• Question: Can I register my childs name in another language?
• Answer: You can register your childs name in any language you wish providing you use English characters.

I had already discovered that England and Scotland had no such restriction, so I was curious what the basis for it was in NI. Was it some sort of sectarian hold-over from a system that tried to discourage all those Irish names with their fadas and lenition? I could vaguely understand Chinese immigrants being forced to Anglicise their babies’ names, but would all the new Polish immigrants have to avoid all those ł’s and ś’s, or convert them to l and s, so that in generations to come there would be all sorts of pronunciation traps like with Menȝies?

Presumably some punctuation characters would be allowable, apostrophes and hyphens being fairly common, but what about others? Could someone have an ! or even an @ in their name?

So I emailed GRONI to find out.

At first they were mildly unhelpful, stating only: “The General Register Office will accomodate ‘accented’ character as long as the name registered is in english text. For example you asked if Irène would be acceptable. The General Register Office does accept such characters.”

So I asked about for a proper formal definition of what was acceptable or not, giving as a further example letters that might appear to be accented, but actually aren’t, like å, Ø, and š. Again the broader question was ignored and I was merely told that my examples “would all be ‘characters’ that the GRO could accommodate.”

Fearing a protracted game of Zendo, where I gave more and more elaborate examples and was left to puzzle out the rules, I gave up on the probing and asked whether it was a legal restriction (in which case, under what legislation), or purely a technical one in some system they use (in which case, an answer about what character set(s) or even Unicode code points would suffice).

After three further emails, all of which were completely ignored, I made a formal complaint. That was initially brushed aside, but eventually I got a response that said that, actually, names can be registered with “any Unicode character”, and although there is currently “a technical restriction on the signature field regarding Unicode characters”, this is “currently being investigated”.

So it seems things are better than I thought, and even 吳安娜 is allowable.

They still haven’t changed their FAQ though.

Generally the comments, whether on the original article, on reddit, on digg, or on various blogs that have also posted the story, appear to be completely idiotic. Almost everyone is up in arms that such a terrible thing could happen, with some even going as far as calling for the judge to be removed and the HOA president to be fired. If they’re lucky, that is. Some commentors seem to want either or both of them to be tarred and feathered instead.

Most seem to ignore the fact that the behaviour of dear Mr Prudente is much more imbicilic than any HOA rule. The facts are actually quite simple, if you can get past the over-sensational nature of most of the reporting. As part of the covenant for living where he does, Mr Prudente has a obligation to keep his lawn maintained in a certain manner. He entered into this agreement freely and has presumably complied with it for the last ten years, but has recently stopped doing so. He ignored a series of letters asking him to rectify this, so ended up being taken to court to enforce performance.

Rather than attending and pleading poverty, he chose to not even show up for the trial. In a civil matter the court process basically boils down to a simple formula: each side gets to make their case in turn, and the judge rules which is most persuasive. If you don’t bother to turn up, it’s taken as you not making any case at all, and the other side will pretty much always be more persuasive than you! So, unsurprisingly, he lost and was ordered to bring his garden into line within 30 days. A month later, having still not done so, he also had fees awarded against him, presumably after again not turning up to argue why they shouldn’t be.

In September, 3 months after his “Do this within 30 days” period had expired, having continued to completely ignore the order of the court, the judge found him in contempt. Judges generally don’t like being ignored. But the judge gave him a final chance, offering him another 30 days period to comply, and warning him of the consequences of continuing to just ignore it.

A month later, Mr Prudente discovered that judges aren’t joking when they tell you “Do this or go to jail.”

It’s really a simple system. When a court orders you to do something, you either comply or appeal. You don’t just stick your fingers in your ears and declare “Nah! Nah! I can’t hear you!”

Is the rule that requires homeowners to keep their grass maintained in a certain manner a stupid one? Possibly. I doubt I’d want to buy a house somewhere that has that sorts of requirement. But mostly that’s irrelevant. The “victim” here agreed to it. Should he go to jail for breaking it? Absolutely not. But he hasn’t. He’s gone to jail for repeatingly ignoring a court order. And should people go to jail for that? Absolutely.

