Bracknell Authors

Another budding author in Bracknell has just published a book.

In The Wool Cycle or The World Well Washed, Dominica Roberts takes a surreal look at the magical world we know as Bracknell.

The World Well Washed is set in and around Bracknell.

It takes in the Bracknell site used as the location of Harry Potter's muggle relations. This book has flying sheep, discussions on the exact type of chocolate that makes up the missing dark matter in the universe, recipes, footnotes and some truly horrible puns.

Readers especially recommended it if you like Terry Pratchett, Jasper Fforde or just giggling inanely at silly jokes.

In the Bracknell News, Mrs Robers is quoted as saying "I've been telling people silly stories about Bracknell for ages, things like the Warfield ghost bus, the way they're always digging the roads up 'for buried treasure' and a whole lot of silly stuff about the underworld under Bracknell.".

It s available from Amazon for £5.99, or it can be purchased from the author for £5 by calling 01344 422902

Don't forget that you can also buy my book (hint hint) from Amazon, and bookshops. See my website at www.coldsuspenders.com.

Best

The Bracknell Standard says that Priestwood has emerged as Bracknell’s best-loved area to live in.

I presume that means the whole area of Priestwod and Garth, or as it was Priestwood One and Two.

It is nice to know that we are in a good place!

The monks of Hurley Priory who were Lords of the Manor of Warfield (3rd place) in medieval times. would be pleased of the heritage they left. Perhaps we should thank the New Towns Commision for creating the open spaces that we have? Bracknell was designated as a New Town on 17 June in 1949. The first 50 houses in the New Town were completed here in 1950.

The original New Town was planned for 25,000 people; it was intended to occupy over 1,000 hectares of land on and around 'Old Bracknell' in the area now covered by Priestwood, Easthampstead, Bullbrook and Harman's Water.

Ancient eyesore

It dominatates Bracknell.

It dominates Priestwood and Garth.

The toothless hag of Winchester House.

More and more often now when I am out walking the dog I will see people standing staring, and somtimes what looks like pouting. They are looking at the skanky skyline.

BBC Berkshire says "It's awful, horrible, an eyesore and a mess. That is the verdict of Bracknell residents on the state of Winchester House building in Bracknell. Now Milton Land, owners of the former 3M building, have been ordered by the council to clean it up."

Residents questioned by BBC Berkshire reporter Sabi Phagura said they would prefer to see the building pulled down, blown up or turned it into a hospital.

Bracknell Forest Council say that:

The section 215 notice served on Miltonland Ltd, the owner of Winchester House, means that the building, which has been repeatedly vandalised and damaged by fire, will be made safe and brought up to a decent safe and presentable condition.

The owners of the building now have four months to carry out the improvements, which include:

*The removal of all broken glass;

*The boarding up of all broken windows with clean wood;

*The closure of all glazed openings for two storeys above the market;

*Repainting of fire damaged panels;

*Removal and painting over of graffiti from the exterior of the building;

*Blocking up of access where it has been vandalised on the ground floor;

*To finish the external face of the building.

We can only hope.

But maybe blowing it up would be much more satisfying?

A bit of Googling brings up BBC Bristol and Westmorland House.

Sounds familliar!

Comer Homes bought the plot in 1989 but has not been able to agree plans for its development with the city council.

Tracking the Hacking

The defence of human liberty can affect us all. The Extradition Act of 2003 was passed into law to fight the “war on terror” post 9/11. But one wonders how Gary McKinnon, who suffers from Asperger’s syndrome (a form of autism), can be described as a terrorist.

Lord Jones of Birmingham, a former Government minister has attacked Britain’s "lopsided" extradition arrangements with the United States. He has called on the Government to change the rules "the lopsided, biased extradition arrangements between the USA and the UK".

The Extradition Act 2003 requires the US only to show "reasonable suspicion" that the intended subject committed a crime before they can be removed from Britain, a lower threshold than British authorities must show in order to bring an American to trial.
The High Court is expected to rule on whether to grant judicial reviews of aspects of the Government's decision to extradite Gary McKinnon. The courts have seen details of numerous embarrassing intrusions by hackers into some of the US military's most sensitive systems.

