This month’s Humanist Community of Leeds was looking very promising with the glorious sunshine that the weekend had experienced. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite last until Sunday evening, but it was an enjoyable evening none the less. With food now served until 10pm we were a little less under pressure to get started and enjoyed a long evening of discussions that was arguable even more political than normal.
I’m currently consulting at a small software house in Leeds city centre and we’re making continuous integration a big thing.
Initially, we started off using CruiseControl which integrates nicely with phpUnderControl. Unfortunately, phpUC is now seriously showing its age – many of the components simply didn’t work anymore and it still uses phpDocumentor, a project that was abandoned years ago to the point where it is now unusable with modern code (though I’m glad to see the project has recently been rescued and a 2.0 version is being developed).
As a result, we’ve now switched to Jenkins and it’s really working out well. it seamlessly integrates with Subversion and using the Ant build script we’re able to integrate PHPUnit, PHP CodeSniffer, PHP Copy & Paste Detector and PHP Mess Detector, all of which provide great feedback on the standard of code which is being written.
You can then varying the log level and what classes as a failed build, so if you want to ensure everything is absolutely perfect, you can have Jenkins email you every time someone doesn’t quite space their code out right, or adds a local variable that they never use. Then again, you can just have that stuff running in the background and check it when you have time.
One issue you might run into when first integrating such tools is that builds can take a long time to run – CodeSniffer and Mess Detector can take up to 10 minutes each even on a small code, when there are lots of issues to resolve. However, once you have resolved most of these issues you will find that they run quickly again and should be able to get your build time down to a couple of minutes on even a large codebase.
It boggles the mind that people still use imperial measurements.
They just don’t make any sense in a decimal number system (which is the number system we all use – based around tens). I mean what is it? You have an inch, and there are 12 of those in a foot, and there are three of those in a yard and there are 1760 of those in a mile? Nobody can make an argument for that being a better system of measurement!
But if you ask people how tall they are, or how much they weigh, you often get an imperial measurement back. Or a slap if you’ve just asked a fat girl. But mostly an imperial measurement. Once you make the leap, you realise how silly it was, but we’re never going to win hearts and minds by lambasting people; we need a positive approach.
So here are five great reasons to make an effort to use the metric system…
1. Your penis is longer. Why settled for a six inch penis when you can have a 15 centimetre one?
2. Why have a pint of beer, when you can have a litre?
3. Using the metric system annoys the Bible Belt who believe it is a Communist plot.
4. You can drive at over 100 kmph legally, you can’t do that in mph without risking instant disqualification.
5. Even drug dealers have started to use the metric system now. How will you know if you’re getting a good price if you don’t know what 50 grams are?
I really enjoyed Louis Theroux’s recent two documentaries, Extreme Love, even if they were both heartbreaking.
The first, which looked at autism focused on a specialist school in New Jersey. What struck me first though was that I was somewhat thrown as to what I was watching. Was this a special school for autism, or a special school for fat kids?
It sounds like a joke, but I was genuinely shocked as to how many of the children at the school were significantly overweight. Has obesity in the United States become such an epidemic that it has now become so shocking to the rest of the world?
Probably not. A quick google around suggests that obesity is particularly prevelant in children with autism. They use data which is now eight years old and even back then, over 30% of children with autism were reported to be overweight.
This compares with 23% of children who do not suffer from autism – still a very high number though.
I’ve started to pile on some pounds (we really need to come up with an updated term that reflects the metric system I know and love) recently, to the point where I’ve gone from the most perfect weight a human being has ever weighed to having only four kilograms of wiggle room before I’m no longer in my target BMI.
It’s very distressing because I lead, on the whole, a very healthily lifestyle and if Rob Lyons is to be believed you could probably even drop the “on the whole” qualification.
Still, after a long day of carrying my fat body around, I do enjoy sitting down and catching up on Stuart Ritchie’s Twitter feed, which provides a refreshing change from the normally interlectually void stream of inane nonsense that normally comes through (Alex, Lil and George while at Fab, though I enjoy that stuff as well).
