Radiac's Diary

Royal Mail training isn't what it used to be

2009-06-11T18:35:46-00:00

It seems that postmen are no longer being trained in the ancient and mystical art of matching up the number at the top of the letter with the number on the door; for the third day this week we received post for our neighbour, and they have received ours.

I should probably also comment on the amusing election results, but I think they speak for themselves. Suffice it to say that I am disappointed all around. Just 14,922 of us had our finger on the pulse and voted for the only party who had policies where it mattered - but now, without an MEP for Mebyon Kernow, how will Cornwall ever get a devolved government?

Before I go, let me give a shout out to my regular readers from the Internet Explorer team at Microsoft - I really hate you, even more than I ever have before. You have cost me 3 days of going round in circles on what should have been an extremely simple 2-4 hour project, which has meant I've missed an important deadline, and the delay has also held me up from migrating services to two new servers which are sitting idle in their respective datacentres at the moment. Frustrating.

In more positive news, only 196 days, 6 hours and 24 minutes until Christmas!

European Elections (or who I will not be voting for)

2009-06-04T14:12:59-00:00

Over the past few days I've had some pamphlets through the door from various parties who want my vote in the European Elections today. Here are the parties whose leaflets disappointed and/or disgusted me to the point that I will definitely not be voting for them, and made me feel the need to make this post in the first place.

UKIP

Now, I am not a fan of the EU for many reasons, so I should be right in the target audience for UKIP, who "Say No to European Union" (presumably as well as to grammar, but let's not split hairs). However, ignoring the never-ending stream of deliciously stupid mistakes of the past few years, their flyer would not persuade me to vote for them.

Lets ignore the picture of Churchill, which is a pathetic attempt to elicit war-time spirit and patriotism, by cynical politicians who think nothing of cheapening the iconic war-time image. Although his views in the late 1940s were similar to UKIPs now, if my knowledge of history serves correctly he actually proposed a union between Britain and France in 1940, and was the first person to speak publicly about a United States of Europe. Besides, a lot has changed in 60 years; who's to say he'd say the same thing now?

No, it's the actual content of the flyer. Pretty much every sentence starts "Say No" - as far as I can gather, their policy is just to be entirely negative about the EU. I couldn't see a single thing that they will actually do as MEPs - as the few MEPs that were elected last time have demonstrated, they are entirely incapable of achieving their aim of taking the country out of the EU. They simply don't have the power. Even their own pamphlet implies they're only good as a protest vote, to "send out-of-touch politicians a message they cannot ignore". Yes, because that proved so effective at the last european elections.

They're a joke. No clue, no actionable policies, no vote.

Labour

Regular readers will know that I hold Labour in contempt, and revel in any opportunity to point out their shortcomings. Most of you will already be aware that I disagree with our new and improved surveillance society, the piss-poor management of the economy by our Glorious Leader for 10 years and his subsequent piss-poor management of the country as a whole, and of course the pointless wars, bloating of civil service, constant spin, and headline-grabbing empty policies. However, those are things that we should be holding against them at a local or general election; we elect our Euro MPs based on what they will be able to do for us in Europe.

Sadly this distinction has been lost on Glyn Ford, who seems to be an MEP for my area. His head floats above scenic fields on the front page of his pamphlet, accompanied by a quote about how terrible the Tories are, and how Labour is just like President Barack Obama - although of course Labour isn't mentioned until the tiny white un-bold logo buried at the bottom of the page. At least it's good to see someone in the party isn't completely deluded about how popular and successful they are. But it's symbolic of what Labour have become - they know the only way they can get you to vote for them is to deceive you.

The inside of their pamphlet goes on about how wonderful Labour have been to Gloucestershire, and makes tentative links between what parliament does and what the European parliament does. But the best bit is that their pamphlet was glued shut, and surprisingly difficult to open - presumably so you wouldn't see the tiny picture of Gordon Brown on the inside, and instead would just read the back, about how terrible it is that the Tories want to cut spending, and that the Lib Dems want to legalise drug use - the scum.

