A group of MPs objected to Brian Haw's protest about the Iraq. He's been camping in Parliament Square for years.
The MPs got so upset that they brought in a law banning all protests around Westminster in order to get rid of him.
Except the law was so badly worded that it doesn't apply to Brian Haw.
Gotta love our politicians.
It's obviously a shame when so many (1,500 apparently) people lose their jobs, but Time Computers going into administration is very good news in so many other ways. Time have been well-known for years for selling cheap computers that rarely work and for having the worst customer support network in the industry.
They won't be missed.
Originally seen on geeklife.co.uk.
Ex-Doctor Who companion Sarah Jane Smith will return in the new series of the sci-fi show, it was revealed as the Doctor's new costume was unveiled.
Popular 1970s character Sarah Jane, played by Elisabeth Sladen, will join new Doctor Who actor David Tennant.
From the BBC site, so it must be true.
I noticed that the O'Reilly stand at Opentech on Saturday had a few new Perl books. I think that a couple of these books are particularly important.
Over the last few years I've heard a lot of people saying that Perl isn't suitable for large scale programming projects as it doesn't constrain programmers in the same way as languages like C++ or Java. I don't, of course, agree with this but it seems to be a popular opinion. It's therefore good to see a couple of books that are firmly aimed at dispelling this belief.
Perl Best Practices by Damian Conway does exactly what the title suggests. It presents over 250 guidelines that will help you write "better" Perl code - where "better" means more readable, more reuseable and easier to maintain. If you're a manager trying to cope with a multitude of coding styles from different Perl programmers, then buy them all a copy of this book and call it the departmental coding standards. If you're a programmer whose manager is telling you that your department is moving to Java because Perl code is so hard to maintain, then lend him your copy of this book to persuade him that Perl code can be just as robust as Java.
Whilst Perl Best Practices will probably get most of the publicity, I actually think that Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook (Ian Langworth and chromatic) is just as important. Testing is a very hot topic in software development right now and the Perl community has built up a testing framework that is second to none. This book is a pragmatic guide to getting the most out of that framework.
Between them, these two books should go a long way towards countering any arguments about Perl not being an appropriate language for writing enterprise applications.
And that, as far as I'm concerned, has to be a good thing.
This morning my tube was held up at Bond St for ten minutes and three carriages (including mine) were evacuated. All because someone left their bag behind when they got off the tube.
Of course, London Underground's method of investigating this was for the driver to wander up and carefully look into the bag.
I was hiding round the corner.
Please people. Now more than ever. Take your bloody bags with you.
A few random thoughts came together in a vaguely coherent form on the way home from Opentech yesterday. Allow them to share them with you.
What do you think?
Update: Er... thanks everyone for pointing out the obvious errors in my thinking. The major problem was in point 5. It's Firefox that parses the page, not Greasemonkey. Greasemonkey just traverses the DOM tree built by Firefox. If you break your page enough that the DOM tree is broken, then Firefox (and probably any other browser) isn't going to be able to display your page.
I did say my thoughts were only "vaguely coherent".
And I should clarify that I think that Greasemonkey and semantic markup are both damn fine ideas.
Move along please. Nothing to see here. Just some idiot waffling.
Just back from Opentech, so here are a few random notes. I'll hopefully fill in more details later.
I started by listening to Danny O'Brien talking about "Living Live in Public". Danny discussed his theory of how the geek world has a weird kind of celebrity where you can be incredibly famous to a very small subsection of the population. He also characterised fame as a situation where people know more about you than you know about them. Where's the power in that relationship?
Then I went off to the seminar room to hear various people talking about Media Hacking. Before the talks started Ewan Spence, who was chairing the session, tried a bit of practical media hacking. He asked for volunteers who had an iPod Shuffle and five people came forward. He then put all of the iPods in a box, shook it up and handed them back at random. The iPod owner who was sitting in front of me returned to his seat distinctly unimpressed by the trick. The actual talks in the session started with Matt Westcott talking about running Linux on an iPod. An interesting trick, but not really interesting to me. Then Paul Mison spoke about ways of hacking iTunes. This was a good high-level survey, but could have done with being twice as long and more detailed. Mike Ryan introduced MythTV, the Open Source PVR package, which I'll definitely be investigating further. Finally Michael Sparks introduced Kamaelia, a new BBC project for building complex applications out of simple components.
