Plans to Prosper

Fantastic Theme for Symbian from Fring

2009-07-08T09:03:00.004+01:00

Given my dodgy eyesight I struggle with the text on my Nokia E71 and am always tinkering with the theme to make it more useable.

But I have found a fantastic theme that is extremely usable for me. It's offered by those nice people at Fring.com.

Some screenshots from my E71 below.

You can download the theme from here.

Lansbury's Lido

2009-05-26T20:45:00.002+01:00

Image via Wikipedia

I've decided I need a new blog to cope with the increase of my political posting. So anything political will now be posted over at Lansbury's Lido.

Thanks!

RIP The Labour Party 1900-1995

2009-05-18T09:01:00.006+01:00

Image via Wikipedia

The Telegraph is doing a great journalistic job on the saga of the MPs' expenses. Every time we think it can't get any worse, it does.

The latest tit-bit relates to possible collusion by Speaker Martin's office that gave secret permission for some MPs to over-claim for thousands of pounds in home loan interest in deals that led to the systematic abuse of the taxpayer-funded expenses system. The Labour MP for Wirral South, Ben Chapman has revealed that he was allowed to continue claiming allowance for parts of a home loan that has been paid off. This follows hot on the heels of another two Labour MPs, Elliot Morley and David Chaytor, claimed for mortgages that did not exist.

So it seems that we have a situation where it's not just the MPs that are corrupt, but the whole Parliamentary system and officials. I bet Speaker Martin will be trying to cling onto his position to retain his £100k pa pension. If he jumps then he wouldn't be eligible for it. Let's hope he has the decency to 'fess up and stand down.

Anyway, back to Labour. The revelation that Ben Chapman was allowed to make these fraudulent claims was, according to the Telegraph because

“By paying off capital I am forgoing interest and investment opportunities elsewhere,” he told the fees office.

For the love of all that is holy! This is a Labour MP! What has it come to when a Labour MP can behave like some parody of an investment banker. My dear hope was that when Blair moved on and the Blairite rump were no longer interested that the Labour party could be reclaimed from the New Labour experiment. But methinks the corpse has been dead this past fourteen years.

Hardie would be spinning!

MPs' Expenses - What The Labour Party Should Do

2009-05-15T09:12:00.005+01:00

Image via Wikipedia

It seems like every day that the revelations from the Telegraph newspaper are getting more and more obscene in the milking of the system ny MPs. I think we are now in a situation where the whole concept of a Parialimentary Democracy is under threat. Unfortunately most of that threat seems to come from within the current political class at Westminster. Any reforms have the possibility of further reducing the representativeness of our Parliamentary Democracy by the back door.

For myself I have to say I would be unsurprised to find any of the Tories 'maximising' the system. However, to find members of the Parliamentary Labour Party doing so goes beyond the pale. I think this current mess that the PLP finds itself in is an unavoidable consequence of the adoption of the career politician and the creation of the 'political class'. These are the MPs and members who have been attracted to the Labour Party for what it can offer them and have swung into positions riding on the coat tails of Blair, although I personally find the root of this starting with Kinnock. Judging by the recent dramatic drop in the membership of the Constituency Labour Parties I think most of the New Labour acolytes have already left and there is now the opportunity to send the New Labour PLP packing.

So, here's my foolproof plan to keep Labour in power for the foreseeable future!

Make all of those MPs who have made claims judged as excessive by the 'court of public opinion' face an immediate reselection process.
Make all of those MPs who have made claims judged as excessive by the 'court of public opinion' pay the money back.
Consider prosecution for all those MPs who have made claims judged as excessive by the 'court of public opinion'. I'm sure that they can be had under malfeasance.
Set the pay for MPs to represent the average pay for their constituents.
Get rid of the concept of MPs being able to fund second homes, have the taxpayer pick up the tab and then flog it for a profit. If they need to stay over for Westminster business then they can get a hotel room.

That should do it!

If anybody wonders I left the Labour party over 20 years ago when it lurched to the right when Kinnock took the reigns. I wouldn't rejoin it if you paid me. Leastways not until the New Labour corpse has been well and truly buried. :)

Dennis Skinner on the Minimum Wage

2009-05-13T19:15:00.002+01:00

Image via Wikipedia

Nice to see Dennis Skinner back in the chamber and supporting the minimum wage.

Nice to see a 7p increase, better than nothing.

