Over the last week I've been up in Birmingham catching up with some old friends and attending some talks at the little get together of around 450 Pythonistas that was EuroPython 2009.

This was my second Python conference. The first was PyCon 2008, which was so well organised (by many of the same team as this years EuroPython) that I was inspired to come back. And I wasn't disappointed. There were a lot of very good talks, some that have planted seeds that I'll have to come back and try to find the time to look at and some that showed me things I plan on using in the very near future (such as py.test).

The atmosphere was topnotch. Everyone seemed friendly, the speakers were approachable and after spending the evening with so many people working on so many things it was a pleasure to get back to the room and make sure I actually did something technical before bed.

It's a wonderful feeling to come away from a conference feeling motivated to try new technologies and all I need to do now is actually schedule some time actually write some Python code...

The organisers did a great job and I'll be back next year.

July 02, 2009 09:13 PM

When it comes to Unix diagnostics I was raised the old fashion way, with iostat, vmstat and similar tools. However times change and tools evolve. dstat, while not as comprehensive as using all the tools one by one, provides a wide range of system performance details in an easy to use package.

While it's useful enough in its default state there is even more functionality lurking just below the surface. To see which other modules are available (but are not enabled by default) run dstat -M list. To add an extra module to the output use a command like this one: dstat -a -M topmem -M topcpu

As part of my growing use of the tool I've started to write my own little dstat plugins. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy they were to write and deploy even with my basic python skills. While the memcached plugin was a proof of concept I've not needed much I've found the process count plugin to be very handy.

dstat is becoming one of the overview tools I use when investigating performance issues and it's worthy of a place in your toolbox too.

July 01, 2009 09:32 PM

Plenty of people seem to have an issue with snmpd logging connection information for each poll on CentOS 5, like this:

Jul  1 09:50:04 doghouse snmpd[4159]: Connection from UDP: [10.0.1.10]:59768
Jul  1 09:50:05 doghouse snmpd[4159]: Connection from UDP: [10.0.1.10]:56329
Jul  1 09:50:05 doghouse snmpd[4159]: Connection from UDP: [10.0.1.10]:42126
Jul  1 09:50:05 doghouse snmpd[4159]: Connection from UDP: [10.0.1.10]:47950
Jul  1 09:50:05 doghouse snmpd[4159]: Connection from UDP: [10.0.1.10]:36634
Jul  1 09:50:05 doghouse snmpd[4159]: Connection from UDP: [10.0.1.10]:52677
Jul  1 09:50:05 doghouse snmpd[4159]: Connection from UDP: [10.0.1.10]:44864
Jul  1 09:50:05 doghouse snmpd[4159]: Connection from UDP: [10.0.1.10]:54498

This isnt necessarily a bad thing, however if you want to turn that off, on a fully updated CentOS-5 machine you can change /etc/sysconfig/snmpd.options to something like this :

# snmpd command line options
OPTIONS="-LS4d -Lf /dev/null -p /var/run/snmpd.pid"

Thats about all there is to it. Also, the reason why one finds so many different ways or achieving the same thing on the internet, isn't because everyone is wrong. Its mostly since the -L options syntax and use has been changing over the last few years. And while I am sure there is a good reason for this change but the developers really should consider keeping some backward compatibility in place.

- KB

July 01, 2009 10:20 AM

On Saturday I was at the Hard Rock Calling festival in Hyde Park. It's a pretty good idea to have a three-day festival in London over the same period as the Glastonbury festival as it's easy for the acts to play both festivals over the weekend and those of us whose camping days are long behind us get to enjoy some of the Glastonbury bands and sleep in a comfortable bed.

My main reason for going was to see Neil Young, but there were a number of other acts (across three stages) to see first.

We arrived just as the first act started on the main stage. They were called The Original Sinners and my friend said he was interested to see them. It turns out that there must be more than one band of that name as these really weren't the band he was expected. They were pretty dreadful all in all. They were followed by Rudy Vaughn who had apparently won a competition in the US to come over and play at the festival. They were even worse. And instantly forgettable (I just had to look up their name). The only thing I can remember about them was that they finished with a cover of Michael Jackson's "Beat It".

By now I was desperate for some decent music. The next band on were The Pretenders and they didn't disappoint. To be honest I was surprised that they were still going. Haven't most of them died? But Chrissy Hynde still has it and their set was head and shoulders above what had gone before. They were followed by Seasick Steve. I've seen him on TV a few times and I've never really understood what the fuss is all about. But live, it's a completely different story. He was brilliant. It's just him and a drummer, but they had the huge festival audience hanging on every note.

The next act on was Ben Harper with his new band. I'd never heard of him and nothing I'd read about him filled me with any enthusiasm so I took the opportunity to explore the other stages. I didn't get very far as on the first stage I walked past I came across Alessi's Ark. I was completely entranced by their modern folky tunes and I sat and listened to all of their short set. After that I wandered back to the main stage where I was unfortunate enough to catch the end of Ben Harper's set. Which really wasn't very good.

The sun had be shining all afternoon, but as Harper left the stage it was becoming obvious that a storm was on the way. And sure enough, within fifteen minutes we were all rather wet. There was even some thunder and lightning.

The next band on were the Fleet Foxes. It was still raining when they came on, but it stopped soon afterwards. I love their music, but I'm afraid the rain rather dampened my enthusiasm. When they were playing and singing it was fabulous. But they take their music all very seriously and that means that inbetween songs there is interminable retuning of instruments which rather destroys the atmosphere. I'd love to see them again in a more appropriate venue. It sounds like I didn't enjoy them, but I should point out that even after two hours of Neil Young, it was still Fleet Foxes tunes that were stuck in my head on the way home.

Some time later Neil Young took the stage. I've been a Neil Young fan for years (we all had copies of "After The Goldrush" when I was a teenager) and I'm appalled that I've never seen him before. It's not like he rarely tours or anything.

Young opened with "Hey Hey, My My" (or perhaps it was "My My, Hey Hey" - I get those two confused) and the next couple of hours is a joyful blur of music and feedback. He played pretty much everything I wanted to hear (the full setlist is online). Oh, ok, there were a couple of things missing, but with a back catalogue the size of Young's you'd need to play all day to fit everything in. In amongst the grunge and feedback he found time for a more folky section where he played things like "Heart of Gold" and "The Needle and the Damage Done". If I have one tiny criticism, it's that if he learned to finish his songs a bit sooner he could fit in twice as many. For example, he finished with "Rockin' in the Free World" which had at least four false endings.

The encore was the Beatles' "A Day in the Life". I understand he's be playing that a lot on this tour. But when he got to "Woke up, fell out of bed..." Paul McCartney joined him on stage. I can't really see Paul McCartney and Neil Young as a double act so it all seemed a bit strange to me. I suppose I can say that I've now seen McCartney live. And I won't have to go to one of his (increasing rare and, I expect, overpriced) gigs.

This has to be one of the best gigs I've ever seen (and I said that after seeing Magazine earlier this year too - been a good year for gigs so far). I think this was the last night of the tour. But he'll be back. And if you get the chance to see him play, I strongly recommend that you take it.

June 30, 2009 01:18 PM

Today’s notable achievements were that I managed to stay on power and network for most of the day. Mostly due to the fact that I lucked out to get a seat next to a power bar in the lecture theatre holding Luke Leighton’s Pyjamas tutorial. I was interested in Pyjamas for a web project I may have to get up and running quite quickly over the summer. Although there were some rocky patches due to SVN mismatches I mostly managed to get a handle on how Pyjamas works. As a note to future tutors: if you need your tutees to download the trunk from SVN it’s probably best to specify the revision that works. This avoids everyone turning up with a version of your code that won’t run the examples. Also, I still don’t understand decorators.

Today’s buffet lunch was nice. Props to the conference organisers.

The day was nicely rounded off by dinner at a fine indian restaurant and a pint of very nice beer in the Wellington. Looking forward to the start of the conference proper.

June 29, 2009 09:34 PM

I have to admit to a certain amount of trepidation when I signed up for EuroPython 2009. As primarily a sysadmin rather than a developer I was worried that I might not have the requisite knowledge to get the benefit of a week-long developer conference. After today’s experience I’m beginning to relax about that.

Today and tomorrow are the tutorial sessions before the conference proper starts. Having never been to a Python conference before I wasn’t sure what form the tutorials would take. From the outcome of the day I would have to say “much less programming than you might expect”.

