Submitted by johnh on May 25, 2007 - 12:17.
Because you don't need to travel to Dublin to sit in a room and watch television </only joking, guys>.
Chat with others as the results start coming in, and/or post/watch the progress at Kildarestreet.com.
See you in there. Some well-configured users can click this link and join in right now. Everyone else - server is irc.freenode.net, channel #kildarestreet.
Submitted by johnh on April 30, 2007 - 14:00.
I'm only bringing this up because it's relevant to what follows, but I maintain that Twitter still sucks (it was down all night again last night, by the way and its user-hostile and flaky nature just bit another respected ex-colleague).
That said, and moving right along to the real point of this post, there's a lot to be said for the idea that maintaining a blog could be simpler. Today I'm going to share with you the real reason I don't post here as often as I should.
It's because I post elsewhere. Some years ago I unilaterally that evolt.org's predominantly-social IRC channel could do with its own blog. That decision was based predominantly on having tech-envy of two illustrious predecessors: The Daily Chump, powered by a Python bot penned by its members; but above all 2lmc's spool. 2lmc was once a house in Islington containing several twentysomething perl programmers (including my former business partner who's now doing something complicated at Flickr). The spool, then, was partly software written by people I know -- but mostly it was also a very funny blog written by people I know (it's very much less active these days since the house was scattered to the four corners of the tech universe).
Unable to source the code at the time to run 2lmc's bot, I settled on the Chumps' engine. And so spool.evolt.org was born.
Someone posts a link, and it either sits there for others to follow at their leisure, or the rest of the group leaves comments on it. These could be more related links, dumb pictures, or (most usually) snark. (Apparently the kids are calling this a 'tumblelog' now because they don't know it's been around forever and -- at the risk of reigniting a debate with James yet again, it seems everything has to be invented all over again indefinitely by the less-geeky ones who didn't see it the first time.)
This format's bluddy grate. It's social (it's written by everyone in the group or any ad-hoc subset thereof). It's quick and dirty, like all good tech is. But -- and here's the Twitter reference -- it's insanely easy to write. I can make a new post by copy-and-pasting something off my browser's address bar and pressing Enter.
Compare that to writing this. I need to attempt to cram everything into some sort of logical order despite sleep deprivation, after logging in and typing it all into a web form, then checking and unchecking a bunch of stuff and submitting and rechecking. And then editing out the inevitable typo or three. Blogging software these days is great as a simple content management system. But for actual blogging, for throwing a bunch of stuff up or covering something in real time? These IRC things are so much better.
In 2005 I was running a then-rather-well-known political blog before and during the UK general election campaign. In the last week I set up a second blog to cover as-it-happens election news and invited the world and her dog to join in on election night.
The channel was packed on election night, and twenty or more people were posting results in real time as they arrived for the sixty-odd people in IRC and another several thousand hitting Refresh watching the IRC blog on the web.
In other words, it's been tested in action during an election and it was a) successful and b) inclusive, but most of all c) great fun.
So here's today's new project: KildareStreet.com. News and commentary as it's posted elsewhere, sifted by whichever group of people ends up coalescing around it. Plus as much snark as you like because, let's face it, no matter how much heat is generated in the next 23 days we can be pretty sure there won't be any light.
Come on down and try it for yourself. #kildarestreet on Freenode.net -- the IRC bot doing all the work has been christened 'ceanncomhairle'.
After the election I imagine I'll keep it going to cover whatever comes next, but right now I've got no idea how it'll turn out. More interesting that way.
Code | Ireland | Politics | Vocal Voter
Submitted by johnh on October 31, 2006 - 17:06.
For those of you who are as frustrated as I am at the relatively slow pace of progress at Vovo, an update of sorts.
Last week I unilaterally decided to postpone the collection of more indices to electoral registers until after the site is launched -- which sounds remarkably counterintuitive since that was supposed to be how I'm resolving addresses to constituencies.
Simon McGarr and I spoke at some length at BarCamp Ireland last month about a different approach: perhaps, we thought, the famed map hack plus the OSI's DigiBoundary would get us very close very quickly?
Sadly not without dropping at least seven thousand euro. Because obviously it's a frickin' state secret which places are in which constituencies. So that idea died about two weeks back.
Anyway. I've since had another idea, and it's working. I spent some of Friday night writing code which will take another couple of weeks to finish doing its thing. So far, this new process has added another half a million people to my home-served private prototype.
If (as herself says), God willing and the creek don't rise, and nothing else goes wrong, there's a good chance I'll have a full national address-to-TD lookup working in four weeks.
That'll be the hard bit done, and we can get to sorting the writing to them part and launch the bugger -- and all in under a year from the first promise. Barely under a year, I grant you, but still.
Submitted by johnh on May 15, 2006 - 18:07.
ABC hairdo Brian Ross seems to have rediscovered what his job is, finally.
Bush administration people are going through ABC News's land line and cellphone records to trace calls made from inside the Federal government, hoping to find out who's leaking all this inconvenient information about the rampant lawbreaking so many of them are up to.
Tip: UK reporters use no-name "pay as you go" cell phones for this stuff. Smart people assume that someone's going to want to listen in. No point in making it easy for them.
Ireland | Politics | Vocal Voter
Submitted by johnh on March 20, 2006 - 14:08.
The development site now covers an extra half million people compared to yesterday, since I've finished merging the Dublin Corporation's data set.
Top marks to Dublin City, by the way, for having the best data in the country. Streets which are divided between electoral areas are clearly marked as such (Cork County, by way of contrast, just lists them once in each area with no information about which parts are which). EAs which straddle constituency boundaries are divided accordingly with pseudocodes.
Yay Dublin, in short.
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Ireland | Politics | Vocal Voter
Submitted by johnh on February 23, 2006 - 12:49.
...have residents who can determine their local eleced representatives on the Vovo dev site.
Because I've added Galway City and Galway County to the database this morning.
Ireland | Politics | Vocal Voter
Submitted by johnh on February 17, 2006 - 23:56.
The Vocal Voter prototype now also covers Leitrim.
Adding a second county required a whole bunch of UI work which counties three through 26 won't now require.
Ireland | Politics | Vocal Voter
Submitted by johnh on February 14, 2006 - 23:56.
It's not finished, but then again I have often found that posting something here is the next best thing to never telling anyone.
It contains only streets and townlands in County Mayo.
It allows you to find out who your TDs are. It does not yet have the whole faxing-people thing going on.
Clear? OK.
I've knocked up a prototype. It's at http://dev.vocalvoter.com . If you live in Mayo, you may find it useful :)
If you want to help us scrape up the data we don't yet have, join the list and then get into the wiki to find out more.
If you care about the details, it's Drupal 4.7. The Ajaxy live search thing is generated by my new Street.module's implementation of Drupal's new autocompletion hook.
And I'd just like to say, for the record, that figuring out fecking MySQL's cackhanded UTF8 handling cost me nine hours of my life last night that I will never see again.
Still. Pretty, isn't it?
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General | Ireland | Politics | Vocal Voter
Submitted by johnh on January 31, 2006 - 22:14.
My Pledgebank effort on the FaxyourTD project has jumped from 10 to 13 today thanks to some judicious pluggery by the likes of John Breslin and Mick Fealty. I still need two more before tomorrow to make the Pledgebank deadline.
Update, 27 hours later: Success! 21 in the end.
General | Ireland | Politics | Vocal Voter
Submitted by johnh on December 11, 2005 - 19:31.
Several days passed, so here's a progress report on my efforts to port Writetothem and make it work for Ireland.
You'll want to read this because I've got something wicked cool to show you at the end.
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