Recently a whole fleet of little roadworks signs have descended on us round here, each giving the date of impending roadworks and ‘possible delays’. I looked at them at first and sighed, resigned to the fact I’d end up sitting in traffic for the forseable future. I saw plenty of people ranting about it on Facebook and Twitter alike.

But something dawned on me. This year the council has done it differently. As a rule, they’d be doing all this work around September time. Just as all the schools go back. However, they seem a little bit ahead of themselves this year and are doing it all as the schools finish. So basically when the traffic is lighter – i.e. they’re doing exactly what people have been saying they should have been doing for years.

So far the disruption to me has been quite minimal. My drive home was slowed down a little because they’d taken off the top surface so I had to slow down to get over that. I think one of the back roads it due to be completely closed for a day or two next week – but that doesn’t matter because I have the choice of two alternate routes anyway; had the schools still been open it’d only be one route.

The amount of signage has been quite something too – in so much, I’ve seen approximately eight signs on one junction warning of the impending works. That’s something that they never really used to bother with. You’d maybe get a little sign strapped to a lamp post, but nothing major. This time they’ve gone all out with proper road-side signs, which are clear, and legible when whizzing by.

So I’d just like to say well done, Council. You got it right for once!

If you’re installing the Python Cheetah library, you’ll most likely follow the instructions, which say to do the following:

To install Cheetah in your system-wide Python library:

1. Login as a user with privileges to install system-wide Python packages. On POSIX systems (AIX, Solaris, Linux, IRIX, etc.), the command is normally ‘su root’. On non-POSIX systems such as Windows NT, login as an administrator.
2. Run python setup.py install at the command prompt.
3. The setup program will install the wrapper script cheetah to wherever it usually puts Python binaries ("/usr/bin/", "bin/" in the Python install directory, etc.)

Quite simple. However, what it neglects to mention is that there is a little module within the library called ‘namemapper’. What it does, I don’t entirely know (something to do with mapping names would be my guess), but this module is written in C. Simply running the install as per the Cheetah docs won’t build this module, which results in much slower performance from Cheetah overall as it falls back to a python-based internal equivalent. However, if you run the command python setup.py build BEFORE the install command, it will happily compile said module. The install will then install it along with everything else, and all is well. Obviously you need gcc installed to do this (I had the dev pattern installed on my OpenSuSE box).

Why the docs don’t mention this, I don’t know. Still, nice to know there’s a simple fix.

The first two seasons mostly followed Dr Josh Wurman’s team of scientists, who were chasing storms to try and study them more closely. They were also accompanied by Sean Casey, a film maker who was trying to capture film of a tornado from the inside with an IMAX camera. Dr Wurman’s team would direct Casey’s team towards ‘safe’ tornados so they could place their specially adapted road vehicle (called the Tornado Intercept Vehicle, or ‘TIV’) in the path and capture film of it passing over.

During the second season we also saw the introduction of Reed Timmer’s team from Tornadovideos.net. They would chase partly for fun, but also to study and document tornados, eventually selling the film they recorded onto local news outlets for the inevitable reports they would produce post storm.

The third season saw less of Dr Wurman’s team as he had joined a much larger government-funded project, but introduced Tim Samaras’s TWISTEX team to the show. Timmer’s team had taken the lead on the show now. The fourth season has continued this, and has seen Dr Wurman’s team disappear altogether.

Throughout the seasons, a noticeable change has happened. In the first couple of seasons, Dr Wurman and Casey would regularly butt heads over decisions over which storm to chase, and a healthy rivalry existed between all the teams. Ultimately they all were in it for the same reasons, so despite the odd little bit of sniping, it was relatively friendly.

The show has steadily grown in popularity, and Discovery has – in the UK at least – moved it from random late-night times, to being part of the Prime Time lineup, and giving the show great deals of promotion. Since this has happened, the whole tone of the show has changed, and for the worse.

The show originally made use of a voiceover (localised to the UK, but a US-based VO was also used; Discovery UK occasionally would show the original HD version with US voiceover, yet the SD version had a UK VO). The VO would explain things going on, and give explanations of how the storms formed and grew.

During the filming of the show the various people we would see would respond to questions from producers about what they were doing, and what was going on. Occasionally the odd gripe about the other teams would creep in, but nothing major. It was all good, and informational.

Each episode would usually concentrate on a couple of good storms, and the chase and aftermath of those storms, as well as how the teams would interact and chase. It was a great format which informed, but also entertained. During the episodes I’d often find myself getting quite involved in the narrative, and really rooting for the teams.

