February 2007 Archives

Unless there's some kind of breakthrough in negotiations in the next few hours I'll be losing four BSkyB channels from my cable TV feed at midnight tonight.

The four channels in question are Sky One, Sky Two, Sky News and Sky Sports News. I only ever watch Sky One (and the occasional repeat on Sky Two) and the only programme I'm regularly watching on Sky One currently is Lost. Sky One is only any good for US imports and most of the good ones are now on E4 or More 4.

Currently Sky One broadcasts Lost the day after it is shown in the US. Which means there will be lots of well-seeded Bittorrent trackers. So I can't really see it effecting me at all.

The lowest point of the argument has been the adverts aimed at Virgin that Sky have run during popular programmes. These have put across Sky's view of the dispute ("Sky want to continue to give you top quality programming but those nasty people at Virgin Media are going to cut you off") and strongly suggested that Virgin customers phone Virgin asking them to cave in and pay Sky's increased fees.

Maybe I'm biased, but it seems to me that Sky have been acting like bullies here and I'm glad to see Virgin stand up to them.

Update: Well they're gone this morning. Sky One has been replaced with Virgin Central 2 (which is identical to Virgin Central - and a bit of a waste of a channel if you ask me). Sky Two has been replaced with a message from Virgin saying "blame Sky, not us". And BBC News 24 has been moved to the old Sky News spot.

I feel I should comment on James Cameron's claim to have found the tomb of Jesus and his family.

This claim seems to be based on two things. Firstly the names on the tombs and secondly DNA testing of the remains. Obviously I haven't seen the documentary, but I can't see how either of these can provide any kind of proof.

Firstly, the names. Cameron says that the combination of names would have been very rare in the Middle East at that time. But historians say that just the opposite is true, all of the names on the coffins would have been common. And even if the names were rare, that's no proof of the identities. You only need one other family with the same set of names for this identification to be in severe doubt.

Then there's the DNA. This is even less conclusive. DNA testing shows the genetic relationships between the bodies found in the tomb. And in this case it apparently shows exactly what you'd expect for a close family interred together. Many of the bodies have DNA in common showing that they are related but the main couple have no genetic links at all - as you'd expect from a husband and wife. Nothing here backs up Cameron's claims that this is Jesus and his family.

Of course, I'd love to have prove that Jesus died and was buried instead of floating off to be with the sky pixie. But that level of proof is very unlikely. And this certainly isn't it.

Many christians seem to be rather angry about these claims, as you would expect. You can't have an eternal and undying god when his bones are on display in the museum. But there are a few possibilities that they perhaps haven't considered. If two of the bodies were Jesus and his mother Mary then their DNA should be identical as Jesus didn't have a father to donate half his genetic makeup. Taking that one step further - shouldn't Jesus have no Y-chromosome? There are plenty of opportunities to make scientific discoveries that back up the gospels.

And that's all before we even start to consider the possibilities of cloning.

The main feature in yesterday's G2 was an article by Stuart Jeffries on the growth of loud disagreement between religious people and atheists. Regular readers will know that I usually agree with the Guardian, but this article has got it horribly wrong.

The article's main error is to give time to the views of Colin Slee, the Dean of Southwark. He has this to say:

We are witnessing a social phenomenon that is about fundamentalism. Atheists like the Richard Dawkins of this world are just as fundamentalist as the people setting off bombs on the tube, the hardline settlers on the West Bank and the anti-gay bigots of the Church of England. Most of them would regard each other as destined to fry in hell.

You have a triangle with fundamentalist secularists in one corner, fundamentalist faith people in another, and then the intelligent, thinking liberals of Anglicanism, Roman Catholicism, baptism, methodism, other faiths - and, indeed, thinking atheists - in the other corner.

This is a straw man that I'm tired of hearing. "Oh, look," says someone from the Church of England's more liberal wing, "On one hand you have those nasty fundamentalist christians and on the other you have those nasty fundamentalist atheists - they're both as bad as each other, the obvious compromise is to be like me".

But it's nonsense. There is no comparison between the religious fundamentalists and the atheists. Let's see if we can make this clear.

Religious people have certain beliefs. They have no evidence for these beliefs but they are sure that they are true. If you present them with evidence that contradicts these beliefs then they will ignore or ridicule that evidence. The one thing that they won't do is to change their beliefs to incorporate this new evidence.

