After clicking through 3 pages of introductory text (which nobody will ever read) the first step is to log in to the Government Gateway thing with its easily memorable 12-digit user ID. Fortunately I do my self assessment online so I already have an account because just getting a gateway login is a challenge in itself. Nevertheless I was quite impressed that they have a unified login for all government services. Or do they?

Once signed in, and after clicking through a few more screens of text, you have to enrol in the Motoring section which involves filling out all your personal details again in an extra long form which asks for increasingly irrelevant details such as UK passport number. After over ten minutes of form-filling, the last step it told me that my details didn’t match up and made me go back and check everything.

It turned out I had omitted my middle name from the form. OK, so I’ve just provided all thiss personal information including addresses, 16-character driver number, 100character photocard reference number and 12-digit counterpart license reference number and they’re failing the form because the middle names don’t match? Really? After stepping through the entire form a third time because the confirmation page incorrectly formatted my postcode with an extra “0″ (incorrect use of sprintf()?), I finally completed the form.

The final step, they informed, was to print out a form, date and sign it, and post it, my photocard driving license and my counterpart license to the DVLA within 21 days.

Now pause for a moment of reflection and compare this to the pre-online experience of updating your driving license address.

Step 1: write your new address in the space provided at the bottom of your counterpart driving license.

Step 2: post this and the photocard license to the DVLA.

Step 3: oh, wait, that’s it. There is no step 3.

I intend to resume regular podcasts but to spend less time on each. Seeking out audio samples to intersperse tracks takes me ages as does sequencing and beat matching. What I mostly want is to create a record of all the tracks that have caught my attention recently so I’m afraid simple cross fades will have to do.

Download Mixtape vol. 11 – “A Few Old Tunes” and/or subscribe in iTunes.

Tracklist:

1. Hot 8 Brass Band – It’s Real
2. The Very Best – Kamphopo
3. The Bees – No Atmosphere
4. Xploding Plastix – Treat Me Mean, I Need the Reputation
5. Venetian Snares – Szerencsétlen
6. Leila – Feeling
7. Portishead – Machine Gun
8. Alhaji K. Frimpong – Kyenkyen Bi Adi Mawu
9. Tall Pony – I’m Your Boyfriend Now
10. The Doors – The End

The only way I could decipher this mess was to draw a kind of bar chart and fill in the numbers. Once I finished I realised that I had inadvertently created a hugely more readable representation of the information contained in the payslip. So here’s a copy of the original payslip and my effort at an improved version.

Click each image to expand and do spend a few minutes trying to make sense of them.

This improved version displays the same information condensed into one page while clearly showing the relationship between the figures.

Now bear in mind that I’m not an accountant, nor am I an information designer. I’m not even a graphic designer. But I am someone who receives payslips and wants to understand them. And from that point of view I hope you’ll agree it’s a vast improvement.

The principles of usability apply to more than websites & software. Just about everything can benefit form a bit of sensible design.

Currently it requires the CSV file to be uploaded online somewhere. If there’s demand I can change it to allow uploading of a file or just pasting in the data.

Convert CSV to JSON.

The bot is updated from a PHP script on this sevrer which is run on a cron job every 20 minutes. Each time it runs this is what happens:

1. It starts by fetching a JSON feed of the current “trending topics” as determined by Twitter. How these topics are calculated isn’t known to me but they’re the same 10 topics that are shown on the Twitter search page and in the right column of the Twitter home page when you’re logged in.
2. It throws away all but the top three terms that are not hashtags.
3. It checks the local database to see if it has already tweeted the topic in the past 8 days. If it has then it ignores this term. If it hasn’t then it adds it to the database and continues.
4. It then starts contructing the text of the tweet starting with the term itself and a link to the Twitter search results for that term.
5. It fires off a request to the Google Web Search API using cURL to fake the referer and checks the results:
   • If one of the top 5 results is a Wikipedia entry then link to it.
   • If one of the top 5 results is a Twitter profile then add a link to that user.
6. Add a link to the Google search results page for the term.
7. Finally send the tweet to Twitter, again using cURL.

I hope that’s been vaguely intersting.

For the future I’d like to add a check for current news items using Google news and also add a filter to remove trends which are parts of a popular blog title such as stuff from TechCrunch and Smashing which often end up on the trending topics.

As an aside I find it quite amusing to see all the people sending topic ’suggestions’ to @trendingtopics. It doesn’t work like that people, sorry!

The first part is the simplest. Download two-finger-scroll which is a simple little free program to enable Mac-style two finger scrolling on Windows. No installation necessary, just put the TwoFingerScroll.exe file somewhere out of the way, run it and enjoy two finger scrolling! You’ll probably want to go to its settings page (right click on the hand icon next to the clock) and check “Start with Windows”. While you’re there, check out the bonus features such as middle button emulation using two-finger tap. The “one + one finger” options were a bit obscure to me. Turns out it means “hold one finger on the trackpad and tap with another” to simulate, for example, a right click. Nice idea but I couldn’t get it to work reliably.

