If you’re running CentOS, you may find yourself frustrated that you have GCC 4.2 or older, when you need to be running at least 4.3 for some features – for example, if you want to compile HipHop for PHP.
Never fear, you don’t need to compile a compiler from source!
As well as the gcc RPMs in the repository, there are also a set for GCC 4.4, appropriately enough named gcc44 and you can install them in the usual way.
yum install gcc44 g++44
I’m a bit strapped for cash at the moment, so you can imagine how excited I was when I received the following email.
Attn:
My name is Captain David Kelly, a Liberian soldier who served in the NATO force, that brought an end to era of late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.
In one of the raids I found the sum of USD13.5M stolen and hidden in a cave and I am writing to you to assist me in receiving the fund so that after my service I will come to your country for investment of the fund in any lucrative business of your choice.
Please, if this offer appeals to you do let me know, so that full information will be communicated to you More importantly, I suggest you keep this transaction with utmost confidentiality.
Sincerely,
Captain David Kelly
The question is though, how did I know he was legitimate? I thought it best to ask him.
Dear Captain Kelly,
That sounds too good to be true. How do I know you are legitimate?
Yours faithfully,
Rev Chris Worfolk
He emailed me back a week later to reassure me.
Dear Rev Chris Worfolk,
Thanks for taking time to understudy my email and for your response; in answer to the question about my legitimacy, I assure you that this is real and risk free.
I thought about leaving the money behind but changed my mind when I remembered that this was stolen money which probably was meant to sponsor terrorism. You will agree with me that the best option was to take the money and invest it into something positive.
Therefore, I solicit for your assistance so that you receive this fund and invest it on any profitable business of your choice and on our behalf.
If really you are interested please furnish me with the following details to enable me link you up with the security company where the fund was deposited by my personal aid.
FULL NAME:
MAILING ADDRESS:
TELEPHONE NUMBER:Waiting for your response.
Yours faithfully,
Captain David Kelly
Well, what a relief. He has assured me that he was real, and risk free! I emailed him back.
Dear Captain David Kelly,
Thank you for your response. I must confess I am most excited by the prospect. In a stroke of good fortune I received an email from my brother last week. He moved to America some years ago and is currently looking for investment to start a farm. What an ideal opportunity I thought to myself!
However, I am curious as to how the transfer would be made? And on what terms?
Look forward to hearing from you.
Yours faithfully,
Rev Chris Worfolk
He got back to me with full details.
Rev Chris Worfolk,
Again thanks for your email. It is a great opportunity for your brother if he can accept and invest this money in his proposed farm firm.
To effectively carry out this fund transfer, I have made a concrete arrangement for the security company where the fund was deposited as family treasure to effectively get the consignment to you or your brother without hitches.
The fund was concealed and deposited as family treasures to avoid attracting heavy taxes associated with such huge fund transaction. Upon successful movement of the fund to you, we will share it to the ration of 50-50% and have it jointly invested in your brother proposed farm firm, or what do you think?
Please write the security company with the following email address and inform them that you are the beneficiary of the deposited treasure and keep me updated with your communications with them.
Yours faithfully,
Captain David Kelly
I decided it was best to explain about my brother’s farm in full.
Dear Captain David Kelly,
Yes, I am most excited about the prospect. I don’t fully understand what he does, as I am a man of God rather than a man of science, but he believes he has found a way to breed miniature pigs so that they could be sold to restaurants who could serve the phone pig, dressed with head and all, to their customers.
Such an arrangement sounds more than fair. Very good thinking in depositing it as a family treasure. Do I need to supply the security company with any kind of reference or account number when I contact them?
Yours faithfully,
Rev Chris Worfolk
As it would happen, I didn’t need to give them a reference number or proof or identity, because they would just know who I am. Brilliant.
Dear Rev Chris Worfolk,
Thanks for your response, thought it took you quite some time to reply. Just write the security company and inform them that you were referred by me in respect of the consignment deposited with them in your name.
From there, they will furnish you with all the delivery details. I have hereby handed over the business of receiving the consignment to you on trust as I am not disposed to constant communication due to my work schedule.
I trust that you will handle this transaction effectively. Once again here is the Security Company’s detail:
ALPHA SECURITY SERVICES LTD UK
Email: alphasec.ukltd@yahoo.co.ukYours sincerely,
Captain David Kelly
All going well so far. So I sent the security company an email, explaining the situation.
