Archive for February, 2013

Last month, Paul Hopwood presented his talk “You Know Less Than You Think.” I have already blogged about it, but this time, I’ve got pictures. Also, if you missed the talk, don’t worry as it was the 2012 Worfolk Lecture, so you can watch the Leeds Skeptics event online.

Sometimes you might want to install an MSI on your Windows system, without being logged in as an administrator. Normally, you would just right click and select “Run as Administrator” but this option is not available on MSIs.

Instead, right click on “Command Prompt” in the start menu, then select “Run as Administrator”. Once this is running, use the msiexec command to execute the MSI.

msiexec /i Filename.msi

This will then run the installer using administrative privileges.

Happy Copernicus Day!

I’m drawing a line across the emails that Twitter continue to send me.

For months and months they have continued to send me updates on what is going on, what people have saying, stuff that isn’t even an interaction with me. Every single time I get such an email, I click the unsubscribe found at the bottom of the email, and Twitter.com appears to tell me I will no longer receive that kind of notification.

But I continue to get them.

No matter how many times, no matter how many different notifications I turn off, they find some new category to send me emails. So enough is enough. Any future emails are getting forwarded to MailFoundry’s spam monitor address and flagged as spam in my own email client.

Recently, Sky did a hack day – the idea was that you could take a day to work on any project you wanted, as long as it was vaguely business related. Then at the end of the day, everyone came together to demo what they had done.

It was a cool idea, and most people really enjoyed it, though I was fairly non-plussed. I couldn’t get my project working, on a number of angles, so didn’t really have much to show by the end of it (I had a demo, but as I couldn’t integrate it into the product, I didn’t think it worth showing). I think if I had actually worked for Sky though, I would have been far more motivated by such an event.

You may be familiar with John Sweeney, a war reporter who has also turned his interest onto the Church of Scientology, making the 2007 Panorama documentary, “Scientology & Me.” Since making that, he received a leaked set of communications documenting how he was followed (the Church denies they are genuine) and spoken to some of the people who followed him, but have since left the Church.

Most of this was retold in a follow up documentary he made for Panorama, but he has now written a book about it too, The Church of Fear.

At a rather bargain price of around £3.50 on Kindle, I decided to give it a read. It comes it an 336 pages, which I checked upon before making the claim “it’s reasonable short” – apparently it isn’t, I just assumed it was because I read the entire thing in two sittings – only having purchased it last night. Instead, I think that provides testament to what an interesting read it is.

One thing that did freak me out a little though – as I put the book down so we could head out for dinner, my phone began to ring. I didn’t answer as I recognised the number – it was the Church of Scientology London.

If you are running MySQL replication, you may find that the structure of a table is brought over, but not the data. You can troubleshoot this by logging into the slave MySQL and showing the status.

SHOW SLAVE STATUS \G;

You may find an error similar to the following.

Table definition on master and slave does not match: 
Column 1 size mismatch - master has size 150, example_db.test_table 
on slave has size 50. Master's column size should be <= the slave's column size.

This is usually caused because you are using different character sets. In the example above, the master is set to UTF8 (utf8_general_ci) while the slave database is set up in Latin1. You can fix this in two ways (and should probably do both).

First, to change the database, log into phpMyAdmin and go to the operations tab. Here you change it from the dropdown and then hit save.

Secondly, you should change the default charset in MySQL to be UTF8 (you could also change it to Latin1 if that is what your master is running but in this day and age, everything should really be running UTF8). You can do this by editing your my.cnf.

[mysqld]
default-character-set=utf8

After editing it, you will need to restart MySQL. Any databases created from then on will default to UTF8.

Happy Galileo Day! Leeds is lucky enough to be hosting two Feasts in honour of the man – one at Fazenda at lunchtime and one at Browns this evening. Tomorrow, also sees Leeds Skeptics host the 2013 Galileo Day Lecture, Brian Quinn with a talk entitled “Superstition – The Odd Delusion”.

For my seventh project in my Toastmasters Competent Communicator manual, “research your topic”, I presented a talk entitled “Were the Catholics Framed?” This looked at whether the gunpowder plot was actually a set up by the Protestants, to frame the Catholics and increase the persecution.

Much like the arguments made that 9-11 was allowed to create an excuse to invade Afghanistan, the claims against 5-11 are almost certainly untrue as well. Not that there isn’t good evidence, but if you compare it to the Moon Landings, there is what looks like good evidence to suggest they were faked too – but when you dig a little deeper, you soon find the evidence isn’t so good, and you need very good evidence to belief a conspiracy theory.

I felt the talk went well, and managed to see off some good competition to take another Best Speaker ribbon – my fifth overall, and forth in a row. That said, there is certainly some room for improvement.

Part of my talk included a letter, which I read out, but having learned the letter I decided not to glance at it. This was a risky strategy because it might look to some people as if the letter wasn’t genuine, and indeed one person said he had wondered this. The letter was of course genuine, I had just prepared reasonably well, but maybe a few fake glances down at it would have been helpful.

Given the time constraints, I also cut some material out and hoped that it still all made sense. It did, except perhaps for my use of the word recusancy – the act of not attending CoE services, a crime that Catholics were often fined for.

I also felt I could have worked more movement into the speech, though nobody pulled me up on this in the evaluation or feedback. In any case there is work to do – as I write this, we are only 26 days away from the first round of the Public Speaking World Championships – and I haven’t started my speech yet!

Last week, we all gathered round to watch the third most watched sporting event in the world – the Super Bowl.

Actually, I don’t know where those figures are from. The reality is, we have almost no idea what the most watched events in the world are, but if we did, it probably would point to the Olympics. But it’s safe to say a fair few people were watching with us.

While ultimately, my favourite team, the San Francisco 49ers, lost to the Baltimore Ravens, a good night was had by all, and no one went away bitter about the fact that the 49ers only lost because the judges refused to throw a flag for the blatant pass interference against Michael Crabtree on the 4th and goal that decided the match. No one.

As usual at these sorts of events, we made too much food, allowing us to spend another two days living off ribs and wings – and what a happy two days they were.

It is also worth noting that Chris Culliver netted himself $40,000 for his appearance – more than a lot of my friends earn in an entire year. I guess homophobia does pay after all. I hate it when life works out like that.