After lunch I was back in the main room for what were probably the two major talks of the day. The first was the official launch of BBC Backstage. Ben Metcalfe also announced a new Backstage data feed (containing weather data) and a competition to create an interesting application based on their recently announced TV schedule feed. Ben was followed by Jeremy Zawodny who was talking about how Yahoo! is opening up their data through the use of web services APIs. He also had some interesting thoughts about where the web services industry might be heading. An interesting question asked during that session was about the politics of persuading business managers that giving just anyone free access to all your company data is a good idea. Even more interesting if you know that the question was asked by someone who might be about to be involved in something very similar at another major content provider.
After a brief break (during which I got involved in an O'Reilly "meet the author" session) I went to a session on blogging and social software. Tom Reynolds gave some tips on how to write a work-based blog without getting fired, Paul Mutton drew graphs of social networks by monitoring IRC channels and Paul Lenz (from the company behind WhoShouldYouVoteFor) introduced their new site WhatShouldIReadNext.
Finally there was a session on web services. Don Young from Amazon gave what was a bit too much of a corporate presentation on Amazon Web Services, Gavin Bell talked about the concept of social documents and Lee Bryant introduced a couple of prototypes based on BBC Backstage data (did I mention the heavy BBC presence at the conference!) To finish off Simon Willison and Rob McKinnon talked about Greasemonkey. It was slightly badly timed given the major security flaw that was found in Greasemonkey this week, but a fixed version is promised in days. Simon demonstrated Matthew Somerville's script for fixing the Odeon web site, but the biggest applause was saved for Rob when he demonstrated his script that reformats the New Zealand equivalent of Hansard on the fly. It takes something that is really difficult to read and converts it into something that looks like TheyWorkForYou.
More data (and links!) later but for now, here's a link to the "opentech" tags on Technorati and Flickr.
I'm not sure what to make of this. I'm just throwing it out there as a data point.
Everyday we get tube disruptions in London (just look at Stef's tube map). Some days are better than others.
Today was a really bad day. And I'm not talking about this afternoon when incompetent bombers shut down large parts of the tube system. I'm talking about this morning.
I needed to travel from White City to Chancery Lane to get to a meeting this morning. As we pulled out of Tottenham Court Road the driver said that he'd just heard that the next station (Holborn) was closed. So we just passed through it without stopping. Chancery Lane was the next stop so I got off. By the time I left the tube station the tannoy was announcing that services were being withdrawn from large sections of the Central Line. Judging by how late other people were to the meeting, that problem took about half an hour to clear.
Then I had to get back to White City after the meeting. I got on the tube at about 11:45. The journey should take about twenty minutes. It was about forty-five minutes later that we got to White City. I wasn't really listening to the announcements (too deep in conversation) but I'm sure they were saying something about problems at Shepherd's Bush.
But we travelled through the other Shepherd's Bush station[1] to the one where the bomb was.
I'm just saying that there were a lot of disruptions on the Circle Line today - even before the major disruptions started. And I'm wondering if someone (whether that's the Police or London Underground or someone else) had a hint that something was going to happen.
[1] Shepherd's Bush station is one of a very small number of places which has two completely different tube stations in different locations that share the same name. I swear we do it to confuse the tourists.
The people running Eyeconomy are bad people. They encourage people who have web sites to use bad practices.
Take a look of their section on sub-sites. What they so innocuously call "sub-sites" are better known to the rest of the world as "pop-unders" - that is those extra windows that open underneath your existing browser window and stay there until you find them when you minimise or close your browser. Or, at least, they used to until you installed Firefox and got the benefits of pop-up blocking (you did install Firefox, didn't you?)