The day started off with Michael Spark’s giving an introduction to Kamaelia the simple concurrency system designed by BBC Research. We started off by building a brain-dead simple version of Kamaelia to outline the principles by which it operates. This took us on to writing a bulletin-board system by chaining together simple Kamaelia components. This was, needless to say, pretty intense for a Sunday morning.

Having expected to be doing a lot of coding I dutifully spent Friday evening makeing sure that I had the suggested software installed and working on my netbook. As it turned out I only wrote about 20 lines of code during the whole tutorial. I was ever so slighlty miffed by this. This is the first time this tutorial has been given and in my opinion would benefit from being all-day with time for coding exercises between explanations.

Despite these minor problems I felt that the tutorial left me with enough of a grasp of Kamaelia’s basics that I could go away and write something simple in it without too much trouble. One other good point of the this session was the handout printed from lulu.com which was really nice. So nice in fact that I think we should spring for these next time we run a training course at work.

After lunch I was in Jonathan Fine’s JavaScript for Python Programmers tutorial. Which was in a room that was too small for the audience and much, much too hot. It also appeared to have a grand total of two power outlets. Fine started off with a horrifying list of the ways basic constructs in JS behave in ways that Pythonistas will find completely illogical. After the break he delved into the nitty-gritty of OO and Inheritance. As the tutorial progressed and Fine got further from his slides the session transformed into something more like a seminar rather that a tutorial. Overall I found this session enjoyable and informative, although my brain was beginning to melt by the end of the day.

I suspect that Wifi and power are what most people will grumble about, but knowing how hard it is to sort these out for events at my home institution I won’t carp too much.

Now for some time with the Django tutorial in preparations for tomorrow’s Pyjamas session.

June 28, 2009 06:56 PM

I managed to score myself a Google Wave account by promising to write a Swedish Chef robot. So this afternoon I wrote one, in a language I've never used before (Python) and to a target platform I've never explored (Google App Engine). Mostly I ripped off code from other sources, especially Dive Into Python.

So if you have a Google Wave sandbox account, add borkforceone@appspot.com to a wave and your text will be translated into cod-Swedish.

Contact me

June 28, 2009 05:09 AM

There's a lot of material out there on the internet. And the nature of the internet means that it's easy to reuse that material without paying any attention to copyright. If my browser can display an image, then I can save that image to my local disk and then, perhaps, use it on my own web site or in some other publication.

But just because it's easy from a practical perspective, that doesn't mean that it's legal to do it. Much of the material on the web is subject to various copyright restrictions. And if you're going to be a responsible internet citizen then you're going to ensure that you are careful not to use any material in ways that are contrary to the copyright.

If you are, say, a national newspaper then you're going to want to be really sure that you're being careful about copyright. I'm sure that someone like (to pick a paper at random) the Daily Mail would get very upset if they found someone using one of their photos without permission or without giving correct attribution. It's therefore reasonable to expect them to offer the same courtesy to others.

Take a look at this story about Philip Schofield and Twitter. Don't bother to read it. It's the usual Mail nonsense. They're complaining that Schofield shares too many details of his life on Twitter. But they do it (ironically, I'm sure) by poring over every detail of a meal in the Fat Duck. No, don't read the words. Take a look at the pictures. Schofield has illustrated his evening by posting photos to TwitPic. TwitPic is a Twitter "add-on" that allows you to share photos as easily as Twitter allows you share text.

Notice that the Mail have put a copyright attribution on each of Schofield's photos. They all say "© Twitpic", implying that that TwitPic own the copyright on the photos. But if you take a few seconds to read TwitPic's terms and conditions, you find that they say:

All images uploaded are copyright © their respective owners

• 3.2. You agree not to:
• 3.2.1. use any part of the materials on this Site for commercial purposes without obtaining a licence to do so from us or our licensors;
• 3.2.2. copy, reproduce, distribute, republish, download, display, post or transmit in any form or by any means any content of this Site, except as permitted above;
• 3.2.3. provide a link to this Site from any other website without obtaining our prior written consent.

June 25, 2009 03:46 PM

If you want to test out some experimental libguestfs changes to a virtual machine, you can use a qemu snapshot to test changes before committing them. Here’s how. First, use qemu-img to create a snapshot. In this case I have a base file called “RHEL52PV32-20090213.img” and my temporary snapshot will just be called “snapshot”. [...]

June 24, 2009 03:23 PM

Long-time readers will know that I am not averse to contacting companies to complain about bad service that I receive. This isn't a particularly fulfilling hobby as you very rarely get any kind of satisfaction. But recently it's becoming even less satisfying than before. I've noticed that email conversations with customer service reps are becoming more and more drawn out as many of them seem less and less capable of understanding the issues that I am raising. It can often take a couple of rounds of email before they are clear what I'm talking about. And I'm pretty sure it's not me describing things badly.

Here's an example.

Last week the BBC showed an abbreviated version of Leonard Cohen: Live in London. I missed it as it was first broadcast, so over the weekend I tried to catch up with it on iPlayer. We have Virgin Media, so we can watch iPlayer content through our V+ box. I found the programme and started to watch. I didn't last long though as the aspect ratio of the programme was wrong. The programme had been filmed in 4:3, but the iPlayer has stretched it to 16:9[1]. This meant that everyone everyone appeared fatter than they should be. I know that many people are used to watching television like this, but to me it renders a programme unwatchable.

I wrote to the iPlayer support team explaining the problem. Here's what I wrote:

The version of "Leonard Cohen - Live in London" which is currently available on iPlayer on Virgin Media is in the wrong aspect ratio. It appears to be a 4:3 broadcast which has been stretched to 16:9. Everyone therefore seems to be far too fat and the programme is unwatchable.

I understand you're unhappy with the size of 'Leonard Cohen' on BBC iPlayer.

The bit rate varies per programme and is dependent on the amount of changes per video frame. For example, a programme such as 'Doctor Who' or 'Leonard Cohen' will be at a higher rate than a Current Affairs programme (where a presenter is fairly static in the frame).

Considering the above information:

The average file size for a 30 minute streamed programme is around 110MB. The average file size for a 1 hour streamed programme is around 215MB.

I appreciate you may feel differently on this matter and I'd like to assure you that I have registered your comments on our log. This is the internal report of audience feedback which we compile daily for BBC iPlayer and commissioning executives within the BBC, and their senior management. It ensures that your points, and all other comments we receive, are circulated and considered across the BBC.

1. The person genuinely misunderstood what I was asking about and answered the question to the best of her ability. In which case she needs better training in the products that she is supposed to be supporting.
   
2. The person didn't read my mail carefully and just sent a reply that looked like it might address the issues I was talking about. In which case she needs to read email more closely. Perhaps the iPlayer support team needs more people so they have time to read messages and write replies carefully.
3. No-one read my email and some automated system sent a canned reply based on some (obviously flawed) keyword matching.
   

June 23, 2009 02:29 PM

This game should have been the one that made me forget about the likes of the early Splinter Cells and Thief III. This game was born in the era of the expectation of hideously overpowered graphics cards, tons of memory, multiple cores and physics processing units.

Graphically, it is quite good. And what is used to distract you from merely "quite good" graphics is piss-poor linear game play, poor controls, sterile environments and, in fairness, excellent voice acting.

This game has everything wrong with it that you would expect when a moderately successful console games is crammed onto the PC platform by people who've never played any of the sneak'em'up greats. Such developers should be forced to complete Metal Gear Solid, all of the Splinter Cells and all of the Thief series before getting their hands on what should have been the best stealth FPS ever to grace a personal computer.

"Execute over 50 different brutal maneuvers to deliver a quick and silent death to enemy soldiers" the marketing says. What that says to me is I have 50 different brutal maneuvers at my fingertips, choice mine to dispatch an enemy. Bollocks. What in practice happens is you sneak up behind your unsuspecting target and click the left mouse button. That's it.

At this point it can go two ways. 1) You take out the enemy and have time to drag to corpse into the shadows. Jolly good. However what happens depressingly frequently is option 2. Our heroine turns into Miss Stabby and goes to town. Definitely killing the target kraut but taking so long about it that you get caught by the next chap walking along. Repeat.

Then you get moments of sheer comedy:

Kraut #1) Deary me, look at this puddle with the electric cable running through it!
Kraut #2) Mein Fuhrer! Someone could electrocute themselves!
Kraut #1) Ja! Let us hope no-one throws that big switch over there while we are walking through it.
Kraut #2) Nein! That would be awful!

Krauts 1 & 2 proceed to splash about in the water.

Don't buy this game, I did, and it's rubbish.

