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Has anyone tried to do a GDPR request yet to either see what data they actually hold, or to test the right to erasure?


Actually good question, I would like to know how these requests are handled post Brexit. Do A.13 GDPR requests still have to be honoured by the UK up to the Brexit date forever?


Until it is amended or repealed, all European law is brought into UK law through the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018. (Formerly, it was brought in through the European Communities Act.)

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2018/16/crossheading/ret...


GDPR is still in force until the end of the transition period (I think Dec 31). What will change after then, who knows? I don't think I've seen anything coherent on any front from the government at this point.


The Data Protection Act 2018 essentially copies the gdpr into UK law, tweaks the corners where allowed under gdpr and adds afew other things.


This is the case for many EU laws - depending on the area [0], laws agreed upon in Brussels don't actually mean anything on their own, but member countries are required to write them into their own law. After Brexit happens such laws will still apply, as they have been written into UK law.

[0] https://ec.europa.eu/info/about-european-commission/what-eur...


It will require parliament to actually enact a law to cancel GDPR in order for it to change.


I'm fond of "A Fire Upon the Deep" by Vernor Vinge, and its kind of prequel "A Deepness in the Sky", they both contain some great ideas and I love the fact they have some very alien aliens!

Oh and if you haven't read any Douglas Adams "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" is fantastic


Seconding "A Fire Upon the Deep": a fast-paced, high-stakes action adventure in a zany, 5th Element-esque space opera universe. Explores the idea of strong AI in a unique and interesting way.


Love both of these. Perhaps more so "A Deepness in the Sky", with its darker tone, very thoughtful programming-related remarks, and the reversed "alien invasion" concept.


I really like how Vinge addressed the Fermi paradox by permitting that the constants of physics may not be different in different parts of the galaxy.

The first chapter (via Audiobook) was one of the best first chapters I've ever read / listened to. I was totally hooked after that.


Just about to chime in about Vernor Vinge myself - awesome conceptuals and well written


His books are great, I loved both "fire upon deep" and a "deepness in the sky". It is unfortunate he inspired the Singularity movement which I find full of bullshit and religious overtones.


Hitchhiker's matches nicely what you look for


Working in a team where the senior engineer let me fail.

We were working on a fairly large new system and I had an idea about how I wanted to do something. We discussed the pros and cons and afterwards he sat down and said to me "If you do it like this you'll have problems when you want to refactor it in the future, but if you want to do it that way go ahead". I went ahead and did it my way, he was exactly right and I learnt a very valuable lesson in application design, architecture, and how to lead people in the future.

I like to think that now in all the teams I lead that failure is always an option.


We use a few languages in our apps but for the ruby apps we use rerun in our docker-compose files (https://github.com/alexch/rerun) like so:

`rerun --background -- "foreman start"`

It is super simple and works well for us


There is already a way of doing this using the URL like: https://github.com/jamesRaybould/go-mssqldb/issues/new?body=...

You can then add it as a simple href to the readme.md.

It also means that you can have multiple templates depending on what a user wants to do, just by having multiple links and changing the content of the `body` parameter.

Simplest way to get going on this is to use http://urldecode.org to write the markdown you want and then hit the encode button, take the result and add it after `body=`

We also use it to auto-assign labels using `labels=` in the URL


Do you get many issues that don't use your template because people go to /issues and click the new issue button? When I create an issue with a project, I typically don't a link in readme.md.


You could combine it with the new feature and put a warning message into the default box saying to click one of the links in the README in order to get an issue through.


That is just... Why? That's such a UX failure I'm not entirely convinced you wreent being sarcastic.


But why...


Admittedly we use it on private repos so we haven't seen an issue with it, but there isn't anything from stopping you putting the link in other places


It's not that the link isn't in the right place. It's that regular old users like me are familiar with the Issues -> New Issue workflow, and will continue to go right to that whenever we want to create an issue since it's a guaranteed way to create an issue.


Doesn't this inadvertently give users access to something they might not otherwise have? That is, the ability to add labels on issues. Might not really be a security concern, but not really desirable behaviour either.


I don't think so, it seems like its just a link to what you can see within the UI anyway and simply pre selects it for you. But I am by no means an expert on it and it is pretty simple to experiment with if you want to give it a try


People who aren't owners can't normally add labels.


They presumably still can't via the URL.


