Blue Life or Green?

The funniest Star Wars movie you'll ever see...

2007-01-13T11:56:00.000Z

What happened after the Death Star blew up!

Happy New Year :)

2007-01-13T10:01:00.000Z

My new year's resolution? To blog more :)

Spot the difference??

2006-06-06T21:40:00.000+01:00

So a new week, a new pay offer for UK lecturers! But hang on, this one looks familiar! Let's see now, the new pay offer says this (from the UCU website):

August 2006: greater of 3% or £515
February 2007: 1%
August 2007: 3%
May 2008: greater of 3% or £420
October 2008: 2.5% or RPI (as at September 2008) whichever is the greater*

while the "old" pay offer said this (from the NATFHE website):

Aug 06: greater of 3% or £515
Feb 07: 1%
Aug 07: 3%
May 08: greater of 3% or £400
Oct 08: 2.5%

Am I missing something? The "old" offer gets rejected, while the "new" offer gets put to the ballot? Personally speaking, this stinks. I was at the UCU march to the employers' association offices in London on June 1st, where the sturdy rhetoric of the speakers led us all to believe that the union was standing firm against a crap offer. And now this!

I wonder, though, if the union interests have suddenly diverged from those of its members. Read here a story about University of Ulster lecturers accepting a LOCAL pay deal of nearly 16% over three years. Local bargaining destroys union power, and if Ulster set a precedent, then the new UCU is finished before it really gets started. So instead, to preserve national bargaining, it accepts the crap deal (with a couple of meaningless concessions from employers to save face) - which, ironically, is probably worth less than the Ulster deal!

To see some interesting comment and quotes on this story, go to the Socialist Worker website here. Not a big fan of Socialist Worker, personally, but for once, they have something interesting to say.

Shame on you, UCU. I will vote against this deal.

New talks planned in lecturers strike

2006-06-05T13:45:00.000+01:00

Discovered here - news that new talks are scheduled for tomorrow (Tuesday 6th June) at TUC headquarters.

Also, the Times Higher reports that UCU union officials believe UCEA (the employers' association) is out to smash the newly-formed union (an amalgamation of the two existing academic unions, NATFHE and AUT). See the story here. The key quote from the THES article is this:

"Senior union figures said that during 23 hours of informal negotiations last week, employers made a two-year offer in double figures, which could have enticed unions to put the offer to a ballot of members. But they said that this offer was torn up at the eleventh hour and replaced this week with a formal offer that the employers knew would not be acceptable to the unions."

Tut tut, UCEA!

UK Higher Education Employers association - economical with the truth AGAIN!

2006-06-02T13:15:00.000+01:00

See the Personnel Times for a quote from Jocelyn Prudence, chief executive of the employers' association UCEA.

She says: "There have been endless meetings since the beginning of the year, there have been all sorts of Acas discussions. There really isn't anything more that is achievable at national level."

This is another example of UCEA's cavalier attitude to the truth! The unions submitted their pay claim late last year, and started the industrial action in the first place in March this year because the employers' association had made no response to it.

Should we ask for a grovelling apology like the one they made to the Parliamentary Select Committee?

UK Lecturers Strike

2006-06-01T08:57:00.000+01:00

I'm one of the lecturers in the UK taking industrial action to improve our pay. Although the action has been taking place since March, it's really only in the last few weeks that it has become difficult. Personally I hoped that last Friday and (again) this Tuesday would see the end of the dispute. Sadly, that's not the case.

I'm angry, though, not with the union for rejecting the latest pay offere, but with the employers association UCEA for underhand tactics. Firstly, I was puzzled by the lack of an offer on Friday (as was the union). Secondly, the offer, when it was made on Tuesday hardly seemed any improvement on the last one (half a percent better over three years!). My suspicion was that this offer was not genuine, but simply to force a ballot of members by the union and a suspension of industrial action - if this did happen, then even a suspension of two/three weeks while the ballot was being held would see all the outstanding assignments/exams held and marked. And then no-one would bother about us until next summer!

What kind of confirms my suspicion is that over the weekend, the union held its conference, at which the government minister for higher education spoke. If UCEA had made their offer on Friday (which had been VERY widely expected, based on the UCEA's own comments), the offer would have been rejected at the conference, in front of the minister and with maximum publicity. UCEA (according to this theory, anyway) knew their offer would be rejected, and so delayed making it until AFTER the conference. And because they knew it would be rejected, made it probably just to force a ballot and hence a suspension of industrial action.

