My report from UK GovCamp 2013

Open Data

First session was on Open Data.

The room was full of people like me passionate about Open Data. We nearly all felt that councils should take the lead and publish more Open Data We should try more to promote the use of Open Data and the benefits it brings to the community but we acknowledge that it is never high of councils priority list. Except in cases where legislation forces councils to publish Open Data. It is a pity that this is the only time the councils really take Open Data seriously.

How to Hack into a Government Website

A very intriguing title for a gov camp session. Talked about the security around networks and systems. First of all the issue of passwords was discussed.

No matter how robust an organisations password system is, bad password choice by users would still create holes within the security system. If you want to hack into a government system that the password system is an early port of call.

The presenters were amazed about the number of times that they came across the word password being used as a password. Some organisations insist on a capital letter being used in a password as well as lower case. In the majority of times the user will make the first letter of the password the capital letter. Some organisations insist on a number being in the password. For this the majority of users will add these digits to the end of the password and in 30% of cases they will add the number 1. If a special character is required this is most often an exclamation mark added to the end of the password. The more rules to add the more likely it is that users will create complicated passwords and then write them down and stick them under their keyboard or around their desk somewhere.

Password Length.

13% of passwords have 6 characters
17% have 7 characters
21% have 8 characters
16% have 9 characters
13% have 10 characters

Meaning that 80% of passwords are between 6 and 10 characters.

There is a temptation to add system names to passwords to obey the different passwords to different system e.g. Passwordtwitter, PasswordYammer, FacebookPassword etc. This should be discouraged as once you know the format you'll be able to access all that persons systems.

Also the use of names are common. Wives, Girlfriends, Lovers, Secretaries names being the most common. Research has shown that where a man has a name as a password in 80% of cases that name is female.

Going back to the use of digits. Whilst 30% will use the number 1 other popular variations would be persons age when setting up the password, their house number, Office room number etc If a 4 digit number is required then most popular choice would be either 19xx or 20xx.

Password good practice should be implemented from the day someone starts in the office and that security should be part of the induction process. An example was given of a US organisation which ran a competition to see who could break into their system the quickest. It was won one year by a guy who called IT helpdesk and got through to someone who had just started that day. He told the called that as he just started he might not be able to help, to which the caller replied. Don’t worry, I think you are the perfect person to help me..

One side issue about the helpdesk was mentioned in that in so many organisations one call to the helpdesk can get someone’s password reset without any cheking as to who the caller is. The helpdesk will even give the caller the new password.

Cross Site Scripting and SQL injection

These were also mentioned but these deserve a whole blog posting to themelves.

Wordpress

Wordpress was initially released in 2003 and its current version, version 3 has been reported to have been downloaded over 65 million times. Initially it was a blogging tool but now it is claimed to be more of a CMS. I attended this session to learn more about Wordpress. I use blogger.com for my blogs but I’m not happy with their stats package. Looking around the web and looking at my twitter friends blogs I see that many use Wordpress. Indeed the @weeklyblogclub which I support with my own blogs, use Wordpress for their site.

The hosts of the session were experts on Wordpress and it seemed that a lot of the attendees were at the same level as myself. Though there were some there that seemed to be experienced users of Wordpress and praised the software. The basic Wordpress software can be downloaded free of charge from their site main site wordpress.com but it’s main advantage is the over 1,700 themes and nearly 25,000 plugins that are also free to download from Wordpress.org. These have been written by other Wordpress users. A question was asked on how to know which plug-in were safe and which were not. The hosts of the session advised that it states on each plug in it shows the number of times each has been downloaded and users give a rating on each one. They suggested that you can be confident that those with high download figures and a high rating would be the best to use.

I had no idea at the time on how many themes or plug ins were available otherwise I would have seeked advise on how to search through the huge list to find the right plug in to use.

Had a small chat afterwards with someone from Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) who use Wordpress for their site. They use it as a more fully fledged CMS. This is something that I am defiantly going to explore further.