Another reason to shut down the House of Lords

2009-05-12T21:58:00.003+01:00

Exposed as the biggest bunch of grasping parasites this side of the Atlantic they refuse to acknowledge their theft and try and turn things around.

Wasn't there a New Labour manifesto pledge to shut this lot down? Blair's got a lot to answer for, not just war crimes.

Pah!

Nokia E71 look at the time

2009-05-12T21:43:00.003+01:00

Image via Wikipedia

I've had my Nokia E71 for a few weeks now and I have to say it's one of the best phones I've ever had. There's always something new to learn or a new feature that you discover.

Today I discovered that if you want to look at the time when the keypad is locked just press the big middle button and it'll display the time in big white letters on a big screen.

Very handy, especially for the optically challenged like myself.

The Future of the Gurkhas?

2009-05-12T12:48:00.004+01:00

Image via Wikipedia

As much as I was pleased by the UK Government's swift about turn on the issue of residency for the Gurkhas and their familes, I do wonder whether there are plans for revenge?

Given the incomptence, vindictiveness and corruption of this present lot of New Labour cronies I'm betting they'll be seeking to remove the Gurkha regiment from the British Army in the future.

Strangers into Citizens

2009-05-09T15:59:00.006+01:00

Image via Wikipedia

STRANGERS INTO CITIZENS is a call by the UK’s largest civic alliance to bring thousands of long-term British residents within the scope of the law. It starts from the truth which all admit but few face: that a mass deportation of thousands of UK residents is both impossible and unacceptable. At this point the matter ceases to be a legal question to become a political, social and moral one. Reality has exceeded the confines of the law, and the law must adapt for the sake of human dignity.

Here in the UK for whatever reason we have between 500,000 and 1,000,000 people who live a life of uncertainty, concern and often fear. These are people who have overstayed student visas, awaiting asylum claims, have been denied asylum or have come into the UK by other means. These people are living an existence that does them no good and does society no good. They often have to work in black market employment jobs where their rights as workers are woefully absent. They often work without the concern of safety that we have, and are put upon by all sorts of pressures.

Here's a story from http://www.thinkingfaith.org/articles/20090506_1.htm about Jacob which illustrates the situation of many.

‘Oh, Jacob will do that’, I remember being told when I first arrived at St. Ignatius parish in Stamford Hill, ‘he’s always happy to help.’ Jacob was well-known in the parish. He was an usher at the Sunday Masses and helped to serve the teas and coffees afterwards. An exuberant young man in his early thirties, he had arrived from Nigeria on a student visa 15 years before. One day, I received a call from a solicitor telling me that Jacob was being detained and prepared for deportation. Three days later, despite our best efforts to intervene, he had gone.
It was long after Jacob’s departure that the story emerged of his undocumented status in the UK. Only a few trusted friends – parishioners – had known of his shadow existence. He had overstayed his student visa by twelve years and in that time had changed address eight times, frightened that anything too permanent might lead to detection by immigration authorities. He had been detained five years before and had avoided deportation, but since that time had been required to register every Monday at an immigration office. He worked illegally as a part-time security guard on the other side of London, and did various cleaning and dishwashing jobs in the early mornings and late evenings. As the eldest of 10 children, he would send his family a substantial amount of his earnings each month. His father had passed away during Jacob’s time in the UK and was buried without his eldest son’s presence because Jacob couldn’t leave the country. His aged mother and aunt depended on the remittance sent home every month, and many of his younger siblings had been educated on the strength of it

I see it as irresponsible to leave this situation as is, we only have two choices:

Deportation
Residency/Leave to remain

Deportation is often the call from certain sections of society and those of a certain political viewpoint. However it would be totally impractical to deport this number of people. It's estimated that it costs £12000 to deport someone. So 12,000 x 500,000 = 6,000,000,000 or six billion pounds. Seeing as the bankers seem to be at the top of the pile for public handouts at the moment this option falls flat on it's face.

So offering a one-off residency/leave to remain seems a good choice. It takes people out of illegal employment, it generates tax revenue, it enables the 'humanisation' of some of our country's most marginalised people.

It's not going to be a carte blanche for everyone though. There will be criteria such as two years without a criminal record and gainful employment or community recommendation.

Hopefully this will be put into action, as long as the media stop ignoring it.

And oddly enough Strangers into Citizens is attracting support from left and right, from faith groups and others.

If You Go Down To The Woods Today...

2009-05-04T16:14:00.002+01:00

04052009001
Originally uploaded by theukhalls

...it's going to be very noisy as the army are doing their thing!

