Paul Irish talks about tooling and the webapp development stack at the jQuery Oxford Conference 2012.

Private Eye‘s Signal Failures column is a constant reminder of everything that was good about British Rail.

Putting all ideological objections to privatisation to one side, the 1994 sell off of British Rail was inherently unworkable, and would inevitably result in the current fragmented and inefficient system.

Unbelievably, the real cost of the public rail subsidy is now higher than it ever was under British Rail: “In 1994, the total government support received by BR was £1,627m, (£2,168m in 2005 terms, adjusted by RPI), while in 2005, government support from all sources totalled £4,593m” (from Wikipedia).

Come back British Rail – all is forgiven!

Picture courtesy Queeky.

Jeremy Vine reports on how the BBC‘s graphics are put together for the live coverage of voting on 3 May 2012.

Yesterday I went on the May Day March from Clarkenwell Green to Trafalgar Square, accompanied by fellow BECTU members and the union banner.

Pictured above was the scene in Trafalgar Square at the conclusion of the march.

I went to a most interesting meeting of the Big Data London group, at the new Google Campus, on 23 April 2012.

The sessions covered:

• Ade Oshineye (pictured) gave an introduction to the knowledge graph [1.3MB PDF] (relevant links), with particular reference to schema.org. He also spoke of the historical move from the web of pages, to the web of data and now to the web of knowledge.
• Doug Cutting gave an introduction [844kB PDF] to the Avro data serialisation system.
• Tim Estes spoke on automating understanding of human data at scale [7.0MB PDF]. He argued against trying to map the world and in favour of human’s teaching computer systems, and said he took a Wittgenstein approach to his work.

Big data is obviously a big subject! This was the first time I’ve attended this group, and intend to go to further meetings to explore this fascinating subject.

I had my first couple of pints of Elbow‘s build a rocket boys! draught beer on Saturday (28 April 2012) at the Falcon in Clapham.

The bitter, brewed by Robinsons, proved to be a most excellent quaffable brew.

A nice touch was a CD being used as the basis of the beer pump clip.

Is this the first time a band have had a bitter specifically brewed for them?

To make things even better their website is powered by WordPress!

Plus a significant percentage of all profits raised by the sale of the beer will go to the Oxfam Famine Appeal.

Brilliant!

Seen playing Led Zepplin‘s Stairway to Heaven in Lecester Sqaure tube station last night (28 April 2012) is a member (sorry, can’t remember your name!) of Lost Gravity.

Behind the Lyric, just off King Street in Hammersmith W6 at 1852 on 21 April 2012.