Wikipedia

The final session of the day was hosted by someone who I have got to know very well on Twitter after meeting him at last years UK Gov Camp. Since then Andy Mabbett has received the (well deserved) honour of being awarded a Fellowship of the Royal Society of the Arts for his work in the fields of Open Data, Wikipedia and Social Media. So who better to give a talk on Wikipedia.

I first created an account on Wikipedia back in September 2004 and have made hundreds of changes to the site since then, created some pages, added some photos to Wikipedia commons etc but nothing to the extent of Andy.

He talked about the time he spends being Wikipedia in residence at various museums, art galleries etc around the country. He talked about the time that he (and others) spent in Monmouthshire creating Wikipedia articles about the area and adding QR codes around the place to make it easy for people to access those articles via their smart phone. This really helped visitors get more from their visit to the area. It must also have been incredibility interesting for them to do such work and learn about that area. This is something that all councils, art galleries, museums can do. Editing Wikipedia is free and creating QR codes is free.

I also quizzed Andy about how I could use Wikipedia to help with my Historic Churches of Great Britain website and he gave me valuable help with this. Pointing to the many articles on churches on Wikipedia and we talked about the photographs on Wikipedia commons that are licensed for re-use by anybody under the creative commons licence. Since then I too have added to the collection of photographs on Wikipedia commons.

I was truly inspired by this sessions and feel that despite its detractors Wikipedia is a valuable tool.

Spotting (Part 1)

Fellow @weeklyblogclub member Louise once said to me that she would be interested in reading an article about why I go spotting aircraft, train, bus, tram etc and I’ve been thinking long and hard about this. I thought I’d start off with a brief introduction as to how I came to take part in all these hobbies.


It started in Junior school, Roy who was my best mate at the time told me that he went out to our local airport to spot planes every Saturday and he asked me if I would like to go out with him. I got permission from my mum and the following Saturday we headed across the fields to the airport. On arrival he told me that civil aircraft have registrations painted on them (military aircraft have serials) and the object of the hobby was to see as many different aircraft as possible. Pocket money was saved up to buy a book called Civil Aircraft Markings. This listed all aircraft on the British and Irish civil aircraft register. Plus listings of foreign airliners that came to the UK. I started ticking off all those that I saw. Whilst the Civil Aircraft Markings and it’s sister publication Miltary Aircraft Markings books are still published. I have computerised my sightings in a piece of software Aircraft Spotters software called Aerodata for which I pay £8.25 to receive updates for at regular intervals. Thanks to this software I can tell you that I have so far logged over 35,000 aircraft registrations.

During the early days I went on trips with other local aircraft spotters to far flung destinations such as Heathrow and Yeovilton. My friends at the time also collected numbers of other things whilst on route, some collected BMW car registrations (they were quite rare back in those days), some collected all car registrations that just contained a one in them (e.g. EL1 etc). I wanted something like this but different. Also I needed one fundamental thing. To have a list that I can check off. So I knew how well I was doing. I’m sure there is some physiological reason why I need a list but I do.

My list came in the form of a book. Buses of South East England by A M Witton. It listed buses own by the major bus companies. Buying that book lead me to start bus spotting. The actual collecting of bus numbers ceased when I was in my very late teens but I still like to photograph them. Which is strange as this is one area that I do deviate from my need for lists. Whilst I maintain my own on-line list of bus fleet lists of operators that I have an interest in. I don’t have complete lists of every bus and coach but do take photos of all that I can, both British and those from abroad.

Whilst I was in secondary school I was chatting to another friend about spotting who said that if he did any form of spotting then it would be trains. So we both agreed to start train spotting.

Going back to the need of lists. The train spotting books at the time only listed diesel and electric trains, not steam. Hence I’ve never collected steam train numbers, Again I photograph them when I see them, but never go out of my way to see them. I’m in the process of building a model railway and I read somewhere that people often model scenes from their childhood and this is certainly the case for me. My layout is set in the 1980’s and features British Rail Blue throughout

So that’s why I started. In future blogs Ill answer questions like. What exacyly is spotting? Does it take up all your life? How sad do you think it is? Ill also be talking about the plus side of the hobbies and some of the negative.