To whom it may concern:
I was recently contacted by Captain David Kelly who has referred me to you, in order to help him move his family fortune out of Libya. He instructed me to write to you, and that you would furnish me with further details.
Yours faithfully,
Rev Chris Worfolk
They emailed me back a form to complete.
Attention: Rev Chris Worfolk
Please view our letter with regards to the consignment with us by Captain David Kelly of which you are the beneficiary.
We await your response with regards to our demands.
Yours faithfully,
Bernard David
Manager, Treasury Department
Alpha Security Services (UK) Ltd
I had a few questions though, which I responded with.
Dear Bernard,
First of all, let me thank you for all your hard work in assisting Captain David Kelly and myself so far.
Having recently spoke to Captain David Kelly, he informs me that he may be away for some time due to his hectic work schedule. I trust that this will not interfere with the process of transferring the consignment?
Now, the consignment is eventually destined to be invested in my brother’s farm. He runs a pig farm you see, and has managed to breed miniature pigs so that the whole animal may be presented to the customer, dressed of course, at a local restaurant he supplies.
To better illustrate, I have attached a picture I have drawn. Please do not laugh at its crudeness – I am the first one to admit that I am no artist, but I thought it would better help illustrate his business model.
Therefore, I wonder whether it would be best to have the consignment transferred straight to his address, or whether it is necessary for it to pass through my hands first? I will leave this to your advice, as you are after all the expert on such matters.
Yours faithfully,
Rev Chris Worfolk
Below is the picture I attached.
I presume they liked the picture, and emailed me back straight away.
Dear Rev Chris Worfolk,
This is to acknowledge receipt of your detailed email, however, I am sorry to inform you that all documentation on Captain David’s instructions have been registered in your name and it will take quite some time to reverse this documentations.
Please let us continue dealing directly with you to avoid deviating from our agreement with Captain David. Thank you.
Kindly furnish us with your direct telephone number for easier communication since we find out that it takes you more time to respond through email.
Find here attached the consignment’s certificate of deposit in your name.
All things being equal by Monday the delivery arrangements would have been concluded and delivery will commence.
Yours faithfully,
Bernard David
Manager, Treasury Department.
Part two is coming tomorrow.
EDIT: Part two is now available here.
Worfolk 18 is pleased to announce we’re expanding our existing range of adult entertainment websites with our first gay offering – Gay Men 365. Updated with a new photo every single day!
This month saw the AGM of the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire. It was a rather well attended affair, at least for an AGM, which normally sees people stay away. This year, I had volunteered to give a short talk as well, so hopefully that proved to be a bit more of a draw.
While it’s pretty much business as usual, I will be changing my role from a general committee member to treasurer of the society. We’re also going to gauge interest in bringing over bigger speakers over the next year, so we will see how that goes.
Louis Theroux’s latest documentary sees him revisit a documentary he did 15 years ago, about the adult industry.
It’s makes me feel very old that the documentary is now fifteen years ago, though with that recently having been screened alongside it brought back some interesting memories – for example in the original, Louis actually appeared in one of the films. He was just an extra, and kept his clothes on, but I’m sure it provides him with a great dinner party anecdote none the less.
I actually felt his blog post about it was more enlightening than the documentary itself was, mostly with him just re-visiting people he had previously seen. A lot of what I saw made sense, but only because of the added commentary I had already read from Louis’s writing (to which I would link to but I can’t remember where I read it; it wasn’t on his official blog).
The industry is described as being one in crisis as YouTube still porn sites overtake the DVD market.
This seems somewhat obviously (as if anyone buys DVDs these days, the new MacBook Pro doesn’t even come with a DVD drive) and rather than it putting them hard times, it seems more that, as with most markets, changes happen and the industry needs to adapt.
The traditional film and music industries are good example of this. Internet piracy is apparently destroying the music industry, but it’s been destroying it since people started making recordings on casette tapes and yet somehow it has survived all these decades.
But to suggest that the internet has prevented the music industry from making any money is simply nonsense. Apple, with its iTunes music store, is now the most valuable company on the planet, ahead of oil giants and banks. Spotify is looking like it will soon be posting profits and as for the film industry, last year LoveFilm sold for £200,000,000. There is clearly money to be made for this willing to adapt to the changing conditions.
