Electoral reform

With the UK election likely to produce a hung parliament there is likely to be much discussion of electoral reform there. Indeed, the Liberals are likely to demand this in order to form a coalition.

To my mind, this is long overdue. I'm not sure of the exact figures, but for the last few elections a 30% share of a 60% turnout has given a huge majority in parliament. Now, whilst you can argue that those that don't vote don't deserve their views to be represented, it can't be right that 80% of the population end up with their views not represented by the party in power.

Proportional representation would be a good start. A single, transferable vote system would certainly improve things. One key benefit of this is that it largely eliminates the need for tactical voting, each voter can express their preferences, in order of preference, rather than have to guess which parties actually have a chance of winning and voting tactically.

PR though is just a beginning. The opponents of PR point out that it will lead to hung parliaments. Well, yes it will if there is no clear majority for any one party in the population. Now the problem here is that a minority party can then have more influence than maybe they should in a coalition.

A second problem is that even with PR, suppose there are just two parties sharing most of the votes, one has 52% share, the other 48% share. The 52% party will get a majority in parliament, the significant minority won't have their views represented.

The problem is that once in parliament, simple majority rules.

How can you address this?

Well one way is as follows. Once the election is complete, any group with 5% of the MPs can select a representative to go to a meeting. At this meeting the 20 representatives come up with an agenda for parliament and pick a prime minister.

Each MP is allocated a number of votes for the session. The MP can place as many votes as they want on each issue, so if there is one issue they really care about they can put all the votes on that issue.

In this way, minority issues can get an airing and can get pushed through once on the agenda.

The key to this working is of course the meeting of the representatives. At this meeting there will be a need for debate, consensus, compromise etc. I'm not sure current politicians are capable of this, but if they were I believe it would result in much better goverment.

350% increase in Ottawa Ubuntu in just 6 months

Last night was the Lucid Lynx release party for Ottawa.
The attendence was up a massive 350% on the Karmic party, just 6 months ago.
At this rate we'll need to book the new Ottawa congress centre for the 11.04 release.
Here are some photos from the party.
A good time had by all celebrating a great release.

Lucid Lynx Beta

I upgraded my primary machine to Lucid the other day.

So far I've been pretty impressed.

I'd heard a lot of stuff about the 'me' menu and the messaging integration, without really knowing what it is all about.

Under karmic, my experience with empathy had been more than a little disappointing.

With Lucid, things are much better. The envelope in the top panel which goes green when a new message comes in is working really well for me.

The Super-m keyboard accelerator takes me to the messaging indicator and allows me to switch easisy if I want to talk to a contact.

I took a look at the code, the Super-m key binding is hard-wired into the indicator code, so I've had to re-train my fingers which, since I've had that bound to minimize windows.

Super-s takes you to the logout menu, again no way to configure this though.

On balance, I'm a big fan of keyboard support for everything.

This is probably one reason I don't really care about the buttons moving to the left. I don't use the things as a rule (I use the keyboard). One thing I do like on the buttons is the close window one is red -- easy to spot and hit if I need to.

In other news, so far sound has behaved itself. Hopefully the days of 'killall pulseaudio' are numbered.

What do you do if your gas pedal gets stuck?

So the press is having a field day with Toyota's gas pedal problems.

Maybe I have missed it, but I haven't come across any advice from the press (or Toyota for that matter) as to what you should do if you encounter this problem.

I've heard a few tails from people who did, most recount tales of having both feet on the brakes trying to slow the vehicle.

Putting the car into neutral would seem a good option, failing that I would think the thing to do would be switch off the ignition, but then you have to worry a bit about power steering and steering locks.

So why isn't the press interested in educating the public?

The Pants Bomber

Another (failed) terrorist attack, once again the solutions being proposed involve more inconvenience, more invasion of privacy and little in the way of true increased security. Chalk up another round to the terrorists.

It is more than a little annoying that having had to give fingerprints to travel to the US, submitting all those details they so love, with talk of countries passing on credit card information and the like, that this attack was done by someone on their 500K list of people to watch.

See this article for more on the information that was available about the terrorist. It seems that this attack was an intelligence failure, as indeed was 911: there was information out there that might have stopped the attack if the pieces had been put together.

Of course, it isn't quite this simple, with hindsight you can look back and find the pieces that needed putting together. 500K is of course rather a lot of people to keep an eye on, OK as a table that computers can check names against, but you're not going to be able to keep track of them all.

It would be interesting to know where in the 500K people he ranked in terms of risk. A single list is less useful than a prioritised list, 500K might be manageable for singling out for special searches (depending on how many are frequent flyers). It is no use having so many on the list you can't afford to check any of them at an airport -- some prioritisation is in order.

Fancy new search equipment isn't the answer to stopping someone on your high risk list getting on a plane, that stuff is there to catch the ones you don't know about yet and to discourage the nutters. Sure, it helps when your intelligence fails, but the solution to an intelligence failure is not to beef up plan B.

Good news from Jamaica

As mentioned in an earlier post I left my Acer Aspire One with a guy in Jamaica.

He has been having his challenges getting all the stuff he wants working on that machine. He has asked a few questions, but has mostly found his own solutions.

He's been trying hard to get the video conferencing (with empathy) working. Not much joy there, I've had trouble myself, tends to be a bit hit and miss + the AAO can struggle a bit with voice and video.

Anyway, this mornig I got a video call from him :)

Some Italian guy from the Ubuntu forums had helped him install the latest pidgin, talking him throught a bunch of terminal stuff.

Ubuntu you are awesome.

Copenhagen shows what can be done if you are serious about supporting cycling

The video here shows what can be done if you are serious about promoting cycling in your city.

Some of the things they have done:

• Lots of double width cycle lanes
• specially designed junctions to cut down serious accidents
• LED's to warn right turning vehicles about bikes
• traffic lights co-ordinated so bikes travelling at 20km/h never have to stop
• bike counters to a. monitor and b. let everyone know how many bikes there are.

Such a refreshing change from the world's worst bike lanes. Hopefully, other cities will start to catch on.