The ongoing struggle

Dammit, stop opening the bug.

Beau Bo D’Or has come up with this amusing poster in preparation for George W. Bush’s visit to London (which it seems only anti-war groups are taking an interest in), and it’s bouncing around the blogs at the moment.

Much as I do harbour a dislike for both Bush and Johnson, it seems unfair to take this quote so massively out of context.

The Spectator article (from 2003) that it comes from starts like this:

“What has brought so many folk on to the streets, however, is a much broader case: that the President is a cross-eyed Texan warmonger, unelected, inarticulate, who epitomises the arrogance of American foreign policy, and who by his violent and ill-thought-out actions in Afghanistan and Iraq has made the world a more dangerous place.”

i.e. he is attributing this viewpoint to the protesters, not stating his own opinion.

It also contains the following:

“As they bawl and wave, they might bear in mind that this was precisely the kind of behaviour forbidden in Iraq these last 25 years. It is no thanks to the marchers, or their supporters, that the Iraqis now have the freedom to demonstrate without being shot or tortured. It is thanks to the man whose visit they deplore.”

I do not agree with the latter viewpoint either; I’m just pointing out that this is his actual opinion from the same article. It’s the complete opposite to that which the poster above suggests.

Update: As you can see from Beau Bo D’Or’s comment, he has now found a direct quote from Johnson saying something similar. It seems that Johnson had a complete change of heart in the space of just under one year. Still it seems much better to use this new (if not as amusing) quote that represent his own views and not those of another group.

Today I was in Sandhurst for the dedication of Ava, my friend Paul’s daughter. I didn’t really know what to expect other than “it’s a bit like a christening”, which it was.

Of course I was really there just to catch up with Paul and to see Ava for the first time, so I’ll skip the religious bits. I think she was really very energetic and surprisingly happy to perform for people’s cameras, resulting in a number of very cute shots.

It was also great to see old work friends Chris and Simon to catch up with their lives over the last ~2 years, some good, some bad.

I would see all of these people more often if I could drive; that is getting a little irritating now, so I really should try to find the time from somewhere. Either that or Berkshire needs to get a transport network a little more like Greater London.

Oh and not forgetting the bonus appearance of my favourite domesticated animal, the greyhound!

On Saturday I was invited over to Jenny’s dad’s open day for the narrow gauge railway he has in the garden. Yes, a train track in his garden that you can ride on! Except there was no way I was going to ride on it myself and risk looking very silly. I just took a bunch of photos and made myself useful as a teaboy. A fun day though, and it was good to meet most of the family for the first time.

There’s some pictures of previous open days too.

Since I needed to go to Sandhurst the next day, I ended up having to get home that night using a selection of trains and night buses from Beaconsfield via Northolt Park and Heathrow. On the upside the 3g dongle with the Eee PC is working quite nicely for email/irc in the middle of nowhere.

I’ve not long got back from colo’ing the new server, obstler. Tonight was the only night I could do it before next week, and Graham very kindly offered to give me a lift from home at 6pm, aiming to be there by 8pm.

I left dayjob early and rushed home but unfortunately Graham got held up in bad traffic coming across London and it was more like 7pm when he got to me. The M25 anticlockwise was pretty clear though so despite my mere presence breaking the satnav and making the indicator relay go into overdrive (*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*click* …. *click*click*click* … *click*click*click*click* ………… *click*click*click*click* ……………. *click*click*!), we made good time and arrived at about 8.30pm.

As it happened, Andy Millar who was also colo’ing his server today had had some technical difficulties and so things were running late anyway. In fact we had some time to wait around while that was finished off. It turns out that his HP power supply was drawing 1.1A, which went down to less than half that when replaced with a Sea Sonic one. I shall have to investigate that for myself, as it looks like it would save me about £20/month per server!

obstler was pretty quick to colo, then we headed off to some Chinese restaurant near Canary Wharf Pier. As usual I became totally disoriented by the twisty turns around that place.

I couldn’t remember exactly when my last direct train from Waterloo was, but thought it might be 23:50. It was actually 23:58 so I made it with plenty of time, got home about 00:45.