June 21, 2009 10:32 PM

Last night I was at the O2 Arena to see one of the 30th anniversary performances of Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds. For some reason it was a year late - the 30th anniversary was actually last year.

I wasn't entirely sure what I was expecting. I wouldn't have been surprised if it had been Jeff Wayne with a group of unknowns performing the album, I was therefore pleasantly surprised to find that with a couple of exceptions each part was played by the person who played it on the original album.

One of the exceptions was, of course, Richard Burton who narrated the album. But he was there in a way. A giant animated head was projected onto the side of the stage and recited Burton's lines. The animation was impressive but it was slightly strange that it was based on a version of Burton's face which was far younger than he was in 1978.

There was an added treat even before Burton's opening narration. The show began with an animation of the martians plotting their attack. Some research this morning reveals that it was taken from a computer game based on the album which was released in 1998. This piece is also the source of the sample "the problem is, of course, the humans" which is used in one of the Ulladubulla remixes and which has been bugging me for years.

Following this short film, Burton comes in ("No-one would have believed ...") and "The Eve of the War" starts up. The animation continues telling the story of the invasion and in the middle of the song, Justin Hayward walks onto stage and tells exactly what the odds are against anything coming from Mars.

The performance continues in the same fashion. The band (and orchestra) play almost note-perfect renditions of the music, the video screen plays out the story and occasional guest stars come onto the stage to sing. It's all really rather impressive.

The first missing guest star is David Essex as the artilleryman. I haven't heard why why he isn't involved but, to be honest, he isn't really missed. Alexis James (no, neither have I) takes the part and does it very well.

During "Thunder Child" another surprise is revealed as a large martian fighting machine is lowered to the stage and started shining bright lights over the audience. My companion pointed out that "it all went a bit Pink Floyd" at that point, but in my opinion that's no bad thing. As the Thunder Child was destroyed, Burton told us that "Earth belonged to the martians" and the first half of the show (the first album in the double album set for those of us old enough to remember such things) came to an end. We had a twenty minute break.

The second half starts in a lower key than the first half. "The Red Weed" is possibly the weakest musical link in the whole piece. Not that it's bad by any means, it's just that it doesn't (in my opinion) hold up to the standards of the rest of the album. The animation was very nice at this point though.

I was expecting the pace to pick up again with "The Spirit of Man" which is my favourite part of the album. On the original recording this is a duet between Phil Lynott and Julie Covington. I know, of course, why Lynott wasn't there but Covington was another unexplained absence. And these two were really missed. Lynott's place was taken by another unknown called Shannon Noll and Covington's by Jennifer Ellison. I really really tried to ignore my prejudice against Ellison, but she really isn't the equal of Covington. Maybe her presence drew in some people who wouldn't have come otherwise (I doubt it) but I was distinctly unimpressed by her performance.

The Alexis James returned to give us some more of his David Essex impression whilst singing "Brave New World" and the evening was back on track. Except that there wasn't really very much track left. If you were writing the piece for stage then you'd make sure that there was a big finale. The War of the Worlds doesn't have a big rousing finale. It just kind of fades out when the narrator realises that the martians have all been killed by terrestrial bacteria (sorry if that's a spoiler for anyone).

Most of the audience were people who knew the album well and knew that there wasn't much of interest likely to happen after the end of "Brave New World". Combine that knowledge with the fact that the transport links to North Greenwich were severely curtailed last night (no Jubilee Line) and you end up with a large proportion of the audience starting to leave before the show was over. I have never seen so many people streaming out of an auditorium whilst the band were still playing.

We stayed until the end. It was good, but not as good as the end of the first half. There's nothing they can do about that. The first half is just better.

All in all, it was a great show though. If you're a fan of the original recording then I highly recommend it. If you're not a fan of the original recording, then you really should be.

Now, who's going to buy me a copy of the 7 disk collectors edition?

June 21, 2009 12:39 PM

Earlier this week I bought an Acer Aspire One D150 to use as my new portable and, possibly, desktop. Most of these new netbooks are pretty much the same inside, so a few things won me over to this one:

• Ten inch screen, substantially bigger than the seven inch netbooks.
• Very good reviews of the keyboard, and I concur it works well with my fat fingers, and dedicated Page Up/Down keys are very handy
• Built-in Bluetooth, which means tethering to my phone for mobile broadband is trivial
• Built-in SD card (it does other formats too) reader, makes it trivial to upload my photos
• VGA-out plug, meaning I can potentially use it as a desktop with two screens

Downsides include the Microsoft tax (which I'll attempt to recoup, after Simon Hackett's encouragement), a hard drive that I don't really need and probably is an unnecessary drain on battery, and a touchpad that has been fairly strongly vilified.

I'd tend to agree that the touchpad is pretty poor. The buttons require so much force that you really have to use two hands to do anything like click-drag. That said, I mostly don't use these things anyway and carry around a little retractible mouse anyway.

The install from Ubuntu Netbook Remix was trivial. Change the BIOS settings to boot from USB (F2 at boot to access BIOS) and boot. It was done in about fifteen minutes and most things just worked, including wireless, suspend and hibernate.

I've found a few issues with sound. Playback from Rhythmbox, the default Ubuntu music app, can be a bit choppy. I suspect this is just the application, and I might just change apps. Sound after suspend doesn't seem to work, which is a bit annoying. I haven't worked out how to reliably get the sound to work with Skype either. I'll keep playing with that.

Settings to change

I've made a couple of changes to the default Ubuntu install for this system.

I disable Caps Lock on all machines I use, because it's a completely useless key and my fat fingers often hit it accidentally. The Caps Lock key on the Aspire One is no exception, and I have to wonder why they would include one when a dedicated NumLock key would be more helpful. Add the following to ~/.bashrc:

 if [ "$PS1" ]; then
    # Disables the bloody CapsLock button
    xmodmap -e "remove lock = Caps_Lock"
 fi

Inexplicably, Ubuntu disables laptop_mode by default, which means it doesn't do useful things when running on battery power that will extend battery life. It also makes it hard to work out why it isn't running, putting the setting in a seemingly unrelated file, and returning nothing when you try to run the init script. Change ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE=false to ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE=true in /etc/default/acpi-support to enable it.

The touchpad is overly sensitive and when you're in the middle of frenzied typing, often moves the cursor on you. Most annoying. I get around this by disabling clicks from the trackpad, given I don't use it anyway.

Firefox, by default, takes up a lot of useless vertical screen space. I've reduced this by removing the Bookmarks Toolbar and moving it up next to the menu. I also installed the Littlefox theme, which uses much smaller icons. This gives you a bit more of the critical vertical screen space.

The included soft slip case, made out of wetsuit material, is alright but has no space for my little mouse and a pair of headphones, which I think are essential portable accessories. I might try sewing on a couple of little pockets to make it perfect.

Conclusion

It's early days just yet, but I'm pretty damn happy with my new little netbook. It's suiting my needs pretty well, and looks rather fine too.

Contact me

June 20, 2009 01:59 AM

On the train home I was pondering the difference between guerrilla marketing and gorilla marketing.

Antonio points out that the Cadbury's Phil Collins advert might be an example of gorilla marketing, but I think it's probably deeper than that.

According to Wikpedia:

Guerrilla marketing is an unconventional system of promotions that relies on time, energy and imagination rather than a big marketing budget. Typically, guerrilla marketing tactics are unexpected and unconventional; consumers are targeted in unexpected places, which can make the idea that's being marketed memorable, generate buzz, and even spread virally.

June 19, 2009 07:01 PM

I remember a time, not very long ago, when people assumed a link between literacy and professionalism. When producing text for public consumption people would always take the time to ensure that their spelling and grammar were correct. Obvious errors in copy would be seen as a lack of attention to detail and would throw grave doubts on your level of professionalism.

Those days are long over. Here are a couple of good examples from today.

Firstly, I got an email from an agent who was asking if I'd be interested in a requirement that she was trying to fill. Her email began like this:

I hope your well?

My, there are a *lot* of "gorilla marketing" experts on LinkedIn

June 19, 2009 04:58 PM

the June NWRUG is tonight. There will be a code surgery and introduction to Zsh. Plus free pizza!

Email me or leave a comment to sign up.

June 18, 2009 12:20 PM

The people at uSwitch saw yesterday's blog post and were rather pleased that I was so happy with their service. To show their thanks, they've written to me with an offer for my readers.

If you use this link to visit their site and change energy supplier before the end of June 2009, they will send you an Amazon voucher for £10. You'll also (obviously) need to give them a valid email address so they have somewhere to send the voucher.

