Welcome, to The Perfect Curve.

There are 175 posts in total.

UK Parliament petitions website - potentially compromised?

simon gray — 2016-06-29, 12:39:08 - 609 words

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 [...]

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In group Public / Third Sector Digital

A content strategy for local government

simon gray — 2016-06-21, 12:45:57 - 9003 words

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, [...]

Read the rest of A content strategy for local government .

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 - 1908 words

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 [...]

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Smoked mackerel sushish

simon gray — 2016-05-11, 13:31:51 - 374 words

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 [...]

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Election results

simon gray — 2016-05-06, 08:44:06 - 50 words

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 - 1958 words

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 [...]

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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.