May 2008 Archives

Long time readers (and followers of my Flickr stream) might remember that a couple of years ago I developed an obsession with taking photos of the City of London Livery Halls. The obsession waned when I stop working in the City but over the last couple of weeks I've been wandering around the city a bit and have noticed some maps pointing to halls that aren't in my collection yet. So at some point soon I'll start trying to get photos of those (I think I'm missing half dozen or so).

But then I started thinking about maybe organising a walk round the City one weekend to see as many of the halls as possible. And, of course, in order to do that you need a map showing where they all are. And the easiest way to plot random points on a map is to use the "My Maps" feature in Google Maps.

So, after a couple of hours work - here is a map showing the London Livery Halls. Actually, currently it only shows the ones I've photographed. I'll add the missing ones soon. I'll also add more information to each pin - the address, a link to their web site and perhaps a photo. But I think it's interesting and useful as it stands, so I thought it was working mentioning it even though it's still a work in progress.

Over the last two days, as part of the debate on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, Parliament has had four votes[1] where the forces of Medievalism tried to impose the views of their imaginary friends to prevent the advance of science.

As you'll have seen in the news, they lost on all four counts. This is fantastic news. I really think that we might be seeing the power of Bronze Age myths starting to fade away in the UK. It's laughable, of course, that anyone could even consider debating in the House of Commons on the basis of fairy stories. But it's heartening to know that rationalism might be starting to break out.

Of course, the objections to the Bill weren't all religious in nature. During the abortion debate there was plenty of mention of a poll which says that 75% of women want a reduction to the 24-week limit on abortions. Of course the poll was conducted on behalf of the Christian Institute (so maybe I was wrong and there wasn't any non-religious objections). And given that this is a debate on a medical topic, shouldn't we give more credence to the views of the medical profession, rather than the general population?

Well, apparently the majority of MPs agree with me. They did listen to the medical advice and didn't lower the limit. Let's hear it for rational debate and the defeat of superstition.

I'm looking forward to looking at the front pages of our more reactionary press this morning. I bet they'll be livid. The BBC was a little disappointing. Their lead story (at least on  the 7am bulletin I saw) was a preview of some football match that is taking place tonight.

A final word from Health Minister Dawn Primarolo, talking about Nadine Dorries contributions to the debate: “She has asserted many things as fact which are not this evening.”

[1] Ok, actually more than four as there were a few amendments to the section on abortion.

Today's vote on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill is going to be an interesting test of the power of religion in 21st century Britain. As far as I can see, there are no reasons to object to the bill that don't have their basis in Bronze Age myths.

Gordon Brown has been really rather unimpressive since he took over as Prime Minister but I was really impressed by his defence of the Bill in yesterday's Observer. This is a man who is obviously passion about defending something that he believes in strongly.

Should scientists be given the legal framework they say they need to pursue new cures and treatments through stem cell research or will we turn our back on these potential advances?

Should children who face death or critical illness find new hope in scientific advances that would allow their new brother or sister to be not just a blessing to their family, but also a saviour sibling to them? And should people be able to approach IVF clinics without fear of discrimination on the grounds of their sexual orientation?

My answer to all those questions is an unequivocal yes.

I believe that he is absolutely right. Stem cell research is a vital tool that enables us to make advances in the way that we treat many diseases. To turn our back on these advances because of how a shaman interprets texts that are hundreds of years old would be irresponsible lunacy.

Religion has had a strong hold on British society for too long. It's time we said that enough is enough and stood up for a secular society which makes decisions based on rational thought, not on the capricious whims of an imaginary friend. I really hope that parliament sees sense today and votes for rationalism over medieval superstition.

Update: Bid to ban hybrid embryos fails

An MP's attempt to outlaw the creation of hybrid human-animal embryos has been defeated by 336 votes to 176.

An excellent start. More votes follow over the next couple of days.

I had a little bit of an accident over the weekend when I accidentally started to restore an old back-up of the database that runs this blog. I noticed what I what I was doing pretty quickly and stopped it before too much damage was done.

