January 2007 Archives

They're just messing with us now. Having a laugh. Seeing how much they can get away with.

BBC correspondent Gordon Corera said the plot was thought to involve "some kind of kidnapping - possibly of an individual".

You don't say! Kidnapping an individual. As opposed to kidnapping, what, a hatstand?

Also:

Finding evidence to back up the suspicions was "key" to the inquiry now, he added.

Now, I'm no expert in criminal investigations, so bear with me if I've got this wrong. But surely you'd want evidence to back up your suspicions before arresting eight people.

Seems to have knocked Lord Levy's arrest off the top news slot though. Handy that.

Update: Bah. Both of those quotes have been removed from the story.

From an "Amazon" phishing mail that I've just received.

Amazon will request personal data (password, credit card/bank numbers) only on our home site, wich is securely incrypted with SLL.

See, if you don't pay attention in your English classes, you'll never be able to fool English speakers.

Well, unless they didn't pay attention in English either.

Oh, and it pays to get your technical abbreviations right too.

Another worrying poll today about how young British muslims are becoming more radical. Apparently 37% of 16-24 year olds want to live under sharia law and the same percentage want to send their children to islamic schools. There are many other equally depressing findings.

No response from the government yet, but the Telegraph report contains this interesting snippet (They're talking about Tory leader David Cameron):

... in a speech today, Mr Cameron will warn the Muslim community that it cannot use the "screen of cultural sensitivity" to deny women their rights.

And he's right you know. We have laws about sexual discrimination in this country. And if your religion isn't compatible with those laws, then maybe you shouldn't practice your religion in this country. Oh, and that goes for catholic adoption agencies too!

Update: More about Cameron's opinions:

Mr Cameron calls for a "calm, thoughtful and reasonable" approach to building community cohesion.

"It's no use behaving like the proverbial English tourist abroad, shouting ever more loudly at the hapless foreigner who doesn't understand what is being said.

"We can't bully people into feeling British - we have to inspire them," he said. "Inspiring as well as demanding loyalty from every citizen will require a new crusade for fairness."

In his speech later, Mr Cameron will warn that in some parts of Britain's Muslim community "women are being denied access to education, work, involvement in the political process and surprisingly even denied access to mosques".

He will go on to say: "We must be bold, and not hide behind the screen of cultural sensitivity to say publicly that no woman should be denied rights which both their religion and their country, Britain, support".

As Martin points out below, that "crusade for fairness" is an astonishingly bad choice of words.

This is all based on an article from yesterday's Observer.

How many films have you seen?

That's not a question I've ever pondered before. But it came up in conversation earlier this week when a friend was telling me about Listal. A new web site that he had been playing with.

Listal is aimed at the High Fidelity geek audience. It's a web site for making lists. My friend had been making a list of all of the films he had seen and had very quickly found himself with a list of over 600 films.

That sounded in the right sort of area to me. If we assume that I watch on average one new film a week and that I've been doing that for twenty years or so then I'll have seen about a thousand films. But how many of them can I remember?

So I joined up and over the last few days I've been building my own list of films that I've seen. It actually turns out to be a) pretty easy and b) very interesting. I've also got to over 600 films (is there some psychological limit there - humans find it easy to remember the titles of 600 films?) and with such a large data set interesting patterns emerge. You can find the actor you've seen most often (Ian Holm apparently) and the director whose films you've seen most of (Spielberg - which I found quite surprising).

So feel free to laugh at my taste in films. But why not build your own list and let me laugh at yours in exchange.

Oh, and if I've mentioned seeing any films that aren't yet on my list then please let me know.

On Monday, Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre gave a speech where he ranted about the "cultural Marxism" of the BBC. He was, of course, pretty much completely wrong. And today we have a well-written piece by Lance Price pointing out many of Dacre's errors. And as a bonus, he does it by having a little pop at the church.

No organisation that gives free air-time to a minority sect like Anglicanism can truly be considered part of a Marxist conspiracy. Watch Songs of Praise and you would think that the people of Britain were filling our churches with undiminished enthusiasm every Sunday. "Thought for the Day" is an extraordinary anomaly in the otherwise rigorous Today programme. No economist, politician or businessperson is given a free slot to expound their take on the world completely unchallenged. And quite right, too. What's so special about people of faith?