Nice! Is this documented anywhere?


https://developer.github.com/v3/issues/#create-an-issue gives a bit of list of things that can be set, when using it as a link title isn't required. I can't for the life of me remember where I first saw it so I am pretty sure someone else deserves credit!


We are looking at using Docker to help make our dev environments a little bit more sane. We deploy to Heroku so we use the Heroku docker image to give us (what is hopefully) as close to production environment in dev as possible. I have got docker working in a proof of concept project but the performance on OSX when using volumes, so you can actually dev on it, pretty terrible.


I guess this would be the docker image in question? https://registry.hub.docker.com/u/microsoft/aspnet/


Yes, the tutorial came out before the image. This official image uses the Dockerfile in the tutorial. (well, almost)


I love my fitbit and wear it pretty much religiously, it tracks how much I move in a day and how much I sleep, but 2 things irk me about it. It is constantly broadcasting my location via bluetooth LE. You have to have an internet connection to retrieve any data from it.

As a software dev I'd love to get my raw data out just to see what fun an interesting things I could do/see with it. When I have asked in the past they have turned me down flat saying that they don't provide access to the raw data because people could "figure out how we calculate our raw data and algorithms, so this data is all proprietary"


There is one open-source project that manages synchronizing a fitbit to their service. Apparently, one used to be able to get data from listening to this communication, but they now encrypt all data coming off of the device.

I got a Jawbone Up24 for my birthday, which seems to be a similar device. I'll see how easy or difficult it is to get data off of that. (I think it's designed to sync via bluetooth directly to a smartphone, which then syncs to their service, so there might be some more wiggle room on communicating to the device).


It looks like Jawbone has a reasonable-looking API [1]. Alternatively, you can set up Beeminder [2] to collect the data (or for Fitbit) for free and then use Beeminder's API [3].

[1]: https://jawbone.com/up/developer [2]: https://www.beeminder.com [2]: https://www.beeminder.com/api


Privacy concerns are one of the reasons I went for the Garmin Vivofit -- it only powers up the radio when you activate sync by holding the button (necessary to achieve the one year battery life).


Great point about the Bluetooth LE.. I've been doing some BLE investigations recently and one of my apps showed both my Fit Bit One and My Wife's. I've been thinking maybe I could use this to automate some stuff around the house.. ;-)

"Supposedly" it randomizes the BDADDR but it seems everytime I look it's the same for both devices.


> saying that they don't provide access to the raw data

This was exactly why I'm awaiting Misfit to fulfill on their promise to open up Shine's data. I will trade my fitbit in right away.


You can minute-resolution step counts through their Web API.

If you're interested in raw accelerometer data, why not just write an app that uses the accelerometer in your phone?


I've been using OSM with first Cloudmade and then Mapquest for an internal project at work and my experience is mixed.

The most notable difference in terms of quality that I have personally noticed is that the geocoding on the OSM side of things is of wildly variable. The Cloudmade v1 Geocoding API was simpler and returned better results that the Cloudmade v2 API, but the data returned in v1 had less detail that the data returned in v2.

Mapquest offer a licensed data geocode and an open data geocode. The licensed data geocode, as you would expect, returns better results than the open data geocode but still fell short of both the ease of use and accuracy of the v1 Cloudmade geocode.

The kicker in all of this is that Cloudmade recently changed the way they choose to do business. That meant that my internal application wouldn't generate enough hits to the the Cloudmade servers to continue to keep the account open. We were literally in a situation of wanting to throw a small chunk of money at Cloudmade but because we couldn't meet a seemingly arbitrary lower limit we couldn't, abandoned Cloudmade and moved everything across to Mapquest.

Also I'd just like to call out that Leaflet.js is a fantastic library to use and allows us to do everything we want to do to the maps with an absolute minimum of fuss. We are looking at adding internal floor plans to some of the maps and I managed to throw together a PoC in leaflet.js that is looking like it would easily support this with a minimum of fuss.


Surely its not about outsourcing a status page but just making sure that it is on completely different infrastructure?


Outsourcing allows you to isolate the status page from your human infrastructure. If your team makes a bad decision that leads to an outage then they can make the same bad decision about your status page if they are in charge of that as well. This provides a form of human fault tolerance.


I agree that insulating against human fault is always a good thing to do but at some point you must trust your team to do the right thing. In fact in using a 3rd party you are trusting that said 3rd party also has a form of human fault tolerance.

That said I cannot imagine even the most incompetent team making a change to the status page, which I would always host on completely separate infrastructure, at the same time as the rest of production infrastructure.


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