exo

• location: Mull
• weeks: one
• weather: good
• eagles: golden
• goats: feral
• munro: steep
• roads: narrow
• ferries: four

Dear bicycle manufacturers of the world,
it’d be lovely if you could see fit to provide bikes with wee patches to protect the frame from rubbing cables. I always forget to do so until too late.

Surely the question should be “What do we want it to be to be British?”

All the debate you hear about in the media and from politicians about defining Britishness, and lets ignore the inherent narrow mindedness of this question, talks about what it is to be British. This seems to be a fundamentally flawed approach being as it is all about, at best, the present. I am much more interested in what we want to be; in looking forward to how a society should be and working out how to move towards that. Change as the nice man across the pond is wont to say.

You’ll be wanting to follow this advice. Especially the bit about every night.

Although you may wish to cargo cult this incantation:

#!/bin/bash

# change $yourusername and name of drive accordingly
sudo rsync -axSE --delete \
--exclude-from /Users/$yourusername/backup_excludes.txt \
/ /Volumes/backup/

# required for the bootability apparently
# as it turns out this isn't at all required for booting. 
# the partition type in the jwz thing above are though.
# sudo bless -folder /Volumes/backup/System/Library/CoreServices

Where /Users/$yourusername/backup_excludes.txt looks a little something like this:

/tmp/*
/Network/*
/cores/*
*/.Trash
/afs/*
/automount/*
/private/tmp/*
/private/var/run/*
/private/var/spool/postfix/*
/private/var/vm/*
/Previous Systems.localized
.Spotlight-*/

One other tip is to exclude your backup drive from spotlight indexing otherwise you’ll find when you want to eject it you can’t as spotlight has its grubby little hands all over the damn thing. You can do this in System Preferences -> Spotlight -> Privacy.

When you smack your laptop down a bit hard and the death rattle starts emanating from your hard disk you will be mighty glad.

And really, every damn night or you will loose something you can’t replace.

Or rather the feature of XP, and possibly other versions, that allows you to place a web page on your desktop. Many people, including me, poured scorn on the feature when it first emerged but it turns out be quite handy if you point it at a page with all those little details you need to refer to frequently. And because it’s a normal web page you can use cut and paste.

In my case I use it to list, among other things, IP addresses of various servers, assorted useful vi key combinations that I don’t use often enough to memorise, some magic mysql incantations and various details that are often required when writing ad-hoc database queries.

To ease the process I’ve got a shortcut key to open the web page in an editor so I can add stuff to it quickly.

To set it up you want to use the following sequence:

• right click on desktop
• select Properties
• select Desktop tab
• click Customise Desktop…
• select Web tab
• click New..
• stick in path to web page
• click OK a lot

Sadly I have yet to find a way to do the same on a Mac or Linux. I imagine there is a way on the latter though.

Burnham, a father of three, insisted his proposals were not intended as an attack on freedom of speech, but were a necessary counterweight to the proliferation of “unacceptable” material on the internet in a similar mould to the 9pm watershed on television. “It worries me — like anybody with children. Leaving your child for two hours unregulated on the internet is not something you can do. The internet has been empowering and democratising in many ways, but we haven’t yet got the stakes in the ground to help people navigate their way safely around what can be a very, very complex and quite dangerous world,”…

Naturally, something must be done! That something appears to be age ratings for websites, which I seem to recall has been tried before with exactly no success 0. However, let us consider for a brief moment that we were attempting to implement such a scheme and consider how we would do it.

Clearly, given the nature of the internet any sort of self regulation involving meta tags in the HTML is not going to work. Partly as who can honestly be bothered but mostly, and more relevantly for Mr Burnham, because it’s rather open to abuse by all those sites hosted outside UK jurisdiction.

This then leads us to the notion that you need some sort of body to classify websites into bad and good. For this to work you have to assume that any unclassified site, or most of them as I prefer to call this category, are automatically bad. Thus you end up with your view of the web reduced to an astonishingly small subset.

Let us, just for the sake of argument, assume we have come up with some method of classifying the web quickly through some sort of crowd sourcing algorithm. You now have the problem of filtering not just websites, but individual pages on these sites. The prime example is wikipedia. There is much there that one would want a child access to; there’s also pictures of 70s album covers that are less suitable. That’s a lot of ratings and a lot of filtering and a substantial burden you are placing on ISPs. At least to do it properly, which is what I assume you’d want to do. It’s certainly not an impossibility though.

And then finally the ISPs will have to offer some sort of, oh, I don’t know Parental Controls package so you can access the web unfettered while your kids only get to see the cbeebies site.

Alternatively you could install one of the various bits of commercial software that promise to censor the intarwebs for you. And then wait the short while it takes your kids to figure out how to disable it…

Or, most usefully, you could do some research, maybe on the web, before you make half arsed statements that result in you looking like an idiot.

0: Of course I can’t find this as all the results on web site ratings are for this nonsense.

I think that’s the only way to describe the emotion as I listen to and read the steady flow of stories on our less than gentle descent into recession. And also no small measure of bafflement.

As someone who is reasonably cautious about debt I’ve always been amazed at the cavalier approach many people have to it. In the individual this merely invokes bafflement. It’s when it occurs at an organisational level that it begins to make me angry. To be careless with one’s own finances is foolish, and if enough people are it’s bad for everyone; to be, essentially, careless with other people’s finances is far less forgivable.

And it’s this carelessness that results in me shouting at the radio on the way to work. All these people who were so desperate to make more money that they ceased to think about the consequences for others. At least I hope that’s the case. Yet now we all have to care about the consequences of this unchecked avarice for the very organisations and people who led us here thanks to the way a modern free market economy works. It’s astoundingly galling.

In which we note that snow plus a road bike is not a recipe for a pleasant commute. And also that looking out one’s window in the morning is not an altogether reliable means of predicting the weather 17 miles away, or for that matter 8 hours hence.

This is my somewhat belated mention of the good people at The Open Rights Group and their campaign to double their membership. If you aren’t already a member, are in the UK, and care about DRM, copyright, e-Voting, Data Protection and so on then you might want to consider chucking them some cash.

Yesterday I was sitting listening to Theresa May and Tony Wright on The Week in Westminster talking about how to change the culture of parliament and bring an end to yah boo politics. This is in the context of a Speaker’s commission to discuss how to make parliament more representative of the country and heated exchanges at Prime Minister’s Questions over the Baby P case. As ever, they hand wring about how the culture of the place puts people off and lament about the common image, on display at the aforementioned heated exchanges, of a room full of largely middle aged white men whose apparent approach to debate is more Sunderland FC fan than Socrates. At no point does either of them suggest the two most obvious steps that could be taken to reduce the problem.

The first is to simply ban the jeering and shouting that takes place. I don’t care what anyone says about the tradition and character of British democracy or parliamentary process; it’s childish, obnoxious and serves no purpose other than to satisfy the baser instincts of the participants.

The second is to abandon the whole notion of grouping MPs of the same party on adjacent benches. Setting up the chamber in an adversarial manner is hardly the best was to get away from tribalism in politics.

I’d like to think that these two simple steps would greatly reduce the unedifying spectacle of our elected representatives shouting abuse at each other across the dispatch boxes on a weekly basis. Not to mention encouraging people to think of politics and democracy as a consensual process of arriving at solutions rather than a glorified playground name calling exercise.

( And if you’re interested in how thoughtful, polite and knowledgeable debates in parliament can be then spend some time helping TheyWorkForYou.com to match video to transcripts. )