I don't yet have a policy for promoting products on this site. Perhaps I should think about that if offers like this become more common. I should, however, point out firstly that I have no connection to uSwitch (I'm just a satisified customer) and secondly that I'm getting no payment for mentioning them again - the offer is just for my readers.

So, once again, here's the link to use. The offer is valid until the end of this month. Which gives you about two weeks to make use of it.

June 17, 2009 08:29 AM

How do you buy your power? Or, more specifically, how do you decide which company to buy your power from?

Here's how I do it. Ever six months or so I go to uSwitch and spend five minutes researching who does the cheapest gas and electricity for our usage. If I find something that is much cheaper than our existing supplier then I'll change. Most of the time I can make the change over the internet by simply following a link from the uSwitch site. Most of the time the differences are so small that it's not worth changing.

One thing that I will never do is to sign on for a new power supplier from people who knock on my door and try to tell me a new supplier without giving me time to investigate their offers. Firstly, I think it's incredibly rude to disturb people whilst they are at home, but mostly it's the hard-sell tactics that I object to.

We had one last week. He was from npower, but they are all as bad. I noticed him as I was walking home, but realised that he was walking away from my house. When I got in, my wife said that he had knocked at the door but she had ignored him. But an hour or so later he came back. I answered the door and he immediately launched into his nonsense. Apparently, most of my neighbours had realised that he could save them money so they had all signed up. He didn't have price data for my current supplier but he knew that he could save me money. I tried to explain to him how uSwitch works, but it seemed to just confuse him.

In the end I told him that I refused to do business with any company who called on me uninvited as I considered it rude. He started to argue that it wasn't rude, but realised that he was wasting his time and retreated.

Ususally I just let these things go, but on this occasion I decided to take it further. Firstly I checked with Uswitch and, as I suspected, my supplier (Scottish Power in case you're interested) we still the cheaper than npower by about a tenner a year. Then I emailed npower customer services to complain about them sending out uninformed and unethical sales people.

Today I got a reply from them. They were sorry to hear that I felt their sales representative was attempting to mislead me. They were also sure that normally "the standard of service offered by our Sales Team is professional and of the highest standard". They also pointed out that if I sent them my address they would pass my details to their "Marketing Supression Team" which would stop me getting further visits.

That last item got me thinking. Of course, it'll be an improvement if I get no more sales visits from npower. But there are many other power companies who delight in trying to mis-sell their services in this way. The absense of the npower team will scarely be noticed. Wouldn't it be good if there was a industry-wide "Marketing Supression" list that all of the power companies signed up to. I can't be the only person who gets annoyed by this.

I have no idea how effective these sales calls are. It must work to some extent as it's a relatively sales method. I know those people won't be paid much (and most of it will be commission), but there are a lot of them. I'm surprised that people listen to their nonsense, and I worry that they are preying on people who don't have the presence of mind to think about what they are being told and therefore take it at face value. I suppose that if you're told that "most of your neighbours are switching" and you're not given a chance to check that out before signing, then some people will just accept it.

Until we can get an industry-wide marketing suppression list (or, better, banning this kind of selling) can any one recommend any good tactics for annoying these people?

And please, make use of uSwitch.

June 17, 2009 07:59 AM

I'm known for being an early adopter of new Internet fads. You can now stalk me on Twitter, mart_brooks.

June 16, 2009 05:14 AM

IE 5.5 is dead. The number of people using it are tiny, at least according to the stats on the most popular sites I run. Here are the numbers.

Jokes-o-matic

Has a larger proportion of Firefox users than Internet Explorer users due to the high level of traffic from some social bookmarking sites, meaning a more web-savvy crowd who are more likely to be using alternative browsers:

jokes-o-matic.com browser breakdown

The level of IE usage is still pretty high though, but even so only a single hit from IE 5.5 recently:

jokes-o-matic.com IE versions

Recycling Group Finder

A much more broad and ‘average’ user base with Internet Explorer dominant:

Recycling Group Finder browser breakdown

Still, only 6 Internet Explorer hits recently, a tiny proportion of overall visits:

Recycling Group Finder IE versions

What does this mean?

Yahoo.com as seen in Internet Explorer 5.5

These statistics, and others I have seen suggest that almost no-one uses Internet Explorer 5.5 or below any more. The small minority that do must be used to the internet breaking in unique and interesting ways due to the lack of support for more recent developments in CSS and really bad Javascript support (see right for yahoo.com as seen in Internet Explorer 5.5). I predict that a fair number of sites just don’t work in any usable way on anything less than Internet Explorer 6.

Time is money

Designing for multiple browsers takes time. The more browsers you need to support the more time you need to spend supporting them.

A recent project I worked on required a redesign of the site from the ground-up (aswell as a bunch of other stuff) and making the site work in any version of Internet Explorer lower than 6 just wasn’t worth the time, and therefore money, put into it. The return just wasn’t there and I decided that IE 5.5 was gone, dead, obsolete and I wasn’t going to try and mangle the design to work in it. Rather than just display a really crappy looking site to the user I decided I would let them know via a short and to-the-point message that their browser was not up to displaying the site and directing them to upgrade to a new version of their browser.

Give them the good news

Message displayed to all users visiting project in anything below IE 6

But how to do this? The site was developed in Ruby on Rails and I’d heard of a neat gem called rack-noie6 that provides a piece of Rack middleware that blocks Internet Explorer 6 and below, but that isn’t going to work in most cases. Hard as it may be to make your site look good in Internet Explorer 6 you can see from the stats above there’s still a large proportion of users using it and to turn them away would be crazy, at least while the pool of IE 6 users out there is still so large.

So a quick fork and patch later (github we <3 you so much) and the new noie6 was accepting an option for a minimum version of Internet Explorer it should accept instead of just rigidly blocking version 6 and below. Configuration is really simple:

Now any users visiting the site in anything below Internet Explorer 6 gets the message above helpfully directing them to update their browser. Not bad for a two line config update.

June 15, 2009 09:08 PM

I've just had my first ever gpg signed spam email. Yes it is gpg signed, and its signed correctly with a key that seems to not be mentioned anywhere ( or atleast papa google does not know about it ). These guys are still getting better and wiser. Whats next ?

Going to see how this shapes up over the next few days before dropping my gpg-header -> whitelist rule :/

June 15, 2009 01:10 PM

# cd /dest/dir && nc -l -p 12345 | tar -xf -

# cd /src/dr && tar -xf - | nc -q 0 remote-server 12345

June 15, 2009 12:51 PM

At work, my desktop machine is a dual opteron 250 machine built on a MS-9620 mother board ( http://www.msicomputer.com/product/p_spec.asp?model=K8N_Master2-FAR ) and in the last few months the machine has become really loud - source of this tracked back to the cpu coolers. There is another case fan ( as exhaust, at the back to the case ) which is very quiet, and turning it off seems to make no difference to the overall sound. The PSU also seems to be relatively quiet.

Anyway, the plan is to replace those CPU coolers with something quieter, and we got some Noctua coolers ( http://www.quietpc.com/gb-en-gbp/products/amdcooling/nh-do ). But, inspite of them saying that it will work with a Socket 940 based Mobo, these ones dont fit! the problem being that the MS9620 seems to have some sort of a custom bracket for the fans already on there, and there seems to be no 'usual' hinged/clip type mounting for the cpu coolers. Whereas the Noctua coolers only have that usual hinge/clip mounting. I've taken some pictures of mounting for the existing cpu coolers, you can see them here : http://www.karan.org/pics/ms9620/

Anyone know what replacement coolers I might be able to get for this MoBo ?

- KB

June 14, 2009 12:10 AM

One new feature I really like in the upcoming Thunderbird 3 tree : thread summaries in the message view pane. Here is an example:

Click the image above for a full size view.

What makes it even more cool, is that since Thunderbird can already recognise and mark the quoted portion in followup replies, it conveniently ignores this quoted text in the summaries.