The adult industry is the same. People aren’t throwing money at mail order DVDs anymore, but to say that nobody pays for porn anymore is simply untrue. Just like at the rapid expansion of Kink.com who in 2006 were so profitable that they could afford to spend $14,000,000 on the historic San Francisco Armory to use as a film studio. Plenty of new opportunities have arisen too – cam sites for example is a huge opportunity to take a massive cut out of the strip club market, in the same way that live dealers on gambling sites have taken a cut out of the casino market.
When I first entered the adult market in 2004, it was all about pushing paid content sites. Now the landscape has changed – it’s now about pushing dating sites (I use the term dating sites loosely, casual sex sites would probably be a more appropriate name) because that is where consumers are spending their money these days. They’re not spending less, just as I don’t spend any less on digital music than I did on CDs, they’re just spending it in different ways and you have to change your business model to adapt to this.
If the industry wants to survive and thrive, it needs to be willing to role with the times.
Mustache is a logic-less templating system, written by people who apparently can’t spell moustache correctly.
It has been ported to almost every popular language ranging from PHP to C++, though it has its origins in Ruby. It isn’t just useful for HTML either – you can also use it for things like config files.
The idea behind it is that templates are logic-less. It divided the traditional view into two parts – a view which is a class in your host language, and a template which is the Mustache markup. The view class can also be an associative array, like you would pass with a traditional templating system, but using a class allows you to easily make use of functions.
It produces very clean mark-up – you simply place your variables in curly braces (or double moustaches if you will) like {{so}} and they are swapped out. Repeating sections are handled by {{#sections}} that repeat based on lists {{/sections}} or are just used once to display or not, instead of using if statements.
The advantage is that you get templates which are almost logic free. I saw almost because of course you do still have repeating elements and tags in there designed to replicate if statements. But there are no logical statements in there – just tags!
The disadvantage is that it means doing a bit more work with your views. MVC already splits out the stack into three components and Mustache divides the view one step further.
One of the drinks I missed most since I stopped drinking alcohol is Rekorderlig. It’s like Kopparberg, but a lot nicer, there is more of a fruit taste in it. Luckily, when you are in a country full of alcoholics, they cater for such a niche.
Alkoholiton is Finnish for alcohol free. It’s amazing! Devastatingly, since returning to the UK I had a search around on the internet to see if anyone imports it, but it seems not.
Apache comes with a cool load testing script called Apache Bench, which lets you throw loads of requests at a URL. It comes bundled with Apache, so if you’re running the LAMP stack, you probably already have it.
The syntax is simple.
ab -n 1000 http://www.google.com/
This will throw a thousand requests at Google and then produce a report on how long it look. You can also use the -c option to set the number of concurrent requests. There are lots more options too – see the Apache docs for full details.
Now that I am self employed, I hate holidays. It’s fine to say, well I budget for that in my earnings, but when it actually comes to taking time off and doing the maths surrounding it, it’s very hard to make that decision.
Therefore, given I was forced to take a four day weekend for the Jubilee, we decided to fit in a cheeky trip to Finland to go see Elina’s family.
As if I didn’t hate flying enough, it turns out Finnair were running a new programme trial in which instead of feeding us, they didn’t feed us. Rubbish,
I had previous met her mum who provided us with a warm welcome and some amazing cooking. Indeed, she cooked so much that we ended up having beef and chicken for breakfast the next day too! I’m hoping it will become the new traditional Finnish breakfast.
It’s a really beautiful country and not called the land of a thousand lakes without good reason.
We had to drive through quite a bit of forest to get to the lakes. No wonder Finland produces so many rally drivers, it was ace.
On Monday we went to Turku, one of the larger cities where Elina went to university. It was mostly full of sex shops that offered live shows and a river that you would never want to drink from, but was nice never the less.
Then, in the evening, we travelled up north to Rauma so we could eat at a restaurant that served reindeer steak.
It was a lovely traditional restaurant, and the food was excellent.
After a long day of adventuring, Moomintroll was very tired.
Thank you so much to Elina’s mum and brother who put us up for the three days.
At the most recent Toastmasters meeting, I took on my second role as Grammarian. This involved introducing the word of the day, which I had chosen to be jubilant (after giving a short rant about how we should abolish the monarchy), as well was watching out for good uses of grammar and interesting phrases.