I could blog every day about the insane laws that are being passed with alarming frequency in the US and UK, and rant about where the legal systems are running wild. But this isn’t one of those stories. It isn’t even close to one. This is simply: “Man sent to jail for continuing to refuse to do what a judge tells him.” Please find something better to be outraged about.

Whilst on such travels, I often take photos. My camera timestamps these photos, but doesn’t have a built in GPS.

So, I want something that takes the photos, and the GPS tracks, and writes the GPS information into each of the photographs.

So far, so good - there is all manner of software out there to do this.

However, this relies on the clocks in my GPS and camera being in sync, which isn’t always true (and even if I were to remember to synchronise them every time I go out that doesn’t help with old photos which are really badly out of sync, such as from my round-Australia drive where I was crossing timezones on a regular basis and would often forget to update the time on my camera for several days).

GPSPhotoLinker, which I normally use, is almost good enough here, but not quite. It allows me to adjust the time on all my photos by a specified amount. But then I need to work out what that amount should be, and that’s a decidedly non-trivial problem.

Generally I can pinpoint fairly accurately where at least one photograph was taken, but then I need to manually find that point in my GPS tracks to work out what time I was really there at - which is also non-trivial as if I’ve stopped to take a photograph, and my GPS is logging every second, I’ll have a variety of points all roughly around the point. And it’s even worse if I’ve been past that same point several times. GPS Visualizer is quite helpful here as it will plot a GPX file onto Google Earth with timestamps as waypoints, but it’s super slow, and really doesn’t like big GPX files (of the type you might get if you drive 300+km a day logging every second…)

So what I really want is something that will take the GPS track, and a set of a photographs, and plot the photos on a map for where it thinks they were taken. Then I should be able to take one or more of the photos and drag them to where they were actually taken, and the software will use that new information to adjust all its timings and replot all the other photos. Then, when I’m happy they all look like they’re in roughly the correct location, it can write the GPS info to the photos.

Does such a thing exist?

If not, how difficult would it be to even write a little utility that does the plotting of photos onto Google Maps and then lets me “try out” different scenarios simply by giving it an offset and having it move all the photos accordingly, until I get a good enough result by trial and error? It doesn’t sound like it would be too difficult, but there are too many components of it I don’t know anywhere near enough about to actually do it.

Anyone any thoughts or pointers?

“The Home Secretary’s record on private information … displays a reckless disregard for the privacy of other people’s confidential information, matched with a determination to keep Government data just as secret as he or the Government choose at any one time. The Labour party believes that the balance should be struck differently and that it is the individual who needs protection in two ways. First, private information relevant to him or her should be protected against the state, and secondly, information possessed by the state that might result in detriment to the individual should be made available to that individual.”

– Roy Hattersley, Data Protection Bill debate, House of Commons 1983

At first glance it seems like a stupid question: of course you have to have a name. But do you? And if so, from when?

You don’t get given a name the instant you’re born, so there’s obviously some length of time during which you’re entitled not to have one. My first thought was that it was to do with the birth being registered, which is controlled by the Births and Deaths Registration Act 1953. However, although all births must be registered within 42 days, there is no obligation to register a name at that time. At any time during the first 12 months the Registrar can add a name to the original record.

And although it might be possible to infer from this that you must therefore have to have a name by the end of your first year of life, it doesn’t actually say so. So if it’s a legal requirement it must come from somewhere else.

But where?

Suggestions welcome.

The first, from LoveFilm, opened: “Dear {CUSTOMER_INFO_FIRST_NAME}”.

The second, from Easyjet, greeted me: “NAME: [[Firstname]] [[Surname]]”.

Doesn’t anyone pay attention any more?

Instead I’m going to focus on one simple question that seems to have lots of people confused. More and more people are giving up on broadcast TV altogether, and buying or renting all their TV shows on DVD to watch. So, do they still need a licence?

