February 24th, 2009 by mike
I suppose it was only a matter of time – the Labour Government want to fly spy drones over Britain 
The drones are able to fly for hours, are quieter and cheaper to run than helicopters, and will obviously only catch terrorists (there was some sarcasm there).
This is yet another attack on our civil liberties and right to privacy. The article also points out that you will soon be CCTV’d when buying alcohol in a pub (you’re recorded on entry to the pub), and also that Britain has more CCTV cameras than the rest of the EU put together. And do not give me that “if you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear” crap either – we all have. That’s why the MPs didn’t want their expenses published.
As usual, Labour are using George Orwell’s 1984 as an instruction manual, not as a cautionary tale – where’s that General Election?
Posted in Politics | No Comments »
February 20th, 2009 by mike
With today’s depressing news that the nationalised banks liabilities of £1.5 trillion pounds will shortly be added to the national debt (thanks Gordon!), I’ve been playing with some figures to put it into something I can understand. Please note that I am taking a trillion to mean a million million ( e.g. £1,000,000,000,000) so the debt is £1,500,000,000,000
I’m fairly sure most of us can imagine a million – it’s a good lottery win, the price of a normal-sized house just outside London or a castle with 6,000 acres in Scotland. Basically, if you had a million, I think with careful estate planning, you’d be set for life.
So, let’s say we start spending a million – a day. Every day, wake up, buy a smaller house in London, and what the hell, that castle and just 3,000 acres in Scotland. Bing, bang, done, you’ve spent a million. Or, you could create a charity that would provide clean drinking water to every country on earth and pay for that per day. You could solve the problem of global warming – by paying every green on earth £10,000 every day just to stop bleating about it 
Anyhoo, a million pounds a day, from £1.5 trillion. Let’s forget about the interest (seeing as interest rates are in the crapper anyway), and just concentrate on spending a million pounds a day. Now, how long would it take to get through that amount of money at a million a day?
(scroll down…)
4,109 YEARS. Four millennia and one century. An age. About the same time that sensible man has been on this planet. That’s how long it would take to spend £1.5 trillion pounds at £1 million a day. That’s the amount of debt we are being saddled with by this Government and their ridiculous decision to nationalise two banks.
Prudence, my arse
Posted in Money, Personal, Politics | No Comments »
February 20th, 2009 by mike
Ok, here we go:
- £1.5 TRILLION (£1,500,000,000,000.00) of the nationalised banks’ liabilities heading onto Britain’s national debt, thanks to this government and their incompetent FSA (national debt would then stand at over £2 trillion)
- Freedom of speech not being stood up for
- CCTV in pubs otherwise licenses will not be renewed
- £BILLIONS wasted on the NHS with services detieorating
- £BILLIONS spent of welfare to baby factories and workshy skivers
- Speed cameras that just raise revenue for the government
- Automatic Numberplate Recognition Systems to watch you on the roads
- ID cards being foisted upon us at the cost of bailing a bank out
- An £18 BILLION overrun on Government IT projects – that’s not cost, that’s overrun
- CCTV cameras to watch you everywhere else
- Job losses everywhere apart from the public sector, whose gold-plated pensions the few of us left in the private sector pay for
- The decline in education standards, where an exam in tanning (TANNING!) is equivalent to a Maths GCSE
- The FSA being incompetent in regulating the banks – and still receiving bonuses
- Shootings, stabbings, muggings, youth crime all on the streets, and no police anywhere
- Redundancies everywhere
- Unable to take pictures of police any more, it’s an offence
- People being arrested for dressing like V
- The Home Secretary on the fiddle with her second home
- The Chancellor also on the fiddle over his second home
- And so on…
And what do the British do? NOTHING. Not a damned thing – no protests, no riots, hell, the Icelanders forced a General Election (two years early) a while ago by rioting and yoghurt. It speaks volumes when yet another MP is caught with their hands in the till and just shrug, and say, “Well, what do you expect?”
I don’t shrug. I am incapable of shrugging. I get mad, and frankly, I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it any more.
Now watch all of this clip, take it to heart and start getting mad:
Write to your MP, join a protest, write to your local paper – but do something, don’t take it any more.
PS: It is amazing how like the situation we’re in now is like the one in the clip, in the late 70s – history doesn’t repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme
Posted in Personal, Politics | No Comments »
February 5th, 2009 by mike
…here’s my message to you:
From the excellent Bus Slogan Generator, relevant to my earlier post about the “extreme” weather.
