April 2005 Archives

Tim O'Reilly writes about the percentages of various web browsers that are use to access the various oreillynet.com web sites. They are currently showing Internet Explorer at 54.66% and Firefox at 35.08%. O'Reilly's audience do, of course, tend towards the geekier end of the web browsing audience but they tend to lead where the rest of the world will follow.

And they big story isn't so much the size of the numbers (thought they are, of course, impressive) it's the speed of the changes. In October last year, Firefox was at just just 3.24%.

I've said it before and I'll no doubt say it again, but if you haven't yet switched from IE to Firefox then you're deliberately crippling your web browsing experience.

An article on the front page of today's Independent investigates the Labour party's claim that protest voters run the risk of opening the door to a Tory government.

Their conclusion? It's bollocks. It would take a swing of 11.5% away from Labour for Tony Blair to lose his commons majority, but even that wouldn't leave the Tories as the largest party.

Protest vote away people.

Back to the hospital again yesterday for an x-ray and another appointment with the chest specialist. The x-ray apparently shows that my pneumothorax (collapsed lung) which I got from the broncoscopy is almost completely recovered.

The full results from the bronoscopy aren't in yet, but the results they have so far are all pointing to a confirmation of the diagnosis of sarcoidosis. The fact that I'm reacting well to the steroids also backs this up.

The doctor prescribed another four weeks of the steroids, but at a lower (and reducing) dosage. Also, as one of the side effects of steroid treatment is a thinning of the bones, he's given me some calcium tablets. They're about the size of dinner plates so they don't look much fun to take.

But all in all everything seems to be going according to plan. I don't need to go back to the hospital for another four weeks.

On election night, Guardian Unlimited will, of course, have all of the results on the site as they are announced. Something as important as this obviously requires people to be here overnight ensuring that everything goes smoothly. And it seems that I'm going to be one of this crack technical team.

I'm looking forward to it. I'd be staying up all night to watch the election anyway, so I might as well get paid for it. Hopefully it'll all go really smoothly on the night and I can spend the night with my feet up watching Peter Snow.

Tony Blair is banging on again about how a protest vote against the Iraq war will let in a Tory government. Let's get a few things straight.

If I don't vote Labour, then it's not just a protest vote against the war in Iraq. It's also a protest vote against foundation hospitals, ID cards, top-up fees and dozens of other pieces of legislation brought in by this government over the last eight years.

My pro-war Labour MP had a majority of 5,000. The chances of 2,500 of those Labour voters deciding to protest vote and choosing to vote for the Tory candidate is tiny. If I don't vote for the Labour candidate then it's not going to mean that the constituency will change hands.

Even if the extremely unlikely happens and my constituency is won by the Tories, the Labour party has a majority of 160 in the House of Commons. There is no way that the Labour is going to lose that majority in this election.

The Tories are not going to win this election, no matter what the protest voters do. No-one honestly believes that they can. Tony Blair doesn't believe that they can. Even Michael Howard doesn't really believe that they can. Blair is just resorting to scare tactics in order to keep his majority as big as possible. And sane people want his majority to be as small as possible in order to make a leadership challenge likely.

And anyway, if the voting system was fragile enough to make it likely that a relatively small number of protest voters can make the kind of difference that Blair is implying, then maybe that's indicative of a fundamental flaw in the voting system and maybe we should be looking at proportional representation.

Oh, bloody hell, listen to me. Maybe I am turning into a Liberal Democrat!

Update: Polly Bloody Toynbee is perpetuating the same nonsense in today's Guardian. Robin Grant demolishes her arguments. And there's a debate about the piece going on over at the Guardian Election Blog.

If you're in the London constituency of Brent South then there's apparently no point in voting on May 5th. Dawn Butler is standing to replace the existing Labour MP, Paul Boeteng, and her new web site is already declaring her as the winner.

I realise that a 17,000 majority might give you a certain amount of confidence, but I can't help thinking that it's a bit impolite to rub your opponents' noses in it like that.

Update: The site has been removed, but we have a screenshot taken earlier.

