The devil has no power over a drunkard
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Police local crime maps are knocked offline
THE COPPERS local crime stats websites have fallen over under the strain of people checking to see how bad their neighbourhood is.
The websites, which launched today, were supposed to inform local citizens about what is going on in their areas, including what crimes had been committed and how they were being investigated. That was the promise, anyway.
Of course this sort of ghoulish voyeurism has been popular in the UK ever since we used to stand around in groups watching criminals being hanged, so it should have come as no surprise that such websites would be popular amongst Internet users and people who should be working and not worrying that their house might be being burgled.
Apparently it is a surprise, though, to someone at the Home Office, or whoever it was that was in charge of the program, as they may not have done much load testing in the runup to launch.
We heard about the service early this morning and of course checked the local listings, however as early as 11:00am the website was spinning and showing us not much more than the search box and the postcode we had typed into it.
This means that, as far we know, without opening our front doors or turning on the television, World War III could be taking place in our local neighborhood.
The reality is far removed from what the Home Office promised earlier when it said that "a quick post code search" was all that was necessary. We introduced a local dog, who fits seven years into one of our human ones, to the webpage, and even our local dog thought that the load time when we searched on our post code was excessively long, as he lost interest and started licking himself.
Since then the Home Office has tweeted that despite the slow progress we should cancel all other plans and just wait for its virtual crime map to arise dripping from the swamp of bureaucracy into life.
"Hugely popular #streetlevel crime maps getting 75,000 hits per minute so you might experience delays. Keep trying," it tweeted some five hours ago.
Any rumours that coppers in the metropolitan area are investigating the brazen theft of a large number of government web servers are unfounded. µ
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It still amazes me that the government are so blind they expect a new service like this not to be popular.
10 years ago, I would have accepted 'the site is overloaded. We didn't expect the response we got' excuses, maybe even 5 years ago.
But in this day and age, when CPU power and internet bandwidth is pence, there is absolutely no excuse.
It's like sending 5 soldiers to Iraq then wondering why they are all dead.
Load-balancing, numerous-sites, server farms, redundant systems are all terms which spring to mind. As well as, badly implemented, badly thought out and completely ignorant.
Hmm, thats sounds like every government policy for the last 20 years!
I heard about it early, and was awake at 6am, so I was able to try it before it was flooded by the unwashed masses.
It was pretty quick with just me playing with it. Quite interesting too, although it did leave more questions than it answered... My area is pretty quiet and "boring", but I discovered some "Anti social behaviour" just round the corner from me, and now I want to know why this wasn't reported to me by the curtain twitcher network!
I didn't have a chance to see if there was any other data apart from "December 2010" available, it would be nice to be able to "trend" the data.
Oh well, I applied for a developer API key, so hopefully when they've stopped running about screaming "oh f*ck it's crashed, f*ck I told you an Access DB wasn't up to the job, f*ck f*ck!", they might get round to sending it to me and I can have a proper play.
"Any rumours that coppers in the metropolitan area are investigating the brazen theft of a large number of government web servers are unfounded."
Superb!