Chris Worfolk's Blog

When we ran events at the University of Leeds, everyone was welcome. But, as they were our events, we insisted on white people sitting at the front, and black people sitting at the back.

That isn’t true.

But imagine if it was – how shocking! How outrageous! To be clear, given I’m known for my sarcastic nature, I am being entirely serious here – obviously it would be completely unacceptable. I genuinely do mean unacceptable – people would not accept it. The good people of Leeds would rise up against me and say “No! We’re not going to tolerate your bigoted views!”

As I said, we hold no such views. But imagine if you replaced the term “we” with “Islamic Society” and the racial segregation with a segregation based on how many X chromosomes you have – another property that, like skin colour, you have absolutely no control of. That is exactly what you get happening up and down the country.

I haven’t been to an Islamic Society run event at Leeds, so I can’t comment on their events, but I have been to Nottingham Trent where they had separate entrances for men and women, Richard Dawkins regularly tweets about segregation at UCL and last time Bob went to Bradford University he ended up making a protest about the whole thing when he refused to move after inadvertently sitting down in a row designated for women – these aren’t one-off incidents, they are happening all over the country.

Firstly, just segregation is just as bad as racial segregation – those who implement such systems are bigots. Yet the irony is that when we call these bigots on their bigoted views, they then try and say we’re racist for not respecting their bigoted religion.

Secondly though, were are the masses standing up against this kind of behaviour?

I’m proud that we have freedom of expression in this country. This means that Nick Griffin can stand up and say he doesn’t like gays – which is undesirable – but at least when he does, a million people stand up and tell him how wrong he is! That is why freedom of expression works, because everyone gets a voice and when bigots stand up and shout, we shout louder than they do.

But when one of the bigoted leaders of Islam stands up and demands segregation, where are the voices that cry out in defiance? They seem to fall silent.

Is it that all Islamists are bigots? I doubt it. None of my Islamist friends are bad people – otherwise I wouldn’t be friends with them. I think it says more about the evils of religion, than it does about the people following it.

Religion brainwashes people. There is no other word for it. It gets them to do things that typical human beings would not agree to, whether it is murdering abortion doctors, blowing yourself up, or supporting segregation whether it be racial, gender or down any other lines.

If Islamists want to convince people that their religion is one of peace and harmony, perhaps they should start by calling out their leaders on the hurtful, bigoted views they spread in university lecture halls up and down the country.

Last Thursday, the Trinity Leeds shopping centre opened. On Friday, it snowed. This presented quite a few problems for the new shopping centre, whose website claims it is the largest in the UK, even though we know that’s not the case (as if it wasn’t obvious to anyone who was walked around Meadowhall, that in itself is only the 8th biggest).

Snow settles on the roof
The large glass roof that covers the centre over will no doubt be magical in ideal conditions, but with a lot of it being fairly flat, the snow just settles on top of it. As a consequence, it almost felt a little gloomy over the weekend because all you could see when you looked up was a thick layer of snow.

It’s very cold
The centre isn’t actually enclosed, it just has a roof over it. The result is that when it is cold, it is cold inside as well because there is nothing to keep the heat in. This would be fine, but at least one of the restaurants has most of their seating outside, which is then rendered useless by our wintery conditions.

It snows inside the centre
Another rather unfortunate consequence of not having a sealed roof is that when it snows outside, it snows inside as well. Walking though the centre on Saturday felt like just being outside as as much snow seemed to be falling inside as it was outside.

Speaking of speech contests, here is my area winning speech from the humorous speaking contest last September.

If you’re using BDD (Cucumber or Behat for example) with Selenium, you may find you occasionally get an error where the framework is unable to communicate with the Selenium server.

Failed to connect to 127.0.0.1: Cannot assign requested address

This seems to occur when there are two many requests going to Selenium. This can be alleviated be rewriting your tests to ensure you are now sending too many requests at once.

For example, if you’re using Behat/Mink, then avoid using the wait() function on the Session object, as this can cause excessive requests to be sent to Selenium.

Last Thursday law the club level competition for the International Speech Contest.

I’m pleased to say I won the Leeds City contest and will be advancing on to the area level contest in April. I was looking forward to facing off against one of our club’s Distinguished Toastmasters, but he unfortunately dropped out. Never the less, Dinesh provided some tough competition.

If you missed it, don’t worry, the White Rose Speakers competition is happening on the 27th, so you can attend that one instead!

With Michelle back in town, we headed down to 51% Bourbon for some drinks.

Where better to celebrate a birthday than Blackhouse?

While up in the Dales, we found some ponies.

Last weekend, we headed up to the Yorkshire Dales for Elina’s birthday. We stayed at Hollins Hall, which is part of the Marriot chain.

It was quite a nice hotel, they have a big pool, although there were people in it which was always annoying and their spa bath was a bit rubbish. It was nice to have a decent length pool though.

The service was excellent, and the staff were friendly.

We dined in their Heathcliff’s Restaurant, which was OK, though I was a little disappointed by the roast, as the Yorkshire pudding was a bit hard and crispy. The white chocolate sauce that came with the profiteroles was a winner though.

Sometimes you need to put a constraint on a whole class, rather than a single value. Duplicate usernames are a good example of this – you don’t want to be able to set a username to one that is already in use – but if it is in use with the user you are currently working on, you don’t want to flag it up as an error!

Lets use that as an example. You have a Username constraint and a UsernameValidator object to do the actual validation. We need to supply the validator an object, so we need to put the following method inside the Username object.

public function getTargets()
{
    return self::CLASS_CONSTRAINT;
}

This will turn the first parameter in our isValid function in the UsernameValidator class to an object.

public function isValid($user, Constraint $constraint)

Finally, you can call the constraint from your YAML validation file.

User:
    constraints:
        - nocs:UniqueUsername: ~

Normally, under user you would have getters and properties – but here we’re adding a new section named “constraints” which lists all the class constraints.