Archive for March, 2012

Last weekend we held our house warming party for our new place. Despite the continued and so far unstoppable process of ageing which continues to haunt us, we managed to keep going until gone 5am and managed to polish off around twenty bottles of various spirits – not to mention George getting through two vase-size snakebites.

We would like to say a big thank you to everyone who contributed to our Gift of Gloves project. We have now received and distributed many pairs of gloves, mittens and extra warm socks, all of which were gratefully received by their recipients.

Last Thursday, I headed down to the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire to see Dan Bye, council member of the National Secular Society, present a talk on Humanism: The National Scene.

I saw Dan speaking last year at Leeds Atheist Society on faith schools and it was a great talk. Thursday was no less interesting, with Dan giving an excellent overview of the non-religious movement in the UK and reminding us that we actually have it better now than we ever have had in our lifetimes. Religion is shrinking and public debate is on the rise.

Recently, there has been quite a lot of discussion around the subject of adoption. People stand in horror that the adoption process is being sped up so that we can match children to adoptive parents in a quicker amount of time.

The phrase you hear most often is that “we need to make sure that perspective parents are suitable.”

But is that really true? I’m going to suggest not.

The reason is, we don’t actually need adoptive parents to be that suitable. Of course if they are brilliant perspective parents then that is fantastic news, but I think we need to take a more pragmatic approach to the whole situation.

After all, these are kids who are usually in care homes. So the question isn’t are we placing them with suitable people, it’s whether we are placing them we a couple who would be at minimum more suitable than living in a care home.

We know that a care home isn’t a good environment to bring a child up in, we’ve done the research and statically it doesn’t end as well. So the question then becomes, what exactly would be the harm in having a more relaxed attitude to adoption?

On Thursday, 1 December I received a letter from my letting agent, Walker Singleton, stating they would be terminating my tenancy because they had to sell the apartment on behalf of the mortgage company. I was shocked and alarmed at the idea of having to leave me home, so I phoned their office. Multiple times. They never answered.

I eventually managed to speak to them the next day, and said that if they had to sell the apartment, I would just buy it (at the asking price!), it would be cheaper for them, it would be cheaper for me, no one would have to move, everyone is a winner.

They said no, claiming they had to sell it with vacant possession, and if I wanted it I would have to move out, wait for it go on the market, then buy it and move back in.

I went away and discussed this with a few people, and it didn’t make sense to any of us. So on the Monday I rang them back and explained to them the situation in more detail, and that HSBC had said they would give me a mortgage, so this really was an easy win for the both of us.

They said no. I asked why repeatedly but they wouldn’t give me a straight answer, just saying they couldn’t do it. I then asked if I could speak to the owner of the property, or the mortgage provider. They said that wasn’t possible, but wouldn’t explain why.

So I went to the Land Registry and got the title register for the property and found that the lender was Mortgage Express. So I phoned Mortgage Express and they put me through to Possessions. Possessions said they hadn’t taken possession yet, so I would have to speak to Late Arrears. So I phoned their help desk back again and asked to be put through to Late Arrears.

They said they couldn’t discuss anything to do with the property other than to confirm that someone had a mortgage on it, but because I wasn’t the account holder I wasn’t allowed any further information.

I also tracked the guy down on LinkedIn

Hi Richard,

I’m a tenant of yours, currently living at an apartment you own – Crown Street Buildings in Leeds. I’m just looking for some more information about what is going on, as I’ve been served an eviction notice.

Best wishes,
Chris Worfolk

He never got back to me.

So now I’ve moved out and everyone seems to have come away with a loss. Bad times.

Archive is a cool MySQL storage engine designed for fast inserts. In fact, it’s so optimised for this that it actually only supports INSERT and SELECT – you can’t run UPDATE or DELETE commands against it at all.

This is a problem when developing though, as you’ll often want to empty out the table and start again. But because it doesn’t support delete operations, it won’t actually let you truncate the table! So to answer the question posed in the article title – you can’t.

Therefore, you have two options.

Firstly, you can drop the table and re-create it. This is the recommended way from MySQL, so make sure you have a copy of the table creation command handy.

The second option, the lazy hacky way if you will, is to change the table storage engine over to InnoDB or MyISAM, truncate the table, and then turn it back to ARCHIVE ;).

If you store passwords as part of a PHP script, you may be using md5() or sha1() to hash the password. This is common practice, but you may be suprised to know that actually, the PHP manual recommends against it.

The reason is that they are both fast but relatively insecure hashing algorithms that can be brute forced by modern computer systems if they get hold of the strings. A better approach is to use the crypt() function, which is a little more expensive in terms of resources, but worth it for the increased difficultly you create for any potential hackers.

As a belated Valentine’s Day present, I recently took Elina to Paris for four days. We took a plane there.

Needless to say, it was incredibly stressful, but once you put aise the horror of travelling it was a fantastic place to be – these two extremes balance the entire trip out to an average response of “it was ok.”

Also, my “translator” girlfriend, refused to speak to anyone on the trip, so I had to do all the talking, despite not speaking a word of French for over a decade. Another lie in her backstory is revealed. But anyway…

Paris is a gorgeous city. We were fairly central – just five minutes walk from Notre Dame Cathedral, so we spent our nights walking the banks of the Senn and listening to groups of jazz musicians freestyle by the river. Not that you have to be central – the beautiful buildings seem to go on for miles and miles, all in the same Parisian style.

We got the open top bus tour tickets that they sell everywhere Рeven Leeds Рso we could just hop on and off, allowing us to work our way round the Arc de Triomphe, Eiffel Tower, Place de la Concorde and do some shopping on the Champs Elys̩es as well as seeing the Louvre, Notre Dame Cathedral and the Panthelon, which were all only a short walk away.

I wasn’t expecting a great deal from our hotel room given my experiences in other capitols, but it turns out we had got one of their “executive suites” (LateRooms FTW) so it turned out to be massive, with an en suite that was bigger than entire hotel rooms I have stayed in in London, and a balcony overlooking the streets below.

I was also shocked at how cheap it was to eat out – the restaurants in the Latin quarter offer three course meals for €10 and there was more food than I could eat! On the last night I treated myself to the €15 menu (which is still half what I would expect to pay in Leeds!) and had an amazing duck in orange sauce (or a Canard a l’orange if you will) as well as snails, muselles and some beautiful desserts.

I recently returned from Paris (I’m not bragging or anything), and one thing I noticed was that I only saw two people wearing the hijab (Islamic headscarf) the whole time I was there (four days). I saw nobody wearing a burka either, though that is to be expected given it is now illegal in France.

One explanation for this could be that there are simply very few Muslims in Paris, but given the multicultural nature of any large capitol, that seems unlikely. A more likely explanation, at least if I was to take an educated guess, is that the French have managed to create a society in which is the Islamic community does not feel oppressed (and therefore needs cultural signifiers such as head scarves) and is able to integrate. Perhaps we’ve simply got it very wrong in the UK, and the segregation many communities are seeing, is the result.

The Humanist Chaplaincy Network has just re-launched its programme. You can now find updated information about what we do and how it all working including a new “About HCN” booklet which can be downloaded from the membership information page of the website.