As the show has climbed in ratings, it seems the producers behind the show (or possibly Discovery) decided that the show needed a little shakeup. Season four has lost the original feel of the show, and now focuses far more on the conflict and relationships between the teams. It started to creep in during Season three, where a whole storyline of Reed Timmer and his driver Joel Taylor fall out of favour with each other. Given it happened mid-season, it was relevant to the show, so it was fair to include it.

Season four has also dropped the VO, and instead relies on the various faces in the show doing ‘faux interview’ segments which are obviously scripted where they explain what happened. The people in the show aren’t actors, and so they are wooden and forced, and do nothing to help the narrative of the show. The ‘interview’ segments are quite liberally peppered throughout the show, and as a consequence in Season four I’ve seen three episodes, and only seen a couple of tornadoes – briefly.

Storm Chasers has gone from a scientific entertainment show, to becoming a show basically about the teams and their infighting. More emphasis is put on the rivalries between the teams; the TWISTEX team is quite highly regarded all round, so they barely feature, other than when they are making negative comments about storms Timmer has decided to chase.

The whole premise of the show now seems to centre around false jeopardy, and conflict. Not the storms suggested in the title.

Unfortunately for me, I think Storm Chasers has jumped the shark. I’m willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. I hope it picks up, but I somehow don’t think it’s likely. A real shame.

Post update, it decided to redirect me to google.nl all the time. No idea why, as it had been working fine previously. Checking every option I could within Opera, I could find no reason why.

The answer, lies in a config file, which lives here: (I’m on Windows 7, so yours may vary slightly)

C:\Users\<Your Username>\AppData\Roaming\Opera\Opera\operaprefs.ini

Towards the end of the UserPrefs section, is this line:

Google TLD Default=.google.nl

That was the one! I changed it to .co.uk, restarted Opera, et voila, it now goes where it’s meant to. I can only assume it’s something the installer did. My system is set to UK everything (I checked) and I’ve never had anything else go whizzing off to google.nl. Even going to google.com redirected properly.

Very odd!

Currently, according to most polls, Labour is mostly trailing. The Tories are slightly out in front, and the Lib Dems are mostly weaving up and down the polls. There’s lots of talk of a possible ‘hung parliament’. Personally, I can’t help but feel that it won’t happen. The Tories are edging slowly higher on a daily basis. They need around a hundred seats to take a majority. It’s possible it could happen, and each day seems more likely.

A hung parliament could be a good thing, as it could bring around a lot of reform people have often spoken of. Electoral reform would be a great thing, given that our local seat is ALWAYS Tory, and has been since 1926. The likelihood of him losing his seat is amazingly low. I don’t feel represented in parliament because of this. My vote is effectively useless, because the winning party represent an opposite view to my own. Some sort of reform could change that. I don’t think a hung parliament is likely though.

The notion of a Tory government being formed concerns me, given how dead-set they seem on hacking so much money out of the government budget. Right now is the wrong time. I just know they’ll sell the government stake in the banks off almost instantly. It’s too soon to do those things.

It’s right the budget is too high though. The BBC put together this useful infographic on spending. It’s a never-ending issue that the electorate want a government that doesn’t tax them, but spends massively on public services. Efficiencies can be found all over government. Hacking money out at the top isn’t going to work. It has to start within. Despite what many people will say, there’s plenty of career benefits claimants milking the system. I fully agree in a totally free healthcare, schools, and a social security system to help those that need it. Claiming benefits shouldn’t be a viable alternative to working. It should be there for those who find themselves out of work suddenly, or can’t work due to illness or whatever. Social security accounts for a massive slice of government money. It should be carefully reviewed and reduced.

When I went through school, it was mostly under the Tories. I remember schools being like something out of the latter years of Soviet Russia. Poor books, peeling paint, ripped curtains, broken furniture. Just before I left things were turning around a lot. Taxation on the richest parts of society brought in money to fix those things.

The Tories are planning to raise the threshold on Inheritance Tax. Well that’s good – if you’re in a tiny minority of people. They want to cut corporation tax. Even better. Now those big corporations can earn even more off us. Money we never see! So fatcat bosses can earn yet more off share options and dividends. More money they can hand over to their children in inheritances. At least it won’t be taxed!

Meanwhile, the lowest parts of society, those who need it, will find themselves unable to get benefits they need. The career benefit cheats will however continue to claim.

