The UK Government have launched a new web site to inform people about IT security issues. The links page on the site contains an image which proudly identifies the site as being built of valid XHTML 1.0. Sadly, clicking on that image runs the W3C validator tool which then demonstrates that the page is not valid XHTML.
These kinds of basic mistakes only demonstrate that the webmaster really isn't paying attention.
Brian Sedgemore was my MP for a couple of years when I lived in Hackney in the mid-80s. He's one of a small number of Labour MPs who still seem to understand what the Labour Party is supposed to stand for. He's retiring at the end of this Parliament and last week he made what will almost certainly be his last speech to the House. It's impressive stuff.
As we move towards a system of justice that found favour with the South African Government at the time of apartheid and which parallels Burmese justice today, if hon. Members will pardon the oxymoron, I am reminded that our fathers fought and died for liberty-my own father literally-believing that these things should not happen here, and we would never allow them to happen here. But now we know better. The unthinkable, the unimaginable, is happening here.
He'll be sadly missed.
Off to Brussels in a couple of hours to go to the FOSDEM conference. I'll be running the Perl Developers' Room.
Hope it's warmer there than it is here.
I wrote last month about the irony of the Sunday Times praising RSS but not having RSS feeds available on their site.
This got me wondering which UK papers currently offer RSS feeds of their stories. I'm planning to put a page up at some point that lists all the the feeds available from each paper, but that might take a while to get going so, in the meantime here's a list of the papers who offer RSS together with a link to a page which lists all of their feeds.
And then, of course, there's the BBC who have links to RSS feeds on pretty much every section of their news site.
But that's all I can find. It's not much of a list is it? If you think I've missed any, then please let me know. And if you have any inside information about when other papers might be joining the list then I'd love to hear that too.
Update: Added the FT.
See, even the title of this entry has sent my street cred plummenting. Now watch me completely destroy what's left of it.
I've never really enjoyed the "classic" Rick Wakeman albums like Journey to the Centre of the Earth or The Myths and Legends of King Arthur. They've always seemed like they are trying to be classical symphonies and if I want to listen to a classical symphony then there are far better ones to list to.
I do, however, really like No Earthly Connection which I bought on vinyl when it first came out in 1976. Looking back, the subject matter is complete tosh - it's all about how music was a gift from spacemen to us humans and how they might want it back some day. But, hey, I was 14 and still reading Von Daniken back then!
Although I still have my vinyl copy, it's been ten years since I played one of my records and probably much longer since I listened to this particular record. And although I've looked occasionally I've never found it on CD.
But a couple of weeks ago I found a CD copy being sold on Ebay. And I won the auction (it cost £15). It arrived yesterday. Although the pseudo-religious spaceman stuff now sounds like complete bollocks (ok, it is complete bollocks) the music and the overall sounds stands up rather well. I really enjoyed listening to it again after all these years.
And I still remembered all the lyrics.
Ok. Let the piss-taking commence...
Lloyd just pointed me at Greasemonkey which looks very interesting. Throw it together with something built using Ajax and suddenly the potential is enormous.
Update: Here's another nice piece about Greasemonkey.
Gary Younge in today's Guardian being as astute as ever.
As the election approaches it is time for those of us who identify with Labour but find ourselves somewhere between disillusionment and disgust with the party to weigh strategy and morality and hopefully get our sums right. If the polls are right, the Labour party's numbers in parliament are set to be depleted considerably in May. As progressive, left-leaning voters we need to decide what role we want to play in that, if any, and be clear about why.
I just had a bit of an adventure with the HSBC Bank and I've discovered a couple of things that might be of interest to other customers.
On Monday I paid a rather large cheque into the Holborn Circus branch of the HSBC. For various reasons it was important that this cheque cleared as quickly as possible. I paid it in to one of their automated teller machines and being a technology-friendly sort of person I used a particularly new type of machine. The difference with this new machine was that you don't put the cheque and the paying-in slip in an envelope, but you feed them into to the machine which then gives you reduced photocopies of both the cheque and the slip as your receipt.
This morning the cheque still hadn't appeared in my account so I called my bank (First Direct, another part of the HSBC chain) to find out why. They agreed that it was unusual and said they'd contact the branch to find out what had happened. I'm going to omit all the details of the phone calls I've been involved in this morning as you'd only get bored, but the end result was that I went back down to the branch at lunchtime. It's all been clearer up now and I'll see the funds in my account tomorrow but, as I said before, I've learned two important lessons.
1/ If you want a cheque to be paid in as quickly as possible, don't use a machine
When you pay money in over the counter, it goes into the system immediately. If you pay it into a machine it only goes into the system when the machine is emptied. This might be at the close of business that day (which could add an extra day to the processing time) but in less busy branches the machine might only be emptied every few days.