Atheists also have beliefs. But they have evidence for their beliefs. The amount of confidence that they have in their beliefs is directly proportional to the strength of the evidence. If you present them with evidence that contradicts their beliefs then they will incorporate the new evidence into their view of the world and change their beliefs accordingly.

Atheists are "anti-fundamentalists". They have no beliefs that can't be changed if they are given the right evidence. Theists will do everything they can to avoid changing theif beliefs. And when the level of evidence gets too great then they'll often resort to the equivalent of sticking their fingers in theirs ears and chanting "la-la-la, I can't hear you".

Equating atheism with fundamentalism is a ridiculous proposition. It's appalling that Jeffries allowed Slee to get away with such a weak argument. We expect better from the Guardian.

There is a discussion of the article on Richard Dawkins' web site.

Something amusing to start your day - Conservapedia.

Conservapedia is a much-needed alternative to Wikipedia, which is increasingly anti-Christian and anti-American. On Wikipedia, many of the dates are provided in the anti-Christian "C.E." instead of "A.D.", which Conservapedia uses. Christianity receives no credit for the great advances and discoveries it inspired, such as those of the Renaissance. Read a list of many Examples of Bias in Wikipedia.

They have a list of "commandments" that must be followed when editing articles. Number one on the list is

Everything you post must be true and verifiable

Which is extremely funny given the fundamentalist christian basis to all of the articles.

I suppose it's fair enough. Wikipedia doesn't reflect their bias so they're free to go ahead and set up an alternative. Of course, we're all free to laugh at them.

Probably of little or no interest to most readers, but there's now an e-petition calling for the abolition of IR35.

IR35 was a way of gathering extra tax revenues (without raising the basic rate for taxation) by picking on Computer Contractor's who work in a way that suits the relatively short life-cycles of the industry.

It paints tens of thousands of honest hard working tax payers as tax avoiders, whilst giving no recognition to the risk and extra work that they have to put in to make there living.

Shame that the petition paints contractors as people who don't know the difference between "their" and "there".

Oh, and while we're talking about spelling - d-e-f-i-n-i-t-e-l-y.

Have you ever inherited an email address? It's a very strange experience and it's happened three times to me.

The first time was when I worked at a small dotcom company and was given the address dave@small-dotcom.co.uk. It turned out that the same address had been used by a former employee who had left some time earlier. He still had a number of mailing list subscriptions though and once my mailbox was active it soon filled up with information about things he was interested in but I wasn't. Took me months to unsubscribe from them all.

Then when I started at this bank I was given the address david.cross@large-bank.com. In this case, the address was still warm from the Chicago-based research analyst of the same name who had left only a couple of weeks earlier. I get invited to all sorts of fascinating meetings in Chicago. Oh, and my previous incarnation played a weekly hockey game with some friends and each week a mail discussion would start about whose turn it was to bring the beers. They actually turned quite aggressive when I suggested that a geek from London wasn't actually interested in their sporting activities.

The third time has just happened. Over the weekend I saw that davecross.co.uk was available, so I registered it and pointed it at the Magnum Solutions web site. But almost immediately I started getting spam to that domain. And then I got a couple of mailing list messages. It seems that someone has been using that domain fairly recently.

So I fancy a bit of domain name archeology. What can I find out about the previous owner of the domain? There seems to be nothing in Google's cache and the Wayback machine doesn't have anything either. Maybe I'll just wait and see what mail turns up.

Does anyone else have any suggestions?

Anyone who has anything to do with customer service in their organisation should read and learn from Joel Spolsky's article on the subject. It's not just software companies he's talking about. Anyone who deals with customers could benefit from taking his advice.

I particularly liked point 2, "Suggest blowing out the dust".

Microsoft’s Raymond Chen tells the story of a customer who complains that the keyboard isn’t working. Of course, it’s unplugged. If you try asking them if it’s plugged in, “they will get all insulted and say indignantly, ‘Of course it is! Do I look like an idiot?’ without actually checking.”

“Instead,” Chen suggests, “say ‘Okay, sometimes the connection gets a little dusty and the connection gets weak. Could you unplug the connector, blow into it to get the dust out, then plug it back in?’

“They will then crawl under the desk, find that they forgot to plug it in (or plugged it into the wrong port), blow out the dust, plug it in, and reply, ‘Um, yeah, that fixed it, thanks.’”

