Twitter Twat
David Wright is the Nulabor MP for Telford and a whip. So you’d think he know how to behave.
But he’s in trouble for a tweet on Twitter, that calls the Tories, “scum-sucking”. Now, he is claiming that the tweet was edited by a third party. If it was, his security has been compromised probably by his own stupidity. If he’s not, he’s lying to try and save his skin.
But whatever is the reason, he just doesn’t understand things like Twitter. You have to be subtle in my view too, to get your message across.
I hope that the good people of Telford consign him to where he belongs at the next election.
Spam Messages
This was the body of a spam e-mail I received.
Introduction The girl scout around a crane caricatures a flabby cloud formation. Another most difficult eggplant operates a small fruit stand with a carelessly polka-dotted deficit. If the mortician steals pencils from a bullfrog, then a fundraiser defined by the tomato ceases to exist. If a For example, a tornado about a tomato indicates that a cheese wheel about the wheelbarrow writes a love letter to a paper napkin. Some corporation over a tornado hesitantly is a big fan of another tomato from the freight train. A cargo bay is impromptu. A rude minivan rejoices, and the wheelbarrow caricatures a ball bearing. When the dust bunny living with a tornado is proverbial, some geosynchronous polar bear sanitizes the cab driver. Now and then, the globule gives a pink slip to the prime minister from a customer. The tape recorder aro faults with a soggy polygon. Introduction A buzzard recognizes a greedily rude crane. Most people believe that a lover about a satellite reaches an understanding with a diskette near the parking lot, but they need to remember how wisely the sandwich gets stinking drunk. When a pompous burglar returns home, an umbrella prays. nWUQPeBMQIZgCH[AXUThe formless void borrows money from a customer behind the stovepipe. A deficit derives r freight train laughs out loud, a demon earns frequent flier miles. A canyon around the grain of sand is hypnotic. Any grand piano can organize a crane, but it takes a real eggplant to seek the magnificent crane. When the turkey is frozen, a class action suit slyly figures out an apartment building. Indeed, the hockey player caricatures the tornado. When you see the canyon, it means that a crane beyond a formless void prays. Introduction When another mortician toward the blithe spirit is college-educated, a CEO inside the apartment building sanitizes the accidentally slow razor blade. A cocker spaniel is boiled. Sometimes a most difficult dolphin beams with joy, but a hydrogen atom always has a change of heart about the burglar! When a completely makeshift hydrogen atom leaves, a single-handledly load bearing recliner hides. carpet tack about a short order cook plans an escape from a gentle light bulb the cashier inside a dust bunny. The oil filter living with the skyscraper Indeed, the chestnut defined by some nation knowingly laughs and drinks all night with a turn signal living with some polar bear. A proverbial defendant is rude. The overripe cyprus mulch steals pencils from a stoic fruit cake. Any vacuum cleaner can negotiate a prenuptial agreement with a tripod related to a polygon, but it takes a real bottle of beer to accidentally share a shower with a vacuum cleaner over some cyprus mulch. An apartment building self-flagellates, and a completely tattered deficit takes a coffee break; however, a tripod over a pine cone buries the ostensibly twisted avocado pit. The feverishly loyal inferiority complex sells an eggplant inside the tuba player to the earring, but the customer somewhat finds lice on a cough syrup. When a hockey player for the roller coaster is cosmopolitan, another foreign reactor sanitizes the slyly dirt-encrusted briar patch. Furthermore, a nuclear cargo bay ruminates, and the Alaskan squid dances with the eggplant about a rattlesnake.
You could imagine Richard Burton or Eric Cantona reading it. It would still not make sense, but it would have a certain lilt to it.
As a programmer though, you have to admire the man, who wrote the program that writes this rubbish.
Blogger Abandons FTP
I use Blogger to create news pages within web sites. This approach is good as it enables anybody to update the news without disturbing the actual web site. It also has advantages in that as Blogger updates the search engines directly, any changes are reflected immediately.
In most of the sites, I have used FTP to update the blogs, but Blogger have recently announced that FTP support will be discontinued.
I had felt this would be a problem, but if you look at my stud web site, Freedom Farm, you’ll now see that it uses a standard blogspot address, freedomfarmnews.blogspot.com.
The web site works as well as before, but I’m afraid it’s lost all it’s search engine history, so I’ll have to grow the blog from start again. I suspect too, that because the web site is now hosted on a different url to the news, that the two will not work as well together. That is probably a good reason to use WordPress for a combination of a web site and news.
But if you want still keep to Blogger, there wasn’t too many problems.
- I had to change all of the links, but this was a global edit in the web site and a few changes to the template.
- By default you get the Blogger NavBar, which is annoying in a web site. However there is a patch to put in the template to remove it. The details are here.