2/ If you must use a machine, use one of the older ones
The problem, it seems, was with my handwriting. I'd put my sort code and account number on the slip, but there was some confusion over a couple of the digits. It took them a couple of days to work out which account to pay the cheque into. Now, on the older machines when you pay money in you put in you bank card and the machine reads the account details from the card and prints them onto the envelope. So even if you have the worst handwriting in the world they will still know who you are. With the new machines, you still need to put your card in, but this is just used to authenticate as an HSBC customer. Your bank details aren't read from the card. So it becomes vitally important to print your sort code and account number legibly.
So there you go. I've been on a bit of a financial rollercoaster this week because I didn't have this hidden knowledge. So I hope this saves someone else from having the same problems.
It's great having the new Daily Mail RSS feeds. I get huge amounts of illogical bigoted nonsense direct into my RSS reader. The latest headline asks Could Ken's Nazi jibe scupper Olympic bid?
Let's hope so :)
Update: Now they're saying that Tony Blair has ordered Livingstone to apologise. Not sure what the point of this would be as Livingstone has already made it clear that any apology would just be empty words without any real feeling behind it.
This Thursday (17th Feb) Living TV are starting to show Life As We Know It. Obviously I wouldn't normally point out when an obscure cable TV channel picks up a new US teen drama, but this one gets special treatment as it's apparently based on Melvin Burgess's excellent novel Doing It. I'm surprised that none of the (admittedly minimal) press coverage I've seen has picked up on this fact.
It seems that the company hosting Backing Blair have taken the site down pending investigation of a complaint they have recieved.
Nice to know that people have been taking notice of it.
Update: It's back now. Here's the full story.
It's sad that we need this, but I really think we do.
Kirrily Robert plays Emily Post for the digital generation.
And your place, if today's newpapers are to be believed, is being totally awestruck by the magnanimity shown by the royals in letting us mere plebs know about their wedding plans.
Honestly, it's all over every paper. And it's really of no interest at all to anyone with the slightest vestige of intelligence. Two middle-aged rich parasites are going to marry. So what? And there's still two months to go. It's only going to get worse. And then there will be all the paparazzi trailing them on the honeymoon.
All of which will leave very little room for real news in the tabloids over the next few months. Which is, of course, the real story. Only a real cynic would suggest that a this has been planned so that the General Election was held whilst the flag-waving, tabloid-reading sheep in the country are still basking in the warm glow of jingoism that only a sporting triumph, a (legal) war or a big royal party can give them. Or that this can only be to the advantage of the party in power.
But then we only use industrial strength cynics here at davblog. And it's worth noting that this news was (accidently, I'm sure) timed to remove last night's debate on ID cards from today's front pages.
That nice Tony Blair would never sink so low, would he?
Update: Oh look. General election announcement likely to clash with wedding date
Update: Actually, it wasn't quite every paper. Hats off to the Independent for their "Here is the news you may have missed" front page
The Backing Blair campaign has launched. Please visit the site and take a look at all the interesting things that are going on.
Some interesting things to start with:
And much more...
Tell all your friends.
This may get a bit ranty. Please bear with me.
The front page of todays Daily Mail is angry that Tony Blair apologised to the Guildford Four yesterday. They ask why he hasn't apologised to the victims.
The answer is surely obvious. He has nothing to apologise to the victims for. The men he apologised to yesterday were imprisoned for many years for terrible crimes that they didn't commit. If the death penalty had been in force they would almost certainly have been executed. The British establishment made a major mistake and as the current spokesperson for that establishment, it's right that he makes that public apology.
Of course the victims and their families have been devastated by the tragedies of the pub bombings. But is any of that the governments fault? Is there any more that the government could have done for the victims? Why does the Mail think that the victims are owed an apology? They deserve sympathy. They deserve all the help we can give them. But an apology? I just can't see it.
Incidently, I would have linked to the story on the Mail's web site, but I can't find it. A search for references to the Guildford Four finds a story from yesterday saying that the apology might be forthcoming, but today's front page story doesn't appear to be anywhere on their web page. Is that a reasonable way to run a newspaper web site? Most of the news seems to be about two toffs marrying.
(Please forgive me a vaguely sentimental entry. We'll be back to our usual cynicism later I promise.)
Today was my stepdaughter's eighteenth birthday. She was eight when I first met her. It's been an interesting journey with only a very small number of bumps.
I never wanted to have children of my own and I don't regret that decision at all, but having watched her grow from that child into the mature, confident, interesting (and, even better, interested) young woman that she is today (and having, to a small degree, influenced that process) I can certainly understand why people do it.
It's a pleasure to know her.
Just got back from the first meeting of that nice Mr. Ireland's new Meetup group.
Many very interesting discussions ensued. More details in the next couple of days, but in the meantime, let's all sing the London Underground song.
The September that Never Ended is finally ending.
This is book seven in my attempt to read fifty books in 2005.
Another Booker Prize winner and another book I really didn't enjoy. But whilst I can understand why people like the Rushdie, I can't see any redeeming qualities in this book at all.
The plot is predictable and the characters are stereotypes. This book has nothing to recommend it.
I finally got most of the work done on the new version of get_streams my program that extracts the addresses of the Real Audio streams from the BBC Radio web site and then builds this page of links.
