March 2008 Archives

Having just been saying how much I like the new Guardian URL scheme, it was interesting to see the URL for this article from today's paper. The article is about some early hominan[1] remains that have been found in northern Spain. The URL is

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/mar/27/archaeology.dinosaurs

I can obviously see why it's in the science section. And of course it's about archaeology. But "dinosaurs"? What connection do hominina have with dinosaurs? They are separated in time by about sixty million years. URLs like these only work if the person assigning them has an understanding of the subject area.

And, of course, it's too late to correct it now as URLs are permanent :-)

[1] I originally put "hominid" there believing it to be the correct word. But according the Wikipedia, the definition of hominid has gradually changed to encompass all the great apes. Humans and their closely related species are now apparently described as hominina. That's something new I've learned today.

I'm a great believer in the idea that URLs should be permanent. When I publish something on the web then (hopefully) people link to it, and it would be nice to think that those links still work in five, ten or fifty years time. A few months ago I changed the URL scheme for davblog, but I ensured that the old-style URLs would redirect to the new ones.

Of course, this is a relatively small site. It has a couple of thousand entries. My fix to ensure that the old URLs still worked simply consisted of a few pages of Apache RedirectPermanent directives. If you're dealing with a site that is larger and more important than this one, then the problems become far harder.

So it was nice to see Simon's post pointing out that the Guardian had taken this problem seriously and had put some work into making sure that their old URLs still work correctly now they are in the process of switching to a new URL scheme. As an example, he links to an old blog entry which contains a link to

http://www.guardian.co.uk/religion/Story/0,2763,1382899,00.html

No prizes for guessing which CMS generated that nasty URL. Clicking on that URL now redirects you to the (far saner)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/jan/04/religion.uk

And all is well with the world.

Well, almost. Digging around on some old (and rather embarrassing) web sites that I haven't got round to taking down yet (because URLs are permanent!) I find this page (love that 1997 web design) which contains a number of links to Guardian web pages. Here's an example:

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/News/1997_07_24/1997_07_24_29440.html

Clicking on that page leads to a shiny new "URL not found" page.

Which, I think, demonstrates a couple of interesting things. Firstly, at some point when the Guardian were moving from one CMS to another the permanence of the URLs wasn't considered a high priority. There is no chain of redirection in place which converts this old URL to a newer style one. It looks like when the Guardian moved from this URL scheme, they broke all incoming links to their site. I wonder if that problem was even considered ten years ago.

Secondly, look at that really old URL. It's not perfect by a long way but, to me, it looks a lot easier to understand than the first URL example above (the one generated by the CMS they are currently moving away from). There's one "magic number" in it - 29440 is probably the article ID in some database - but you can work out the date that the article was published (24th July 1997) and the section it was in (Politics News). The other URL tells you that it points to a religious story, but those four numbers at the end make most of the URL completely meaningless.

Working out a good URL scheme isn't a trivial task. That's particularly true for a complex site like the Guardian. I'm really glad to see that they are making great progress in this area. But it's interesting to see that at some point in the history of their site their URL scheme took what seems to be a big step backwards. Presumably, switching to the CMS which produced those nasty URLs was seen a giving them many other advantages that outweighed the URL damage.

I wonder if there's anyone around who remembers this change.

Update: Searching the Guardian site finds only one article that was published on July 24th 1997. And that doesn't look at all like the one that I was trying to link to, which was apparently about student fees. So it appears that not only are the links broken, but that some of the content from that era is no longer available on the site.

Oh, and thanks to Robin for adding his comments. I was hoping that someone like him might drop by and chip in.

I've been dabbling with Yahoo!'s new location service FireEagle. Well, when I say "dabbling" I really mean "looking at it and thinking that I should really get round to trying to write something that uses it". All I've actually been doing is updating it (when I remember) to tell it that I'm at home or at work.

The key point there is "when I remember". A location service is no use at all if it isn't accurate. And, currently, my FireEagle location has about a 50% chance of being accurate as after the first few days of excitement I soon get bored of keeping it up date. I expect there will be applications that keep it updated in real time using information about which cell your mobile phone is connected to - but those are still in the future.

