Thank you very much for your recent letter to me with regard to your concerns about the Government's intention to introduce some form of ID card system in the UK in the future.
May I first of all apologise for the delay in my response to you but this is due to a heavy caseload coupled with the seasonal holidays.
I very much share your concerns and scepticism about the likely efficacy of such a system and would advise you that at the current time if this matter comes before the House of Commons I think that it would be extremely unlikely that I would support it.
If you would like to discuss this mater [sic] in more detail could I suggest that you contact my office and we can arrange a mutually convenient time to meet.
Thank you once again for taking the time to write to me and I look forward to meeting with you in the very near future.
I'm working three jobs at the moment, building networks and making money. It's hard work, I've milestones on different projects interleaved on a daily basis. It was OK at first, but now I'm missing the deadlines. I knew when I took the work on that it would be a fairly serious endeavour but felt it was within my grasp, and worth the effort. What I've discovered in the last week is that while that's probably true, the stress levels are pretty great and there almost more than I can deal with.
I'm working every day and night. I have allowed myself R+R, but only a few hours playing Gamecube here and there. I'm going stir crazy in the flat not really seeing anyone and just being chained to my computer. If I do get away I can't relax because the next deadline is always in the back of my mind - I'm constantly questioning my right to be relaxing. I went to the cinema the other day. As the credits rolled I suddenly realised that I had to go straight back to the work and I just started crying.
I'm doing it to myself to a certain extent, biting off more than I can chew, but I've also been trying to use this marathon effort as a stick to beat my fellow directors with, which has worked to some extent. Our intentions are really beginning to look like an intractable problem. The more we think about the company and the market we want to address, the more work there is to do. The more I get pissed off with the work, the more I feel that our goals are out of reach. It's really easy to get excited about stuff, but I find that excitement more and more wearing. How can we hope to achieve these things when it takes everything I've got just to pay a salary that doesn't cover my monthly costs?
I know the company needs to grow. It's ideas are too big for three people. But we have no money for these other people. We burned through our own savings learning valuable lessons, but now we're running on empty.
4:16, Thursday December 30th, 2004 • feeling relaxed • no comments
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.
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.
