Ireland loses entire airport amid new postcode chaos Ireland's Shannon Airport, up until a few days ago to be found in Shannon, County Clare, has seemingly up sticks and moved to County Limerick following the introduction of Ireland’s new postcode system, the Eircode. Other problems with the Eircode range from incorrect addresses to data protection concerns. Despite this, …
"When the limit is reached an alert is shown, although you may look up a further 15 searches the following day,” it continued.
So what's stopping someone at 15 searches? Can't you just log out and back in? If it's IP, change it. If it's your name, change that. If it's a cookie, delete it.
we "do not collect or store your name or address as part of this data", in its Code of Practice it admits that in some circumstances, Google Analytics "can capture the IP address of the user
It seems to me that if they don't collect or store any information then they wouldn't have an identity whereby to tell if it's the same person/computer making the query. Perhaps they're just not explaining themselves clearly.
This is true - however the vast amount of normal users will not be aware of how to get around it, and that's the main point.
The comparatively small number of users who DO know how to get around it won't bother them at all, and those who legitimately require a higher number of searches, such as businesses, will hardly notice the fee they charge as part of their normal cost of doing business.
During the startup period, people are going to be doing many searches in order to update their contact lists. As a result, for the first 3-6 months at the least there should be no limits, other than possibly some number per hour (15?) per IP address. That would discourage commercial interests from scooping up the entire database, which I also presume is available for some "reasonable" fee?
A postal address is a routing instruction in that it tells the Royal Mail HOW to get the item to you. It includes the concept of "Post Town", which is usually the nearest large town, but that may not necessarily be in the same county as your small town, village, or house. There are also many "county towns" where the name of the town is so similar to the name of the county, EG Oxford & Oxfordshire, that they add no useful information, they are just noise.
There are so many of these instances that Royal Mail do not use counties as part of the postal address as it is just confusing. Their Postcode Address Finder tools do not return county data. Third party tools based on Royal Mail PAF data may return county data because it can be useful for marketing, but it is still not required for a correct postal address.
Let's see if I remember this right from my CCNA course...
The UK postcode is sufficient for it to reach the local area delivery point where a source of authority for that locality will be able to deliver the packet to the intended recipient. Packets are bundled together and put onto high capacity trunk carriers until they reach an intermediary node which has more knowledge of local routes. Of course, the UK postcode system will eventually reach capacity and a new addressing system will have to be used. This new system will probably be able to assign a unique address to each destination node...
Hang on... I'm getting a bit mixed up here, aren't I?
The old postman was postman NAT, of course. He kept the service going years past its sell-by date, bless.
He'd put the packet in the holding stack and look up the local address on the table. 5% of packets were dropped from the table and ended up lost. Of course, you'd never know that if you sent it unsigned for.
Yeh right. We ran a business that was located in Leicestershire - we were six miles from the border with Warwickshire. However, we had a Warwickshire postal address. This played havoc with companies that used county borders for their sales teams. I lost count of the number of reps that phoned us and asked where we were only to be told that we needed ot see another rep for that area. And don;t get me started on insurance quotes. A postcode just 300 yards away was 15% cheaper than ours just because a Leicestershire address was deemed a lower risk than Warwickshire.
That said, losing Shannon airport is a good thing as it is a poor airport with a runway built in completely the wring direction for a location with mainly south westerly winds. The cross wind landings can be scary.
"Yeh right. We ran a business that was located in Leicestershire - we were six miles from the border with Warwickshire. However, we had a Warwickshire postal address. This played havoc with companies that used county borders for their sales teams. I lost count of the number of reps that phoned us and asked where we were only to be told that we needed ot see another rep for that area. And don;t get me started on insurance quotes. A postcode just 300 yards away was 15% cheaper than ours just because a Leicestershire address was deemed a lower risk than Warwickshire."
That's not the fault of the Royal Mail, that's the fault of the businesses that misunderstand and misuse postcode data.
