April 2007 Archives

Andy Lester has scanned a letter from the Arkansas Democrat Gazette

You may have noticed that March this year was particularly hot. As a matter of fact, I understand that it was the hottest March since the beginning of the last century. All of the trees were fully leafed out and legions of bugs and snakes were crawling around during a time in Arkansas when, on a normal year, we might see a snowflake or two.

This should come to no surprise to any reasonable person. As you know, Daylight Saving Time started almost a month early this year. You would think that members of Congress would have considered the warming effect that an extra hour of daylight would have on our climate. Or did they?

Perhaps this is another plot by a liberal Congress to make us believe that global warming is a real threat. Perhaps next time there should be serious studies performed before Congress passes laws with such far-reaching effects.

I'm speechless.

Update: In the comments Chris points to the Snopes page about this article which reaches the conclusion that this letter is satirical. Still funny though.

I don't personally care whether or not Prince Harry goes to Iraq. Or whether he throws a royal tantrum and resigns if he is banned from going.

But this whole affair raises one question in my mind. If you join the army, then you are trained to be soldier. That becomes your job. If it's possible that you're going to be prevented from doing that job for some reason then perhaps you should declare that possibility when you sign up. And if it's likely that you're not going to be able to get involved in the day to day work of a soldier (like going off to parts foreign and potentially being put in mortal danger) then perhaps the army should think twice before spending (some might say "wasting") money on training you to do things that you won't ever be allowed to do.

When did Facebook get fashionable? I was just getting used to only following a couple of social networking sites and suddenly I start getting "be my friend" mail from Facebook several times a day.

And I don't really understand what Facebook gives you. MySpace at least has everyone in the known universe on it and you can find interesting new music (well, so I'm told - I'm still looking) and LinkedIn seems to have pretty much everyone who I've ever worked with - so it's good for professional networking. But I can't really see why Facebook is so popular.

Anyway, I've registered and I'll certainly hand around for a couple of weeks to see if I can work out what it's for. Feel free to befriend me. That also goes for MySpace and Linked In.

Update: Oh, I forgot one. There's also Last.fm if you're interested in watching my taste in music slowly deteriorate.

Evidence mounts that the UK education system is giving up on teaching maths to any reasonable level.

Firstly, there's this story from yesterday. Schools are measured on the results they get. And as maths is hard, some people don't do very well in maths exams. The solution seems to be to discourage pupils from taking maths exams - as if they don't take them, then they can't do badly in them. Far better that they spend their time working on easier subjects that they'll do better in, which will improve the school's scores.

An alternative might be to improve the level of maths teaching, but that doesn't seem to have been considered.

And then today there's this story comparing maths problems set in entrance exams for students applying to take chemistry degrees at universities in England and China. The Chinese problem is something that would require me to spend some considerable time drawing diagrams and scratching my head. I solved the English problem in my head in seconds. And I'd expect most intelligent people to be able to do the same.

It looks like English schools are turning out mathematical morons. Where are all the decent maths teachers?

You have to laugh at the way that many newspapers are still struggling to make sense of the internet. In many cases it's largely because their writers have no idea what they are talking about when they are covering the subject. Here's a great example from the Daily Mail.

On Sunday, Daily Mail columnist Petronella Wyatt (daughter of the extremely unpleasant Mail writer Woodrow Wyatt) turned her attention to Wikipedia. As an experiment she created an article about herself - thereby ignoring the fundamental Wikipedia rule that only other people can decide that you are notable enough to justify an entry. She then sat back for a few days to see what people made of it.

And she was appalled. People said terrible things about her. Or, at least, that's how she tells it:

I decided to look at the entry again. As I did so, I leapt out of my chair howling. Beneath my original paragraph were five new ones, depicting me as a monster of depravity.

To internet users, the British journalist Petronella Wyatt was a combination of Messalina (the Roman Empire's most famous prostitute) and Lady Godiva with a bad case of bipolar hypomania. Among the more startling was the allegation that I frequently rode to hounds "bare-breasted".

