Brew Monday

The team got together on Monday to join in on Brew Monday for us to have a catch up. Brew Monday, also known as Blue Monday, is an annual initiative in the United Kingdom that encourages people to connect with others over a cup of tea or coffee. It aims to combat loneliness and provide emotional support, especially during the winter months when feelings of isolation can be more pronounced.

The team had caught up on how we were doing, along with sharing our interests, such as films, TV shows, games and graphic novels. Along with some pictures of our pets.

Following our catch up, we are going to schedule a fortnightly drop in session for us to catch up. Along with setting up a Google Drive for us to share any (non-work) reading / watching / playing / doing stuff / animal care tips we’re recommending to each other.

Cockle fishing in the Dee Estuary

NRW regulates commercial cockle fishing in the Dee Estuary to ensure it’s carried out sustainably, so commercial fishers need a licence from us.

The application window opens every three years and lasts for three months. It opens up again on Monday.

Over the last couple of months, Sam’s worked with the cockle officer to create a new way for people to apply.

Applicants are asked for evidence of commercial fishing, in each year, for scrutiny and scoring by NRW. This evidence can sometimes reach back to 1995.

There are two different applicant types which posed some design challenges for the user journey. As it’s a hefty process for users, we used lots of question routing to move people through the process as quickly as possible.

It’s been really good to work on this with a fab SME who has such a great understanding of this user group - and was open to working in line with our content and publishing manual.

Content clinic

Some of us in the digital team attended a content clinic this week with the lovely Christine from Crocstar. Christine has worked with us before on the Woodlands and forest content.

The team had an opportunity to ask Christine for help with pieces of content they were struggling with, a bit like a content crit.

Our users are now asked to protect wildlife and to stop habitat destruction if they are planning to cut down trees. Phil shared a problem spreadsheet that he had been sent by the subject matter experts, this spreadsheet didn’t work very well as web content and isn’t accessible. Christine and the digital team offered some great advice. The spreadsheet is now going to be turned into an online check service that will help our users know when they can cut down trees throughout the year, without damaging wildlife or their habitats.

New approach to PDFs

Earlier this week, a few of us got together to review and implement our new process with adding PDFs onto the website.

That we will stop checking, advising and fixing PDFs before they are published. Instead, we’ll escalate the current non-compliance, and build on / promote guides and best practice.

We will audit any PDF that is going onto the website and list any failings and include recommendations. This should enable us to identify any top issues and provide targeted support for staff.

The work of our other team members:

  • Sophie has been working with the Diversity and Inclusion team to add a variety of new resources to the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Intranet page for NRW colleagues. The resources are focused on neurodiversity, but keep an eye out for more coming soon
  • James has been working on writing instructions to help users create a map of their felling area – a long-winded task because the map’s UX is so bad. He’s also been gathering analytics for our flood services to feed back to Welsh Government.
  • Toyah, who has recently joined the team, has managed to survive her week of induction meetings. “It’s been a great experience, the information sessions have helped me get a better grasp of what the organisation is like and how it operates. The networking session (which I’d slightly dreaded) turned out to be my favourite! Having a chance to meet people from all over the organisation and make some connections has been a real benefit”
  • Sam met with a lovely BJSS content designer about planned fixes for the broken hazardous waste returns spreadsheets. We’re still not sure what impact a new solution will have on how users access the service through the website, or whether we can use this opportunity to improve the user experience more generally (we know users had some issues with the process following our 2022 discovery work)
  • Owain had finished creating the new LookerStudio dashboards since the GA4 update was released

Shaun has been working on:

  • Amendments to installations environmental permit web content resulting from the latest wave of SRoC (strategic review of charging) changes.
  • Hydrogen production web content and application forms.
  • Changes to form WRI (water impoundment) requested by permitting.
  • Preliminary work on the Smart Survey installations environmental permit application form (mainly trying to bring together staff who are concerned with or already looking at this form).

Laura has been working on:

Fun fact

On 19 January 1986, Brain was created, and it is considered to be the first computer virus created.

Brain affects the PC by replacing the boot sector of a floppy disk with a copy of the virus. The real boot sector is moved to another sector and marked as bad. Infected disks usually have five kilobytes of bad sectors. The disk label is usually changed to ©Brain, and the following text can be seen in infected boot sectors:

Welcome to the Dungeon (c) 1986 Amjads (pvt) Ltd VIRUS_SHOE RECORD V9.0 Dedicated to the dynamic memories of millions of viruses who are no longer with us today - Thanks GOODNESS!!! BEWARE OF THE er..VIRUS : this program is catching program follows after these ….$#@%$@!!

There are many minor and major variations to that version of the text. The virus slows down the floppy disk drive and makes seven kilobytes of memory unavailable to DOS. Brain was written by Amjad Farooq Alvi, who at the time lived in Chah Miran, near Lahore Railway Station, in Lahore, Pakistan. The Alvi brothers told Time magazine they had written it to protect their medical software from illegal copying, and it was supposed to target copyright infringement only. The cryptic message “Welcome to the Dungeon”, a safeguard and reference to an early programming forum on Dungeon BBS, appeared after a year because the brothers licensed a beta version of the code. The brothers could not be contacted to receive the final release of this version of the program.

Brain lacks code for dealing with hard disk partitioning, and avoids infecting hard disks by checking the most significant bit of the BIOS drive number being accessed. Brain does not infect the disk if the bit is set, unlike other viruses at the time, which paid no attention to disk partitioning and consequently destroyed data stored on hard disks by treating them in the same way as floppy disks. Brain often went undetected, partially due to this deliberate non-destructiveness, especially when the user paid little to no attention to the low speed of floppy disk access.

The virus came complete with address and three phone numbers, and a message that told the user that their machine was infected and to call them for inoculation:

Welcome to the Dungeon © 1986 Amjads (pvt). BRAIN COMPUTER SERVICES 730 NIZAM

BLOCK ALLAMA IQBAL TOWN LAHORE-PAKISTAN PHONE: 430791,443248,280530. Beware of this VIRUS…. Contact us for vaccination…

This program was originally used to track a heart monitoring program for the IBM PC, and people were distributing illicit copies of the disks. This tracking program was supposed to stop and track illegal copies of the disk, however the program also sometimes used the last five kilobytes on an Apple floppy, making additional saves to the disk by other programs impossible.