So I even knew exactly what my first application was going to be. I was going to write a command line application for setting your location which I could set up as a regular job to run twice a day and tell FireEagle when I was going to work and when I was coming home. Of course, that still wouldn't be accurate all of the time, but it would be better than the current situation.

I was going to write it over last weekend. But I got too caught up in other things. And this morning I found that I no longer needed to write it. That nice Mr. Wistow had released a Net::FireEagle module to CPAN and it included a simple command line program for querying and setting your location.

So now I have what I wanted. FireEagle currently knows that I'm at home. And at 8am tomorrow morning (assuming everything works) it will automatically be updated to know that I'm at work. And at 5:30pm it should get updated again to know that I'm at home. If I wanted to be really clever I could time a few journeys in each direction and make it update at approximately the time I pass each tube station on the way. Perhaps that might be seen as overkill.

So the lazyweb triumphs again. By not doing something when I planned to do it, I've managed to not have to do it at all. It's a procrasinator's dream.

Of course, now I need to thing of something else to write using FireEagle.

Oh, and by the way, I have a few FireEagle invitations left over. If you're interested in playing with FireEagle, then email me.

Update: Ooh. It worked this morning.

It's nine years since I registered the domain dave.org.uk and set up a web site there. And I've never really known what to do with it. Since I started blogging, it's seemed even less useful. The blog front page was where all the interesting stuff happened. The main page just contained links to a few bad jokes and a couple of useful sub-sites. For years I just tinkered with the design a bit, but I was never really happy with it. Sometime early in 2005 I rewrote it so that it took a lot of its content from various RSS feeds that I published. But the code to do that was a really nasty hack which I've wanted to rewrite since the day I first wrote it.

A few weeks ago, I wrote Perlanet which is a simple program for aggregating web feeds and republishing the results. As I had some spare time yesterday, I rewrote the dave.org.uk front page using Perlanet to do most of the heavy lifting. It now contains the full text of the most recent entries from my various blogs, together with examples of my latest flickr uploads and list of recent twitters and delicious links. It'll be simple to add other feeds to the mix in the future.

I realise that this isn't exactly new. People have had sites like this for years. But I'm happy at how quickly I managed to build this and happier that it shows that Perlanet is as flexible as I wanted it to me. I'm also pretty happy with the way that it looks (although that is, I suspect, more to do with the Boilerplate CSS framework than my design skills).

I've also started to publish a number of Atom feeds. As you'll see from the top right of the new page, there is one feed containing the blog entries, one containing the shorter stuff, one for photos (that's just the original flickr feed but it might be expanded in the future) and one that contains everything (that's the planet davorg feed). That allows readers a bit more flexibility over what content they subscribe to.

Oh, and I've also taken the opportunity to remove the links to all the old jokes. The pages are still there if you know where to look, but Google Analytics tells me that they won't be missed.

Here in the UK we don't have many problems with creationists. We  have to be vigilant because it looks like they might be on the increase, but currently we mainly just point and laugh at them. It's therefore hard sometimes to understand how much of a problem creationism is over in the US.

Unless you keep a close eye on our transatlantic cousins you might not have heard of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed - a forthcoming film which claims that a number of educators and scientists are being persecuted for their belief in "Intelligent Design" (the modern rebranding of creationism). The film first came to my notice last year when Richard Dawkins mentioned that he had been interviewed for the film under false pretences. Amongst the other people tricked into appearing in the film was PZ Myers, the Minnesota biology professor who is well-known for his blog Pharyngula.

Dawkins is currently in the US on a speaking tour. As part of the tour, he was in Minnesota on Thursday where he was due to speak at the American Atheists Conference. That evening he met up with his colleague and friend Myers. Also in Minnesota that evening was a screening of Expelled. This was one of a number of pre-release screenings of the film which have been held all over the country in order to build awareness of the film. Myers had reserved seats in the screening for himself, his family, Dawkins and some people who work on Richard Dawkins' web site. He did this by registering on a web site. He didn't use a false name or in any way try to disguise that he would be attending the screening.