Posted in Fun, Personal | No Comments »
February 4th, 2009 by mike
When constructing drop-down lists for an ASP.Net page with hierarchical data, it is usually desired to indent each hierarchical entry to illustrate the "tree" of data, e.g.:
Books
Non-fiction
Biographies
Reference
Thrillers
Historical
Spy
CDS
Classical
Dance
The way to do this is by using a non-breaking space . However, just slapping in the new ListItem constructor won't work:
ddl.Items.Add(new ListItem(" Apple", productID.ToString()));
The above would render out this entry in the list:
Apple (you would see the mark-up as well as the word Apple)
The way around this is to use the hex value of the non-breaking space character, 160. This is obtained by using  , e.g.
ddl.Items.Add(new ListItem("  Apple", productID.ToString()));
However, you will still end up with mark-up similar:
  Apple (you would see the mark-up as well as the word Apple)
This is because the   needs to be decoded as it's being passed into the ListItem constructor, e.g.:
ddl.Items.Add(new ListItem(HttpUtility.HtmlDecode("  Apple"), productID.ToString()));
This will give you a space-indented entry.
However, this would be of more use:
ddl.Items.Add(new ListItem(HttpUtility.HtmlDecode(MakeSpace(level)) + category.Name, category.CategoryID.ToString()));
where category is an item in a list (ArrayList, List, whatever) and level is the level it should be indented to (more on that next post). The method MakeSpace is as follows:
private string MakeSpace(int level) {
string spaces = String.Empty;
for (int i = 0; i < level; i++) { spaces += "  ";}
return spaces;
}
(if anyone knows of a better way of writing MakeSpace, please let me know)
UPDATE 05/02/09: Ok, there is a better way for MakeSpace, as suggested by my colleague and unofficial mentor, Duncan Godwin:
private string MakeSpace(int level) {
return new String('-', 2 * level).Replace("-", " ");
}
Of course, you could place that directly in the Items.Add method, but I find that less readable.
Posted in ASP.Net | No Comments »
February 3rd, 2009 by mike
If you’ve not read Alan Moore’s incredible Watchmen graphic novel – don’t. Not yet, anyway. Go see the film (out in March), then read it. Or, read it, then see the film, it’s up to you. Either way, see the film and read the book
Here’s an alternative take on the official trailer (needs audio, natch):
Posted in Films, Fun | No Comments »
February 3rd, 2009 by mike
The Telegraph reports that average speed cameras will now be used in residential areas. I think that in the future, this is the final straw that broke the camel’s back for the motorist.
First, a disclaimer: I don’t speed through villages, I don’t speed where unsafe, but I occasionally go over the speed limit in other areas where it is safe to do so. A good hypothetical example of this would be road that was previously a 60mph limit (for years) and was then reduced to a 40mph limit (and had a speed camera slapped on it).
There’s a worrying trend that many roads are having their limits reduced and a speed camera placed on them, purely for the point of raising revenue. Yes, speed cameras can reduce accidents in accident blackspots, but I suggest you read about regression to the mean for an explanation why placing them in such spots is flawed.
Anyhoo, back to the cameras: they will be placed at entrances and exits to various estates and zones to make sure you can’t escape by rat-running (but that won’t stop people from trying). As previously stated, I don’t speed through villages, but this will lead to drivers watching their speedometer instead of watching the road and the environment around them, which is unsafe. What’s worse is road speed limits will be downgraded before the cameras are installed, i.e. from 30mph to 20mph – tell me again that cameras are not revenue-raisers?
Sigh – it’s just another part of the Government’s panopticon project, where you are measured, weighed, surveilled, judged, monitored in everything you do…
Posted in Driving, Politics | No Comments »
February 3rd, 2009 by mike
Really, what happened? We’ve had some snow and it seems like the entire country has ground to a halt. Actually, it has – on Monday, all London buses were cancelled, schools were shut (and public parks locked so kids/adults can’t play in them), people lost their heads, it was pathetic…
What happened to the country that once ruled a quarter of the globe? The country gave us many inventors, nobel prize winners, people who had grit? With all this snow and people’s pathetic reaction to it, what would Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton say?
And really, schools closed on Tuesday across Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire? Where the roads were clear? We really are building a nation of wimps…
Britain: Rise up! Become Great again! 
Update: Quentin Letts at the Daily Mail makes the same point, but far more eloquently.
Posted in Personal | No Comments »
