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LCD Screens Ruled Hazardous Waste By Environment Agency

The Environment Agency has now ruled that LCD screens contain hazardous components, which will have an impact on businesses that have been using flat screens for some time and may now be considering replacing them. The liquid crystal substances themselves are not hazardous, but the back lighting fluorescent tubes are, as they contain mercury.

According to the Environment Agency website (which will not be winning any awards for accessibility or functionality in the near future):

On the evidence we currently have, all electrical equipment containing cathode ray tubes and most LCD televisions should be classified as hazardous once they have been designated waste. Waste Plasma displays and televisions do not appear to contain hazardous components and at the present time we do not consider these hazardous.

If the hazardous components referenced above are removed from the waste electric or electronic equipment, and there are no other hazardous components present, the equipment will not be classified as hazardous.

For more informationm on the subject, see the Hazardous Waste Links below:
Environment Agency Website
Environment Agency PDF

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The Spending Challenge Featured Blog

The featured WordPress blog this week is actually a UK government site called The Spending Challenge.

It uses a Theme in a directory called Coalitiondocdg, which may be a custom solution, with Contact Form 7 plugin by Takayuki Miyoshi to capture your feedback. It also uses Recent Posts with Excerpts plugin by Stephanie Leary, which lists your most recent posts with excerpts, optionally limited to a category.

According to the home page, The Spending Challenge is your chance to shape the way the UK government works, and help us get more for less as we try to bring down the deficit. It seems to be open initially to people who work in the public sector, but after 8th July the process will be opened up to the wider public. It is easy to make a suggestion via the site, and the email address is optional, so there is a level of anonymity.

For what it is worth, my suggestion was to allow (or even ecourage) organisations to save money by using open source web applications like Apache, MySQL and WordPress on the national infrastructure to provide a low-cost generic platform for non-critical applications.

To visit the site and see an example of WordPress in action in government click here to visit The Spending Challenge.

If you are interested in adding either of the plugins to your WordPress site, see the links below:

You can download the plugins from the links above, or alternatively, if you are in the Install Plugins section of your site Dashboard, search for Recent Posts with Excerpts or Contact Form 7, and the when you have found the right one, click on Install Now.

If you are interested in those plugins, you may also be interested in the Contact Form 7 Widget by Stephanie Wells which allows you to use Contact Form 7 Forms in your sidebars.

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Government Action Plan on Open Source Awry

A colleague recently invited me to comment on a proposal they have been reviewing before a major government department undertakes a technology update in the near future. I was reminded of our post back in April last year optimistically titled UK Government Encompasses Open Source. I wonder if I might have been breaking out the champagne bottles a little early, as it seems that little has changed in the glacial world of government IT thinking. Obviously my colleague, the government department involved and the suppliers involved will not be named for legal reasons.

It appears that it might take the closed world of government procurement and suppliers a few more decades before the radical concepts of open standards and best value impinge on the practices and closed thinking. After all, Open Source would mean we could use WordPress, PHP and MySQL on Apache for non critical applications such as Intranet sites, for example, or the Joomla portal engine and content management system.

However, the proposed technical solution in the, soon to be rolled out, upgrade is likely to exclude Open Source (presumably on grounds of security!) and any operating system except Microsoft Windows. I will not stoop to comment again on the browser version, as you can read previous musings in A Few More Nails in the Coffin of IE6

In a touch of spookiness reminiscent of the best spy movies, since starting this post, the source material has disappeared from the Cabinet Office web site! At the start of writing it was at www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/cio/transformational_government/open_source.aspx, but the link now returns a Page/Document not found! It is not just us who are pointing to the missing link, as writetoreply.org also carry the broken link at writetoreply.org/ukgovoss/, along with some of the details.

For those who did not dig into the content of the paper before it disappeared, the document outlined the expected expansion in the use of Open Source and Open Standards, with the main action points as follows:

  1. Clarity in procurement
  2. Increasing capability within Government
  3. Reuse as a practical principle
  4. Maturity and sustainability
  5. Supplier Challenge
  6. International examples and policies, and keeping up to date with developments
  7. Industry/Government joint working
  8. Open Standards
  9. Open Source techniques and reuse within Government, and appropriate release of code
  10. Communication, Consultation and Review

Government Action Plan on Open Source Awry
If only someone had a copy in their cache, we could read the whole thing. If you are linking to this post or referring to it or it’s source, please use the tag #ukgovOSS to enable interest in the subject to be tracked.

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TechCo Management Back From Hong Kong

TechCo Management are pleased to announce their return to UK from Hong Kong after crewing and supporting Success Resources, Asia’s largest seminar company, promoting the Platform Skills Intensive from Christopher Howard Training. While there we made lots of new contacts from Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand, while renewing friendships with crew from the USA.

While in the deep immersion environment, we were able to compare, contrast and debate the difference between Associative and Linear thinking, and what it might mean for the future of project management and the creative process. While Western culture ignores or marginalizes non-linear conclusions, Asian thinking encompasses and encourages Associative ideas in order to preserve harmony. For more on this topic, see Coaching and Facilitating Associative Thinking

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A Few More Nails in the Coffin of IE6

A number of well connected people have been asking about the article we wrote back in January about the persistent use of Internet Explorer version 6 (IE6) in Government circles (click here to read). This is particularly relevant as Microsoft are working on IE9, while some IT Suppliers, who can not be named for legal reasons, are busily planning to deploy whole new infrastructures including IE6.

