London Riots (Again? Really?)

So, just at the start of Thatcher’s government there are riots at the start of Cameron’s. It is disappointing – no matter whether you like the election result or not (I don’t) the right-wingers sucked it up under Blair for 13 years without this kind of rubbish.  The left-wing need to do the same.  

Can’t help thinking that this:
Charlotte Church plans makeover of £1M home

is linked to this:
Charlotte Church “Mad as hell” as she joins Cardiff protest following Conservative majority

Or perhaps not. After all it’s not as if z-list, sorry former b-list celebrities ever mouth off about politics when they ne ed a higher profile or have something to sell…

I’m sure I can’t think of any recent comedian examples.

(And insulting my grandmothers and your own – “Tory Scum”? Some of those WWII women helped found the NHS for heaven’s sake!  – does nothing to make your point of view dearer.)

And as for this claim that Labour would be better? Ha!

I watched Blair and Brown slam part-time teachers and agency nurses when trying to hit IT contractors who simply went overseas (IR35). I watched them destroy the entire industry I worked in and sell my UK client relationships to big business (not to mention resurrecting a law that specifically targets female business owners by assuming their income is their husband’s – S660). Cameron& #8217;s now allowing a new law that will destroy the rest of my rebuilt business – #EUVAT, due to be rolled out to all online sales next year – which has just removed the entire US customer base I’d built to replace the UK one. I’m burned out. I just don’t care anymore.

There is absolutely no point in trying to build a small business in this country. After 13 years of Labour and 5 years of the Con/Dems I’m damned if I can tell the difference.

Bitter? Oh hell yeah. But I’m not destroying people’s workplaces and homes, or insulting dead women.

I’m just not sure I can pick myself up and try to rebuild a company for the third time in fifteen years either.

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This blog has now moved to http://www.rablogs.co.uk/tirial, where the original article can be found.  London Riots (Again? Really?) - http://rablogs.co.uk/tirial/2015/05/09/london-riots-again-really/ was published on May 9, 2015 at 8:04 pm.

Voting and Elections

I was going to post about EUVAT and the mess that’s about to cost 750,000 British jobs due to a leftover of Brown’s government that Cameron’s done little about, or possibly a vaguely comical post on the local election campaign. Then I saw this video by Helen Pankhurst.

http://t.co/htpeluSBO8

This annoys me. This bloody well annoys me.

1. The suffragettes and suffragists fought for the right for women to vote, not to make voting compulsory, just as women in the 70’s fought for the right to choose a career, not to make work compulsory.
2. My gender does not give you the right to demand what I do, even if you are another woman.
3. This argument could as well be made for every group that now has the vote:
   1. Every man who owns property worth £10 or more should thank Lord Grey and the Whig government of 1832 for going against Arthur Wellesley Duke of Wellington to secure middle class sufferage.
   2. Male lodgers should thank the Chartist Movement and the reform act of 1868. The Chartists were arrested, opposed (the word "crushed" was used) by the authorities, and spent 30 years fighting for the right to vote.
   3. All other men should be grateful for the 1880’s acts.

It is worth remembering that the right to vote was fought for not just by women, but by the ancestors of every voter in the country at some point or another. Electoral reform was not a peaceful process, with riots, uprisings and more in a process that went from wealthy landowners only in the 1820's to universal sufferage in the 1920s. The suffragettes were force-fed in the 1900's. The Chartists, fifty years earlier, were tried for treason and transported.

The right to vote was won by the people and then protected by those who fought the second world war, those who stood on the front lines through the cold war and those be hind them who guarded that right from attacks at home.

Thanks to them, the long chain of campaign and sacrifice, you have the right to vote in Britain. You also have the right to choose not to, which is just as important.

I intend to vote. You don't have to.

My reasoning basically goes that it’s the only time for four years you get to have a direct say in government, so vote if you can find someone to support. If you want to protest, spoil your ballet paper, vote for a minority candidate, or tear up the sheet, but consider at least taking the time to stand in the ballot box. Because if you aren’t there, the people in charge just think you’re happy with the status quo.

But whether you decide to vote tomorrow, or whether you decide not to, make sure it is something you decide. Because if you don’t speak up for your future, someone else will.

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This blog has now moved to http://www.rablogs.co.uk/tirial, where the original article can be found.  Voting and Elections - http://rablogs.co.uk/tirial/2015/05/06/voting-and-elections/ was published on May 6, 2015 at 8:16 am.