Many requests for a customer to check something can be phrased this way. Instead of telling them to check a setting, tell them to change the setting and then change it back “just to make sure that the software writes out its settings.”

The BBC has a report about a survey from LearnDirect which estimates that over 14.6 million people have lost their employers money due to a lack of basic literacy and numeracy skills.

Almost two in five of the people surveyed said that they relied on someone else at work to check their calculations.

There was also a widespread dependence on computer spell-checkers, particularly among the young. The survey suggested that 67% of people relied on spell-checkers - with this rising to 75% among 16 to 30-year-olds.

Ewe no, Eye don't really sea watt's rung with vat. Eye wood of fort every buddy nose that a spill chequer is the best weigh to find you're miss steaks.

Ooh, this is going to rattle a few cages.

CCTV images of one of the 21 July bomb suspects apparently fleeing London in a Muslim veil have been shown in court.

The jury at Woolwich Crown Court saw footage prosecutors say is Yassin Omar, 26, wearing a black full-length dress and burka with a handbag over his arm.

I predict the tomorrow's Mail or Express (maybe both) will be calling for the banning of burkas as they can be used to disguise terrorists.

They might even use the headline "Weapons of Mass Distraction".

Today the Daily Mail is very angry about the possible end of free banking.

Banks and building societies are moving to kill off free banking as they prepare to unveil record profits of more than £40 billion.

Industry leaders claim compulsory monthly fees on current accounts, which are common in North America and Europe, are the 'fairest' way to charge.

And it really doesn't require a crystal ball to predict their readers' reponse.

Little wonder so many people are leaving the United Kingdom and setting up homes abroad!

Well if they do introduce charges for ALL current accounts, I shall move my money to another source and go back to paying my standing orders personally! It's disgusting, they make millions from investing our money. what more do they want, blood?

Ah, the old country is living up well to it's nickname. 'RIP OFF BRITAIN'.

This is a particular favourite:

It's high time we had an alternative to banks. If they are making these obscene profits, where are they making their profits from, if not their customers? Banks should not rule the world, they are criminal institutions. It's called usury.

We used to have an alternative to banks. They were called building societies. And they were accountable to their members (i.e. the people who had accounts with them) rather than their shareholders. Of course, we don't have many left now because the greedy British public has voted to change them all into banks. I bet the £500 or so that most people got out of the deal has all been spent. Does it look like a good deal now?

But my main problem with this whole debate is the concept of "free" banking. Banks are businesses. They need to make profits for their shareholders. You need to pay for using their services. There are three common ways that this happens:

• The bank siphons off some of the money it makes by investing your money (this is how most personal accounts currently work)
• The bank charges you for each transaction you make transaction (this is how most business accounts currently work)
• The bank charges a fixed fee each month (this is how some premium personal accounts currently work)

None of these are free banking. They all cost the consumer money. It's like "commission-free" foreign exchange. Jsut because there's no separate charge on the bill, it doesn't mean you aren't paying for it.

There is, of course, an interesting debate to be had on the subject of bank charges and profits. Do they really need to make that much money? If they switch to a model that charges by transaction then how much will savings interest rates increase by? Which charging model best suits different types of bank customers? There are many areas that the media can cover on this topic.

But intelligent debate isn't helped by shoddy journalism like the Mail's and the use of emotive terms like "free banking". It doesn't exist. It never has and it never will. Get used to it.

Update: It seems the BBC made a similar mistake yesterday.

Sometimes people make a real effort to follow the basic rules of bulk email only to fall at the last hurdle.

I've just got a bulk email from Prospect (no, I'd never heard of them either, I wonder when I signed up for their mailings). As is usual with these things, they really want you to read the HTML version. But they do bother to attach a plain text version for luddites like me. And they do include within that plain text version a link so you can read the full HTML version on their web site.

Or... at least... they think they do. Actually, what the text version contains is this text:

If you can not see this email please follow this link

And that's it. There's no link to follow.

A quick look at the HTML version reveals what has happened. The HTML version contains this:

If you can not see this email please follow this <a href="...">link</a>

But to create the plain text version they have passed the HTML version through some kind of HTML stripper. And that has removed the tag. Leaving them with plain text that is meaningless. So whilst they've tried to help the non-HTML-reading luddites, they've ended up potentially confusing them.