A few bolder people in Government IT have asked us, off the record, for links and references to some of the criticism of IE6 on the web. Although they are clearly concerned about using an obsolete browser, they wisely do not want to raise their heads over the parapet! After very little searching, we have come up with the following links on the subject:

For a quick sample of IE6 Vulnerabilities check out:

It is also worth a visit to Ed Bott’s blog, to check out It’s time to stop using IE6, which contains the immortal line that
“Any IT professional who is still allowing IE6 to be used in a corporate setting is guilty of malpractice“.

Finally, for anyone in the development community who is interested in the direction Microsoft is going with the next browser release, or any senior manager wanting to make a strategic decision on which browser version their next infrastructure upgrade will deliver, take a look at the comment from Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager, Internet Explorer on The Windows Internet Explorer Weblog..

If you are wondering about the direction to take with your next browser release, and policy, dogma or contract clauses prevent you from considering Chrome, Firefox or Opera, then you should consider An Early Look At IE9 for Developers when making your decision. If you find that the detail there is incomprehensible, or that you can’t see the reason why it makes any difference, then maybe the questions you should really be asking yourself are: “Am I qualified to make such a decision?”, and “Where do I get my advice? “.

If you want partisan advice about your choice of browser, on which to build you next corporate infrastructure, you can click here to contact Bruce Thompson

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Mike Manisty on UK Government Radical Change

According to Mike Manisty, former CIO of the National Offender Management Service, and currently working for Gartner, “Reality in government IT is too often a triumph of procrastination and pedestrianisation over inspiration and aspiration!”

Mike has been an inspiration to TechCo management over many years, due to his unusual way of looking at the usual. He has been prepared to criticise the status quo, and challenge the excesses of government IT procurement and outsources contracts.

In a comment to a post on the new UK government IT Strategy, Mike goes on to say that “To achieve such a radical change will require the sacrifice of a number of sacred cows, including procurement policy, HR policy, security accreditation, sourcing contract overkill, project governance, budget delegation, just for starters.”

This is straight out of the TechCo recipe book, and we look forward to tackling the ingredient list; we love a challenge! We would particularly like to see procurement rules changed to allow smaller companies able to compete for IT work with a minimum of hassle. While we are at it, we would also like to see Agile concepts introduced in government application development – now that would be radical!

To read the full article, and Mike’s contribution click here to read Andrea DiMaio on the New UK IT Strategy

Mike Manisty was arguably the first person to undertake a solar-powered voyage upstream from Westminster to the navigable source of the Thames near Lechlade in Gloucestershire. He started on 24th June 2008 and completed the journey on 21st July 2008 at the pub near the Round House.

Click here for details of the Thames Solar Challenge by Mike Manisty
Mike is also on twitter, click here to follow

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Google to Drop Support for IE6

It appears that Google is about to Drop Support for IE6, which might be the final straw for the outdated browser.

On the Official Google Enterprise Blog, under the tile of Modern Browsers for Modern Applications there is a post that confirms what right minded people have been pressing for for a long time: IE 6 is on it’s way out. The entry posted by Rajen Sheth, Google Apps Senior Product Manager, starts with the compelling reason why IE6 must go:

The web has evolved in the last ten years, from simple text pages to rich, interactive applications including video and voice. Unfortunately, very old browsers cannot run many of these new features effectively. So to help ensure your business can use the latest, most advanced web apps, we encourage you to update your browsers as soon as possible.

Although IE6 has been a staple for millions of users in the past, it is time to move on and embrace the future with tabbed browsers like IE8, Firefox, Chrome and Opera. On behalf of web users and developers everywhere, we thank you, Google!

To read more about this subject see:

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Space Shuttle Lifts Off Amid Twitter Frenzy

Space Shuttle Atlantis sailed smoothly into orbit today with six astronauts and a full load of spare parts for the International Space Station (ISS). Watching from front-row seats were 100 Internet-savvy NASA fans cheering on the shuttle and churning out constant Twitter updates.

The tweeps, as they are called, represent 21 states plus the District of Columbia, as well as five countries, including Morocco and New Zealand. They traveled to the launch at their own expense, after NASA invited its Twitter followers to sign up online for the chance to see a space shuttle launch up close. The 100 slots and 50 backup positions filled in less than 20 minutes on the 16 October 2009.

With only six shuttle flights remaining and still no word from the White House on a future course for astronauts, NASA is tapping into social media such as Twitter, Facebook and the like to spread its message about the need to stay in space. Astronauts have been tweeting from Earth and orbit since spring, while NASA has already held a few tweetups.

NASA estimates the 100 have more than 150,000 Twitter followers. It’s a dream outreach program for a space agency looking to drum up support. Even the most staid NASA types see the benefit of reaching out to a younger, hipper crowd.

Meanwhile, Britain’s aspirations to become a spacefaring nation inched a little closer as thousands of microscopic worms were aboard Atlantis as it launched from Cape Canaveral for the mission to the international space station. To find out more on this story, see Worms from Bristol rubbish tip journey to the space station

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New York Court Orders Google to Reveal Blogger’s Identity

A New York state supreme court judge has ordered Google to reveal the name of an anonymous blogger who maligned Liskula Cohen, a New York fashion model. The case could restrict Americans’ ability to slag off enemies from behind a veil of Internet secrecy.

The Vogue cover girl has now confronted and forgiven the anonymous blogger who trashed her on a special Web site. Steven Wagner, the attorney for Cohen said the decision would send a message to bloggers about the limits of permissible Internet speech.

Anne Salisbury, a lawyer for the blogger, argued that the raunchy digs at the model were nothing more than “youthful, jocular, slangy” terms – like “sleazebag,” “slime” and “pimp” – that are protected by the courts.

You can read more about this at the following links:
Google ordered to reveal blogger’s identity
Google reveals blogger’s identity to model