A good night’s work; won’t be able to finish configuring obstler or doing much of anything useful with it for a couple of days, but really glad it’s finally in.

Thanks again to Graham for giving me a lift with the server!

Jake, absolutely! But there are far too many people with illogical ideas about the sanctity of corpses to stand for it, I fear. As Niven suggested, will we see this first applied to prisoners, and then the death penalty for jaywalking?

My MP, Alan Keen, finally wrote to me after about 6 weeks to say he had signed Early Day Motion 1155 on public photography. fanks mister! \o/

A cynical man may suspect that all labour MPs have been instructed to make nice after their local election hammering, and otherwise ignored communications from constituents have been revisited.

Just in case you are unaware, a planet in the blogging context is an aggregation of content from a list of individual sources such as blogs, journals, articles etcetera. Some examples of planets in no particular order:

• Planet Debian
• Planet Ubuntu UK
• Planet BitFolk
• Planet SysAdmin

Over the last couple of weeks there have been some heated words on various planets about what is acceptable content for that planet. I don’t run any of those planets so I’m not going to comment on specifics. I’ve also seen people who operate planets asking for people to join them, but only if they will post on a particular topic — in fact I’ve recently seen a request on a mailing list, which itself receives off-topic personal posts from members of its community, for bloggers who will only write on-topic posts on that community’s planet. And I’ve been added to planets which then later ask me to obey posting guidelines.

To me all this is very odd. I personally read various planets because I want to know more about the people who are in those communities and what they are up to. I appreciate the on topic posts they write but often I appreciate the slightly more personal ones even more. I like to see what people are interested in and what their values are, so to then restrict the posts to a particular topic to me seems to be counter-productive.

For the one planet that I do run, when I ask people if I can add them to it I sometimes receive the response, “Do you want me to use a tag?” or, “I’m sorry I don’t have a tag set up for this, you might get a lot of non-technical posts.” Great! If I was going to have expectations over what you are writing about then I would expect to be paying you to be a technical author for me. I don’t want that; I’m interested in what you are about.

Someone else said something like “in this day and age we have the technology to have the aggregator provide custom feeds with some people removed, and this is the way forward in dealing with people you really can’t stand to read”. I’m paraphrasing that, and I don’t remember who said it or where, but I couldn’t agree more. To me the planet is a view in to the community it represents and being a member of that community is usually all that is required to have a feed included. It does not mean that the planet operator endorses everything they say, that the reader should agree with their viewpoints or that the reader will find them an interesting person! We are presumably all grown-ups here and we can decide what to read or not.

If you are a paid blogger or if you want to make a name for yourself writing articles about a given subject then fair enough, I can understand why you might want to mark only certain articles for publication to a certain audience.

I don’t write much of value or anything contentious. I don’t write much at all, except links to strange things. I haven’t ever had a planet operator tell me that something I wrote wasn’t appropriate for their planet, but that’s probably because I’m not syndicated to many of them. But I would definitely ask to be removed before I would agree to tag posts.

Is it ever healthy to run an aggregator of personal blogs and then expect to exert editorial control over that?

I’m getting increasingly disturbed by reports of members of the public being harassed whilst innocently taking photos. I’m going to start keeping a list of links to this sort of thing here.

• 2008-06, UK — Bus-Spotter Labelled A Paedophile — Yahoo! News UK
• 2008-06, Washington DC, USA
• 2008-05-14, Los Angeles, California, USA
• 2008-05-13, Spokane, Washington, USA
• 2008-05, Los Angeles, California, USA
• 2008-03-24, South Shields, UK

See also:

• Home Secretary green lights restrictions on photography — British Journal of Photography
• Bruce Schneier: Photographers aren’t terrorists and vice-versa — The Guardian
• Write to your MP - Early Day Motion on public photography (UK)
• A short guide to photographers’ rights in the UK

• Mad hair thing (via Why, That’s Delightful!)
• “Luckily, the butter knife that became lodged in his head did not pierce skull”