’d been robbed of all his money and needed the money I owed him (I think he believed there was money in his mother’s estate) and could I send £1500 as soon as possible.
I had about £30 in the bank.
The next six months were hell as I sent over dribs and drabs in response to his increasingly strident letters, but I remember one triumphant moment. I’d been caught at work calling the Chilean embassy. I was in trouble until the reasons were explained to a senior manager. He put me in touch with the right people and before I knew it the Foreign Office offered a loan to help repatriate my father.
I’d done it. He was going to be ok. I’d sent as much as possible to him, borrowing money, trying to sell what I could legitimately sell… but it amounted to no more than around £600 over the months.
I went out and bought a £15 phone card to give the good news.
Son… I thought you had a good job? I need the money why don’t you have any?!
I told him it was no problem… I could get him home! I explained the loan.
What use is that? I’d be in the same situation, but in England…it’s much cheaper to live here
He was angry. And I remembered all those times he’d been angry before. The card ran out cutting him off mid-sentence. It was over. I was never going to speak to him again. I realised he hadn’t been asking me for help…he’d been asking me for money, that’s all.
Since then I stopped responding to his letters. I’d been struggling with the flat so I sold up and moved into a room. We lost contact.
Update 29-08-2010: I was reading through his letters yesterday and realised that I’d found the solution of a loan for repatriation earlier than I thought I had. I’d simply brought it up again during that last phone call and he essentially repeated what I’d said. I also think I’d continued to send him money for a while, but remained mute.
In 2001 I managed to find out that he’d renewed his passport in Quito in 1997, but that was all I had. In 2006 I was invited to a wedding in Lima, Peru, and took that as an opportunity to try and find him. I got close…searching the town of Arica in the far north of Chile. But if he saw the notices he didn’t respond. If he’d even searched Google he’d have found me for years and years. I even put a page up about him which was good enough for my estranged sister to find me with this year. In the end I reached the conclusion that he no longer wanted to find me.
And then the knock on the door in the early morning. I don’t know why the police do it that way. The officer was perfect…knew exactly how to break the news. Quickly, succintly, followed by the detail. He’d died on the 19th of July in a hospital in Arica, Chile.
I’m going to wrap this up now…it’s an awfully long piece to type entirely by phone and my fingers are aching. Hopefully I’ll be able to post it up on arrival to Lima. More soon… my plan is to document this trip, my feelings and my need to find reconciliation wherever possible. Sharing helps.
Just a few quick shots from last night. I’d arrived late for the first afternoon thanks to a failed gearbox mount (thanks for that, VW Warrington) but at least did get there thanks to a courtesy car (also thanks, VW Warrington!) that got me here just a couple of hours late…
Anyway, to the pics. I’ll add more later, I’m sure.
Staybridge Suites – economical luxury…
Stuart Robarts (@FACTLiverpool) and Don McAllister (@donmcallister)
I’d started to notice that my site could often be slow to load – other sites on the same server weren’t suffering the same way, so I wanted to document a simple way in which one can identify performance issues on the site. This is one of them.
Well, it took me a while to get back to the issue (babies and a booming business don’t help!) it’s continued to get worse and worse, until a recent change has improved things… but only marginally, as shown by the Pingdom chart below:
Not looking good…
This is dreadful, really – daily average of 4,000ms responses just aren’t acceptable where, two years ago, I was getting 800ms.
So, now the process starts. The recent small improvement came after installing our Spectacu.la Advanced Search Plugin, which runs a regular database optimisation to help keep things nippy, but it was still dreadful.
Is it Pluginitis?
My first suspicion is always that of plugins (and sometimes themes, if they’re complex). In our office we have a term called ‘pluginitis’ which refers to the problem of a site having too many plugins installed, many of which are poorly written. I hate to say it, but when clients call to ask for a plugin to be installed that we’ve never tested we go through it and, 90% of the time, discover serious performance or security flaws that will cause long-term issues.
