Straw calls Id cards a likely "debacle"

As you may or may not know, I’m not a fan of Jack Straw as I find him smarmy and wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him. However, according to The Register, Jack Straw understands the issues surrounding Blunkett’s ID cards. More accurately, I suspect he’s worked out the cost in terms of votes, but that’s good enough for me if we end up kicking the stupid idea out.

Leah's Party

We spent the weekend up with Jen & Tim and it was Leah’s 4th birthday party yesterday. We went to a place called “Smiles & Faces” which is a big room with a climbing frame/ball pit/slide/lots of fun place. Leah seemed to have a really good time, as did Jon.

Today, my mum and Jen cooked us a really nice Sunday lunch which went down a treat. The journey home wasn’t too good, we left at 3pm and got home at 7! Four hours to travel 130 miles!

Arnie

Does anyone else find it fascinating that Clinton was damned for having a consensual relationship with a woman who is not his wife and Arnie can be elected after having sexually harrassing many women?

Iraq goes GSM

According to The Register, the mobile networks in Iraq will be GSM. This is good as all the surrounding countries use GSM and having the US CDMA standard there would have have been a nightmare for the users.

Nice to see a sensible decision made for a change.

Nana & Sam

Nana(Jacky) & Sam are visiting us today mainly to see Jon. With a little bit of cunning, Jacky also brought round some boxes that Georgina was storing at her mum’s so we had to accept them. They’ve gone into the garage with all the other boxes. One day we will sort them all out!

We went out for Sunday lunch at the local Beefeater. It was quite a nice lunch with large portions, and reasonably cheap. Jon behaved himself very well too and a good time was had by all.

CMS System

I’m currently setting up another site separate to the-allens.net for the software I write. I thought that rather than coding all the pages, this time I’d use a content management system instead. The only criteria I imposed was that it must be free, not impose a “box” layout and produce a site that is “search engine friendly”. By this I mean that all pages are accessible using urls without a ? in them as Google and other search engines don’t spider pages with ? in them. After a bit of searching, I found Drupal and Xaraya. I’m giving Drupal a go first as it appears a more mature product, but we’ll see.

No Smoking Gun

David Kay, the head of the ISG has asked for more time to search for evidence of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Isn’t that what Hans Blicks asked for before we went to war?

The ISG has spent millions of US dollars and found next to nothing. They have found no weapons of mass destruction but have found some evidence that Iraq wanted to “resucitate” it’s wmd program.

Tony Blair and the Government told us that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. They did not say that Iraq may have them in the future; no, they said that they could be deployed within 45 minutes of the order to fire being given. You therefore have to draw the conclusion that Tony Blair and the Government was wrong when it told us this.

So who is to blame?

There are two choices: Tony Blair and the Government or the British Intelligence agencies. If we believe Tony Blair’s assertion that the Government didn’t “embellish” or “exaggerate” the intelligence reports, then our intelligence organisations should be investigated for incompetence and those responsible for the faulty reports should be fired.