Recently, he tweeted about a new report which suggests that female body dissatisfaction is primary caused by inter-peer competitiveness, and not the media.
Based on the results of the study, the report concludes that media exposure actually has minimal impact on how unhappy women are with their bodies, in comparison to the significant effect that inter-peer competitiveness has.
So why are we always being told that it’s the media that are ruining our teenage daughters?
This reminds me the video games cause violent crime argument. It was a fact that a lot of people spread, and then we looked at the actual evidence and it turned out that video games do not cause violent crime. Though even after that, people continue to toot that horn.
In both cases, you have to wonder who is spreading this? Presumedly, it isn’t the media trying to give themselves a bad name (of course it could be different sectors of the media attacking each other). Is it just genuinely honest but misinformed people running pressure groups? Do we just assume that it is the case because it seems to fit the puzzle?
If you want to change your timezone on Debian, use the following command.
dpkg-reconfigure tzdata
Introducing Village Chief, a fun strategy game that allows you to come the Chief of a village and grow it into a flourishing community.
We’re very pleased to announce this first beta version. You start the game with some villages, gold and buildings to get you started. You can then expand your village by buying more houses, farms and even a bank. As you grow, your villagers will procreate and pay you taxes too – money you can use to expand your village!
At a recent Atheist Society meeting, Karel du Pauw provided a brick by brick deconstruction fo any claim that Jesus could have been a historial figure.
A similarly great deconstruction, though not as comprehensive as Karel’s, is provided by the film The God Who Wasn’t There and it is a subject I have previously touched on even though I don’t believe the question makes any sense.
Such talks really bring things into focus – not just for the fact that the Bible isn’t true, but also open up interesting questions about why people believe in it. Clearly, it isn’t because it makes sense from a historical perspective. There is simply no evidence that King Herrod had all the babies killed, there has never been anything like people having to return to their hometown for some kind of Roman census and there are someone simply forgot to tell the earlier writers of the books of the Bible that Jesus was an actual historical figure that actually lived on Earth.
Yet, lots of people, sometimes even smart people (though statically far less often than less smart people) believe it.
To me, it is a stark reminder of why it is so vital that we have groups like the Atheist Society. Clearly, rational thinking and evidence are not the only forces at work when people make a decision as to whether follow a religion or not. There are emotional factors to be considered too, and if we can’t provide for those in the same way that religious institutions do, critical thinking won’t win hearts and minds.
That’s life on a planet in a binary star system.
Having pushed back my leaving do at Buzz Sports to accommodate the other four people who were leaving, it turned out it handed directly on top of the first social event of the new organisation I’m now consulting with.
I know what you’re thinking – the obvious thing to do would have been to constantly make excuses about going to the bathroom and then rapidly running between venues pretending I was simultaneously attending both events in some kind of sitcom setup.
Unfortunately, I eventually opted for something far more pedestrian. Having worked round Sandinista, The Lounge, Mojo’s, Fibre, Revolution and Call Lane Social with Gooroo, I headed over to Maven to find the Buzz crew. By this point (11pm) there were only two of them left standing – Simundo and Ian.
As it turns out, Maven is quite a find (and number two in the best kept secrets in the UK, according to Ian). They don’t seem to have cocktail menus – I just went up to the bar and told them what ingredients I liked and two minutes later I was sipping on a very nice raspberry based long drink. Delicious. Further investigation is definitely required.
I recently joined Toastmasters, a public speaking club which isn’t a cult (lets be clear about that from the start).
The most recent meeting of the club saw me take on a role for the first time. A role basically follows the definition of the word – each week the different roles be it chair (or Toastmaster if you will), Time Keep, Grammarian, Evaluators, etc are taken on by different people so you get experience doing lots of different things.
As Ah Counter, my job was to watch out for people using crutch words – these are words such as “well” that you might add to buy time in the middle of a sentence, or “ahs”, “umms” and “erms” – none of which are needed and can be replaced by a dramatic pause.
It was fun though sometimes I found myself so consumed in focusing on my specific part that I was almost missing what else was going on around me.