But otherwise it was painless.
I wouldn’t use Blogger again for this purpose, as it’ll probably degrade the search engine performance significantly, as the link between the web site and news are broken.
Cutting Unemployment
I run a couple of small businesses; one is a computer software firm and the other is a thoroughbred stud.
I have a problem on the stud in that work is distinctly seasonal and so some of the essential maintenance jobs that no-one really likes to do, get put to the bottom of the queue, when other more important things come up. For instance, if it means having an injured horse for rest after a racing injury, which requires extra care time, then this will take precedence over say painting fences or renewing a badly worn gateway, because the former is better for your cash flow.
In the past twenty years or so, whilst my late wife and I have run the stud, we’ve often needed someone for say a month or two for these maintenance and other tasks. Usually, we’ve subcontracted to a building firm, who don’t like these sort of small jobs and charge much more than say employing someone for a couple of months.
What is needed is a computer system based on the technology used on many web sites, to match the unemployed to the small jobs available. The site might be something like a cross between a dating-site for something like The Times and eBay.
Suppose you chose someone from this web site for a job that would last anything upwards of a week.
You would pay the site, which would then pay the employee directly and automatically adjust their benefit, so that they avoided the problem of going on and off benefit. After they’d finished, you would then assess their work and post it with ratings on the web site.
I think that this would have benefits for both employers and claimants.
Employers and especially small ones, would have a simple means of bridging that temporary labour problem without any great hassle. They could also read the references of those available for employment in their area and may well choose an employee whose skills and experience matched their needs. In the case of the stud, I’d probably do jobs where I can easily find people to do them. For instance, I have several painting jobs that need doing, so if I found someone, who had experience of industrial painting, then that job would be done.
Claimants would benefit from the work and the extra money, and because they were rated, this would increase their chances of getting full employment. The system would also benefit, those who perhaps because of circumstances like age, children and disability, did not need or want to work all of the year.
It is an idea, that I feel needs to be examined. As a computer scientist, I don’t believe that setting it up would be the biggest of technological problems, although asking the government to do it would probably be a disaster.
Jim Bennett
I get a lot of spam. This is an interesting one.
My name is Jim .E. Bennett, I am a citizen of United State of America and the Executive Director of SPD Corporation, a multi-national oil corporation operating from London-England, UK. I am seeking your assistance to retrieve the sum of ( fifteen Million Dollars Only), consisting of two Consignments boxes.
This money was acquired from over invoice and it was accompanied by a diplomat to the U.S.A, my reason for this is because I have been cheated out of my entitlements by the company for too long simply because I am not a British Citizen.The details of the diplomat will be given to you if you indicate your interest to help me.
The two boxes content is $15M and for your help I am ready to release 30% to you, for security reasons the consignments was registered to be ( CONFIDENTIAL DIPLOMATIC DOCUMENTS), and I can explain why it was declared so. Bear in mind that the diplomat is not aware of the content of the two Consignments boxes , it has been there for the past 1 month as I’m looking for a reliable partner.
I will be leaving the country immediately the consignments is delivered to you for my private investment and I have vowed never to step back into London, England. Please, I need your urgent response before my plans to leave the company is discovered.
Please if you are not willing and interested in helping me kindly delete this e-mail from your computer and pretend you never got it.
I’m pretending I haven’t got this e-mail, so if you read this, then please pass it on, so that no-one gets conned by this crook.
One point is that he says he will be leaving London immediately the consignments are delivered. Funny, that but the e-mail came from China.
Banking Security
I don’t like internet banking. Well to be truthful, I like the concept, but some of the implementations of it are rather poor.
Take my bank. I need to enter my account reference, a password and then three numbers from a key code. I can remember these in most cases, but if I access the account from someone else’s computer, I need to have the account reference written down. But I do write it down in a way that no-one could ascertain.
Although it is a system that works, it is not the best. It is typical of many systems used to login to on-line banking.
I am a mentor on The Horse’s Mouth, which is a web site where people put ideas and others pass comments. It is an interesting concept and from what I read in the press, it is highly regarded.
In the last few days, the web site has put me in touch with a company called SafeTok.
It looks like it could be a solution to better Internet security.
But then I am not an expert in this field. But then I’m a consumer who knows what I don’t like.
Adding my Posts to your Web Site
I have no problem with people putting up my posts on their web sites provided they acknowledge who wrote it all in the first place. I said as much in Electronic Plagiarism and Copyright Infringement.
Recently though, I’ve had a request about putting a link to a series of posts on my pages. It was the Cambridge Busway, of which I write about fairly often, as I think it is a wonderful example of how not to manage a project. It is well over budget on costs, very late on finish time and short on the important small details. That link is given below.
https://anonw.wordpress.com/tag/cambridge-busway/
Click it and you’ll see all my posts on the busway.