I bet they paid some bulk mail company a lot of money to handle this mailing for them. And I bet someone in Prospect raised the question of plain text versions. And I bet the bulk mailers said "sure, we have code that handles that". But it didn't. So I hope someone in the bulk mail company gets in a lot of trouble.

If you're religious, then you really need to read this BBC article about a cargo cult in the South Pacific.

Villagers at Sulphur Bay worship a mystical figure who they believe will one day bring them wealth and happiness.

"John is our god," declares village chief Isaac Wan, who beats his fists into the ground to emphasise his words.

"One day he will come back," he says.

See, you probably look at those people as deluded and wasting their time. Well that's how rational people look at theists. All theists.

One particularly nice bit of irony:

A Christian youth worker told me how he thought the cult was childish. "It's like a baby playing games," he insisted. "Those people are holding on to a dream that will never come true," he said.

James Cridland from Virgin Radio has written to me pointing out that they have a number of radio streams that I might like to add to my BBC Radio Streams page. Of course, not being BBC streams, they don't really fit on that page and I'm not really interested in building a complete directory of radio streams. But I'm happy to mention them here.

Virgin Radio
MP3 / WMP

Virgin Radio Classic Rock
MP3 / WMP

Virgin Radio Xtreme
MP3 / WMP

Virgin Radio Groove
MP3 / WMP

Ooh, this looks fun.

It's a search engine which tries to work out the connections between the results it gets and draws a map that illustrates them. Nice use of Flash and the results seem (mostly) relevant for the few searches I've tried.

Stupid name though.

I'm probably way behind here. You all saw this weeks ago, right?

I've been saying for months that the MySpace generation are going to have a big shock when they start to make their way in the world and employers have access to all the intimate that they have shared with their thousand or so friends. Two members of Democrat John Edwards' staff have given us a glimpse of what that world might look like.

Amanda Marcotte, employed as Mr Edwards's "blogmaster" to write his official blog, and Melissa McEwan, a part-time technical adviser, said they wished to spare the candidate further damage.

Ms Marcotte's personal blog, Pandagon, came under fire from the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, a nationwide group that attacks what it considers to be liberal anti-religious bias. It called her a "foul-mouthed anti-Christian bigot", pointing to entries where she accused the church of sanctioning the practice of lying to young couples about birth control and calling God a "sadistic bastard".

Ms McEwan came under fire for her blog, Shakespeare's Sister, for labelling President Bush's religious supporters his "wingnut Christofascist base".

Blog backlash hits Edwards

If you want more, the two blogs in question are Pandagon and Shakespeare's Sister. They both sound like extremely sensible women to me.

The Daily Express is in apoplectic mood today having discovered roadsigns in the UK that are written in Polish. The way they discuss it anyone would think that it's one of the signs of the apocalypse listed in the Book of Revelation.

Even better is the reaction of their readers on the comments page. I can just picture them pounding away at the keyboard with purple faces and a vein throbbing dangerously on their temple. Many of them are threatening to leave the country. I wish they'd hurry up.

Coo.

There's a London Barcamp this weekend. I was supposed to be in Brighton this weekend so I didn't bother trying to get a ticket. My plans have now changed and I'll be in London. So I thought I'd try to get a ticket.

The web site said that thirty more tickets would be available tomorrow (Thursday). But it's just let me book one.

Which is nice.

Now... what to speak about?

Update: Ergh. What a weird and unproductive weekend. Didn't get to BarCamp. Didn't do the book review I was supposed to be working on. Didn't achieve anything useful at all.

This is completely unscientific, but I thought some people might find it interesting. Here are the top ten most visited BBC radio feeds pages on this site over the last seven days.

1. Radio 2
2. Radio 4
3. Radio 1
4. BBC 7
5. Five Live
6. Radio 3
7. Radio Ulster
8. 1Xtra
9. Five Live Sport
10. World Service

If you publish an RSS feed on your web site, then it's important that it continues to work. If you accidently break it, then you could be missing out on visitors.

I just happen to have an example handy.

London Eating is a useful site that carries reviews of London restaurants. For example, here's the page for my current favourite restaurant - Lamberts. If you view that page in a browser that understands such things (like Firefox or IE7) then you'll see the orange RSS icon indicating that the page has an associated RSS feed. That feed is here. Notice how both of these URLs contain the number 3295. I assume that's the unique number that identifies this restaurant in their database.

