April 2006 Archives

Last week I got an email from the Labour Party proudly telling me about their new "Dave the Chameleon" campaign. I had seen the web site earlier in the day and, like any sane person, I had been appalled by what I saw. So I sent the following email in back to the Party:

I've seen the press coverage about this new campaign and I had been looking at the web site earlier today.

Frankly I'm appalled. Is there no level that "New" Labour won't stoop to? The Labour Party that I used to support would never engage in this kind of negative campaigning.

There is nothing that Cameron can do to persuade me to vote Tory. It's just not in my nature. However I didn't vote Labour in 2005 because of a number of Government policies (Iraq was only the biggest) and nothing the Government has done since then has persuaded me that Tony Blair is at all interested in listening winning back my vote.

It was already unlikely that I was going to vote Labour in the council elections next month and stupid stunts like this make me feel that I might never be able to vote Labour again.

I'm a natural Labour supporter. Not supporting you last year was painful for me. You should be worried about losing people like me. But nothing I hear from the party convinces me that you have the slightest interest in my support.

I thought that would be the end of it. I honestly didn't expect a reply. But this morning I got one. And it's a long one.

Thank you for your email about the Dave The Chameleon Campaign.

Bearing in mind your comments, I thought it would be useful for me to set out our thinking behind Dave the Chameleon. As a political party we want to engage with the public in new and different ways and we want to engage with the millions of people who are traditionally turned off by politics. Dave the Chameleon has been created with this demand in mind.

The film breaks new ground in political campaigning. We know that traditional campaigning needs to be complemented with a more sophisticated modern approach and we do recognise people are turned off by negativity. Dave the Chameleon is a humorous way of making a serious political point about David Cameron. His creation was inspired by John Prescott's speech to the Labour Party Spring Conference earlier this year. Dave the Chameleon has a strong message - there is nothing that David Cameron will not do or say to gain popularity; and therefore the only thing which you can be sure of is that he is a Conservative to the core.

We believe Dave the Chameleon is genuinely a new form of political communication and our feedback has shown that many have found it fun to watch, witty and enjoyable. Dave is meant to be an endearing character, which we hope will make people smile when they see Dave cycling through his animated world. But we too hope that voters will also question just what he believes in given the speed at which he changes his views and they will conclude that the only thing you can be sure of about David Cameron is that he is a Tory through and through.

Finally, I wanted to reassure you that we are committed to fighting this and every election to the highest possible standards and the Dave the Chameleon broadcast is only part of our overall strategy. We are campaigning on three key positive messages for the local council elections on 4 May:

• lower council tax under Labour councils
• fighting anti-social behaviour
• good education for all, not just a privileged few.

The Labour government has introduced measures to enable police to crack down on those who make the lives of others a misery, with tough action against persistent anti-social behaviour, new Community Support Officers and neighbourhood policing teams. All over the country Labour councils are using tough new powers to crack down on anti-social behaviour, to tackle fly-tipping, graffiti, abandoned cars and ensure cleaner neighbourhoods. Having voted against new powers to make our neighbourhoods cleaner and safer, David Cameron said that tougher sanctions on the disruptive few who make life a misery for the many is just a 'gimmick'.

Labour is working hard for our local communities. Combining extra investment in local services with rigorous reform Labour councils are costing less and delivering better services. This year's council tax increase is the second lowest in over a decade and Labour councils have led the way by delivering both the lowest increases and the lowest average council tax In 2006/07 the average council tax is £957 for Labour councils and £1147 for Conservative councils.

This election is vital to the continued growth and success of the country as a whole.

Thank you once again for your email.

So there you are. They do have policies to fight this election with. It's just a shame that they haven't bothered to tell anyone about them. I suppose they were too busy thinking up "new and different ways" to "engage with the millions of people who are traditionally turned off by politics". Oh, and Dave the Chameleon is "a more sophisticated modern approach".

Idiots.

Those nice people at london.pm are once more looking beyond Perl to present an evening of talks about Javascript on May 25th.

It's currently planned to take place at the Fotango offices, but if it's as popular as last year's web frameworks night I can see it having a couple of changes of venue.

