Chris Worfolk's Blog

A proposal by the government to introduce regional variation in public sector pay has been greatly discussed in recent times. The idea is that because the cost of living is more expensive in one place and less expensive in others, pay should variety to reflect that.

Having listened to the arguments on Question Time last Thursday, one of the suggestions was that, taking teachers as an example, the areas which have higher pay would then become magnets for the best teachers and other areas would be left with lower standards.

This completely misses the argument that the cost of living is different and therefore the pay would simply reflect this – in actual fact, it is the lack of regional variation should cause such a problem – if you get paid the same but your cost of living is cheaper, your effective pay is currently higher in the North East than it is in London.

However, I don’t support regional pay variation for that reason.

I’m going to use London as an example here, but in reality London could be replaced by any other big city. Indeed, London is perhaps not the best example given a divide in pay already exists in the form of London weighting. But given its relative size to other places in the UK, I’m going to proceed none the less.

Whether you truly believe there is a strong North South divide or not, it is hard to deny that as a country, we are very London centric. Not to the extent of other countries (Helsinki in Finland for example), but the best jobs, the biggest companies, museums, theaters, events, etc, etc are almost always bigger and better in London.

It then becomes self propelled – the big cities become more attractive places to live as they grow and grow, adding more exciting attractions, therefore attracting more people, and the cycle goes on.

London in itself is attractive enough to bring in talent in the public sector, and therefore we don’t need to offer people a pay packet which is effectively equivalent to those in other areas. To maintain a balance between the biggest cities and the rest of the country, we actually want to pay people more for not living in these places, which are attractive enough already.

This week, George Osbourne rolled out The Budget. Norm described it as a budget he found “impossible to get angry about.” But I disagree.

The increase in the personal tax allowance is great, thumbs up there, well, on the most part. I’m not too bothered by the granny tax either, as state pensions have in fact gone up quite considerably in a time when many working people’s pay have been frozen despite the ever marching climb of inflation. Not to mention is that all that is happening is that their personal allowance is being lowered to match that of working people.

However, when it comes to the top tax bracket, it is nothing moe than a traditional Tory budget. There is little justification for giving 14,000 millionaires a tax break given the financial crisis we are in.

One of the clearest messages we have received from this government is that the previous one has left them with a huge hole in the budget and that strong austerity measures would need to be put in place. So, if it so important to plug the hole in the budget and pay back some of our borrowing, how can we afford to give tax breaks to the rich?

Having recently re-read the Foundation trilogy by Isaac Asimov, I went on to read the fourth book in the series, Foundation’s Edge.

Despite high praise elsewhere, I was somewhat disappointed by the book. While it was certainly an enjoyable read and one I don’t regret, I don’t feel that it played out with quite the brilliant design that the original trilogy did. It was a great read, but not as good as the first three.

While listening to the radio this morning, I heard that some councils are planning to place restrictions on fundraisers. I’m very much in favour of this, so I write to my local councillor to voice my support.

Dear Elizabeth,

I am a resident living in your ward. As you may have heard, several city councils have proposed restrictions on “chuggers” raising money for charities on the street. I am writing to you to voice my support for similar restrictions in Leeds.

I walk though town on a regular basis and often feel like I am “running the gauntlet” as I walk up and down Briggate or Lands Lane only to have people madly waving their arms at me and block my path.

Worse still, as a trustee of a local charity based here in Leeds, I am familiar with the industry and know that these people are almost always professional fund raisers that are primarily funding their own salaries, and taking money away from local charitable causes. This to me seems dishonest, as when people give to charity, they expect that money to actually end up in the charities pocket.

Therefore, given they provide benefit to neither charities nor residents, I would strongly support any move to reduce this nuisance.

Yours sincerely,
Chris Worfolk

I would encourage you all to do the same.

If you need to get a break down of how much space each directory is using, you can do that using the du command. Using a few choice options it will produce a list of all directories in the current folders and how big they are.

du -sch

Last weekend saw the start of the 2012 Formula One series.

I wasn’t quite prepared for just how disappointing it was to not be able to watch it live. While the BBC’s extended highlights were pretty good, there just isn’t the magic of watching it live as it happens.

Never the less, it was a good race. It will be interesting to see how the season pans out – I hope that it doesn’t turn into a bunch of cars following two McLarens round a track, though Vettel’s strong performance suggests it won’t, and the rise of Mercedes looks promising too.

I had an interesting experience at this month’s Wendy House.

A girl, who as far as I could tell, nobody knew, joined our circle on the dance floor and began dancing with us. More specifically, she seemed to be dancing and making eyes at, me. I thought I was just imagining it at first, but two of my friends later independently joked to me “I think you’ve pulled”, so I wasn’t the only one thinking that.

I’m in a long term relationship so I couldn’t do anything. Or could I?

I could have totally misread the situation – maybe she was just being friendly, maybe she was friends with someone in our circle, maybe she was even friends with me and I didn’t recognise her (because that did happen last month, sorry Charlotte!). But she apparently walked off as soon as I went to get a drink so I’m just going to asume I was correct, as the exact truth is irrelevant to this blog post.