So far so good. But this is where it all starts going wrong. If you subscribe to that feed in your RSS reader of choice then you'll see a new entry appear each time a new review is published. This is what you'd expect. But the entries have three problems with them that range from annoying to making the feed all but useless.

Firstly, the entries don't show the full review. They just contain an extract. That's a bit annoying, but not too unusual. Many sites do that, so that you have to actually visit the site (and see all their advertising) in order to see the complete article. I'll just note that they had full feeds then I wouldn't have found the rest of the problems.

Secondly, each entry has exactly the same URL associated with it. So each review doesn't have it's own unique URL, they all share the URL of the page for that restaurant. It would have been easy to give each review on the page an HTML anchor and have the RSS URL going to that specific point in the page. Again, not a major problem - but it'll probably have some of the RDF fanboys gasping for air.

But the final problem completely overrides the previous two and makes the RSS feed pretty much useless. If you open one of the links in the Lamberts RSS feed you'll see this:

ADODB.Field error '800a0bcd'

Either BOF or EOF is True, or the current record has been deleted. Requested operation requires a current record.

/detail.asp, line 15

If I wasn't a bit of a techie, that error message would have sent me running from the site, never to return. As it is, I just grimaced and investigated further. And it didn't take long to track down the problem. The URL in the RSS feed is wrong. It contains the number 24075 instead of the number 3295 that you'd expect from our earlier experiences.

I presume that 24075 is some other identifier that is stored in the site's database. And that they are publishing the wrong identifier in the RSS feed. Obviously I haven't tried every URL in every RSS feed that they publish, but I've checked half a dozen or so of my local restaurants and they all exhibited the same behaviour.

I first noticed this a few months ago. And at the time I emailed the site owners and explained the problem. But I got no response and the problem hasn't been fixed. It's incredible that they haven't noticed the problem. It suggests that they added RSS at some point because they heard it was cool, but that they don't really understand what it's about.

Also, it would be nice if giving their site an invalid restaurant identifier didn't return an ASP error. It might be nicer if it said "sorry but I can't find that restaurant" or something like that.

As always, testing is key.

Update: About an hour after posting this entry (and less than an hour after sending a link to them) I got an email from the people at London Eating telling me that the main problem was fixed (and a quick test verifies this). They're even looking into fixing the two minor problems that I mentioned.

I love it when the web reacts that quickly. Kudos to the London Eating techies.

And as it's Darwin Day, we should take every opportunity to shine scientific light on unscientific nonsense. As a good example, here's Ben Goldacre deconstructing "Dr" Gillian McKeith.

Happy Darwin Day!

And if you're enjoying this Darwin Day, then you should sign this petition campaigning to make Darwin Day a public holiday in the UK.

Oh look, the jews and the muslims are pummelling the crap out of each other in Jerusalem again. Not sure why the christians aren't involved. Maybe they overslept today or something.

If they can't share their toys nicely someone should lock the toys away so that no-one can play with them.

A few days ago, CNN ran a segment on Paula Zahn Now where they discussed atheism. Unfortunately they forgot to include any atheists (or anyone who knew anything about atheism) on the panel. You can read the transcript online or watch the whole thing courtesy of YouTube.

This strange omission was noted on a couple of atheist web sites (here's the discussion on Richard Dawkins' site), a number of letters were written and CNN have now announced that Richard Dawkins will be on the programme tonight.

So that's nice. But that's not why I'm mentioning it. One of the panelists in the original discussion was some I'd never heard of called Debbie Schlussel. She was one of the people who said that atheists "should just shut up". She has her own blog so people were able to send her comments on her performance. I assume these comments weren't very complimentary as she wrote an astonishing rant about the experience. Even the title ("When Atheists a/k/a Future Muslims Attack") is unbelievable. The main thrust of her... er... well let's call it an "argument" (even though that's a very generous use of the word) is

I don't mind receiving the atheist hate mail, since I know that in a few years, many of these same people will either be Muslim extremists (redundant) or helping the country fall further in its fight against the creep of Islamic imposition on America . . . or both.