If you're interested in coming along, then please sign up so they can gauge the level of interest.

Special levels of kudos to Greg McCarroll who is behind it all.

The scary thing[1] about the Religious Right is the fact that they are so completely mad that it's impossible to tell their real beliefs from parodies of them.

Take this for example. I honestly can't tell it it's real or if it's a really well-done pisstake.

Like most things that are worth owning, Computers are an American invention. Look at any modern computer and you will see that the whole thing is the product of American brilliance.

For example, this rugged IBM laptop I am using was designed and built by an American company. It runs software built by Microsoft, one of America's most productive organizations. My computer does everything I could possibly want: I can do my work, submit my taxes and even search the Bible.

Like all the greatest American engineering, it's an example of innovation that makes a growing group of European and Chinese hackers jealous. They hate our lead in computing technology and will stop at nothing until they have control of all of our computers.

I'm talking about a project called 'Linux', something you may not have encountered, but might do some day. It's a computer program that was initially developed in Finland as a means of circumventing valuable copyrights and patents owned by an American company called SCO Group.

The whole article is full of misunderstandings and half-truths about Linux and the Open Source movement. But there are little things (like the reference to "SCO" above) which make me think that the writer knows more than he lets on.

The comments are worth reading to. I particularly like the bit where a few people point out that the web site is, in fact, running on Linux. The site's supporters deny this is the case, claiming that nmap (which was used to determine the operating system) is a "russian hacker tool".

Oh, and Apple comes in for some stick too.

Also I would like to mention that Apple's 'Mac Os X' is a real threat, too. This damn extrem leftwing company is giving millions to the democ-rats!!!

Also I suspect that this Mac OS is sending personal information to Apple and other communist companies and organizations!

So there you have it. Using any OS other than Windows is Un-American.

The rest of the site is just as funny too.

[1] Ok. One of the scary things about them.

From the Guardian

Ashley Highfield, the BBC director of new media and technology, also announced proposals to put the corporation's entire programme catalogue online for the first time from tomorrow in written archive form, as an "experimental prototype"

This is the cool Ruby on Rails project that Matt Biddulph was working on last year.

More announcements tomorrow apparently.

Update: It's alive

I've just been phoned by someone at the Nokia Club[1] offering me a chance to test drive a Nokia N91. I get three weeks to try the phone and fill in a questionnaire and then I get to keep the phone.

I said yes please. Should arrive in a couple of days.

Anyone got any opinions on this phone?

[1] I think I joined years ago.

It's been a while since I wrote about politics. There's been so much going on that it's been difficult to choose what to talk about. So let's ignore most of April and instead concentrate on the last week when we can watch the Labour Party spiralling out of control as it desperately tries to win your vote in next week's council elections.

It all started last week with the launch of "Dave the Chameleon" - one of the most ridiculous political campaigns ever. It's bad enough that the Labour Party have resorted to a purely negative campaign, but it's even worse when you realise that basically they are attacking David Cameron for doing exactly what Tony Blair has been doing ever since he became leader of the party. The web site vanished briefly over the weekend so it looked like wiser councils had found favour at Labour HQ, but it soon reappeared. You're better off watching Backing Blair's version of the advert which has been remixed in a Pop-up Video stylee to reveal all the hidden messages.

Then over the weekend, the Observer had an article where Tony Blair and Henry Porter debated the curtailing of civil liberties by letter. I particularly enjoyed the bit where Porter says "in Parliament Square we now see people parading with blank placards to make the point that they are not allowed to demonstrate within one kilometre of the Square" and Blair replies saying:

You say people can only have blank placards outside Parliament and can't protest. Go and look at the placards of those camped outside Parliament - they are most certainly not blank and usually contain words not entirely favourable to your correspondent. Outside Downing Street, virtually every day there are protests of one sort or another.

Of course, he's talking about Brian Haw - the only person in Britain not barred from protesting in Parliament Square by the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act because his protest pre-dates this Act. So effectively Blair is saying "you are wrong because one person is still allowed to protest in Parliament Square because we screwed up the drafting of the Bill". And I'm not sure that legislative errors can be taken as proof of a liberal society.