Apparently, I had done this many times while visiting in Virginia in the U.S., causing "huntsmen to blow their horns in panic", horses to bolt and children to "utter petrified cries".

Allegedly, so many men decided to attend the hunt in order to see my exposed poitrine that an unprecedented number of divorce actions followed.

What Ms. Wyatt fails to realise is that all Wikipedia entries have a history. And no matter what deletions and corrections are made to the entry, the history remains. So her claims can be checked. Having nothing better to do last night I looked through the (rather short) history of the article. The closest I can find to what Wyatt describes are these three paragraphs that were apparently removed by Wyatt herself on April 12th

It was alleged that she had had an affair with Boris Johnson, fellow journalist on Spectator and politician, and that she got pregnant and underwent an abortion when Johnson refused to leave his wife for her. Her father's diaries, published after his death, mentioned that Archbishop of Canterbury once stared at his daughter Petronella's bosom for a long moment. Woodrow Wyatt's critics targeted her father's attempt to get her entry into an Oxford College as a misuse of political influence.

For six months commencing in 2003, Petsy lived with American Charles Bruce Berry at his home in Charlottesville, Virgina, where she participated in his horse-and-hound centered lifestyle. Many of her columns in late 2003 focus on her experiences in the US foxhunting and observing American holidays such as Thanksgiving. She foxhunted with Farmington Hunt in Virginia, where members called her "Petrified Petronella," when they were not staring at her breasts, whose cleavage was remarkably exposed, despite her hunting attire.

According to Berry's ex-wife, Charlotte von Lilienfeld (her father was West Germany's Ambassador to the United States from 1961 to 1968, to Iran from 1968 to 1974 and to Spain from 1974 to 1980), Petsy happily left the States just before Christmas of 2003 "screaming" because Berry had been so emotionaly and verbally abusive to her. Little did he know that he was serving as her "beard" as she flew from the charms of Boris Johnson. Many people she interacted with in Charlottesville thought she seemed "drowsy," "drugged up," or "on tranquilizers."

Now, that's perhaps not the kind of thing that you want people saying about you. But to my mind it falls far short of the insults that Wyatt claims to have seen in the article.

It seems likely that Ms. Wyatt genuinely didn't realise that Wikipedia articles have a history, so she didn't know that her claims could be checked out quite so easily. But given that she has so obviously used "journalistic licence" exaggerate this event, how much can you trust anything else that she writes?

Some of you have pointed out that you've been seeing 500 errors when trying to post comments ot this site over the last few weeks. I'm painfully aware of the problems as I've been seeing the same thing when I've been posting entires.

But I think you'll find that the problems have gone away. I've put some changes in place that seem to have fixed all of these issues. Please let me know if you are still seeing problems.

If you're not interested in the details, then stop reading this entry now. If you wait a few minutes I'm about to post something that takes the piss out of the Daily Mail (again).

So here are the gory details. The problem was, of course, down to comment spam. I'm still getting hundreds of spamming attempts every day on this blog. None of them ever get published, so the spammers are wasting their time completely, but that doesn't seem to bother them. Even though I'm not publishing the comments, the Movable Type comment handler still gets called for each of these requests and even just ignoring these comments takes enough processor power that the system is often brought to its knees and needs to be rebooted.

When Movable Type 3.34 was released, one of the major new features was support for Fast CGI. Fast CGI dramatically cuts down the amount of time it takes for a web server to respond to a request. So a properly configured Fast CGI setup would hopefully prevent my server being swamped by comment spam requests.

But it didn't work out quite like that. Oh, it cut down the processor load alright. But something was broken somewhere in my Fast CGI configuration and that gave us those annoying 500 errors. I poked at it a bit every once in a while but couldn't fix the problem.

Yesterday I got so annoyed about it that I removed the Fast CGI configuration. And within minutes my processor load was through the roof somewhere. But I remembered reading somewhere about an Apache module called mod_security which can be used to drop certain HTTP requests much earlier in the request cycle (so they use up less processor time).