It's this kind of underhand dealing that is poisoning relations in higher education and making it hard to trust employers - oh yeah, that and the 25% plus in salary increases that VCs enjoy awarding themselves through their remuneration committees that they appoint, while telling us that we are going beyond the limits of affordability. Tellingly, a recent newspaper article pointed out that those VCs that want to dock lecturers pay for taking part in industrial action are the very same VCs that have seen their pay rise the most. C'est la vie :)

Hell hath no comeback like an ebayer scammed!!

2006-05-26T16:40:00.000+01:00

You must visit http://www.amirtofangsazan.blogspot.com/. It's a blog created by someone who was scammed on ebay by someone who sold a broken laptop that was advertised as working. A truely awesome piece of revenge! Even better, read the comments because the scammer realises what has happened and tries to threaten the victim through a series of nasty comments posted using aliases!

Help the poor guy who got scammed and post/send a link to his blog around the world!

Bird flu in Britain

2006-04-06T19:13:00.000+01:00

On the news tonight: Britain's first confirmed case of H5N1 bird flu. Of course, this means that we'll see a lot more of a story that has died down a lot over recent weeks. While bird flu has been continuing to circulate in Africa and Asia (Egypt confirmed another human death today), the UK media has been quiet on the whole subject.

The British discovery was in a mute swam in Cellardyke, Fife, in Scotland. The area is home to at least 176 poultry centres, with around 260,ooo free range birds. The dead bird was found in a decomposed state, which meant that the tests for bird flu had to be repeated twice. On Channel 4 news this evening, a spokesman for the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) stated that the bird had probably been died "a good time ago". Given that the bird was discovered on 30th March, that places the infection in the UK at 2/3 weeks ago.

Something else to consider is that the dead bird was a mute swan, which are usually non-migratory but which live in the area all year long. The conclusion, therefore, is that bird flu arrived in Britain at least 3 weeks ago from another source and is currently loose among British wild birds in the Fife area. Despite the precautions currently being taken, the time lapse between bird flu arriving here and its confirmation today probably mean that we will hear of more infections among British birds (including poultry) in the weeks to come.

Blair must go!

2006-03-20T17:09:00.000Z

Back in 1997, John Major, the then-Tory prime minister lost the general election partly as a result of "cash-for-questions" and other allegations of sleaze against members of his party. At the time, Labour seemed fresh, keen and eager to sweep away the corruption that accompanied the Tory government.

Now we have cash-for-peers (!), strange temporary mortgages, flexible expense accounts on multiple homes, and god knows what else. It can only get worse, because once the mud of sleaze sticks to a politician or a political party, it never comes off.

In other words, it's all over for Blair. Blair must go, and go soon, if he is not to destroy the entire Labour government project by association. While he is not the only guilty party, he is the head of the party and this is so serious now that it requires his sacrifice (and Ruth Kelly and Andrew Adonis, too, please while you're at it because their idiotic slash-and-burn approach to school education in this country).

Greek mobile phone tapping scandal - AGAIN!

2006-03-09T10:53:00.001Z

I've written before on the Greek/Vodafone phone tapping scandal (a few weeks ago) and had thought the story had gone dead. How wrong I was! The head of Greek Vodafone is going before a Greek parliamentary committe today to give evidence - see here a story on this from the BBC.

Right at the end of the story is a snippet about a former US embassy employee (no name, no position, so how can we tell how authoritative this is, eh, BBC?) that he believes it was the US behind phone tapping because they didn't trust the Greeks for security over the Olympics. IMHO, this is total rubbish. It doesn't make a great deal of sense. If the US were worried about security, then (i) why did the phone tapping continue AFTER the Olympics, and (2) surely you would bug other people! Remember the list contained politicians (dodgy lot, to be sure) and journalists (!).

What is not mentioned in this story is that Vodafone have promoted the head of Greek vodafone in what has been seen by the Greek media as a direct challenge to the Greek government.

Greek mobile phone tapping scandal - AGAIN!