See how proud they are of their technology. See how they use marketing terminology to make it sound like what they are advocating is perfectly acceptable.
And then see this chilling phrase towards the bottom of the page.
Coming soon - Total Pop-up blocker bypass system - Regain that lost traffic due to pop-up blockers with our new system which simply ignores the block and delivers anyway
Now, I know that it's possible to get round most pop-up blockers. I've started to see it happen occasionally on Firefox. But that's ok. A newer version of Firefox will eventually plug that hole. And then people like Eyeconomy will spend time getting around the improved pop-up blocking. And then Firefox will block the new pop-ups. And so on.
But what people like Eyeconomy need to realise is that pop-up blocking is popular for a reason. People don't like pop-ups. And forcing pop-ups onto people when they've installed a pop-up blocker isn't going to be a very popular move.
The lesson is that pop-ups just piss people off. You really don't want to be using them.
So I decided to go ahead and make the changes that I mentioned yesterday. To summarise:
If you notice anything strange with these feeds over the next couple of weeks then please let me know.
Additionally, if you're one of the twenty-five people who reads my blog through the Live Journal davorg_full account, then now might be a good time to update your subscription so it points to davorg_blog or the misnamed daveorg_burn instead.
It's nice that Google have set up Google Moon so you can take a closer look at the Apollo landing sites. But have you seen what happens when you zoom right in?
Anyone who was subscribed to the full.rdf or full.xml feeds from this site would have stopped getting updates for a couple of weeks. Sorry about that - I've fixed it all now and you should have just recieved many days worth of bloggy goodness.
It's worth pointing out that full.rdf and full.xml are both deprecated and I'll probably be killing them off in the next few weeks. Don't worry tho' I'll be doing some sort of HTTP magic to ensure that your RSS reader gets redirected to the appropriate place.
And while we're talking about deprecating feeds, I see that Atom 1.0 is about ready to go, which means that I can't for the life of me the point in RSS 2.0 any more. If you want a simple syndication format then use Atom 1.0 and if you want the full power of RDF go with RSS 1.0.
With that in mind, I'm also considering removingf the RSS 2.0 feeds from this site. Again, I'll redirect anyone trying to access it to the Atom feed instead.
So, to summarise, I'll be providing a few less feeds of this site over the next few weeks. There will be an RSS 1.0 feed and an Atom 1.0 feed. In addition, there will also be the Feedburner version which combines my blog feed, my del.icio.us feed and my Flickr feed in one (RSS 1.0) feed.
Does that all make sense?
I've made some pretty sweeping changes to the BBC streams page. Some of the Real Player links are now gone and there are now links to play everything in the BBC Radio Player application.
You'll notice that there are still some links to Real streams on my page. These mainly point to talk shows where the BBC owns all of the rights and doesn't have to negotiate with a third party. These links are also available on the BBC web site. The code which builds my site has been adapted so that as more BBC pages have that link on them, so the Real links will automatically appear on my site. But for programmes where the BBC doesn't give a Real link, I won't be giving one either.
Now before anyone starts jumping to conclusions, I haven't been closed down by the BBC. No-one is forcing me to make these changes. No-one is threatening me with legal action. In fact, no-one has even asked me to make these changes.
But I have had a conversation with the BBC. And I now understand why they don't want people listening to some of their shows in the standard Real Player. Well actually, they do want people to be able to do that and they are doing all they can to move towards that happening as soon as possible. However they have to live in a complex commericial environment, and the people who own the rights to the music played on the BBC are a little wary of the prospect.
The BBC are engaged in constant negotiation with these people are are trying to persuade them to allow unfettered to this music. The presence of the Real stream links on a reasonably well-known page like mine could potentially undermine those negotiations.
If the BBC get their way, then all of these shows will be available for free download without any kind of DRM and I hope that's what we all want. If by removing the extra links from my page then I can do my bit in bringing that a bit closer then I'm happy to do that.
I have a Flickr Pro account to give away by the end of today. If you're interested then drop me an email.
Be a shame to let it go to waste.
