Data Circle

Mapumental is a cool new service brought to you by the brainboxes at mySociety with some help from 4ip. Basically it allows you to see exactly where in the country you can afford to live (based on “average” house prices) and still commute to a given place of work.

Unfortunately you need an invite to get access to the interactive site, so you’ll have to make do with the teaser video for now. However, I can confirm that the system is one of the coolest and potentially most useful sites I’ve seen in ages. Hopefully there will be some improvements to come, some of the things I’d like to see include:

1. Ability to set a start time which isn’t 9:00am, for those of us who have to be in work earlier, work shifts or are students with lectures at varying times each day.
2. Rent data as well as house prices, as the latter doesn’t help much if you can’t afford to buy or the banks won’t give you the credit you need. Not entirely sure how this would work as house prices are kept at the Land Registry but there is no equivalent for rents.

Does such a thing exist, or am I still dreaming? Firefox is currently eating up 15% of my CPU and 20% of my RAM according to the top command, and I only have ten tabs open. I have just tried Dillo, but it doesn’t seem to support floating objects in CSS, rendering almost every 2 column stylesheet layout—such as the one I use on most of my hand-crafted sites—useless.

Perhaps once I have finished my thesis I will dedicate some time to hunting down memory leaks/usage in Firefox, or just write my own standards-enforcing browser from scratch…

Every day there are a number of tech stories which I come across that are interesting but I don’t have time to write full commentaries on them all. To get around this, I’ve created a Twitter account where I will ‘tweet’ (i.e. post to the updates page) links to tech stories, with a short headline for each. You can follow the updates on Twitter directly, subscribe to the RSS feed for datacircle or take a look at the sidebar on this site, which displays the last four tweets.

Have you ever typed twitter.co.uk into your browser instead of twitter.com? If so, you may have been surprised to find yourself on a completely different site, rather than being transparently redirected to the one you thought you were going to. The reason for this is that the domain is not owned by the Twitter company, but an individual named Steve Crawford, who is currently inundated by emails from the site as people enter something@twitter.co.uk as their email address and then start being ‘followed’ by other users—causing Twitter to send a new email each time.

This is partly Twitter’s fault, as they do not make any attempt to verify the email address you supply when registering. Not only does this hammer the wrong user/mail server with emails if an incorrect address is provided, but it also means that the real account owner cannot reset their password either. On the other hand, I have slightly less sympathy for Steve as he must have switched on a catchall address if he is actually receiving all these emails, which is asking for trouble under any circumstances from spammers who email all common names and words at every domain they can find. Of course, turning off catchall would still hammer his mail server and be rather annoying, but at least the emails would be rejected.

One does wonder why the people behind Twitter didn’t register the name with other extensions—the UK in particular is a big online market and .co.uk is probably one of the most common country domains, possibly because it doesn’t impose any residential restrictions on registrants. However, they haven’t figured out how to make money from the site yet, and openly admit to holding off implementing such features, so I don’t expect them to be clued-up on the topic of registering domain names under different suffixes.

Further information

• Twitter.co.uk – the tale of a forgotten domain

I have been using the latest version of Ubuntu for a couple of weeks now, and so far it is proving to be a fairly robust and reliable system—certainly good enough for me to do my job, write development code and work on my thesis on a daily basis.

The only problems I have encountered so far are:

• Corrupt tracker index problem – I can’t believe this made it into the final release as it seems to have affected so many people it should have picked up in testing. There is a proposed solution and a workaround, but unfortunately everyone seems to be using the latter (can’t blame them – having a working machine is generally more important than testing bugs for most people). If I get a bit of time over the weekend I might install a separate instance under VMWare and see if I can do some testing.
• Freeciv doesn’t have any sound, unless you install the freeciv-sound package—and even then you’ll be lucky to get music. I don’t think this is a Jaunty-specific problem though.
• Although the function buttons on my laptop still work, I no longer get any visual feedback when using them—before upgrading when I altered the volume a bar would appear on screen showing me the current setting. This isn’t a major problem as the functionality still works, but having no visual feedback is a bit annoying.

Other than those issues though—some of which I hope to look into and file bugs for—everything seems to be running fine. Now if only I could get Alien Crossfire to play under Wine…

There is currently a petition on the Number 10 website asking the Prime Minister to save Bletchley Park. For anyone who hasn’t heard of Bletchley, the Wikipedia article on the subject has some good starting information—basically this was the place where some of the defining events of the Second World War took place, including the cracking of the ciphers generated by the Engima machine. I’ve yet to make it to Bletchley Park myself, so I would be extremely disappointed to see it go due to a lack of funding.

If you want to take more direct action, the Bletchley Park Trust welcomes donations and has a Friends of Bletchley Park scheme which you can join.

N.B. You can only sign the petition if you are British citizen or resident, though this includes expats and people living in British Overseas Territories or Crown Dependencies.

A slightly quieter story which has been doing the rounds this week is the news that Yahoo has disabled new registrations for GeoCities accounts and announced that the service will be shut down later this year.