Oh, and here's Lloyd having a tremendous amount of fun with the hapless Mr Dacre.

Last time I checked (sometime late last year) the Karma Download web site was displaying a message saying that they hoped to be back in action in a few days (I understand that they were negotiating with a potential buyer - or perhaps it was an investor).

But now I see that the URL goes to a domain parking site. So I suppose that the deal didn't come off and Karma is completely dead. Which is a shame. It was an interesting site. I wonder what happened to the rights to the code. Maybe they could recoup some of the costs by selling it to another music download site. It was really well-written (of course, I'm a bit biased there).

The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Archbishop of York have written a letter to the Prime Minister in which they back the rights of Catholic adoption agencies to be exempt from rules of the Equality Act which comes into force in April. The law makes it illegal to withhold services from people on the basis of their sexual orientation. The Catholics believe that it's their "god-given" right to discriminate against gay people.

But in their letter, the Archbishops make an excellent (if slightly longwinded) point. They say:

It would be deeply regrettable if in seeking, quite properly, better to defend the rights of a particular group not to be discriminated against, a climate were to be created in which, for example, some feel free to argue that members of the government are not fit to hold public office on the grounds of their faith affiliation.

But that wouldn't be regrettable at all. That's exactly what we should be striving for. A society where people who believe in sky pixies are considered unsuitable for public office. I've said it before, but it's worth repeating - taking instructions from invisible friends is no way to run a country.

This is well worth doing.

"I will Arrange my MP to receive a copy of Richard Dawkins' book "The God Delusion" but only if 645 other people (one per UK constituency) will do the same for other MPs."

Further details:

The head of the UK Catholic Church has today (23 January 2007) has asked the UK parliament to exempt Catholic adoption agencies from being forced to consider equally, applications from homosexual couples.

I do not believe the church should be given special status. Catholics, like everyone else in the country, should play by the rules. Faith should not exempt one from being guilty of discrimination.

Richard Dawkins, as Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, is best placed to make this argument, and his book "The God Delusion" (costing 11 pounds online) does it convincingly.

I will buy a copy, and have it delivered to my own MP. Should this pledge gain momentum, I additionally undertake to maintain a simple online list of MP's (and their addresses) for whom pledges have been received, to eliminate duplication of effort.

Go on. You know it makes sense.

Oh look, a local battle to fight

All Age Church is attempting to reach the Balham area for Christ and an essential part of our appeal is Christ Church Kids. Many of those we aim to reach won't know that yet but our task is get them in and give them a taste so that they'll never want to leave. We know it works because it's happened once. You'll know that I'm attempting to cultivate a relationship with Telferscot School so that in partnership with them I am welcome in that school, am invited to run regular assemblies and help out with the teaching of RE. In principal the Head Teacher has given me the go ahead to run a Kids' Club in the Summer Half Term. My hope is that not only will CC Kids attend but that having built up a favourable reputation and a good rapport kids from the school will want to come. At the end of the holiday club we'll have a Sunday Meeting at which the kids will perform and make presentations. Although the Holiday Club is some time away we start building our reputation from here. Our kids are the best advert followed secondly by their parents.

Doesn't that sounds sinister to you? The school they are talking about is a primary school. "Our task is get them in and give them a taste so that they'll never want to leave". Get them early before they can think about what a load of bollocks we're telling them. Teaching children to follow a religion before they are old enough to consider it critically amounts to child abuse. It should be made illegal.

Looks like this initiative comes from Christ Church Balham.

Minor Update: Christ Church Balham are part of a movement called the Co-Mission Initiative. I'm trying to find out what their views are on the teaching of creationism of schools before contacting the school.

Update: Richard Perkins (the owner of the blog I'm talking about) has written about my reaction to his post. He didn't actually link to my post though. So none of his readers can see my post (although he does quote extensively from it). It also means that Technorati didn't pick up the reference.

I'll be writing a more detailed reponse later.

