Order of the Bath

Try the Samsung 3000 Turbo, there’s nothing it can’t do (don’t worry about the commentary, just watch the pictures).

I was glancing back over past posts and realised that I hadn’t reported back on what happened last year so better late than never (as they say), hence it covers 14 months.

• Very little has been done on West Penwith Resources though I note that 14 major new sections were added at the start of the year bring it up to 857 pages. The promised makeover never happened. The primary cause was a major commitment offline which took up a large proportion of my time; I even had to drop work on the Census project for a while.
• Custom fonts were abandoned. I came to the conclusion that not enough browsers supported them and the bandwidth penalty was too high.
• I surprised myself by keeping up a flow of posts to the blog, managing one or two most weeks. Accidentally I seem to have become a national authority on the Renault Laguna, the Advent GPS system and mobile phone scammers, none of which I know a lot about.
• This was the year that blog comment spam became a problem. I first installed the Akismet plugin which trapped it nicely and then, later, Worst Offenders to manage the collected spam and attempt to block it at source.
• email spam got completely out of hand so I had to abandon the open domain approach and restrict addresses to a short list which involved changing a large number of sign-on accounts. It is now down to manageable proportions again.
• Other than that and a small hiccup mid-year, email has been working reasonably well. I did consider changing supplier but the only one I contacted never replied. I don’t know how easy it is to separate email from hosting on the same domain.
• The site is now running as a search engine for the Cornwall Online Census Project as their server doesn’t allow scripting. It is the biggest bandwidth user on my site but keeps the load down (and hence the host company happy) by using the Zoom CGI rather than PHP engine.
• Offline I have finally detached myself from MS Office and gave away my copy to a deserving cause. OpenOffice 2 is good and the retraining curve has not been too great. The Firefox 2 upgrade was painless and has improved the spelling on this site by checking before posting.
• While installing a new home computer (a traumatic and very time consuming business) I took the opportunity of re-organising our file server so that it is automatically backed up and can hence hold archive as well as backup files. I have fine tuned the client backups so they are easy to run (using Backup4all). I use my home setup as a sandbox for the church system which is run largely unattended and used by non-technical people so it has to be low impact.

For this year … ? I am wary of making resolutions as I met so few of them last year; any way it is a bit late now.

• I will have to jump to WordPress 2.1 soon and Thunderbird 2 is promised as well. From past experience these will be quite easy. Vista is not even in my range of vision.
• I am getting concerned that the UPS I installed is having a measurable impact on our electricity bill over and above having things like the server and network equipment on all the time; I need to find a way of measuring it.
• A longer term project will be changing the church website over to a content management system, probably WordPress, but I don’t know if it will be this year.

I imagine that, by now, most people will have experienced ringing a help line on what looked like an ordinary number, and finding that the call goes to India, Belgium or Ireland. This can also be true of traditional 0800 or 0808 Free Phone numbers. These are called ITFS (International Toll Free Service) numbers and are just forwarded to the real destination.

Another sort of number which has been slow to appear are true international numbers—called UIFN (Universal International Freephone Number) they start +800 i.e. from the UK they would be dialled 00800. The big advantage is that it is exactly the same number (except perhaps the + prefix) from most countries of the world which means that international businesses only have to publish one number.

Disadvantages are:

• if your phone service blocks international calls, most of them don’t recognise that these are in fact free.
• don’t try ringing them from a mobile; they are most certainly not free.
• You have no idea where the other end is.

This by Phil on our internal company blog

I see I can get Windows Vista Ultimate and Office 2007 Ultimate for the bargain price of £816.98 – a reduction of just over £150 on the list price of £969. But still the same price as two copies of a good Linux distro and OpenOffice – with the hardware to run them on thrown in for free…

The question of citizenship has come up again because the heir apparent has said that new immigrants should do community service as well as pass a test.

This test is 45 minutes to answer 24 multiple choice questions and you have to achieve a score of 75%. Indirectly it also tests whether you can use a computer. It is actually much more a test of comprehension—have you read and understood the book—than knowledge, but in that respect I suppose it means that the candidates must have a good grasp of English (or Welsh or Gaelic).

The cost is £10 for the book and £34 for each attempt at the test. Most of the practice tests cost money, this is one of the few that doesn’t. Try it for yourself, this is how well I did.

1. %age of population under 19—no idea but can make a sensible guess.
2. Women’s vote—OK, I know that one.
3. Causes of crime—again a sensible guess.
4. Population—a sensible guess (that is the problem with multiple choice questions)
5. Largest ethnic minority—I got this wrong.
6. Census—well I ought to know this one having worked with it for a number of years.
7. Religion—I got this wrong as well.
8. Width of country—guess again but why expect them to learn obsolete units of measurement.
9. Language—I would dispute “widely spoken”
10. Sport—not surprisingly I got this wrong.
11. Bank holidays—I forgot to count May Day.
12. Easter Eggs—I have no idea and I don’t suppose many other people do either.
13. Boxing Day—I know that, but celebrated is an exaggeration.
14. Prime Minister—I got the answer right but technically it is wrong.
15. Cabinet—I got this wrong.
16. Lords—A good guess again.
17. Queen—OK but again a technicality likely to trip up a foreigner.
18. EU foundation—ignoring the spelling mistake, I have no idea. A random guess.
19. EU size—I know that.
20. Age for public office—I got this wrong.

The site failed to add up my score but I got 12/20 = 60%. When do I get deported?

We happened to switch on the TV at about 10pm on Friday to get some news and, on News 24, be landed in the middle of the story about the Cumbria train derailment.

Some observations I made at the time:

• A major incident it certainly was, but it didn’t look serious enough to black out ALL other news both from home and overseas.
• It was addictive—I felt that you had to hang on a little longer in case something important came to light.
• It made the official spokesmen look stupid. They didn’t know what was going one, we knew more from mobile phone calls and pictures from people on the train.
• They kept saying that, apart from a few people unable to move, there were only minor injuries.
• The train seemed remarkably empty—only 120 people on a nine carriage Friday night express from London to Glasgow?

Now a few days later, some of my opinions have changed.

• They were wrong—it was more serious that they knew. It goes to show that the people actually there don’t necessarily know what is happening.
• The official spokesmen were not stupid, they knew that only had part of the information and were sensibly not committing themselves before they knew for certain.
• The BBC executive reporting from the train should have known better. Her position gave her reports authority and weight which was not justified by the circumstances.
• It calls into question how reliable any “on the spot” journalism is.

We keep getting calls from 0803 969 3882. We have no idea who it is and they don’t ring long enough to answer. Please stop it.

A correspondent (Colin) was reading my Cockney Alphabet page and was asking if anyone knew the rest of another one he has a snippet of.

F is for freedom, which England’s all about
If you can’t afford your dinner then you’re free to go without!

Apparently Tony Benn mentioned it on a radio program but doesn’t know any more. Does anyone know the rest?