Today someone (AJ) pasted a link to FixMyStreet into #srcf. It actually looks rather good and could be an important way of fixing the current pot hole problem resulting from the snow last winter and in general improving the quality of our local environment.

So far I have reported some pot holes and an abandoned car. :-) Maybe they will now magically disappear.
I also noticed that other people had reported most of the problems I had been thinking I should report in Cambridge :-).

See Web 2.0 can do something useful :-).

It is Ada Lovelace day today.

I would like to thank Frances Zhang for putting up with me in supervisions this year and for being really hard working and understanding things I don’t (e.g. probability) and not boasting about it as I tend to (sorry).

Dina Bester is generally awesome, has supplied pizza for many hungry CompScis and was willing to take on project Bravo which I thought looked pretty impossible and got a good project out at the end.

Sarah Gordon for doing a Women@CL talk which showed how testing can be exciting and be just as complicated and technical as writing the code that runs the project while requiring a greater understanding of how the whole project fits together.

I also think that Ada Lovelace day is a good idea and I am glad that my operating system (Ubuntu) is supporting it (or at least the Ubuntu Planet is). Making the internet a better place, one step at a time :-).

The first programmer was a women (Ada), the first programmers (ENIAC) were women, it is sad that the proportion of women in Computer Science now is as low as it is. Especially since they get proportionally more 1sts in CompSci.

Today 4th June 2009 is the day of the European (and local council) elections.
This is the first election in which I can vote, and I will most definitely be voting.
If you are reading this and can vote but aren’t intending to I really think you should.

Part of the reason for writing this is to solidify my decision as to who I am going to vote for. Now at all previous elections since 1997 which is the first one I remember I would have voted Labour had I had a vote. At this election I will most definitely not be voting Labour. There are a number of policies on which Labour would have to make U-turns before I would consider voting for them, ID cards and centralised databases of far too much personal data about innocent people are a couple of things which mean that I can’t support them, there are other reasons such as various wars (I marched against the War in Iraq back at the beginning of that whole mess) and their Complete failure to do anything much about the Climate Change.
Now it appears from their election leaflets that the Conservatives are backward looking eurosceptics and as such they won’t be getting my vote either.
Now who does that leave? Well there are a whole pile of loony parties a few I have never heard of and two parties that appear fairly sane and which I have heard of. These would be the Liberal Democrat Party and the Green Party.
Now my father who has voted Labour since forever and been a member of the Labour party just as long is not voting Labour at this election but instead Green. (or at least I think he is). Things have changed.
Now what is the most important issue which we face? The most important issue that we face is Climate Change. Now Blair said that and he was right, but then he was good at talking but bad at actually doing things.
We have until 2015 to cause CO₂ emissions to peak. That is a very tall order but when the alternative is the extinction of 90% of life on earth there isn’t really any choice.
Now I think that the Liberal Democrats understand that the environment is important but will my voting for them tell the other parties how important the environment is?
Now the European elections have proportional representation which means every vote counts in a way that first past the post doesn’t. So I think that for the European elections I will be voting Green.
And then I ask myself the question, how much do I care. And the answer is that I care a lot. I care if people live or die. I care about the future. I am going to find out what happens in this grand experiment we are playing with our world. I am going to see millions of people die due to Anthropomorphic Climate Change in my life time. That is something I can’t prevent. The choice is this: how many millions will I watch die. I live in the hope of a better world. I believe among other things that we should leave the world in a better state than we found it.

And so here at my first vote I shall make a choice between life and death. To that choice I have only one answer Life. For the sake of the children I hope to have one day. For the sake of my family and friends and of their children. For my own selfish sake and because one of our fundamental responsibilities is the stewardship of this planet.

I think I shall vote Green twice once in the European and once in the Local Elections.
I shall never give up hope, even through the horrors we will witness in this century we can make a better world. I care enough to cry for, I care enough to live for, I care enough that even this coward will stand up and be counted.

VOTE: For Life, Freedom, and Democracy.