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"East Midlands airport has a Derby post-code but is in Leicestershire (and don't even mention the stupid name-change debacle)."
As someone's already pretty much said, postcodes aren't an authoritative guide to the location of a place, it's for postal routing, so the "boundaries" won't and is never meant to match up with actual administrative boundaries.
http://www.royalmail.com/find-a-postcode allows 50 UK postcode searches.
However the limit is done, it's in the terms of use of the service - so getting around it technically is not the point.
People should publish their own postcode with their address.
Welcome to the 20th century, Ireland.
Why is this a privacy concern? If someone already knows your address they can already pinpoint your property using any other mapping service (And if they know where the property is they can get your address). Additionally knowing your individual postcode won't really change anything.
Because a lot of surveys ask for postcode (and no other address details) for categorizing responses into geographic areas. Generally in the UK they will only use the first 4 or 5 digits (not needing to go down to road segment level) but will get a user to enter the entire postcode as its easier than trying to explain which part they do want. If the eircode identifies the house the anonymous survey is suddenly a lot less anonymous.
It would be interesting to know how they encode for individual properties. Presumably that does not include a code for every house in a block of flats?
The UK system works quite well when someone's garden is used to build new houses. The street's house numbers may be interpolated or extended - but the post code is already in place. At a maximum of seven characters the post code is also within the limits of most people's memory for such things.
Yes, they are uniquely identifying individual flats in a block.
http://www.eircode.ie/what-gets-an-eircode
What will get an Eircode?
Generally all postal addresses that currently receive mail will be assigned an Eircode. For example:
Residential addresses:
Each house on a street
Each flat in an apartment block
Each house in a rural townland
Both units in a duplex unit
Business addresses:
Office building
Factory or warehouse
Shop, hotel, bar or any business premises
Health centre, hospital or any public building
Each unit in a shopping centre
Each unit in a business park or industrial estate
"The UK system works quite well when someone's garden is used to build new houses. The street's house numbers may be interpolated or extended - but the post code is already in place."
Occasionally this breaks down when the developer builds flats where a commercial building used to be.
I used to live in a flat with the same postcode as the rest of the street. This was absolutely fine provided senders put "9, Whatever Buildings, Whatever Street..." as the address.
Unfortunately some firms only store the postcode and house number which they later used to recreate my postal address - as "9, Whatever Street".
The Post Office knew about this anomaly and took the appropriate action, but it lead to some interesting discussions with courier companies...
The UK system has been borked since day 1. The last 3 or 4 charcters identify a group of addresses.
Not a single employee of the Royal Mail or their contractors appreciated the significance of primary keys.
Anyone with a modicum of IT common sense would make the house number and postcode unique. Because they have not done this when a house number is duplicated in a post code the sorting machines only sort to the postcode. The postie then sorts by house number and 99 Enterprise court is put with 99 Marine Drive ( a Torpoint example). Enterprise court is a block of 30 small businesses, some who have large volume of mail. Because Mr Bloggs at 99 Marine drive has post delivered almost every day that is not for him, he just puts it in the bin. RM do not give a stuff and will do nothing to correct this problem. Every novice in basic uses line numbers in multiples of 10 to allow new code to be inserted. No one though of this when UK postcodes werre developed.
I once received a letter addressed to my house number and road name - but in a nearby town in the outer reaches of the post code district. Hard to see how it had mis-sorted the post code - or how the postman missed the different town names.
Put it back in the post with a large annotation saying the obvious "NOT <my town>". Two days later it plopped back on my mat. Put it in an extra (stamped) envelope addressed to the proper recipient with a note explaining the strange event. Never heard anything again.
An Post already had a secret Post Code system from 1990s, but would not publicise it for commercial reasons. (Bulk advertising mail).
They decided to Tender instead of forcing An Post to go public. But wrote a Tender that would disqualify any Geo locate / Geo code system.
The idea of a post code is obsolete.
This analysis explains why Eircode is rubbish.