June 13, 2009 11:52 PM

Running dstat normally gives you something like this :

# dstat --nocolor
----total-cpu-usage---- -dsk/total- -net/total- ---paging-- ---system--
usr sys idl wai hiq siq| read  writ| recv  send|  in   out | int   csw 
  3   0  97   0   0   0| 820k  456k|   0     0 | 800B  866B|1054   255 

And you can split the disk metrics up based on devices using something like this :

# dstat -D sda,sdb,total --nocolor
----total-cpu-usage---- --dsk/sda-- --dsk/sdb-- -dsk/total- -net/total- ---paging-- ---system--
usr sys idl wai hiq siq| read  writ: read  writ: read  writ| recv  send|  in   out | int   csw 
  1   1  97   0   0   0| 176k   77k:  30k  162k: 411k  478k|   0     0 |3608B 4005B|1447  1458 
 33   2  63   0   1   2|   0     0 :   0   216k:   0   432k|2470k 1611k|   0     0 |2915  6967 
 31   2  65   0   1   1|   0     0 :   0     0 :   0     0 |2210k 1338k|   0     0 |2866  6051 

But you can also get deeper level device names / nodes to measure - which is required in many cases if you have drivers for storage creating nodes further down the tree than /dev. Eg. I have a setup where there are four mysql instances running, each with its own dedicated storage :

# mount | grep srv
/dev/cciss/c0d1 on /var/lib/mysql/node1 type ext3 (rw)
/dev/cciss/c0d2 on /var/lib/mysql/node2 type ext3 (rw)
/dev/cciss/c0d3 on /var/lib/mysql/node3 type ext3 (rw)
/dev/cciss/c0d4 on /var/lib/mysql/node4 type ext3 (rw)
/dev/cciss/c0d5 on /srv/wal type ext3 (rw)

so in this case, to get dstat reporting working you need to mention just the component level, like this :

# dstat -D cciss/c0d1,cciss/c0d2,cciss/c0d3 --nocolor
----total-cpu-usage---- dsk/cciss/c dsk/cciss/c dsk/cciss/c -net/total- ---paging-- ---system--
usr sys idl wai hiq siq| read  writ: read  writ: read  writ| recv  send|  in   out | int   csw 
  3   0  97   0   0   0| 209k   89k: 201k   86k: 204k   85k|   0     0 | 799B  865B|1055   256 
 90   1   8   1   0   0|3196k   68k: 764k    0 : 816k   24k|1067k 1650k|   0     0 |1999   609 
 95   1   3   1   0   0|2548k    0 :   0  4084k:2448k 5700k| 660k  791k|   0     0 |1611   571 
 96   1   2   1   0   0|2628k    0 : 808k    0 :1620k    0 | 352k  798k|   0     0 |1835  1605 

And you get the details, for each block device.

- KB

June 12, 2009 03:04 PM

This morning a friend was complaining on Twitter about using Evolution on Linux to talk to his company's Exchange server. Evolution is the default answer to the question "how do I talk to Exchange from Linux", but my past experience has been much like my friend's - it's really not a very good answer.

I suggested Thunderbird to him. In my opinion, Thunderbird is the best email program out there. It's been my email program of choice for several years. It will happily work with Exchange to receive and send email. Googling for "thunderbird exchange" will bring back lots of useful results.

But Exchange isn't just about email. There's a whole calendaring system there too. Evolution supports that, but (by default) Thunderbird doesn't. There is, however, a way to get your Exchange calendar into Thunderbird using a rather circuitous route. Here's how I do it.

Firstly, you need the Lightning add-on for Thunderbird. Lightning adds calendar features to Thunderbird. You can create events and get alerts when they are about to happen. You can even subscribe to external calendars as long as they are in a standard format. Unfortunately, Exchange calendars aren't in standard formats. So we need some kind of intermediary.

The intermediary I use is Google Calendar. In fact I use Google Calendar as my definitive calendar. Every other calendar application I use reads from or writes to my Google Calendar. And Thunderbird (or, rather, Lightning) is one of the applications that interacts with it. Google Calendar writes calendars in the correct standard format, so Lightning will read a Google Calendar out of the box. But we can get cleverer than that using another Thunderbird add-on called Provider. Once Provider is installed, communication between Lightning and Google Calendar becomes two-way. I can add events either in Lightning or in Google Calendar and they will turn up in both.

There's one final step. We need to synchronise our Exchange calendar with Google Calendar. And Google have a product that does just that. It's called Google Calendar Sync. With this installed, your Exchange calendar is automatically synchronised with Google Calendar regularly. So now we can edit our calendar anywhere and the new or updated events will show up in all of our calendars. I've even noticed that invitations to events from other Exchange users show up in Lightning - but I haven't tried replying from there yet.

There are two things I don't like about Google Calendar Sync. Firstly, it has to be running on a PC running Windows which is connected to your Exchange Server. So it's not a solution that will work whilst you're (for example) out of the office with your office PC switched off. Secondly, it will only sync with your main Google Calendar. I would have liked to have a separate calendar for work events (and it's only work events that come from my Exchange calendar), but that doesn't seem to be supported yet.

And there are a couple of caveats with Lightning and Provider. If you're using a Beta test version of Thunderbird 3 then the standard Lightning and Provider downloads don't work with it. There are nightly builds of them both available, and the version of Lightning that I tried worked fine but Provider still didn't seem to work. I expect that situation to change quickly over the next few weeks as the Thunderbird 3 launch gets closer.

A year ago I was really disorganised. I never knew what I was supposed to be doing. Settling on Google Calendar as a definitive place to plan my life was a really good idea. At least now, I know which meetings I'm missing.

June 12, 2009 12:50 PM

I've been working on a fair bit of marketing-related stuff over the last few years, and we've been spending pretty big on online campaigns. Much of this money has gone on display advertising, the kind of stuff you'll see on Fairfax and News Corp sites. We've had a whole range of problems with this stuff, and I've come to the conclusion it's more trouble than it's worth. Certainly if you want to measure response based on sales, the rate is pitiful. Here's why it's broken.

When you buy a search ad, you can be pretty certain the person is actually interested in the topic represented by the keyword you're buying. So when someone types "wireless keyboard", it's a good bet they're probably interested in buying a "wireless keyboard" of some sort.

When you buy a display ad, you get pretty loose categorisation. Perhaps your technology product might end up in the technology section of the site, so at least you're being exposed to people with an interest. Or you might be in the "general interest" pool, in which case you're getting exposed to the people who clicked on "celebrity shows boobies" links. Just the people you want. But regardless of the type of category you end up in, you're getting people who are expressly there for something other than finding something about a very specific topic.

So really, you can't measure the results of display advertising by expecting people to buy immediately after clicking, it's more for branding. Or so the salesmen for these mass media properties will tell you. So really you're getting your brand exposed to roughly categorised people.

Except it's completely unmeasurable, and the mass media sites have only themselves to blame for this. You see, if I want to have my brand exposed randomly to roughly categorised people, I need to have some pretty solid statistics on how many have seen it. I'm an Internet advertiser, so I'm used to pretty solid stats, not based on diary entries like TV or circulation surveys like newspapers (yeah, like most copies of the newspaper get read by more than one person, every day).

The problem is the major media in Australia specifically make any "impression" numbers meaningless, by adding a little line of code like this to every page on their site, this from news.com.au:

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0300" />

This line of code means the page gets reloaded every 300 seconds, or 5 minutes. Fairfax have recently started doing this in a slightly different way (checking if a video is playing first) but they do the same thing.

By reloading the page every five minutes, they've made their impression numbers completely meaningless. People regularly leave their browsers open with a page: the news, the weather, whatever they were just reading. So they go off for a half hour lunch and three "impressions" tick over, except there's nobody home to be impressed. There's no way to quantify how often this happens, so the impression number isn't just inaccurate, it's some unknowable amount completely wrong.

So you see, measured by the only accurate measurement, click throughs and subsequent sales, display doesn't make sense. And as a branding exercise it's not worth playing around with because the publishers have specifically taken steps to make the numbers meaningless.

And they wonder why newspapers are dying, when they go out of their way to devalue the one thing of value they do produce?

11th June 2009 addition: this "study" by News Digital Media just confirms my suspicions. Surveying less than a thousand people when the ad had 300,000 impressions, yeah there's something you can use to draw conclusions! These being people who had just seen the ad (possibly, given what I said above).

Contact me

June 11, 2009 06:20 AM

database=# SELECT 
   tablename, 
   pg_size_pretty(pg_relation_size(tablename)) AS table_size, 
   pg_size_pretty(pg_total_relation_size(tablename)) AS total_table_size 
FROM 
   pg_tables 
WHERE 
   schemaname = 'public';
 tablename  | table_size | total_table_size 
------------+------------+------------------
 deferrals  | 205 MB     | 486 MB
 errors     | 58 MB      | 137 MB
 deliveries | 2646 MB    | 10096 MB
 queue      | 7464 kB    | 22 MB
 unknown    | 797 MB     | 2644 MB
 messages   | 1933 MB    | 6100 MB
 rejects    | 25 GB      | 75 GB
(7 rows)

June 10, 2009 09:42 AM

For the last five years I've run a virtual server from the excellent Linode which has hosted a number of services including this web site, a Jabber server, some other web sites, and my email. Initially I did spam filtering myself, but between the load this placed on the server and the constant tweaking required, it annoyed the hell out of me, so I outsourced that to JunkEmailFilter.com, which while imperfect was passable.