A list of violated military agencies is detailed in a document published by Computer Weekly. The document demonstrates how vulnerable US military computer systems were to attack before and after 11 September 2001.

Mckinnon's lawyers used the CPS' 'Review Note 3' to support their argument in the High Court that US evidence against McKinnon is too weak to secure a prosecution in this country and unlikely even to uphold allegations against McKinnon in the US.

Mckinnon has Asperger's syndrome – a type of autism that makes him shy and prone to obsessive behaviour – his supporters are concerned that his condition would probably deteriorate were he to be taken away from his family. His condition means he would sometimes combines a compulsive need to follow any mission to its conclusion with an almost complete inability to envisage any negative outcome.

Leah Hardy writing in the Daily Mail says "As a mother and a voter, I feel nothing but loathing and contempt for those cowardly, two-faced Labour MPs who signed up to this newspaper's campaign for Gary McKinnon, then, faced with pressure from their own party, caved in and voted to sacrifice him - and any other UK citizen the U.S. happens to take a dislike to - for their own craven ambitions."

I was fascinated by the book "Born On A Blue Day". It gave an insight into the mind of a person with Asperger's.

It is very distressing to read how Gary McKinnon has been abandoned by his own country. Here we have yet another wrong decision by our current government.
I is also very interesting to read how relatively easy it has been to break into these supposed secure systems, which is perhaps another lesson that our government should pay attention to.

More - Computer Weekly

Wrapping up RSS and smashing atoms

This was an interesting exercise. I had to do several things that I had done before, but it was a bit like relearning some of it. Seems like the things I learnt 30 years ago stay in my memory better that thing from 30 days ago.

The thing is now created though, and I have a bracknellblog.com wrapper around the Blogger blog stuff. The wrapper picks up the things from blogger using RSS. I am using php rather than a script (must remember to call the files php not htm or html) to include the RSS stream. This meant remembering how the Wamp server worked, and where to put stuff in directories. All easy really one I remembered where I put it all.

WAMP includes Apache 2, MySQL, and PHP 5. Once installed, it just works. There was a fiddly bit with the RSS and rssinclude. I had not used that site before, but it did make it easy. I should probably now revist http://www.bracknellcomputers.com/virus.php and tweak that a bit. The RSS part there is a bit clunky.

It was interesting picking up a website template off the web. A lot of the positioning of stuff is done through Cascading Style Sheets CSS. I thing that I really should pay more attention to. It can make things look quite pretty, but is not always obvious in use. I always fell much happier handcoding HTML. I suppose it is the sort of way I feel better using Assembler to produce code instead of somthing like C++ as one can see exactly what the computer is doing, and where one is heading.

Thinking of Assembler, I must get around to visiting the National Computer Musem at Bletchley Park. They have a Elliott 905 computer there that it would be nice to see again.

The 920 was a millitary version.

Oh dear. A lot of techy type stuff here.

What a waste

Following on from an earlier post about Tracking Trash, and Watching Waste it was interesting to see the front page of the Times on Saturday.

Two British companies are being investigated over the discovery of 1,400 tonnes of hazardous waste from Britain at Brazilian ports.

The Times now says that Britain is preparing to take back more than 1,400 tonnes of toxic waste said to have been exported illegally to Brazil for recycling.

It make you wonder if recycling targets are real or not.

We just have to put our trust in contractors, and government schemes.

We learnt, earlier in the month, again from The Times that More than 2,800 tons of paper left out by householders for recycling is being dumped in landfill sites every year. Paper collected in the same containers as plastic bottles and metal cans is being contaminated by food and liquid waste, making it unusable for recycling.

A Bee on my Bonnet

We have loads of Bumble Bees going in and out of the garage.

They decided to live in there somewhere quite some time back.

We have to make sure that the back door is opened when we get up, so that the bees can get out easily. They could get out through the up-and-over door, but it's a bit more complicated.

I forgot the other morning, and a lone bee came in the house, presumably to get me to open the door. The door glass was covered in bees, all waiting to get out.

How, I wonder, are we to persuade them to live somewhere else next year?

According to Defra, up to £10 million is to be invested to help to identify the main threats to bees and other insect pollinators. Maybe it's because they get themselves locked in a garage all day?