Frameworks, and coding, and CSS...oh my!

Sometimes I despair of the modern coding scene. Android, and Chrome and mobile and Jquery have emerged, and it does appear to do something very strange to some programmers: specifically they don’t know how to program.

I had a slightly odd CSS query but I knew there were ways round it in 2004 when I last used CSS in anger, so I had a look around the forums and the talks to see if anything had changed.

“Oh no, you’ll have to use jQuery and customise x function” External dependency and several hundred lines of code?

“How about wordpress? Bootstrap can do it if you…” Framework, with extra holes, potential vulnerabilities, external dependancy and bloat from unneccessary functions.

“It’s not possible.”

“Generate the entire page with javascript!” No, that’s not happening. Because I’m not a moron.

“Static layer to hit before that acquire details and then…” sigh. Load my page three times?

So I went back to my old-school, rather rusty, ten-year-old CSS

Three lines.

Three lines of basic CSS in the header (OK, stylesheet)

And what’s even better, when I put them into google to see why no one covered them anymore, those three lines are covered by W3C schools.

This is entry level stuff guys, used admittedly in a non-standard and browser-compatible way, so why isn’t it used more often?

Because it needs to be coded.

And that is sad.

It’s been many years since the interview where a coder shot himself down in flames by sitting in a major finance house, failed to answer any of the coding questions and announced he didn’t need to because – holds up CD – he had all the tools he needed right here.

The interview ended right there. An unknown disc loading unknown programs into a highly secure environment and he didn’t think it would be a problem. He couldn’t even imagine how we were working if we didn’t already have these tools loaded, because no one built code from scratch…

At the time we all thought he was an outlier. Now, sadly, I suspect he is becoming the norm, and that is going to cause real problems with coding. If no one ever examines the frameworks they are building on, if they never check the foundations of their work, there could be some very nasty surprises coming up. And yes, I know I’m using wordpress for this blog. I am aware of the risks, and my serious sites either manage them, or don’t use it. However, I suspect that many of the coders above do, and they aren’t even aware that there are risks. And that worries me. Because if you aren’t even aware of the risks, how do you protect yourself?

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This blog has now moved to http://www.rablogs.co.uk/tirial, where the original article can be found.  Frameworks, and coding, and CSS...oh my! - http://rablogs.co.uk/tirial/2015/03/16/frameworks-and-coding-and-css-oh-my/ was published on March 16, 2015 at 10:01 am.

Server Woes and silver linings (Pt ii)

(I will explain why this is in two parts further on.)

The front page of the host’s site

Then I discovered that their site could still be viewed on mobile so off I went. (The site is relichost.net – don’t know if you can still see the directory structure but why not have a try. And a laugh.)

This post is in two parts because I keep getting logged out – it seems the server sessions are now rather shorter than they should be, and shorter than they w ere, making it very difficult to write articles. This might be due to memory.

It seems, among other things,  the host have nerfed the memory on the server. WordPress takes 64MB to run out of the box with no plugins, security or extras.  I would normally run it at 96MB or 128MB. A little bird (memory check) on the server revealed that it was running at 48. That’s right, it was running wordpress on a web server with less memory available than my ten-year-old phone. What makes it really funny is that wordpress is offered as part of the package preinstalled.

Now this could be because they have a new self-managed VPS package that they want to ‘encourage’ people to upgrade to – encourage as in “if no upgrade, your site no work”. I’ve left hosters before because of that.

There’s a problem however. For what they are charging I can get a fully managed server from a reputable firm. So I did. (I didnR 17;t intend to but when I saw that rate available I reached for my credit card…)

So my PC got written off by Firefox and recovered by Microsoft system restore and Adobe giving my a free software upgrade. Now my host has damaged my site and the result is a major upgrade in servers without spending more.

Always a silver lining? Perhaps, but I think I’d prefer fewer clouds

I’m off to play with my new server now. Ta ta.

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This blog has now moved to http://www.rablogs.co.uk/tirial, where the original article can be found.  Server Woes and silver linings (Pt ii) - http://rablogs.co.uk/tirial/2015/02/26/server-woes-and-silver-linings-pt -ii/ was published on February 26, 2015 at 10:45 am.

Can renewable energy run out?

