January 2008 Archives

Argh. I've just noticed that having rebuilt all of the entries in the blog, the URLs have all changed. For example the URL of my entry about finding Perl programmers in London has changed from http://blog.dave.org.uk/archives/2007/02/perl-programmer.html to http://blog.dave.org.uk/2007/02/perl-programmer.html. They've dropped the "archives" directory. No doubt there's a good reason for it, but until I put a some redirections in place, I'm going to have lost all the Googlejuice that those entries used to have. And all the Technorati pings too.

I'm beginning to wish I'd just stuck with the old version of the software.

I promise to get back to blogging about something other than my blog any day now.

I've had a bit of a play, and I'm not convinced that Movable Type Open Source 4.1 is quite as stable as Six Apart want us to think it is.

Yesterday I was having trouble publishing pages. I was getting timeouts which were leading to 500 errors. I still haven't been able to republish all of the old entries that I imported over the weekend.

I've had this problem before when upgrading MT and one cause seems to be incompatibilities between older page templates and newer versions of MT. I hadn't made too many changes to the templates (since the last time I upgraded) so I reset all of the templates to the defaults and started again.

At that point it looked like I was able to publish pages without getting 500 errors. But the pages I was publishing were all missing the various bits of information that appear on the right-hand side of the page. A bit of digging revealed that this version of MT uses something called widget sets to determine what is in that part of the page and that my default set of templates had no widget sets defined. That was pretty easy to fix (although it still needs a bit of tweaking - the "About this page" widget, for example, looks broken when it appears on the main index page).

Also, and throughout all of this tweaking the blog continuously seemed to forget the minimalist white theme that I had applied and reset itself to the minimalist red version that seems to be the default. I'm sticking with that until I get far closer to the finished design.

So, at this point it looked like I could publish pages (albeit slowly) and that they had approximately the correct widgets on them. Before going to the hassle of republishing all 1,400 entries I thought I'd add my Google Analytics tracking code to the templates.

And at that point it starts going wrong again. I've started getting 500 errors again when I publish a page. Maybe it's the Google Analytics code that's doing it, but I can't really see how a bit of Javascript can cause this problem.

So currently I have a blog that is has about 400 completely unpublished entries, about a thousand entries that are published but that have no Google Analytics code and are missing the page widgets and about twenty entries that look approximately as I want them (but in the wrong colour). And that's before I start thinking about the category and archive pages.

Oh, and the search program seems to take over all of the CPU whenever it's run, thereby bringing the system to its knees. And publishing any page (which includes adding a comment) will give a 500 error.

I've used Movable Type for a long time. I've always been a big fan. But why is upgrading it such a problem? I've spent so much time fixing the upgrade that I haven't had time to write about anything other than the upgrades. That's really not what this blog is supposed to about.

I'm sure the this new version looks great if you're starting a blog from scratch. But for people upgrading a blog that has been going for a few years, it all looks like a bit of a pain.

Of course, with the new Open Source version of MT, it's finally fine for me to go in and fix these problems myself. But I'm not really interested in writing blog software. Blog software should be a tool that I can just use. When maintaining a tool take more time than using the tool then you have to wonder if you're using the right tool.

Maybe I'll have another look at WordPress. Or Blogger.

Made some progress on restoring the old blog entries yesterday. I managed to get the old web server working long enough to export the blog data and I've successfully imported it into this installation. Over the next few hours I'll try to get the pages rebuilt.

At the same time (never let it be said that I'm not ambitious) I've upgraded to the latest version of Movable Type and switched to using the new Open Source version. All of which means that there might be a few issues to iron out over the next few days (James has already spotted one).

I've also spotted that my usage of categories, keywords and tags has been... er... inconsistent over the five years or so that I've been writing this blog with the result that the tag cloud and list of categories on the front page have both become unmanageable. So I need to do some tidying there.

But, all in all, it's looking good. Nice to have the old entries back.

In 1985 I went to the cinema to watch A View to a Kill. It was one of the worst films that I had ever seen. And on further reflection I realised that it had been years since I had enjoyed watching a James Bond film. I decided to stop wasting my time and stopped going to see Bond films.