Only An Post is going to use this, to deliver to letterboxes. They already can do that perfectly with very little address. Otherwise they would have made their internal system public 20 years ago.
None of the freight companies or emergency services will use it.
The database to get a GPS code or use it sensibly will always be incomplete, full of errors and very expensive.
Any one that bothers with this is wasting time and money.
We have had geocodes for 20 years. We don't even need the Open Postcode system, we have both OSI grid and GPS lat + long.
Mines the one with a smartphone GPS in the pocket.
Eircode is not a postcode. It is a delivery point identifier. Australia and the USA have both postcodes and delivery point identifiers.
In Aus and the United states, cheap bulk mail is required to be labeled with a delivery point identifier. All the banks here use cheap bulk mail to post out bank statements. Same for social security, the tax office etc. For postal sorting of this mail, the address written on the envelope or visible in the window is not used at all: the mail is sorted using the delivery point identifier.
Each delivery point in Aus (and Ireland now) has a unique random number. The bank (or government office, or other bulk sender) is responsible for deciding which of the available delivery points the address you gave them corresponds to.
This is not the same as a postcode, and no, it does not do what a postcode does, and no, it does not do geolocation. It is only an ID. A primary key in a database. Having a primary key is not stupid: it is normal.
The difference is that in Aus and the US, these delivery identifiers are not known to or used by the public. Many people don't realise that their new postcode (Eircode) is a unique identifier. There have been cases already of people publishing their code on social media, not realising it can easily be converted to their full address.
Entities like e-commerce sites abroad aren't necessarily going to know either that Irish postcodes are unique identifiers and treat them accordingly. Such sites might have robust privacy policies, but could easily end up revealing personal information in any aggregated data that they provide/sell to third parties.
It's going to be interesting to see how this pans out, and if or when it causes problems for people.
I knew a guy who had to sort records for British Gas. He managed to slip in a few phoney records.
There's probably a meter reader who has been searching continuously for the last 20 years on his mission to find Dingley Dell. If you see an old battered BG van with a grey bearded driver please tell him to go home.
From the sound of it this (Irish) project doesn't sound like it fell apart and had to be abandoned after costing several times what it was meant to cost. Didn't fail to deliver what it was intended to deliver.
Hasn't lead to a multimillion Euro court case. Hasn't even lead to lots of postmasters being locked up because they can't defend themselves against "the computer".
Whereas, just across a small strip of water..............
In the late 90's, I wrote the mapping dll for a service (which Vodafone bought out) to supply dynamic mapping/address finding in Ireland to cellphones using WAP.
With no postcodes.
I honestly think it would have killed me if it weren't for the tender ministrations of Doctor Jameson.
Dublin sort of does, but even then it's just dividing the city up into regions, nothing very precise.
Having no postcode system is not that unusual in small countries with low populations - New Zealand is the same, Auckland has a few postcode regions but generally in NZ they're just not really used.
I have family in County Mayo and I visit quite often. It's fairly simple. If you want to go to Castlebar and you're in Balla, you follow the road to Castlebar. If you want to go to Knock Airport, you go to Knock then follow the road that goes past the Airport.
It literally is "Go down the road until you come to the cow in the field, then turn right" up there. But you know what, it works. My girlfriend who had never been there before couldn't understand how people who weren't from there could get around without a working sat nav.
Then again, Ireland (at least in the country) have a different out look on life. We burried my Dad over there as he was born there (left when he was 17, only visited the place as a holiday thereafter) and it was always home. Anyway, the undertaker was a local man and he was fantastic. The day we were leaving to go back to Birmingham we wanted to pay the bill to him, he didn't want paying he just said "pay whenever I'm in no rush".
If you've only been to Dublin, you haven't been to Ireland. Get a car, read the road signs or get a map, and explore Real Ireland.
"If you've only been to Dublin, you haven't been to Ireland. Get a car, read the road signs or get a map, and explore Real Ireland."