TVL et al have been very successful in their misinformation campaigns here, as numerous people seem to think that the answer is “yes”.

The true answer is remarkably difficult to find, but is buried rather deeply on the BBC’s website in the section where they publish their responses to Freedom of Information queries. Of course these are published as PDFs to make it less likely anyone will stumble over the information, and, just to make it even more difficult, the PDFs are image scans, so Google etc can’t even index the underlying text.

So, as a public service, here are the steps to convincing yourself (or others) that you don’t need a license if you only use your TV to watch DVDs:

1. Visit http://www.bbc.co.uk/foi/docs/responses_tvlicence.shtml
2. Find response SR2006000623 - TV Licence Requirements
3. Download the PDF
4. Read the answer to question 2: “Is a TV licence required for a television that is used for playing DVDs and videos (i.e. not for receiving or recording broadcasts)?” [you may also need the context of answer 1: "A licence is not needed simply because a television receiver is owned"]

Next week: How to deflect accusations of shady behaviour by doing everything under a name of an entity that doesn’t really exist in any legal form…

That plan too fell by the wayside, mainly due to the overwhelming tiredness that seems to follow a “20,000km in 7 weeks” drive.

And so, with great sadness, I have finally accepted that I am unlikely to ever share in this forum the many delights of that trip. At some stage I might reawaken to the task with great enthusiasm, but for now I have resigned myself to merely extol the virtues of the most underappreciated Australian attraction. I did, of course, see many of the classic landmarks: Sydney Harbour, the Twelve Apostles, the Nullarbor, Cable Beach at sunset, Uluṟu, etc., but for the most part they were all rather underwhelming[1]. One sight, however, outclassed almost everything else. It was mentioned in none of my guidebooks. No Tourist Information Centre carried any leaflets singing its praises. None of the fellow travellers I met along the way recommended it as a “must see”. But, that it is.

Even getting there was an adventure. My quest was unexpectedly delayed by a day due to the entire town of Katherine losing power for three hours, preventing me from refuelling the van and necessitating another night’s stay before being able to set off on the hunt. After a 300km drive north, I knew I was close; but it appears on no signposts, and I had to drive right around the town twice before discovering it, seemingly abandoned, beside a filling station on a road out of town.

It has no information board, nor even a simple plaque to explaining its history. So I cannot share the “why”, or even the “how”. But I can, with complete sincerity, eulogise the finest of Australia’s “Big Things” - The Boxing Croc of Humpty Doo:

[1] Other than Uluṟu. It was all I could have expected and more besides.

My best airport experience of the trip, as previously reported was in Dunedin, but as it was for a domestic flight it doesn’t really count. My arrival in NZ was quite a mess, but that was mostly due to the boarding desk in Tonga checking me and my luggage the whole way through to Dunedin, even though they weren’t supposed to, as I needed to clear immigration and customs in Auckland first. And having a pot of hot coffee tipped over me by a flight attendant on the connecting flight didn’t help much either, but that’s not really an airport story…

My arrival in Samoa was probably the simplest process of anywhere: the immigration desk was staffed by a very friendly and welcoming woman who seemed positively enthusiastic to see everyone, and customs was a fairly simple “put your bags on this conveyer belt so we can x-ray them” affair. Unfortunately I associate that arrival with the subsequent no-show of the transportation that had been pre-arranged to take me to my accommodation, and the overly aggressive taxi-drivers who volunteered to take me there instead. I was finally rescued by the mini-bus for a neighbouring hotel who then got confused as to where I’d said I was staying proceeded to leave me at a completely different place. Thankfully I noticed that the sign outside it didn’t seem quite right before the driver disappeared.

So I suspect I’m left with Sydney as the best all-round arrival process. There everything flowed incredibly smoothly and quickly, and I was outside looking for a cab quicker than getting off a lot of domestic flights.

Oslo still remains my all-round favourite airport, though. There’s a sense of design and beauty about it that you just don’t see in most airports.