And last night we have the Safety Elephant speaking at the LSE and complaining about the media all being beastly to him and his friends (and their policies). It seems that anyone criticising the government is only doing it because they don't understand "the balance of powers which currently exist in our society". He expands his point on Comment is Free.

When you come to vote next Thursday, remember that although council elections should be seen as completely separate from parliamentary elections, every vote for a Labour candidate will be interpreted as support for Blair, Clarke and their plans to remove civil liberties bit by bit. If you want to hasten Blair's removal from office then please consider voting for another candidate or spoiling your paper.

The amount of junk mail and leaflets we get through our door is ridiculous. We often get five or six separate people pushing unwanted leaflets through our letterbox each day.

I can tell that I'm not the only person on the road who is getting annoyed by this. A few houses have recently put signs saying "no junk mail" on their doors. These are largely hand-written signs, but a couple of them seem to have bought stickers from somewhere.

This a good idea, but I can't help thinking that a hand-written sign like that would look a bit ugly on the front door. I'd want something with a bit more class. What I'd really like is a nice little brass plaque that says "No Hawkers, No Circulars" - signs like that were quite common as I was growing up.

But I worry that modern leaflet distributors wouldn't know what it meant.

I've just noticed that The Sun has started providing RSS feeds. So now it's possible to get even more racist, sexist and homophobic bile delivered direct to your RSS reader.

Interesting to read how they try to explain the concept of RSS in words of one syllable for the benefit of their readers.

I'l get it added to the UK newspaper RSS list soon. I'll probably do another quick scan to see if any other papers have dragged themselves into the 21st century since the last time I looked.

I've been looking for a new laptop. I've had my current one for about five years and it's looking a bit long in the tooth. It struggles to keep up with the demands of any newish operating system.

I'm currently working near the Moorgate branch of PC World so I decided to go in there yesterday lunchtime and see what they had. I can hear UK readers groaning as they read that. PC World are well-known as the place that sane people avoid (as I said earlier this year). However, I was surprised to see a nice looking model at a reasonable price. I asked if they had any information about any Linux compatibility problems with this model and, of course, none of the staff could help me there (they did, however, know what I was talking about - which is an improvement on previous visits).

Obviously I couldn't buy the laptop without knowing about Linux compatibility, so I returned to the office to do a bit of research. And found that the couple of people who mentioned running Linux on this model both said that it worked fine.

So I knew what I wanted to buy. But I still couldn't believe that PC World would be the best place to buy it. A bit more Googling seemed to indicate that DSG (the Dixons, Currys and PC World chain) were the only people selling it. And I also discovered that if you ordered it from the Dixons web site then there was an online promotion code which got you £40 off the price (which was £800).

Armed with this knowledge, I spent almost an hour on Tottenham Court Road yesterday evening looking at laptops. No-one had anything at a similar spec at a similar price. Eventually I got to the PC World at the top of TCR. DSG stores are well-known for allowing you to haggle on the price, so I decided that if I could get anywhere near the £40 off then I'd buy the laptop there.

But I was disappointed. Firstly they wanted to prove that the other offer was genuine and in the heat of the moment I couldn't find it. Then they said that the price was fixed and they couldn't do anything to change it. I left the shop without a laptop.

Before buying online (and waiting five days for delivery) I decided to have one more try at the Moorgate branch of PC World. I went in this lunchtime knowing that I'd need to be persuasive and my technique was far more sophisticated than last night.

I pointed out the "we won't be beaten on price" sign.
I pointed out that it didn't need to be money off the price - I'd consider free stuff too.
I pointed out that it didn't even have to be £40 - getting my hands on the PC immediately is obviously worth something to me so I would have settled for £20.
I pointed out that it was silly to lose the sale over such a small percentage of the price.

The salesman I was talking to just shrugged his shoulders and said it wasn't his decision. The manager said that there was no way they could change the price.

At that point I mentioned that you always used to be able to haggle a bit on prices in DSG shops and asked if this was a new policy. The manager said that it was, but by that point I strongly suspect that he just wanted to get rid of me, so I'm not sure that he even really listened to the question.