But I lost the last few days entries and comments. Luckily I hadn't rebuilt the site, so I still had the missing stuff in the HTML files. I've restored the entries and I've got copies of the comments which I'll put back when I have command-line access to the database this evening.

Sorry about that.

Geeks invented the internet. And for many years it was inhabited solely by geeks and academics. Over those years a number of unwritten rules arose which controlled the way people used the internet. The unwritten rules were passed on to newcomers who saw the wisdom of the rules and continued to follow them. Everyone followed the rules and all was well with the world.

But in the mid-90s the rest of the world discovered the internet and suddenly everything changed. The companies who were providing internet access to the public had no interest in the rules so the new users knew nothing of the rules and continuously broke them. Some companies (and I'm looking at you here, Microsoft) produced internet software that encouraged users to break the rules.

This made the original internet users very sad. Many of them fought back against this abuse of what they saw as their system. They would try to enforce the rules but, of course, they had no power to do so and generally failed. Which made them even more sad.

You can't beat that weight of numbers. The vast majority of internet users now see the (eminently sensible in my view) old internet rules as irrelevant to them. Most people that you meet on the internet have no knowledge of the rules. There's only a tiny minority of people who still care. But many of that tiny minority still try to fight the barbarian hordes and impose their old rules.

So I think it's time to give up. Much as I support the old rules, I think it's pointless to go on fighting this battle. It's a battle that the geeks can never win.

Here are three examples of rules that I think it's time to abandon. These particular examples are all about email.

1/ Top Posting

Most of the time email is a conversation. I send a message to you and you send me a reply. I might then reply to your reply, clarifying some points and asking some more questions. And so we go on.

The sensible way to carry on a conversation like this is to format it so that it reads like a conversation - i.e. a question followed by its answer and then another question followed by another answer.

Geeks know this. Their email conversations are really easy to read. Everything is in the right order and it all makes sense. Non-geeks just dump everything they have to say at the top of the email. This means that firstly if you want to review everything that has been said then you need to read from the bottom up and secondly it's often really hard to know which parts of the reply refer to which parts of the original mail.

Life would be so much easier if everyone followed the geek way of doing things. But it's never going to happen. There are still people holding out against this in geek communities, but most of the world top-posts all of its replies.

And that's not going to change. Accept it. Deal with it. Move on.

2/ HTML Email

The same email software that initially encouraged top-posting also introduced the wonders of HTML mail (sometimes know as "rich text" mail) to the world. No longer would your mail be constrained to boring old plain text - now you can change fonts and colours, and include images.

Of course, it doesn't really work like that. No two email programmes work the same way and an email that looks great in Outlook might look like a complete mess in Thunderbird (or, as is more likely, on your mobile phone email application). As a result, people who design HTML email (and people apparently make a living doing just that!) have to ignore everything we've learned about HTML design in the last ten years and design to the lowest common denominator. Table-based HTML design isn't dead; it's been relegated to HTML email.

And then there's the problem with viruses and phishing. The more complex an HTML email can be, the higher the chance that someone can use it for nefarious purposes. The net result of that scare is that many email programmes now won't show external images unless specifically requested to by the users. Which means that your carefully designed marketing message will actually end up looking a bit shit to many of your target audience.

But much as you might hate it (and if you're sane you will), HTML email isn't going to go away. Simply set your email application to display the plain text version of the email and let the idiots enjoy the pretty colours and viruses. If someone sends you an email that doesn't have a plain text version then just ignore it. They weren't worth talking to anyway.

HTML email is a fact of life. Ignore it. Move on.

3/ Reply-To On Mailing Lists

If someone sends a message to a mailing list and you reply using the "reply" button then your reply should just go to the person who wrote the original mail. That's just common sense. It you want to reply to everyone on the mailing list then you should choose "reply all" or (in better email applications) "reply to list".

But somewhere over the last ten years or so, people stopped understanding that and mailing list owners started to configure their mailing list software so that replying to a mailing list mail sent a mail to the whole list. That's obviously completely broken behaviour and there aren't many weeks that pass when I don't see a geek being caught out by a broken mailing list and sending what should have been a private mail to the whole list.

