Yorkshire council hit with prolonged web outage A Yorkshire council's website has been out of action since Boxing Day, causing a headache for residents mostly seeking info on bin collections. Kirklees Council's phone lines and website went down last week reportedly due to a power surge. Since then the council has been unable to provide much of a digital service to its …
In the universe where HTML strike tags work.
Mystery solved. Thank you.
Here that's more a case a case of "the universe where HTML strike tags work visibly"
Enlarging so I can see the pixels, the strike through is only 1 pixel high out of a possible 12, and at 4th up from the bottom not even at the half way mark. Even the dot at the base of the question mark is 2 pixels high.
Latest Firefox on macOS Sierra (10.12,2)
A failure by Firefox then. MacOS Sierra + Chrome shows it perfectly fine.
Confusingly, it also displayed perfectly fine here - latest Firefox, but on OSX 10.9.5.
One of those spooky confluence-of-factors bugs that only manifests on a particular combination of OS & software, at a particular phase of the moon, when the computer is oriented just-so relative to Magnetic North...?
Extremely unlikely. More than likely the cabinet chose to, as with a local sports centre providing excellent services for the community, especially the elderly, which has, sorry, oops HAD one of the few facilities of it's kind in West Yorkshire.
Kirklees, i am told, is one of the most deprived areas of England. The nine strong ( all Labour) cabinet are doing their very best.
OK, IT services may be "down" but how come that stops the physical bin collection with old fashioned men and lorries?
Ha, ha, f*cking, ha.
Now excuse me whilst i go bring the still full bin in.
"Kirklees, i am told, is one of the most deprived areas of England. The nine strong ( all Labour) cabinet are doing their very best."
The cabinet, whilst invariably crying t'poor tale as an excuse for shutting libraries and museums, had money to spaff on the likes of the Tour de France. I doubt that many council tax payers here and in the other councils that "invested" in such vanity projects realise that we paid the promoters rather than vice versa. We're then told how much money this brought into the area, none of which seems to have actually benefited the community as opposed to the few businesses that profited.
"That will explain why all the local A&E departments are being closed down."
Separate organisation and separate issue. That's the Kirklees and Calderdale NHS trust.
There's a common underlying trend, however: lumping together areas that don't actually belong together.
Kirklees was a piece of miscegenation from the 1974 reorganisation of local govt. Someone decided to get rid of the old West Riding County Council and the various Urban District Councils etc below them who had a fair idea of what they were doing and replace them with a single layer which they constructed from Mirfield and Huddersfield, two separate communities which had had relatively little in common except being neighbours and which, collectively, have maybe even less in common with the valleys upstream from Huddersfield and which are also part of this administrative monster. Some idea of the quality of thinking which went into this is indicated by the name they gave it: there really is a place called Kirklees and it's in Calderdale. If Kirklees Metropolitan Council ever had any real value it's long gone. The whole unwieldy mess should be broken up.
The creation of the NHS trust was a piece of financial engineering inflicting on HRI (Huddersfield Royal Infirmary) something similar to what happened to Ferranti. The hospital in Halifax had a huge PFI debt and was financially unviable so it was merged with HRI which had a valuable site. It's not just A&E being bled away from HRI; SWBMO's eye clinic is now in Calderdale, maternity services are in Calderdale, hip replacements are in Calderdale...
Kirklees Metropolitan District is covered by two NHS trusts. As you say, the Calderdale and Huddersfield trust covers the West Kirklees, but Mid Yorkshire trust covers East Kirklees, Wakefield and Pontefract. Both trusts are crippled with PFI debt and both are holding "consultations" that recommend closing the A&E departments in the hospitals they own in Kirklees, leaving the district without an A&E. Each consultation is independent, so will not consider the proposals of the other consultation.
If both Huddersfield and Dewsbury A&Es close, in an emergency, you will be "rushed" to either Calderdale Royal in Halifax or Pinderfields in Wakefield, both of which are damn near inaccessible in rush hour. Both hospitals are overstretched, so are diverting patients to the hospitals that are threatened with closure. The additional travel time will have a knock on effect on the ambulance service, but it's a separate trust, so isn't considered in the consultation. The NHS trusts have no electoral accountability, except to the Department of Health, so Kirklees Council has no control over the decision. And the Department of Health won't intervene as selling off NHS assets fits the Conservative's privatisation agenda.
"Each consultation is independent"
Independent? Pull t'other, it's got bells on it.
You're right, of course. And if you live in the Colne or Holme Valley HRI isn't easy to get to in the rush hour either. A hospital with an A&E at the old St Luke's site would have been better but I suppose they've sold that off by now.