Whilst the party was waiting in the queue, a security guard approached Myers and told him that couldn't attend the screening and would have to leave - apparently missing the fact that Richard Dawkins was standing right next to him in the queue. Myers went off to the local Apple Store (where he posted this blog entry) and Dawkins watched the film with the rest of Myers' family. In the Q&A session following the film Dawkins asked the film's director why he asked for Myers to be removed and the director just lied in reply.

This is a brilliant own goal by the creationists. They seem to be as inept at public relations as they are at science (and also, if reports are to be believed, at filmmaking).

Myers published another, more detailed, account later and the story has also made the NY Times. The account on the Expelled web site seems extremely unlikely to anyone who knows anything about either Myers or Dawkins.

Finally, here's a film of Dawkins and Myers discussing the incident.

Update: Here's Richard Dawkins on both the incident and the film.

You have to feel sorry for the electorate in Mid Bedfordshire. When they elected Nadine Dorries in 2005, I'm sure they couldn't have know what a huge mistake they had made.

You might recall how she accused Ben Goldacre of publishing parliamentary secrets. When Goldacre pointed out that the facts he had published were in the public domain, she ignored him. When people tried to point out the errors on her web site (which she calls a blog even though it's nothing like one) she responded by removing the ability to comment.

It's therefore nice to be able to report that Ben has caught her out again. This time she is propagating a well-known urban legend which has been doing the rounds for almost ten years. The story goes like this. in 1999 Dr Joseph Bruner carried out an operation on a 21-week-old foetus. During the operation a photo was taken which shows the hand of the foetus apparently holding to the surgeon's finger. Anti-abortion campaigners like to use this image to show that carrying out abortions at this age is wrong.

[Update: Previously I called the photo an "internet hoax". I think that's inaccurate. I'm not saying that the photo is faked. I'm just saying that it doesn't show what the anti-abortionists say that it shows.]

There are (at least) two problems with this. Firstly, Dr Bruner is clear that the foetus was fully anaesthetised throughout the operation. There's no way that the foetus could have moved in the way that some people claim. Secondly, even if the foetus did move in the way described, that is no measure of the long-term viability of the foetus.

Anyway, that's a debate that I don't really want to go into now. The point is that the photo has been around for years and that there has been enough debate on it to at least through severe doubt on the interpretation that the anti-abortionists (and Dorries is a loud member of that group) like to place on it. It has just taken me ten minutes with Google to work that out. Surely it's not too much to ask that our elected representatives put in a bit of effort to verify things they publish as fact.

Let's also remember that Dorries is very keen to mention the fact that she used to work as a nurse. So you might think that she has the medical knowledge to realise that what she is posting as fact is (at the very least) rather suspect. I know that we can't expect MPs to be experts on every subject that they have to deal with. But this is an area where Dorries claims some level of expertise.

I don't know if anyone in Mid Beds reads this blog. But if anyone from the constituency comes across this entry and is considering voting for Dorries in the next general election then I urge you to reconsider. The constituents of Mid Beds deserve better than this.

Update: Dorries has responded to some of the criticism in post that is laughably called "the hand of truth". I suppose we have to give her some credit for responding. Usually she just ignores her critics completely. But her response does absolutely nothing to either address the issues or enhance her reputation as a medical expert. Firstly, she asks why the surgeon would bother to anaesthetise a foetus - apparently forgetting that the mother and the foetus share the same blood - so it's hard to anaesthetise the mother without effecting the child. Secondly, she seems to think that the foetus must have made the incision in the uterus wall that we see in the photo as it's jagged and no surgeon would be so untidy. I didn't realise that a foetus had the strength to break through the mother's skin. If that's the case then surely it' surprising that so many of them get carried to full term.

She also implies that the surgeon might lying about what happened because he's in fear of the "vociferous, and unfortunately violent" pro-choice campaigners in the US. I don't know about you, but I can't ever remember reading about violent pro-choice campaigners. From what I've seen, it's the anti-abortion campaigners that you need to worried about crossing.