Geeks expect one behaviour. Non-geeks expect a different one. Once again the non-geeks will win through sheer weight of numbers. I used to be adamant about this and would configure any mailing list I ran so that replies would go to the sender. But so many people don't understand that, so I have now capitulated and run most of mail mailing lists so that a reply goes to the whole list. It's broken and wrong, but it leads to fewer problems in the long run.

You might think that this is one area where geeks could still have their own way within their own communities. Surely geeks could still run their own geek mailing list according to the old traditions. Well, some lists are still run like that but it seems that the inability to understand the semantics of the "reply" button event infects geeks. Often you'll see a mailing list that is configured correctly gets complaints about it being "broken" and the list owner changes the behaviour.

So now, in the majority of cases, a reply to a mailing list mail will go to the list. That's not going to change. It's not worth fighting about. Deal with it.


So, yes, the barbarians are at the gate. The lunatics have taken over the asylum. Good ideas have been crushed by the number of people who don't understand them. But there's no point in complaining about it. You just have to accept it and move on.

Now I'd better stop before I start ranting about Betamax.

The full schedule for Opentech has been announced. There are three tracks of talks and it looks like that I'll need a couple of clones in order to see everything that I want to see.

The previous Opentech conference (was it really three years ago) was a lot of fun and I fully expect this one to be just as good. Registration is already open (you reserve a place and then pay a fiver on the door) and if previous experience is anything to go by, places will be booked up pretty quickly. I didn't post this entry until I'd reserved mine :-)

Hope to see some of you there.

Regular readers will know that this blog has experienced some problems over the last few months. Since I last moved to new hardware this blog has been running really slowly and more often than not any attempt to publish content (whether a blog entry or a comment) has ended with a server error. This has made me less likely to write here and has made you far less likely to comment. Which is sad.

When the problem first arose I prodded at it a bit, but nothing I did made any difference. So I decided to ignore the problem in the hope that a Movable Type upgrade would fix it at some point in the future.

Over the last couple of weeks, that strategy has been causing me large amounts of grief. The problem is that any of the programs that publish content to this site are taking such a long time to complete that the connection times out. So what should take a few seconds is actually taking two or three minutes. Over the last few weeks the amount of comment spam I get has risen to new levels. And even though none of that spam ever gets published, each request runs the MT comment program. For about two or three minutes.

As a result, when I come under a comment spam attack (which is happening several times a day) I get dozens of copies of the comment program running simultaneously (because they aren't finishing quickly enough). The load on the server goes right up and all of the sites on this server stop responding. I've been having to reboot the server on an almost daily basis. Sorry if you've experienced problems with any of my sites being unresponsive.

On a separate front, I decided to move hardware (again). This was prompted by the fact that the people who I rent my colo box from have started to support Centos as well as Fedora (they have Ubuntu too, but I'm far happier in rpm-world). Centos is a far better distribution for servers than Fedora so I'm in the process of moving.

Last night I started to move my blog on the hope that the new hardware and new operating system might somehow fix the performance problems. As part of the process I needed to dump the database that runs the blog on the old server. Some way into the dump process, MySQL told me that it couldn't dump the mt_log table as it was corrupt. I logged in to the database server and ran "fix table mt_log". The dump then ran successfully.

Then it struck me. Any time you publish content on an MT site, you write to the mt_log table.  And the symptom I was seeing was that a process would complete all of its work and then hang. And presumably all of the logging goes on at the end of the process.

So, hopefully fixing the mt_log table has fixed the performance problems. I was able to successfully rebuild the whole site in thirty minutes last night. Previously it would have taken hours and had a good chance of failing somewhere along the line.

We're running on the new hardware and operating system too, Which, all in all, should mean that the performance problems are no more. I'll start blogging a bit more and hopefully you'll start commenting a bit more too.

