DougWeb – Doug's home on the Web

My mobile’s broken, so don’t expect a reply to any calls/texts for a few days…

…’animals on the line’. The poor announcer woman was clearly embarrassed, as there was a long pause between ‘We would like to apologise to customers for the delay this morning, this was caused due to’ and ‘animals on the line’.

There was much rolling of eyes…

Please die a slow, horrible death. Soon.

Thanks

I’ve just bought an N95 (delivery Tuesday). I had considered waiting for an iPhone, but decided not to for a few reasons.

• iPhones are selling for $500 plus a 2 yr contract in the US. So in UK that’s going to end up as £450 plus an 18 month contract, since electronic goods don’t obey the usual exchange rates. And I’m just not going to pay that much for a phone!
• iPhones don’t have 3G. That’s just incredibly stupid really for any kind of modern phone, never mind one that’s sold on the premise of having the internet handy.
• iPhones don’t let you add a custom ring tone. That’s also kinda stupid.
• iPhones can’t use MMS. That’s kinda stupid.
• I don’t want to wait until October for a new phone.
• The N95 has GPS. I’ll sure I’ll get lost sometime in the next 12 months, and will truly appreciate it then. In the meantime I’ll just appreciate it based on it’s geek-like coolness.
• N95 camera has a (crappy) flash and autofocus. iPhones have neither
• The N95 has dozens of extra features, most of which I’ll never use but represent astounding value for money compared to an iPhone.

My entire office just shuddered - either something has just exploded or we’ve had an earthquake…

UPDATE - something belonging to BT exploded underground. It managed to blow one of those rectangular manhole covers out of the ground as well as rock nearby offices…

UPDATE - my office is being shut for the afternoon because half the building has no power, and we’ve got no running water. Most of us are off to the pub…

What happens if you build a wooden horse, put some soldiers inside it, and then ask security guards if you can leave it overnight inside their complex?

via The Old New Thing

I’ve just found out that the charity I work for is looking to make 30-35 people redundant.

Crap.

Just before leaving work on Thursday night, I sent an email to approx 11,000 people promoting some new publications the charity is selling.

Upon arriving at work Friday morning I discovered 2600 bounce-back emails in my inbox. So I’m not best friends with the records department at the moment - I spent all day Friday going through the database and deleting wrong email addresses. And I still have 2200 to go.

And then when I got home Friday evening, I found 1100 bounce back emails in my personal inbox, because some fuckwad spammer had got hold of my email address and decided to send out adverts for viagra and a variety of diet pills in my name.

If I believed in God, I would think I was being punished…since I don’t, I’ll have to be content with being extremely pissed off.

We all know the universe is bigger-than-you-can-ever-imagine-big. But I hadn’t quite realised how full of big things it was. And now having seen these, I am feeling a little bit insignificant.

(doesn’t require sound, but works best with it)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6266436.stm

Well the New Scientist thinks so. So that’s my excuse from now on!

Apparently not a single education reporter for the BBC, The Times, The Telegraph, The Sun or The Daily Mail actually know how A-level exam grades are awarded. And I suspect if I looked at other news sites, I would find the same (depressing) result.

A level grades are not given out solely based on percentage of marks gained in an exam! If this years A-level maths is truly easier than last years, then candidates will need to score more marks to get an A. If this years paper is harder than last years, then candidates will need to score less marks. It’s simply not possible for them to write papers of the same difficulty each year. Even in subjects like maths, they can’t simply take the previous papers and change the numbers in the questions, because then people would simply need to learn the techniques tested in the previous years papers, and not the entire syllabus.

The confusion arises because people do like to compare things from one year to the next. Most people would agree that someone getting 86% on an ‘easy’ paper has less knowledge than someone who got 78% on a ‘hard’ paper. In fact the 86% might have been a B, but the 78% was worthy of an A…

Because of this the exam boards map the raw marks onto something called the UMS (uniform mark scale). So someone who scored the minimum marks for an ‘A’ on their particular year’s exam will receive 80/100 on the UMS. Someone who scored halfway between the grade boundaries of ‘A’ and ‘B’ for their particular year, will receive a UMS score of 75/100. Students receive their UMS score, not their raw marks. IQ tests work in a similar way - the actual ’score’ given by a test depends on the difficulty of the particular test, and not just how many questions you got right.

