What’s even more surprising is that the images of Sir Fred’s home are still available on Street View, unlike many images which have been removed at the request of homeowners or passers-by. (It was easy to find thanks to some newspapers which gave the name of his street, unlike the BBC and the police, which even gave the wrong area of Edinburgh for the address.)

Compare with photos in the media.

As much as I’m unhappy with the size of the pension Sir Fred is to receive, I can’t agree with this sort of criminal activity at all. I doubt the people who attacked his home are interested in economics. They are unlikely to be RBS shareholders or even disgruntled employees of the bank. Most likely, they are just thugs, using the news story as an excuse to commit vandalism. They might think they are outraged by top bankers’ remuneration, but as is so often the case with people who take “direct action”, they are actually far more of a problem for society than the people or organisations they attack. For a start, thanks to the vandals, even more taxpayers’ money will now be wasted providing police protection for Sir Fred and his homes. Even given Sir Fred’s much publicised income, I think the perpetrators should be made to pay for every penny of the damage, as is the only fit punishment for vandals. The sooner they are caught the better, otherwise how soon until they attack the wrong house – Google Street View to help them or not?

The slippery slope to booking fees started some years ago, when TheTrainLine introduced a charge for paying by credit card. This then increasaed from £1 to £1.50, £2, and is now an extortionate £2.50. The fee could be avoided by paying by debit card. The newest fees are £1 for having the tickets posted to you, or 50p if you choose to collect them from a “FastTicket” machine at a railway station. These latest fees can not be avoided, as you have to obtain the tickets somehow.

So what is the alternative? It is important to remember that it’s possible to buy any rail ticket from any outlet. You don’t have to buy the ticket from the station your journey starts from or from the same train operator, and you can also buy cheap, advance tickets in person. TheTrainLine’s claim that they can save customers £63.28 on an Edinburgh to London journey, for example, is quite misleading as they are comparing an advance purchase ticket with one bought on the day of travel. The cheaper ticket could be bought at your local station, assuming it was convenient to go there.

Of course, it’s not always convenient to go to the station to buy tickets. Even if it’s nearby, there may be long queues, or it might not be manned at the right times. The customer can also never be sure the person in the ticket office has explored all the ticket options to find the cheapest, which can be quite time consuming. Fortunately, most of the train operating companies operate their own ticketing websites. For example, I use the website of my local operator, First Great Western. Once again, remember that it’s possible to buy any ticket from any outlet. Just because you are using a particular train operator’s website doesn’t mean the journey has to involve travel on that operator’s trains.

Most of the operators’ websites are actually provided by none other than TheTrainLine. Anyone used to the latter would feel quite at home. The layout and interface are practically identical, it’s just the colours and branding that are different. It even appears as TheTrainLine on your credit card statement! However, unlike TheTrainLine’s own site, the train operators’ own sites don’t levy the extortionate additional charges and booking fees. At the time of writing, if you book a ticket with First Great Western, it is free to have the ticket delivered or to collect it from a FastTicket machine, and there is no credit card fee either! Therefore, it’s possible to save up to £3.50 just by using a site with different branding. In addition, TheTrainLine insists on selecting insurance for the journey by default, which the customer must remember to deselect. First Great Western leave the insurance option unselected so that the customer need only check the boxes if insurance is required.

According to Wikipedia, TheTrainLine accounts for 20% of all train tickets by value. It also runs the websites of 16 out of 20 of the train operating companies, most of which don’t charge additional fees. So next time you book a train ticket, please try the site of one of the train operators. You’ll save yourself some money, and hopefully reduce the market share of TheTrainLine.com, whose position as the largest retailer of tickets has clearly made it complacent, to the extent that it believes it can rip off its customers without them going elsewhere for their tickets.

But what do Royal Mail recommend if, after choosing your destination, the deadline for that country has already passed? Under the heading What to do next it suggests: “Try a different service or destination”.

How useful! Instead of sending the parcel to the person it is intended for, I could send it to someone random in a completely different country! I would never have thought of that.

And as for “a different service”, if it’s too late to send by Airmail, the only other option to most international destinations is Surface Mail. Perhaps Royal Mail’s intention is to ensure the gifts arrive in time for next Christmas.