So, anyway, I came back to my desk and ordered it from the Dixons web site with the £40 off. Should arrive within five working days.

If you're interested, it's a Philips Freevents X51[1]. List price is £799.99 and you get £40 off by entering "ONLINE40" as the promotion code as you're checking out. Not sure how long that promotion runs for.

[1] Can't find it on the Philips site. In fact I can't find any computers on the Philips site. Not sure what's going on there.

I'm subscribed to an RSS feed which shows me any new photos on Flickr that are tagged with balham. Mostly I just get too many photos of people getting pissed at various parties, but occasionally it throws up real treasures.

This photo appeared a few days ago, along with a few similar ones. And I've just looked at all the photos uploaded by this person. There are a number of great photos from early in the last century.

This is the kind of thing that makes the web great.

Update, July 2008: And also a good demonstration of the kind of thing that makes the web intensely frustrating at times. It seems that these photos have been removed from Flickr.

It's been a while since I posted one of my "basic guide to the internet" articles (sorry, I've been a bit busy - new job and all that), but whilst you're waiting for the next one here's a good article by Nik about why you shouldn't implement a web site purely in Flash.

I think it's his third point that is the most important. Google (and other search engines) can't index sites that are in Flash. To them (and their users) a Flash site is a black box. It might contain something useful and interesting, but who can say?

Someone once told me that the most important visitors to your site aren't the humans, but the search engine spiders. Every once in a while, it's worth looking at your site in a text-only browser like lynx so you can see your site how they see it.

I found a couple of reports of this week's evolution lecture. Firstly a write-up from a blogger who was lucky enough to get in and secondly a review at The Register.

The Register also gives a link to a statement issued by the Royal Society about evolution, creationism and intelligent design.

Science has proved enormously successful in advancing our understanding of the world, and young people are entitled to learn about scientific knowledge, including evolution. They also have a right to learn how science advances, and that there are, of course, many things that science cannot yet explain. Some may wish to explore the compatibility, or otherwise, of science with various religious beliefs, and they should be encouraged to do so. However, young people are poorly served by deliberate attempts to withhold, distort or misrepresent scientific knowledge and understanding in order to promote particular religious beliefs.

To celebrate easter, Comment is Free gives you both sides of the faith schools argument today.

So you get Polly Toynbee talking sense:

But how odd that in this heathen nation of empty pews, where churches' bare, ruined choirs are converted into luxury loft living, a Labour government - yes, a Labour government - is deliberately creating a huge expansion of faith schools. There is all the difference in the world between teaching children about religion and handing them over to be taught by the religious. Just when faith turns hot and dangerous, threatening life and limb again, the government responds by encouraging more of it and more religious segregation. If ever there was a time to set out the unequivocal value of a secular state, it must be now.

And you also get Peter Franklin talking bollocks:

Finally, we come to the c-word: creationism. It seems that some faith schools teach it. When I was at school I was taught about socialism and fascism, and I don't believe in either. But don't get me wrong, I don't object to teaching children that they randomly evolved from a pool of slime; it's just that I don't think we'll ruin their education by telling them that there is an alternative view: which is that they're the special creations of almighty God.

Pick a side people. Rationalism or nonsense?

Well, at least, it is according to the keyboard player of Counting Crows:

The public should support all "digital rights management software" because, in the end, it means that more movies will be produced, and they will be of better quality. Copy protection is fair and it's right and it's good for art, for artists and for anyone who enjoys art.

Of course, there are those who might be of the opinion that anything which kills Counting Crows music isn't necessarily a bad thing. I couldn't possibly comment.

A few months ago I changed the way my email server works. Instead of using POP3 to download the mail and then filtering it on the client side using procmail, I configured the system to filter the mail on the server side so that I could read mail using IMAP. At some point during that change I broke the Spam Assassin set-up so that Bayesian filtering no longer worked. The upshot of this was that I was suddenly getting an extra 150 or so pieces of spam that were ending up in my inbox rather than being shunted off to my spam folder. This was most obvious in the mornings when I'd always wake up to 70 or 80 unwanted messages in my inbox. Despite this being an annoyance, it never became enough of an annoyance for me to spend the few hours it would take to fix it.