But it's how she closes which annoys me the most. She says:

Finally, don't listen to me, don't listen to the pro-abortionists. Trust your own eyes, believe what you see.

And she ensures that you don't listen to the other side of the argument by failing to actually link to any of the criticism (you can find a lot of it by googling for "dorries hand of hope"). To me, that indicates that she isn't interested in a fair debate on the subject. She just wants to lie to the electorate and push her biased view of the world.

Don't believe what you see. Question everything you see and everything you're told. Research the subject and see what the experts say. And decide who you'd rather believe - the surgeon who was carrying out the operation or a stupid MP who is obviously pushing an agenda.

I'm convinced that if it wasn't for Arthur C Clarke, Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, then I wouldn't read anywhere near as much as I do. It was through spending my childhood reading those authors (and others like them - but mostly those three) that I developed my love of reading. Oh, I admit that most SF isn't exactly great literature and none of those three authors are literary geniuses - characterisation, in particular, seems to be a closed book to them - but they got me into a habit of always having a book with me. And for that I will always be grateful to them. I don't read much SF these days, but I always think of it fondly.

Clarke outlived the other two by over fifteen years, but he died yesterday at the age of ninety. To be honest, I don't think he wrote anything worth reading for about twenty years, but I still highly recommend novels like Childhood's End[1], Rendezvous With Rama and Songs of Distant Earth.

If you haven't read any Clarke, and want to give him a try then start with the short story The Nine Billion Names of God.

Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.

[1] Which, shockingly, seems to be out of print. There's a new edition due in August. Wonder if they'll bring that forward now.

Over the weekend I found time to rebuild the rest of my missing planets. I've resurrected Planet Balham (Atom), Planet Westminster (Atom) and Planet Doctor Who (Atom). They all have Atom feeds available as well.

This has been an interesting test of Perlanet (my simple planet-building program). When building planet davorg, I was only using feeds that I had some kind of control over. It was therefore pretty simple to ensure that the web page created was valid HTML (though, due to some bugs in the Perl modules I'm using, the same can't be said of the Atom feed). But with these new planets, I'm aggregating feeds from all sorts of places and am seeing problems that I hadn't seen before. In particular I've changed Perlanet to deal with the cases where the feed can't be downloaded for some reason (I think that some of the MPs on my list have stopped blogging) and where the feed isn't valid.

There are also plenty of examples of feeds that have some pretty mad HTML in them which are breaking the layout of the output pages. On Planet Balham there seems to be some broken HTML that is badly effecting the <div>s on the page, moving the Google Adsense block halfway down the page. Also, the second half of the page is currently in italics due, I suspect, to an unclosed <i> tag. On Planet Westminster there's also some kind of problem which means that the names of the feeds change size halfway down the page.

So it's clear that I need to add something to clean up the feeds. I'll probably look at using HTML::Tidy or HTML::Scrubber (perhaps both). Expect some better looking pages in the next few days.

A few months ago I moved this site to another server. At that point all of the "planets" that I was hosting on theplanetarium.org stopped working too because the software that I was using to build them wasn't installed on the new server. And installing it was going to be a bit of a nightmare.

But over the last few days I've written a simple system that does much the same thing. You can read more of the technical details over at my use.perl blog (which is, of course, one of the source aggregated into planet davorg).

Planet davorg is already back online. My other planets should be back over the next few days. Now I have the software, it's just a case of writing a few configuration files.

Of course, once you start aggregating stuff like this, you run into the data repetition problems that Paul Mison mentioned last week. I should be able to use the same software (or something based on it) to easily offer readers a choice of feeds containing just the content they are interested in.