Yesterday evening, I was reading an article, ‘Half’ unaware of smoke ban date, which claimed that many people are confused about the long overdue ban on smoking in public places in England. To the right-hand side of the article, under the heading “Across the UK”, the first link was to an article from 2005, How UK smoke bans differ. At the time the article was written, the government was considering a less comprehensive ban in England which would still have allowed smoking in “pubs not serving food” and in private members’ clubs, despite the fact that the other parts of the UK would have total bans. Fortunately, this proposal, which would have seen England becoming the dirty man of Europe where smoking is concerned, was voted out by parliament, so from 1 July, England will have a comprehensive ban as in the rest of the UK.

Unfortunately, because of all the confusion and coverage of the original proposals, many people still think that smoking will be allowed in some pubs and clubs. I thought the BBC’s inclusion of a prominent link to an outdated article unhelpful, as it would only add to people’s misunderstanding. I sent a quick note to the BBC website, and was half surprised to find today that they had removed the link as I’d suggested.

BBC error or revealing quotation?

On a previous occasion, I contacted the BBC website after it published an article on concerns about wi-fi networks in schools. It quotes a teacher, Michael Bevington, who claims that exposure to wi-fi in the school where he works has made him sensitive to other sources of electro-magnetic radiation. The story listed satellite navigation systems as one of the things that affected him.

Now, as I’ve discussed before, traditional satnav systems do not transmit anything, they simply pick up the weak signals from satellites and use these to calculate the current position. If anyone claimed “radiation” from a satnav made them ill, that would only show the the ill effects were all in the mind.

I left a comment to this effect via the form at the end of the article. That was back in December. I only remembered about it a couple of weeks ago, when the technology commentator, Bill Thompson, wrote an article, also on the BBC website, about how fears over wi-fi lack credibility. This prompted me to go back and find the earlier article. I discovered that there was no mention of satellite navigation. Was it the wrong article, or had I imagined the whole thing? Luckily, back in December someone had copied the article into a post on a discussion forum, so the original version is preserved. It clearly reads:

Like a number of other schools, Stowe has turned off some of its transmitters. But Mr Bevington says he is now sensitive to other sources of electro-magnetic radiation, such as phones, microwaves, fluorescent lights and in-car satellite navigation. He also has problems with city centre hotspots and his neighbours’ wi-fi networks.

The BBC moderators did not approve my comment for inclusion at the end of the article, but they did remove any mention of satellite navigation. (Of course, as usual, they didn’t thank me or notify me.) This leaves me to wonder whether Mr Bevington did mention satnav systems, or whether this was added by the BBC themselves – something that makes a big difference to the credibility of Mr Bevington’s claims (if only the difference between unlikely and totally ridiculous). But it’s something that’s likely only ever to be known by himself and the BBC’s editors.

I occasionally post on a forum called SkyscraperCity, and yesterday I noticed the posts were full of words replaced with strings of asterisks. The site appears to use a filter to remove obscene language, yet the words that had been removed included “city”, “street” and “tower”, all words that are used frequently on a site about architecture and high-rise buildings. I wondered whether hackers could have accessed the list of swear words, but soon found a reference to 1 April elsewhere on the forum. So I fell for the joke – or did I? It was only 31 March, and surely tradition dictates that the person playing the trick on the wrong day is the fool?

So I’m not going to include an April Fool of my own this year. Maybe next year I’ll relent, and post one with a disclaimer about the different timezones. In fact, you can now find out what I will post next year using a new search engine that I found recently, which shows you how websites will look in a year’s time – effectively the reverse of the popular Wayback Machine, which shows how websites looked in times gone by. Why not give it a try?

If any readers found any good April Fools this year, online or anywhere else, please leave a comment to tell me about them!

I won’t comment on the merits or otherwise of these particular sites. What struck me is that, while it is currently free to register with them, they both plan to charge in the near future: around £10 for studentswaps, and £14.99 for localmothers.

Now, these sites were both set up to help, by people who themselves required the service in the first place. Yet it seems that, rather than wanting to help others by providing a useful service, the founders wish to turn their websites into money-making enterprises.

I’m quite aware that having a website hosted costs money, and that the cost increases with traffic. But this could easily be offset by incorporating advertising on the pages, which only takes a few minutes to set up. As the number of visitors to the site increases, so does the pay-per-click revenue. You don’t need many paying members at £15 a time to pay for web hosting, so that can’t entirely be the motive behind introducing payment.

The trouble with requiring payment to join this sort of website is that it has a significant effect on the number of active members. So while on a free site it might be possible to find a selection of suitable rooms or willing babysitters, once payment is required the choice will be extremely limited, and quite possibly there will be no other local members at all. Worse still is when the site introduces two levels of membership, free and “premium”, with only the latter able actually to contact anyone. They advertise having thousands of members, but the number of active members is actually quite small, and one has to wade through hundreds of pages of people who will never pay money to the site before finding anyone who is contactable.

It’s important to remember, unlike paying for an “offline” service, these online services don’t actually do anything for you other than provide somewhere to post an advertisement. To find someone with whom you can do a swap, you have to do the searching for yourself. Nor are advertisers vetted in any way before joining the site – in fact, most sites carry a disclaimer that they are used at the user’s own risk. In fact, this type of website would be entirely unnecessary if more people were a bit more savvy when it came to search engines. Anyone posting in their blog to say they are looking for a room in Leicester is within minutes included in Google Blog Search or Technorati. Then all the other person has to do is to search using suitable keywords, sort by date, and they find what they are looking for. Unfortunately, most people would never think to do this. If they are looking for a room swap, they think they have to use a room swapping site.

Ultimately, anyone setting up one of these services should think carefully before charging. After all, which are the most popular – and profitable – services? Google, Yahoo!, MySpace. The latter is a site that’s been in the news a lot lately. It has millions of users, and last year was bought by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation for $580m. The significant thing is that all of these websites offer almost all their services for free, supported by advertising. If the services had to be paid for, the sites would not be nearly as big or successful. Unfortunately, people are always going to look for ways to make money, and it’s to the loss of the whole community that specialised sites won’t reach their full potential because of charging for their services.

The system of postcodes in the UK is (almost?) unique as a postcode pinpoints a small number of addresses – usually a street, or part of a street (for example the odd numbers). Properties receiving a lot of mail will have their own postcode. So in theory, your letter will get through if you write just the postcode and house number, although this may make life difficult for the postman who will have to remember which street it is for.

Postcodes were introduced between 1959 and 1974. Before then, mail was addressed using a postal town and county name. The latter ensured addresses were fairly unambiguous, although there are still some instances of multiple towns in a county having the same name. Postcode areas are determined by distance from sorting offices and do not follow county boundaries at all – in fact, they also cross the boundaries between England, Wales and Scotland.

The format of a postcode is X[X]n  dXX, where X is a letter, n is a number 0–99 and d is a single digit 0–9. The code may begin with one or two letters. Some places (parts of London) use the format X[X]dX  dXX. Using letters of the alphabet in place of digits increases the number of postcodes available – an advantage over the zip codes used in many countries.

Postal areas

The first one or two letters represents the postal area. It is usually an abbreviation for the largest town or city in the area. For example, “B” for Birmingham or “LE” for Leicester. Usually the first letter of the code is the initial letter of the town, and the second letter (if there is one) is another letter in the name of the town. There are some exceptions. Central London uses points of the compass: E, EC, SW, SE, W, WC, N, NW. “L” is actually the code for Liverpool. There are also a number of other codes that don’t quite match the names of the towns:

AL

St Albans. Ignoring the “Saint”.

DG

Dumfries. This probably stands for the name of the council area, Dumfries and Galloway, but that wasn’t created until 1975. The authorities must have had the name in mind long before then. Interestingly, “DF” is unused.

FY

Blackpool. Actually stands for the nearby place, Fylde.

HP

Hemel Hempstead. Does it just stand for Hempstead? Why not “HH”, which is unused?

IG

Ilford. Why not “IL” or “IF”? Perhaps it’s to incorporate nearby Chigwell. Or perhaps they hit the same wrong typewriter key as for Dumfries.

SM

Sutton. Could be blamed on a typo if “SN” wasn’t taken by Swindon. Maybe they decided to go for an adjacent code, although “SU” is untaken.

SP

Salisbury. Perhaps “Salisbury Plain”?

TD

Berwick-Upon-Tweed. Or “Tweedside”.

TS

Middlesborough. Or “Teeside”.

Wikipedia has the full list of postal areas.

The remainder of the postcode

After the initial letter(s) comes a number representing the postal district. There can be up to 100 of these in a town as 0 is used. Often, 99 (and other high numbers) is used as the postcode for PO boxes.

After the postal district there is a space, which must be included for a correctly-formatted postcode. After the space are three characters which together represent the street, part of street, property or business.

The main post office in the town often has a postcode of the format XX1 1AA. One oddity is the postcode for Girobank, which was formerly part of the Post Office but is now owned by a commercial bank. This postcode is GIR 0AA – the equivalent of a personalised car number plate. It would be nice if the bank was located in Glasgow, but it isn’t.

There is lots more detail about postcodes at Wikipedia.

Finding a postcode or address

Royal Mail maintain a big database mapping postcodes to addresses. This is sold as a commercial product to companies, who use is as a quick way of entering addresses. If you’ve ever been asked for your house number and postcode, this is the reason.

There are several sites allowing the public to look up the postcode for an address or vice versa. They normally place a limit on the number of searches a user can make in a single day – obviously they don’t want companies using the database for free instead of paying for it! Royal Mail offer their own interface allowing 12 searches per day. But I prefer the service offered by AFD Software. Their interface allows more intelligent searches for addresses, will add the county name, and provides extra information about properties or businesses it finds. AFD allow 8 searches per day, so there’s 20 in total already…

Unfortunately, the address database isn’t perfect. I know at least one address where the entry in the database gives a misformatted street name. And because so many people use this instead of entering the address as given by the customer, most letters arrive with the address formatted wrongly.

That’s my brief introduction to postcodes. If you have any questions, comments, etc. please, as always, leave a comment.

Last week, the Chinese search engine Baidu launched its own wiki-based encyclopedia called Baike. Unlike Wikipedia – the free, collaborative encyclopedia available in many languages including Chinese – articles submitted to Baike do not appear immediately, but first have to be approved by anonymous editors. In addition, if a user attempts to search for a topic about which discussion is forbidden, the connection to the server is refused, and access to Baike is blocked for 10–15 minutes!

For example, try visiting Baike and searching for “democracy” (民主) or “Falun gong” (法轮功) – you can copy and paste the Chinese words from here if you don’t have the means to input them yourself. Not only will you receive no response, but you won’t be able to access the site again for a while. First-hand evidence of censorship.

Perhaps it’s understandable that a Chinese company has to follow the Communist Party line. It’s a bit more unfortunate that the likes of Google and Microsoft have chosen to do the same.

• Wikipedia article on Baidu Baike

This is the photo which they claim is of Leicester prison:

As anyone from Leicester will realise, the photo in fact shows Regent College! The true Leicester prison is indicated with the red circle in the following aerial shot (courtesy of multimap.com); Regent College can be seen in the bottom right corner:

I don’t know if the owner of the website is trying to say something about students at Regent College (or about the teachers for that matter)! Let’s hope the exam papers are more accuate than the revision website.

Today I looked at the overview of Great Britain, and immediately noticed that the newest high resolution areas, which appear a different shade of green and so stand out, follow the shape of county boundaries. In northern England is West Yorkshire, South Yorkshire and Greater Manchester; in the east is Cambridgeshire; and to the south is Berkshire. In Wales, all of the unitary authorities of south Wales are covered with the exception of Monmouthshire; and let’s not forget the tiny County of Bristol across the Severn. It also appears that the West Midlands, Buckinghamshire and Surrey are currently being worked on, maybe from a different set of photos.

Compare the following images and you’ll see what I mean:

You can also view a map with the names of the counties. In Scotland, the cities of Glasgow, Aberdeen and Dundee, as well as Renfrewshire, have received the same treatment.

The high resolution photos are not just the approximate areas of the counties, but follow the boundaries exactly. So what does this mean? Surely if they were satellite photos, presumably from Google’s American supplier, the detailed patches would be square, or at best follow geographical features. The fact that they follow the shape of administrative areas makes me think these images probably come from a UK-based source. And most significantly, they are likely to be taken from an aircraft as the irregularly-shaped edges are quite different to the long, square strips that came from the satellites.

It’ll be interesting to see which counties they cover next. In the meantime, if you want to find somewhere in the areas I mentioned, you will be able to zoom right in.