Ever-cheaper SD cards are the mobile solution

The price of those little SD memory cards continues to plummet. You can now get them via Amazon for a startlingly low £7.75. How on earth does Argos think it can justify a £69.99 pricetag?

At prices like these, there’s almost no point thinking about more complex ways to connect your devices. Engadget has details today of a video recorder from SanDisk which can use ‘any composite video source such as your set-top box, DVD player, or TiVo’. Record your video, take the card out, pop it into your PDA, and away you go. (And yes, this is finally happening – I’m starting to notice more and more people watching video on the train.)

Add some kind of EPG / Sky+ functionality to simplify the recording process, and I’ll bite your hand off.

Alphabetical order in Welsh?!

If you’re involved in UK government web work, you’re probably more familiar than the average UK resident with the Welsh language. The official guidelines state:

For services provided to the public in Wales, and with due regard to the Welsh Language Act, the Welsh and English languages must be treated on a basis of equality.

… although generally, people take an encouragingly pragmatic and relaxed view. Which is just as well.

The Welsh language has 28 letters – or possibly 29, depending on your stance on the letter ‘J’. (Er, what about Jones?) These include: ch, dd, ff, ng, ll, ph, rh and th. Yes, I know each of those is two letters, but they only count as one. Technically, this is known as a digraph.

And here’s the best bit. In a Welsh dictionary, words beginning with ‘ch’ don’t come between ‘cg’ and ‘ci’ (if there are any). Oh no. They would come after ‘cz’ (if there was a ‘z’, which there isn’t), since ‘ch’ is considered to be the letter between ‘c’ and ‘d’. Unless, that is, it really does mean the two letters as two distinct letters, rather than one. So for example, in the placename ‘Bangor’, the ‘n’ and ‘g’ are two letters, and not the digraph ‘ng’.

So what? Well, if you’re trying to write the specification for a bilingual English / Welsh database with presentation in alphabetical order, and you want to do it properly, you’re going to have to write one very clever sorting routine.

In case the reason for my research is of any use to anyone else: 2002′s UK government web guidelines say to use ‘Character set Latin 1′ (ie ISO-8859-1) for Welsh, even though this doesn’t contain the required w-circumflex and y-circumflex characters… but this may have been because the all-encompassing UTF-8 was only properly adopted as an internet standard in late 2003. The BBC, National Assembly for Wales and Welsh nationalist political party Plaid (formerly Plaid Cymru) all currently use ISO-8859-1.

UTF-8 is the choice of the Welsh Language Board – which seems like the strongest possible endorsement. It is also used by Welsh language TV channel S4C, plus the Welsh versions of Google and Wicipedia (not a typo). The missing characters also appear in ISO-8859-14, also known as ‘Latin 8′, but this is rarely used if ever.

Cameron’s (video) blogging case study

It’ll be worth keeping an eye on David Cameron’s (apparently) one-off blogging effort during a trip to India. The first posting is half-text, half-video. It’s also half joking-in-departures, half earnest-piece-to-camera. It’ll be an interesting case study to see which approaches win out.

Guido’s mob censorship makes the proper media

Somebody called ‘Bob’ left a comment on my post last night about the vandalism on Defra’s wiki, and it’s a brilliant point which deserves more prominence. Over to Bob:

Guido’s gang seem to forget that being a wiki, the content they helpfully amended had probably been written by non-Defra people who wanted to contribute to a debate.

By trying to attack Miliband and/or Defra, all they’ve achieved is an attack on the people who want to influence Government policy on the environment.

Effectively, they’ve tried to censor a forum for the discussion of a subject that affects us all. I don’t think they’ll have an impact on Defra’s approach to the wiki, but you can be sure that there will be some people who’ll’ve seen the wiki and been deterred by Guido’s fan’s comments. Not exactly a success for democracy, is it?

Couldn’t have put it better myself. Otherwise I would have.

Inevitably of course, this found its way into the proper media: this morning’s Times tries to turn it into a ‘humiliation for Cabinet minister’ story. I hardly think Miliband was ‘forced to creep back into his cyberhole’… it was a wiki, it has rollback functionality, this is the whole point.

Oh, and incidentally, a quick note to Jonathan Richards: this didn’t happen ‘a few hours after the site went live’… unless by ‘a few’ you mean ‘almost four hundred’. The wiki was launched three weeks ago.

There were also pieces on AP and AFP, making it a global story. Brilliant.

Guido’s gang trash the Defra wiki

I suppose it was too good to last. This morning Guido Fawkes reports on Defra’s wiki experiment (two weeks behind the times…) – and his acolytes decide to wreck the place. All very amusing, I’m sure. Have your Friday frolic, guys, then maybe we can continue trying to achieve something constructive.

This was always going to happen. I spoke to the guys at Defra as it was being launched, and they knew the risk they were taking on. But it’s exactly why wikis have a rollback function. If anybody dares turn this into a ‘government website gets hacked’ story… grr.