Chris Worfolk's Blog

Two years on from The Zuck officially announcing that the age of privacy was over, the government are once again on a beeline for another giant step in privacy invasion. The question is though, who is going to stop them?

Probably nobody. In fact, it’s already too late for that. They already track who we send emails and text messages to. They might not have the content of them yet, but they can already see what is going on. So despite the fact that we have freedom of association, and therefore I have every right to be friends with terrorists if I wanted to, chances are none of us would because our the government would then be watching everything we do and our telecommunications providers would have no option but to hand the records over.

So the downward spiral into Nineteen Eighty-Four seems to be well underway. In fact, Cameron doesn’t even need to install telescreens into our homes because as CIA director David Petraeus pointed out last month, we’re installing the gadgets for them.

But even if we did recognise that our freedoms are quickly being eroded, who is actually going to stand up against it? The answer is probably very few of us. Because ultimately, privacy is something that you can live your life without.

Of course, nobody wants to, and the visions from Nineteen Eighty-Four are horrific, but a slow, gradual erosion of our liberties isn’t going to affect our lives too much and unless we’re going to look at the bigger picture, it will be reasonably easy to swallow. I mean, the government already tracks all the messages we send and receive and watches us on CCTV on all the roads and city centres already. But we all accept that now.

Motiving yourself to get and there and do something about the bigger picture is never easy because there is little motivation to take care of it now. Not to mention that the government has got us so scared of terrorism that we openly invite many of the security measures put in place – just look at what Bush managed to push out in the Patriot Act.

Day to day, the invasion of privacy is just a purely intellectual exercise – we have nothing illegal to hide, it’s only the terrorists who need to be worried. Of course, we would prefer to have privacy, but it isn’t like we need it to go about our lawful lives.

Furthermore, what can you really do about it anyway? Chances are it will never feel like we’re now at the line that we must draw and go no further – it will continue slowly and gradually. Much like the slow ticking of the evolution clock, there is no definitive cut-off between here and Nazi Germany.

Indeed, we have many of the tools to do it now. You can route all your internet traffic via an anonymous proxy. But almost nobody does. It’s just too much effort. That’s the problem – it will simply be easier to just swallow the erosion of our civil liberties than it will to fight the fight. So where do we go from here?

It’s a hard life being a petrol tanker driver. Having to struggle by on an average salary of £45,000 a year. How do they cope?

Actually, as a result of finding out how much they rake in, I’m thinking about suggesting to Elina that she retrains in HGV driving as there seems to be far more money in it than translating, not to mention an ever widening variety of role models such as Lisa Kelly.

Anyway, onto the real topic. It’s easy to say that the mini-crisis we recently experienced was caused by politicians. It is easy to say this, because it mainly was. What is a ridiculous thing to say, everyone should panic and start storing fuel in jerry cans.

But to let the media off would be short sighted. Even the BBC for example where jumping on the bandwagon (or should I say tanker) with a count of how much extra money the petrol companies were making out of the increase in petrol sales.

That doesn’t make any sense. Why would people by more petrol overall? Surely they would just ensure their cars are filed up, but they wouldn’t burn more petrol, so they wouldn’t buy more in the long run. If anything they will look to conserve fuel, and therefore will actually cost petrol companies money.

While I’m busy with my new venture, I’m also working on a project to add a further arm to the prolific Worfolk Online empire, in the form of Worfolk Games. It’s going to be publishing it’s first game in the next few months with a focus on the social gaming (Facebook) arena. Stayed tuned.

From time to time, Firefox might try to update itself and get itself stuck an a loop where every time you try and open it, it tries to upgrade itself, fails, closes and then you have to try and open it again and the same thing happens.

95% of the time, this problem is caused by Logitech webcam software.

I don’t know why, I don’t know how, but the problem has hit my system several times and every time after some googling, the suggestion to try and close my Logitech camera software comes up and as soon as I do, Firefox is able to upgrade itself and open fine.

Sometimes, you might install your dependencies via composer but find that the tests don’t work for it. You could get an error similar to the following.

phpunit
PHP Fatal error:  Class 'Symfony\Component\Yaml\Yaml' not found in
/home/example/Gherkin/src/Behat/Gherkin/Keywords/CucumberKeywords.php on line 31

This could be because if you have just run composer install, it will only install the main packages, but some packages could be specified as dev only. You may find a “require-dev” section in the composer.json file.

If you do, you can install the packages using the following flag.

composer install --dev

This will install the development packages as well, which should allow you to run the tests.

If you try and compile APD on PHP 5.3, you may get an error similar to the following.

error: 'struct _zend_compiler_globals' has no member named 'extended_info'make: *** [php_apd.lo] Error 1

This can be solved by modifying a few of the APD files. To do this, you need to download the APD archive file and uncompress it.

Then make the changes as detailed on the PHP bug tracker. Once this is done, it should install as normal.

phpize
./configure
make
sudo make install

APD should now be installed.

You know, except for the fact that I don’t have a dubiously serviceable spaceship named Serenity (I don’t have a perfectly serviceable one for that matter either). Nor do I have a crew, rugged good looks or such a free-spirited approach to whether to follow the law or not.

Look at him there, what a man.

Pioneers, out there, working for themselves. Well, that is what I will be doing. I recently handed in my notice at Buzz Sports. It has been an amazing three years, but the time has come to move on and establish my own technical consultancy, which will be opening its doors in April.

So if you need help with your software project, get in touch. With expert knowledge of scalable web application architecture and a reassuringly expensive price tag, you’re in safe hands.

Hey, anyone else remember the Sun? You know, the big glowing thing in the sky.

It’s back and we’ve been cashing in. I spent Saturday with Norm, George, Oli and Raby on Millenium Square, soaking in the rays (and in everyone else’s case, soaking in equal amounts of beer). That has been followed up with a lunch in The Box’s beer garden and two lunches in The Oak’s beer garden this week. It’s a hard life.

Last week, I finally made it down to the Leeds PHP User Group.

The meeting consisted of a talk by Lorna Mitchell on Git, Github and Open Source. It didn’t tell me anything that I didn’t already know, but it was interesting none the less. They also provide free food at their meetings, so I then regretted eating before I went 😀 .

By a perhaps unfortunate coincidence, the next day one of my friends sent me a contact they recommend I speak to about my career. The name rang a bell – turns out the recruitment agency had in fact been sponsoring the event and she was there – if only I had known 24 hours earlier I could have introduced myself in person! Still, there is always next month.

This month’s meeting of Leeds Skeptics in the Pub welcomed Dr Neil Cooper from the University of Bradford’s Peace Studies department to talk about arms regulation.

It certainly captured the interest of the audience as the talk itself was followed by one of the longest question and answer sessions we have ever had at Leeds Skeptics!