The Times Online has a wonderful article about a UK Trading Standards officer who couldn’t believe that Mozilla (being free software) is allowed to be sold for profit by someone. This article is well worth a read, so READ IT!
Monthly Archive for February, 2006
The FBI had an opening for an assassin. After all the background checks, interviews, and testing were done there were 3 finalists. Two men and a woman.
For the final test, the FBI agents took one of the men to a large metal door and handed him a gun.
“We must know that you will follow your instructions no matter what the circumstances. Inside the room you will find your wife sitting in a chair. Kill Her!
The man said, “You can’t be serious, I could never shoot my wife.” The agent said, “Then you’re not the right man for this job. Take your wife and go home.”
The second man was given the same instructions. He took the gun and went into the room. All was quiet for about 5 minutes. The man came out with tears in his eyes, “I tried, but I can’t kill my wife.”
The agent said, “You don’t have what it takes. Take your wife and go home.”
Finally, it was the woman’s turn. She was given the same instructions, to kill her husband. She took the gun and went into the room. Shots were heard, one after another. They heard screaming, crashing, banging on the walls. After a few minutes, all was quiet. The door opened slowly and there stood the woman. She wiped the sweat from her brow.
“This gun is loaded with blanks” she said. “I had to beat him to death with the chair.”
MORAL of the story: Women are evil. Don’t mess with them
Pass on this advice !!
I often pick up the Metro on the way to work (A free London paper for those who don’t know it) and there was a small article about a teenager who was fined for using the word ‘fuck’ in a private conversation on the street. It seems that you can be slapped with an £80 fine for almost anything these days, but I would like to know if anyone has fined radio 1 DJ Chris Moyles, who recently said the same word on air live. Should he be fined £80 or £80 x ‘number of people listening’?
Does the whole idea of fining someone for swearing in public seem slightly wrong to anyone? Talk about freedom of speech (or the lack thereof)
On a similar note, the UK government has already spent £32 Million GBP on ID cards, according to the Metro, even though they have yet to decide how/when they will actually come in. The bills have not finished going through parliament and they have still managed to spend £32 Million… Hands up those who voted for Labour? (In fact, just slap yourselves. It is a shame we cannot kick Blair out for this misuse of power!)
The BBC News had a bit on a drug course for barin tumors, which cost £11,000 for a course (lasting 6 months). The problem is that the NHS is debating not making the drug available unless you go private. How on earth is it that a company can charge £11,000 for a drug? That is an absolutely insane price… Reminds me of something ages ago: IIRC Taiwan was manufacturing a vaccine to some drug and ignoring the patents on it because the company wanted too much for it. Good for them I say…
I was pleased to hear that an American sentenced to death has had his execution postponed as doctors refused to administer lethal injection. First it was postponed because they needed an anaethetist and none wanted to do it, so they are just saying a doctor has to administer one single injection, but none are willing to do it. How on earth can you ask a doctor to kill somone who does not want to die? They all take an oath when they graduate to never harm a patient (I listened to them swearing it during my graduation!). There is something wrong with the US states that still have the death penalty, and I will never understand why they have not abolished it. They seem to think that an electric chair or lethal injection/gas is far more civilised than beheading with and axe or guillotine or even being hung - It is not!
So I finally got fed up with drupal. There is nothing really wrong with it, but wordpress is simply so much simpler and neater. The new version has a nice gui editor for posts and there is a really good integration with gallery2 called g2image. It plugs into tinyMCE, the editor used in wordpress, and lets you insert images from your gallery by browsing the gallery in a pop-up window.
So with some help I imported all the old posts and links from drupal. I couldn’t be bothered to do the comments, and unfortunately the passwords wouldn’t move so you will have to create a new user account (if you want one that is).
The only issue with wordpress is that I have set moderation on the comments requiring any post to be authorised first. Your first comment will be held, but then once I have approved it it should allow you to post instantly. The only problem is that it does not tell you that it is being held for moderation (and it seems that having a user account does not help either). Maybe I will turn off the option, or maybe I will just change the code to tell you that your comment is being moderated… who knows.
I am also testing out a gui blog porgram called zempt. I have yet to find one I like, but this one is not too bad, though I might end up writing my own. What I want is one that automatically gets new posts from your blog and keeps the last few offline so you can edit them or refer to them. It should also let you write posts, and then hold them until you are online and then post them automatically - this is what none of them do at the moment. They all allow saving, but save as a file not as a pending submission. Basically I want an ‘outbox’ for blog posts in the program…