For over twenty years I didn't see another Bond film. I only relaxed my self-imposed rule when Daniel Craig started playing Bond. Craig is an actor that I have a lot of respect for so I watched Casino Royale (on DVD obviously - didn't want to waste my money going to the cinema). It was, of course, better than A View to a Kill (that's not exactly difficult) but it wasn't anywhere near as good as everyone else was telling me. I'd still far rather watch the Peter Sellers version.

Thinking about it further, I think my problem is that the recent Bond films (where 'recent' means 'made in the last thirty years') bear little or no resemblance to the books. And I was a big fan of the Bond books when I was growing up. Films never accurately reflect the books they are based on, but from The Spy Who Loved Me onwards, the films take nothing from the books other than the title and a few character names.

Therefore it's interesting that the title of the next Bond film has just been announced as Quantum of Solace. This is the title of a short story (from the collection For Your Eyes Only). Bond is really only a minor character in the story and there's no action in the story at all. It's one of my favourite Bond stories but a film based on it would be nothing like the other films in the series so there's no chance that the plot will have any connection with the original story. Which is, in my opinion, a terrible shame and I'm very unlikely to go and see the film.

I still have a small hope that someone will someday make a new series of Bond films that use the plots from the books, but I'm aware that economics make that unlikely.

But I recommend that you all get hold of a copy of For Your Eyes Only and read Quantum of Solace before you see the film. You can then join me in bemoaning what could have been.

You'll also be able to read the original stories of what will most likely be the titles of the following two Bond films - The Hildebrand Rarity and Risico. You read the rumour here first.

Another example of web site stupidity.

When she finishes at university this summer my step-daughter is planning to go travelling. To make this a bit easier for her we decided that we'd give her one of our credit cards. That's a pretty standard thing that parents do, isn't it?

I decided to make her an additional cardholder on my Egg card. The process seemed easy enough. I just had to fill in a simple form on their web site. There were no problems and the site told me to wait seven to ten days.

Seven to ten days passed. And then another week. The card didn't arrive. Yesterday I decided to email them to find out what had happened to the card. Today I got a reply. Apparently you can only have two cardholders on an Egg account. And because my wife is already on the account I can't add anyone else.

That seems like a rather silly restriction to me, but I suppose they have to draw a line somewhere. But given that this restriction is in place, surely it should be reflected on their web site. Checking again today, I see that the option on their site is labelled "add a second cardholder" and not, as I assumed previously, "add an additional cardholder" - so that should be a big clue. But that's not really enough is it? They've got the details of my account. They know the account already has two cardholders. Why even offer me the option to add another one? And why allow me to go through the process of adding a new cardholder and tell me at the end that everything is fine and that I should expect the new card to arrive in ten days? I hadn't bothered to chase them about it I could still be under the mistaken impression that the card was on its way.

Here's what they should really do. Leave the "add a second cardholder" option, but when someone who already has a second cardholder on the account chooses that option, display a message explaining why they can't add a third cardholder. Doesn't that seem simpler? I wonder how much time their customer service team have wasted answering queries like mine.

I've now applied to add my step-daughter to my Virgin credit card instead. Currently I'm the only person on that account, so it shouldn't be a problem. They say the new card will be with us in seven to ten days...

It's a new year, so I'm making my annual attempt to get more organised. To help me with this plan, yesterday I:

• Upgraded to Hiveminder Pro (on the basis that if I pay for a product I'll be more likely to use it)
• Starting playing with I Want Sandy (a service that I had signed up for months ago but had never really used)
• Upgraded my N800 to run OS2008 (because shinier toys are more likely to be played with)

The old gits in the audience will realise which of those got me humming an old Bow Wow Wow hit.

Looking in more detail at the N800, it seems that its usefulness grows massively when it's connected to the internet (I suppose there's a clue in the way Nokia describe it as an "internet tablet") and that means I probably need to sign up with a wireless provider.