In these situations, you have to do the maths. Well, you don’t have to, you could just reject the idea out of a blind policy that you’re in a relationship and that is the end of that, but if that is your line of thinking, how do you actually know that you want to be in the relationship and are not just sticking with it out of blind faith? It’s a rhetorical question; you don’t.

So I did the maths. On the pros list – if I did make a move and she was into me, we could go off and have a bit of a dance, a hug and a kiss. That’s always good. On the cons side, I would have broken the trust of the person I love most in the world and potentially ruined a hopefully lifelong relationship.

Obviously, the cons outweigh the pros. It never scares me to do the maths because I always know that is is going to come down on that side – Elina is always going to win, unless our relationship hat deteriorated into a state where neither of us wanted to be in it, and that certainly isn’t on the horizon (I hope lol…).

But the problem with this method of thought process is just that – it involves a lot of thinking. You have to make a rational decision and reject the instant gratification in favour of the greater long-term payoff.

Both engaging rational thought on the subject and being able to restrain myself for the long-term payoff are not something that I personally particularly struggle with. But I can’t imagine that is the same for everyone.

Compound on that the fact that most people are severely intoxicated when they commit such acts of infidelity and suddenly you’re on very rocky grounds for decision making.

I wrote about a similar issue back in December when I commented that the lack of protection used during one night stands is not acceptable, but is perhaps understandable.

The chances are that a lot of people don’t put quite so much rational thought into their actions or have the self-control to wait for the long-term payoff. As a result, is it any wonder that some people do end up making silly decisions and cheat on their partner? Not acceptable, but perhaps understandable.

I’m currently re-reading Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series.

They are a fantastic series of novels and it’s brilliant to see the way Asimov carefully laid out all the story lines and concepts and weaved them in and out so that you never really know where it will end up, yet it all seems so obvious at the end.

I also find a lot of amusing parallels between the concept of The Tech-Men and work. Carefully tinkering around to try and fix systems we don’t really understand but somehow manage to keep ticking over 😀 .

Last weekend, I joined my parents for dinner at Escobar, which bills itself as “Mexian restaurant and live music venue at the heart of Leeds.”

Despite only three or four of their twenty tables being occupied when I turned up, they seemed somewhat startled that I had turned up, but a quick double check against my booking seemed to pacify the situation. “We’re short staffed tonight” the waiter explained.

The menu was reasonable, it offered a good selection of fajita and fajita style products, though not much else. I decided to go for a burrito, which was enjoyable and more than I could eat (you should now have playing in your head the phrase “wow, this burrito is delicious, but it is filling.” 😉 ).

Not a bad place to eat, but I’m not in any hurry to go back.

I recently requested an evaluation of Go, an agile release management tool from ThoughtWorks Studios.

I filed out the form but unfortunately it insisted I hadn’t filled out my city, even though I had. So I sent a support request to them and a few hours later, someone emailed me back asking where I was based so they could direct my query. I told them, but never heard back from them.

A month later I got an email from one of their sales guys asking me how I had got on with my evaluation. I emailed them back saying I never actually had an evaluation because they had never got in touch. He apologised and sent through my license key. However, at this time I was on my Mac, so I had to download the Mac client. I went to the website and this time I managed to register and download the software. Great, I thought.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get time to look at it until I was back in the office and by that time I was back on my Windows machine, so I needed to download the Windows version. I went to the website and tried to enter my email address I had used last time I registered to download.

But I just got an error. So I tried again. Another error, different this time. So I tried to go through the whole registration process again, but this once again went back to telling me that I hadn’t entered my city when in fact I had.

I sent their support another email asking for the direct download links and having been sent them, I was finally able to download and install the server. Huzzah! So I did that, but then didn’t really know what to do. It said it had started the sever, which was fine, but there was no indication of what to do next.

After some googling, I eventually found the URL I was supposed to access the dashboard with and entered that into my browser, but didn’t get anything. I tried restarting the server, no luck. I tried running it from the jar. No luck. I even tried uninstalling and reinstalling it. Still nothing.

I decided to boot up my CentOS virtual machine and try installing it there. I downloaded it and tried to run the installer but it told me I needed JDK 1.6 or greater. A quick search through yum and I had it installed. I tried to run the installer again and I got the same error, even though I now had JDK installed.

Eventually, after searching the web for awhile, I found out that they didn’t support OpenJDK yet (you know, the JDK that everyone on Linux uses) so you have to install it using the ignore dependencies flag. Finally, it installed.

It then said that Go Server was up and running and so I tried to access the URL, but it did not work. I tried Apache, and that was working fine, so my virtual machine was working fine, it was just Go Server. By this time it was quite late so I turned everything off and headed home.

The next day I got in early to have a play around with it. I booted up the virtual machine and tried to start Go Server using the service command. All I got was “Error starting Go Server”. I tried googling the phrase, but apparently, it had never before been seen on the internet.

I tried googling some more and eventually found a post that seemed to have the same problem that I had. They eventually found that the problem was to do with the hostname. I couldn’t find any way to change the hostname though, so decided to try the Windows approach and remove and reinstall it. This didn’t work either.

I tried to go look it up in the online documentation, but their website was down again with a 500 error. I waited a few minutes and did a couple of refreshes and eventually it reappeared, but I couldn’t find a solution.

By this point, I had wasted far too much time on this, so I gave up. My advice is, go elsewhere for such software.