Look at famous atheists and what happened to them. Adam Gadahn a/k/a Azzam Al-Amriki--now a top Al-Qaeda video "personality"--was raised by his hippie Jewish father and equally bizarre gentile mother as an atheist. And look how he turned out. Ditto for hippie-spawn John Walker Lindh.

Those two people are enemies of America, and many of those who think like them are of equally weak mind. If you don't believe in anything, you'll easily fall for virtual nothings. That's why Europe is so quickly turning Islamist--because atheism dominates and Christianity is rapidly dying there. Over there, the number one cause for which atheists are suddenly finding "god" is Islam.

Over here, as I pointed out on CNN, atheists are on the attack against religion and G-d only when Christians and Jews are involved, not when Muslims and Islam are. A Christian prayer at a public school graduation or football game? Send in the ACLU lawyers. A Muslim prayer at a high school football game in Dearbornistan? Suddenly, when the "Religion of Peace" is involved, atheists boast extreme tolerance and display ultimate deference. No lawsuits. Ever. And the Muslim prayers continue.

It's a frightening piece of misinformation. If you're an atheist then either you're just about to convert to islam or you're only interested in attacking christianity - you're happy to let islam get away with anything.

There are already dozens (maybe hundreds) of comments to this piece. A healthly proportion of them are pointing out the obvious errors in her argument. But she seems to be ignoring the debate.

It's a worrying reminder of just how closed some theist minds can be.

Update: Apparently the Dawkins segment on last night's show was bumped to make way for in-depth coverage of Anna Nicole Smith's death. Because that's obviously far more important.

Update: The Dawkins interview was finally shown yesterday (Darwin Day, in a nice touch of irony). You can see it (together with discussion of it) on Richard Dawkins' web site.

The Daily Mail fearlessly exposes the secret language that paedophiles are using to tempt your children into unspeakable acts.

Or, perhaps it was a slow news day and a lazy journalist just decided it was time for another "dangers of the internet" story.

Oh, I know there are real dangers out there, and children do need to be taught not to be too open with strangers they meet on the net. But the vast majority of this chat is just teenagers fooling around with their friends. This kind of scare story doesn't achieve anything useful.

NIFOC

Why do so many people get so irrational when discussing religion? I realise, of course, that religion itself is completely irrational, but there's no excuse for not discussing it rationally.

There's a story on the BBC News site today about an Islamic school in West London. People are complaining because it uses textbooks that are offensive to other religions.

Let's look at a couple of the supposedly offensive passages:

give examples of worthless religions... such as Judaism, Christianity, idol worship and others

Nothing wrong with that is there? Well, they've missed Islam off the list. All religion is worthless.

But anyone objecting to it is misunderstanding the way that religion works. At most one religion can be true (sane people know it's fewer than that). Believers in any given religion will, of course, fervantly want to believe that it's their chosen fairy story that is correct. Therefore they must believe that all other religions are worthless.

Here's another "objectionable" quotation:

explain that those who die without adhering to Islam will go to hellfire

Once more, that's just an obvious consequence of picking one supernatural explanation of the universe over the others. If someone doesn't believe in the "one true" fairy tale then they obviously won't be entitled to the benefits of that belief. And for both muslims and christians one of the benefits of their beliefs is that they'll be in heaven when they die. Non-believers will be suffering in hell.

The textbook is only saying what all muslims must believe. And it's exactly the same as (although a mirror image of) what all christians must believe. Maybe in polite society they don't go round telling people that they're going to hell, but it's what they believe.

Yes, I agree that children should be taught to treat everyone with respect. And yes, it would seem that these children aren't being taught that. But this isn't because they are at a muslim school. It's because they are at a religious school.

Religions teach their followers that they are better than non-believers (or, at least, that they will have a more comfortable afterlife than non-believers). That is divisive and is yet another good reason why religion should be kept out of school.

I've just upgraded this blog to use version 3.34 of Movable Type. The main reason for doing this is that this version has added support for FastCGI. Hopefully this will mean that each request is handled far more quickly and the comment spammers won't be subjecting this server to an effective denial of service attack every few hours.

If you see this leading to any strangeness, then please let me know.

I'm reading Robert Scoble as I often do first think in the morning and he mentions Blogwerx Sentinel which is an application that monitors splogs to see who is copying your blog content without you knowing. It sounded interesting so I signed up.

And a few seconds later I get this email:

Dave Cross,

Thank you for registering with Sentinel.

