… been written in a magazine.

Not only is love blind but falling out of love is indeed its mirror opposite

Thanks to Rachel Garrod for writing into the New Scientists letters page with this wonderful little quote amongst others. Your quote now graces my quotes page with its presence.

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I was pondering today just exactly WHY the Leeds School of Computing newsgroups are public.

Every time support remove a post for having inappropriate content the reason that is almost always cited is that the groups are accessible from the outside without a SoC username and password. My question is that if this presents a problem, why is it so? I mean, the groups are SoC related and if they are not they are most certainly predominantly aimed at SoC students.

Why should our freedom to post be governed not only by the fair use policy (which I accept and respect) but also by the potential offense caused to outsiders who have nothing to do with the school just because internal groups are world readable with no authentication. Just seems daft to me that if a post doesn’t contravene the fair use policy it cannot exist because it might be read by an outsider. If a post or discussion abides by the school’s policies the answer is to block the outsiders, not us from posting. That is all.

</soapbox>

As an aside, if someone from the school wishes to give me a good reason that I am staring blindly at as to why news is public without authentication then feel free to post in comments.

It really pains me to say this but I’m losing patience with the phpBB group. I respect that all their work; development, website and support is done in their own time, but it strikes me that recently they have got their priorities all wrong.

One day I wake up to find they’ve had a hard drive crash and they need to take some time to restore the site. Fair dos. When the site finally comes back they have this amazing new design and they have started using version 3 (very nice it is too), but half the site was broken (mods and styles mainly) and there was no version 3 release for the users! So they get to state that we can’t use v3 supported in a live environment but use it on their own site with over 1000 concurrent users, furthermore they stop us from getting the most out of v2 by breaking the system for submitting and downloading mods and styles.

Don’t get me wrong, I love phpBB and work with it regularly, but this attitude is taking the piss. If you have time to develop a new site, surely you have time to finish v3? I flatly refuse to create another site using v2 because it would need too many mods and style alterations that an “upgrade” to v3 would be impossible. I’ve got several sites that I need to create for business that need forums and I’ve been delaying them in order to use phpBB v3.0 RC1 but it really does look like its never coming.

Well, despite the fact it probably won’t be read, I have a message for phpBB group; If you dont release what is clearly RC1 worthy in the next couple of weeks to your users, I’m going to move EVERYTHING to vBulletin. Your software is miles better in my humble opinion, but if we can’t use it on our sites without you bitching at us saying its not ready when you are using it on your own site, then I’m going to have to pick the next best solution in the chain, and that’s vBulletin. I’ve been very patient, but I just don’t have the time to wait anymore and I can’t be creating extra work for myself by using v2 with mods just to get v3 functionality and then because of that not be able to upgrade to v3 (or making it very difficult to upgrade to v3).

Get your act together phpBB; I and I’m sure many others are tired of waiting for software to be finished that is obviously already finished.

It has come to my attention over the last few days and weeks even that the number of people on my blogroll who are making regular posts seems to have declined. While I might be guilty of having the odd few days, even a week, where I don’t post anything I soon catch up at the end of the period by making all 5 or 6 or so of my pending drafts complete and public.

This doesn’t seem to be the case for everyone else on my list, except for perhaps Chris, but even his posts seem to lack their usual zing. Apart from the Easter break, is there anything else thats happened recently to stop people writing a few lines? If so, perhaps someone could kindly let me know. Oh and if you don’t have an excuse, get blogging folks!

Its never nice when it happens but it looks like I’m a victim of fraud. A while ago I sold my old Dell Inspiron 5100 laptop on eBay so I could purchase one that was more suited to my needs. There was nothing wrong with the machine, it had served me well, but it was time for the drive to be wiped and for it to find a new home.

Like many people I figured eBay would be the best place to sell the laptop and indeed purchase a new one, so I took a photo and listed it. After a few hiccups where Nigerian scammers attempted to get me to send the laptop to Lagos I sold the laptop to a local person (relatively speaking anyway) who requested to be able to pickup after paying for the item. I agreed to this and so after receiving the payment in a completed state via paypal I provided my address for him to collect. He did so the next day.