Nice little bit of satire in Saturday's episode of Doctor Who. The Prime Minister was asking the UN for help dealing with aliens who had "massive weapons of destruction" which could be "deployed in 45 seconds".

Made us smile.

The Huntress Group are a recruitment agency who seem to specialise in employing the most unprofessional agents that I've ever come across. I strongly recommend that you don't deal with them.

I've now been a freelancer for ten years. Over that time I've dealt with a lot of recruitment agencies and my contact details and CV are stored in a lot of databases. This means that I'm often getting speculative phone calls and emails from agents asking what my current work situation is and what kind of jobs I'm interested in. This is fine.

Over that ten years, I've specialised in various areas. If a job requirement doesn't involve moving data into or out of a database on a Unix platform (probably using Perl) then I'm not really likely to be interested. The most cursory glance at my CV would tell you this.

However, also over that ten years, the systems that I've worked on have interfaced with many other systems. So my CV contains phrases like "worked on interface with SAP system" or "exchanged data with Stratus system". This is where the problem starts.

If you're a lazy agent and you're, for example, trying to fill an SAP role you might do a basic search in your database for CVs containing the phrase SAP. If you're vaguely sentient then you'd check these CVs before contacting any matching candidates about the role. This simple check would remove inappropriate CVs like mine from the list.

And this is where Huntress go wrong. They seem to specialise in areas of computing (like SAP and Stratus) where I have no knowledge, no experience and no interest. But their lazy employees are constantly matching my CV in searches for roles in these areas and sending me emails asking if I'm interested in the role. I reply politely explaining their error and asking them to remove me from their database. My emails are always ignored.

So this is my next step. Hopefully, my Googlejuice will be good enough to get this page high up in a search for Huntress and people will read about their unprofessionalism and decide not to do business with them.

Here's a partial (I don't think I've kept all the emails) list of the inappropriate requirements that they have sent me. I'll add to this list as more emails come in from them. I currently seem to be getting about one every two weeks.

That's it all over then. The Sun has this morning thrown it's weight behind the Labour Party saying that they'll give them "one last chance".

What, I suspect, has actually happened is that Murdoch's election "experts" have decided that a Labour victory looks inevitable and therefore the paper is backing Blair so they can run more "It Was The Sun Wot Won It" headlines.

Still trying to get help in working out who to vote for, so I turned to the Political Survey 2005. My results are here.

They suggest I vote for the Green Party (which would be unlikely to be honest) but the biggest surprise for me was that they described me as "fairly socialist". Fairly!

Looks like Google Maps has expanded to cover the UK.

WhoShouldYouVoteFor.com tells me that I should be voting LibDem!

Who should I vote for?

Your expected outcome:

Your actual outcome:

	Labour 4
Conservative -75
	Liberal Democrat 96
UK Independence Party -22
	Green 66

The LibDems take a strong stand against tax cuts and a strong one in favour of public services: they would make long-term residential care for the elderly free across the UK, and scrap university tuition fees. They are in favour of a ban on smoking in public places, but would relax laws on cannabis. They propose to change vehicle taxation to be based on usage rather than ownership.

Take the test at Who Should You Vote For

Today is my third day on the course of steroids that are supposed to be curing my sarcoidosis (on the - still unproven - assumption that it is sarcoidosis) and already my life has changed beyond recognition. I'm still coughing (but much less) and I still get a bit tired, but I feel like I have far more energy than I have over the last two months. I know I'm not cured, but there certainly seems to be a light at the end of the tunnel at last.

One side effect of the steroids is that my appetite has returned which is good in many ways, but bad in others. Over the last six weeks I've lost over two stone (thats about 13 Kg) and I'm now within a pounds of a normal weight for my height for the first time for about twenty years. When this is all over I can write a weight loss book (Get Sick and Lose Weight). But I'm going to have to be careful that my new voracious appetite doesn't undo all that good work over the next few months.