No credibility, no policies, no vote.

As an aside, I will risk my future political career by coming out and saying that I support legalising drugs, at least in a controlled way. There are plenty of things in this country which are just as addictive, dangerous and destructive as illegal drugs but which are perfectly legal, such as alcohol, smoking, or Jeremy Kyle. If you legalise drugs you will start to lift the stigma and make it easier for people to come forward for help; you can control the supply of drugs at sale, ensuring people are educated on the risks and that they know how to take it safely; you can control the supply of drugs at source, protecting against the harmful effects of production on the country of origin; and you can tax it to the hilt, helping to clean up Brown's economic mess.

I feel the same way about prostitution; legalise it, license it, tax it, protect everybody involved. These things have been going on since time began, and the only thing you succeed in doing by making it illegal is to push it underground where people can be exploited without any protection or representation. Unlike certain (soon-to-be-former) members of our Glorious Leadership, I realise that we shouldn't ban something just because it doesn't fit into my limited view of how the world works.

With one exception:

BNP

There. I've done it. I've mentioned the BNP. I feel dirty doing so, just as I felt dirty holding their propaganda. But it's worth a mention because evidently many people around the country felt equally dirty about being approached to appear on their leaflets; I recognised the Elderly White Loving Couple and the Tanned-But-Still-White American Doctor from spending far too much time on iStockPhoto, and after a quick bit of digging, it turns out I'm right. Reason #374 not to let a photo of you go into a stock photography site.

I won't discuss their "policies" which ignore basic economic truths, or how, similar to UKIP, they're using a spitfire to call upon war-time spirit and patriotism, ignoring the irony that the fight was against a political system who discriminated against people based on race, and despite the fact that 1/5th of the pilots in the Battle of Britain were filthy stinking foreigners - particularly those damned Polish migrant workers, a squadron of whom racked up the highest number of kills in the war. See, they were coming over here and stealing jobs from good hard-working British People even then.

Wait, would these be the same hard-working British People who create the opening for foreign workers in the first place by realising they can make enough money to pay for Sky+ by working the benefits system, instead of getting a menial job that would involve having to wait a few hours before watching Jeremy Kyle?

That's enough of that - Charlie Brooker said it better anyway.

Fail.

Conservatives

Gosh. Really a no to them from me, a Tory born and bred? Well, their pamphlet was actually ok. They said it was a general election communication, and had stuff covering both the local council elections and the EU, with a bit of Gordon-bashing thrown in for good measure. What's not to like?

Well, I disagree with their MEP's policies. They think that copyright terms should be extended, that it's fine to store absurd amounts of data about internet use, and that the three strikes rule for cutting off internet access - based purely on an accusation from a biased commercial entity, without due process - is a fantastic plan.

Well, I make that three strikes - you're out.

So who will I vote for?

Good question. I'm still undecided:

Lib Dems seem to mostly agree with what I care about most, but I haven't had a flyer from them, their general policies on Europe seem confused, and their website is down so I can't find out more.
Libertas' policy for reforming the EU seems good, but can't find any actual policy details, let alone how they feel about internet rights. Have they published a manifesto? They certainly haven't posted me anything, which makes me feel left out. Perhaps they're just not running in my region?
The Greens seem to agree with the ORG, seem to agree with Libertas regarding reforming the EU, and I support environmental reform - but I'm not a hippy.
votematch.co.uk says I should vote UKIP *spit*

Decisions, decisions.

Progress!

2009-05-28T00:12:29-00:00

As you may have noticed, I've been remarkably silent here so far this year. This is due in part to moving random comments onto twitter rather than expanding them into longer diary posts as I did in the past - I've got a couple of posts to make about things I've twittered about recently, so hopefully this won't be the only post in May.

But mostly I've been quiet because I've been up to a lot. We're trying to buy a house; I've cooked a couple of excellent puddings (must update the recipes); and I've taken up archery, having lessons for an hour or so a week.