Update: It's gone now.
At the same time as I moved my mail handling to a different server, I also made a tiny tweak to my procmail settings.
Can't remember now why I did it, or what I thought it was going to achieve. What it did achieve was to get procmail to throw away random pieces of email.
Anyway, it all seems to be fixed now, but if you sent me something in the last couple of weeks and didn't get a reply, then that may well be the reason. Please send it again.
Roger Mosey, head of BBC Television News, says what he really thinks about Fox.
Finally, we are never immune from accusations of bias. It goes without saying that there is nothing more sensitive than matters of life and death, and the BBC's audience response has been massively supportive and understanding about the dilemmas we face in reporting terror. There have been two main exceptions. From a smattering of radical websites comes the argument that we are being hypocritical in mourning the dead of London when we allegedly gloried in civilian deaths in Iraq.
This utterly misrepresents the BBC's reporting of Iraq, where we have always sought to portray the whole picture of events in that country. The second exception is principally Fox News in the United States. A contributor to Fox said after the London bombings that "the BBC almost operates as a foreign registered agent of Hezbollah and some of the other jihadist groups". On the Fox website today there is an opinion piece, "How Jane Fonda and the BBC put you in danger". I am writing this in a building which was bombed by Irish terrorists. My colleagues and I are living in a city recovering from the wounds inflicted last week. If I may leave our customary impartiality aside for a moment, the comments made on Fox News are beneath contempt.
Did you see that? "The comments made on Fox News are beneath contempt." Which sounds about right to me.
Yesterday I got a call from my credit card company saying that they had seen some unusual activity on my card. It seems that some has been buying a lot of 3 phone credit with my card. They also bought a National Express coach ticket and had a bit of a field day in Argos.
The card has now been cancelled and the card company are investigating further.
But today alarm bells started ringing in my head.
I'm probably jumping to conclusions, but it's all a bit worrying.
I moved my email handling to a new server a month or so ago and since them I've noticed a larger than usual amount of spam getting into my inbox rather than being caught by Spamassassin. Today I decided that enough was enough and that I'd investigate further.
My first theory was that in moving my configuration onto the new server, I'd somehow lost my database of Bayesian scores but no, that still seemed to be be intact.
Then I checked the spam score on on of the spam mails that had found its way into my inbox. It was 6.5. And everything over 5 is supposed to be identified as spam. Except on this box it wasn't. I'd installed Spamassassin from an RPM file provided by Fedora. And they had changed the default spam score from 5 to 7.
And guess what. Every piece of spam that found its way into my inbox has a spam score of between 5 and 7.
So a quick edit to /etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf and everything seems to be back to normal.
Which makes me wonder why the Fedora people decided to mess with the defaults. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Update: If you're on a Fedora system and you're having the same problem, don't forget to run "service spamassassin restart" in order for your changes to be registered.
Not that anyone is going to be surprised by this, but it seems that a number of recruitment agents have problems with basic reading skills.
This morning I got three emails from agents containing details of potential jobs. In two of the three cases they were actually quite good matches for my skills. But, of course, I've just started a three month contract at the BBC and I'm not looking for work right now.
To make life easier for agents (and, in theory, myself) I maintain a web page which has up to date information about my current availability and the list of skills that I'm interested in using. The theory is that an agent will have the address of that page in their database and they'll check it before contacting me about work. That way they don't waste their time contacting me unnecessarily and I don't waste my time replying to their email.
So I wrote back to all three of them pointing out that I wasn't available and giving them the address of this useful page. I've just heard back from one of them who said:
Thank you for getting back to me. Anything changes, please don't hesitate to get in touch.
Well no. Did you even read my email? The point is supposed to be that I don't need to get in touch with you when my circumstances change. When my circumstances change I'll update the web site and the next time I come up in the results of one of your searches you'll check the page and see that I'm now looking for work.
Moron.