Then this morning I found only ten or so spam messages in my inbox. My immediate response was to think that there was some kind of problem with my mail server (the recent trackback denial of service attacks have made me sensitive to problems like this and the constant stream of spam is a useful heartbeat to monitor).

But once I'd woken up a bit more I realised that that wasn't the problem. Actually there wasn't a problem at all. All that had happened was that yesterday I had finally got round to upgrading to version 3 of Spam Assassin (only 18 months after it was first released!) And this version is much better at catching spam than the old version. So I'm seeing less spam in my inbox again. Which is, of course, good.

Not sure if the Bayesian filtering has started working again tho'. Need to check that over the weekend.

It's a good day for space anniversaries.

On April 12th 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human to go into space.

Twenty years later Columbia took off on the first space shuttle flight.

I failed to get in to Steve Jones's lecture at the Royal Society last night. Unfortunately, I didn't fail to get in until I had been standing in the rain for over half an hour. Apparently there was room for 500 people in the hall and I estimate that at least 200 were turned away. It's heartening that so many people were interested in the lecture, but I wonder if many of the people there were creationists turning up to argue with the sane people. There are certainly a lot of them on the discussion board.

If anyone was there or has pointers to any reports of the evening then I'd love to hear from you.

Update: Looks like the lecture is available online. I haven't had a chance to watch it yet.

Over the last few days, this server has come under attack from spammer scum trying to leave fake trackbacks that point to their nasty little web sites in order to increase their Google ranking. It doesn't work of course. No trackback gets posted to this blog until I've approved it. But they don't care about that. They just fire off trackbacks to as many sites as they can without bothering to check whether they're actually getting any benefit.

What it does acheive, however, is to bring this server to its knees. When it's attempting to process dozens of trackback requests there's precious little processing power left in this server to do useful stuff like serving blog pages to you or handling my email.

After struggling with this for almost a week I've decided that the simplest course of action is to just disable the program that handles trackbacks. Trackback is an interesting and useful feature to have on the server, but it all gets a bit pointless if it's preventing the server from doing any real work.

Currently I've turned it off with extreme prejudice. If you're writing something that will trigger a trackback on this site then you'll almost certainly just see an internal error message page. Sorry about that, I'll get round to cleaning it up later on.

This is important stuff

Been I while since I did anything really geeky in my spare time so this weekend (whilst watching the UKTV repeats of last year's Doctor Who) I went back to a project that I was thinking about a few months ago.

I've built Balham Blogs. It's a site that aggregates RSS feeds that have some connection with Balham. I was going to use the Planet software, but last week someone mentioned Plagger to me and as it's a Perl toolkit I used that instead.

Plagger is still under heavy development and the documentation leaves a little to be desired. I had to resort to reading code a few times in order to work out what I needed to do. But in the end it only took a few hours to get the site up and running.

If you run a site that produces an RSS (or Atom, I'm not fussy) feed that has something to do with Balham, then please let me know and I'll be happy to add it.

The new job is working back in an investment bank for the first time for several years. It's going to take some getting used to. Everything about the technical environment is completely tied down. There's a very scary firewall between me and the outside world. And my workstation is completely locked down. Currently I can't install any new software (apparently that can be changed with permission from my line manager).

The biggest downside so far is that I've had to use Internet Explorer for the last week. For the last couple of years I've only ever used it occasionally for checking how badly standards-compliant web sites break in it. I can't remember the last time I used it as my main browser - it's possible that I never have.

And it's terrible. Oh, I'm aware that the problems are largely a case of it not being what I'm used to, but I'm have having real problems being productive using it. There are so many things that I'm missing. Tabbed browsing, incremental searches and so many useful extensions. I'm sure there are similar add-ons available for IE, but remember I currently can't install any new software.

