New Data Protection Directive and NGOs

The European Commission is proposing a reform to the Data Protection rules. Although they've highlighted a few things in the press release, there is some wording which may be of interest if you work for an NGO that is made up of different organisations in different countries. (It applies to companies too, but as UK charities have to be autonomous, as I understand it, we may have looser links with our partners, yet share data.)

As I Am Not A Layer, I shall just quote rather than make interpretations.

"...legitimate flows of data to third countries will be made easier by reinforcing and simplifying rules on international transfers to countries not covered by an adequacy decision, in particular by streamlining and extending the use of tools such as Binding Corporate Rules, so that they can be used to cover data processors and within groups of companies , thus better reflecting the increasing number of companies involved in data processing activities, especially in cloud computing;" from the communication.

"Member States shall provide that where a controller determines the purposes, conditions and means of the processing of personal data jointly with others, the joint controllers must determine the respective responsibilities for compliance with the provisions adopted pursuant to this Directive, in particular as regards the procedures and mechanisms for exercising the rights of the data subject, by means of an arrangement between them." from the proposal.

I found out today that the US is working on a Privacy Bill of Rights and working together with the EU. Good to see.

Getting a list of postcodes in a parliamentary constituency

Whilst there are a few places where you can look up a single postcode and get which constituency it's in, I didn't find a single place to get a list of postcodes. Here's how I did it:

• I got a list of postcodes and which ward they were in from here. (Also available from the Ordnance Survey.)
• I got a list of wards and their codes from the electoral commission website.
• Fortunately the whole constituency I wanted was in one region, i.e. the letter or two at the beginning. The reason it was fortunate is because the data is in a file per region. So I used Excel to do a vlookup from the postcode list to the ward list and filtered by those which were in the ward list.

Raspberry Pi and the BBC Micro

A sprinkling of snippets:

There is widespread comment about Raspberry Pi and whether it will be the new BBC Micro. This article by Martin Belam "Digital Literacy for all" is fairly sane. He says

Firstly, programming isn’t everything. There will be plenty of kids for whom sending an email and filling in a web form is all they need to know about computers.

The Guardian, his employer, has a campaign about IT in schools.

One thing that annoys me is that some people are saying, like the otherwise brilliant Brendan Dawes, "you have to learn to program to do anything with [it]". The recommended Linux distro (Fedora) allows you to do lots of stuff.

This podcast is an interesting discussion on what IT skills should be taught in school and university.

One of the things they mention is scratch, which one of my kids has come across at school. It's great for learning the fundamentals of programming in a graphical way.

Feel the CPU power

Whilst it's not too hard to gather stats on the performance of older computing devices, in this blog post you won't find any numbers to do with clock rates, or storage sizes. I'm talking about how performance feels.

Mumble-mumble years ago I worked on minicomputers. They were about the size of a two drawer filing cabinet. To anyone under 40 it must sound strange to call such a beast a "mini" computer. However in those days non-mini computers were as big as chest freezers or bigger. PCs were around, but weren't very powerful. They had just grown out of being hobby computers and appearing in offices. However the computer systems we worked on needed proper powerful computers.

Then one day I came across "Linux" on an internal mailing list. Someone had installed a Unix variation on a PC. For me Unix was the OS on the PDP-11 I used at University. I had no idea what it looked like, and in my mental pictures of it it still used tape for main storage. I used Unix on an NCR computer at my year out job at York Health Authority - it had 16 terminal ports and we didn't stretch it too much, apart from the odd complicated SQL query.

My experience of using a PC for "proper" computing stuff was trying to get it to work as an X-windows terminal. It was incredibly slow and I spent more time that I wanted to really trying to get it to not double refresh windows.

So the idea of running a grown up OS like Unix on a little PC was very strange. Time passed and a few years later Linux came to be the thing you ran on older PC hardware as it had better performance than Windows. In that time too Windows started to get grown-up with Windows NT which ran well on a dual P-90 workstation.

Time continued passing and one of my sons got an Android phone and there, as it started up, at the top of the screen were the familiar messages of a Unix-like OS starting up...

This is the first post I'm tagging nostalgia, though I need to tag at least one or two others.

Secondary attention

Our old TV died the other week, giving us psychedelic colour effects as it did so. Now we've got a new one with a VGA input. So I've been thinking about what sort of secondary attention thing I can do with it.

The other day I found a video on YouTube of a fire. I put it on 20 minutes or so before there was a TV programme we all wanted to watch. After it ran for a few seconds the boys asked me to find something else. I said no, the whole point is that your fire doesn't change, it just keeps burning.

I'm thinking of something that's equally boring, but in time, or over a period of time, does something interesting. So when the TV's not showing a programme it sits there in the corner and is worth glancing at. So not a programme, but a program.

The BBC Micro and me

A couple of weeks ago Charles Arthur, the technology correspondent for The Guardian asked on twitter

So who is there out there whose experience with the BBC Micro led them to achieve something notable in the computing business?

I responded as we had a BBC Micro at school which I used in the sixth form. I gave him some details, but he was looking for someone who, if it hadn't been for the BBC Micro, wouldn't have got into computers. I wanted to be a programmer from aged 11 and we had a Spectrum at home, so that didn't apply to me and he didn't use my story in the article that he wrote on it. I paid for my driving lessons with the money I made on games I wrote for the Spectrum (and probably the BBC) and sold to magazines.

In our correspondence he asked

And do you think that kids today have enough access to that sort of programming, or do they need a "new Micro" to inspire them?

I replied:

Kids today have access to a wide range of free programming environments via the internet. If I were to start doing games today I'd be using a physics/gaming engine to do the heavy lifting, and aiming to get my stuff on miniclip or in an app store. Angry Birds is probably the thing that inspires them.

So I'm not sure any new type of hardware is needed. Today the BBC ran this story about a new curriculum for ICT.

Computer games entrepreneur Ian Livingstone, an adviser to Mr Gove, envisages a new curriculum that could have 16-year-olds creating their own apps for smartphones and 18-year-olds able to write their own simple programming language.

So I guess they agree with me!

I also recently came across this petition on the UK Government petitions website "Teach our kids to code". I don't like the way it uses the word "coding" which is a bit of jargon which could be better expressed as "programming". It also seems a bit unnecessary now in the light of that BBC story.

Photo from Rain Rabbit.

My public speaking engagements in 2012

I've read a couple of blog posts recently where people have outlined their public speaking engagements this year. Now I get to do it too!

Actually there's only one.

We're having the Wycliffe Conference at our church on 4th February 2012. I'm doing a session entitled "Tech Transforming Translation". What I'm planning to do is try and condense our Check IT Out day (which we're unfortunately not running this year) into 50 minutes.

So it's going to be a bit of a roller coaster ride. At the moment I'm planning to cover the following topics:

• Using media (videos, CDs, websites, mobile phones, mp3 players) for distributing Bibles
• Translating sign languages
• Complex fonts
• IT support in harsh conditions (dust, heat, humidity, lightning, dodgy electricity supply)
• How you can use your IT skills to help missions, without leaving this country - MissionAssist (formerly Wycliffe Associates UK)

More details on our Wycliffe Conference page.