Unconventional Current

The BCS have a handy copy of their Personal Data Guardianship Code (pdf) which is a nice overview of the level of protection we should demand from organisations which hold our personal data.

I’m a big fan of Regina Spektor’s quirkily beautiful music and am eagerly waiting for delivery of my pre-ordered copies of her new album, Far, from Amazon and iTunes. It’s a real treat then to be able to listen to the whole album for absolutely no pennies whatsoever at her MySpace page.

Tag this under ‘you couldn’t make it up’.

Ireland’s ‘most romantic man’ has been stripped of his 46,000 euro prize after it was discovered that he has a conviction for following women around in Galway while having a wank.

Apparently he had been ‘working himself to the bone’ when the incidents took place.

Very interesting article from John Sullivan, Operations Manager at the Free Software Foundation, on why the FSF is against the RIAA lawsuits.

At the beginning of this month the judiciary in Iran hanged 22 year old Delara Darabi. The details of this case are harrowing and it is almost redundant to write about the tragedy of ‘justice’ in many, if not most, Islamic countries. Reading about the case though brought this piece by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown to my attention.

I have to confess that as a white male I don’t feel qualified to comment on the issues raised, or rather I fear that almost anything that I could say would just be immediately written off as prejudice. Better to just read the article and thank God that my daughter and partner have at least a half-decent chance of being treated as a human being, instead of “a body without a mind, something that moves and does not think”, existing at the whim of a man.

Like a lot of people in IT I have followed the Government’s headlong rush into a national identity card scheme with mounting unease. The latest stage in this campaign to further alienate millions of voters is the start of a city-wide ‘trial’ in Manchester and the publishing, on the 6th May, of an ‘impact assessment’.

Much has already been written about the futility of piloting the scheme in one city on a voluntary basis but I thought this article in Computer Weekly  gave a nice overview as well as providing some interesting links to previous articles.

What really stood out for me was the claim that the Government would save £6bn over the next thirty years by introducing the scheme. Putting aside the fact that even saving enough money to cover Margaret Moran’s property development schemes for the next few decades isn’t enough to justify an appalling attack on our traditional civil liberties, that figure still deserves some qualification.

For starters Ms Smith has massaged the figures to hide the fact that the scheme is going to cost a staggering £4.3bn more than the current passport scheme over the next decade. Well OK that is a lot of money but the savings that we will make, up to £17bn in the more fevered of the Home Secretary’s pipe dreams, are also huge.

Except that these savings are from ‘time savings to individuals in dealing with government and business’, more efficient processes for government and business and a reduction in “identity related fraud”. In other words pie-in-the-sky-plucking-figures-out-of-Gordon’s-capacious-arse savings. The top price of a passport these days is £119.00, anyone remember a few years ago when they were less than £40.00? So where has the extra revenue gone? Surely not into pushing forward an unwanted, undemocratic, badly thought out, unworkable National Identity Card scheme. Perish the thought.

The Telegraph, that bastion of free speech and the rights of man, has published a column in which Boris Johnson attacks Jacqui Smith for the ban on Michael Savage entering the UK. Luckily much of the column is quoted in this Guardian article so you don’t have to get that inside-and-out-dirty feeling that contact with the Torygraph can bring.

I don’t know a great deal about Mr Savage but from what little I have seen he seems like the sort of unpleasant bully you wouldn’t want to find yourself stuck on a bus with. A quick search will provide any sensible person with plentiful evidence that the man is a ranting loon. However in a healthy democracy the principle of free speech must be sacrosanct and that is why, however painful it is to admit it, Boris Johnson is absolutely right when he pillories Smith.

We have laws in this country to protect us from those who seek to cause violence through inflammatory language and if an individual from any country breaks those laws they should be prosecuted. Until they do so they should be free to speak as much as we should be free to laugh at their idiocy.

People like these serve a purpose. Their very extremism helps throw into relief our own casual bigotries. They are a distorting mirror that by exaggerating our own failings help us to steer clear of the pit they have so clearly fallen into.