I've used mutt as my email client since some time in the later 90s, after upgrading from pine. The advantages of a text-mode mail client were speed, accessibility from nearly anywhere, integrated tools (gpg, lbbdb) and the fact that a clueless boss looking over your shoulder will think "techie stuff, must be work" and hence not require me to justify my work throughput.

More recently I've noticed myself regularly bouncing messages to my secret gmail account. Partly this is because Google Reader produces broken text attachments, and a few of my correspondents insist on using that, but mainly it's because more and more emails included stuff I couldn't use in a text-mode client, like links to complicated web site, pictures, or links to videos.

So I thought I'd try out moving all my email to Google excellent web client. The process of moving the whole domain was surprisingly easy. Just point the MX at Google's servers, set up the appropriate accounts and define the pass-through mail server for anything that doesn't have an account on the Google servers. This means the mailing lists and weird aliases I have on my server continue working as before.

The hardest part was uploading all my old mail. I've been saving mails into their own Maildirs based on the big before the @ in the email address, so john@smith.com ends up saved as john/ and if there's any doubling up of "john" it's still all in there. Gmail has a pretty good (and very fast) search, so filing becomes much less important.

There's a bunch of tools you can find that claim to be able to upload Maildirs to Gmail. I couldn't get any of them to reliably work. Eventually I downloaded the corpus of my Maildirs to a desktop and used Thunderbird to upload them all to the new location. It took ages, but it worked.

So far I'm pretty damn happy with this. I haven't had a single spam get through, and even the ones that make it to the Spam directory are pretty minimal. The add-on Postini spam filtering service has done two false positives on spam so far, which I consider pretty good and I presume it'll learn.

Now that I'm paying US$50/year for each email account (one for me, one for Holly) it's costing about the same as my former JunkEmailFilter.com and rsync.net accounts. I'm also going to downsize my Linode which will also save me some money. More importantly, I'm doing even less maintenance, and the search engine on my email is vastly superior to mutt. It's also a graphical email client, which is nice, and the mobile clients are really quite good.

Quite happy with it.

Contact me

June 09, 2009 07:37 AM

I've been learning to drive in Sydney for the last few months with an excellent instructor who's been patient, thorough and reassuring. Tashman driving school has seen me through a bunch of lessons at varying times of day and traffic conditions, including a really severe hail storm in peak hour, night time traffic on Parramatta Road and the Hume Highway. I've really appreciated his excellent guidance.

As well as excellent guidance, Tashman is quite an accomplished self-promoter on his web site. He asked me to blog about his service, and I'm happy to recommend him.

After about twelve hours of lessons, I finally graduated to driving with Holly in our own car yesterday. It went fine, apart from one stupid near miss in a car park where I nearly hit a stationary object. I'm learning!

Contact me

June 09, 2009 12:26 AM

Last night I dreamt that the BNP had won seats in the European Parliament. This morning I woke up and it was true. Across the country, 6% of the electorate (well, ok, 6% of the 35% who could be bothered to vote) had decided that they were best represented by racists. In two regions the percentage was high enough for them to win a seat.

It's difficult to know who to blame for this. Certainly the Labour government have a lot to answer for. If they hadn't done all they could to alienate the electorate over the last few years then there wouldn't have been the need for people to vote against them. And it's not just the Labour Party, of course, every MP who has been abusing the expenses system and destroying the public's trust in politics has to take a share of the blame. Then there's the right wing press. They don't explicitly support the BNP, of course, but papers like the Sun, the Mail and the Standard ("sorry", my arse) have been slowly but surely creating an environment where the BNP's poisonous attitudes have moved from being completely unacceptable to something that "middle England" discusses over the dinner table. People who didn't vote were also to blame. Low turnouts favour minor and extreme parties. Every vote that isn't cast increases the power of votes that are cast.

And then there are the voters. There's a load of nonsense talked about the BNP vote being a protest vote and that the people who voted for them not being racists. I'm afraid that doesn't really bear any kind of scrutiny. There were plenty of protest parties to choose from. Just because you want to give the Labour Party an electoral kicking, that doesn't lead inexorably to voting to the BNP. There are only two reasons why you would vote for the BNP. Firstly you're the kind of racist dickhead who agrees with their policies. Or, alternatively, you thought you wanted to vote against Labour and didn't bother to research the policies of the party you decided to vote for. In either case, you're a moron.

Just before I went to bed last night, Nick Griffin (the leader of the BNP) was being interviewed by the BBC. What an odious little toad of a man. He was on the defensive throughout the interview. He obviously knows that his opinions are completely offensive to all rational people so he spends all of his time trying to find increasingly bizarre ways to defend them. He claimed that one reason why the BNP only allows white people to join is so that they can use race discrimination legislation against employers who try to sack employees who are found to be members of the party. Every time he opens his mouth, sane people just want to slap him.

I can understand why the BNP want to be a whites-only organisation (it's because they're racists) but I don't understand why UK electoral rules allow it. They want to be seen as a legitimate politcal party. So why can't we pass a law saying that all UK political parties have to reach certain standards of equality. You know, basic stuff like not discriminating on the basis of gender, race or sexuality. Seems obvious to me.

Griffin also likes to harp on about the "indigenous people". He really needs a lesson in history. Perhaps someone should send him a copy of Homo Britannicus. The UK doesn't have any indigenous people. Modern humans arrived in the UK from Europe less than 30,000 years ago. Maybe we should try to send Griffin back to the home of his ancestors. Mind you, it'll be pretty crowded there as we all have our roots in Ethiopia.

Before the election there was a lot of discussion of the BNP on Twitter. The "#theBNPareTwats" meme got a lot of use. And yet it appeared to achieve nothing. But that's not really surprising, is it? Twitter is largely an echo chamber. You follow (and are followed by) your friends and people who like what you write. The BNP discussions were largely people who were never going to vote BNP telling other people who were never going to vote BNP not to vote BNP. The chances of any of that witty repartee reaching and converting people who were going to vote BNP was close to zero. So perhaps we're to blame a bit too. Instead of doing our bit to exchange insults about the BNP on Twitter, we should have been out there knocking on doors and explaining our point of view to people who don't share it. Perhaps shouting about things on Twitter (and, I'll admit with slight embarrassment, on blogs) isn't the best way to change things.

It's too late now though. There's nothing we can do[1]. Four the next five years, two regions in the north of England will be represented by racists. We can hope that people saw these elections as unimportant and that they won't vote the same way in the next General Election. But can we be sure of that? Perhaps we'd better consider doing some real campaigning next time.

Because the thought of BNP supporters in the House of Commons is far too grim to contemplate.

[1] Well, we can (and should) sign Hope Not Hate's "Not in My Name" petition, but it's not going to change anything.

June 08, 2009 02:59 PM

Yesterday I was at the British Humanist Association's one day conference, Darwin, Humanism and Science, at the Conway Hall. I confess that I was really going to see Richard Dawkins speak, but actually I got a whole day of fascinating speakers.

Following a brief introduction by Polly Toynbee, Dawkins was the first speaker. His talk was based around the final words from The Origin of Species.

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

June 07, 2009 11:28 AM

After perusing ukpollingreport it looks to me like the 4th seat in the Welsh region will be a straight fight between the Liberal Democrats and UKIP. Given that my dislike of xenophobes is stronger than my dislike of anti-nuclear policies it looks like I’ll be voting LibDem tomorrow.

I think the seats will go down like this in Wales:

1. Conservative
2. Labour
3. Plaid Cymru
4. UKIP

In descending order of their share of the vote. Although obviously I hope that the 4th seat doesn’t go to UKIP.

June 03, 2009 08:07 PM

Nagios has a wonderful 'duration' column in its web interface that's always bemused me. At what point does a check being in a warning, or even worse, a critical state stop being a problem worthy of head space and start being normal operating procedure?

Checks can stay in an extended broken state for many reasons but they all seem to be symptoms of a larger problem. If it's a small thing then are you getting enough time to do housekeeping? If it's a big thing do you have enough business buy in to keep things running optimally? Are you monitoring the wrong thing? Is there even anything you can do to fix it? If not then maybe Nagios isn't the best place to put the monitoring, maybe a status report is a better place.