You can’t say that a UMS score of 80/100 is 80%. The numbers just don’t work that way.

QCA even explain this themselves…

Whether or not the standards expected for a particular grade have gotten softer over the years is another matter entirely…

The BBC have got a news story on their website at the moment about a game being pulled from shelves for causing offence:

A video game which uses a term abusive to people with disabilities is being pulled by its manufacturer.

MindQuiz, a brain training game for the Nintendo DS handheld console, was released in the UK by French software giant Ubisoft in March 2007.

However, poor performance in one section sees the player labelled in an offensive manner.

The company has apologised “to anyone who was offended by the game” and said it will withdraw it.

“As soon as we were made aware of the issue we stopped distribution of the product and are now working with retailers to pull the game off the market,” a spokesperson said.

“The game was developed in Japan, and we unfortunately did not pick up on the offending word in our quality assurance. We are currently working with the developer to find a way to rectify the issue.”

The problem emerged after a Belfast woman contacted BBC Radio Ulster’s Nolan Show.

Nicola told the show she had been playing the game - aimed at ages three and above - to pass the time while in hospital giving birth to her baby son, Austin, four weeks ago.

It was a fraught time for the young mother, who had lost her other son, Logan, just before Christmas.

The three-year-old - who suffered from cerebral palsy and was severely brain damaged - passed away after contracting pneumonia.

Nicola was shocked when she had performed poorly at one part of the game and it rated her efforts in a manner derogatory to the disabled.

“I thought it was absolutely appalling that a word like this should be used to describe someone who has not achieved very well,” she said.

“My daddy also has cerebral palsy and he is in his mid-50s and this is a word that really offends my dad.”

So what’s the word that caused the offence? Spastic? Retard? Something else? The mystery word is the entire point of this story!

It actually offends me that it hasn’t been published for what I can only assume is ‘fear of causing offence’. It’s a news website - if anyone is offended by any word when used in a strictly reporting context (x said y), then they need to grow up and live in the real world. Should we ban dictionaries?

Bah. I’ve made an official complaint to the BBC - wonder if they’ll get back to me…

I spent yesterday at the Novotel West for my organisation’s annual event, which on the whole was a fairly dull (but complicated) event.

However the evening’s party more than made up for it.

P.S. Note to self: Mimosas are deceptively alcoholic

For the next week I get to share my office building with Ofsted, who will be spending a week checking up on the training side of the charity I work for. As long as they don’t want to talk to the web guy, I’m sure we’ll get along just fine…

The identity card scheme will become a “great British institution” on a par with the railways in the 19th Century, Home Office minister Liam Byrne says.

Bollocks they will.

(source BBC News)

As I write this, the visitor counter (not pages, not hits - visits) is displaying 2000724. That’s two million seven hundred and twenty four visitors visits to my site in the past 3years 3 months.

That’s quite a lot.

So thanks to you all.

There was a letter from ‘Electoral Reform Services‘ waiting for me when I got home earlier. Confused as to why they were writing to me I opened the letter and discovered that because I am a member of T&G (joined recently) I apparently get a vote for Labour’s deputy leader.

Here’s the thing. In order for my vote to count, I have to tick a box agreeing to the following.

I support the policies and principles of the Labour Party, and am not a member or supporter of any organisation opposed to it and pay a political subscription to the body that issued this ballot paper.

I feel dirty for just typing out the words ‘I support the policies and principles of the Labour Party’, so I certainly won’t be ticking the box! (I support the Conservative Party)

I’ve gained many a useful tip from blog posts, so it’s only fair that I share the results of an afternoon’s frustration.

If you’re having problems getting the awesome PHP/Java Bridge to work under Tomcat, make sure you’re using version 5.5 of Tomcat and not version 6. I had all of my problems go away instantly when I tried the older version (a final act of desperation). I assume it’s got something to do with the confusing table of servlet specifications outlined on the Tomcat homepage, but that’s just a guess since I try to keep as far away from Java as I can (I dislike strongly typed languages).

Anyway, that’s what worked for me. Hopefully it helps someone else out there.