Tim Ireland’s new project is more necessary than ever. It’s not quite achieved the same degree of punch and professionalism that the daddy of tab-bashing blogs, BildBlog offers readers of Germany’s biggest newspaper, but give them time. (This also bothers me. When I started this blog there were one million blogs, of which 50,000 updated…
Read More Blinded By The SunYou rock. It’s interesting that blockade-running is a lasting technique of protest; Joseph Conrad did a spot on behalf of the Spanish Carlists, Erskine Childers for the IRA (although he thought he was doing it for the other side), and then, there was the saga off Bilbao in the Spanish Civil War. It’s always worth…
Read More Outside the three mile limit in ’65…So I’m trying to make a little Google Map overlay, that will reload data from a remote server every time the page it contains loads. Obviously, I read the documentation, look at examples, sign up for a Google API key. But it’s not working, and I’m getting error messages that the API key is “for…
Read More Google Maps API IssueI’m about to propose something to make Daniel Davies cry. Specifically, it’s a solution to a problem we currently deal with by a cash transfer through the tax and benefit system. But I think I’ve made a good case that trying to deal with high energy prices by paying the poor to burn more energy…
Read More The Harrowell Plan (Or, No Christmas Card from Dsquared)So, the Tories are currently making hay on the economy, while the black clouds are overhead. Unfortunately it’s all drivel, and specifically, it’s drivel because the current economic crisis is entirely the result of the Tory economic settlement. The promise of infinite free money from property was the core Thatcherite proposition, and its costs (specifically,…
Read More The grass is several shades of blue; every MP trips over you…Recently, our dear duckspeaker Philip Hammond MP had his local talking points cache refreshed. He’s now constantly saying that the Government is causing “uncertainty” in the housing market because they haven’t decided whether or not to cut stamp duty, and that this is a problem. Both statements are of course completely vacuous at best, and…
Read More Hammond’s Sauce Works BandSo, walking back from dinner, what did I catch lurking in a side street? Yes, but yes, one of these… There it waited, with a 4-way CCTV installation lunging out the roof like a Blairite erection…I took photographs, and the driver suddenly reversed. But he or she didn’t go. So I called the phone number…
Read More Birthday PresentSo, what if there was an airline that uses the Zimbabwean registry in order to get around most people’s idea of aviation safety, is almost certainly in cahoots with the Zimbabwean government, and was involved not just with running guns into the DRC in the late 90s but also with actual combat air missions, dropping…
Read More Avient, AgainView Larger Map The ViktorFeed is now operational! The map’s permanent link is here (aren’t Google URLs snappy?); the raw data is available as an RSS 2.0 feed with Simple GeoRSS tags here, at least until I decide on a permanent URL. It is updated every 5 minutes. Huge thanks to all at MySociety.
Read More Aaaand….we’re operationalHere is the presentation I delivered at OpenTech 2008: | View | Upload your own I’d publish the text, but I didn’t prepare a text:-) Anyway, the ViktorFeed is a development of basic python scripts I’ve been using for some time to collect data on certain aircraft movements through Sharjah and Dubai Airports. Both of…
Read More The ViktorFeed: Documentation