Welcome to The Perfect Curve.

There are 173 posts in total.

The failure of politics

simon gray — 2016-11-05, 17:22:31

Whilst the referendum itself was David Cameron's hubris, the constitutional controversy which has come about this week is entirely the fault of each and every one of the 650 MPs and 812 lords who were too bone idle or too incompetent to give the Referendum Bill the proper scrutiny during its passage through parliament to ensure all the Is were dotted and the Ts were crossed. No wonder the overriding theme of every Adam Curtis documentary the last 15 years has been about the failure of politics to organise society. 

#politics #AVeryBritishRevolution

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Local Government Digital Service Standard Summit, 19 September 2016

simon gray — 2016-09-19, 13:20:35

Earlier in 2016 the Local Government Digital Steering Group, of which I'm a member, held a workshop day at the Government Digital Service to discuss whether there was any mileage in creating a local government version of the GDS Digital Service Standard. Not surprisingly, there was overwhelming agreement that it was indeed a good idea, so the steering group set to work in collaboration with local government digital practitioners up and down the country to create one - the Local Government Digital Service Standard. Today there's a summit at City Hall in London to share the work that's been done so far, gaining insight from people working in central and local government in their experiences of using the standard - and an important point being emphasised that it's not about creating a whole load of bureaucracy, and neither is it about replicating the same thing across hundreds of councils - it's just about creating good digital services.

Here are my notes from the morning main speaker sessions.

Natalie Taylor, Head of Digital Transformation, GLA - City Hall and the Digital Service Standard - Building the new london.gov.uk

  • changed the focus to be based on user needs and user research.
  • Introduced an agile development methodology, with clear roles. Daily stand-ups, sprint planning, retrospectives, show and tells, and moved to fortnightly sprints with continuous development and testing.
  • Reduced the content by 75% to make it better written and relevant to the users, by proper talented content editors.
  • Got successful buy-in from senior management, [...]

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    In group Public / Third Sector Digital

Pork fillet on a bed of leek and celery sauce with orzo pasta

simon gray — 2016-07-21, 14:28:19

Ingredients:

  • Pork fillet
  • Leek
  • Celery
  • Orzo pasta (or rice)
  • White wine
  • Calvados (or brandy)
  • Stock cube
  • Double cream
  • Garlic
  • Tarragon
  • Salt and pepper

Method:

Set your piece of pork fillet cooking the way you like to cook it. Because I'm a bit pretentious and have a sous-vide, I cook mine at 62C for about an hour. If you don't have a sous-vide, either follow the cooking instructions on the packet, or cook it the way you usually like to cook it.

Start your orzo pasta cooking. Although it's small it still takes a bit longer to cook than you'd think, but because it's small you've got to be more careful about stopping it sticking to the pan than than usual pasta. If it's cooked before the sauce is cooked, just turn the heat off.

Chop the celery and the leek as finely as you feel motivated to, and fry in a pan for a few minutes, then add the garlic to fry for a few moments more; add a fair amount of white wine and a bit of calvados and reduce for a bit, then add a big dollop of the cream, the amount of salt and pepper you like, and the tarragon. Let all that bubble nicely for a while; the final consistency you're after for this is creamy, but not too thick nor not too runny - whilst it's cooking if it's getting too thick then thin it down a touch with some milk, but keep it on the thicker side of how you want it. When [...]

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UK Parliament petitions website - potentially compromised?

simon gray — 2016-06-29, 12:39:08

In the aftermath of the referendum vote to leave the European Union, one of the things being focussed on is a petition (which ironically was created a month before polling day by a Leave supporter when it was looking like there would be a likely Remain win) calling for a second referendum. At over 4 million signatures it is probably the most-signed petition in history. Or at least it would be, if those signatures were valid.

Suspicions started to be raised when somebody had a look at the raw open data JSON feed for the petition and noticed there were a number of signatures appearing to come from the UK - including more signatures from certain countries than those countries' populations! The Government Digital Service is already investigating these potentially fraudulent signatures and removing them.

As much for a programming exercise to learn how to parse a JSON feed as anything else, I decided to make a tool to make that country data human readable, and display on a pie chart what the proportion of UK to non-UK signatures might be, and how significant that proportion might be.

So the tool is at https://perfect-curve.co.uk/toys/petition, and on there you can see a live real-time feed of signatures as they are logged in the system after a user follows the confirmation email..

The first thing to note is the proportion of (notionally valid) UK-sourced signatures vs (notionally invalid) non-UK signatures, at 96% UK to 4% non-UK; i've done some checking with other petitions [...]

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In group Public / Third Sector Digital

A content strategy for local government

simon gray — 2016-06-21, 12:45:57

In a previous job role on the main corporate webteam for a local council, one of my main focuses was on website content strategy, for the Birmingham City Council website; towards the end of that role (before the team itself was fundamentally changed in a departmental restructure) I completed the first draft of that strategy. As departmental and corporate priorities have shifted my original document has been changed and expanded considerably, but I thought it seemed worthwhile sharing it here for the wider community - the Local Government Digital community and any other public / third / educational sector digital community to use as a basis for their own work on developing content strategies.

It is high-level, strategic in nature; its goal is to outline principles to be followed when creating content; although there are some specific matters of detail towards the end of the document, a content strategy should not be expanded into a highly detailed how-to guide for creating content or checklist for evaluating it - such detailed information is best contained in separate documents rather than expecting content designers to read and absorb one large all-encompassing document.

Many of the principles outlined are taken from the work of others, most notably the Government Digital Service’s Style Guide and LocalGovDigital’s Content Standards, and further details can be found there.

Definition

Content Strategy has been described as…

‘…the practice of planning the content creation, delivery, and governance…’

and

‘…a repeatable system that defines the entire editorial content development process for a website development project…’

by using

‘…words and data to

[...]