Things started to go wrong a few days later when paypal put a hold on the funds that had been sent to me in the sale for “Investigation”. While rather unusual I have known this to happen before, especially with larger payments and as such wasn’t too concerned and decided to see what came of it. I did hold off leaving the buyer feedback in case there was a problem.

Unfortunately things took a turn for the worse some weeks later when I got confirmation from paypal via e-mail that the funds had in fact been reversed and I was both without laptop and payment. Only recently have I spoken to paypal and found there is categorically no way to recover the funds through them and that the buyer used fraudulent means to transfer them to me in the first place.

This leaves me in a nasty state of limbo. I want to take more action but feel I’m rapidly reaching the end of the line in what I *can* actually do. I’ve got eBay to place an unpaid item strike on the users account, but this has only served to get me my final value fees and listing fees back, a mere £15 compared with a £400 sale. Contacting the buyer proved useless; no response was received to e-mails and the phone number listed turned out the be a Keighley take away shop.

I noted however that the buyer had logged onto and used his eBay account because he had bought further items (laptops and computers) from other sellers, no doubt intending to defraud them too. I contacted one seller (who sold an expensive item to him before me) and was told that the sale was in fact OK, but I decided to leave negative feedback in order to warn other sellers about this individual. I also made a note of the other sellers who had sold to him in case I needed to contact them, after all if he’d defrauded a whole lot of us then we had strength in numbers. Surprise, surprise within hours of leaving the negative feedback the buyer made his feedback private. So he can log on and access his account when it suits him, but not read my messages which were there for him also - clearly a fraud.

The problem is where to go from here. I could contact the police, but with such a low (relatively speaking anyhow) priced item they are unlikely to investigate the case, at least not to a point where I get the money or the laptop and its likely to use up a fair whack of my time speaking to them and filling in forms. An insurance claim is useless as I intended to sell the item - it wasn’t stolen from me in the direct sense - so they haven’t have any interest in it. The last option I considered was a debt collection agency as I have a name and address for the individual, but I can’t be sure if the details are correct and all agencies have fees associated with them and I could stand to lose yet more money if they cannot trace the buyer.

All suggestions and comments are welcome of course, but it looks like I’ve lost the laptop with no payment and thats really not a nice situation to be in, in fact I’m rather unhappy and annoyed to be honest

Everybody has heard the phrase “What goes around, comes around” but there is one thing I never thought we’d see the mass return of - chain e-mails. First we had chain letters, then when everyone went mad over Hotmail and MSN Messenger we had chain e-mails. The latter certainly promised bad luck if you didn’t send them on, but I believe both carried some form of text strongly encouraging you to not break the chain.

Well, they are back! Not in letter form, not even in e-mail, but in the form of facebook notes. A lot of them have been altered to suit the format of facebook (mentioning walls etc.) but they are certainly the same old chain mail kind of thing. The wonderful thing about this re-incarnation is that is shows how many people actually *want* to take part. With e-mails everyone got one, like it or not, so it was a real pain if , like me, you resented the deluge of “Fwd” e-mails appearing in your box. Now though you only see peoples forwarding work on the feed page and so you can ignore it if you want. As such, I was amazed at how many people are taking part in this.

I really thought that these were just some school kid idea of a way to avoid doing homework in the evenings but clearly not. All I can say is there must be an awful lot of university courses that either are not being engaged in fully by students or that aren’t giving students enough to do!

The one downside of it all is that people using the notes to do some serious blogging are finding their readers have their feed aggregation page polluted by such messages and as such are not reading the good blogs as often as they might, or even not at all as the chain type notes tend to be long and the thin format of the facebook pages mean that a lot of scrolling is required to get past them. This perhaps is something facebook should address, but quite how they would I’m not sure. Maybe they could just display a summary on the feed aggregation page and so reduce the need for scrolling and also making it easier to see the more serious posts on offer.

I almost feel guilty about ranting on this subject but at the same time it really does need to be said. When we take the time and effort to organise going to a gig for jazz and blues society its not a nice situation when no one turns up. On Sunday night when I had work due the next day I went out to meet society members at the union to then walk down to the Grove Inn on the other side of town to go to a gig. I arrived at the union at 7:30pm and by 8pm no one had showed up. Not to worry I thought, I’ll meet people at the pub, but sadly that wasn’t to be and after arriving at the bar at 8:15pm and waiting until 8:50pm still not a single person had showed up. As I had work to do and didn’t fancy drinking alone I just went home.