• Jack the Ripper Walk - a photoset on Flickr
  Photos from an unofficial Jack the Ripper walk. I'm considering orgnaising something like this myself later this year.
  (tags: london walking jacktheripper flickr photos)
• GooSync Home Page
  Synchronise your phone calendar with Google calendar. Why didn't I know about this?
  (tags: google calendar sync mobile phone)
• Fire Eagle - API Kit & Examples: Perl
  Perl module for interacting with FireEagle. Would be nice if this was on CPAN. There's a Net::FireEagle on CPAN but it seems to be completely different (and rather old).
  (tags: api perl yahoo fireeagle)

• MathMiracle.com - Witness a Miracle
  Conclusive proof (apparently) that god exists. It's all nonsense of course.
  (tags: religion idiocy numerology)

Tomorrow is the thirtieth anniversary of the first broadcast of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. This makes me feel more than a little old. I didn't listen to the first episode but, having heard about it from friends at school, I started listening from episode two.

The BBC web site has decided to commemorate this anniversary with a spectacularly bad piece of journalism entitled What on earth is 42? The premise of the piece is that 42[1] has some deeper meaning which H2G2 fans spend their waking hours trying to work out. A task which has apparently become far harder since the death of Douglas Adams in 2001. The article looks for explanations in mathematics, philosophy and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The author even asks Douglas Adams' friend Stephen Fry if he knows the answer. Fry tells him that he knows the answer but that he is sworn to secrecy and must take it to his grave.

Unfortunately, all of this digging ignores one crucial point. In 1993, Douglas Adams wrote a message to the alt.fan.douglas-adams newsgroup which attempted to end this kind of speculation for once and for all. He said:

The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought '42 will do' I typed it out. End of story.

Which looks pretty definitive to me.

I suspect that Stephan Fry was well aware of this and was winding the reporter up.

I'm disappointed that the BBC has chosen to mark this anniversary by publishing such nonsense.

[1] On the off-chance that anyone reading this doesn't already know, 42 is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything which the computer Deep Thought calculates after ruminating for 7.5 million years. If you needed this explanation then please do yourself a favour and track down the original radio series or the books.

• chaff:: feeding the daemons
  Paul talks about an issue that I've been thinking about recently. When you are generating multiple RSS feeds, how do you deal with the overlap between feeds? Or users who only want to see particular types of post?
  (tags: husk, blech, rss)
• One Year to Midnight (Watchmen)
  Pictures of the Comedian, Nite-Owl, Ozymandias, Rorschach and the Silk Spectre from the forthcoming (in a year) Watchmen film. They look pretty good to me. I _so_ want to like this film.
  (tags: comics film watchmen)
• Open - Code - New York Times Blog
  This is cool. The New York Times has a blog which talks about its experiments with Open Source software. I wonder which British newspaper will be the first to follow.
  (tags: blog nyt programming opensource media)

Yesterday I mentioned that I had recently read Rip It Up And Start Again by Simon Reynolds. It was a really interesting read, but (at least in part) not for the reasons I expected.

It was interesting because it was full of bands that I had never listened to and had always meant to. This was particularly true in the early chapters when it was talking about people like The Pop Group, The Slits and The Raincoats. I remember being vaguely aware of these bands at the time, but I don't remember listening to them and it's been costing me a bit of money filling in some of these gaps in my music collection. I've been enjoying this very much.

All of which leads to another question. Who was I listening to during this period? I haven't yet resorted to getting the vinyl collection out from the back of the cupboard to check, but I've started to piece together some memories.

I was definitely starting to listen to Bowie in the late 70s. I have a complete run of Bowie singles from about the time of "Heroes" to sometime in the mid-80s. I also know that I listened to more heavy metal than I'm comfortable admitting. The end of my interest in heavy metal is neatly marked by a copy of Gillan's Future Shock album which I bought in 1981 and played about twice. There was also a lot of Hawkwind being listened to at the time, along with bands that no-one has ever heard of now like Barclay James Harvest. There were, however, some indications of wider interests. I bought Tubeway Army's Replicas when it was first released and saw Gary Numan on his first solo tour (supported, if I recall correctly, by OMD).