Nokia have two suggestions for wireless providers. When I bought my N800 it came with literature that was really plugging The Cloud. This gives you a 30 day free trial and then connectivity through any of The Cloud's access points for £10 a month. The OS2008 upgrade comes with adverts that heavily plug Boingo. This plan will give me access to their access points for £4 a month.

Seems like an obvious choice, you might think. But it's not as simple as that. Looking at Boingo's list of locations in London, many of them seem to be run in conjunction with other providers and at some of those you get charged by the minute for using the service - on top of the monthly fee.

Boingo's international aspect is also appealing. But I spend the vast majority of my time in London. So I need a plan that's going to give me good access to wireless in London.

So, I'm open to advice. Have any of you used Boingo or The Cloud? Do you have any opinions on the quality of their service? Who should I sign up with?

Update: I've received an email (some time ago I must confess) from Christian Gunning, the marketing manager at Boingo. He points out that I badly misunderstood their web site. The plan I should be looking at is called Boingo Mobile and it incurs no extra per-minute charges.

Thanks for Christian for putting me right.

Like, I suppose, most people in London we live in a controlled parking area. To park on my road you must either have a resident's parking permit or buy a ticket from the machine (£1.80 an hour, maximum stay four hours).

We don't have a car, so most of the time this doesn't bother us at all. The only time we even think about it is when we have visitors. For those occasions Wandsworth Council allow us to buy one-day visitors parking permits. You buy them from "parking shops" around the borough. Our closest one is near Tooting Bec.

Last weekend we had friends coming to stay and had run out of visitors permits, so I needed to go and buy some more. Before setting off I realised that as only residents are allowed to buy these permits I would probably have to prove where I lived. A quick rummage in my filing system and I wandered off bearing my passport, a letter from the council, a mortgage statement and something official from the Inland Revenue. All pretty impressive stuff I thought.

Not, however, impressive enough for the man at the parking shop. He has a list of approved items and no matter how important your pieces of paper are, if they aren't on his list they don't count. His list contains a driving licence, a current council tax bill, a home contents insurance certificate, a benefit book and a rent book. I tried hard to convince him that my paperwork was just as good as the stuff on his list but it was to no avail. He had his list and he was sticking to it. I went home empty handed.

I appreciate, of course, that Wandsworth Council need to be careful about who they sell these permits too. But I can't help thinking that they're going a bit too far here. Why is a rent book acceptable but a mortgage statement isn't? What makes a benefit book more convincing than a letter from the Inland Revenue? Why won't they accept letters from the council?

Why can't they do checks themselves in the shop? Surely the people in the shop could be given access to a database of the names and addresses of everyone on the council tax list. Or maybe the council don't trust their employees with that kind of data.

Or (and let's get really radical here) maybe they could make it possible to order these permits over the web. Take names, addresses and credit card numbers on a web site. Check that the name matches the names on the electoral register at that address. And then send the permits out in the post. To an address that you know to be in the borough. I think that would be far easier for everyone.

We got our permits in the end. My wife went down a few days later with her driving licence.

Oh, and our friends arrived a little later than expected. They turned up in the evening. About an hour after the parking restrictions had been lifted.

For reasons too boring to go into, I'm currently reading The Big Picture by Douglas Kennedy. I really don't recommend it. It's a rather dull story of a rich American whose life is suddenly changed in dramatic ways.

But one thing interested me in it. That's the way that the topical references in the novel really date it. It was published in 1997 but it already feels really out of date.

The main reason for this is that the protagonist is a NYC lawyer whose hobby is photography. His well-paid job means that he is able to spend whatever he wants on the latest photographic toys. In fact the first few chapters of the book feel, at times, like an up-market photography catalogue. But as this is 1997 this is all "chemical" photography. He spends his money on expensive film. He has a darkroom and a state of the art enlarger. Things that very few hobbyist (or even professional) photographers would be interested in today. Later in the book when he happens to be in the right place at the right time to get some very interesting photographs, time is wasted as the prints are developed.

