Speak softly and carry a big stick

Two weeks ago: the parents outside a school in Cotham debating the best way to key-tattoo a car blocking pedestrian access by the school.

Last week: someone in Clifton gets their tyres let down for parking badly.

This week, opposite Clifton High, the Peugeot Y877TDL gets a polite telling off.

See that black car that looks like it is about to do a U-turn without indicating? It's actually parked in what appears to be the middle of a junction. It also appears to have been there long enough to get a cease-and-desist note

It says "Please refrain from obstructing the junction to worcester terrace. Kind regards. "

The actual question of whether this car is obstructing the junction is one of debate. It is almost close enough to the corner to block the lowered pavement, so it can consider itself acceptably parked. Yet the letter write felt differently, and felt strongly enough to drop them a note.

Not an abuse rant, not even public web site commentary. No, a pleasant little handwritten letter. But such a well written letter. The only people who write such polite and elegant notes are lawyers. There's so much implicit menace in the sentences that only a lawyer would know to put the please and kind in to take the edge of and to introduce ambiguity in the court case. Take refrain -legal speak for stop doing this and never do it again. Then there's "obstructing the junction". An unambiguous statement of what the author feels the car is up to. B accepting the letter the driver of Y877TDL it probably implicitly accepting that they have done exactly that. Then there's the closing "Kind Regards". Friendly, but with the threat that they are being watched. Yes, a lawyer of some sort wrote this. And have billed the driver a minimum of 1 hours labour and the serving fee for placing it on the windscreen. Subtle.

Datamining the school run

On some initial surveys, Clifton High appeared to be free of parents exploiting the school-keep-clear section. But it was just their school starts early, at 0830.

Here, on Oct 8, at 08:39, One car doing a dropoff in the defacto-dropoff-zone: WU56LUD

Here, on Oct 9, at 08:28, a car doing a dropoff in the defacto-dropoff-zone: WU56LUD

This car is are now, as they say, "in the database". Not some toy little local government database running on a ropy server in an undercooled attic. Not some secret central goverment server farm somewhere of car number plates -no, they are in a bigger database: the Web. In one of Google's datacentres.

Photos are uploaded to Picasa, running on the Google File System. That also hosts the blog, routing the click log back into GFS for Google Analytics to analyse the visitors, creating stats that get stored in BigTable. All words in the blog, including registration numbers get picked up in their PageRank scans, probably implemented as a big MapReduce job, with the results again stored in GFS and BigTable. Which is why, a few hours after this posting, a search for the word will not return "Your search - WU56LUD - did not match any documents.", as it does now, it will return this page -and any others we add later.

That's our database. A combination of photo, tags and text marks up all cars whose driving/parking skills are felt to be significantly entertaining to merit attention, and then, when the time comes to visit the particular schools, we just retrieve all entries tagged with that school, paste the photos into powerpoint, and we have the list of repeat offenders we expect them to deal with.

Which is why it is important to thank people for their contributions. That's the photographers, but also the subject. Thank them, after they've had their car/bus/van snapped, because without their actions, we wouldn't have anything interesting to write up, and the database would be that much less useful. And Google's BigTable would have less number plates in its columns.