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Now some news stories can get me mildly annoyed. In the end, though, I shake my head and move on. But every-so-often something comes along where the general public are so ridiculously stupid that it really, really winds me up – people who buy houses next to airports and then complain about the noise, that kind of thing/

Here’s one today…

Angry residents of a Buckinghamshire village blocked the driver of a Google Street View car when he started taking photographs of their homes.

Police were called to Broughton, near Milton Keynes, after residents staged the protest accusing Google of invading their privacy and “facilitating crime”.

I heard a little more about this on the news this morning. By “facilitating crime” they mean that they believe burglars are using Street View to plan their next target. Now, I’m no burglary expert but I would suggest 3 things…

1. Back gardens and alleyways are the best routes in and out. Street View only shows views from the road.
2. A burglar could get a much better view by simply driving up the road.
3. Why couldn’t a burglar use the overhead Google Maps service, which isn’t being criticised? That shows views all around a property.

Therefore I would conclude that only a really stupid burglar would use Street View for planning purposes.

So, why has Google caved in? Why, when the Police were called by the villagers did they not get into trouble for wasting Police time? By law, Google are doing nothing unlawful. Yet, by standing in the road blocking the car I would suggest the villagers in question probably are breaking at least one law.

I suspect they’ve been reading too much Daily Mail who refer to it as a ‘burglar’s charter’ and ‘Google spy cameras’.

It’s all a load of over-reaction by a bunch of NIMBYs with nothing better to do. Shameful.

Quidco is an excellent service for making money on your online purchases. The only thing I thought was missing was  a quick way to search for merchants from the Firefox search bar. But that’s now resolved!

I’ve now created a Quidco search plugin, available from the Mycroft Project website to download.

If you haven’t spotted already, I’m tinkering (again) with the blog layout.

In particular, I’m working on the design at the bottom of each post. This is also extending to the pages with, and for the first time, the ability to leave comments on them. And after writing a new plugin (coming soon!) for which I’ve learnt all about using custom fields, I’m using them to suppress adverts and comments on specific pages.

Oh, and I’ve done something (reasonably) clever with one my plugins. YARPP (Yet Another Related Posts Plugin) is good but the fixed number of recommendations per post was causing me problems – lots of related posts for a short entry was looking like overkill but, at the same time, large posts were looking a little, erm, lacking. However, the number can be overridden so I’ve updated the plugin call to vary this depending on the blog size. It’s not 100% accurate but, hey, it’s better than it was before.

Here’s the script…

$post_len=strlen($post->post_content);
if ($post_len<1000) {
    related_posts(array('limit'=>2));
} else {
    $max_posts=floor(($post_len+2000)/3000)+2;
    related_posts(array('limit'=>$max_posts));
}

As you can see, it’s quite simple. If the number of characters in the post if less than 1000 then it default to a maximum of 2 related posts. It then goes up by 1 at 1000 characters and then again every 3000 characters.