OK, here's the official invite to the Brighton & Hove Issues Forum. I'm ashamed to say that my involvement in this has been close-to-zero - i.e. turning up to an initial meeting and leaving early. But it's great to see this sort of thing actually happening: getting individuals engaging with government at the messy local level where Things Actually Happen.

"I am part of a team which is launching a new web site for everyone in
Brighton and Hove. It is going to be a place where everybody can talk about
the issues that affect them, or interest them, to do with our City.

You can choose to participate via email or over the web. To take part, all
you need is an email address and access to the web - available free at your
local library. Please tell your friends about this new public forum."

Interesting post proposing deliberately avoiding single-sourced IDs: "A pragmatic solution with no unique ID is the opposite. There's no up-front data cleansing. ID is continuously inferred, the system copes with duplicates, and structure is applied retrospectively. Ther's a presumption of ambiguity which makes us proceed with appropriate caution. Quality increases with volume and over time. There's little up-front cost. "

This is pretty well what we have now, isn't it? Driving license, electoral register, NHS records, etc. all contribute to identity.

Some new images from the updated UIQ interface are here. What strikes me about these is how desktop-like they are. Look - a menu bar, title, icons, pop-up dialogs...

I've never been a big fan of UIQ - producing an interface that relies on stabbing tiny portions of the screen seems to be a poor Fitts (sorry) with styluses and mobile phones... we're used to painting and writing with less precise, broad strokes and that seems a better way to conduct everyday interactions (closing applications, making selections, firing off actions) than most of these handsets do today.

How to use Napsters free trial to get 252 CDs of free music; as I think I've written before, when any business faces off against the combined will of the worlds teenagers, my money is on the kids...

I mean, look a Microsoft: a software company. The Big One. And yet *they* suffer tremendously from piracy. If there was a technical solution, don't you think they'd have gotten onto it a few years back?

Update: Martin's pointed to this story, which contains a lovely quote from the Napster folks:

"The DRM (digital rights management) is intact. Basically, people are just recording off a sound card. This is nothing new and people could do this with any legitimate service if they want to use a sound card," she said."

Oh, that's OK then - I mean, the music's been stolen, but thank god the DRM is still intact!

Doom - the board game. Wonderful, but I want more. I want to see multiplayer, on-paper games of Microsoft Office: format that paragraph! Throw 2 sixes to save successfully! Play your paperclip card for no reason other than to really fuck the other players off!