June 03, 2009 07:55 AM

I found Nigel Farage’s performance on Question Time last week to be horrifyingly entertaining. Personally, I can’t get past the idea that UKIP were specifically formulated to appeal to Daily Mail readers.

Web Presence

I’ll give this one a big “meh”. Distinctly functional, but underwhelming. In contrast the Welsh UKIP site is nearly as horrid as the SLP’s was.

I found the single most annoying part of the site was that all their detailed policy proposals were in the form of PDFs. Bad on so many levels. Dear UKIP stop doing this now.

Another failing is the almost complete lack of any personal presence by their candidates. I could find out who the candidates are, but very little about them.

Policies

UKIP provide a handy summary from which I shall select an unrepresentative sample.

UKIP will leave the political EU and trade globally and freely.

You’ll trade “freely”? Really? I’m not sure that word means what you think it means.

We will freeze immigration for five years…

I thought so. You see this free trade thing, it involves the free movement of labour as well as goods. You can’t be for free trade and against immigration, it doesn’t make sense.

The UK would withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights

Who needs those pesky Human Rights?

We will radically reform the working of the NHS with an Insurance Fund, whilst upholding the ‘free at the point of care’ principles.

I’d have to see the details of this but it doesn’t sound immediately batty. However, I would suggest that any healthcare system that is free at the point of delivery is going to be expensive.

We will take 4.5 million people out of tax with a simple Flat Tax (with National Insurance) starting at £10,000. We will scrap Inheritance Tax, not just reform it and cut corporation taxes.

The regressive nature of a flat tax aside; how are you going to afford an NHS free at the point of delivery with all this tax-cutting?

All joking aside the thing I dislike the most about these policies is their strident, and faintly racist, advocacy of closed borders. I don’t want to live in a world were I can’t choose to go and live and work in another country. The world is almost entirely better off for immigration. To take a trivial example the NHS (which UKIP is apparently a fan of) would fall apart without the thousands of foreign doctors and nurses it employs. Should we deport all of them. I mean some of them aren’t even white.

European Policies

Like a lot of the anti-european parties UKIP does a good job of articulating it’s specific policies for the European election.

The only people who should decide who can come to live, work and settle in Britain should be the British people themselves.

Yes, I think you made this point earlier. It’s just as tiresome now.

…we should not be focussing on the insular regional trading blocs, but opening our arms to trade with the rest of the world, starting with the Commonwealth.

I wasn’t aware of any huge barriers to trade with Australia and New Zealand, other than them being on the opposite side of the planet. While Europe is right next door.

Not Mental

I choose to characterise them as eccentric, possibly dangerously so.

Summary

Never in a million years would I vote for this bunch of xenophobic, mercantilists.

As an amusing side note, Nigel Farage has recently been lionising the Euroskeptic President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus. Mr Klaus happens to be a real free marketeer of the Austrian school. You can bet he doesn’t agree with UKIP’s economic policies.

June 02, 2009 08:02 PM

There's a European Parliament election on Thursday. I've been trying to work out who to vote for.

That's not normally a problem for me. I'm a natural Labour voter and have been for most of my life. Voting for any other party feels strange. But I'm so disillusioned with the government right now that it would seem even stranger to support them. So I've been looking elsewhere.

And there's plenty to choose from. There are nineteen parties and independents standing in the London constituency. The voting form is huge.

There are some obvious candidates to eliminate. I'll never vote Tory, UKIP, BNP, English Democrat, Christian Alliance or NO2EU. I might consider voting for a socialist party, but there are two of them, seemingly determined to split the socialist vote and ruin any chance that a united party might have of winning a seat. Then there are a few independents and smaller parties that no-one's ever heard of and who stand no chance of winning. Not going to vote for any of them.

I was left with two alternatives - the Lib Dems and the Green Party. I've dabbled with both of these parties before. I was a member of the Green Party briefly twenty or so years ago and I voted Lib Dem in the last General Election. They both have polices that I agree with and policies that I don't agree with. I couldn't really see much to choose between them.

Then I saw this report about the Green Party's health policies. I knew that the Greens had some Luddite tendencies, but this goes way beyond anything that I could possibly support. How can I possibly vote for a party that says:

complementary and alternative medicine, and community and social interventions will be used where appropriate

Patient empowerment would eventually encompass choice of treatment backed by NHS funding for patients’ preferred treatment whether it be within the conventional framework of treating an illness and/or utilising alternative therapies.

We will encourage the development of a wider and more relevant range of research techniques, including methods appropriate to the assessment of complementary therapies.

We would oppose attempts to regulate complementary medicine, except by licensing and review boards made up of representatives of their respective alternative health care fields.

June 02, 2009 12:33 PM

After a lovely sunny weekend break from blogging it’s time to get back to the grindstone and continue my series of posts about the various small parties of the upcoming European elections.

I first became aware of Jury Team when I heard that Esther Rantzen had joined them and was standing as a candidate. Well I have to admit that put me off them from the start. However it did get me to look at their website where I found out that they were founded by former Director General of the Conservative Party, Paul Judge (he claims the name of the party isn’t a joke about his surname); and that independent MP Dr Richard Taylor and former independent MP Martin Bell were also joining. This made them a lot more credible in my eyes. While I have a fondness for ideologues there is something to be said for a party founded by people with a bit of practical political experience.

Web Presence

Pretty good overall. Not as appealing visually as the Green Party website, but featuring the same wholehearted embrace of social media. The local candidates have short sections showing every sign of having been written by the candidates themselves.

Policies

This is where we run into a bit of a problem because Jury Team isn’t a political party in the traditional sense. Apart from a basic set of principles every candidate has to sign up to, they don’t have policies as such. Indeed one of Jury Team’s proposals is the abolition of the party whip, so even if they did have policies there would be no guarantee that an individual MP would vote for them.

However I would like to point out item 1 of the candidate agreement.

I agree not to support any policies discriminating on the basis of race, colour, gender, sexual orientation, disability or religious or other belief.

That already puts them head and shoulders above a number of other parties I could mention.

The party of independents concept has the added complication that in a regional list system like the current election you could be putting an X next to four candidates with radically different ideologies. However for practical purposes they are unlikely to get more than one MEP so I really only need to consider the candidate at the top of the list. Which in this case is Paul Sabanskis. He also has his own site at www.pjsmep.eu

The first thing to mention is that the wonderful votematch.co.uk puts me in pretty close alignment with Mr Sabanskis’s views. In his own words:

Wales needs strong representation within the UK, and within Europe, so that areas can gain access to funding that is designed to help economies transform from being resource-led (e.g. coal / steel) to taking advantage of the opportunities offered by the Internet Age. I especially would like to see greater advantage being taken of environmentally sensitive technology, as this would be a great way of regenerating former mining communities.

While the phrases like “environmentally sensitive” always worry me votematch says that he is pro-nuclear which leads me to believe that he is fairly pragmatic.

Zero tolerance on crime, with harsh punishments for repeat offenders.

Well that sounds pretty illiberal to my ears, but it would depend on what this actually meant in practise. Mainly because we’ve heard zero-tolerance from a number of politicians, none of whom have actually implemented it.

One thing that he says that did make me happy is this:

I have an open mind on most issues and prefer to act based on the facts and evidence.

European Policies

Jury Team have a list of core proposals most of which revolve around reforming the nitty-gritty of Westminster parliamentary procedure. Without wading into the details it seems that they boil down to various fairly sensible ways of increasing parliamentary oversight and pruning back the power of the executive. If this sensibility transferred to the European Parliament then I would consider that to be a good thing.

Mr Sabanskis addresses a couple of European issues himself.

Scrap the CAP which is wasteful.

The CAP in this instance being the Common Agricultural Policy. It is indeed a horrifically wasteful policy so I’m in full agreement with him here.

I believe we should have a proper debate about our role in Europe with facts rather than scaremongering and when promised a referendum, we should have one, not excuses and hair-splitting.

I couldn’t argue with that.

Not Mental

Mr Sabanskis is quite outspoken and has a tendency to resort to “x should be banned”, rather than taking a more nuanced approach to policy. That being said I would hate to conflate strong opinions with being a nutter.

As a whole the Jury Team proposals are almost boringly reasonable.

Summary

I like the idea of more independent politicians and have a lot of sympathy with the idea that political parties are kind of a bad idea in and of themselves. The European Parliament could do with more politicians who have signed up to the principles of transparency and oversight.

I might take a punt on Jury Team despite the obvious irony of an anti-corruption party started by a man who lost a Libel case over the allegation of party donation fraud.