And here's a good tip for fixing MT performance problems. Use the MySQL "check table" and "fix table" commands regularly. I'll certainly be looking to schedule an automatic job to do that.

Sorry for any inconvenience. Regular service has (hopefully) been restored.

A lot of books this month. But you might think that there was a bit of cheating going on.

The Bible: The Biography - Karen Armstrong
This is a book I've wanted to read ever since I saw it published in hardback last year. Actually, it wasn't quite what I expected. I was expecting a lot more about the writing of the bible, but that was all covered in the first couple of chapters. Most of the book was about the history of the interpretation of the bible. It was all very interesting stuff. I recommend it.

The Children of Men - P.D. James
Something else that I had wanted to read for some time. In this case, my interest was piqued by seeing the film adaptation last year. This was one of the best films I saw last year so I really wanted to read the book. This is the first PD James book that I have read and I was very pleasantly surprised. The plot has major differences to the film, but it's a great story and well worth reading. I understand that it's not typical of James's work though so I'm not usre that I'll be rushing to read any more of her books.

Linux Networking Cookbook - Carla Schroder
Linux Server Hacks, Volume Two - William Hagen, Brian Jones
The first little bit of cheating. Neither of these books are really meant to be read from cover to cover, but I skimmed over them both over the course of a few days. Both of them do exactly what it says on the tin and if you're interested in Linux systems administration then you'll find one or both of these books to be useful.

The Fifth Child - Doris Lessing
This is this months book club book. I've read a couple of her books in the past and this has left me wanting to read more. I'll probably start by tracking down a copy of the sequel - Ben in the World.

Lyra's Oxford - Philip Pullman
More cheating here. This book is about twenty pages long. And the pages are tiny. I read it because I'm a big fan of the His Dark Materials books. But this is a pretty pointless extension to that series. I bit of a waste of time to be honest. But not much time.

A Spot of Bother (Mark Haddon)
Like pretty much everyone I know, I read and loved The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime a couple of years ago. That was always going to be a really difficult book to follow. This isn't in the same league at all. But that's not saying it's a bad book at all. Far from it. I thoroughly enjoyed it and would recommend it to anyone. It's just a shame that its predecessor gives everyone such high expectations which, realistically, were highly unlikely to be met.

Slam - Nick Hornby
A new Nick Hornby book is always a cause for celebration. This is apparently aimed at young adults, but you barely notice that. The protagonist is younger than you'll find in Hornby's others books, but other than that we're on familiar territory amongst the middle class of Islington. There were a couple of chapters that didn't really work for me. I can't go into too much detail without giving spoilers, so I'll just say that Hornby doesn't seem particularly comfortable writing supernatural events.

Update: Removed one book which I realised I'd read in May, not April.

One of the joys of MPs having blogs is that you often get to see what they are really like without their utterances going through the filter of the party spin machine. And it's amazing how often so many of them make complete fools of themselves.

Today's example is Nadine Dorries. Of course as a Tory she's very happy about the results of yesterday's council elections. I can't really blame her for that. But does she channel that happiness into a well-researched and interesting article about why people voted the way they did? Did she write something about how the Tory party can build on this success in order to maximise their chances in the next general election?

I think you can guess the answer to those questions.

No, she wrote some childish nonsense[1] comparing Gordon Brown to Andy Pandy.

Oh dear boys and girls, Gordon's not looking very well today.

Lets put him back in the desk shall we and see if he can face coming out tomorrow.

There's obviously a very good reason why she isn't making large sums of money as a comedy writer.

Voters of Mid Bedfordshire, is this really what you want from your MP? She is making you a laughing stock. Please use your vote more wisely next time.

[1] It's possible that this link might not go to exactly where it needs to. Dorries "blog" (it's not really a blog at all) has a ridiculous URL scheme which means it's impossible to link directly to individual items.

From a geek mailing list where they are currently retreading the endless arguments about why there aren't more women in Open Source.

Now arguably, "chick" is a bit derogatory.

It's not even ironic British understatement - the writer isn't British. But it's a good indication of just how far we still have to go.