alex.mullr.net/blog

I don’t know where to start with this.

At least I didn’t give these retards a decent password. Who the hell displays the last three letters to you every time you login? What were they thinking when they designed this?!

At the end of 2008, I posted a map of all the teenage homicides in London by collating BBC News articles. This year, it was significantly easier; my Freedom of Information request was returned by the Metropolitan Police’s Performance Information Bureau yesterday, and here’s the map:

View 2009 Teenage Killings in London in a larger map

The total number is down on last year, from 28 to 15. However, where there was only one girl last year, there are three here. The mean age is between 17 and 18 years old, with the average age for the girls being just under two years less.

This is what both sets of points (1st January 2008 to 31st December 2009) together look like:

And both years in central London:

Thanks to the Met for taking the time to dig out this information for me. The title of the report they provided is “Names, Dates and Location of Homicide Victims aged 13-19 between 1st Jan – 31 Dec 2009”, FOI 2010 01 0002688.

(This appeared on BBC News two hours ago. I suppose I’ll have work to do next year too, then.)

I’m trying to like Google’s latest offering, Buzz. Really, I am.

But when the front page looks like this for me, I can’t keep on coming back day after day. There are 22 shared Google Reader items, which I need to read in Google Reader because the rest of my feeds are there. There are 13 Google Buzz posts, which I can only read in Buzz. And there are 4 tweets, which I need to read on Twitter so that I can keep track of everybody else I follow.

The content unique to Buzz is (comparatively) very small, and comes from an incredibly tiny subset of my “social circle” (God, I hate that term).

During my first week at uni I posted about how I thought it was really cool that York were considering moving email, calendar and collaboration services to the cloud; EC3.

Tim pointed out on my original post today that the proposal was totally rejected, which is confirmed by the university’s own page:

The recommendation was that cloud computing services should not be taken up as a means of delivering central email, calendaring or instant messaging services for the University. The main factors contributing to this recommendation were concerns around issues of data protection, privacy, security and contractual arrangements.

They dumped it? The March 2009 issue of Keynotes (I’m a bit behind on this news, then) leads with:

The Cloud Computing project which has seen extensive work both within and without the Computing Service, and which has attracted much attention, has now concluded. The Project Team, writing on page 6, give an overview of the reasons to reject the use of cloud computing services at this time, a decision which, judging by the results of the extensive user consultation, will attract both disappointment and relief from amongst our users.

I’m disappointed. But not for me, for everybody else. The vast majority (80, 90%) of my friends use the university’s webmail service to get their email. I’ve posted about it before, and why it sucks. Because it looks like this. It’s 2010, and we’re still dealing with webmail that looks like that? Webmail that shows only fifty messages at a time and doesn’t group conversations? As we know, most users leave the default checkboxes, don’t bother to configure things and don’t dive into options. Sure, you can forward your email to a different, personal, even Gmail account. Do most people? Of course not.

It’s a shame. When I first arrived at York, that flyer gave me hope that things might be different here. I’d grown up in a world where my school used an ancient version of Internet Explorer and blocked access to Google’s Gmail & Microsoft’s Hotmail. But it’s fine, because now I can see this university is just like any, and every, other corporation. Ah well.

Addendum

Tom, last year’s (2008–2009) YUSU President, comments via Twitter:

I was part of that consultation last year. Their reasons are compelling – data protection and research privacy being the big two

That’s good to hear, as I trust Tom’s opinion over that of an IT department that I’ve never met.

Lewis Bretts was elected to the Student Union at the University of York last summer, beating Ed Durkin, Dave Sharp and George Papadofragakis. Recently, the student newspaper has been having issues with his promises. At first glance, this seems like student politics and student journalism mixing and turning a little crazy, as normal. Except, then I had a look at his manifesto.

I’ve generally got a pretty good idea of what’s going on on campus (I read YUSU’s blog, watch most of Lewis’ video blogs, etc), though I obviously don’t know what’s going on inside the Union 24/7. So if I’ve got something wrong, like Lewis I’m “human and fallible”, do let me know.

This post shouldn’t just be taken as having a go at Lewis. I read all the sabbatical officers manifestos after his, and they all offer a fairly similar theme. Come elections this year (a few weeks to go now), I think I’ll be looking for the most sensible candidate with the simplest manifesto.

It strikes me as funny that there’s a huge need to get more people involved in campus at the moment, but we can’t really trust what the only people we have a choice in actually say. Hmm.

I can’t be bothered to actually write about the iPad; too many incredibly intelligent people have done that already, you can read what they have to say. If you’re looking for something to listen to, Leo Laporte’s MacBreak Weekly 177 had a load of clever folks.

However, I would love you to read this MacRumors thread:

iPoop… iCry. I was so hoping for something more.
Great just what the world needs, another freaking MP3 player. Go Steve! Where’s the Newton?!
Why oh why would they do this?! It’s so wrong! It’s so stupid!
gee! an mp3 player with a HD! how original! kinda reminds me of a JUKEBOX i once knew..

People got pissed off, angry and felt disappointed when Apple first introduced the iPod in 2001. You know, the iPod? That shitty little thing that currently holds the majority market share of MP3 players?

MacRumors link credit: notes, Andre Torrez

From the OpenStreetMap wiki, shared on Google Reader by Frankie. This is definitely worth a read:

I am currently in Port Au Prince with the Fairfax County Urban Search & Rescue Team (USA-1) out of Fairfax, VA, USA. I wish there was a way that I can express to you properly how important your OSM files were to us. Most of our team members own their own Garmin Rino and 60CSx units on top of the units we already have in the cache. Having these detailed maps on our GPS units is a big deal. Shortly after discovering your work I quickly spread the word and transferred the street level maps onto as many Garmin units as we could before sending the American rescue teams on the streets. The team members are thrilled to have this resource you have created. I wish you could see their faces ‘light up’ when I take their GPS unit and tell them that I’m going to give them street level detail maps.

This is just fantastic news.

YouTube recently announced an HTML5 beta. Here’s the numbers, using Safari 4.0.4 on a 2.2GHz MacBook with 4GB of RAM:

I saw some of the talk about the Express article on the BBC’s Twitter presence, but never bothered to go in search and read it. After seeing Rowan taking it apart, I had to see the original.

Oh. The Express site reports that:

The article you are looking for does not exist. It may have been deleted.

Pffft. They’ve already lost my respect, but they could have perhaps clawed a tiny part back by leaving a proper apology in its place.

So, now I wanted to see the original even more. It’s fantastic; here you go: