Snow

I woke up this morning to find snow outside, a little more than a light dusting, a reasonable kind for making snowballs. The sky is now pleasantly clearing. This is quite unusual for us: while we are within a couple of hours' drive of various decent skiing in the Cairngorms, our village is at low altitude and near the Tay and appears to remain correspondingly temperate, so I am more used to seeing snow on the hills or mountains in the distance as I drive around, than finding it close at hand.

Everywhere we lived in the US got decent snow. In Boston our children were able to horizontally dig an enclosed snow tunnel in the front yard. If we really wanted plenty of snow here then probably just an hour's drive north would quite suffice. I can see the appeal of living somewhere like Arizona where I might ride a motorcycle year-round instead, which would be rather cheaper indeed, but now I have a family I try to make some effort to actually remain alive.

Police Scotland call centers

Yesterday morning on BBC Radio Scotland they were talking to somebody from the police. They have joined the local forces into one national force for Scotland and are closing the regional call centers, with some call-handling mess-ups along the way. I was curious about the mention of their gazetteer system and I wonder how well it does replace staff with local knowledge: for example, on my commute I am typically held up in traffic approaching the Swallow Roundabout, so-named locally because the Swallow Hotel used to be near it years ago, now I think it's a Hilton, but Google Maps doesn't appear to mention the roundabout's name, nor is there a sign there. Mind you, I'm not sure anybody expects actual police to be close at hand when unexpectedly required anyway.

It was a rather weaselly interview. For instance, on the question of how many of the investigation's recommendations they've now implemented after the previous mess-ups, the best answer was just that they're working hard on those and more. And, in answering why the call center closures are necessary, the guy explained about how the local forces did things differently but the single force needs them done with consistent procedures: the question of why they can't follow the same procedures in different centers didn't seem to be considered.

I think that they also mentioned a non-emergency 101 number for calling the police, as if everybody already knows it. I think that I have heard it mentioned before but however it is advertised doesn't seem to reach me anywhere near as well as all the posters and whatnot about 999 used to years ago. I should find out about these other numbers: I can't even remember the NHS one and I was looking around the doctors' waiting room just recently.

Text chat at work

At work we usually chat internally via XMPP when by text; videochat is by Zoom.us. Some of the Mac users have had trouble with their client, Adium, and it is apparently not much maintained, so we have been trying out Slack. As with Zoom.us, it appears to be a proprietary client and protocol. I rather prefer being able to rely on open protocols^* and have my choice of open-source clients^† and, while Slack's client offers all manner of pinning and emoji and other stuff that for some is a delight, personally I was relieved to find that Slack offer what appears to be quite usable IRC and XMPP gateways. I have limited screen real-estate and want to watch chat in various kinds of channel so being able to use Slack and other things without needing multiple clients is welcome.

This has caused me to rediscover irssi. I reasoned that the IRC people have learned plenty about how to write a client that allows efficient management of servers and channels, and sure enough it's largely been a delight to use. I'm generally more a fan of text-based tools anyway rather than clicky GUIs. The configuration file is thought through well and I now have it attaching to Google (I have an account for work, we use Google Drive, etc.), freenode (I am mtbc on our #ome IRC channel), our Computional Biology division's XMPP, and Slack's XMPP gateway. Really, the only wrinkle so far is the lack of convenient XMPP support for Cygwin's packaging of irssi, but I try to avoid Microsoft Windows anyway: I've installed Debian on my work laptop (under which the Zoom.us client has now progressed from segfaulting to doing nothing).

^*SIP/H.323 over NAT can be a pain, maybe IPv6 will help there, but WebRTC seems to already work well anyway.

^†I am irritated that I can't already do online banking in this manner. Too many services come bundled with the need to use their chosen web UI. And, worse, many web UIs seem now to want to imitate smartphone apps.

Update: We have moved on to non-Slack alternatives, and I suspect that we may try out Gitter, but I remain glad that Slack's client prompted me to switch everything to irssi.