This article in Wired points out that the consumer release of Windows Vista will almost certainly see the use of RSS reach a tipping point.

Save the date: RSS will go mainstream on Jan. 30, 2007.

That's the day Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system hits retail shelves. Internet Explorer 7, the first version of Microsoft's web browser with native RSS support built in, ships on the Vista desktop. As users upgrade to Vista and IE7 and discover the convenience and power of RSS, we can expect a huge upsurge in the popularity of syndicated information on the web.

It's sometimes hard to remember just how far ahead of the curve you are if you use tools like RSS. But the coming weeks will see thousands of people seeing that little orange icon in their web browser for the first time and things can only get more interesting from here.

The Telegraph web site was relaunched recently and they are promoting this with an advertising campaign. I've seen many adverts on the escalators in tube stations.

But these adverts have some very strange wording on them. They claim that the Telegraph site is "the UK's most visited quality newspaper web site". And there's a logo which is probably from the organisation who created the statistics that the Telegraph are quoting from. There's a similar claim on the new site ("Britain's No.1 quality newspaper website") together a logo which links to this page on a site owned by a company called Hitwise.

Now these kinds of claims are pretty rigorously tracked by the advertising standards people, so I was interested to hear the Telegraph making them. Everything I've read before says that Guardian Unlimited is the most visited UK newspaper site. For example this report from Alexa has GU at number 29, the Sun at 48, the Times at 50 and the Telegraph at 97. So I wondered how the Telegraph could get away with this claim. Perhaps it has something to do with the word "quality". Is it possible that they are equating a quality newspaper with a broadsheet newpaper? The Telegraph and the Financial Times are the only remaining national broadsheets in the UK - so that would certainly explain how the Telegraph can claim the title. But it's a bit of a stretch to claim that the Times, the Guardian and the Independent all stopped being quality papers when they moved from the broadsheet format.

Perhaps I should just contact the Telegraph, or Hitwise, and find out what their definitions mean. Because currently it's all a bit confusing.

Update: Simon Waldman (who knows a bit about this topic) discusses the Telegraph's claims.

I haven't been watching Celebrity Big Brother so all the information that I have on the current racism row has come from a number of media outlets (and via BlogLines).

I have come to a few conclusions though.

• I don't understand why people are surprised by this. Do people really think that people in the UK aren't racist? If you're surprised by the opinions shown by the contestants then you really need to get out more.
• If the media are going to create an environment where people like Jade Goody are made into "celebrities" for no good reason (25th most influential person in the world!) then you can't possibly be surprised when the under-educated little morons start to believe that their ill-thought-out opinions are valid and important.
• The one thing that surprises me is the way that our xenophobic tabloid press are covering it. Littlejohn is constant sniping at foreigners and many Sun editorials contain thinly-veiled racism. But today they are all pretending that doesn't happen (relying on the goldfish-like memories of their readers) and promoting a vision of the UK where all races live togther happily.

I have never voted for a contestant in Big Brother. But right now I'm very tempted to do all I can to ensure that Shilpa Shetty wins. Well, anything short of actually phoning up and voting. Obviously.

Harriet Harman has started a blog. Of course, she's also standing for election as deputy leader of the Labour party - so the timing is all very suspicious. I wonder how much she'll be writing once the election is over.

But, anyway, I've added her to Planet Westminster.

Interestingly, Harman's web site is also available at labourvoter.com. What does that mean?

Right. I think I've got all the commenty stuff working again. You'll still have to be registered with Typekey in order to comment, but hopefully you're all used to that now.

Sorry for the inconvenience over the last few weeks. I'm sure you've all got loads of really interesting comments stored up.

And a big thankyou to Sarah over at the SixApart forums who showed me the error of my ways. I was missing a Javascript file that was added to MT in version 3.2.

Slowly getting the holiday photos organised. Here are two more sets for your amusement - photos from Cahal Pech in Belize and La Paz Waterfall Gardens in Costa Rica.

I've been tagged by Piers, so here are five things you might not know about me.