There is no doubt that extremists will find a minority prepared to listen but to deny them the right to speak at all is to simply hide under the bedclothes in denial of the fact that they exist.

The following are tutorials or Powerpoint shows used in this years Software Development module. Apologies for the bulk upload.

Class Diagrams

Defensive Programming

Design Patterns

Fundamental OOP

Use Cases

Extreme Programming

Not a new idea this but something that can save hours of annoyance if you’re working with IE. You can change the default editor with a simple registry edit.

Navigate to HKLM>Software>Microsoft>Internet Explorer and create a new key called View Source Editor. Now inside this create another new key called Editor Name and then set the default value to the path to your chosen editor e.g. “C:\Program Files\Notepad2.exe”. Of course if the keys are already there you just need to edit the default value.

Hats off to Thea Burger for the super-useful post I found this in.

A particularly useful feature for anyone developing for the Web using Apache is that you can define virtual hosts for your local test environment. This brief article will tell you how to do exactly that but assumes that you have some very basic knowledge of Apache (as long as you can edit the httpd.conf you should be fine). For our example let us say that I am currently developing three applications: Spiffy; Tidee; and Kewl. The code for each of these projects lives in a folder, named after the application, under “C/wamp/www”. Note that my strive towards complete idleness means that I have used the excellent WampServer to set my development environment up. I should also say that while these instructions are written for Windows systems they should apply pretty much to Linux as well.

Now I could just change the document root in httpd.conf when I switched to working on a different project but this is a pretty unsatisfactory state of affairs. What I really want to be able to do is to type http://spiffy (or one of the alternatives) into my browser’s address bar and get the spiffy start page. And that’s where virtual hosts come into play. If you’ve never come across the term before it is the same way that Web hosts can host multiple Web sites on the same server.

Setting up virtual hosts in Apache 2.0 is simplicity itself. Just open up httpd.conf and add (or un-comment) the line

NameVirtualHost *:80

this tells Apache to listen for any requests for your virtual hosts on the default http port 80.

Don’t close httpd.conf just yet as you also need to define your hosts. The code below shows our three example apps defined as well as the default localhost. It shoudl be pretty self-explanatory but the most important elements are the ServerName (which should be the name you want to type into the address bar) and the DocumentRoot (the folder containing your app).

<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot "C:/wamp/www"
ServerName localhost
ErrorLog logs/defaultsite-error_log
CustomLog logs/defaultsite-access_log common
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot "C:/wamp/www/spiffy"
ServerName altlocalhost
ErrorLog logs/spiffy-error_log
CustomLog logs/spiffy-access_log common
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot "C:/wamp/www/tidee"
ServerName localhost
ErrorLog logs/defaultsite-error_log
CustomLog logs/defaultsite-access_log common
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot "C:/wamp/www/kewl"
ServerName kewl
ErrorLog logs/kewl-error_log
CustomLog logs/kewl-access_log common
</VirtualHost>

I’ve changed the apache and error logs for two of the apps but you could leave them at default if it isn’t important to you.

That’s it for the Apache side of things. Save and close httpd.conf and we have one more job to do.

The code above will set up your Apache virtual hosts but you still need to get your browser to recognise that http://spiffy is a local host. This is another easy task and just involves editing your systems ‘hosts’ file. On Windows you can find this in “C:/windows/system32/drivers/etc. Open this file in notepad and you will see it contains a list of IP addresses and hostnames. If you have never edited the hosts file before you should see at least one entry:

127.0.0.1 localhost

For our example we would need to add the following lines:

127.0.0.1 spiffy

127.0.0.1 kewl

127.0.0.1 tidee

And that is it. That’s all it takes to get your virtual hosts up and running.

Admittedly there are lots more options for virtual hosts and if you’re interested there is a wealth of information in the Apache documentation but for most uses this is as much as you need to do.