And of course, in between my hectic social life detailed above, I've tried to fit in a bit of work. 20-22 working hour days for 6-7 days a week have been common since Christmas. I misunderestimated my January and February projects and failed to take account of unpredictable day-to-day spikes, which has knocked me off track - even with the overtime, the project I'd pencilled in to complete at the end of March wasn't complete until mid-May. Not helped by deadline confusion with the client, who expected it in February. Always confirm things in writing...

However, I'm definitely getting on top of things now; my inbox is down to 12 outstanding tasks from the peak of 150+, I'm back to a ~24 hour turnaround on most tasks, and I've at last reached the first deliverable of my new Django-based CMS. Still a lot left to do, but I've started moving client sites to it, and after 10 years of on-off development, I'm finally getting somewhere. Two more deliverables and I should be ready for a beta release, so it actually looks like I might get it out before Duke Nuken Forever - bonus.

So, this year there has been progress, but there's a lot more to do. But that can wait for another entry.

Happy Easter!

2009-04-10T22:00:50-00:00

Modern life is a bit lame, really, when you think about it.

We're meant to roam the forests and fields, stabbing things and eating them; when we're not hunting or sleeping, nature intended for us to be punching each other for the right to mate with our womenfolk and propagate the most awesome DNA around.

Instead, the majority of the world now sits in chairs in large concrete boxes, pushing bits of paper around and tapping away on little bits of plastic, making silly lights dance around on a glass box. Hunting consists of staggering out of the nearest door into small metal boxes which take you to another concrete box, where you hand over a small piece of plastic to swap meaningless numbers for stale poor-quality mass-produced processed food, which we take back to our desks and stuff into our mouths.

The evolutionary battle for genetic superiority is reduced to online dating. Survival of the fittest no longer applies - these days anyone can find someone suitably inappropriate to procreate with. Regardless of the quality of our genes, we multiply unchecked; taming, consuming, or destroying everything in our path.

Instead of rising with the sun and retiring with the darkness, we come up with increasingly elaborate ways to extend our waking hours in an attempt to out-do each other in our futile efforts to collect longer numbers on bits of paper than the people around us, so that we can buy bigger concrete boxes and more plastic trinkets to show everyone how awesome we are.

We organise ourselves into groups who try to out-do each other by seeing who can come up with the most convoluted and absurd explanation for how we came to be and how we ended up in this state, and we then go around coming up with increasingly imaginative and disturbing ways to kill those who disagree with us.

And if we ever manage to collect enough numbers and bits of paper that we can at last take the time to look out of the window to enjoy our fleeting experience of conciousness, the miracle of modern medicine fails us, and we act all surprised when our weak corpulent bodies start to fail. And then we die, leaving nothing of worth.

All in all, I wish I'd been born a cat.

Awesome!

2009-03-15T13:47:53-00:00

Hey, someone at MIT has implemented my dissertation idea, and then taken it to awesomeville. Want.

Entering My Mid-Twenties

2009-03-01T11:56:08-00:00

It's my birthday, which means I am now 26. I am getting old!

My mind has been infected

2009-02-25T09:02:59-00:00

I'd hoped that dropping a few references to it in my last post would help exorcise the song that's going round and round in my head, but it just won't stop. I woke up yesterday morning humming the "Still Alive" song from the Portal credits, literally humming it before my mind had figured out where I was. That's not normal. I haven't played the game for over a year, but I still spent all morning humming it; I tried listening to it on a loop for a few hours to try to make my mind sick of it. It didn't, and now I know the lyrics, so keep finding myself singing it. Woke up again this morning mid-verse. It just won't leave me alone. Help?

In other news, yesterday I went to see a consultant. I wasn't quite sure why I was going - I'd been to my GP concerning my nose again, and he'd referred me to another ENT consultant, but then the second letter arrived for another consultant. I showed up and it turned out he was the allergy consultant; he gave me a pin prick test, where he dabs blobs of samples of things I might be allergic to, then drives a pin through deep into the skin. It turns out I'm allergic to grass and wheat pollen, or something like that. And unsurprisingly I'm also allergic to being allergic to things - I reacted particularly well to the positive control test. Still, I now know I'm not allergic to cats, dogs or shrimp, which will be very handy next time I go to a pet store.

