Archive for June, 2012

Following on from my previous post about installing ImageMagick from source, to get it working with Apache you need to do the following. First, we need to install something from Pecl. So make sure you have the pecl command at hand – if not, install it.

apt-get install pear

Then run the following.

apt-get install php5-dev
pecl install imagick

Finally, add the extension to your php.ini.

extension=imagick.so

Yesterday, it was announced that science fiction author Ray Bradbury, best known for his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451, had died. While it is far from a tragedy, at the respectable age of 91, he will be deeply missed.

If remembrance, here is Rachel Bloom singing about her love for Ray.

Based on a true conversation.

Recently, I stopped using Foursquare.

I really like the concept. Making every day life a little more fun. It’s good because it encourages you to go out and do new things – if only to get the Foursquare points, and anything that encourages people to go out and explore the big wide world is a positive.

However, I found it was just taking over a little too much. The first thing I would do when arriving at somewhere new to check in, and it was just taking too much time to log onto my phone all the time and check in somewhere. So I decided to go cold turkey and remove it from my phone.

The May meeting of the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire saw Mike Granville speak to us on the topic of “The Vatican: How Do They Keep Getting Away With It?”

It was a chilling reminder of the amount of outrageous things the Catholic church have done and gotten away with over the centuries, from the the Papal states, to the complicity in Hitler’s Nazi Germany and constantly covering up child abuse.

This also struck a chord with Alistair McBay’s recent article in NSS Newsline who commented that a certain “non-resident octogenarian” named Rupert Murdock was recently hauled up in front of a government committee to answer claims about his organisation covering up people’s phones being hacked and described as not being fit to lead such an organisation.

Yet, when another non-resident head of a multinational organisation arrives in the UK, someone we know covered up child abuse claims against priests and even resisted their removal from the priesthood, he is welcomed with open arms on what was described as a state visit.

By this point, most developers have realised that Firefox is a cludgey pile of crap that eats up all your memory, and made the switch to Chrome, those developer tools long since surpassed Firebug.

Recently though, I’ve been running out or memory a lot and I don’t think it’s accurate to say Chrome isn’t to blame. As it runs everything in different processes, it’s easy to miss how much memory it is eating up, but I found it using 620MB of memory with just four tabs open.

Of course having Netbeans eating up so much clearly isn’t helping either, but IDEs are always a bag of crap (Eclipse is worse, I miss Notepad++).

You have to be a bit of a dick to park in a disabled bay when you’re not disabled. The same thing applies to parking over two parking spaces. But parking over two disabled spaces – that takes a special kind of asshole.

There is an RPM available for ImageMagick on Debian, but it isn’t the most update to date, so if you need all the new features, you’ll need to compile and install it from source. Luckily, it’s very easy to do.

wget ftp://ftp.imagemagick.org/pub/ImageMagick/ImageMagick.tar.gz
tar xvfz ImageMagick.tar.gz
cd 
./configure
make
make install
make check

Recently, Nicola said this…

Wow doctors are selfish or stupid. The rising life expectancy and massive deficit means they need to work longer and get a reduction in pension.
£68,000 on top of probably huge savings isn’t too shabby, but they’re striking!

I really rather wish she hadn’t, because it lead to a huge amount of comments, some of which were nonsense and as such, I am now unable to sleep because people are wrong on the internet and I can’t just let that be.

I don’t really have a problem with the strikes. They’re not putting people at much risk and they have a right to strike if they want to. But I don’t think they should expect a great deal of public sympathy for their cause.

While Nicola quoted £68,000. The BBC News article I read put the figure at £58,000. But that is still a huge amount of money. To retire on! That is more money than I earn while I’m still working. That is more money than my mum earns having spent twenty years tirelessly working as a teacher at an inner city school – surely an equally noble profession?

Ashwin chipped in…

Seriously though, speak to other Doctors and Medical students, and find out just how hard and long (that’s what she said!) a Doctor works and then you’ll appreciate our perspective much more.

But I probably won’t. Why? Because we don’t live in a society where hard work equals more money. You want to know about hard work? Go to my friend Eric who works 60 hours at week scrubbing floors at McDonald’s for a pitance. I’m sure a lot of doctors do more hours than that. But with the average GP earning a six figure salary, do they do ten times more hours than that? Of course not, because that is more hours than exist.

Paul I think you’re grossly confusing Doctors with Footballers. Also, this may be news to you, but Doctors do have loans and mortgages to pay off!

Which is probably true, as doctors are probably the only people who can afford to get on the property ladder these days. The rest of us have to rent.

Moz adds some good points…

I think the difficulty in debates like this is the gross inequality that people see between salaries across the various sectors. At the end of the day there are people in each sector who work just as hard as each other and do very difficult jobs, but receive vastly different salaries/pensions. In the private sector (e.g. bankers) you get people earning obscene salaries doing non-specialist jobs that don’t even benefit society that much. In the health sector you have people also earning obscene salaries, but at least doing a highly-skilled job that greatly benefits society (I wouldn’t include dentists in this – how they demand the salaries they receive is beyond me). Whereas in academia you have people earning very little to do a very difficult highly-skilled job. As an academic, I don’t moan about not being paid enough (well not much at least). But tbh I would love to see other people who have easier jobs than me earning less than I do. Its selfish but it would make me feel a lot better and more valued. Overall I think there should be a salary/pension cap that applies to everyone including doctors. Afterall no one person can be *that* much value to society.

But this just reinforces the point that you’re not paid in proportion to how much work you do, it’s how much value you are to society. In Moz’s case, that isn’t that much value. Not because Moz doesn’t do important stuff, he does. But because it would be fairly easy to replace him, because lots of people would like an academic research drop, which drives wages down.

But the important point here is that we live in a free market economy where you enjoy a choice of careers. If you don’t think you’re getting a fair deal, go do something else. If people vote with their feet, the government will be forced to offer higher wages. But actually almost nobody does, because people are actually still quite happy with the sweet deal they get as a doctor, so the government can cut their pensions.

No they are different points. How about going to a cornershop and buy a packet of sweets worth 50p and offer 45p. It’s only 5p difference. But you’ll probably be told to bugger off. Principles at stake

No, there isn’t a principle here. If everyone turned round and said “I’m only paying 45p” any half intelligent businessman would drop their prices. Similarly, if they were constantly selling out at 50p, they would put their prices up to 55p. That is how supply and demand works.

If doctors aren’t happy with their pay they need to vote with their feet – don’t work for the NHS (you can practice privately in the UK), go work in a different country (you have the right to work in any other EU country and as a doctor will get a visa for almost any other country too) or change career entirely (why not become a banker, for example).

In the IT industry we offer some really high wages (though not as high as doctors, I might add) because you simply can’t get the staff. They’re like gold dust, there just aren’t enough of them. That drives up wages. We can get the doctors (say what you want about the shortage, we still have a world class healthcare system and the government is so confident in our ability to retain them it’s even slashing pensions), but if there is some point where we can’t, we will have to start offering more money and benefits.

Strikers always make out they are the victim. But you’re never a victim in the free market unless you choose to be.