As mod_security is pre-packaged for my system a quick "yum install mod_security" followed by "service httpd restart" was all that was needed to get the benefits. And the benefits have been huge. My processor load has remained low and I haven't seen the MT comments program filling the process table. And that's just with the default set of mod_security rules. There are endless possibilities for tweaking and improving them.

So if you've got an MT installation and you're suffering from too much comment spam, I strongly recommend installing mod_security.

Hack day sounds fun. Two days of hacking and socialising at Alexandra Palace. All the cool kids[1] are going to be there. Are you?

The language on the official site is a bit "legal". Tom Coates explains in English.

[1] Places are limited. I hope I'm cool enough :-)

Martin's article today about the Daily Express web site reminded me that it's been some months since I looked at my list of Newspaper RSS feeds. As the list is created by screen-scraping the individual papers' web sites, it's no surprise that it all goes out of date as the sites are redesigned and updated.

And sure enough, it was a real mess. When I ran the program that generates the pages, about half of them were broken. But it wasn't too serious, and after half an hour or so of tinkering with regular expressions, it all seems to be working again.

But all in all, it's a good lesson in why screen-scraping is a really bad idea. This would be far easier (in fact it would pretty much be unnecessary) if the papers took the next step and released OPML files of their feeds, rather than free-form web pages.

Anyway, it's all back again now. Please take a look and let me know if I'm missing anything obvious.

I've rearranged my feeds slightly. This probably won't effect anyone, but here are the details.

I've set up an experimental tumblelog (which, of course, has its own RSS feed). That'll be where I'll posting very short entries for the time being. Given that photos and links can both be considered short entries, my Flickr feed and my delicious feed will both be aggregated into that feed. I've also added my twitter feed.

As always, the best way to see everything I write is to subscribe to the RSS feed from planet davorg.

Like most of you, I despise ticket touts. I will never buy tickets from them or sell tickets to them. Today, the BBC has an interview with a 15 year old who has been making money by touting tickets on eBay. This is what he has to say for himself.

I'm 15 and I'm at school at the moment, so ticket touting seems to be the only way I can make a good income.

Can you see the flaw in his argument? He says that ticket touting is the only way he can make a good income. There seems to be a bit missing from that sentence. The bit where he says "... without actually getting off my arse and doing some work". He seems to think that his laziness justifies ripping people off.

You can think it's taking away the chance for genuine fans to get their tickets, but I've got to make my money and it's better than being like most kids and going out causing trouble on the streets.

He's got to make him money obviously. And he believes that this justifies ripping people off. It doesn't of course. He's just lazy. Youth of today... don't know they're born... in my day... spare the birch... conscription...

Oh look. I've come over all curmudgeonly. I'll be writing letters to the editor next.

The BBC Have You Say about the Virginia Tech shootings has (predictably) turned into a debate about the right to bear arms. There are, of course, many Americans who still believe that a society with free access to guns is safer than one without. And it doesn't matter how much you try to persuade them otherwise, they are incapable of seeing sense.

A couple of particularly stupid comments that I've seen:

If more people had guns, the shooter wouldn't have gone so far before ending the rampage at his own convenience. It sickens me that there was no armed resistance. Even with gun control, the criminals will get guns when they want them. The law abiding citizens are left ducking for cover.

Drew D, Philadelphia, United States

So the problem is that there weren't enough guns on the scene. Does that make any sense at all?

to all you Europeans using this moment for more schadenfreude, you'll never understand Americans belief in the right to bear arms. That's why you had Hitler and the unelected EUcrats now.

Jason Harris, Dallas

Now, I don't claim to be an expert on 1930s Germany. I don't even know what their laws on private gun ownership were back then. But I strongly suspect that the reparations that Germany had to make after WWI were a far more important factor in the rise of the Nazis than the amount of gun ownership.

Remember people, guns don't kill people - bullets kill people. Well, I suppose you could kill someone by hitting them over the head really hard with a gun.

Oh, and if you enjoy picking the best nonsense out of the stream of ill-informed bollocks that usually passes for debate on Have Your Say then you'll love Speak You're Branes.

