Archive for April, 2015

Yes, it’s official!

If you are in the City & Hunslet ward of Leeds you can vote for me for Leeds City Council. I’m standing as a candidate for the Official Monster Raving Loony Party.

You can find my personal manifesto here.

CentOS does not always have VIM installed on it. This is easy to fix though:

yum install vim-common vim-enhanced vim-minimal

Run as sudo.

Recently I registered with the new Virgin Money credit card service. They have just taken over the running of their own credit cards from MBNA so everyone has to re-register on their new system.

I selected a 14-character password containing a mixture of upper and lower case letters, numbers and symbols.

Five minutes later I was changing it to a simple easy-to-remember phrase. Why? Because every time I log in to my account I have to enter a set of certain digits from my password.

The problem is that I have no idea what my password is. It is safely secured away in 1password; I never look it at, I never know what it is. But thanks to Virgin Money’s so called security measures, much like other financial organisations do, I am instead forced to use a far more easily crackable password.

If you attempt to run php.exe on Windows you may get an error involving the following DLL.

MSVCR110.dll

The resolution to this is to install “Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2012 Update 4”. Note that you should install the 32-bit version even if you are using a 64-bit operating system!

This can easily catch people out first time, however you can just install the 32-bit version over the top.

How dull.

Where exactly was the debate? There were a few topics, each candidate then said what they stood for in turn. That isn’t a debate. Has nobody who conceived of this show actually seen a debate or understood what a debate is?

There was a bit of back and forth between the candidates, but nobody really got to the meat of it. There were no real discussions of the advantages or disadvantages of different policies.

Nobody even said that much about their policies. If you didn’t already know what each party stood for, would you have watching that? Think of all the Green policies for example. They were hardly mentioned throughout the two hours.

Two of the candidates are not even fielding candidates in most of the country. According to The Guardian, one of the most popular questions after the debate was “can I vote SNP in England?” The answer is no.

Thus the SNP seemed mainly there to chip in “we’ve already done that” when an English politician put forward a good idea. That should probably be a wake-up call – we do trail Scotland on hospital parking charges, prescription charges and preventing letting agents from charing unscrupulous fees.

The one thing that Nigel Farage got right was that he was the only person saying something different. As person after person trailed out the message “we want immigration and to be part of Europe, but we want tighter controls on it”. Their answers blurred into one. Farage was the only person with something different to say. Is that the debate we wanted? One where Farage, king of the bigots, is the one offering an alternative?

Everyone else was too scared to step out of line. Nick Clegg pushed the boat out by asking the rich to pay “a little bit more.” It would have been far better if Natalie Bennett had at this point screamed “we’re going to make the rich pay loads more!” and Cameron to jam in “I think my friends pay quite enough.” But they didn’t.

In summary then, it felt like a complete waste of my time to watch it. Maybe we would be better to have a two party system with the ghost of John Stuart Mill running one party and Arthur Scargill running the other.

Massive success.

Thanks to the hearty contributions of savoury from Anna and sweet from Elina and Gabrielė, we were treated to a rich variety of treats from across Europe. I would have taken some pictures but thanks to the Instragram-generation, you’re now a complete dick if you take a photo of your food.

Instead, here is a picture of a hamster:

Ah Owen Jones, hero of the left. In his book “The Establishment: And how they get away with it” he rails against the man. The man it turns out is politicians, big business and the media. Of course Jones is an Oxford graduate who writes for a national newspaper. It received mixed reviews from the critics (who are also part of The Establishment) but wider support from the proletariat including being Waterstones’ book of the month.

Jones jumps around to various topics, gradually weaving them together. He begins by talking about the links between politicians and big business. Most big businesses have MPs on their boards for example, and cabinet ministers regularly earn £70,000 a year for non-executive directorships. Money that most people can only dream of earning for working full time, let alone for a handful of days year. Being an MP can be incredibly profitable in this manner and yet how can they possibly claim to be objective in such regards?

Thus big business took control of our society after being invited in by Thatcher. This was the end of the drive towards income equality in the UK. They settled down and began to fuse economic liberalism with an authoritarian state.