• When I was very young I was a member of my local Boys' Brigade. As well as weekly BB meetings, this entailed going to church (and Sunday school) every week. I have no idea why I did this as, even back then, I wasn't at all religious.
• Just before taking my A Levels I was told not to come back to school until I had shaved off the ridiculous excuse for a beard that I had (barely) managed to grown. I therefore did most of my final revision in a local college library. Luckily I saw sense and shaved it off before they stopped me taking the exams.
• At the age of 20 I was the Entertainments Officer for my Students' Union (at City University). I wasn't very good at it. I turned down the chance to book Culture Club because I had never heard of them. The night I was offered turned out to be the night after their first appearance on Top of the Pops.
• My final year project for my degree proved "conclusively" that GUI systems would never catch on. This was immediately followed by getting a job as a Windows programmer (which, in 1988, was still quite unusual).
• Between about 1993 and 1996 I used to line dance. And I don't care who knows it.

I don't really hold with tagging people with these memes, but I'd love to hear five things from Martin, Nik, Dave, Dean and Barbie.

I really hate it when companies who have a good product spoil it by trying to trick the customer into spending more money than they really want to. Today's example is LoveFilm.

Last year I wrote an entry about how I was considering trying out one of these new DVD rental services. They all seemed pretty similar, so in the end I chose LoveFilm largely because they offered a few free tickets for Picture House cinemas along with the standard month's free trial. They are also the people behind the Guardian's Sofa Cinema service.

The trial went fine - I watched a number of films that I hadn't seen before - but eventually I decided that the service wasn't for me. This was largely because I didn't really like the way that you get sent two random films from your list. I have a wide taste in films and often the films I was sent weren't films that I was in the mood to watch.

So anyway, I decided that I wanted cancel the service at the end of the free trial. And that's when things started to go wrong. You can't cancel an account on the web site. You need to phone them. That means two things. Firstly, they are hoping that most people just won't bother making that extra phone call and secondly, the customer service people you speak to will do every thing they can to persuade you not to cancel. And sure enough when I made the call I was subjected to all manner of persuasion in an attempt to get me to change my mind. When I held firm, their parting shot was to try to scare me by saying that if my last DVDs weren't back by my next payment date then I'd be charged for another month.

But I returned the DVDs in time and assumed that my relationship with LoveFilm was over.

They had different ideas and over the last six months I have had frequent mail from them inviting me to rejoin. Most of these offered another month's free trial, but over christmas I got an offer of a three months trial. I decided to take them up on that offer.

During the signup process they asked me which rental package I wanted a free trial of. There wasn't much information about what the various packages meant so I just signed up for the most expensive one (as that's the best value if they're all free!) A few days later my first rentals arrived and I remembered that I had planned to investigate the packages in more detail.

I discovered that the expensive package that I had signed up for not only included DVDs, but also computer games. And as I rarely play computer games, there was no point being on that package. So I changed down to a cheaper package that only covered DVDs. I confess that at this point I didn't really read the page that closely.

A couple of days later I was checking my credit card and discovered that LoveFilm had charged me £12.99. I wrote to customer services to find out why and they told me that by changing my package subscription I had cancelled my free trial. Of course, it says that on the page where you change your package so whilst I'm still in discussion with them, it looks like I won't have a leg to stand on and that I've royally screwed up my free trial.

But doesn't that sound a bit underhand to you? Who is going to want to move from a free trial to a paid package? Seems to me that the only reason to have that functionality available is to catch people you don't read the small print (and, yes, I admit that's my own stupid fault) and to trick them into paying money that they don't need to pay. I know that the page tells you that by changing your package you'll be cancelling any free trial, but it's below the fold. It seems to me that it might be more appropriate to have the message in large, flashing red letters - "Warning: this will cancel your free trial and that's a bloody stupid thing to do!!"

So, as I said, I'm still in discussions with them. I'm hoping they'll refund the money and put me back on the free trial. If they don't then I'll just have to cancel and make the most of the month's subscription that I've paid for. And then wait for the next free trial offer to come along.

Here's tip for web site developers. If it makes no sense for a customer to take a particular action then don't offer it to them. Or, at the very least, give them a confirmation screen that makes it clear how stupid this action is.