Please keep the following for your records.

Username: dave@dave.org.uk
Password: [removed]

You can log in by going to:

http://www.blogwerx.com/sentinel

Thanks again!

The BlogWerx Team

(The password wasn't blanked out in the original version).

So that's strike one. They don't understand basic password handling.

I reply to this mail pointing out their errors. The mail comes from newaccounts@blogwerx.com. But my reply bounces back. That address doesn't exist.

So that's strike two. They don't understand basic bulk email rules either.

Oh, and when I logged in, their site used Apache basic authentication. How retro is that?

And none of the useful looking links on their site (info, help, contact us) do anything. I've even tried in IE.

They might have a great product, but all this niggling errors don't sell it well.

Update: Looking at this site more closely, it's so badly developed that I'm becoming convinced that it's a scam. It must just be there to collect bloggers email addresses.

Update: A review of the site by someone who has had exactly the same experience as me. And the screenshot has exactly the same data in it as the one I've been looking at all day (only the feed address is different). So I'm pretty much convinced that this site isn't actually doing anything and that Scoble has been scammed.

Anyone who follows political blogging in the UK will be aware of the current... er... disagreement between Tim Ireland and Paul Staines. It's a disagreement about how blogs should be run. Ireland is arguing for transparency, permanence and good things like that whereas Staines delights in obscurity, astroturfing and deleting comments whenever it suits his purpose.

The interesting (though, perhaps completely unsurprising) thing to come out of this is that the supporters of the two main protagonists are split on party lines. There doesn't seem to be a single left-leaning blogger who would consider Staines approach to running their blog or a single right-leaning blogger who doesn't approve of it.

If you were drawing conclusions then you'd have to consider the idea that left wingers are just more decent people than right wingers.

But I wasn't going to go into details as I don't think I can add much to the acres of text that has already been written about the topic. I'm writing this because I wanted to draw your attention to this post by the Political Penguin which seems to sum it all up nicely.

I don’t advocate the position of exclusivity, every principle I believe in is against exclusion. However there was a time when there were certain codes, netiquette, terms of engagement, mutual respect. The problem we now face, particularly if we consider the culture of blogging in the UK, in particular political blogging is that with the advent of blogging tools for children (Blogger/Blogspot.com) (that’s not aimed at you Paul) is that any fuckwit with a gob that doesn’t match either their intelligence nor technical nouse is out there trying to make a name for themselves and stroke their own ego.

This poses a particular problem for someone such as myself. Given my background and personal beliefs about the principles of what blogging should be about and indeed this seems to be a common belief among Labour Bloggers that what is online stays online. However the last few months have shown the complete disrespect for which these principles are held by the Tories and they’re strategy is clearly to drag what’s online into the mainstream media environment with the constant drip drip of dodgy biased and downright wrong information about the Labour Party and various staff/politicians.

Judging by the number of calls and emails that I'm getting recently, the demand for Perl programmers in London is going through one of its periodic increases. Hopefully recruitment agents who are desperately googling for "perl programmer london" will find this entry and save themselves a little time.

The Perl community likes to do what it can to help people to get the most out of Perl. And that includes finding Perl people for Perl jobs (and Perl jobs for Perl people). There are a couple of specific initiatives that help people looking for Perl programmers in London.

Firstly, there's the Perl jobs site. This is an international site which allows employers (and recruitment agents) to post job adverts for free. Perl programmers who are looking for work either get new jobs sent to them by email or can subscribe to an RSS feed of jobs on the site. It's a very effective way to get your Perl job requirements in front of a lot of Perl programmers quickly.

Secondly, the London Perl Mongers run a jobs mailing list. People who are looking for Perl jobs in London can subscribe to this list. And people who are looking for Perl programmers can post jobs to the list (send mail to jobs[at]london.pm.org). Whilst this is a London-only list, other Perl Monger groups may well have something similar.

Of course, both of these initiatives only works as long as they have a good supply of both jobs and job-seekers. So as well as encouraging employers and agents to post their jobs, I'd also like to encourage Perl programmers to subscribe to use resources when they are looking for a job.

Oh, and it seems to me that currently in London the pool of Perl programmers is smaller than the pool of Perl jobs. So perhaps more companies should consider cross-training programmers. Did I mention that I run training courses in Perl?