2006-03-09T10:53:00.000Z

BBC FAQ on Bird flu

2006-02-22T12:09:00.000Z

See here for a bird flu FAQ from the BBC News website by Prof. John Oxford of Queen Mary's School of Medicine and Dentistry and other experts. One interesting point, though, is that the question about whether housewives can contract H5N1 from preparing an infected chicken for cooking is not answered! It may be that the BBC's medical correspondent, who answered this section, didn't know - but it's a major point, and illustrates that despite the increasing prominence of bird flu in the media, the breadth and depth of the information being reported is poor.

Technorati tags: Birdflu, H5N1.

First bird flu in poultry in Europe

2006-02-22T12:02:00.000Z

See this BBC news item - the first case of bird flu in poultry in Europe. Mind you, it was a chicken being kept in the same cage as an infected swan, which is pretty dim.

Technorati tags: Birdflu, H5N1.

Is vaccination the answer to bird flu?

2006-02-22T09:26:00.000Z

This editorial from the Times Newspaper here in the UK argues that the UK Government has failed to learn the lessons from the foot&mouth epidemic that hit cattlel here a few years ago. Then, as now, vaccination was ruled out and a kind of "scorched earth" policy was adopted to contain outbreaks of the disease. If any infected cattle were found, the surrounding area was cordoned off and cattle within that area were slaughtered and burnt. The pictures of the huge bonfires of cattle carcases were terrible to see.

The Times argues that following the same policy as before is a mistake for the simple reason that bird flu does not follow the same transmission pattern as foot and mouth. F&M was spread through national-only routes, between farms etc., using largely predictable entry points. Bird flu however is international in scope and can enter the country using multiple and unpredictable entry routes. Slaughtering a chicken flock in one location will not safeguard neighbouring areas because they can all too easily be infected by another international arrival. Under these conditions, the policy could lead to the complete slaughter of the entire national poultry flock (although the Times doesn't say as much). Hence, the Times says, vaccination is the answer.

However, is this true? What are we trying to protect? If we are trying to protect poultry only, then perhaps the Times is right. But the big fuss about bird flu is the fact that it WILL mutate into a form that can be transmitted between humans. If this is what we are concerned about, then only a concerted international effort to bird vaccination will stand any chance. We might vaccinate all poultry in the British Isles, only to find the mutation arising in Nigeria.

The answer, therefore, is surely to concentrate on preventing bird-human transmission of the virus. We simply cannot control the international spread of the virus between birds, but we MUST do something about its introduction into humans.

Technorati tags: Birdflu, H5N1.

Bird flu already in UK???

2006-02-21T09:16:00.000Z

The latest on bird flu from the New Scientist is here. Two interesting points about this article:

(1) that the danger of a mutated pandemic flu is rising as bird flu infects populous areas where large numbers of people live in close contact with poultry (Egypt, India, Nigeria etc.). A previous article from the New Scientist points out that bird flu is more likely to be picked by people from chickens for reasons we don't yet understand,

(2) a wildlife virologist from Sweden makes the point that bird flu is probably already in the UK, and that just because we haven't found a dead wild bird with H5N1 doesn't mean it isn't here. This makes the UK government's insistence that poultry should not be moved indoors until bird flu is actually detected a very risky strategy. By then, it might already be too late.

One thing that troubles me is my neighbours chickens - these are kept in a chicken-wire enclosure in their garden. So my question is, is this enough to keep them safe from infection by wild birds? I haven't yet seen any discussion about how wild bids infect poultry (I assume it's through faecses on ground that both flocks share). But how indoors does poultry have to be to be safe? Does anyone know?

Technorati tags: Birdflu, H5N1.

Bird flu article

2006-02-20T18:56:00.000Z

A good review of what's known about Bird flu appeared in the New Scientist a few weeks ago. I can't find the review online, but the New Scientist website does have a good collection of articles relating to bird flu here. The print version had a particularly good explanation of how flu pandemics arise: essentially, we all develop immunity to a flu variant each year, as we are exposed to it, giving us some partial immunity to the next variant. Since flu viruses evolve incrementally, this helps us a great deal. However, every once in a while, a new flu virus appears that is so different that our built-up immunity is of no use - this usually happens when a bird flu virus jumps over to humans.