Now I know this is no one persons fault but I hate it when I end up wasting time, especially where work is involved and just wish there was some way of avoiding it. I had the idea that I should get people to reply if they intended to go and that receiving no replies would mean we wouldn’t go, but the problem with this is that we advertise in many ways, some of which don’t really provide a method of letting us know if you’re coming, like posters and flyers for instance. If anyone has any ideas on how to deal with this, please reply in comments.

On a lighter note, the start of the new academic year in September should bring many more members and so eliminate the problem and make the society so much more fun

I didn’t think I’d have to write about this again but apparently I have to because there is still a problem with free speech in LUU, a bigger problem in fact than I had previously mentioned or even imagined. To cut a long story short and get onto the business end of discussing or ranting about the issue, this post has come about because of a blatant display of censorship by LUU.

Essentially a friend of mine posted a comment up on facebook about one of the specifics of the way the union was run, the information for which had come from one of their friends that worked in the union. Within a matter of hours of posting it my friend recieved a phone call from their LUU employed friend frantically requesting the message was removed because they feared they would lose their job. This wasn’t like it was a state secret of anything, just a piece of information.

This quite frankly disgusts me. This is a students union we are talking about here, not a military operation. We know more about what goes on inside Guantanamo Bay than we do about our own union. What is so f**king special about our union that they get to hush things up, hide things from students and threaten or at the very least appear to threaten the jobs of any employee who even speaks about how the union is run behind the scenes. We have a right to know - they use our money to fund themselves (a portion of our tuition fees goes on union funding) - so why aren’t they telling us or letting anyone tell us about what they are doing with our cash? Sounds like a huge conspiracy to me.

Well I’m not willing to stand for it anymore. While my post here is a big rant, there are some proactive things that you can do. I’m linking to this post from the top of my site to raise awareness and doing the things described in the bullet points below - I encourage you to do the same

• Ask the union staff and the exec why they censor staff and its members
• Request information from LUU about its activities, finances and affiliations in an attempt to prevent them hiding behind closed doors
• Vote for people in union elections who stand for transparency and freedom of speech

More news from the facebook development camp, this time with respect to photo uploading on Facebook. So what is it all about I hear you cry, well essentially they have added libraries to the API that will allow software developers to upload photos to facebook from outside of facebook its self.

When I saw this I was quite excited. I’ve long know that a number of my friends read my blog through facebook because it is syndicated there, but conversely do not check out my photo gallery because you have to visit my site directly for it. What these new API libraries would allow me to do is to syndicate every photo uploaded to my gallery into facebook. I would even be able to create galleries with the same name as the ones on my own site.

I’m not sure when I will find the time to write such a plugin for my gallery but if and when I do I’ll be sure to shout it from the rooftops.

I heard the other day that the next scheduled install fest (where school of computing students can bring their PCs along to the school of computing of an evening and have Linux installed on their systems and find out more about the operating system from those who use it every day) was going to be cancelled due to health and safety reasons.

This made me furious and I’m going to tell you why. Our whole lives are seemingly decided by authority, not for the purposes of law enforcement, national security or public health but because we “might cause ourselves harm”. My point is a very simple one, shouldn’t that kind of decision be up to us? If I put my fingers in a university plug socket and get a shock is it the university’s fault for having plug sockets? Of course not, its mine, for being a prat and sticking my fingers in there in the first place. This means that I should be allowed to use plug sockets because its my fault if anything bad happens.

Why then do we have rules that prevent us from doing something as simple as plugging in an electrical device with the reason cited that the organisation responsible for the existance of the plug socket is held reposnsible for anything that happens to me while using it?

I feel like we have been living in a nanny state for too long. Stupid health and safety rules need to be abolised as do the laws about organisational and individual responsibility to others that cause those rules to have a reason for exising. Whats wrong with us? Can’t we use our own brains anymore? The answer is yes, we can, its just someone is telling us we can’t. Its time for them to be given a kick out the door - permanently.