June 01, 2009 07:33 PM

Spent the day walking a coast path on the Glamorgan Heritage Coast. Have managed to sunburn one patch of one arm. v.annoying.

Pictures to prove that sometimes the sun does shine in Wales.

May 31, 2009 08:25 PM

Ssh...

Still in stealth mode. But this could be huge.

(Apologies to Jemima)

May 29, 2009 04:27 PM

I think that one of the reasons that a certain type of politician is wary of the internet is that once you've said something on the internet, it becomes very hard to unsay it. If you're used to dealing with the world of newpapers and broadcast media where everything is ephemeral then it must be quite a culture shock to deal with a medium where everything is archived and people can carefully compare what you said last week with what you are saying today. Of course, if something is published on your own web site you'd think that it was easy enough to alter what you wrote and claim that we've always been at war with Eurasia. But it's not that simple.

Here's a good case in point. Last week Nadine Dorries wrote a piece on her blog entitled "All's Fair in War and Politics", where she questioned the credentials of one of her opponents. It was an astonishing piece and not something that a careful politician would ever write. Here's what she said:

My Labour opponent had a very strong letter in the Beds On Sunday this week.

In the letter he deployed his usual tactic of distorting the facts, something I’m becoming used to these days; however, he also said:

“I fought for as a soldier in Iraq in 2003”.

Anyone who reads my blog will know how pro-military I am.

I stand in awe and admiration of our soldiers, their professionalism and bravery.

Only last week, I wrote of how moved I was when I heard a Scots Dragoon Guard use his moment on TV to talk about the moment a soldier receives his pre-assignment message: ‘ contact with the enemy is certain’ - and what it is that fires that soldier on, one of our heroes, into battle.

So, you can imagine, when I read the words “I fought as a soldier in Iraq” I was quite impressed. Gosh, thought I, good job I’m the MP or I may be tempted to vote for him myself.

Only, did he fight in Iraq? Did he go out into the danger zones along with the a regiment on Op Telic 8, and risk his life and limb side by side with our soldiers, for the sake of freedom and democracy? The values for which he claims to have “fought in Iraq” .

I will be interested to find out the answer.

Claiming to be a hero when you write a political letter as the Labour candidate in a newspaper is a very big claim indeed. One that secures advantage and wins you votes.

Let’s hope it’s true.

I got that from Google's cache of the site because it's no longer on her web site. It seems that someone has had a quiet word in her ear and the piece has been somewhat toned down. Here's what it currently says (I'm not just linking to it in case it changes again in the future):

The local press are picking this up now, I will leave it up to them.

Anyone who reads this blog will understand that I have the hugest regard for all serving military personnel, TA, Army, Navy and Air Force and consider myself very lucky indeed to have two bases in my constituency. RAF Henlow, Chicksands and a TA training base.

I talk to many soldiers, regular and TA before they leave to serve, and as detailed in my blog, 'A Soldiers Tale', when they arrive home. I know and understand well exactly the danger and the operations they engage in.

However, the one thing I have learnt over the last few weeks is that in the battlefield of politics, one needs to be absolutely honest AND precise. Nothing less will do.

Which is, I hope you'll agree, completely different to the original piece. It's so watered down that the original point has been completely lost (it's like homeopathic blogging!)

I'm not sure what Dorries intended by editing this post. Or, more importantly, editing this post without saying what she had done. A more responsible blogger would have struck through the original text and left a note saying why it had been done. Or, if the text needed to be removed for legal reasons, replaced it with a note explaining what had happened.

Editing text without any explanation really looks like that you're intending to fool people into thinking that the current version is what you had always believed. And that's dishonest. And we don't expect dishonesty from our MPs[1]. Luckily the internet has a longer memory than that.

We have always been at war with Oceania.

[1] Well, ok, yes. Of course we do expect dishonesty from our MPs. But we shouldn't.

May 29, 2009 01:39 PM

Neal's Yard Remedies are purveyors of the finest magic water. Water that remembers magic ingredients that have been dissolved into it and diluted until no memory of the ingredients can possbily remain. Yes, they sell homeopathic treatments.

Someone in their PR department decided it was a good idea to get involved in the Guardian's "You Ask, They Answer" feature. In this feature, readers post questions and the organisation under the spotlight posts the answers.

Except this week it didn't quite work our that way.

The article was published on the Guardian web site at about noon yesterday. And the questions soon came flooding in. Questions like:

Do you see no problem with trying to be 'ethical' while at the same time selling snake oil for a living?

Please could you explain what level of evidence of efficacy you require before stocking any product?

Does your part in the MMR scare make you feel guilty?

have just had a chat with NYR.

Unfortunately, despite previous assurances that they would be participating in this blog post, I've now been told they 'will not be taking part in the debate'.

So yes, as several people have pointed out, this has become something of 'You Ask', rather than a 'You Ask, They Answer'. I'm still hoping NYR will reconsider.

When faced with the opportunity to answer some of their sternest critics and to produce evidence of the efficacy of their products, Neal's Yard Remedies bottled it. They decided that it was better to just run away and hide.

I hope that the Guardian will run with this story. I'd love it if as many people as possible knew that Neal's Yard Remedies were unable to produce answers to the questions that any sane person would need answers to before buying stuff from them.

And yes, I know already the kind of comments I'll get if the friends of homeopathy get wind of this article. "But it cured my mother's cancer", "science doesn't know everything", "you can't be sure until you try it". All nonsense of course. Homeopathy does not and cannot work.

The plural of anecdote is not data.

Update: A nice follow-up about why this is a PR disaster for the company.

May 29, 2009 08:15 AM

I have just pushed live the latest feature of the Recycling Group Finder, support for Google Groups!

It has taken a while to roll out, the changes to the code-base that runs the site were pretty fundamental as the site was originally only written to work with Yahoo based groups. As a result there may be some issues, let me know if you see any.

To get started just email me your Google Groups recycling group URL or head over to the group addition page.

May 28, 2009 09:27 PM

I’m not sure I appreciated what a marathon this was going to turn into when I started it. Yesterday’s horrid slog through the rhetoric of the SLP was distinctly unrewarding. I’m hoping for better things from today’s turn: The Welsh Green Party.

Web Presence

Very nicely done. The most engaging and interactive of all the sites I have visited thus far. They have links to all their social media outlets right on the front page. A quick trawl through their Youtube channel turns up one of the best descriptions of how the regional list proportional representation works that I have yet seen. Although I could have done without the “vote for us or the BNP get in” scaremongering. The air-raid sirens where, perhaps, a bit much.

Top of the Welsh list is Jake Griffiths. Who seems to write the news posts for the Welsh Greens news-blog-thing. So at least you can get an idea of how he feels about the issues, and more importantly; how he feels about Welsh issues.

So the greens score well on this front. Their candidates appear to be actual real-life people and they even engage in conversation with people (for example answering comments on their youtube channel).

Policies

Green Party policies seem to boil down a few major initiatives.

1. Tackle climate change by increasing investments in wind and solar. And by simultaneously taking steps to reduce energy demand. For example they want to subsidise insulation for residential properties.
2. A 20mph suburban speed limit to reduce accidents and allow residents to reclaim their streets.
3. An increase in affordable housing.

Jake also has some specific things to say regarding Wales.

• He’s against the Severn Barrage.
• He’s against an M4 extension.
• He’s pro micro-generation and anti-nuclear.

I have to say that the Greens have done a good job in recent years making their policies distinctive from the main parties and yet bland enough that there is nothing really outrageous to object to. Fortunately for me the have a policy archive which reveals them to be just as wingnutty as ever.

My main objection to the Greens is their fanciful energy policy. While I agree with them that climate change is a real problem I disagree with their prescription for solving it. Solar and Wind are great in that they don’t produce any C02 but you need to put in somewhere above 40% backup to them for when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine. Now the obvious step forward is to back them up with Nuclear which can provide reliable and CO2 free power, but the Greens are ideologically opposed to Nuclear. The policy document contains the following charming statement:

Green Party scientist Dr Busby has stated the nuclear industry has been responsible for over a million deaths worldwide.

Really, a million? Bear in mind that the WHO reckons that Chernobyl, the worlds worst Nuclear accident, killed around 50 people with epidemiologist projecting a total death toll of 4000. So I’m not sure how we get to one million.

The other strand of their energy policy is reducing demand both by mandating energy efficiency and by some more “inventive” strategies.

peak electricity demand when people switch on electric kettles and cookers at the end of a popular television programme. If there were to be a threat of power cuts because demand was already abnormally high during exceptionally severe winter weather, this could be averted by varying the times of transmi