Since talking to Mat about his future plans for Moblog I’ve been working on adding virtual-serving and componentised pages to InfoCMS. The former is there now and can be considered alpha. The latter still has a bit of a way to go, but with the latest version I can construct pages by pointing and clicking my way around.

So that’s cool. I’m a bit worried about the state of the code though. It’s looking a touch ugly, which is a greater concern because this is a framework that’s meant to make developing apps easier. If the code is unreadable, it will be noticeably less useful. Interestingly enough, I’ve been thinking that some of the spaghettification is due to using arrays as an all purpose record type, instead of creating any proper data types. PHP doesn’t really have types, so I’ve been thinking about what this stuff would look like in a statically-typed language. I’m not going to be rewriting this in Haskell or Ocaml any time soon, though I would really love to have a crack at it.

*short pause*

Crap, now I spent an hour building mod_caml, ocaml-mysql and deps. I’d love to have time to spend on this kind of thing, but I’ve got two large projects to deliver at the end of the month.

Anyway, InfoCMS is coming on. Night.

The ID card debate is on Monday, and Clarke intends to press on with Blunkett’s white elephant, so:

Dear Iain,

I am writing to you to urge you to speak out against the proposed national ID card scheme in Monday’s debate. ID cards do not stop terrorism. David Blunkett himself said “I accept that it is important that we do not pretend that an entitlement card would be an overwhelming factor in combating international terrorism.”[1] ID cards do not make society a safer place. According to police forces in this country and others, lack of identification is not the major problem in combating crime[2].

ID cards do cost a lot of money. The £5 to £7 (£420m over 60m people) quoted by the home office does not take into account many hidden costs. Michael Howard’s proposal in 1996 cost two to three times as much. Australia’s system doubled in price after the project was started, finally topping AUS$820[3] (£320m over 20m people). ID cards will increase the crisis caused by growing identity fraud[4]. No system is ever completely foolproof, the ID card introduces a single point of failure, instead of the distributed system we have currently.

As my representative in Government, please don’t burden me with extra expenditure and invasion of my privacy in the name of enhanced security by implementing a proposal that can not achieve that goal.

Thanks,

[Afternoon]

Let it be known formally in a Googlable place, that:

• Charlie has my copy of Blondie 24
• I have Ultraruby‘s copy of the Penguin Café Orchestra

That is all