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#voteTO: voting for something

Tomorrow night, I expect the fine city I'm now calling home will have a mayor who doesn't just fail to win the popular vote, but for whom there is a preferred candidate for most voters.

Losing the popular vote is pretty much par for the course with FPP, but this election looks especially clear we can do better.

I think we should all vote for something; and a preferential voting system would naturally discourage the mudslinging that has characterised this campaign.

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UK DNA database consultation

The UK's Home Office has been running a consultation, entitled Keeping the right people on the DNA database.

I'm gravely sceptical about the entire episode and, throughout, the document tilts heavily towards keeping DNA for a long time because that will – supposedly – make us safer.

David Mery has had some choice words and a very thorough response to the Home Office's proposal. I am not so thorough, and kept my contribution to the section of which Ben Goldacre rightly asked 'Is this a joke?'.

The consultation closed yesterday, here is my contribution, written from the vantage point of my academic high horse.

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Police must not hide

The police have been misbehaving. I'm angry about that, and would like to do something practical.

I'm pleased that people aren't sticking to the supposed ban on photographing the police. The videos of Ian Tomlinson being attacked from behind minutes before his death and the seemingly brutish attack on a woman at the memorial protest the following day show that we really do need some daylight here.

Update at 05:31 EDT, 21^st April 2009 – Added notes on how to tag things.

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A penguin president

There's been some chatter recently about how Barack Obama isn't really black. The claim is that he's basically a privileged white guy.

I've a proper problem with that, and my basic difficulty is with a classification that is so damn crude.

Why try and jam Obama into one of the pigeon-holes of being exclusively white or black, but never both? I'm sure a large part rests with the media, in wanting a story that is simple to tell; I fear that a greater part is playing on America's more fragmented, near segregated culture when it comes to colour. Growing up as a kid with a mixed background made me feel no less British. I have a great love of Irish and Indian culture, but they aren't quite home to me. I'm not sure America, or perhaps just public identity there, allows such a tick-all-that-apply approach to cultural identity. I'm pretty sure living in London makes that much easier, which is why it is home now.

I hope people start the more nuanced conversation about Obama. He is black and white. He could be their first penguin president.

Amazon patent decent URLs for search

A long time ago, I wrote gallery.future-i.com, and I was particularly exercised about using clean URLs (and still am).

One place I feel I did a really nice job was in making the search URLs pretty nice, e.g. a search for 'mary' lives at:

http://gallery.future-i.com/search/mary

I did that in the middle of 2001, and I expect plenty of others did similar things by then, too. For me, the tricky bit is all done by Apache's mod_rewrite, which takes incoming requests to your web site, and let's you rejig it to pass parameters to scripts without exposing all that grunge to the outside world. It isn't the only way to do it, but it is powerful and effective.

My annoyance now is that Amazon have a patent on a very similar technique, covering URLs for search results of the form http://somedomain/flibble, filed in 2004.

I was impressed by Amazon's A9 when it launched, principally for the clean URLs for search.

That doesn't mean they own the idea, which is plainly in play before that. And don't get me started on parallel invention, making it all the sillier.

I hope the patent boils away in a sea of prior art.

[Via Buzz Out Loud #589, Slashdot coverage]