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samwwwblack's journal
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samwwwblack's JournalVarious rants |
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| May. 13th, 2010 @ 02:22 pm Blog has moved | |||
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Music: Queen - Radio Ga Ga
I've moved my blog to http://samwwwblack.lapwing.org You'll probably want to check there for updates and such. This account will probably still be kicking around, just in case I get fed up with WordPress ;) | |||
| May. 10th, 2010 @ 10:23 pm Its been a while | |||
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Mood:
Its been a while. In more ways than one. optimisticMusic: Oasis - Don't Believe The Truth - Guess God Thinks I'm Abel Firstly, its been a while since I posted here. Whilst I've sort of randomly updated my identi.ca account, I've been irregularly working on lapwing-web, RPMification of Lapwing-Linux and various other bits n pieces. I'm hoping to rectify that a bit (not the first and definitely not the last time I'll say that) by using this blog to demonstrate/showcase FOSS I've written. Or I could move everything to http://samwwwblack.lapwing.org. I dunno. Otherwise, its business as usual; looking for a developer/computer support related job in the Midlands in a job market fixated on the south east whilst working in the Argos stockroom offloading lorries. Great return for 5 years of uni ;) Secondly, its been a while since we had Liberals in power, and hopefully by the end of However, I kept coming back to how Dib Lemming put it; the Lib Dems won. Not in terms of seats, votes or forming a LibDem government, but in terms demonstrating the fatal flaw in first past the post voting; how can a party get more votes than last time, but lose seats? Is that a fair representation of the people's will? Is giving 9% of the seats to a party with 23% of the vote fair? Viewed in those terms, the case for voting reform is made readily apparent. I hope the current Tory/LibDem talks end well, although I don't like the secrecy surrounding them. I can understand the case for keeping the discussions under wraps as both sides could be tearing chunks out of each other whilst publicly proclaiming to be getting along, so as not to worry the people or fuel the anti-coalition sceptics. It just seems, as a FOSS developer (and I use developer in the loosest terms), that this antithesis to public conflict is counter productive. Raging arguments of opposing views happen on a regular basis in the FOSS world, yet those projects around the arguments still exist and release code. It seems that some very good work has come out of these major arguments and disagreements, the GNU Project being the most prominent example. Open arguments engage more people, allowing them to contribute their view point, their experience and their information. It also allows a greater number of people to fact check "truths" used in an argument, and to provide counter arguments backed with "truths", and so on. This perpetual proposition and rebuttal process tests an idea to destruction, where it either evolves to fix the flaws or dies. Having this argument in public, recorded for the public, adds the sense of ownership to the idea. In a time where people are disillusioned in politics and the LibDems especially standing for a "new era" of politics, airing everything in public and inviting public input is the best way to push this change. Thirdly, its been a while since I started to write this post. I tend to take the best part of a day getting things just so. Thus, everythings probably changed when this post appears ;) | |||
| Feb. 27th, 2010 @ 09:28 am Extended job titles | |||
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Mood:
The BBC wrote up an article on extended job descriptions. amusedMusic: Muse - Hyper Chondriac Music From the comments; "My boss in the bank was always going on about targets and "vision" and as I didn't have a job title he was thrilled when I came up with my own - Sales, Lending and Vision Executive. Of course when I put it in as the reference in a letter I got into trouble for using the acronym SLAVE. - Isla Biggs, Durham" and "I once had the pleasure of meeting Kevin Mellett, Nasa's man in charge of refitting space shuttles between flights. Pompous job title? Not a bit of it. On his business card he simply describes himself as "Rocket Scientist". - Ewen McLaughlin, Swansea" That made me chuckle. | |||
| Jan. 23rd, 2010 @ 12:06 am Illegal anti-terror law threatened, terror alert goes up | |||
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Mood:
I'm naturally sceptical. Especially when it comes to governments "protecting" us from an unseen threat "out there". pessimisticMusic: Queen - Fat Bottomed Girls Just today, the Government, acting in response to absolutely no specific intelligence (kinda like the last time then), raised the terrorist threat level. This happened just over a week after the ECHR ruled that Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 was unlawful. This is the bit of legislation that allows the police to stop and search anyone in a designated area for any reason "in the prevention of terrorism". London has been under a section 44 since the assent of the legislation, and you'll only find out a section 44 is in use when you are stopped and searched. Whilst the Government are appealing the decision, its business as normal for using section 44 (if I were convicted of a crime, and I continued doing it whilst I awaited the appeal, I'd be charged again. Not so for UK.gov it seems). Anyway, I mention the raising of the terror level "[with] no intelligence to suggest a terrorist attack was imminent" and the attached "advice" of the Home Secretary "to support the police and security services in their continuing efforts to discover, track and disrupt terrorist activity." as a likely reinforcement of the absolute need for section 44; I fully expect whilst the threat level is raised that the number of section 44 stop and searches will dramatically increase, and when the threat level lowers for the Government to crow "See! See! Section 44 is really needed in the fight against terrorism! Without it, who knows what might have happened!". It might be that I'm being hyperbolic. I really hope so, and that there is genuine chatter relating, however imperceptibly, to an attack in Britain in the near future and this is an appropriate response. However, I simply don't trust this Government, who seem more determined than ever to micromanage everyone's lives, not to use the Bush Fear Manipulation Handbook for their own political benefit. | |||
| Jan. 18th, 2010 @ 10:26 pm Still not dead | |||
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Mood:
+++ BEGIN TRANSMISSION +++ apatheticMusic: Muse - City Of Delusion I've been working at Argos since November as a stock assistant, still plugging away at Lapwing-Linux (still no release though) and various other bits n pieces. Nothing really to report. +++ END TRANSMISSION +++ | |||
| Jul. 1st, 2009 @ 07:32 pm Back in Lichfield | |||
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Back in Lichfield, joining the "Real World" after 5 years in uni. Trust me to pick the worst economic crisis in modern times to rejoin it. 2:2 in Computer Interactive Systems MEng. No idea how I managed to achieve that, and even less of an idea where I'm going to use my degree with jobs being so competitive. So yes, back in Lichfield, which seems stupidly quiet compared to Brum; just as people move out it seems :) | |||
| Jun. 8th, 2009 @ 12:05 pm EU and local council elections | |||
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Mood:
It's been a while, and I'm still alive. Uni is done, just awaiting results out next Wednesday. relaxedMusic: Muse - Absolution - Endlessly For those wanting to look in on how little I'm doing, you can go to indenti.ca: http://identi.ca/samwwwblack But on to the boring bit of this post; the local council elections and the EU elections, specifically about the BNP. No, I didn't vote for them. Even if it were illegal to vote against the BNP and they were the only party running, I would add a box with "RON" and vote for him. That aside, I think in the long run it will do our democracy a massive service that the BNP have a county council seat and 2 MEPs now, and I hope they adhere to their policies and apply them in the course of their work. This will mean that these actions, policy decisions, voting record and comments whilst in office will be on record, accessible to the public, for years to come. So when the next vote comes around and the BNP are expecting to make gains, the records of their officials can be held up to demonstrate what a vote for the BNP really means; not a protest vote, not a joke vote, but a vote for a racist and immoral organisation that can't even get people to pose for their promotional material or check what squadron a spitfire belongs to. I think our democracy can handle this low if we learn from it and don't repeat it in the future. Moving away from the BNP and to a general election basis, I honestly think that the next parliament will be a hung one, and that the Conservative and Lib Dems would form a coalition government, based on the slightly softer way the Tories and Lib Dems are talking about each other lately. Whilst I would prefer an all out Lib Dem government, having some cabinet positions would vastly improve the percentage of the vote in the elections afterwards. At the moment unfortunately the Lib Dems have enough mass to be noticed but haven't achieved critical mass to erode the other two main parties' proportions significantly. 5 years ago the Lib Dems were seen as the protest vote party, and since then although the vote is predicted to have fallen (from 22.1% in 2005 to ~19% now) its still up on the 2001 and 1997 elections. Like I said, big enough to be noticed, not enough to generate the momentum to take them into office. I live in hope ;-) | |||
| Oct. 17th, 2008 @ 04:45 pm Store cleaner to aisle 3, store cleaner to aisle 3 | |||
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Mood:
Woopsy, the global economy has had a small accident.pessimisticMusic: Oasis - Little By Little By small, I mean a $1 quadrillion ($1,000 trillion) accident. Just don't worry that the gross domestic product (GDP) of the planet was ~$54 trillion last year. Or put it another way, less than 6% of the current outstanding debt. Not to worry, Super Gordon will sort it out. Just like how his Home Secretary Jaqui Smith has made us safer from terrorists by proposing legislation to record every sender and recipient of every phone call, email, instant message and webpage in the UK. Or, after it was thrown out of the Lords, she has repackaged the 42 day anti-terror detention plans. We can trust them not to abuse it. Honest. Like how RIPA isn't abused by local councils or how they don't use anti-terror and serious crime statute to seize Icelandic bank's assets. No sirree, they won't abuse it. Where you need to monitor someone, including their communications, you go get a warrant. You put your evidence in front of an impartial 3rd party (a judge in this case) and request to gather more personal information that may help the investigation. That way it is open, transparent and not open to abuse. You don't dragnet everything, hoping to catch the criminals. As explanation for this "need", Smith pointed out that technology has moved forward and the statute needs to catch up with it. What she seems to have completely missed is that technology is continually moving forward and will always outpace the law. This uberdatabase will not correctly detect and correlate Tor or Freenet traffic (simply, these two current pieces of technology obfuscate what you do on the net). All the database of connections will show is user A connected to user B, and the rest is lost. The other argument floated was that Skype and other VoIP telephony was a massive intelligence blackhole that needed to be filled; considering that Skype's encryption is non-trivial to break and therefore the conversation cannot be recorded; why is this "problem" being used as the overriding cause to implement this Orwellian legislation when it is demonstrably flawed? Don't worry citizen, object that our hard won personal liberties are being blatantly undermined and you are in league with the terrorists. | |||
| Aug. 11th, 2008 @ 03:53 pm My timing is always off | |||
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Mood:
I wrote a post over two years ago outlining what I thought would happen as the easily accessible crude oil started to run out. If current events are anything to go by, I was optimistic with my 4-5 years to the crunch. contemplativeMusic: Stereophonics - Last Of The Big Time Drinkers It could happen next week. With crude oil recently pushing $150/barrel (up from $85/barrel 12 months ago), various parts of society started to groan under the pressure. Even though crude has dropped to ~$120/barrel, essentials such as eggs, bread, milk and utilities (gas, electricity, water) haven't gone down in price. Whilst the price of crude isn't the only factor in these costs being high (booming demand from the Far East), it affects and motivates all areas of any society. Including the highest levels of government. The recent invasion of Georgia by Russia could be a case in point. The worlds second longest oil pipeline runs through it (thanks Dermot at Idleworm). I mentioned securing oil being the main motivator for war; Russia knows that NATO's members aren't exactly in the strongest position (with America and Britain heavily committed in their own This could easily lead to escalation. The US is a major proponent of the Ukraine (who have warned Russia about its warships in the Black Sea) and Georgia (into whom the US have "invested" a lot of military kit) joining NATO before this conflict reached the boil. Whilst the US don't have the manpower to goto Georgia immediately, it isn't beyond Bush 'n' Co to whip the masses up about their old enemy the Commies. It wouldn't be that hard to frame the Russian invasion of Georgia (if it heads further south that the South Ossetia border) as an aggressive act against Turkey, a NATO member. This could indeed either mobilise or split NATO; Europe relies on gas and oil from Russia, so it is going to be hesitant about charging to Turkey's or Georgia's defence, especially if this conflict goes on into the autumn and winter months. I seriously think Russia is toying with NATO. Moscow knows it has a lot of the European members by the proverbials and it wants to see how fair it can push before NATO reacts. Having Europe dependant on Russia is an ironic reversal when Russia was dependant on NATO states for money after the collapse of the Soviet government, and how Russia had to put up with the outside pressure because it needed the money. I do wonder how much pressure NATO can withstand before it reacts or breaks. Neither is an appealing prospect. | |||
| Jun. 2nd, 2008 @ 08:52 am Exams are over | |||
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Mood:
Exams are over for my third year. Just an induction on wednesday, then nothing till september/october (hopefully ;-)cheerfulMusic: Stereophonics - Is Yesterday, Tomorrow, Today? So, the summer to work on Lapwing-Linux 2008 and other assorted coding projects. Excellent :) Yeah, thats all, must get shopping and stuff done for BBQ later. Breakfast first though... | |||