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Dorset Enterprises

Started in 1914 by a Bournemouth Councillor, Dorset Enterprises was initially set up to provide work for injured soldiers returning from the First World War who would make a variety of wooden objects for use by the council and externally. Over the years it slowly became a disability workshop employing a range of disabled people.

About 10 years ago they wanted a web presence for their two trading arms, DeckchairsUK and Escor Toys. I must say that working with them was one of the most interesting and enjoyable piece of work I’ve done.

Escor Toys as the name suggests made quality wooden toys. After I had set up the website I was stuck by the number of enquiries from parents and even grandparents who had Escor Toys as children and wanted to pass on their toys to their children or grandchildren but over the years figures had been lost and they were asking if they could get a replacements. I don’t think many toys that get passed down the generations these days. These toys were built to last

DeckchairsUK made wooden deckchairs, luggage stands, windbreakers and the like. The luggage stands can be seen in many top hotels around the country and other customers range from the Prince of Wales High Grove estate to a company that I shouldn’t really name, just to say that they have hosted the UK Gov Camp in the past.

Sadly EU regulations on the testing of toys became too expensive and with cheap imports the Escor Toys side of the businesses closed a few years back. Dorset Enterprises has struggled over recent years their turnover reducing by half what it was a few years back. It the last three years they made an operations loss on average of £470,000 a year. Bournemouth Borough Council has decided that it can no longer afford to subsidise the company and has pulled the plug on its funding. It was a sad day when I received the e-mail asking me if I would put a message on their website stating that the company will cease trading on 31st March 2013 after 99 years of trading.

Many people have companied against the closure, citing that the Council could find the £8.5 million to buy a building (the Imax) and then demolish it and spend huge sums on a surf reef that has never lived up to expectations. They asked if the company was given time and with the right business support and sales advice they believed that Dorset Enterprises could return to profitability. Unfortunately their campaigning failed and 30 odd staff, 19 of which have some form of disability (some severe) will loose their jobs at the end of the month.

My overriding memory of Dorset Enterprises will be the tour of the premises I took when I first got involved. Seeing people with severe mental and physical disability operate the huge machinery that I was too scared to go near. They were truly an inspiration.

Looking for aircraft in France, Ireland and Portsmouth Harbour

As many of you know I spend some of my spare time travelling round the UK and Europe aircraft spotting. Indeed last night I booked a day trip to Toulouse in France for later this month in order to visit the Airbus factory there. I also put my name down for a week long aircraft spotting trip around Northern and Southern Ireland for early next year. It will be so interesting to do Northern Ireland a place I’ve never been to.


One thing aircraft buffs like myself down here on the South coast like to keep an eye on is movements in and out of Portsmouth Naval Base. Not because we are all ship spotters as well, but some navy ships carry helicopters. A navy frigate might have a helicopter deck on which there will be helicopters. We like to keep track of any visiting foreign navy vessels in case they turn up with a helicopter or two on board. Last year I did manage to bag a nice Australian Navy ‘copter when one of its ships visited Portsmouth Navy Base. Rumours fly around when ships are due. Even more so when it is an American Carrier due. They are too big to enter Portsmouth but will anchor in Stokes Bay just off the coast. Local harbour tour companies will run trips out to do circuits of the carrier when they are in. I know a few lucky people who manage to get on the carriers when they are in but how they get on the official invite list is kept a closely guarded secret. I’d love to know how they did it.

Anyway, the reason I’m writing this today is that rumours abound that on Friday a French Helicopter Carrier is due into Portsmouth. The rumours state that it is off on a five month tour and therefore there is a good chance that there will be helicopters on board. Confirmation of the ships arrival will be publicised at lunchtime on the Thursday when the Queens Harbour Master at Portsmouth publish their list of movements planned for the next day. Its on their website in HTML and PDF formats. Perhaps a good candidate for an app or #opendata? Anyway, I’ll be checking those lists to see if the rumours are true and they ship is coming in and if the weather is good I’ll take some time off work to go and see it and hope that there are helicopters on board. The rumours state that the ship will go out on Saturday but I’ll be in London at UKGC13. Fingers crossed that it does come it and that any helicopters on it will be on deck.