Update: I've just heard back from them. They still haven't offered a refund, but they have added another three free months of service to the end of this current payment period. That sounds like a reasonable compromise to me.

Still don't really understand why a customer would want to switch from a free trial to paid package though.

Here we go again:

A CATHOLIC schoolgirl was asked not to wear a crucifix on a chain because it breached health and safety rules, her father said today.

Samantha Devine, 13, was told to remove the crucifix and chain to comply with school rules.

She attends The Robert Napier School, a non-denominational mixed school, in Gillingham, Kent.

Her father, Danny Devine, 30, of Canterbury Street, Gillingham, told the Medway Messenger: "It's just political correctness gone absolutely mad. It's a harmless crucifix and she wears it as a symbol of her religion.

This'll be the front page story on either the Mail or the Express tomorrow. Or maybe both.

Nik talks a lot of sense about technical interviews. As a purely anecdotal aside, I'm pretty sure that the interviews where I've been asked the kinds of questions that he's talking about have lead to some of the jobs that I have least enjoyed.

And, as Nik mentions, this is all in the context of Guardian Unlimited looking for a lot of new employees (I can't help wondering how permanent that URL is). Having worked at GU a couple of times, I'd recommend working there to anyone. It's certainly one of the best places I've ever worked.

The Sun has launched a search for "the web's most disturbing websites". Just send your suggestions to sick.clicks@the-sun.co.uk and "our web team will get on the case" (whatever that means).

I don't know about you, but high on my list of the sickest sites on the web is www.thesun.co.uk. Do you think I should let them know?

Update: They've changed the email address. You should now use talkback@the-sun.co.uk. I wonder if the editorial staff just made up an address without checking with the IT people. And I wonder which address is printed in the paper.

So, iPhone. Looks nice, but I can't see anything that says that it plays Ogg Vorbis files. Which makes it useless to me.

Last time I owned cats, they were called Spike and Drusilla - so I suppose they're kind of on the right lines.

If more proof was needed that religion isn't always the force for good that its proponents would have us believe that it is, them you only have to look at today's rally at Parliament. At this rally you'll see Christians, Jews and Muslims all protesting together to protect their right to be homophobic. That people can still think this way in the 21st century can only be seen as a argument against religion. The only reason that these people hold these views is because they read it in a fairy story. That is no basis for a civilised society.

This petition sounds like it would help.

And (via Dave) here's an excellent article from the Huffington Post.

The highlight of my holiday was the helicopter trip that we took to Montserrat to see at first hand the damage done by the Soufriere Hills volcano since it became active in 1995.

The trip is organised by Caribbean Helicopters on Antigua. I only found it because I was idly flicking through my copy of The Rough Guide to the Caribbean and looked at some of the islands that we weren't visiting. The tour costs $220, which seems expensive, but it's worth every cent.

We almost didn't make it though. We arrived at the arranged time, got into the helicopter and set off. But halfway across the sea, the pilot decided that the clouds were too low and we wouldn't be able to see anything so he turned back. As this was our only day on the island, the company did all they could to rearrange the rest of their day so that we could try again later. We wandered off to have some lunch and then set off again.

And I'm so glad that we didn't just give up and get a refund. The trip was fantastic. I've put up a set of photos, but they can't convey the effect of actually being there. It's incredible seeing busy towns completely destroyed and covered in metres of volcanic ash.

We were there on December 22nd and our pilot, Greg, was taking photos too as he said that there were some changes that the scientists at the Montserrat Volcano Observatory would be interested in. Seems that he was right as two days later the MVO raised the volcanic activity level to 4 (on a scale of five) and early in January a village was evacuated as the volcano was getting a bit feisty. This bout of activity is still continuing. I wouldn't be suprised if flights over the island are restricted at the moment, so we're lucky to have gone when we did.

If you're ever in Antigua and have an hour to spare, then I strongly recommend that you contact the nice people at Caribbean Helicopters and arrange a trip. You won't regret it.

They still need a lot more tagging and reorganisation, but I've just dumped about 350 photos from the cruise onto Flickr.