Anyway, look at me still talking when there's science to do. Laters.

We do what we must because we can

2009-02-24T09:17:56-00:00

Yes, I'm still alive, just very busy with lots of exciting worky things, including my CMS. Yes, that one. And although this will be something like the 5th version that will make it into production, it will be the first version I'll release under an open source license. At last.

The irony is that although my feature list grows and my available time shrinks, with the server-side and client-side frameworks and tools that have been released over the past few years, it has actually become a lot easier to accomplish what I want. But with so much already written by other people, I'm often finding no practical alternative to stitching together popular open source components, and often even the work there has been done before. I can't find a good enough reason to reinvent the wheel - even though the wheels I've got are a bit lumpy, the amount of time and effort it would take to build new ones from scratch is impossible to accept as a realistic alternative.

I can't help feeling that this increasing dependence on complex frameworks and out-of-the-box components risks pushing us towards a homogenised web, with the only real choice for developers being between a handful of existing projects. And if that is the case, although it may help us now, I'm not sure it's a good thing for the long-term health of the industry.

Changing mouse button behaviour in Ubuntu

2009-01-30T18:28:26-00:00

I've just replaced my expensive old mouse after a pathetically short life, and went for the Logitech MX620. I've now discovered that the middle mouse button malfunctions in pretty much all of them, including mine, but that's another story.

Experiences with older Linux distros proved rarely easy to configure hardware, so I plugged in my new mouse with trepidation - but it all worked perfectly, first time. Even the search button - I'm impressed with intrepid.

However, I find I very rarely use back/forward in my browser due to tab usage, so prefer to map the back/forward buttons to page up and page down. Logitech's Setpoint made it fairly easy in Windows, so how hard would it be under linux? Turns out, fairly easy with imwheel:

apt-get install imwheel
mv /etc/X11/imwheel/imwheelrc /etc/X11/imwheel/imwheelrc.bak
cat <<EOF > /etc/X11/imwheel/imwheelrc
".*"
None,           Thumb1, Page_Down
None,           Thumb2, Page_Up
EOF
vi /etc/X11/imwheel/startup.conf

and change IMWHEEL_START=1

The imwheel tool should fire up next time you start up, or you can run it immediately with imwheel.

My Chocolates are Awesome

2009-01-22T15:10:13-00:00

My chocolates arrived, and they taste good.

Words cannot express my joy, so have some photos instead.

I Invented A Chocolate

2009-01-17T22:10:47-00:00

Today will go down in history as the day of the birth of the greatest chocolate to ever grace the earth.

This morning I at last received my Christmas present from Leela - a trip to learn about chocolates from Miette in Stow-on-the-Wold, who are quite possibly the finest chocolatiers in all the land - nay, in all the world. And as you may be able to tell from the superlatives, I rather enjoyed the occasion.

My gift was a chocolate experience - two hours in the company of the proprietor and master chocolatier, who introduced me and Leela to many samples from around the globe, helped us understand what we were tasting, explained the differences, and described various techniques of turning couverture into chocolates with interesting fillings.

But after trying white, milk and dark chocolates made with beans from across the globe, the highlight had to be selecting one to use for a chocolate of our own invention. I nearly went for Caoba, a 41% milk chocolate from Venezuela, but although delicious on its own, we were advised that its smooth flavour wouldn't stand up so well to any additional flavours, so I went for one with a slightly stronger taste. After mixing it with cream to create a truffle base, and testing various flavour combinations, my creation was complete.

Terry's Chocolate Orange Nut Awesomeness is a hand-rolled truffle made with 43% Costa Rican milk chocolate, Cotteswold organic double cream, essential oil of blood orange and pure macadamia nut butter, topped with drizzles of Icoa 30% white chocolate, made with Venezuelan undeodorized cocoa butter. And it tastes good.