And I’m still a little bemused that Tallinn airport seems to have tripled in size since my departure. I was the second person off the plane, and was very glad I wasn’t the first, as I would have had no clue where to go if I hadn’t been able to just follow someone who had obviously been through it before. We arrived away at the far side of the airport where they punish incoming passengers from the UK and Ireland for being non-Schengen, and they don’t really seem to have managed to put up any signage yet for how to get to anywhere.

I expect that any of the side trips I take over the next few months will be much smoother, however, now that most of Europe is effectively borderless.

Recently I noticed that one of their test cases seemed to have a spurious minus sign in it. After confirming that I was correct in every spreadsheet app I had access to, I decided to be nice and report this to them.

But:

• There is no email address prominent in the document to send it to
• There is, however, a link in the PDF that takes you to a website that has a well-hidden link (that looks like text, but, for no obvious reason, isn’t, so that using Find in your browser doesn’t actually find it) to a feedback form.
• When you eventually find and follow the link, you are told: due to technical problems the public “Send a Comment” button on the formula subcommittee page currently DOES NOT WORK. We very much want to receive public comments — for now, please send comments to the formula subcommittee through the <OpenDocument TC comment form>.
• Upon following that link, you discover that the mention of such a comment form was a lie, and you actually need to subscribe to a mailing  list.
• But before you can even think of subscribing, first you need to download a PDF of a legal agreement (or, more accurately, a blank template of a legal agreement that isn’t even filled in for the right specification yet).
• Then you need to read and understand the 6000 word OASIS Intellectual Property Rights (”IPR”) Policy.
• Then, even if you were minded to sign such a document without first taking legal advice, you need to work out what to do with it. The “Guidelines for Mailing List” page implies that there’s a “Subscription Manager” tool that would presumably require you to submit the filled in legal document somehow, but that link is actually just a local link to <a href=”#subscribing”>, which simply takes you back up the page by two lines, as that’s the section that the link is already in.

Maybe there are more instructions in an auto-response email when you try to subscribe, but I don’t know, because I never got that far. Instead I emailed the committee chair - only to get a response (a real one, from a live person, not an auto-response) saying that paying any attention to my email without me going through the entire process would “potentially contaminate the work of the TC”.

Unsurprisingly I haven’t reported any of the 20+ errors I’ve found since.

This one just confused me on so many levels I couldn’t ignore it. At a purely grammatical level I was surprised that dogs kill “kiwi” and not “kiwis”. This called for some further research, whereupon I discovered that although Wiktionary only gives the “kiwis” form, the Wikipedia page on English plural has an interesting discursion on how words of Maori origin can be pluralised with or without an -s.

At a purely practical level, however, I’m completely confused as to what I, as a driver, am meant to do upon encountering this sign. It’s not like I’m travelling with a pack of dogs in the back of my car that I would otherwise have let loose at the first sign of a kiwi. And it can’t just be a simple warning that there may be dead kiwi(s) littering the highway, as it explicitly warns me to be cautious at night. Although the kiwi is generally a nocturnal creature, one would presume that a dead kiwi doesn’t burst into flames or disintegrate into a pile of dust once hit by direct sunlight, and thus a “be careful you don’t run over any dead kiwi” warning should apply at all hours.

So I’m left with the rather unsettling conclusion that I’m meant to be careful I don’t drive into the midst of a frenzied midnight kiwi killing spree, lest the bloodthirsty dogs, freshly exhilarated from the kill, turn on me next.