Totally true. Whenever someone I know says they've been to Dublin, I say that they need to get out of Dublin to see real Ireland.
I'd say this is true of most places I've visited to be honest.
I mean, who'd could say they've 'seen' England (or the UK for that matter) after spending some time in that shithole encircled by the M25? Is Edinburgh Scotland? Paris France?
You get my point
"It's fairly simple. If you want to go to Castlebar and you're in Balla, you follow the road to Castlebar."
I once spent some hours driving round the perimeter of Lille in France trying to find the road to Luxembourg. I knew Liege or Namur would be good enough - but the motorway from the ferry didn't seem to have any of those names. Eventually all that was left to explore was the motorway marked "Brussels" - which I knew was going north not east. After a very short distance the motorway split - "Brussels" to the north - and "Liege", "Namur", "Luxembourg" were then signposted to the east.
Reminds me of driving from Luxembourg to Hamburg. Naively I assumed that all I had to do was follow the "E" road signs towards Denmark. Not only were there none - but they also only signposted the next town or city. No long distance "Hamburg" or "Denmark" indicators. Leaving the autobahn to be able to stop and read the map - I found that unlike the UK there aren't immediate roundabouts - just a dual carriageway all the way to the nearest town before you could turn back.
Belgium and Scandinavia seemed to have a similar signposting system to the UK - which made route planning and following fairly easy.
Back about 20 odd years ago, a woman from the US of A was in Limerick and drank in my Uncles pub. A few weeks later, a letter arrived with a picture of him and her, sellotaped to the front and the instructions : To Mr Postman, Deliver to THIS man (and an arrow to him), Limerick Ireland.
Brilliant !
Bought some glassware from Orrefors in Sweden to be sent to my home in England. Two boxes duly arrived - but the third just disappeared. Eventually they sent me a replacement. Some time after that the missing one did finally arrive - via New England, USA - and I had to pay Customs Duty on that one!
Australia has postcodes,but they're next to bloody useless. My postcode is 2125. My mate, who lives several k away, in a different suburb, also has the postcode 2125.
The whole of the Sydney CBD and quite a few inner suburbs are all covered by 2000.
It's like someone in Australia Post came back from holiday and said ".. and they have these things called postcodes. Not sure what they're all about, but we'll give em a go, eh?"
Back in about 1966 i.d be willing to bet west pennant hills were all fields around there. So no surprise lots of suburbs now share 2125 where DiViDeD and his mate live. (And it was PMG back then, not Aust Post)
But as mentioned above, delivery point identifier aka DPID is much more precise. Tho not known to the public.
Post code back in 1966 was designed to get mail to the local post office for sorting to rounds. Where actual humans knew the area. Much has changed since postcodes were allocated.
I remember being at Uni when during one piss-up session myself and a London friend were discussing addresses with an Irish guy. We asked him his and he gave it to us... all two lines of it. We were flabbergasted! We asked him how the mail gets to his house... his reply was that the postman knows him and his family. Thought this must just be him but another Irish person said the exact same thing!
Even now the Irish person thinks postcodes are pointless, as the postman will always know which house belongs to who.
his reply was that the postman knows him and his family.
There was an item on the local news a few years back[1] about a postcard that had been sent from Australia, addressed simply to "Tim's mum, Southsea". And it got there.
Vic.
[1] December 1988. I looked it up - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01lhb2z
Ireland jumped a few generations in technology and never really needed one.
We went from manual sorting using postal workers to electronic sorting with OCR.
The step where postcodes were useful, sequential electromechanical sorting (This letter means it's in Glasgow, this one means it goes to the centre, this number means it goes to this office, this letter mean it's assigned to this route etc) just got skipped.
"Other problems with the Eircode range from incorrect addresses to data protection concerns."
Anyone else reading "Eircode" as "Errorcode", or is it just me? Seems nicely to sum up the project so far!!