The (maybe) good news is that the evolution of the bird flu virus is unpredictable - it may be that when it evolves to a form capable of human-human transmission it won't be as deadly as it is currently - in some ways, this is good for the virus itself, since it isn't good for transmission if you keep killing your hosts at such a high rate!

Technorati tags: Birdflu, H5N1.

Greek mobile phone scandal - recap

2006-02-20T18:36:00.000Z

Discovered this on www.uncorrelated.com concerning the Greek mobile phone tapping scandal (a slightly incestuous link, since this page also links back to me!) It provides an interesting slant on the technological aspects of the saga.

To recap: Vodafone (via Ericcson, it appears) discovered last year that rogue software implanted in their legal phonetapping systems was being used to tap the mobile phones of about 100 Greek politicians, journalists and (mainly arab) business during and after the Olympics in 2004. The current focus of the journalistic investigation is the apparent suicide of a Vodafone employee a day before Vodafone first notified the government of the phone tapping (which was 18 months before it became public). Copious notes were left by the employee, Kostas Tsalikidis, who has been described as a top network infrastructure manager, detailing his concerns about unexplained things happening in the network.

This article from the english language Athens News contains some details, including the phone numbers that are known to have been bugged.

Liberal Democrats win by-election

2006-02-11T15:44:00.000Z

Coming back to win the by-election in Scotland for a vacant seat in Parliament was a triumph for the Liberal Democrats, overcoming the might of Labour. Far from being New Labour anymore, the governing party is more "Well-Past-Its-Sell-by-Date Labour". The LibDems victory is all the more remarkable given the turmoil the party has been experiencing since it dumped Charles Kennedy and put forward three MPs as candidates for the leadership who are look to be no more than half the leader Charles was. In fact, "coming back" is too tame a description, "rising from the grave" would be more appropriate.

Labour are a riven, no more a driven, party. No energy, no ideas, and no purpose other than to exist. Blair's legacy to Britain, once he has gone, will simply be an abject lesson in how to squander political good fortune to the whims of vanity. I suppose what I object to most in the Government's current political programme is that it is based on dogma and dodgy belief rather than evidence and facts. When are we going to see some "evidence-based policy-making", rather than idiotic rhetoric worn out by repetition? Probably never.

Uninstalling Google desktop

2006-02-11T15:39:00.000Z

Google Desktop has proved itself a really useful tool in the six months or so since I installed it. But enough is enough! Fed up with Google's cavalier attitude towards privacy and censorship, I uninstalled it yesterday and, when asked for feedback on why I had done so via their web form, I clicked on the "Concerns about privacy button". Wonder if anyone is listening?

Americans accused

2006-02-05T08:49:00.000Z

One of the Greek newspapers has, for the first time, come out and directly accused the Americans of the mobile phonen tapping in Greece during the Olympics in 2004. It also directly accuses Miller, the former US ambassador to Greece of organizing it. One of the reasons for this is that, apparently, one of the tapped phones was a US embassy phone. This phone, however, was not used by embassy staff but was given by the embassy to a top Grrek police official to help him communicate with the US embassy during the Olympics.

More on the mobile phone tapping scandal in Greece

2006-02-03T11:58:00.000Z

Greek newspapers are reporting more on the mobile phone tapping scandal there. Here are some more details:

(1) People who were tapped include: the Greek Prime Minister, his wife, the Defense Minister, the Minister of Public Order, the mayor of Athens, journalists (including one from Al-Jeezera TV station) and opposition politicians,
(2) Of the 100 or so phones tapped, only about 46 were in the person's name (through the contract). The rest were given out by companies or agencies, so were not in the name of the person using them - so the big question is, how did the hackers know which numbers to target?
(3) The implanted tapping software only "woke up" when one of the targetted phones was used - this implies that the phone numbers were "hard-coded" into the software and that the numbers were decided in advance of the hacking attempt,
(4) The hacking attempt would have had to penetrate numerous levels of security to embed the software, making it likely that it was an inside-abetted job. Furthermore, a Vodafone Greece employee is known to have (allegedly) committed suicide last year around the time the phone tapping became known to Vodafone and the Government.
(5) The tapping software was sophisticated enough to try each of the "shadow" phones in turn when one of the tapped phones woke it up. When it made a connection to a shadow phone, a piece of freeware recording software recorded the call. I don't know how the investigators can know this, but perhaps there was some protocol handshake between the tapping software and the recording program written into the tapping code.