So how would you add a link like this to your web site?
- Go to the front page of this blog. Click here to do that!
- Click the tag you want from the tag cloud.
- Capture the URL from your browser and paste it into your web site.
It’s a bit technical, but once you’ve got the hang of it, it’s like swimming or cycling. You never forget.
Unless of course it’s swimming, which I can’t do!
How Can We Improve Security?
Over the years the security services and the police all over the world have made many basic mistakes which have meant that people have lost their lives. I should also add that there have been lots of cases of domestic violence and child abuse which were not picked up, which also resulted in death. I could also add in things like misdiagnosis in hospitals.
It’s all part of the same problem.
The evidence in many cases is there, but no-one can put it together to find the correct or even deadly link.
So the first thing that must be done to improve security or in the NHS’s case patient diagnosis is to make sure that all computers can talk properly to each other.
As an example of this, the DVLA can check quickly that vehicles are taxed, insured and MOT’ed instantly. The benefit to the general public is that it is now a simple process to retax a vehicle over the Internet. But to the police it is a valuable tool to check whether vehicles are legal. I suspect that the number of untaxed vehicles has also reduced and the tax take has increased. The only downside of this linking of databases is that because of the on-line purchase of road tax, Post Offices are getting less revenue and this doesn’t help their financial situation.
We still are nowhere near getting a decent patients’ record computer system and I’ve also heard stories about how police computer systems are all different and sometimes need the same data to be entered more than once. I hope most of the stories I’ve heard are wrong. But I doubt it!
All my life I’ve been a maverick kicking against complacency and the status quo.
Any organisation handling data should employ people like me. Well not me, as I’m too old and well past my sell-by date.
But I know that some of my software and other similar systems have been used in very sensitive applications to link data together so that police and others can target criminals, problems or epidemics. This type of software is used outside of the computer mainstream and to many so-called computer managers it is a pain. I can understand their point, but they should see that these analysts are on their side. It could be argued that the collapse of several of the banks in recent months was because senior managers knew better and ignored the well-researched facts and opinions of analysts with minds much sharper than their own.
So every organisation should have a group of people, whose job is to analyse and question the data in every way possible. Unfortunately, these type of groups are the first to be got rid of in times of financial restraint. They are always a pain in the arse to so-called managers.
I should put a bit of history in here. Years ago in ICI, I worked in a Computer Techniques section, that had free rein to poke its nose into problems in the Division. It was very successful, but had it not been for the diplomacy of those that ran it, it would have been very unpopular. I was at one time, when I told a chemist that he was barking up the wrong tree. But then he wasn’t using any mathematics for his reactions and I was!
I also believe that we rely too much on conservative techniques. I sometimes think that some of the problems with the banks were caused because too many people looked at them all in the same way, with the same software.
So if the maverick groups are to be effective, they need to be able to purchase software and services, that may not fit the policy of the organisation. They also need to have access to specialist programming resources. I would say that wouldn’t I!
I would also make the watch lists much more publicly available.
Let’s say that you are a check-in clerk for an airline. Someone turns up and there is something you don’t like about them. You should be able to flag the guy quickly with just a single key stroke. Perhaps, you can now, but if you can’t then you should be able to. If the watch list was able to be checked at that moment, then it would help airport security ascertain if the person was just nervous of flying or a bomber.
But the key to better security is that everyone should be on watch for anything suspicious. After all one of the biggest failures in the Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab case, is the fact that his father reported him and no-one did anything about it. We need a system that allows the public to contribute to the data, when they have suspicions.
But our biggest problem is that all of these security services are closed and secretive organisations, so they tend to believe all their own methods, publicity and hype. I am reminded of a friend, who in the 1950s needed to be cleared to work on top-secret radar systems. The fact that he was a member of CND should have precluded this, but the security services never knew, as they never asked him.
Have they got any better?
But what will we get?
Probably a lot more restrictions on our lives.
How to Encourage Binge Drinking
This story from the Telegraph shows how those in charge of the nanny state haven’t a clue.
The “app”, which measures drinks in alcoholic units, has sparked something of a craze among drinkers to get the highest score.
The NHS drinks tracker was launched at the start of December and is designed to help people avoid overindulging.
It works by converting drinks into units to show drinkers when they have gone over the recommended daily limit.
But within days of the tracker being released it was being described on the internet as an “awesome game” and users were boasting about trying to beat their “top score”.
If you produce a drink-o-meter for an iPhone, you could have bet your life that people will attempt to create a record score. Someone should be fired for being stupid. But I doubt they will be.
The Anonymous Widower 