The next part is a bit more complicated and doesn’t pay off as much so you may not want to bother. It turns out the basic Synaptics drivers include a whole load of multitouch features that have, for some reason, been disabled. Some enterprising souls have hacked the drivers to re-enable these features. Basically you need to download the hacked drivers, uninstall your current drivers, restart, install the new drivers and restart. This enables some cool features like “Swipe two fingers left to go Back” or “Swipe three fingers down to minimize the current window” etc.

Unfortunately the Synaptics drivers don’t support two finger scrolling and the TwoFingerScroll program seems to override the two finger gestures. I’m still playing around with the settings to see which I like most.

I was playing with a friend’s MacBook a few weeks ago marvelling and the gestures like 4 finger swipe down for Exposé. Little did I know my laptop could do the same!

Download Mixtape vol. 10 – “Christopher Hogwood” Edition and/or subscribe in iTunes.

Tracklist:

1. Röyksopp – The Girl and the Robot
2. Kleerup – The Tower of Trelick
3. Little Boots – Stuck on Repeat
4. Lykke Li – Little Bit
5. The Whitest Boy Alive – Courage
6. Phoenix - Lisztomania
7. Lil’ Wayne – A Milli
8. Knifehandchop – Hooked on Ebonics
9. Cage the Elephant - Ain’t no Rest for the Wicked
10. Born Ruffians – I Need a Life
11. Ratatat – Falcon Jab
12. Annie – I Know UR Girlfriend Hates Me

The Röyksopp track is absolutely stunning. As a friend of mine said “it teeters on the edge of mega cheese but falls off on the side of uber cool.” I couldn’t agree more.

Kleerup and Ratatat, I discovered thanks to a blog post at Ohh! Crapp. I saw Little Boots’ cover of Hot Chip earlier this year on YouTube and was blown away but then forgot all about her until I heard this smashing little number. Apprently she’s made it big. Well done.

Lykke Li sings on the new Röyksopp album but I’d heard this track on the excellent OLO Radio podcast last year. Very sweet. Alongside Röyksopp, I’ve also been listening to the new Phoenix and Whitest Boy Alive albums on repeat all last week. Highly recommended. The Whitest Boy Alive is Erlend Øye and friends creating devastatingly effective minimal pop and Phoenix have come up with their best album to date, in my opinion.

Lil’ Wayne, what can I say? I do hope he gets well soon. I don’t know anything about Knifehandchop. I don’t know where I heard the track or where I got it from. It will probably get on my nerves soon but for now it makes me smile.

A very good friend introduced me to Cage the Elephant. I don’t much like the rest of their stuff but this track is Wicked. The first draft of this mix had the Four Tet remix of Born Ruffians on it which is a stunningly beautiful track that I picked up off the Resident Advisor podcast. However it didn’t quite fit with the mood (what mood?!) so I switched it for the original. I kinda like it but probably because it reminds me of the remix.

I don’t know where the Annie track came from. It the kind of pop I’d normally stay well away from, but Annie’s cool cos she did a DJ Kicks.

Hope you enjoy it.

Dear Meg Hillier, 

I am concerned by the great potential for misuse presented by the anti-terrorism legislation introduced in recent years. It is an issue that has worried me for some time but I have been moved to write to you now after hearing the topic raised in parliament today.

The latest cause for concern is the use of the Counter Terrorism Act 2008 in restricting the public’s freedom to take photographs featuring police constables. The act contains the clause “[photographs] of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism” and yet, after barely a month of the law being in force, there are already reports of abuse. One such report involves an elderly man being intimidated into deleting an image in which a police car was visible parked on double-yellow lines.

But the larger issue is the multitude of wide-reaching powers being granted to the police force under the banner of anti-terrorism in what I believe to be a climate of fear and unwarranted hysteria. One such power is the much publicised 28 day detention without charge but there are many others of equally questionable validity. Not only am I vehemently opposed to any extension of the 28 day period but I believe that 28 days is already too long and must be reduced. We are assured that these laws are necessary for our safety and will only be used against extremists, yet time and again we see the same laws being abused and misused.

During the Heathrow Climate Camp in August 2007, for example, it was widely reported in the media that police had been briefed to use laws introduced under the Terrorism Act 2006 against the protesters. The attempts to justify this by claiming that the assembled environmentalists presented a terrorist threat were laughable.

It is not possible to introduce legislation to be “used only against terrorists”. The police, by definition, do not know if a suspect is a terrorist at the time he or she is detained, or else an extended detention period would not be required. So who gets to decide when counter terrorism laws are applicable? It’s only a small leap of the imagination from here to an Orwellian reality in which losing your freedom is just one wrong thought away.

I am sympathetic to the police’s cause and I understand that investigators want more time in order to do their work to the best of their abilities. But I challenge you to show me any professional who does not believe they could do a better job if only they were given more time in which to do it.

While the events of 7th July 2005 were undeniably tragic for the friends & relatives of those who lost their lives, it is worth keeping a sense of perspective. In the UK, more people are killed in traffic accidents every week than have died in terrorist related incidents in the past 10 years. If we, as a society, are not willing to give up the convenience that cars afford us, then how can we justify giving up our human right to freedom?

Yours sincerely,

Tamlyn Rhodes.