Labour MP Austin Mitchell has a blog (he calls it a WeBLOG). Well, it's a bit like a blog, but it doesn't allow comments so it's not really a blog. And it has a really horrible blink effect on some of the text that gives you a headache if you look at it for more than thirty seconds. It's almost as if he doesn't want you to read it. Thank goodness for RSS readers.

Anyway, today on his "blog" he writes about blogs. I'll quote the whole thing so you don't have to suffer the blinking.

Don`t join the chorus of praise for the Blogsphere as a new dimension of democracy which will liberate the people from dependence on old media.

Crap. Blogging is a forum for gossip, character assassination, sensation and expose. It is inherently anti-government and conservative because prejudice is easier to get over than serious explanation. Just like Talk Radio.

So the strongest practitioners are Republicans like Drudge or rank Tories like Ian Dale and Guido Fawkes, leaving this as the only voice of sense, semi-socialism, freedom, truth and justice.

Even so it`s an intellectual feast compared to You Tube, My Space and the rest. They`re the ten second sound bites, playgrounds for manipulation, synthetic situations, thespians and gimmicks. Leave them to Cameron and Blair and don`t rot your brain.

Let's overlook the slight weirdness of using a blog to say that blogs are crap. And let's forgive the bigheadedness that leads him to claim that his site is the only source of sanity of the web. It's far more interesting that he has picked up on bloggers like Ian [sic] Dale and Paul Staines (aka Guido Fawkes) and is holding them up as representative examples of political blogs.

This is exactly the problem that Tim Ireland has been talking about a lot recently. Because people like Dale and Staines shout loudly, they are seen by many people as the best examples of British political blogs. It's very likely that they are two of the most widely read British political blogs. And people will assume a) that all political blogs are like that and b) that all political blogs have to be like that.

Dale and Staines are not good examples of political blogs. It's worrying that a politician like Mitchell thinks that they are. There are civilised British political blogs. There are blogs where intelligent discussion is encouraged. There are blogs where dissenting comments aren't just deleted. Take a look at my blogroll and you'll see links to some of them.

It's just a shame that this civilised side of the blogosphere has been eclipsed by people like Dale and Staines.

Update: It seems that Internet Explorer ignores the blink effect. So if you really must read Austin Mitchell's blog then you should probably use IE. And I never thought I'd be recommending IE for anything.

Dear News Media,

The son of the heir to the throne splitting up with his girlfriend is not news. You might stick it in as an "and finally" item on a slow news day, but you really shouldn't be making such a big deal about it as you have been doing all day.

Please stop.

Love Dave...

According to a story on the BBC, Charles Simonyi has described himself as "the first nerd in space".

Wonder how Mark Shuttleworth feels about that.

I haven't ranted about Apple here for some months, but the time is ripe.

In February I ran a software update on my Mac Book and it downloaded and installed a lot of software. Included in that was Apple Airport Extreme Update 2007-001. After installing this update the Mac Book could no longer connect to my wireless network. It couldn't even see my wireless network. Which is obviously sub-optimal behaviour for a wireless software update.

After a bit of Googling I found that I wasn't the only person with that problem. And I found that the only way to fix the problem was to back-out the update. But that's not the easiest of tasks. Apple don't seem to expect that their updates will break things, so they don't give you an easy way to roll back a change. I had to download the OSX 10.4.9 distribution from the web, extract the required files and replace the updated versions with the older versions.

Sounds simple, but it was a bit of a hassle working out exactly which files I needed to replace. It was quite a relief when I finally rebooted the computer and saw the wireless icon come to life again.

Then yesterday, Apple released another airport update - Airport Extreme Update 2007-002. Once again I trusted Apple and installed it. And once again it broke wireless networking.

Of course I hadn't saved the details of what I had changed last time. But this time I knew vaguely what I was looking for so it only took about half as long to fix it. Still bloody annoying though.

It's astonishing to me that Apple can release wireless software that is as broken as this. Twice.