However I’m always fearful that it could be a wasted journey. I remember one time in the very early days of the internet when the amount of information on it was nothing like what it is today. We had basic email lists to exchange rumours and one such rumour at the time concerned a US Navy ship that was due to visit Portsmouth. People were asking if the ship had helicopters on board. The rumour mill kicked into full force, to such an extent that by the night before the ship was due that rumours stated that the ship was a Frigate and defiantly had a helicopter on board. The ship was due at around 7.30 the following day and one guy got up really early and drove down from Oxfordshire to Portsmouth to see it arrive. By nine o’clock he was at work and posted on the email list how he drove all that way but it was a total waste of his time and money. The ship had arrived but he confirmed that it defiantly did not have a helicopter on board due to the fact… that the ‘ship’ was a submarine!

Fast, Cheap, Good

Whenever people come to me wanting a new website we always discuss cost, timescales and exactly what they want in the site. Normally at some point in the conversation I end up saying three little words.


Fast. Cheap. Good.

I then tell them to pick any two out of those three words.

A website can be done quickly and cheaply, but it won’t be world beating. That might be enough for some who just want a web presence or somewhere to point peoples to.

A website can be done quickly and be good, but it won’t be cheap. You’ll need to throw a lot of resources at it, or maybe even buy in some features and coding.

A Website can be cheap and good, but it will take time. Planning, designing, wireframing, coding, user testing will take time. Longer if you want to do surveys at to what you customers require from your site.

So many people want all three but it just won’t be possible.

Chris Hulme

Well my MP has gone and now we have a by-election. I await the constant rattle of my letter box as I’ll be suddenly bombarded with election leaflets and other party political paraphernalia. I’m sure the local printing companies are rubbing their hands with glee with all the extra work they are suddenly going to receive.

The election as been called for 28 February i.e. 21 days time. A very quick turnaround. Why it is so quick is explained in an article from The Democratic Society entitled Eastleigh, Quickleigh. A really excellent article apart from one thing that really made me laugh. The picture and more so the caption. The caption reads ‘Frenetic activity in Eastleigh’. Looking at the picture I would said to myself ‘erm, where is the frenetic activity? Looks quite a peaceful scene to me’. And why use a picture of a theatre which prides itself on being an international hub for developing artists to illustrate an article on elections?

Not saying that The Democratic Society is alone in this. Many newspapers do this. My local paper did an article about the snow delaying flights and had a picture of a plane in brilliant sunshine with no snow. At least they got the airline and aircraft type right. They are getting better at that, so many times in the past they would accompany an article which features one aircraft type with a picture of a completely different aircraft type.  

What the best thing about working from home?

Was talking to one of the senior managers about working from home the other day and the benefits of it. Sure working from home isn’t for everyone. Some people need to separate their home and work life. They need to be in an office environment to get motivated. Also some jobs just aren’t suitable for working from home. Train Drivers for example. But for us office workers it can have its advantages.

So what did we both agree was the best thing about working from home?

Was it the time saved each day not travelling? For me its 90 minutes each way. That’s three hours in total. Yes, I do put some of that time down to good use. Like writing blogs on the train! But still it’s time that I can claim back and do other stuff. Working fro home you can start work as soon as you get up in the morning and work till late. My flexi really increases when I work from home and so does the amount of work I can get through.

Was it the cost savings. The train costs me £15.60 a day or £74.30 a week. I used to get a yearly tickets at £2972.00 but now I work from home every other week I can save over £1000 but just getting tickets as and when I need to. But sometime I need and indeed want to go into the office and I accepted that when I moved away from Bournemouth it would cost me money to get into work.