What happens when renewable energy runs out?

Sounds daft, doesn’t it? It’s the question asked by a politico from UKIP (See the Independent- Feb 20th) that’s currently all over twitter and news sites, and forums (and annoying me because I’m getting buried by flyers from various parties at the moment and I don’t want to think about politics until April…) with people saying how daft it is. By definition renewable resources don’t run out, right?

And yet it’s not a stupid question.

Poorly phrased maybe, but it does raise a valid issue.

The issue is that there are only so many ways to obtain energy from renewable resources, there’s a limited amount available at any one time, and obt aining it can involve severe damage to the environment.

Salmon Fish Ladder
Buy This at Allposters.com

The Pitlochry Hydroelectric dam (see my lens here) is a wonderful piece of engineering. The dam provides 15MW per year. However, building it required the construction of a fish ladder to allow salmon to reach their spawning grounds and the flooding of a valley with consequent loss of animal habitats and wildlife. It is still an area of remarkable natural beauty and supports many species, but making sure that remained the case was due to a lot of planning and work by the engineers and designers, all of which takes additional funds.

Regarding limits, renewable energy is large but not infinite. If you take a tidal river as an example, there is only so much force in each 24-hour tide which we capture by obstructing that tide. This produces consequences for a river estuary, and also means that you can’t just build dams up the length of a river: each dam will remove energy, and if the tide has less energy it will not reach as far upstream, making those further upstream less efficient. The tide failing to reach as far upstream will have effects on riverside plants, habitats and even erosion patterns and the course of the river.

Tidal Power
Buy This at Allposters.com

Finally given the limits of modern technology, and the amount of energy available there is currently a finite cap on how much energy renewable resources can produce in a time period. If we want to avoid destructive use of it – windfarms in bird’s migratory paths, solar panels built with rare elements, tidal barriers affecting fish – that limit becomes a lot lower.

Wiki places the actual limit on hydroelectric power in the UK at our current “1.65 GW” plus another possible “146 to 248 MW for England and Wales, and up to 2,593 MW for Scotland“.  The same source gives total energy use as “35.8GW on average, and 57.490GW at its peak.” Comparing the figures, there’s a huge shortfall between the available energy and our energy use.

Do I have an answer? No, but I have noticed that limits and consequences are something they don’t tend to teach in schools when they cover renewable resources. It’s basic physics: Energy cannot be created or destroyed. If you remove energy from a system it will affect other parts of that system. Wind power affects air currents, tidal power slows the earth (noticeable in *ahem* million years)…everything has a consequence. Some are just less damaging than others.

Hydroelectric Turbine, 19th Century
Science Photo…Giclee Print
Buy This at Allposters.com

What do I think they should do? How about using what we already have?

• There are Victorian tidal tunnels in the Thames originally built for barges, now abandoned. The daily rise and fall is nearly twelve feet, and yet no one has put a generator in?
• Looking online there are over a hundred functional watermills available to buy right now in the UK. These have been part of the environment for years, have millponds, why aren’t they being used for generation? The Gants Mill site in Surrey generates 12kw for the national grid and is still a scenic location. (There’s more details and working examples here: Using Watermills to generate electricity) Some are also windmills, offering two options.
Solar power is a little difficult in Britain given the weather, but there are other options: geothermal springs, etc.

As you might notice, these aren’t new ideas. There have been studies in this direction for years, for example: UK Hydro-Resource England and Wales Resource Study Oct 2010 (PDF). There are funds available: Rocs and Fits among others. So the question that must be asked, is why isn’t this being implemented further?

And I’ve just realised I’ve written five hundred words driven by a question from a politician that I probably put more thought into than she did.

And I’m a little disappointed. Instead of talking about the shortfall between energy use and available resources, or the failure to develop alternate resources, this morning the same per son stated she meant renewable energy subsidies (Guardian 20th Feb 2015)…oh well. Bureaucratic concerns over hard facts and engineering? That’s about what I should have expected.


*Adblock users miss the picture of the fishladder, the nineteenth century water turbine and the tidal powerstation diagram.

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This blog has now moved to http://www.rablogs.co.uk/tirial, where the original article can be found.  Can renewable energy run out? - http://rablogs.co.uk/tirial/2015/02/20/can-renewable-energy-run-out/ was published on February 20, 2015 at 11:18 am.