I'm sure I could get used to it, but I'm not sure that I want to. Of course, even if I get Firefox installed I'll still have to use IE a lot more than I'm used to. The web site that I'm building is for internal users only, and all (or certainly the vast majority) of the users will be using IE, so that's the only platform that I need to target.

It's a bit depressing to move away from the New Media industry and to find such a large company that still relies so heavily on Microsoft. I'm sure that the same would be true in any number of large companies.

It's all very sad.

Money's good tho' :-)

I've been a bit quiet over the last week. That's because I'm working for a new client and I'm just finding my feet.

A new job, of course, means a new location. I'm working on Golden Lane which is just to the north of the Barbican. In this case it's not exactly a new location to me as when I first moved to London (is it really twenty-five years ago?) I lived in a Hall of Residence on Bastwick Street which is just north of the new office.

So it's been interesting walking around the old stamping group, seeing how it's all changed. In a lot of cases the change hasn't been for the best. The area between the Barbican and Old Street has always been pretty run-down, but it looks like there's been no money invested in the area at all over the last twenty-five years. Even places that looked new and shiny when I first saw them are now looking a bit grim after a quarter century of neglect.

In the other direction the story is completely different. Between the Barbican and Moorgate has been a hive of activity over the last few years. A number of of buildings have been knocked down or refurbished. The old Britannia House is now City Point and there's great looking new building at Moorhouse.

Another big change is the demolition of Northampton Hall. "Notty Hall" was another City University Hall of Residence and I had a number of good times there. Apparently it was demolished in 1998.

I was very pleased in the middle of the week when I discovered that the steps just to the right of the main office to my new office lead up to gate 11 of the Barbican. That mean that my walk from Moorgate tube station to the office can all be done via the Barbican highwalks (gate 3 to gate 11). There are lots of interesting views en route so I foresee lots of Barbican photography in my Flickr stream in the next few weeks.

Rachel has written an account of her meeting with Charles Clarke. Sounds like it was pretty productive all in all.

This morning the BBC news warned me that my part of the Northern Line was suspended because of "overrunning engineering work." However, it seems that "overrunning engineering work" was a bit of a euphemism. I subscribe to a tube alert SMS service and the message I got from that was a little more honest.

SEVERE DELAYS: Nrthrn from 7:16 - an earlier track search for a missing member of staff

Of course we all know that PledgeBank is a wonderful thing. But now it seems that even Tony Blair is getting involved.

Backing Blair are back on the warpath, encouraging people to not vote Labour in the local elections.

There's a catchy song too.

Today's Guardian has an article about Phyllis Chesler, an American feminist writer who believes that by turning a blind eye to what goes on in Islam, the feminist movement is betraying Muslim women.

Western feminism's failure to confront the problems raised by Islam, Chesler believes, is a result of the creation of a hierarchy of sins, "an intellectual culture in which racism trumps gender concerns". The example she cites as the embodiment of wrongheaded priorities is "gay and lesbian movement activists rooting for the Palestinians who, meanwhile, are very busy persecuting homosexuals, who in turn are fleeing to Israel for political asylum".

The result, she argues, is that "instead of telling the truth about Islam and demanding that the Muslim world observes certain standards, you have westerners beating their breasts and saying, 'We can't judge you, we can't expose you, we can't challenge you.' And here in the west you have a dangerous misuse of western concepts such as religious tolerance and cultural sensitivity so that one kind of hate speech is seen as something that must be rigorously protected.

This is a subject that is interests me more and more. It's clear that women in Islam are treated as second class citizens, but you never hear many people talking about it as apparently religious freedom includes the freedom to oppress half of your population. Why is religious freedom more important than the rights of women? As Chesler says:

Feminism began to fail when they began to say, 'We can't judge barbarism. We can't even call it barbarism, because the barbarians will be offended'

Of course, it's not just Islam that thinks this way. Even the more fundamentalist Christian sects will tell you that the emancipation of women was a bad move and that they'd like to reverse it.

I can't speak for other countries but in the UK we have laws against sexual discrimination. Why aren't they used to prevent people from discriminating against women on religious grounds? What would happen if a Muslim woman tried to use sexual discrimination legislation against a mosque that stopped her praying with men?