I swear that one day I'm going to snap and spew so much bile about recruitment agents all over this blog that none of them will ever deal with me again. Hopefully I can hold off from doing that until I'm rich enough to never have to work again :-)
Update: Just got a reply from one of the other agents. As I mentioned above, my email to them pointed them at a web page where they can always get my latest CV. This new reply simply said:
Please send word doc cv Thanks
My web page does has the CV in a number of formats. Including a Word document.
It's a couple of days on, so let's step back and take a look at what happened on Thursday. I'm still trying to articulate exactly how I feel about it all so let's leave that for another post and instead look at more practical matters.
Basically, it seems to me that Thursday 7th July 2005 will be seen as the day the British Blogosphere grew up. Although I was working in the offices of one of the largest news gathering organsations in the world, I was still getting my most up to date news by standing watching BBC News 24 on the TV in the corner of the office. Because I couldn't do that for the whole day, I turned to the internet for my news.
The first thing I noticed was that both the BBC and the Guardian (the two news web sites I instinctively turn to first) weren't keeping up with developments quickly enough for me. They both have editorial procedures in place which meant that stories were only being updated every thirty minutes or so. Both sites were, of course, great for in-depth coverage later on, but for more immediate news I went elsewhere.
I spent much of the morning reading Nosemonkey's constantly updated post. Later I discovered the Wikipedia page and the Guardian news blog (which was more up to date than the main Guardian site). The Flickr photo pool was also being updated constantly with people uploading photos from their mobile phones - the first time that phone cameras have been used so much for chronicling an ongoing news event.
At noon we all gathered round the TV to watch Tnoy Blair's statement. It was good (he's always been good at reacting to tragedy) but it was nowhere near as good as Ken Livingstone's reaction - whoever wrote that deserves a promotion.
Over the next twenty-four hours, more well thought out reactions appeared. The Sharpener set up a pledge for us all to sign. We Are Not Afraid was set up to tell the terrorists that... well... that we're not afraid. And the London News Review nicely summed up the feelings of Londoners with their open letter to the terrorists.
And everywhere I went on the web I was finding much the same feeling. Of course people were angry but their anger was directed purely at the people responsible for the attacks. Only in a very few places did I see people trying to place the blame with a wider community like all Muslims. The few places I did see those opinions raised, they were shouted down pretty quicky.
All in all a terrible day, but the way that Londoners in general and London bloggers in particular dealt with it has reaffirmed my belief that I'm living in the best city in the world.
A little Firefox tip that I just discovered. It makes it far easier to use web search interfaces.
Let's take for example the TV programme search box on the Radio Times web site. It's nn the left hand side of the page - a little text box labelled "search tv". Now the usual way to use it would be to type in the name of a TV show that you are interested in and hit the "go" button. But in order to do that you need to get to the RT page first. And that all takes too much time.
So instead of typing something into the text box, point at it with your mouse and right click. One of the options on the menu is "Add a Keyword for the Search". Select that menu item and you'll get a dialogue box. Give the search a name (which isn't really important) and a keyword (this is important) - I suggest 'rt'. At this point you can also select which bookmark folder to store this search in. I suggest putting it in the "quick searches" folder. After filling all of those details, press the 'ok' button to create the search.
Now you don't need to be on the Radio Times page to search for a programme. At any time you can simply type "rt
And you can set up the same thing for any site that has a search box like that. I have about half a dozen set up and they save me a lot of time.
So it seems that after the excitement of the last couple of days, London has decided that it deserves a bit of a lie down and has taken the day off. I estimate that the tubes had about a third of the normal numbers of people on them. I had the best journey in that I've had all week.
George W Bush in October 2004
We are fighting these terrorists with our military in Afghanistan and Iraq and beyond so we do not have to face them in the streets of our own cities.
It's a bit embarassing, but I seem to be profiting from today's terrorist attacks. People are googling for bbc radio streams and coming across my page. Normally I get up to 400 hits a day on that page. Today I've already had 4,000. And people are clicking on the Google Adsense links. Normally I make less than a dollar a day from those ads. Today, I've already made $6.
I promise I'll donate it to charity.