The BBC changed their site a couple of weeks ago so I needed to update the program to deal with the new page structure. It's still needs a bit more work, but I think it's pretty useable in its current state. Expect more improvements in the coming weeks.
This is book six in my attempt to read fifty books in 2005.
Rushdie is one of those authors who I really want to like. Many people think he is one of the most important writers of the late 20th century. Like many people, the first of his books that I attempted was The Satanic Verses and like many people I gave up after just a few chapters.
But Midnight's Children is generally accepted as his best work. It won the Booker Prize in 1981 and the "Booker of Bookers" in 1993. I was determined to enjoy it.
But I have to say that I didn't enjoy it at all. I can see why people like it. I can see why people think it's an important and interesting novel. But I can't see why people put up with Rushdie's over-complex prose style. To me, that made the book close to unreadable. He also fills his writing with religious and cultural references that I didn't get and that also diminished my enjoyment.
I mentioned that last point to my wife who is a big fan of the book and she (quite rightly) pointed out that Tom Stoppard also throws in obscure cultural references and I always enjoy his work. Thinking about it, the difference is that I get all of Stoppard's clever references and therefore reading him makes me feel cleverer. I estimate that I get about 10% of Rushdie's clever references and therefore reading him makes me feel stupid.
So I don't like this book as it makes me feel stupid.
It seems that just about every Gmail user that I know (including myself) has logged on this morning to find they have 50 invitations to give away.
This has been interpreted as an indication that Gmail is about to come out of beta testing.
I don't expect this to get much national news coverage, but comedian Malcolm Hardee has died (in slightly strange and very hardee-esque circumstances). I spent a lot of the 90s hanging around the periphery of the London comedy circuit. I never knew Malcolm but I knew many people who did. A lot off people who are currently doing very well in the world of comedy got a start playing in one of Malcolm's clubs.
He'll be sadly missed.
I mentioned in passing a couple of days ago that the Times web site didn't have a valid webmaster email address, but actually it seems that this problem is far more widespread. A number of companies, it seems, would rather you didn't have a simple way to contact their webmaster. Another one that came to my attention yesterday is the WeightWatchers site (I was investigating why it didn't work in Firefox, I wasn't trying to sign up - honest).
I'm sure that these companies will cite spam as the reason for not supporting standard and well-known addresses like this but, frankly, that doesn't stand up. If you're running a well-known site like that then you should already have industrial-strength spam prevention measures in place. The webmaster address has been a useful tradition since the start of the web (all those years ago!) Don't let the spammers kill it.
Another similar story from just this morning. I decided to tell some of the local press about Project Martin, so I visited the web site of the South London Press. The "contact us" page on the site has far more postal addresses than email addresses, but it does suggest enquiries@slp.co.uk, so I send my email there. Only to get it bounced with a message that it's not a valid address. And interestingly (well, to me) the bounce email comes from "postmaster@co.uk" which doesn't give me much faith in the people running their network.
If Ben can have his top sekrit Project Marilyn then I can have my Project Martin.
Tim says that it's too late for MPs to get on the blogging bandwagon before the General Election, so I hope I'm not too late to introduce the Unofficial Martin Linton Weblog.
(This is, of course, why the radio streams page isn't fixed yet - sorry about that.)
Kilroy-Silk will surely go down in history as the person who single-handedly destroyed British Euro-sceptics chances of being taken seriously.
It almost makes me like him.
I said "almost".
Update: It seems that Kilroy-Silk's new party doesn't have a web site (or, at least, not one that Google knows about) so I'm happy to join in the google-bomb linking "Kilroy Veritas" to somewhere more interesting.
This is a circuitous tale, but stick with it - it gets interesting towards the end.
I noticed that I hadn't seen any new entries from DJ's blog on Bloglines for a while so I investigated and found that the feed I was subscribed to was dead. Another bit of poking around and I found a newer and better one.
So then I started catching up on all the interesting stuff that I had missed out on. I was particularly interested in this piece about Mozilla's site navigation toolbar. Now I've been using <link rel="next" .../> in web pages for a while, but I've never actually seen what they can do in a browser.
A bit of Googling and I found that the site navigation bar isn't part of the default Firefox installation, but that it's available as an extension. Which I, of course, downloaded and installed.
It adds a new little toolbar in the status bar at the bottom of the browser window. As expected it has buttons to go to the first and last as well as the previous and next pages in a sequence. But it also has buttons to go "up a level" and to the "top level" of a web site. It looks like it guesses these from the URL of the current page.
But most interesting button is the last one. It's there to show "related pages" and it seems that the extension contains some heuristics to extract links from the web page and group them in various ways. If you've got it installed, take a look at what it does with Simon Waldman's homepage.
There are still a few problems. Any link containing words like "first" or "previous" are automatically assumed to be a related page (even if there's also a <link rel="previous" .../> tag. But those heuristics can be turned off.
I need to do some experiments to see exactly how to get the best out of it, but it certainly looks interesting. And another good reason not to use Internet Explorer.
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