July 2004 Archives

In 1999 the Perl Mongers organisation started the White Camel awards. These awards are intended to recognised individuals who have made important non-technical contributions to the Perl community. A few years ago Perl Mongers was absorbed by The Perl Foundation and TPF have continued the awards. The awards are traditionally announced at the Open Source Convention.

So this years awards were announced in Portland last night. And I was one of the winners. Apparently I was nominated for my work starting the London Perl Mongers, "organising" them for three years and then moving on to be the co-ordinator for all of the international Perl Monger groups.

It's nice to know that my efforts are appreciated. Of course, I now feel duty-bound to start putting in even more effort :)

And congratulations to this year's other winners - Jon Orwant and brian d foy.

Our ever-helpful government have produced a leaflet called Preparing for Emergencies full of "useful" advice about how to prepare for terrorist attacks. A copy will be sent to every household in the UK, but there's a web site for those of us who can't wait.

The government web site shouldn't be confused with this site which is much funnier. Unfortunatey the government don't see the funny side and they have asked the owner to remove it.

So please mirror the parody site far and wide in case it vanishes without trace.

This is going to be of even less interest to most people than most of the stuff that I write about.

Julian Ridsdale was the conservative MP for the area that I grew up in for the whole time that I lived there. As such he was responsible for giving me a lifelong distrust of tories many years before I'd even heard of Thatcher. He was a very unpleasant man.

Anyway, he's dead now.

A nice article from today's Guardian about how Wandsworth Borough Council is "sanitising" a number of its green spaces - including the two commons within walking distance of my house.

A year ago you could stand in the middle of Wandsworth Common, south London, and imagine, without too much effort, that you were in the countryside. Not any more. Last autumn the local council declared war on nature and has since waged an unremitting campaign against anything green that gets out of place - trees, shrubs, long grass, brambles, nettles. Even wild flowers planted with lottery money have been mercilessly cut back.

At Tooting Common, a mile or so south, much the same has happened. Beginning in the spring of last year, trees and woodland undergrowth have been razed to the ground, a bat roost destroyed and the local bird and insect population deprived of much of its cover and food.

Crimes Against Nature

Apparently the destruction of the bat roost was illegal.

The Internet Explorer development team have set up an official blog where you can track (and, more importantly, comment on) their progress towards the next version of IE.

There's an RSS feed and I've added that feed to Live Journal.

The comments in the blog already demostrate how brave they are to do this :)

Latest news from the Land of the Free is that Linda Ronstadt has been thrown out of a Las Vegas casino for praising Michael Moore and Fahrenheit 9/11 during her show.

The UK's new MEPs all trundled off to their first session in Strasbourg yesterday and already a UK Independence Party member is making enemies. It seems they're not just xenophobic, but sexist too. I briefly caught this story on the news last night and thought I must have misheard, but it's covered by both the BBC and the Guardian so it must have happened.

UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom has been quoted as saying "No self-respecting small businessman with a brain in the right place would ever employ a lady of child-bearing age". He goes on to add other gems like "I want to deal with women's issues because I just don't think they clean behind the fridge enough" and "I am here to represent Yorkshire women, who always have dinner on the table when you get home". Most parties would have demanded his resignation over this, but so far there's no sign of the UKIP doing that.

Oh, and why was he being interviewed? He had just been given a place on the European Parliament's women's rights committee.

The Computer Shop (formerly Time Computers) have never had a great reputation amongst techincal people in the UK. They might be cheap, but their build quality is shoddy and their support is appalling. Now Yoz Grahame points out another reason for not using them.

Apparently their systems come with a modem that is configured to only work with one ISP. You can only fix this by calling a £1/minute support line and buying software to unlock the modem for an additional £60. Yoz also links to a free solution to this problem.

I'm mentioning this in the hope that my high Googlejuice will mean that this page will appear high in the listings for anyone searching for "Time Computers" or "The Computer Shop".

And, yes, I'm biased. I once bought a PC from Time. It stopped working after a couple of months and no amount of shouting at their support people would get it fixed. It's still sitting dead in my study. It won't even boot.

Last night I watched the first episode of a new Channel 4 series about Pagans.

Whilst it was dumbed down in the way that all documentaries seem to be these days (for example, the first episode went for the biggest possible audience by covering sex) it was all very interesting. What comes out of it most clearly is the fact that the current slightly pejorative meaning to the word "pagan" is simply the result of almost two thousand years of christian propaganda.

Of course, a lot of christian traditions (for example, the dates of christmas and easter, and halos in religious images) are "borrowed" from pagan religions - but the christian church don't like to talk about that.

If you can get Channel 4 then I recommend that you take a look at the remaining three programmes - 9pm on Monday.

Paul Foot, radical columnist and campaigner, dies at 66

He'll be sadly missed.

Here's a link to his Guardian columns.

Interesting piece by Roy Greenslade in The Guardian today. It discusses how The Sun was very quick to condemn the BNP as racists last week (following the BBC documentary) although much its editorial is thinly diguised racism.

The Media Guardian site requires registration - which gives me a good excuse to plug Bug Me Not.

I got a royalty statement from O'Reilly over the weekend. It seems that we still haven't sold enough copies of the badger book to make back our advance. It makes me wonder if there's any point in spending such large parts of my life writing obscure technical books that (almost) no-one wants to buy.