I'll be very suspicious of Apple wireless updates in the future, but on the assumption that they'll catch me out again I'm making a note of here of what I need to do. The required files are here and they need to be put into /System/Library/Extensions. Oh... and it's important that they are owned by root.

Two nice surprises yesterday.

Firstly, when I went into Forbidden Planet I found that they had copies of Fragile Things in paperback. I thought it wasn't published for another month or so. Sure, I could have saved a few quid by getting it from Amazon, but I wanted it there and then. So I bought a copy.

Then secondly, when I got it home and opened it, I found that it was a signed copy. Thinking about I remember reading on Neil Gaiman's blog that he passed through London last week so I assume there was a signing that I missed.

Still. Signed copy. That's a result. I'm happy.

He speaks much sense:

You are living, dear reader, at a watershed in human history. This is the century during which, after 2,000 years of what has been a pretty bloody marriage, faith and reason must agree to part, citing irreconcilable differences. So block your ears to the cooing voices on Thought for the Day, and choose your side.

“But how can you be sure?” Oh boy, am I sure. Oh great quivering mountains of pious mumbo-jumbo, am I sure. Oh fathomless oceans of sanctified babble, am I sure. Words cannot express my confidence in the answer to the question whether God cured a nun because she wrote a Pope’s name down. He didn’t. Mere language does no justice to my certainty about whether God might be waiting for the return to their Biblical lands of the Israelites, before arranging the Second Coming. He isn’t.

Shout it from the rooftops. Write it on walls. Carve it into rock. He didn’t. He isn’t. He won’t.

Did John Paul II perform a miracle? Am I Mother Teresa?

Sky have stitched up Virgin Media customers again.

They've just reorganised all of their film channels. Instead of getting Sky Movies 1 to 9 and Sky Cinema 1 and 2 we now get a load of themed film channels - Sky Classics, Sky Premiere, Sky Horror, etc.

Stitch-up number one: There are fewer channels now than there were before the reorganisation.

Stitch-up number two: These new channels all seem to have shorter broadcasting hours than the old channels.

Whilst I think it's a bit rude of Sky to effectively remove content like that without dropping prices (and rude of Virgin Media to implement those changes without even letting their customers know), I realise that Sky was spreading the decent films rather thinly across its channels and most of the films shown on the channels (particularly during the day) were complete rubbish.

So those changes were disappointing, but they weren't what made me decide to cancel my Sky film channels subscription. No, that decision was made yesterday when I was flicking through the new channels.

Stitch-up number three: The new channels, with the single exception of Sky Family[1] are PIN-protected. You can't watch the films on the channel without entering your PIN. Sky say that this is because these channels potentially show 15 and 18 rated films before the watershed. Which makes a kind of sense. But whilst my digital video recorder is capable of changing channels on the cable box, it can't enter my PIN. So I can no longer set the DVR to record films when I'm not there. In fact, thinking about it, I think the films on a PIN-protected channel are broadcast in the interactive services part of the channel so it's likely that they can't be recorded at all. I bet that the same is true if I get a V+ box. Chances are that it's only a Sky+ recorder that stands a chance of getting round these restrictions.

So I can no longer record films on Sky's film channels. And 90% of my use of these channels is recording films to watch later. So the channels become almost useless to me.

I called Virgin Media this morning to remove the film channels from my subscription. This saves me almost £20 a month which can be spent in my local DVD rental shop or on a Love Film subscription.

I hope that Virgin weren't making much on those channels and that most of the loss in income is passed directly on to Sky.

[1] And guess how keen I am to watch most of the films there

The pledge to send a copy of The God Delusion to every Westminster MP has succeeded (in fact, it's now gone way beyond it's target).

I've just order a copy from Amazon to be sent to Martin Linton, my MP. All of the books should arrive over the next week or so. The pledge organiser was trying to get some publicity for the campaign, so you might see something about it in the press in the coming days.

I hope the MPs read the book. I have to feel sorry for the the person who sent a copy to Ian Paisley. I suspect that might be a wasted tenner.