The thing is, it’s ordinary working class and middle class people voting in the Tories. Why, I don’t know. They only do things to benefit the rich. Privatisation only made a bunch of rich shareholders richer.

I don’t believe everything the Labour Party has done is right. The war in Iraq was stupid and pointless. The Digital Economy Bill was a whitewash. However, I feel that Labour offers a much, MUCH safer option in this post recession climate.

It feels to me that we’re heading towards some very bleak years.

On a similar note, today saw the English Defence League pay a visit to our little town. It passed off largely uneventfully. However, the comments bandied around on Twitter and the news articles on the Bucks Herald website leave me cold. There’s this hard core of ‘ordinary’ people who are convinced their liberties and laws are going to be replaced with some sort of radical Islamic legal system. I’m really not sure why. A local event is being held on Monday to claim the town back. It’s our town – everybody who lives here. We all live together quite happily, and don’t need anybody poking their oars in trying to incite trouble.

The thing about the call which intrigued me the most was that BT are notoriously bad at acting on changes of information. Indeed, somebody from BT told me that a lot of their billing hangs off company names and addresses, so changing it causes all sorts of headaches for the billing department – hence why they don’t!

I can’t help but feel my friend on the phone was cold calling from some random agency, basically looking to find info about us and what we do and needed, which they’d then cold call us about and try to sell to us. Maybe I was being over-cautious, and she was legit. I don’t know, and don’t care. Frankly BT, there’s much better ways of doing this!

Act dumb.

Yes really. Allow me to explain.

I browse a lot of forums, and in many cases I’ll see a barrage of people complaining about various technical support departments at ISPs, service providers, and whoever else. They’ll be wailing that they didn’t get the help they wanted, and nothing worked, and how much the support sucks, and so on.

I’ve called support for Virgin Media, Be, Zen, Orange, and various others over the years. I work in IT, and I do a lot of troubleshooting myself. I often have an idea of what the problem is, and sometimes what might need to be done to fix the issue. I could easily phone up the support line, tell them what the issue is, and demand they do what I want to fix it. I might be right – but there’s an equal chance I’m NOT right, and could send them on a wild goose chase trying to deploy the wrong fix. I don’t know their systems or their networks, so who am I to tell them what to do?

And that’s the issue most people have. They may, or may not know what needs to be done, but the service provider know their stuff better than you do, so let THEM decide what to do. Hence why I say ‘act dumb’. I had an issue with my cable modem. I phoned up, and just told them what they asked for. I did exactly what the guy on the other end told me to do. An engineer was dispatched, and the problem was fixed. Simple. Other people with similar issues (it was an attenuation issue) go through countless engineer calls, and visits, and personally I think that’s because they pre-empt things, and try and tell the support person what to do. I never do.

Yes, I could phone up and say ‘I work in IT, therefore I know what the issue is’. They probably get loads of calls like that every day. As I say, some will know what the issue is, others will only think they do.

I had issues with my ADSL flaking out (back when I was on ADSL), and I jumped through all the hoops both Zen and Be had, which included moving the router to the master socket, and running through all the tests they wanted to do. As a consequence of doing that, all the BT engineer visits I had, which led to a No Fault Found, weren’t charged to me. If you read all the paperwork, in theory I should have been charged about £75 for those visits, but I wasn’t as they were raised as per the processes BT set up for the ADSL providers. We jumped through all the right hoops, so I wasn’t liable for the costs. If I’d phoned up, told them I wasn’t going to move the router and demanded an engineer, I would have been stung. I’ve seen people do that, and wonder why they get charged.

Don’t get me wrong – there ARE plenty of ‘bad’ support lines out there, and poorly trained people manning them. They may be working to a script, but think of it this way; if you were in a play, and one person is working from a script, and you turn up and decide you don’t want to use the script, you’re going to very quickly end up in a mess. Same goes for these support lines really. Let them follow their script, and don’t pre-empt them. Let them ask the questions they have to ask (have you turned it off and on again?). If they can’t handle it, they’ll escalate it anyway. I’ve gotten in and out of support lines in no time, and had all my issues solved pretty quickly, without any shouting, swearing, or demanding to speak to their supervisor.

So remember. Just act dumb!

I found the TSP was actually dropping logs into C:\Temp. I found these lines:

CiscoTSP001.tsp|   CSelsiusTSPWaveList::GetAvailWave() *ERROR* No wave available|<LVL::Error><MASK::0001>
CiscoTSP001.tsp|   CSelsiusTSPDevice::OpenDevice() [ARC-SrvQueue3] *ERROR* GetAvailWave() returned WAVELIST_NOT_ASSIGNED|<LVL::Error><MASK::0001>

I was aware there was a Wave driver in there, but it supposedly gets installed when the TSP installed.