I want to try my hand at fiction. And I want to write something that has a chance of being a best-seller. It seems that the best way to ensure this is to be controversial. With that in mind, here are a few ideas.

* I could jump on the Dan Brown bandwagon and write something based in Hermitic Tradition. Maybe a historical novel based on the Templars. The life of Jacques de Molay or something like that.

* Or, sticking with magic and religion but coming a bit more up to date, the life of Aleister Crowley. Actually, that might make a good film. Lots of special effects. But there was an article about Crowley in Saturday's Guardian so I may be too late with that idea.

* Or keep it simple. Just do something that will enrage the Daily Mail. A book where the protagonist is a paedophile. And portray him sympathetically. That'll do the trick.

Need to think more on this.

You will all be familiar with the Odeon chain of cinemas. You probably know that they have a web site. If you happen to be running the right version of the right browser on the right operating system you may even be able to visit their web site and get useful information out of it.

The problem is that their web site was designed by a bunch of complete incompetents. In order to make the site look as pretty as possible they used Javascript code that only works in Internet Explorer. If you're trying to access their site using any other browser you're out of luck. All you'll see is the word "Odeon" in an artistically blurred image. So for a number of users, the site was completely useless.

This fact came to the notice of Matthew Somerville who is a web designer specialising in accessible web sites. He wrote a version of the Odeon site which grabbed information from the real Odeon site and presented it in an easy to read manner that was equally accessible to all browsers.

For some time, all was well with the world. I was getting information about my local Odeon from Matthew's site. Matthew's site drew quite a lot of favourable press attention. Even the Odeon people said nice things about it in an article in the Independent.

But now all that has changed. The Odeon's lawyers have decided that they aren't happy with Matthew's site. They have forced him to remove it. They claim that too many people were getting confused between his site and theirs. This is despite Matthew's site having "this site is not the official Odeon web site" clearly displayed on every page. The full story is at the old Accessible Odeon address.

So I'm now boycotting Odeon. Until they allow Matthew to put his site back online. Or, even better, they change their site to be accessible by more than one browser.

On Friday I found that Fahrenheit 9/11 wasn't on at my local Odeon. So I went to the Clapham Picture House instead. It's just as close, but it is smaller, friendlier and just generally nicer. They'll be getting a lot more of my custom in the future.

Whilst walking from the London.pm meeting to Victoria Station last night I passed two policemen who were holding very large rifles. One was outside the Houses of Parliament and the other was on a street corner newar New Scotland Yard.

Now I realise that this might not be surprising for people in less civilised countries, but in the UK the police don't generally carry guns. I suspect that the government would say that it is justified by the current security situation[1]. I strongly suspect that this will be one of those temporary changes that are brought about by extraordinary circumstance but then never go away. I still remember when all the rubbish bins were removed from railway and tube stations in the early 1980s because the IRA had planted bomb in one. This was supposed to be temporary, but twenty years on and with the IRA mainland bombing campaign a distant memory there's no sign of them coming back.

I don't really mind things changing. I just wish the government could be honest about it.

[1] I walked past one of the Department of Trade and Industry buildings and noticed that it had a sign declaring that the current alert level was "Black Special".

Last night I came out of a bookshop on Charing Cross Road at about 18:15. I noticed that there were more people about than usual, but thought nothing of it. Then I tried to get into Leicester Square tube station but it was closed due to overcrowding. I realised that something was really wrong when I managed to get on a number 12 bus (the number 12 doesn't usually go down Charing Cross Road).

Through a combination of buses, trains and a great deal of walking I finally got home over an hour later than I should have done. Turning on the news I discovered what the problem was.

Some idiot had decided that it was a good idea to close a number of central London's main roads in the middle of rush hour so that some Formula One drivers could drive their new cars around a bit. This was apparently publicity for a bid to hold an annual London Grand Prix on a similar route.

I'm astonished that anyone could think that this is a good idea. I'm used to the royal family thinking that they can close off large parts of London every time they have a wedding or a funeral - but we expect it from them. They have genetic flaw which means they don't notice (or, more likely, don't care) when they inconvenience the plebs. But this was a deliberate decision made by someone in the local council. They obviously didn't think through the consequences of their little parade. This effected me (and, I'm sure, many others) far more than last week's tube strike did.

And let's hope that their plans for an annual Grand Prix don't come to anything. That would be a nightmare.

We need to start a campaign to keep sport out of London.

Even the (Microsoft-owned) Slate magazine is now publishing articles saying that Firefox is better than Internet Explorer.

If you haven't tried out Firefox yet, then you should. It's really rather good.

I recently discovered Box Office Mojo which is a site that has box office figures from US cinemas (it has worldwide figures too, but that's not the main focus of the site).

I've been using it to track the success of Fahrenheit 9/11. It's already the biggest grossing documentary of all time. It's take three times as much as its nearest rival (which is Bowling for Columbine).

There was an interesting article in Saturday's Guardian about the effect that Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code has had on tourism at Rosslyn Chapel - the small chapel just outside Edinburgh which has been at the centre of the UK grail-hunting industry for many years. Rosslyn seems to have become another essential stop on the standard whistle-stop tour of Scotland.

I'm still amazed at the reactions to this book. There's nothing in it that hasn't been in the public domain since the pubilication of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail twenty years ago. I find it hard to believe that people are so shocked by it now. I guess it just emphasises the fact that information needs to be spread through popular culture in order for it to register with most people. I expect that a whole new group will be shocked by it when the film is released next year.