URLs for other people’s pictures welcomed so I can make at least some of these be links:

• Come And Taste Te Puke
• Merge Like a Zip
• We’ll take care of your hazardous waist
• Te Puke Holiday Park - now with backpackers!
• Pukeko crossing
• 448 Drink Drivers caught on our roads since 1 Nov 2007

Dunedin is simultaneously familiar and yet strangely foreign. A significant proportion of streets, districts, parks, shops, etc are named after places in Edinburgh, which is, after all, the very city’s namesake (the Burgh of Edin vs. the Dun of Edin). They still even drive on the left here (albeit with metric distances and speeds and a really crazy “give way to drivers turning against you” rule). But they’ve evolved their own crazy version of English, where, for example, TV ads bemoan the fact that you can buy cigarettes in the dairy, you wheel a trundler round the supermarket, you can win a trip to a bach of your dreams anywhere in the world, shops have large “EFTPOS” signs in their windows, and radio programmes can talk for an hour about students getting their “OE” in London or New York without ever once explaining what that actually is.

They also have their own version of the Australian habit of shortening everything to two syllables: it took me much too long to realise that “Coro Street” wasn’t just a local soap (and, as an aside, the UK population should pray that no-one at the BBC decides to fill that newly created Neighbours gap with Shortland Street…)

And that’s all before you deal with the Maori influence (and have to learn how to pronounce place names like Whangarei and Ngongotaha), and the variety of words that have leaked through into everyday language.

I’m also reliably informed that calling yourself “George Street Normal School” is perfectly acceptable in many countries, but to me it sounds like someone trying to find an even more innocuous sounding way of saying “Special School”.

And it’s not just the language. I’ve also never quite worked out why you get your Fish And Chips from a Chinese Takeaway, or why soft drinks come in 600ml containers, and it’s taken me a while to get used to my toaster being inside a cupboard. And you can always tell you’re in a small country when primetime TV has ads for fork lift trucks. (I really want to provide a link so that everyone can enjoy the ludicrous jingle of “There is nothing like a Crown / For picking it up / And putting it down” but I can’t find it anywhere. Help, please, anyone!)

But there are some things that are fantastic here. A small example is that they have a TV listings magazine for intelligent people, that actually thinks nothing of running a 5 page article on an interesting topic. It’s not quite the New Yorker, but it’s certainly no Heat.

A common pet peeve of mine is also neatly avoided here in that they have at least as many warnings about drowsy driving they do about drunk driving (which accounts for a much smaller number of deaths but is much easier to detect and thus gets all the attention in most countries). Although I can’t quite see the UK adopting the slogan “If you stop a drunk driver you’re a bloody legend” any time soon.

But by far my biggest delight here has been airline travel. It’s as if it’s still 1988. When I rang for a shuttle to take to me to the airport yesterday I was first surprised that they didn’t ask what time I wanted to be picked up, but only what time my flight was at. Then I assumed they’d misheard me as they said they’d pick me up approximately an hour after the time I would have expected to arrive at the airport. But, indeed, no. You can still turn up 20 minutes before your flight, show absolutely no ID anywhere in the whole process, stroll through to the business lounge without anyone checking you should be there or having encountered any security screening at all, and even carry the Starbucks you bought downtown right on to the plane. It’s a classic example of something that has been slowly taken away piece by piece in most parts of the world, and even though you know things have changed, you’ve forgotten just how much so until you’re confronted so starkly with how it used to be. I suspect it’s as much to do with the relative isolation of the country as a deliberate plan to avoid the terrible creep, but the longer they can keep it up the better!

It’s going to take a while for all the pieces to fall into place, not least because I’m using the opportunity to take February and March off to do a Grand Tour of Australia, but I’ve already begun the first phase:

• http://search.cpan.org/~tmtm/Spreadsheet-Engine

This is a forked version of the core calculation engine from SocialCalc 1.1.0. There is no UI, no file storage, nor any of the peripheral features that would be required for a full-blown spreadsheet application. But it does provide (pace a few small problems) all the functionality for performing spreadsheet calculations at the first level of the OpenFormula specification (approx. 110 functions). It’s unclear what’s going to be happening with the “open development” model of SocialCalc itself now that neither Casey nor I are working on it, but even if that continues with someone else at the helm a fork is almost certainly required due to conflicting requirements.