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In group Public / Third Sector Digital

The UK's EU Referendum Will Help You Lose Your Faith In Politics

simon gray — 2016-06-14, 19:00:01

Back in May 2014 after the results of the elections to the European Parliament, I speculated that I didn't believe  that the whole of the 17% of people who voted for UKIP were actually the xenophobic bigots my fellow left-liberal friends were painting them as; I speculated that most of them were probably simply ignorant (in the unaware sense) of what the EU is, and ignorant of the true nature of immigration into the UK, and simply wanting to give the Tories a bit of a kicking. This was a year before the General Election, when all the polls were expecting a year later to see a win for Labour (a tight one if not a comfortable one), and there was no serious expectation at the time that a referendum on the UK's membership of the European Union would be happening any time soon. My response was rather than complaining about so many people voting UKIP, wouldn't it be nice instead if we could spend the forthcoming year  actually explaining properly what the EU is and isn't, how it works, emphasising the real benefits of its existence and our membership of it, and indeed acknowledging the downsides as well.

Two years on and approaching the end of a referendum campaign about whether or not to stay in the EU, rather than there having been any real attempts to explain the EU properly, rather than either side having any interest in engaging in an actual debate on the matter (the national broadcasters [...]

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Smoked mackerel sushish

simon gray — 2016-05-11, 13:31:51

A recipe for what I am going to call Sushish:

Ingredients

  • Sushi rice
  • Smoked mackerel
  • Mayonnaise
  • Wasabi paste
  • Yuzu sauce (or lemon juice)
  • Fish paste
  • Green beans
  • Carrots
  • Mushrooms
  • Spring onions
  • Ginger (pickled if you can get it)
  • Soya sauce

Method

Start your sushi rice cooking by your favourite method of cooking rice - mine is to steam it in a steamer, with a slight dash of sesame oil mixed into it. Chop your carrots to the size you like them and include them in the rice bowl / pan - leave them at the top, because you'll want to lift them out separate from the rice.

Prepare your mayonnaise sauces - take three small bowls, putting a dollop of mayonnaise in each, and mix in to one of each to your preferred taste a squirt of wasabi paste, a splash of yuzu sauce (or lemon juice if you can't get yuzu), and a blob of fish paste. If you want to try different mayonnaise sauces, or a different number of sauces, do accordingly according to how you feel.

Chop your green beans, mushrooms, spring onions, and ginger to the size and shape you like them to be, and stir fry them - test the carrots, and when they're nearly done fish them out of the rice pan and add to the stir fry pan.

If you're having your smoked mackerel hot, you'll be wanting to start heating it up sufficiently long before everything else is done that it's nice and hot, but not so long before that you're going to end up [...]

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Election results

simon gray — 2016-05-06, 08:44:06

So to summarise yesterday’s election results: all the parties did as well as could be expected, all the other parties underperformed considering where we are in the electoral cycle, and the UK will probably vote to leave on 23 June.

#politics #localgov

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Local election 2016 - who to vote for in Bournville ward?

simon gray — 2016-05-02, 16:38:01

Although Cotteridge and Stirchley (or as I call it, Stirchleyridge) is what the estate agents call an Up and Coming Area, we're still not hip enough to have our own local election hustings - we still have to leave that prestige to Moseley. Unlike some parts of the city, we do at least get campaign literature - from some of the candidates, at any rate.

I've read what they're promising, so you don't have to.

Mary Locke - Labour

Mary is not a sitting councillor, but she's representing the sitting administration, the Labour Party, for a ward which has one of its three councillors as Labour; depending on what issue it is which is most offending voters by this Thursday, she's in with a reasonable chance of being returned elected. What's she pledging to do, then?

  • Well paid jobs and training,
  • Improved rubbish and recycling collections; tackling litter,
  • Action on road safety and congestion, and
  • Regeneration of Cotteridge and Stirchley.

She says she'll help local businesses to create new jobs - unfortunately she doesn't say how she'll help local businesses to create new jobs. Myself, I would have thought that the existing local businesses in the ward have pretty much created the correct number of jobs they have the ability to support at the present time - in order to create new jobs, what's desperately needed here is more local businesses; anybody who walks through Stirchleyridge along Pershore Road and Watford Road past the large number of [...]

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Potatoes fondante

simon gray — 2016-04-03, 14:53:36

If you want the best potatoes you've ever had, try these:

Take a load of waxy potatoes (eg Charlotte), peel them, and cut them in half lengthways. 

Put them in a pan just big enough to hold them all as one layer, together with a massive blob of ghee (or butter if you live somewhere that doesn't know what ghee is). Heat the pan to melt the ghee, then add enough water to cover the potatoes - and crumble in a vegetable stock cube. Reduce the heat and simmer until the potatoes are cooked, adding some Herbes de Provence towards the end. The water will boil off, leaving them continuing to cook in the ghee.

Optionally, after cooking and before serving, put them in an oven at 220°C for a few minutes to crisp up the surfaces. 

#cheatcuisine

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Comedians, prostitutes, and webteams

simon gray — 2016-03-18, 17:44:39

Stewart Lee likens being a comedian to being a prostitute - providing a service people crave yet are despised for. 'At least people don't write in to prostitutes to say they could have done it better'. Sounds like being part of a webteam, really.

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The code behind this site is a bit of an abandoned project; I originally had lofty ambitions of it being the start of a competitor for Twitter and Facebook, allowing other people to also use it turning it into a bit of a social network. Needless to say I got so far with it and thought who did I think I was! Bits of it don't work as well as I'd like it to work - at some point I'm going to return to it and do a complete rebuild according to modern standards.