Also being asked is why Vodafone immediately disabled the tapping software on discovering it, thereby alerting the hackers to the fact they had been discovered; why they waited several days to tell anyone; and why they then told the Government instead of the police - who then sat on the story and told no-one. The mayor of Athens, for example, has only just found out via the news about her phone being tapped.

Mobile phone tapping in Greece

2006-02-03T09:45:00.000Z

A big scandal is unwinding in Greece. It seems that in 2004, during the Olympics, a large wiretapping scheme was put into operation that tapped into the mobile phones of many high-ranking officials in the Greek government and important Arab businessmen. See here for the latest Greek news in English which contains some details.

In essence, persons unknown hacked into Vodafone's system, in particular, the component responsible for legal wiretapping, and implanted software that duplicated a call to one of 14-16 pre-paid phones, so that they could be recorded. Details are a bit sketchy or badly reported at the moment, but the identities of the hackers are unknown - all that the investigators can say for sure is the locations the pre-paid "shadow" phones operated in, which were stable locations about Lycabettus (all of which, funnily enough, are close to the American Embassy).

I'll post more details if and when I know more!

Feeling blue and liberal democrats

2006-02-02T18:33:00.000Z

I haven't been feeling well for a couple of days now. It feels almost like onset of flu - shivers and aches all over. So work on my top-secret project has been a little slow. Still I think I've finally cracked the design of a key component - a database of locations that ties everything up together in a hierarchial format.

Meantime, I'm much diverted by the nastiness of the leadership election in the Liberal Democrat party, which I joined last year just before the general election. The favourite to succeed Charles Kennedy is Menzies Campbell (Menzies in Scottish is pronounced 'Mingies' - hence his nickname 'Ming'). The two other candidates are Simon Hughes and Chris Huhne. Both these have suffered a little adverse publicity in recent days, to the point that public support for the party has suffered a severe drop - notwithstanding the scandal attaching to a previous contender who dropped out of the race. It seems that, having dumped a flawed but good leader, the party lately has become a bit of joke - something that annoys me because I don't want to be associated with a political joke. I want to support and be part of a political movement capable of doing serious things.

Java woes...

2006-01-30T18:09:00.000Z

My "unexpected error" Java problems haven't been properly resolved yet, but in the meantime, I've found a workaround by splitting up the database into several parts based on continents. So, to start with, I have one database of all places in Europe using Berkeley Java DB.

Doing lookups in this database is pretty quick - on a 2.6GHz Intel Celeron processor with 512Mb RAM, looking up 200+ names takes around 500 ms. Not too shabby!

Initially I decided against serializing objects as the values in the database table, instead using strings with embedded field delimiters so I could use regexps to split them up later. But which approach would lead to faster access to individual elements once lookup has been done and also which would lead to a smaller database? So this is one experiment that has to be done.

IDE Cables

2006-01-28T07:17:00.000Z

On Thursday, I encountered yet another obstacle on my route to total world search engine domination. My linux server (1U size) overheated whilst loading a text file into my Berkeley Java database (see http://www.sleepycat.com). I had set the CPU temperature alarm in the BIOS to 66 degrees centigrade, and had checked the processor data sheet to find that the max operating temperature was 68 degrees C. Lo and behold, half-way through the file (of some 400K lines), a tiny beep-beep-beep started coming from the casing. Total panic ensued on my part - CPU melt-down envisaged! So I cancelled the job and shut-down the machine. Then collapsed in the chair.

Eventually, after some research, I realized that this is probably all my fault. A 1U case is very thin and flat so it can fit into a narrow slot in a server rack, so inside the case there isn't much space for air to circulate. A little while ago, I had bought a second hard drive via eBay (which is where the server came from) and installed it (see previous post for this hassle!). But I had real trouble fitting the IDE ribbon cables back into the case. Now it seems that these cables were obstructing air flow inside the case. I went down to a large PC store near us and bought some rounded IDE cables after reading on the web that they help improve the circulation of air. Installation wasn't easy - I had to cut away the plastic sheafs at the terminals to fit them in - but I restarted the machine and ran the same job again. This time - no overheating. The server whirred along nicely. Order has been restored!