There's another great topical reference quite early in the book. Our hero is spying on his wife kissing her secret lover and he thinks to himself:

The last time she kissed me like that, George Bush was still president.

Had to read that a couple of times before it made sense.

This all comes a as a bit of a surprise. But a very welcome one.

The Government has decided against backing more faith schools, the Children, Schools and Families Secretary, Ed Balls, told MPs.

In what is being seen as one of the most significant policy shifts of the post-Tony Blair era in education, he told a Commons select committee: "It is not the policy of the Government nor my department to expand the number of faith schools. We're not leading a drive for more faith schools."

The report also includes this interesting titbit:

Professor Alan Smithers, director of the Centre for Education and Employment at the University of Buckingham, said it had been wrong to argue that church-school pupils did better in exams because of a religious ethos. It was because they could be more selective on admissions, he said.

I can't find a transcript of the meeting (TheyWorkforYou doesn't seem to cover select committees) but the minutes will probably appear here at some point.

What with this and the potential abolition of the blasphemy laws, it seems there's an outbreak of sanity in the government.

Update: It seems that TheyWorkForYou do, in fact, have plans to cover select committees. But they've been hampered by lack of funds. So why not pop over to MySociety (the people behind TheyWorkForYou) and bung them a bit of cash. I'm going to sign up for a tenner a month.

The debate on the amendment to the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill which would repeal the UK's law against blasphemy took place yesterday. You can read the full debate online or summaries from various news sources.

Basically, following a half hour or so of debate the Justice Minister, Maria Eagle, said that the government had "every sympathy for the case for formal abolition" and that, subject to a "short and sharp" consultation with the Anglican church, they intended to table their own abolition amendment. On the basis of this, Dr Harris withdrew his amendment.

I call that a pretty good result.

Tomorrow in Parliament, Dr Evan Harris MP will introduce an amendment to the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill which will seek to repeal the outdated and ridiculous UK blasphemy laws.

To best explain why this is necessary I can only quote the letter that appears in today's Telegraph:

Sir - In the light of the widespread outrage at the conviction of the British teacher for blasphemy in Sudan over the name of a teddy bear is it not time to repeal our own blasphemy law?

The ancient common law of blasphemous libel purports to protect beliefs rather than people or communities. Most religious commentators are of the view that the Almighty does not need the "protection" of such a law.

We are representatives of religious, secular, legal and artistic opinion in this country and share the view that the blasphemy offence serves no useful purpose. Yet it allows partisan organisations or well-funded individuals to try to censor broadcasters or intimidate small theatres, print media or publishers.

Far from protecting public order - for which other laws are more suited - it damages social cohesion.

It is discriminatory in that it only covers attacks on Christianity and Church of England tenets and thus engenders an expectation among other religions that their sensibilities should also be protected by the criminal law (as with the attempt to charge Salman Rushdie) and a sense of grievance among minority religions that they do not benefit from their own version of such a law.

As the Law Commission acknowledged in 1985, when it recommended repeal, it is uncertain in scope, but lack of intention is no defence, and the law is unlimited in penalty.

This, together with its chilling effect on free expression and its discriminatory impact, leaves it in clear breach of human rights law. In the end, no one is likely to be convicted under it.

The Church of England no longer opposes its abolition on principle and the Government has given no principled reason to defend its retention.

We call on MPs to support the amendment proposed by Evan Harris, Frank Dobson and David Wilshire tomorrow to the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill and on the Government - which rightly criticises countries like Sudan for their blasphemy laws - to give it a fair wind.

Philip Pullman, Rt Rev Lord Harries of Pentregarth, Ricky Gervais, Nicholas Hytner, Shami Chakrabarti, Professor Richard Dawkins, Rt Rev Lord Carey of Clifton, Professor A.C. Grayling, Sir Jonathan Miller, David Starkey, Lord Lester of Herne Hill, Stewart Lee, Michael Cashman, Joan Smith, Lady D’Souza, Peter Tatchell, Lisa Appignanesi, Hanif Kureishi, Lord Desai, Roger Smith and Hari Kunzru

If you agree that this law should be repealed, then please use WriteToThem to ask your MP to support this amendment.