So what did we decide was the best thing about working home. Quite simply the fact that you can start your working day………. Whilst still wearing your pyjamas! Oh yes!

Best day of my life

My #weeklyblog club posting this week is just one picture. But for me its the most important picture of my life. On 21st December 2012 I got married to my wonderful fiancee Sue who I love very much.

My New Twitter Account

This week marked a milestone in my Historic Churches of Great Britain Website. It now has a twitter account @Hist_ChurchofGB. Does this mean that I’m ready to go Full Metal Jacket with publicising the site, Well now not quite.

Let me start by giving a quick recap on the story so far. I started photographing churches after getting bored in a Cambridgeshire Travelodge one evening and went for a drive. I’d been admiring some of the countries churches from a distant up to then. A website was displayed to display those photos. As my interest grew I started collecting books on churches. As a way of keeping information gained on each church from these books a background website was created. The those lovely people at Ordnance Survey released their Open Data. One product was Map Vector District which had many categories of buildings in it. One was Places of Worship. It took many many hours to extract the data and insert in into my website. This gave me the Easting and Nothings of each Place of Worship. At the time I downloaded the data they had some 23,000 Places of Worship. However looking at my website you will see many churches not listed. The Ordnance Survey data was a great step forward but it is no where near complete. One day I do hope to give something back and provide some of my data back to the Ordnance Survey.

The Ordnance Survey also released county boundary data and these were used to obtain which county each Place of Worship was in. However more hours were spent refining the data, for example Bournemouth being a unitary authority was listed on its own and not part of Dorset. A bit of data manipulation was needed.

Next stage was to add town/village names to those Places of Worship. Again Ordnance Survey Open Data came to the rescue and they have data on the location of town and village names labels on their Landranger series of map. Using specialist GIS software I was able to locate the nearest place name to each Place of Worship as viewed on Landranger maps. This gave me a good reference point but again more data manipulation is needed. For example a church might on the edge of one town but the closest place name label might be for the next town. I’m slowly working through the whole 23,000 records trying to correct the more obvious errors. It has taken well over six months so far. And I’ve still got about 4 English Counties to do as well as most of Wales and Scotland.

During this time I’ve been adding in the churches that the Ordnance Survey Open Data didn’t have using a combination of my own sightings, books, wikipedia and the excellent geograph.org.uk website. Who’s photos I’m using on many of the pages of the churches I have not visited yet.

Once I’ve got place names checked the next stage will be to add dedication or the name of each church, as well as make a note of all the Places of Worship on the site that are modern buildings therefore out of scope of the website. Once that is done then I will go Full Metal Jacket with the publicity. I reckon that is still a good year away yet though.

However I realised long ago that this was too big a project for one person to do all the research on and so there is a basic user form on those pages where the dedication of the church is still not known by me. I’m hoping to gain information from users via this method and so far I have had some responses. Feel free to check out the website www.peterandsusan.co.uk/church and help where you can please.

The reason for the twitter account now is that I was looking at the page of a South London Website who had their own twitter account. I am beginning to start pushing advertising the website more in the hope that people will supply information and thought a twitter account would help me contact this and other churches with accounts in the hope that they could add more information on their and local to them churches. As at the moment getting information is my priority.

Teenagers - Who'd have 'em

A friend of mine has two kittens. Her teenage son declared that it was his turn to name the family pets and this was agreed. My friend was worried about the sort of names that a teenage boy would come up with. After all she was going to be the one that would be stood at the front door calling their names out to get them to come inside. So she struck a deal with him. He had free reign over the names as long as they were biblical names. He agreed.


Next day he announced that he had come up with names for the kittens. One would be called after a book in the Old Testament and the main character within it. The second kitten would be called after a person that appears in the Book of Genesis. Incidently both characters also appear in the Jewish religion and are also Prophets of Islam from the Muslim religion. So as well as being biblical the names are also multi-faith.

My friend was pleased on how her son did as he was asked and gave them biblical names and not some stupid names.

And so it came to pass that the kittens are called..

Job and Lot….