Chat progress?

So the Information Technology Syndicate Technical Committe Meeting happened this afternoon. I prepared a handout which (in the absence of any guidelines about what it should contain) was basically a brain dump. I quoted Blaise Pascal - "I didn't have time to make it shorter" - which (surprisingly) got a chuckle from the attendees. Rather than going through it in detail I talked briefly about the motivation for the project and the reasons for choosing Jabber and the things that I hope will make it popular. There were a few questions, the most penetrating of which were about whether we'll provide any kind of role addresses (the answer being no, because it requires support from the protocol which isn't really there yet) and whether spam will be a problem (maybe in the future if Jabber becomes very popular, but not yet, and at least Jabber is resistent to spoofing). All in all a fairly easy ride.

So maybe I'll finally (after three months of faff) be allowed to make progress... Next job: finish racking the irritating bastards Wogan and Parky.

Millennium Post

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/connect/pip/dk7o2/

I just heard a pretty amazing programme about technology and the postal service. The thing that struck me was the way they have mechanized bulk sorting of letters. There are 73 major sorting centres in Britain which between them have 200-300 letter sorting machines, which do the obvious jobs of working out the letter's orientation and photographing it for OCR. (Really fast - 30,000 items per hour per machine.) What surprised me is that the OCR is not done on site, but instead the photos are transmitted over the post office's data network to a single centralized data centre which contains all the clever computers. Of course they aren't so clever that they can deal with all letters, so - second surprise - unrecognized letters are handled by sending the images to offices full of people who type in post codes all day.

No significant sorting intelligence is on the same site as the sorting machines.

Hmm, perhaps this is the manufacturer of the machines: http://www.abprecision.co.uk/businessunits/hsp/postalservices.htm

And perhaps this is a press release about the data centres: http://www.prnewswire.co.uk/cgi/news/release?id=59114