"OK, IT services may be "down" but how come that stops the physical bin collection with old fashioned men and lorries?"
Maybe it doesn't, but it does mean that residents don't know when they are going to come round, as the schedule tends to change over Christmas.
Where I live, the bin men have iPads in their lorries which tell them which bins to empty that day. If that connects to the same place / server room as the public website, then that would cause problems and they would have to go back to sheets of dead tree paper on a clipboard.
"Maybe it doesn't, but it does mean that residents don't know when they are going to come round, as the schedule tends to change over Christmas."
Actually the schedule for next year was distributed to households before Christmas & includes the changes.
The site, BTW is back up and as daft as ever. For instance http://www.kirklees.gov.uk/beta/your-property-bins-recycling/your-bins/default.aspx?transaction=bin-collection-dates brings up a search form with two fields. The name/street number field is ignored, you have to put in a post code and it then displays a radio button list for each property before it will tell you the collection date - which is extremely unlikely to be different for two properties in the same post code.
The description of the Kirlkees system is exactly the same as the one for Rushmoor (Aldershot & Farnborough).
This place also shares the factoid with Kirlkees in that the place called Rushmoor is not in the Council District.
The people in Whitehall must have been really pissed when they stuck the names on the councils back in 1973/4. (playing tail on the donkey I expect) I expect that there are more like this all over the country.
"power surge"
If we apply Star Trek Logic and technology, a power surge would have the effect of adding super-speed capabilities to their web page queries and/or bin collections. In this case it probably fried a bunch of equipment all housed in a single rack because; 1) it was cheap, and, wait for it, 2) there were more glowing LEDs in the rack and that looked cool.
I collect pinball machines IRL and have a very large fuse collection. I once let a windoze admin that I did not care for go a whole week trying to find a replacement fuse for a server that was set for 110vac that he plugged into into a 220vac outlet. That was a week well spent! And it kept a clumsy box off the net for a bit longer too.
I was not aware that any futuristic vessel in a TV programme or film ever used fuses at all. Certainly the Seaview seemed to burn out most of its circuits every time the boat rocked.
"I once let a windoze admin that I did not care for go a whole week trying to find a replacement fuse for a server that was set for 110vac that he plugged into into a 220vac outlet."
A true BOFH would have handed him a specially turned piece of brass rod, painted to look like a fuse. That would have kept the "clumsy box" off the net for even longer.
Back in the day, in my misspent youth, in a test gear department of an electronic instruments company, one of the first things I learnt was that the test room had discovered that a one inch bit of potentiometer spindle made an excellent plug fuse replacement.
Apparently, unlike the Real Thing (TM), they never failed ....
I probably wouldn't worry about the bin collections because it's guaranteed they won't be collecting the paper one, you know the one that most needs collecting over Christmas unlike that big ass food and garden waste bin they collect every week without fail because they make money off it.
Talking of councils, it's not funny we have road closures due to ice and road crashes blamed on fog. Looking at the roads and fog near me I would make the assumption that they were not gritted and when you hit fog you slow down anyway so I would also assume that these accidents were caused by roads not being gritted.
Finally, call that an internet outage? Lucky bastards, When I were a lad t'internet went out for 25 years and we had nowt but pen and paper and no bins.
I'm reliably informed by a Kirklees Council resident that the green bins on their street were due to be collected last Wednesday. And yes, you've guessed it, they weren't. Neither were they on Thursday nor Friday.
Any chance of an apology from Kirklees Council? Don't hold your breath.
Of course, in a civilized country, "not knowing which day the bins will be collected" wouldn't be a problem - put your bin out, bring it in whenever it's been emptied, be that next day or a week later.
In modern Britain, however, "putting your bin out more than 2 hours in advance of collection / leaving it out for more than 30 seconds after it's been emptied" is a Capital crime just about on a par with murder, arson, or wrongthink.
Oh, and Happy New Year, everyone!
Paper?
Luxury!
we 'ad 't climb up t' moor, in our pyjamas, after shearing 't sheep in t' dark an' knitting t' pyjamas, through t' snow. bah 't 'at, an' all,an' pluck at t' heather wi' our bare 'ands,
Then we'd ha' t' slither all t' way down t' moor in t' dark t'd outside privvy, shovel t' snow from t' door wi' our bare feet ...
an' i' we forgot t' put lid back on t' hole when we'd done in t' morning our dad ....
What'd ye use t' pen fer?
I think you'll probably find that the DR/BC systems work fine in the role for which they were designed/authorised - ensuing councillors allowances / expenses are paid, regardless of services delivered to the public (just as in the same way, arts/education funding for local services will be slashed before councillors & council executives pay will be reviewed)
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