This is probably the political issue I feel strongest about right now. These laws scare me far more than the terrorism they are meant to protect me from. And yet i feel pretty powerless to do anything about it.

For now, writing to my MP will have to do.

My first attempt was to build a page with an <iframe> in which to show the web content a la StumbleUpon. Trouble is, while you can set the URL of an iframe via JavaScript, you can’t read it when it’s on a different domain for security reasons. That means when a user navigates to a different page within the iframe, the semantic webby thing won’t know what information to display.

So here are some half-baked ideas. Any further cooking tips much appreciated.

• Proxy all page views through a script on the same server as the semantic webby thing. This means all pages are on the same domain so JavaScript can see the iframe URL. But that means rewriting all the URLs in the page on-the-fly which is hard and it will almost certainly break any Ajaxy stuff since we’re effectively changing the domain of the page.
• Create a browser plugin. Only really an option for Firefox.
• Use AIR, which, as I understand it, has a version of WebKit built in. This also requires software installation and effectively means building a new browser interface in AIR.
• Flash/Silverlight? Is it possible to embed a web page in a Flash or Silverlight file and access the page’s URL?

Anything else I haven’t thought of?

Please help!

Update: Thanks to @futureshape for suggesting Conduit which is a cross-browser drag & drop toolbar building platform. I looked into it and it would probably make IE development a bunch easier. However it turned out the project spec could be changed so that I can build the whole thing as a bookmarklet. Hooray for maleable specifications!

At least, this is part of California at a particularly wet time of year. I’m told that for most of the year the creek dries up, the grass dies back and there’s dust everywhere. But right now, where I’m staying in Dry Creek about 10 miles north of Santa Rosa, it’s really beautiful.

For most of February I was in Whistler with my friend Clare, staying with some other friends who are working out there. We had some good riding & skiing and beautiful weather but not much snow. Then two days before we were planning to leave it started to snow. And it’s didn’t stop. So we stayed on in Whistler a couple more days to take advantage of it.

Then Clare and I took the Greyhound down to Seattle for the weekend. Another friend of ours had put us in touch with a girl he met in Argentina who lived in Seattle. It turned out she was away in Honduras for a year but she put us in touch with a friend of hers who also lived in Seattle. It turned out *she* was away for the weekend in California but she recommended some bars & clubs to check out. We ended up going to a night called "Tits & Brass". The tits were average but the brass was good fun. I was impressed to find that a friend of an acquaintance of a friend had a similar taste in venues to us! There was a good crowd there too though rather more whooping and shouting than one would expect from a British crowd.

Seattle is full of crazy people. Kinda crazy in a good way though. We both took an immediate liking to it. Did a lot of random walking about. Accidentally walked past Starbucks #1 without realising and when we went back to get a coffee there it was shut. Boeing, Microsoft and UPS all started in Seattle too. Also did a little tourist tour where they take you, literally, underneath the streets. In the early days of Seattle there used to be a bad drainage problem in the low area by the sea. Then in the 1870s there was a big fire that burned down most of the city. So when they rebuilt it they built out of brick rather than wood and also raised the streets up to fix the drainage. But while they were raising the streets, the buildings were already going up so they had shops at old ground level which were covered over by the pavement (repeat after me: "sidewalk") when they raised the streets. The 1st floors of the buildings became the new ground floor and the old ground floor became a basement and was mainly abandoned. So anyway this tour took you round the empty spaces that were left underneath the streets and hadn’t been touched for over a century. Quite good.

Last Monday, Clare went home and I got a lift down to California with someone who had advertised in the ride share section on Craigslist. Hitch-hiking is kinda illegal in a lot of states here but the ride share concept seems to be quite popular. It was a girl called Katie who, it turned out, had been up in Seattle breaking up with her boyfriend. She was keeping it together very well until the driver-side windscreen wiper fell off while we were driving over the mountains on the motorway in the dark and the pouring rain. We had half an hour or so of panic and stress while we discovered that her mum had cancelled the AAA cover and no mechanic would come out to help us. Then, with the help of a penny and a quarter we managed to wedge the wiper back on and set off again. Andrew, a friend from school who’s managing a small farm out here, came out to meet me in Williams and drove me back over the mountain in his massive truck (small by local standards).

This past week he’s been showing me around. It’s an everyone-knows-everyone, no-need-to-lock-your-car kind of place and I’m slowly learning the Californian three-fingered wave (if you want to try it at home, stick out your thumb, index and middle fingers, spread them apart and point the palm of your hand towards the person at whom you are waving). I helped a bit in the garden on Friday but I’m just not used to physical labour any more. I’m still aching a bit today. Andrew’s housemate works in the cellar at the winery down the road so I’ve been getting a few lessons in wine too.

This weekend we drove down to San Francisco. Had a great time wandering around the city and admiring the sights. Went a blues club on Saturday night and admired the sounds. And lots of bars and restaurants to admire the tastes. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the good choice of beers available in most bars here. I had this idea that all of America just drank Coors and Budweiser but I’m glad that’s not so.

Tomorrow I’m hiring a car and driving out to Yosemite. The adventure continues.