Enjoy.

I rarely have a need to use a US airline, so I don't really know anything about their relative merits. I do, however, now have one useful data point.

Delta is staffed entirely by incompetent fools and I'll never be using them again.

Our return from Costa Rica involved two Delta flights on Friday. DL245 from San Jose (the one in Costa Rica) to Atlanta and (after a four hour wait) DL12 from Atlanta to Gatwick.

The check-in in Costa Rica was horrible. The flight was full, so we queued for over an hour. And when we finally got to the desk they made us repack our bags as one of them was too heavy. In the rush to fix that, we repacked a bottle of Madeira (which we'd been carrying with us since Funchal) in my hand luggage - so it then got confiscated going through security.

I don't remember much about that flight. We'd been up since 4:30am so I was running on autopilot. I'm pretty sure that we were about half an hour late taking off (for reasons I don't remember). The plane was really old. No video screens in the seat backs, and Gill's seatbelt was covered in what appeared to be the dried up remains of someone's dinner from a previous flight.

Oh, and they charge ($5!) for alcoholic drinks.

The one good thing that happened was that our luggage was tagged all the way through to Gatwick, so we didn't have to deal with it in Atlanta. But just as we landed, the crew made an announcement that we would have to collect all of our luggage and check it in again. They were wrong - as our orange labels proved.

I hadn't been to the US since before September 2001. This has been a concious decision. I have no interest in visiting a country that doesn't really seem to be interested in having visitors. I was only passing through because that was the route that was part of the cruise package. And having now experienced current US immigration procedures at first hand I won't be rushing back. I've never before been fingerprinted or had my photo taken in order to enter a country. It's like they're assuming that all visitors are criminals. Another couple who were travelling with us were detained for twenty minutes because they had Lebanese stamps in their passports. I was grateful that we hadn't had our passports stamped in Cuba!

But none of that is Delta's fault. Let's get back to the main story. Boarding for our flight was delayed for about forty-five minutes as the plane was late arriving, but eventually we got on. Then it got very strange.

Firstly, the pilot announced that there were some problems with the way the luggage had been loaded and that it would take twenty minutes to move some of the luggage into a different hold. Then, about twenty minutes later, he came back on to tell us that there hadn't been a problem after all and that someone had just done some calculations incorrectly. All of which doesn't exactly fill you with confidence. But we'd lost our take-off slot and when we eventually took off, we were an hour and a half late.

The flight itself was the usual long-haul, night flight hell. We landed in Gatwick about an hour later than expected, got off the plane, went through immigration and headed for the baggage reclaim hall.

We had three bags checked in. After twenty minutes or so, two of them arrived. After waiting another half an hour, the third bag still hadn't appeared. And it looked like no other bags were appearing. We asked a Delta employee who was collecting bags and he confirmed that all of the bags had been unloaded and that they were all on the carousel. So we headed to the baggage enquiries desk.

There were about thirty passengers with bags missing. So the desk quickly turned into a bit of a scrum. The two employees there were completely bemused by the number of people they had to deal with and reacted by working as slowly as possible. They also gave up any idea of dealing with people in any kind of sane order and just spoke to the person who was shouting loudest at any given point.

It took about thirty minutes to get a form, fill it in, and give it back to one of the chaps on the desk. Initially they said they had no idea what had happened to the bags, but later they seemed to be pretty sure that the missing bags were on the next flight. Which made us start to wonder if the pilots messages to us were accurate. Maybe, as the flight was so full, they had solved their overloading problems by leaving some of the luggage on the tarmac.

Anyway, we eventually gave our form back and were told that they would deliver our luggage by 5pm the next day. We then went off to find our taxi and go home. Of course, he charged us an extra ten pounds waiting time, but I intend to get that back from Delta.

The missing bag did turn up the next day. But I still want to find out what happened. Everyone that we speak to at Delta seems keen to tell us that this kind of thing happens all the time to all airlines. But in the twenty-five years that I've been flying, I've never before before had a bag end up on the wrong plan. And I've never before flown Delta. Is that just a coincidence?