Posts by Adam 24 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Sep 2008
So, pub finds a way around the smoking ban and business quadruples over the space of a few days.
It is now clearly obvious that the declining pub trade is definitely being caused by cheap supermarket prices and absolutely not by the smoking ban.
I wish these people all the best, I hope they give the council the shaft and pubs all over the country start following suit.
Try going into any shop and start scanning barcodes with your phone and see how well that goes.
A friend of mine saw a funny product in a shop just a few weeks ago, took a picture and sent it to me. Immediately afterward she was forcibly removed from the store and had her phone confiscated until the image was removed.
I can't see "I'm doing an online price comparison with all the other shops on the street" going down any better than "I was sending a picture of this hilariously named product to my friend"3
The pricing of alcohol is completely ridiculous. It went out this weekend and the prices went something like this:
Traditonal pub, playing decent music at reasonable volume:
Fosters: £2.85
Guinness: £3.20(!)
Weatherspoons pub, playing horrible dance music at maximum volume, also full of chavs:
2 pints of fosters and a coke for £4.70.
The places which cater to people who want to go out for a sociable drink are amazingly expensive, and the places for people who want to go out and get wasted and usually follow steyotypical 'antisocial behaviour' practically drink for free. Then the government complains that there is too much antisocial behaviour and introduces some new law or restriction that only restricts the sensible drinker further.
"a pay cut in those circumstances is an insult to staff"
A pay-freeze is not a pay cut. You could argue that not getting a payrise effectively loses you money in relation to inflation but the retail price index, used by many companies to determine paryrise amount and the real rate of inflation is currently at 0.1% so no real loss there either.
They took a mainstream programming language used by many people and put it up against a selection of niche scripting languages most of which work best when used in conjunction with PHP.
There is no mention at all of PHPs primary competitors, ASP or ASP.net (which is completely differant to vb.net).
Also to the PHP haters, the language is fine and has been brought up to speed with many other programming languages over the recent years and can do anything any other language can (except namespaces which are coming in the next release - 5.3).
I have been using spotify for a while. It has a fantastic music database and is fast and reliable, but it simply lacks tools for music management that other media players have.
I would like to be able to pool my favorite albums and tracks into a generic music library, create 'views' into the music library so I can browse it however I feel and create dynamic playlists based on my own rules applied to that library. Your limited to dragging and dropping music into static playlists.
Right now, it's a good application for scouting out music - finding the bands/tracks that you heard on the radio or can't quite remember the name for. I then acquire the song in MP3 format and drop them into a proper media player.
If they introduce powerfull tools for music management and drop the price (£120 a year? yeah right!) I would pay for it, until then it will remain something I REALLY want to see do well but is stopping short.
I often consider making the switch, and am a programmer who is fairly familiar with using the unix console. There are four main things I do on my home machine... Web browsing/playing games/watching movies/litening to music.
If I moved to linux, I would spend a lot of time getting everything setup/configured, and then a lot of time re-familiarising myself with a new suite of applications to use, and at the end of the day I won't be doing anything better just differantly.
You have obviously never written code in real world working conditions.
You have a project that has to go live on Friday, you have 4 days left to work on it and 5 days worth of bugs and amends on your todo list before it can go to the client. The deadline is non-negotiable, if you miss it then the company may be out of pocket thousands of pounds (could easily be over 100k), you will get a bad review, ruin your chances for a bonus and get bumped one position higher on the 'bad programmer/replaceable employee' list.
The managers responsible for the project aren't programmers and don't fully understand your security concerns, their attitude is "just get it done for the deadline". If the project appears to be finished it must be ready to go, your security concerns appear 'petty' and are not critical for release to them.
Do you:
A) Refuse to let it out of Alpha/Beta, pissing off both client and the company you work for.
B) Smooth over what issues you can and release the software as-is, keeping everyone happy. You can fix further issues as they crop up and shift the blame onto the company you work for.
Then what do you do a month later when the cycle repeats itself with your next project?