In 1981, I moved to London to start university and I put away childish things. I've already mentioned my conversion from heavy metal (except Hawkwind, of course) but it was replaced in my record collection by all sorts of interesting music. I seem to remember spending all of 1982 listening to Dexys Midnight Runners's Too-Rye-Ay and ABC's The Lexicon of Love - both of which are mentioned in the book.

And from then on, my tastes coincide with Reynold's book far more closely. There's Talking Heads, The Cure, The Human League and Depeche Mode - all bands that I still listen to today.

So, all in all, Reynold's book triggered a big nostalgia trip for me, even though a lot of it wasn't directly mentioned in the book. It has cost (and continues to cost) me a bit of money as I buy music that I missed out on or replace stuff that I only have on vinyl. And one day soon I am going to have to get all the vinyl out and see what other musical treasures I have forgotten about.

The Metropolitan Police have started a new counter-terrorism campaign which encourages people to report any suspicious activity that they see. Suspicious activity like owning too many mobile phones and taking photographs.

I'm particularly puzzled by the poster about photography. It asks you to report people taking photos of CCTV cameras. Surely if you have a CCTV camera, then you know when people are taking photos of it. The CCTV system will record it.

I'm convinced it's all just another ploy to make people suspicious of each other.

Update: Some lovely remixes of the adverts over at BoingBoing.

Fewer books this month. It's a shorter month, of course, but really I got a bit bogged down in a couple of books. I'm still reading David Mitchell's number9dream, but I'll finish it in a couple of days so it will be included in next month's list.

Oh, and I read a few X-Men comic collections. But I'm not going to include those.

Beautiful Code - Andy Oram & Greg Wilson (editors)
I'm told that a good programmer learns a new language every year. If that's true, then I haven't been a particularly good programmer for the last few years as I've largely stuck with my core languages. I picked up this book as an attempt to address that. The book contains articles by a number of well-known programmers writing about what they find beautiful in their favourite programming languages. It is a useful overview of the programming languages that are in current use (there was even an article about FORTRAN - some people still use it). I now have a list of two or three languages that I want to learn more about (Erlang is top of that list) but, more interestingly, it has also reinforced some ideas that I had about languages that I don't want to learn. Michael Feathers talks about the way that the FIT framework breaks all the rules of good Java design and describes code which is pretty much how I would have designed it. Charles Petzold talks about writing code that generates other code in C# and makes me very glad that I use a dynamic language.

A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini
This is this month's book club book. But it's something that I would probably have picked up myself eventually. A couple of years ago I was interested in reading Hosseini's first novel, The Kite Runner, but I never got round to it. Having read this one, I don't think I'll bother now. The novel is about the plight of women in Afghanistan under the Taliban. I think that it uses that obviously shocking background to give it emotional impact - which is a bit lazy on the part of the author. This background is really the only thing that the book has going for it. The characters are all very one-dimensional and the plotting is very simplistic ("oh no, the love of my life is dead", time passes, "oh, wait, no he isn't") and the ending is as contrived as anything I've read. The book is getting a lot of publicity at the moment on the back of the Kite Runner film, but I really don't think it's good enough to justify the hype.

Rip It Up and Start Again - Simon Reynolds
Subtitled "Postpunk, 1978-1984", this is a book about one of my favourite periods of popular (and not so popular) music. Postpunk was never really a single movement. It was a number of different styles all of which built on various aspects of punk rock movement. The diversity of postpunk can be seen from the range of bands covered in this book - it starts with Public Image Limited and ends with Frankie Goes to Hollywood. If you were buying slightly alternative music at the time covered by this book, or you appreciate the music of this period, then I strongly recommend reading it. One warning though - it'll almost certainly have a detrimental effect on your bank account as you are reminded of music that you have forgotten and you no longer have copies of.

• Londonist: Monday Miscellanea
  The Londonist use one of my photos to illustrate their "Monday Miscellanea" article. I wish it wasn't quite so blurry.
  (tags: londonist barbican usingmyphotos)
• Livery Companies - Grocer's Hall, London on Squidoo
  Lots of my photos of Livery Company Halls being used here.
  (tags: liverycompanies squidoo usingmyphotos)