One of the significant restrictions that Dan imposed on the project was that idiomatic Perl code was problematic, as he wanted it to be easily translatable into other languages. This made it particularly difficult to refactor the code in the directions that I believe it needs to move to support the next phase of the project. Now, free from those constraints, I can tear the code apart and put it back together again in the ways that I please. And as I don’t have to support a UI or a particular storage format, this gives me even more freedom to make the engine much more flexible without worrying about backwards compatibility. This is particularly important as I don’t have the safety net of a test suite. We did have the beginnings of a test suite in the public SVN repository, but as that was never officially released, the licensing of it comes with somewhat of a question mark. So I’ve started from 0% coverage again, and begun to implement all the test cases provided in the OpenFormula spec. This has uncovered some interesting bugs (some of which were no doubt caused by the manner in which I extracted the engine from the already splintered SocialCalc code, but many of which I’ve confirmed are also present in SocialCalc), but rather than get bogged down in fixing those, I’m concentrating first on building sufficient coverage, then splitting out all the functions, and then fixing the bugs. That should take me to the end of January, at which point I depart Dunedin for Kiwi Foo and a week of touring the north island, before my 8 week journey around Australia.

Feel free to play with it in the meantime, but if you have any queries or hit any problems, don’t expect a response until April!

Unfortunately for you (but not, of course, for me), in Samoa the insects don’t carry many diseases. If they did, things could have turned out a whole lot worse as my blood appears to smell like the nectar of the gods. On the first morning in Apia, following an overnight night that was too short to get quite enough sleep, and after eventually arriving at my lodgings for the week (a feat made rather more difficult by the no-show of the pre-arranged shuttle they were meant to be sending), I tried to grab a few hours kip. Approximately 15 minutes after falling asleep I was awakened by some friendly staff knocking my door and asking if I wanted any breakfast. I shouted a “no thanks” through the door, and went to turn over to go back to sleep, but then realised that I couldn’t feel or move my right leg. I frantically raced through my mental list of insect bites to see which might cause this, but I was too tired and a little too panicked to get very far in that process. I managed to clamber out of bed and walk about the room a bit until gradually the feeling returned. Relieved, and hoping it wasn’t just a temporary recovery, I jumped straight back into bed and slept for another 4 hours. When I woke I had a large red lump on my leg, but could still move. Over the rest of the week that lump was joined by about 300 more, spread all over my arms, legs, hands, face, neck, and feet.

Your other opportunity in Samoa was some sort of suntroke related fatality. There only seemed to be two weather settings: aggressive thunderstorm or oppressive heat that burns every piece of exposed skin within 30 seconds. The sunburn I ended up with in Samoa was so bad that several weeks later, on the flight from Auckland to Dunedin, after a flight attendent threw hot coffee all over me, they thought they’d scalded my arms. But unless it causes skin cancer later in life (in which case you’ll need to check Marty’s small print very carefully), it was non-fatal.

Tonga came much closer, however. Everything went swimmingly until my penultimate day when I finally got around to going on an island tour. One of the stops on said tour was to explore some caves that seemed to be very popular with locals and tourists alive. Each of us was provided with a candle to light our way, apart from a German girl at the very rear who was given the only torch. The candles were almost entirely useless, but luckily I was right behind the tour guide and relied on keeping close enough behind him to match every step he took. This worked fine until we had to stop to wait for the others to catch up (who were also presumably not having much success with the candles and had to measure each step more carefully). Some locals were making their way back and needed to squeeze past us, so the guide asked me to step to the side to give them room. I made the mistake of assuming that he would only ask me to step aside if there was actually somewhere to step to - and promptly fell over the edge. I’m not entirely sure how he managed it, but the guide managed to grab my arm as I vanished and haul me back up onto the path. My candle seemed to take a very long time to hit whatever would have otherwise have broken my fall. Thankfully I manage to end up with little more than a couple of badly scraped fingers, two very large bruises just below each knee, and a noticeable limp for the next few hours.

From what I can tell New Zealand is significantly safer than most other places in this part of the world, so if I were allowed to enter, I’d be picking Australia right now. I hear a significant number of tourists die there each year…