And this site here is old – I’ve been running a WP install for four and a half years with nothing more than upgrades and, like an old PC that’s been upgraded too many times, that causes issues with old drivers and code. Same can apply to WordPress. So let’s see what we can do to improve things.
First stage is to disable as many plugins as possible so as to isolate the issue. I’m using a division based approach – ie, I’m going to disable half of my plugins to see what happens. If I get full performance back, then the problem lies in that half. I can then reactivate half the plugins and see what happens. If the performance is still good, the problem is in the other half. I think you can see where I’m going here.
I’m also going to go for plugins that aren’t written by us. Not because I’m biased (ok, maybe a little) but because I know all of ours are carefully tested for performance – many are run on major sites such as the Telegraphs blogs site. Speed is of the essence.
I’m also going to skip plugins like Akismet, because anything that’s essentially ‘core’ is usually going to be reasonably performant – at least on a small site like this one.
It’s worth noting that I could easily delve into SQL statements and code efficiency – but that’s only interesting to developers – if you’re simply a WordPress user, performance is interesting but what you can do to find problems is somewhat more limiting.
Plugins being disabled:
Add to feed – a simple plugin, but sometimes simple plugins miss simple tricks.
Headspace2 – I have my suspicions about this plugin as it’s massive. Could be fine, may not be. Only way definite way to know – measure it.
Search Meter – a nice plugin to see what people are searching for, but is it adding load somewhere?
Social Bookmarks – it shouldn’t cause issues, but you can never be sure.
wp-typography – I love what it does for the typography on the site, but it’s also running a lot of javascript.
First results:
I do use YSlow to test the site, but one of the problems is that it’s hard to get a large enough series of data to be statistically relevant. It’s good for seeing the extra load (and why I knew the amount of javascript was an issue) but for longer term analysis it’s flawed.
So, we go back to Pingdom and look at the one day chart. As I type this it’s now an hour since disabling the plugins above – so let’s see what’s happened:
A dramatic improvement!
As you can see, in this afternoon alone there’s been a dramatic improvement – from around 2500ms per visit to 1230ms per visit. In one single step I’ve halved the load time of the page.
What we don’t know so far is whether that’s because the page got smaller to load or whether it’s down to a reduction in database load – but that’s really for another article. What this is all about is trying to document how I’m improving the responsiveness of the site in a way which relatively non-technical folk can follow.
What I’ll do in the next feature is to turn off some more plugins to measure the impact they had. I’ll also be interested to see if the spikeyness of the response times has varied much – are they caused by simple server load, or is there something else at play?
I will then start to switch plugins on again in a structured way in order to measure which was causing the heaviest loads on the site.
There’s enough in the video to convince anybody, but I’ve decided to add my own few thoughts.
As long as the military culture exists that allows this to happen, then the West can never consider themselves superior in any sense, nor can we ever expect peace in the Middle East or the cessation of Islamic terrorism. What happened was murder, pure and simple. The airmen acted as judges, jury and executioners.
Just after the start…
I felt sick. You probably will too. I know that this post won’t reach the eyes of anyone in a significant position of power, but if I show it to you, and you show it to some more people, then we can be a tiny part of what will put pressure on the US military authorities to properly investigate this video and explain fully what happened.
It would appear that, perhaps through a state of heightened tension and military paranoia, that any grouping of individuals in Baghdad could become targets. With nobody taking real care to check what was actually happening the killing of innocents, including two children, was inevitable.
But what really really made me angry was the way the airmen talked like teenagers playing a video-game. They described the scene as ‘nice.’ They were please with their blasting apart of a van that had been trying to help rescue the wounded. Their descriptions of the people they were watching didn’t for one moment suggest they were dealing with people or individuals. People with children, parents, lovers, dreams and ambitions.
There are, I’m sure, a great many in the military who’ll be appalled by this video. Let’s hope they can encourage Thinking amongst those who appear to have detached themselves from any sense of empathy.