Right?

Well, it would seem not. Whether it’s meant to or not, I don’t know. I could find plenty of reference to reinstalling it, but not a lot of mention of how to install it in the first place (or reinstall it for that matter). A bit more digging, and I found this Cisco document which tells you how to install.

It mentions Windows 2000, but it’s roughly the same for 2003, which I’m using. I selected Add New Device, Game and Audio controllers, and just pointed it at the driver.

One thing that struck me is that Windows claims the driver is unsigned. I’m wondering if the TSP installer is trying to shoe-horn the unsigned driver in, failing, and just silently giving up. Like I say, that’s assuming it actually does it in the first place.

Anyway it now works. A simple thing, but it took me a while to find the root cause and fix it.

Thing is, I see something of a major flaw with it, and it extends outside of Twitter. Due to the fact ‘tweets’ have to be 140 characters long, if you want to post a URL (link) to something, people will often shorten them using one of the many services such as TinyUrl, Tr.im, Bit.ly, or Is.gd. The end result being that your original URL, turns from this:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8026736.stm

to this:

http://bit.ly/8kx1o

We now have a considerably shorter URL to post, which saves a lot of space in the tweet.

My problem with it, is that the URL could link to anything! In this instance, it does link to the article above. But it could go anywhere! Any how else would I know until I click it.

TinyURL thought of that particular problem and introduced a preview feature, so the URL http://preview.tinyurl.com/cakpdn actually takes you to a TinyURL page which tells you where the link goes to. You can turn on a cookie to always make it go there, then you choose to click through if you trust the domain. But not all the providers do that. Bit.ly don’t seem to and besides, it relies on the person posting the link using the preview URL, or the person visiting the link having the cookie enabled, both of which rarely happen.

We also end up with URL blindness, and people will just click on them regardless, and end up at a plethora of sites. Most of the links I see go past in my Twitter feed are shortened somehow, and without the context of the tweet are mostly meaningless. How long before they are accepted entirely, and start appearing in Phishing emails and the like? We could end up with shortened URLs firing people off to all sorts of sites.

There have been suggestions by some for the domains hosting the content to provide their own URLs. Personally, I think this is by far the best method, as it means you can instantly see which domain the link goes to and know with a better level of certainty that you’re going to end up where you expect to. Trouble is, it relies on the domain owners implementing something themselves, which they might be reluctant to do, seeing services like twitter as a flash in the pan (I don’t think it is).

A short-term solution might be for the short-URL providers to send short URLs to a landing page, so you can see where the link goes, and if it is malicious or not what it said, flag it as such (although they could be open to abuse as well).

It’s a tricky subject really. Just click carefully!

American Dad is now doing jokes and storylines similar to those The Simpsons was doing around Seasons 5-10 (or thereabouts). The Simpsons are now doing jokes and storylines more like those Family Guy was doing in the early seasons. And Family Guy – well, I’m not entirely sure what they’re doing, but it’s still funny.

For Me, American Dad has been getting funnier, and the storylines have always been very coherent. They have purposely avoided non sequiturs and cutaways (those were Family Guy’s domain anyway), so they had to make good storylines, and good jokes often arise from that.

The Simpsons is a mixed bag. Yes the animation on the first few seasons may have been awful, but the stories were good, so I’ve learned to see beyond that. I’ve found myself really enjoying mid-series seasons as, like American Dad, they had good storylines, and were interesting to watch. The latter seasons have just veered off into total randomness. Bart has gone from being a brat to being plain evil at times, Homer lurches between being dumb and being vaguely intelligent, and Lisa would in real-life probably be heading towards a nervous breakdown. Marge seems to have mellowed a lot though, whilst Maggie has suddenly gotten very intelligent (almost aping Stewie from Family Guy in some respects).

As for Family Guy, I think the last couple of seasons have consisted of mostly excellent episode, then some horribly structured, somewhat pointless episodes, with gags which felt more like filler than something dragged out for comedic value. The cutaways to Conway Twitty are pointless now. It was funny at first, now it just feels like a bit of an up-yours. Then again, the Star Wars special episode was spot-on, and the episode where Peter has a stroke was too funny.

But then again, comedy is very subjective. I don’t find Southpark funny, and others I know do, so maybe some of these things I don’t find funny have others rolling in laughter.

Who knows!