Jones discusses Hillsborough, though his discussion of the Battle of Orgreave is much more relevant. The police attacked, beat and falsely arrested protestors and then tried to cover it up. After a 7 year battle, they were eventually forced to pay out half a million pounds in compensation. Sadly, things haven’t got much better, as the killing of Ian Tomlinson, a newspaper seller who got caught in the G8 protests shows.

No wonder so many people are too scared to attend protests with the fear of violence, kettling for hours and hours, and false arrest ever present when the police are around.

According to Jones, the police have have become an instrument of the state, going round murdering and raping people without consequence. Their actions rob of us our right to free assembly and protest, and their stop and search powers rob us of our presumption of innocence, even though only 9% of such searches end in arrest, let alone charges being pressed.

So much for the working class being the benefit scroungers too. Jones claims it is the rich that are the beneficiaries of the system. They enjoy the educated workforce, infrastructure and regulated society that the state provides while benefiting from huge government handouts.

The bailout of the banks is an amount of money the rest of us can only dream of. The low pay companies offer the working class is subsides by working tax credits and housing benefit. Companies like ATOS enjoy £100 million a year contracts to turf people off sorely needed benefits while the owners send their children to heavily subsidised public schools that are given £88 million a year in tax-breaks.

Yet the government continues to sell off and privatise our public services. Why? Not because the electorate demand it. Polls show that even most Conservative voters support public ownership of the utilities and railways. More likely, it is the £70,000 a year politicians are receiving for their non-executive board positions.

Jones concludes that we should take back our public services, which could be done at no cost as franchises expire, and increase income tax on the rich to bring in extra money. And it would bring in extra money. Rich people do not leave when you increase the tax rate, because they want to live in a safe and secure society with good utilities, infrastructure and a well-educated workforce. Societies that enjoy heavy state spending.

Just a footnote regarding the book cover above: my copy had a quote from Irvine Welsh on the front, not Russell Brand.

When you paste a link into Facebook or other social networks (which in theory you could use) it generates a preview of the website including a title, image and description.

Webmasters actually have the power to suggest content for these items. This is something I recently implemented on the Leeds Restaurant Guide.

For example, the page is structured with the site name in the title and various images on the pages. However, when you post it into Facebook, it is pretty obvious to a human what information you actually want in there. You want the name of the restaurant and the image of the restaurant itself.

To suggest to the client what information I think would be best in there, I added some meta tags based on the Open Graph Protocol. For example, here is an example from Bibis.

<meta property="og:type" content="article" />
<meta property="og:article:author" conent="Leeds Restaurant Guide" />
<meta property="og:title" content="Bibis Italianissimo review" />
<meta property="og:image" content="http://www.leedsrestaurantguide.com/images/restaurants/Bibis%20Italianissimo.jpg" />

This provides helpful information to the client, usually Facebook, as to what information it should display where, making your site more sharable. Sites like BuzzFeed are all other these sorts of tags – just view their source code to see. This is why they are always so well presented and perhaps one of the reasons why they are so successful.

The Laffer Curve is a representation of the relationship between taxation rates and income. That is to say that it shows how much tax revenue you generate at varying levels of tax rates.

Wikipedia has a good article on it. It discusses some of the theoretical and empirical issues with the curve.

RationalWiki has a far lower quality article on it. It reads like a character assassination. For example, it claims that the Laffer Curve shows we should slash income tax and thus it must be wrong. This is nonsense. The Laffer Curve is a theoretical curve and does not have a concentre plot, so we cannot tell what it suggests.

Even when empirical data is used to actually plot the curve, most of the datasets suggest it should peak somewhere between 65-70%, which would suggest a rise in income tax.

RationalWiki can often be a good source for rubbishing some nonsense that you need to rebut. However, it is not without its own biases and political leanings.

The video is put out by an organisation called Prager University. This piqued my interest because they also have a video called “feminism vs. truth”. I went to their website to have a look around (it’s a .com, rather than an .edu) on which they stated:

Prager University is an online resource promoting knowledge and clarity.

We are not an accredited academic institution. And we don’t want to be.

So not a real university then. Of course I enjoy an angry rant against modern art as much as the next man, but this is just that.