Tight deadlines and bad management are probably the number one cause of most of these issues. You often have to cut corners to get the code out on time, let alone even think about a security audit because the people managing the project do not understand the technical implications and requirements for the project and agree the budget/timescale without consulting anyone who does.
PS: If you even consider open sourcing a project the company is being paid to develop in-house, you will get laughed straight out of a job.
would be very difficult to implement.
I can see some sort of content certificate similar to SSL working, where you attach the certificate to a domain which applications can then request and filter.
It would only take one press release/dev-blog from google mentioning that sites which have a valid cert (and follow its rating) might get better organic ratings over those who don't to get almost every major website signing up.
Once the websites start signing up, client side apps will start to appear. Someone will write a firefox plugin, which may get written into the next release which will force IE to follow suit or be branded an 'unsafe for kids' browser. It will all just snowball from there.
The problem I can see is user generated content. I have a huge vocabularly of naughty words that I can type here that would probably not go down too well on a PG rated site. This could lead to 'bombing' sites you don't like to get them filtered by client apps or something.
Also having a freely available and fairly accurate content rating for sites is something that the gov just won't be able to keep its paws off of, and they will inevitably apply some bullshit regulations that fuck everything up in the long run.
Yes, in theory a remotely hosted javascript file can potentially be a security threat, in this specific case that threat is nonexistant.
Google, probably more than any other company in the world, has to be concerned with data security, and I doubt that hijacking urchin.js is as easy as modifying the code and uploading to an FTP server. I expect that any change to production code within google has to go through a rigourous QA procedure where and changes made have to be both justified and tested by people other than the initial programmer before getting anywhere near a live environment. Any changes made would also be logged against the programmer using whatever internal CVS system Google uses - so any attempt to hijack the code could be easily traced back to the original programmer.
Also, unlike most other remote scripts, there is AFAIK a contract between yourself and Google when you subscribe to the service so Google could be liable for any security breach through their software.
If you are going to go to this level of paranoia regarding a site, then the security risk doesn't even start at Analytics let alone end there. A maintenance engineer at the hosting provider with access to the physical machine, a support engineer at the hosting provider with administrative access to the box, your own programmers could writing a backdoor for themselves, anyone working for Obama who has access to the information - all of these are more likely than Google hijacking your Analytics.
There is a line where security and paranoia goes from reasonable precatuion to loopy loopy la la land - and this is well over the line, and still not news-worthy. If you can't trust any 3rd party products, then why are you relying on Verisign for your SSL certificate, Unix for your server, PHP for your programming language - they could all be compormised by a malicious programmer just as much as google to compromise your data security.
So, the GIANT SECURITY RISK to the privacy of every american and/or internet user is that the admin area is on a URL commonly used for admin areas and that the site uses Google Analytics, which doesn't spider pages or give google full administrative access to the site, for usage statistics.
Come back when the username/password are revealed to be admin/admin and I might be a little more interested.
I don't what brand of browser people use, the differance between IE7 and Firefox is negligable to Joe Sixpack who only wants to check their hotmail/ebay/facebook.
I do wish people would upgrade from IE6, its a buggy backwards browser and makes the jobs of web-developers like myself miserable as we have to hack away at perfectly valid HTML/CSS to get it to work in a depreciated browser that AFAIK hasn't had an update in naerly 5 years.
Sadly, if we're asked to accommodate the Mac users in the 1-2% range then it will be a long time before the IE6 mob still in the 20%+ range gets phased out.
Approx 30% of all net browsers make my live miserable on a daily basis by continuing to use IE6.
If people can't even keep the most basic and regularly attacked internet application up to date, what hope do we have that we can trust them to keep the rest of their machine 'secure' through updates?
I don't have a TV license. Other than the monthly letters with massive headings telling me I have to pay a £1000 fine (followed in small print with the phrase 'if you are using a tv without a license'), the only encounter I had with an 'officer' was a brief conversation through the intercom where he didn't even know my name and when I told him to sod off he stated in no uncertain terms that he would keep coming back until I let him in.
That was 18 months ago, and the most annoying fact about it was that he interrupted me watching Dr. Who on the iplayer.
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