But, all in all, I'm feeling pretty damn good right now :)

Here's a tip for you all. Having a doctor push a flexible tube down into your lung so he can take samples of lung tissue is no fun at all. Especially when the anaesthetic that is supposed to be making you feel sleepy and detached from the whole process doesn't seem to work at all.

But it's all over now. They have their lumps of lung and hopefully that will be enough to confirm the diagnosis of sardcoidosis.

One slight complication. When carrying out procedures like this there's a small risk of pneumothorax (a collapsed lung). And guess who drew the short straw. My right lung didn't collapse completely, but it apparently shrank a bit and they kept me in for another four hours to take another x-ray in order to ensure it wasn't getting any worse. Fortunately it wasn't any worse so they let me go home on the understanding that it should re-inflate over the next few days and I'm to go straight back to to A&E if I find myself shorter of breath than usual.

Another trip to the hospital today as I finally got an appointment to see a chest specialist. It's over a month since I first went to my GP about this problem, but this is the first time I've spoken to someone who should be able to definitively tell me what's going on in my chest.

Very quickly he came to same conclusion as the doctors did when I was in hospital - which is that I have Sarcoidosis. This sounds like a pretty grim condition, but it's apparently easily treated with a course of steroids. He's given me a prescription for steroids which I can start taking on Saturday and he expects that I'll start to notice a difference within a week.

So why do I need to wait until Saturday before taking them? Well he still wants to be more positive in his diagnosis. And the only way to do that is to take a biopsy. And the way he wants to do that is to stick a tube down my (hopefully anaesthetised) throat into my lung to grab a few lumps of lung tissue.

And the surprising news is that this can happen tomorrow. There are various potential (but unlikely) side-effects which he explained in detail. Those really don't worry me, but I have to confess to being more than a little scared by the procedure itself.

Hopefully I'll be able to write more details about it tomorrow.

Interesting story in yesterday's Evening Standard[1]. Apparently the Labour Party are trying to get the best value from their electoral funds by spending most of the money in constituencies with a majority of under 5,000 votes. That seems to be where they think the danger line is. The story also reports rumours that constituencies with majorities under 3,000 will get no money as they have already been written off.

In my constituency (Battersea) the Labour Party is defending a majority of 5,053.

[1] Tho' it's worth pointing out that the first rule of the London media is that you can't believe anything printed in the Evening Standard.

Apparently the Labour Party are now trying to win back anti-war voters by promising an enhanced package of international aid.

Labour plans to win back voters disaffected by the Iraq war with a manifesto pledge for international action on HIV/Aids treatment, a treaty to control the arms trade and a timetable for phasing out export subsidies to the west's farmers.

Alarmed at the prospect of large-scale abstentions and defections from a key group of middle class supporters, the party aims to make international development a key part of its push for a third term.

How much longer can they keep misunderstanding our very simple stance? Get rid of Blair and we can talk about voting for you again. How hard is that to understand?

I seem to be getting all the Labour Party election emails. Which is annoying in one way, but I can't be bothered to unsubscribe as it's interesting to see what they are telling their supporters.

This evening I got a good one that claimed to come from Alastair Campbell. It was sent at 20:02 and the subject was "Don't miss the telly tonight". In it they remind you to watch the first Labour Election Broadcast which is being shown tonight. Helpfully they list the times that it is being shown on various channels as follows:

1725 (BBC2)
1855 (BBC1 and ITV1)
1955 (channel 4)

So, assuming that the broadcast is five minutes long, that's a reminder to watch a tv broadcast that was sent two minutes after your last chance to watch the broadcast in question.

Or perhaps it's an incredibly clever spoof on Campbell's well-publicised lack of technical ability.

Update: Bizarrely, it seems that Bloggerheads got a slightly different version of the letter that was sent three minutes earlier and included listings for Channel 5 (19:25) and Sky News (22:30). That last one, of course, means that the email isn't a complete waste of time.

Peter Hain has been banging on again about the Labour supporters who don't feel they can vote for the Labour Party this time. Quoted in yesterday's Observer he says.

