DougWeb – Doug's home on the Web

Not only has it ‘lost’ 1,023 prisoners but it’s accounting for last year was so bad that the gross value of the debits and credits recorded totalled £26,527bn – 1.3 times the GDP of the entire planet and 2,000 times the Home Office budget. Yes, really. Even after they’d redone the accounts, they’d still misplaced £1bn (5% of the budget).

The top civil servent at the Home Office who presided over both of these fiascos recently moved jobs to become the Deputy Governer of the Bank of England in charge of financial stability. I wonder what qualifications they asked for before hiring him…

That’s one fucked-up film.

There’s not much else I can say, other than to stay away if you’re not the type to appreciate some blood and guts. Otherwise, I recommend it.

Apparently it’s part the painful realities of hyena sex. Full article here. I’d like to thank fark.com for that little gem and making me do a double-take when I read that headline this morning.

Since 0.2.2, I’ve made the following changes. Posting this now, so I have a record of what’s changed before I forget…

• Updated the version number
• Created a tab-based navigation list (demo here)
• Added an ‘about box’
• Made a list of contributors without whom the project would never have happened – this includes Brendan Eich, who in the days before fixing critical bugs I found in Mozilla’s E4X implementation, found time to invent JavaScript.
• Added a link to the licence within the application
• Added support for ‘true/false’ wherever skins accept ‘yes/no’
• Made better use of Gecko APIs (i.e. found some that did useful stuff)
• Added optional filtering of ‘adult’ profiles
• Added support for an arbitrary source of cover scans (e.g. from a pre-existing PHPDVDProfiler install)
• Eliminated assumptions about the platform – e.g. registry access isn’t available if running on a Mac.
• Decided to release versions for Windows/Mac/Linux. Why not?
• l10n. Both the application GUI and application output are completely translatable.
• Made the generation of ‘review bars’ match what IVS generate. IVS’s algorithm is evil
• Tag-matching algorithm can handle extraneous spaces between attributes and values
• Fixed reversed logic for <DP NAME=”LOANDUE”>
• Automatic extraction of inline JavaScript and CSS to an external file, to reduce size of generated files
• Added code to compensate for skins that attempt to link to the image HTML files that IVS generate
• Output is saved as UTF-8, instead of US-ASCII.
• Added support for fixing the botched character encoding of IVS’s XML (see upcoming post). This required just under 61,000 lines of code.
• I’ll repeat that number. 61,000. I’m not happy with IVS
• Added icon
• Cross-linking (data generation)

Work still to do

• Cross-linking (UI)
• Expanding/collapsing boxsets
• Get some performance
• Test on Mac and Linux

Translations still wanted!

Readers who live in the UK will know that despite being £800 million over budget this year alone, hospitals closing, people dying of neglect etc, the health secretary Patricia Hewitt reckons the NHS is ‘having it’s best ever year’. Bollocks.

Pic from Beau Bo D’Or via Guido

From Macworld via Slashdot

The U.S. Internal Revenue Service has hit Symantec Corp. with a $1 billion tax bill for allegedly under-reporting the value of intellectual property that the software vendor transferred to two Irish subsidiaries.

Symantec was notified of the issue by the IRS in late March, the company said in a regulatory filing, dated Monday.

The IRS claims that both Symantec and Veritas Software Corp. under-priced intellectual property the two companies licensed to their Irish subsidiaries, said Symantec spokeswoman Genevieve Haldeman. Both Symantec and Veritas, which was purchased by Symantec in 2005, set up the Irish subsidiaries for the purpose of doing business outside of the U.S., she said.

The IRS believes that Symantec owes about $900 million, excluding penalties and interest, in connection with the Veritas claim, which covers the 2000 and 2001 Veritas tax returns. Another $100 million is due in connection with Symantec’s fiscal 2003 and 2004 reports.

Symantec does not agree with the IRS’s position and plans to appeal the tax assessment, Haldeman said.

Symantec’s stock (SYMC) dropped more than 4 percent following the news, trading at $15.73 in after-hours trading on Nasdaq Stock Market Inc.’s INET exchange.

They should consider it a punishment for inflicting Norton Internet Security on the world. Words don’t describe how much I hate that piece of software.

Thanks to Christian Rygaard for doing that (the translation will be included in 0.3)

A German man has taken legal action against the Easter Bunny for grievous bodily harm.

Karl-Friedrich Lentze, from Berlin, has filed a complaint with prosecutors, accusing it of causing addiction to chocolate which leads to heart attacks, obesity and strokes.

Lentze said: “The Easter Bunny is a sadistic and unscrupulous offender who preys on people’s sweet tooth.

“Find this evil bunny, handcuff his paws and remove him from shops in time for Easter.”

Public prosecutor spokesman Christian Avenarius said: “We will act upon the complaint with speed and diligence.”

Ananova

• New ‘About/Credits/Licence’ screen’
• Dynamic locale-switching
• An enhanced wizard
• Localisable GUI
• Localisable output
• A navigation list that doesn’t suck (for the 2nd time)

Someone had far too much time on their hands to make that I think…

So I got to work today, and started talking to Sindy who was shortly coming off an overnight shift. She’s a fairly good looking, slim+athletic girl who I know at least one fellow staff member fancies. She’s also fancied by a few of our ‘regulars’, one of whom gave her a gift last night.

Not drunken abuse
Not a box of chocolates.
Not flowers
…
but a pink vibrator.

I think that it’s kind of a weird gift to give to a complete stranger, but what do I know.

She also mentioned that she’d tested it – and it actually worked. Then she showed me. No, not like that…

This happened again on Thursday – except this time I didn’t get my hard drive back free of data loss – I seem to have lost my local copy of the DVD Profiler Resource Centre (the entire thing!). What’s curious is that I haven’t found anything else missing yet…

The worst part about the loss, is that my development version of the DVD Profiler Companion lived in that folder, and has therefore dissappeared. At least (most of) the changes were done in the last few weeks, so I’ve got a fairly good idea of what I did between 0.2.2 and Wednesday evening.

To whichever git(s) posted on tech troubleshooting boards that the error I encounted was not symptomatic of a failing hard drive – you were obviously talking shit.

Bah.

We’re getting a new bathroom – the only thing that’ll be left untouched is the window. This means no running water, lots of noise, lots of bad smells (welding, sealant) etc. Not the most peaceful environment to work in… grr.

Wow.

I’d heard that this TV show was fantastic – for a myriad of reasons – acting, premise, outrageousness of plot twists (polar bear in a jungle?), the characters, effects (pilot)…

Having watched the whole of the first season, I’ve been blown away by just how good this show is.

The extras on the DVDs weren’t bad either (they used a real plane?!)

Definately my best DVD purchase of the year so far.

It’s been a little low recently, so I’m going to make an effort to post something more frequently.

I’m not dead