Sadly, the chocolate experience which I enjoyed today has now disappeared from their website, which suggests that I may have been their final experiencee. If that is the case, this is indeed a sad day for Britain - although not for me, because I've already been. And that's all that matters. That, and that on Monday they'll send me a massive box of the greatest chocolate to ever grace the earth.

Best. Present. Ever.

Rubbish Bin Ettiquette

2008-12-31T10:54:51-00:00

It has come to my attention that it has literally been months since I last wrote about anything that is of no consequence. I shall therefore correct this oversight immediately.

Since I last wrote about rubbish, there have been startling developments here at Radiac Towers regarding our bins - we now have a rota. We stopped doing the bins about a year ago, mostly because someone has taken to putting them out the morning before, 24 hours in advance. The council can fine you if you put it out before 6pm, so we're not in a hurry to compete for liability. However, the neighbour in question apparently tired of doing it on their own, so told the building management to arrange a rota. Our first week was Christmas week, but we were both away, so we swapped with a neighbour to this week.

Because of Christmas and New Year national holidays, our bin collection has been postponed until Friday. We were aware of this because we are competent. Sadly, the lovely neighbour who we swapped with was not aware of the change, thought that collection day was today as usual, and that we had forgotten to take the rubbish out, so dragged the bins to the kerb this morning.

Now, this mix-up is hardly going to keep me awake at night, but what is the correct course of action in this situation? Should I care what the neighbour thinks, and go round to explain in order to clear my name? Should I drag the rubbish back inside, and leave a passive-aggressive note pinned to the top of the bins? Or should I empty the rubbish on the neighbour's doorstep, and jump up and down in it excitedly screaming 'RUBBISH' at the top of my voice, over and over again, until she calls the police and has me taken away? Or should I just stop wasting my time with this entry, and get on with my work?

Life is full of dilemmas.

In other news, yesterday I saw an Easter egg for sale in the Co-op - 4 months and 14 days early. Needless to say, I bought it and ate it. Happy Easter!

Building with jQuery, IE and invalid markup

2008-12-29T16:29:54-00:00

Ran into an interesting problem when using jQuery to generate DOM from markup: make sure your markup is valid, otherwise jQuery's html function will fail silently in Internet Explorer.

A quick and simple illustration with some invalid markup:

$('#content').html('<div>content</div></div>');

Firefox ignores the second div, but IE does not, and causes it to fail. You will instead find that the innerHTML of your #content element is empty.

This won't happen every time, and depends on exactly how your markup is broken; for example, <div><div>content</div> is also wrong, but will not cause this problem.

As any js developer will testify, these are the most fun kind of problems, especially when the line in question is part of a far larger library, buried in a series of asynchronous anonymous functions, and surrounded by various things that are far more likely to be the cause, such as non-json cross-domain POSTs and GETs, for example. Needless to say, the problem first appeared to be completely unrelated, and I wasted a fair bit of time on this one.

The issue actually seems to be in jQuery.clear(), so it affects html(), jQuery(html), append(), prepend(), after(), before() etc - in fact, any jQuery function that is supposed to parse raw html and add it to the DOM. Functions that set or replace content will set it to nothing; ones that append or prepend content will leave existing content unaffected.

There are several obvious ways to test for this failure, but the easiest seems to be to check whether the html() is null:

var $newContent = $('<div>content</div></div>');
if ($newContent.html() == null) {
    // The content was invalid in IE, raise an error
    return;
}
$('#content').empty().append($newContent);

Simple solution, simple problem, bloody annoying.

Ho Ho Ho

2008-12-01T00:00:00-00:00

Slade is playing, the decorations are up for the 10th year in a row, and TCMI is online... it can mean only one thing: it's that magical time of year at radiac.net again!

Tee hee

2008-11-30T23:59:00-00:00

You know what to expect...