There's now a kind of dinner party critics who quaff shiraz or chardonnay and just sneeringly say, "You are no different from the Tories",' he said. 'Most of the people in this category are pretty comfortably off: it's not going to be the end of the world if they get a Tory government. In a working-class constituency like mine, this is a lifeline. It's not a luxury.

See that's a really good way to get us all back on board - insult us. I wonder why no-one has thought of that before.

As Backing Blair say it's only because people like Hain have failed to address the "Blair Problem" in the party that people like us have to take action ourselves.

Tim Rice was a guest on today's Breakfast with Frost. He was asked to pick interesting stories from today's papers. One story he chose concerned the fact that Death Valley has had so much rain recently that it now has vegetation and wildlife for the first time for ages.

This led to a brief discussion on global warming and climate change. Rice seems to hold some fairly bizarre theories on this. Whilst he admits that it is happening he doesn't think that it's caused by our industrial society. He said something like (and I'm quoting from memory here so it won't be exact) "when you see the power of nature causing events like the tsunami then it's difficult to see how climate change can be caused by a few people driving around in 4x4s". He then compounded his stupidity by adding "if in a hundred years we have camels roaming the deserts of Somerset then we'll just have to accept it and learn to adapt."

He's a very, very stupid man.

Fan, journalist and Douglas Adams biographer MJ Simpson saw a preview version of the Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy film. His review shows that he really didn't like it.

Interesting (and reasonably well hidden) page on the BBC news site where they admit that the number of complaints they have had about their wall to wall coverage of the Pope's death has "swamped" the amount of praise they have recieved for it.

Head of TV news Roger Mosey has answered some of the complaints raised. Personally I don't find his answers very convincing. Less than 10% of the UK population is Catholic. Even taking into account the (small) importance he had for non-Catholics taking up 90% of the output of News 24 for four or five days simply isn't justified.

The Times are slowly staggering into the 21st century. They have introduced an Election Blog (which they've quaintly decided to call a "log" not a "blog") but they have forgotten to include any RSS feeds of the posts.

What use is a blog without an RSS feed? If I can't read it at Bloglines then I'm not going to be reading it. They can't honestly expect me to actually visit their web site every day. Can they? How terribly last century of them.

Update: It seems I was wrong. There is an RSS feed (and an Atom feed). The blog is hosted on Typepad and they are using an iframe to load that page into their existing page and that defeats any feed autodiscovery mechanisms. Which is a bit bloody stupid of them.

Stephen Wilkinson seems like a sensible chap.

Stephen Wilkinson, who until yesterday was Labour's candidate for Ribble Valley and a Labour member of Lancashire county council, said he had become disillusioned with Tony Blair's "increasingly authoritarian" party.

He criticised the government's anti-terror legislation and the "illegal war" in Iraq and said the Labour government had become a "lapdog to George Bush's rightwing Republican administration".

Backing Blair have raised enough money to get their first campaign truck on the road. It'll be appearing at various places in London during the day.

Excellent timing too, that it's on the day that the election is called.

I spent a couple of hours yesterday afternoon blowing into various rubber tubes that were connected to computers.

This was my first appointment being treated as an outpatient at St George's Hospital. I visited the "Lung Function Clinic" which is where they run all sorts of tests to determine how well your lungs are working.

After a couple of hours of tests they declared that my lungs are working at about 95% of the capability that they'd expect for someone of my height and weight. Which is well within normal bounds.

So there's nothing wrong with my lungs. Which is, of course, nice to know. But it's one more test that hasn't discovered what's worng with my chest. The next stop is a consultation with a chest specialist, but that's not for three weeks. We're going to try to bring it forward.

Whilst you're reading all of the tributes to John Paul II that will inevitably appear over the next few days, it's worth bearing in mind a few things. Over the twenty-seven years of his reign this pope has wasted no opportunity to reinforce the catholic church's medieval views on contraception, abortion, euthanasia and homosexuality.

Probably the only thing I can agree with him on is his oposition to capital punishment.

And, on a lighter note, don't forget that according to Malachy there are only two more popes to go.