Firefox (and, I assume, most other modern browsers) does some clever magic when viewing RSS feeds. It doesn't show the raw XML, but instead shows a neatly formatted version of the page along with a button allowing you to subscribe to the feed in your favourite feed reader.

That, at least, is how it's supposed to work. It doesn't always work quite like that.

I've received an email about my newsfeeds page which points out that the feeds for The Times don't seem to work correctly. If you go to a Times RSS feed (here's their top stories feed as an example) you get the raw RSS XML instead of the standard Firefox RSS viewer.

So there's something about the Times RSS feeds that means that Firefox doesn't recognise it as an RSS feed. I've had a quick look, comparing the HTTP header that is returned to the header returned by a Guardian feed but I can't see anything obvious. But there must be something that is controlling this behaviour.

Does anyone know how Firefox recognises an RSS feed? Or is there anyone from The Times reading who would like to investigate why their feeds aren't working as expected?

Update: As pointed out in the comments, the problem is (rather obviously) that the Times feeds are being served with the incorrect Content-Type. There's a whole can of worms about what the correct Content-Type should be, but changing it to text/xml should tell Firefox to do the right thing. I've emailed the Times pointing out the issue. Let's hope they're more on the ball than the Sun's web team.

Update: Here we go again. The Times top stories RSS feed contains the following information:

<webMaster>support@timesonline.co.uk</webMaster>

But the mail I sent to that address bounced back as undeliverable.

<support@timesonline.co.uk>:
143.252.81.140 does not like recipient.
Remote host said: 550 Mailbox unavailable or access denied - <support@timesonline.co.uk>
Giving up on 143.252.81.140.

What's the point of advertising an undeliverable address?

Right now I'm hating all computers with a fierce intensity.

You all know about the server disk crash. I'm still dealing with the fallout from that. In addition to that, on New Year's Day I upgraded my main desktop machine to Fedora 8 - with the result that the wireless network (which is how that machine talks to the internet) no longer works.

Then, when I got back to work yesterday, the security policies forced me to change my password. And for some reason, that change still hasn't synced through to all of the systems. This means that I have spent half of today typing the wrong password. And the other half resetting my password because I've been locked out of systems for typing too many wrong passwords.

And I think this cold is focussing my hate in a most distressing manner.

One thing I've often written about is the decline of customer service. I don't often get the chance to praise good customer service so I'm going to grab the opportunity that I got yesterday.

Yesterday morning I got up to find two mail messages from Ebay in my inbox confirming that my items had been successfully listed. This was surprising as I hadn't listed anything. My initial thought was that these were phishing attempts and that I should just delete them. But before I did, I took a closer look and found that they were real messages from Ebay. They contained both my username and my real name and all of the links in the mail went to the real Ebay site and not some phisher copy[1].

At that point I got a bit worried and tried to log in to my Ebay account (by typing the URL in my browser's location bar, not by clicking on any of the links - always a good idea in cases like this). I found that my password wasn't recognised. It seemed that someone had managed to get into my Ebay account, change the password and start listing items for sale - listings that I would be charged for.

Then I noticed a third mail from Ebay in my inbox that I had previously missed. This is what it said:

Dear davorg,

It appears that a third party accessed your eBay account and used it to list items without your authorisation.

At this time we have taken several steps to secure your eBay account, including cancelling the unauthorised listings and crediting all associated fees to your account. We assure you that your credit card and bank details are kept encrypted on secure server and have not been viewed by anyone.

It then went on to list links to pages that would allow me to reclaim my password and give me advice on how I could make my account more secure.

The two messages about the unauthorised listings were sent at 4:35am. The message informing me of the problems and what had been done to fix them was sent at 4:53am. In less than twenty minutes Ebay had spotted the problem and done all they could to correct it. All while I was fast asleep.

I call that pretty good customer service.

Of course, now I need to work out how someone got access to my account. I admit to having been a bit lax and using the same password on a number of sites so it's possible that one of those other sites was storing my password in plain text (we all know how common that is) and someone got hold of their data. Or perhaps it was some convoluted XSS attack.