I personally have fond memories of GeoCities, when I first started on the Web most of the sites I visited regularly had a geocities.com address—though this was before the company was acquired by Yahoo. GeoCities was one of the first places where you could get free hosting without too much hassle, and it certainly stayed around longer than most. Most of all I will remember the small ‘g’ logo which followed you as you scrolled down the screen, and the dozens of forum posts across the Web asking how to achieve the same effect on other sites.

I suspect Yahoo’s reason for killing off Geocities is simple: the service costs money to run and doesn’t bring in much revenue—I’d be very surprised if it breaks even. Yahoo desperately needs to cut costs and turn back into a profitable company, and Geocities is a service which can quickly and easily be jettisoned to help achieve this goal. Yahoo would of course like you to upgrade to their paid web hosting service, but at $9.95/month you can find a much better deal elsewhere.

Of course, if Yahoo had any sense they would have let Microsoft buy them when a good offer was on the table, instead of trundling along as an independent company trying to cut costs in a desperate attempt to please aggrieved shareholders, who have seen the value of their holdings plummet.

Further Information

• GeoCities will close later this year (Yahoo Help)
• RIP Geocities – Yahoo kills off ‘your home on the web’ (Guardian Unlimited)
• Yahoo pulls the plug on GeoCities (BBC News)
• GeoCities demolished (The Register)

The guys at Akismet have an interesting article about how eliminating spam is good SEO. I’m not so sure about Google trying not to penalise sites with spam comments—I think Google are tougher than they make themselves out to be—but the rest of the article is worth a read.

On the subject of Akismet, it has stopped over 123,000 spam comments from reaching my blog, and currently blocks around 100/day on average. That’s quite impressive for a service which I pay nothing for and don’t have to maintain, other than the occasional plugin upgrade.

As most people in the IT industry have probably heard by now, Oracle is going to buy Sun. As with most big business transactions, the official purchase hasn’t taken place yet, but with a definite offer agreed upon it is unlikely to unravel before the deal closes in the summer.

The acquisition throws up all sorts of questions, but the one that seems to be raging at the moment is “what will happen to MySQL?” In my mind, there are several possibilities:

1. Business as usual: MySQL continues as part of Oracle, just as it has been part of Sun. Oracle gains in several ways, but principally by having another outlet to offer support contracts. The other major benefit to Oracle is being able to offer its database software as a natural upgrade path for businesses who feel that they have outgrown MySQL, in the same was that SQL Server is seen as an upgrade from Microsoft Access. Oracle could also use MySQL as a recruitment tool, in that external developers who commit regularly to the base source code could be offered jobs as Oracle developers.
2. MySQL is sold or spun-off into a separate company: This would enable Oracle to recoup some of the money it paid for Sun, and avoid having two products which could potentially compete with each other. On the other hand, having MySQL owned by another company could be saving up a dangerous competitor for the future.
3. Kill off MySQL: It wouldn’t be too difficult for Oracle to try and kill off MySQL by redeploying all the existing paid developers and letting the project languish with no official support or development. However, given that Oracle has paid a substantial amount of money for Sun, I think an attempt to kill off MySQL – as opposed to selling it – is unlikely to happen. Furthermore, the core of MySQL is open source, so there could always be a fork, albeit not under the MySQL name, if Oracle did attempt to quietly brush it under the carpet.

Sun’s other big property, Java, on the other hand will probably be in safe hands with Oracle, as it already relies heavily on the technology for some of its middleware products. There’s also Solaris, and with it OpenSolaris, which may or may not go anywhere.

Ironically, at the time of writing there is still a huge image on the MySQL home page (number 5 on the list of images) telling users to “get off proprietary databases and save millions now!”, which links to a TCO Savings Calculator showing Oracle costing nearly twenty times as much as MySQL. I wonder how long that will last?

Further Reading

• Will Oracle kill MySQL? Who cares? (The Register)

For those of you who haven’t heard already, the latest version of possibly the most popular Linux distribution, Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty” was released earlier this week.

I’ve been an Ubuntu user for some time now, and it is without a doubt the best distribution for the desktop (I’ve used most of the major ones, so I can say that with some degree of experience). In fact, apart from the occasional problem with printing and wireless, I find that Ubuntu beats XP hands down for Just Working. Even my Vodafone 3g dongle works better in Ubuntu than it does in XP —no software to install and connection is much easier. If it wasn’t for the fact that people occasionally send me documents which don’t look right unless opened in the latest version of Word and I could get to grips with the Gimp as a substitute for Paint Shop Pro, I would probably delete XP altogether.

A word of warning before you rush to update though – make sure you read the release notes as there are a couple of irritating bugs. I was hit by the corrupt tracker index problem when I first logged in and it took me a while to figure out how to fix it. Hopefully the known issues will be fixed in the next few weeks though, so if you’re really paranoid you might want to postpone an upgrade until then.