I can imagine some saying "Hang on a moment, I'll just find the Errorcode for that address"
I went to visit an aunt (+husband and family) in a village in Ireland a few years ago. I was baffled to see neither street names nor numbers. When I asked a local he said 'Oh you need the Allen house, I'll show you the way'
I wonder if this postcode is an improvement.
"I was baffled to see neither street names nor numbers"
That's not so unusual in small English villages either. Many years ago as a field engineer, one of our clients was a publisher who had people working from home all over the place, often in small villages. I usually tried to schedule those for first call of the day and be in a hotel/pub/travellodge fairly close by on the previous night so I could be in the village when the postie or other delivery people were likely to be around. Analogue mobile phone coverage was spotty at best back then. Street names were not always missing as such but were often low down on garden walls hidden by shrubbery. Houses usually had names, not numbers. Name plates also on walls hidden by bushes etc "High street" was one of the easiest to find. Either it was the one with a shop or two on it (remember when villages had shops?) or it was the one that went up the hill. Church street was usually obvious too!
I came across what3words as a potential alternative to GPS/route mapping. I appreciate that it wouldn't work internally to buildings but seems interesting.
This may be too abstract or mathematically "perfect" to capture the sort of real-world concerns of the postal service, but a quick bit of thinking suggests the following scheme...
Divide the code in two (like eircode) with district and "fine" location.
For the first part, create a Voronoi-like diagram showing each postal district. The distribution sites would be at the centre of each "cell". Assign random names to distribution site. Real-world concerns may mean that the shape of districts may need to be tweaked by hand, but they'll all end (as a collection) up being roughly circular.
For location within a district, use a code that encodes a vector from the distribution site to the address. This could be (x,y), angle + distance or something else. Going with the "something else" option, I'd use a hexagonal lattice (search for that text here) since it gets rid of sign bits and is easily extensible by adding more digits (possibly after a "decimal", or more accurately "hex", point).
Publish a database containing the list of postal districts: their GPS coordinates, the shape of their catchment area, their unique alphabetic codes and an integer value representing the "scale" to be used when calculating the "fine" address within that district (basically the degree of tessellation which corresponds with how many digits the second part of the address has to have). With this, anyone should be able (with some simple software) to generate a post code from their GPS coordinates.
Systems that encode as origin + offset vector can generate multiple valid postcodes for the same GPS location, but they can all be converted into canonical form (based at the correct destination routing centre) automatically.
It might be interesting to allow this in the postal system itself—since it's simple to convert into the canonical code, it wouldn't matter if someone decided to construct directions using the neighbouring (and presumably more desirable) postcode as their starting point. That might be an interesting approach to dealing with "postcode envy". To encode for this, the postcode format would have to include some bits to represent the scale of the base distribution cell (ie, the number of digits, which can be cross-checked against the database) and the number of digits actually included in the encoded address (which could be more or less than the official number of digits). The idea is that your "ruler" can be reconciled with the official one.
The same scheme might also be adopted by other users, and possibly tailored by referring to a different top-level Voronoi map (or cut down to just a list of centres of interest and radii).
"How about this instead. Door number, street name, town, county :-)"
Damn right.
Postcodes always struck me as a way for the mail carrier to outsource the sorting work to the customers. Why should I have to write out some random string of characters if I've put the correct house, street and town suitably disambiguated using village/county/province/state and/or country if necessary?
We don't have to remember IP addresses. We get the /computers/ to do that for us - they're good at that sort of stuff.
Why does almost every f'ing website designer use Google Analytics...
"Even using the Eircode finder may present data protection issues. Although Eircode claims that we "do not collect or store your your name or address as part of this data", in its Code of Practice it admits that in some circumstances, Google Analytics "can capture the IP address of the user, and this address along with other data that might be available, can be used to identify you."
Usually because PHB's have seen it on other websites and want it. For no other reason than to have data to put into a daily and weekly report that they send to their PHB (who will never actually open the attachment) in a bid to justify their spot on the Org Chart.
Being a corporate web developer is slowly killing me every single day.
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