I've learnt a lesson though. I'll be far more careful with passwords from now on.

One question still remains. How did Ebay identify that my account was compromised so quickly? I'm sure it was some kind of automated response, but surely it's possible that I was on their site at 4:30 in the morning trying to sell some Ugg boots that were an unwanted Christmas present.

Never thought I'd be praising Ebay for their customer service!

[1] I read all of my email in plain text mode so it's hard for people to send me disguised links.

The hard disk that my old blog entries live on (along with a few other web sites) is still looking rather ill. It's apparently possible to prod it in a certain manner and get it to work for a few hours until it gets tired again. The hard part is persuading the tech support people at the hosting company to perform the prodding ceremony.

As a result, I seem to be getting three or four hour's access to it every four or five days.

Last night it came back again and I used the time wisely be getting a dump of the database that contains the blog.

So I now have a backup of all of the previous entries together with the comments and trackbacks (remember trackbacks?) The next step is to get them into my new blog's database.

Now there's a slight problem there of course. I assume that the new blog entries will have been generated with the same primary keys as the first few entries in the old blog. And as there will be a unique index on the entries table I can't just load the old data into the new database.

Currently I'm thinking that I should update the primary keys in the new database[1] so that they are greater than any of the old keys. But the Movable Type database is a large and complex beast. There will almost certainly be more than one primary key sequence to deal with and a large number of foreign key relationships to keep in step.

Sounds like a lot of fun. But it should be a reasonably mechanical task so I think there's a good chance that I'll have anything back by the end of the weekend. Don't hold me to that though.

Is there anyone reading this who has attempted something like this before? Am I mad to do it the way I've described above? Is there a simpler method?

Any advice would really be appreciated.

[1] Thereby breaking one of the fundamental rules of database design - primary keys should be immutable.

About nine years ago I was on holiday in Somerset with my wife and stepdaughter. As part of that holiday we visited Cheddar Gorge and, in particular, the caves there. Whilst wandering round the show caves is all very interesting, my stepdaughter's attention was grabbed by the fact that they also ran "adventure caving" trips where a guide took you deeper into the caves. We pointed out that the minimum age for the trip was 12 and that she was therefore too young. We promised to bring her back when she was old enough and promptly forgot about it. Until this year.

This Christmas we went back to stay in the same cottage in Somerset. When we asked my stepdaughter (who is now 20) if she wanted to come with us, one of the first things she asked was "can we go adventure caving?"

And that's how on the day after Boxing Day the three of us found ourselves entering one of the Cheddar Gorge show caves in boiler suits and wellies, wearing hard hats with lights on the front.

An email has flooded in about my previous post confirming that I was being too harsh. My correspondent points out that the mother was illiterate, she was just using "txtspk" which, whilst not being a dialect that many people enjoy reading, is still becoming an acceptable language amongst the young.

I don't agree with this for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, I accept that txtspk is a very common language amongst the young. But I think that an important part of being literate is knowing the appropriate language to use in different circumstances. And, in my opinion, using txtspk when talking about her son like that is inappropriate. To me it shows a lack of respect. I accept that not everyone will agree with me.

But secondly, let's look more closely at what she wrote. The quotation I used was "RIP my lil angel mummy knows your still here love u always and foreva". Some of those errors ("lil", "u", and maybe even "foreva") are clearly txtspk so we'll ignore them. But "your" isn't txtspk (that would be "ur", as I understand it) and it's not good English. She means to say "you're". Mixing up homonyms like "you're" and "your" is what marks her out as illiterate.

Maybe she isn't illiterate. Maybe she's just sloppy. But when all you know about someone is their writing, then you'll obviously judge their level of literacy by what they have written. To me, it's important that my writing gives as good an impression of me as possible. It seems that other people aren't as bothered about first impressions as I am.

By the way, I enjoy getting feedback on my blog in any form. But the best way is to add a comment. That way all of the conversation takes place in public.