Like pretty much everyone in London, I had a spectacularly bad journey into work today. On the way in I was composing the blog entry I was going to make about the incompetance of London Underground. I was going to say something terribly witty and cutting about how ironic it was that the London transport system ground to a halt the day after the Olympic bid had been successful.
But then I got to work and realised that it was all a bit more serious than that and that flippancy would be a little out of place.
So I scrapped that entry and wrote this one instead.
Ok, so London will be hosting the Olympics. That's bad enough. But what's worse is having to put up with the terrible gloating and jingoism that it's already bringing out in people.
In the tube station at White City (and, I assume, elsewhere) London Transport had printed posters thanking all of their customers for their support of the bid (I particularly hate this kind of hyperbole that assumes that everyone agrees with some popular idea). At Tottenham Court Road the train indicator boards were scrolling the news that London's bid had won - on the offchance that someone passing through the station had previously missed it).
Of course, the Evening Standard was at its offensive jingoist worst. Their front page headline declared "We've Won!" as though the population of London had somehow triumphed over some major adversity to win a major battle.
If this goes on for seven years I'm not going to be able to stand it.
And I dread tomorrow's papers.
That's it then. London will host the 2012 Olympics. You know, I've yet to meet a Londoner who actually supports the bid.
Congratulations to all of the cities who didn't win.
Now, I wonder how much I can make from renting out my house during the games. I'm certainly not going to want to be in London with that circus going on.
An update on the iRiver after a couple of days usage.
In general, it's great. I've had no trouble loading files onto it and it's a lot of fun having 40 Gb of music in your pocket at all times. I even got iRipDB working really easily, so it has a database of my music which allows me to browse by artist, album and genre (not that the genre tags on most of my music files have much meaning).
There is, however, one slight problem. And it's one that I'm only going to be able to fix by a change to the way I work with music files.
Currently I store all my files using the directory structure Artist/Album/track_name.ogg. For each album I also create a .m3u file which contains a list of the tracks on that album in the correct order. When I want to listen to an album I load up the .m3u file in Xmms and off we go.
But the iRiver has pitiful support for .m3u files. Oh, it claims to support them. But they need to be in the format created by Winamp. Practically that seems to mean that they need DOS line endings and backslashes where any sane operating system would use forward slashes. Of course, making those conversions to all of my .m3u files would be trivial. But it's not worth it as the iRiver only supports 200 .m3u files at a time. So I have a player that currently has 7,000 songs on it - probably about 700 albums - and I can only use .m3u files for 200 of them.
So the alternative is to play each track in an album's directory in order. All of my music files contain (mostly) accurate tags listing the track number. So if we could play the tracks in a directory ordered by that, then everything would be fine. But the iRiver won't do that. It will only order the tracks by filename. Which basically means that you're listening to an album in alphabetical order. Which can be a bit confusing.
The solution is to rename all of my music files so that the filenames start with the track number. Files will look like Artist/Album/xx_track_name.ogg. It's not a big deal. I can write a program to do that pretty easily, and I'll need to reload all of the files onto the player (which takes about seven hours).
It's just a bit annoying that I'm forced into changing the way I've been working for years, just because the software has pointless limitations built into it.
Still, the pros of having the iRiver far outweigh the cons.
So I finally joined the iPod generation. Except, of course, I didn't buy an iPod. Firstly, Mac hardware and I just don't seem to get on. Secondly, the iPod doesn't play Ogg Vorbis files which is the format that most of my digital music is in. And finally, the iRiver (which is what I ended up buying) is just better once you look beyond the herd mentality that most people seem to be following when they buy an iPod.
So I'm in the process of copying my music collection onto the iRiver. I'm using USB 1.0 so it's a bit of a long old job. One of the nice things about the iRiver is that Linux just sees it as another file system, so you don't need any complicated proprietary software in order to use it. I should probably look at upgrading to USB 2.0 or Firewire though,
All in all it looks good. I'm looking forward to using it on my journey to and from work tomorrow. I'll report back in a week or so and let you know how it's going.
Recent Comments