Twitter Client for Nokia and Symbian

2009-05-02T12:55:00.003+01:00

Image via CrunchBase

Twitter is one of those applications which at first glance makes you ask "Why?" But regardless it's taken off as it makes connecting and networking easy, and of course it's fun!

There are loads of twitter clients for Windows/PC and Apple Mac platforms but less so for us linux users. I tend to use a Firefox add on called TwitterGadget which is installed on my iGoogle home page.

But what if you're not stuck in front of a pc? There are a number of twitter clients for mobile phones. I use on called Gravity which is one of the best installations I have ever come across for the Nokia.

Compatible with Twitter and Laconica
All functions available on your S60 phone: tweet, reply, DM, follow & unfollow, create favourites, search, auto-update and many more …
Tabbed view of your Timeline, Replies, Messages, Friends, …
Configurable Audio Alerts for Timeline/Replies/DM’s & Searches
Setup and use as many accounts as you want at the same time
Group support for creating custom tabs with user-defined filters
Twitter-Search section with multiple search tabs and Twitter Trends
Post pictures to MobyPicture, TwitPic, TwitGoo & Posterous
Preview pictures from MobyPicture, TwitPic or TwitGoo
Open URLs from any Tweet
Kinetic scrolling on S60v5 ( Nokia 5800 and Nokia N97 )
Theme support on S60v3 ( fixed dark and bright theme )
Full-Screen mode on S60v3
Built-in auto-update function and beta access for testing the latest features

Well worth checking out.

Times are hard in the recession

2009-05-01T14:47:00.005+01:00

Image via Wikipedia

But not for everyone it seems.

Barclays boss John Varley who received a £2.9m pension top-up in 2008 despite the share price of his company falling from 700p in August 2007 to 234p now.

At insurance company Legal & General, chief executive Tim Breedon was awarded a £1.5m pension pot increase last year despite presiding over a share price collapse from 130p to 52p.

Karam Bhutalia, head of private equity at Standard Chartered left the company in April 2009 with a £16m pay off.

In America, two unnamed highfliers at HSBC failed to heed the company's call for executive pay restraint and between them also pocketed £16m.

One survey showed that 16 top execs saw rises of more than £1m in 2008 including David Brennan, chief executive of drug giant Astra Zeneca who saw the value of his pension rise by £4m.

And John Watson, chief executive of Bellway homes was awarded an extra £3m despite the dire state of the UK housebuilding industry.

Wouldn't it be nice if we call get paid accoring to this system?

Quotes courtesy of Unite.

Just testing mobypicture

2009-05-01T14:10:00.001+01:00

- Posted using Mobypicture.com

Jack Jones RIP

2009-04-22T19:38:00.002+01:00

Jack Jones, 29 March 1913 – 21 April 2009

The video says it all.

Print Error With PDF In Linux

2009-04-20T21:59:00.008+01:00

Just installed antiX linux and am impressed so far. It uses icewm or fluxbox as the window manager without excessive gnome or kde libraries installed. Maybe even without any?

So antiX is a fast, low footprint distro. But with these benefits comes one disadvantage. All of the hand-holding that a desktop manager like Gnome or KDE does behind the scenes is missing. The issue I had with not being able to print from any of the pdf viewers is one such instance. But if you have experience with these window managers or are willing to search the internet then it's not usually an issue.

So when I try and print with these viewers the print queue bombs out. I have my printer installed on the networked family windows pc so I access it using through SAMBA using the CUPS interface. Trying different print queue commands in acroread gives me no result.

/usr/bin/lpr

/usr/bin/lp

Nothing except an error about printer not found. The answer to this is to set the default printer using the commands below:

To see what the default printer is: $ lpstat -d

In my case no response so there isn't one!

To see what printers are available: $lpstat -a

Which returned psc750, success!

To set the default printer: lpoptions -d psc750

And checking again shows me that the psc750 is now my default printer. So back to acroread and setting the custom print command to /usr/bin/lp produces my pdf on my printer.

Sorted!

Another Reason To Not Vote Tory

2009-04-11T12:44:00.006+01:00

Image via Wikipedia

I often find it extremely difficult to think of why the hell I should vote Labour in the UK. There are those in the party who seem determined to ridicule, sideline and try to disenfranchise anyone of faith. I thought that Marxism had failed but there seems to be no end of them re-moulding themselves as fundamental atheists.

Then along comes a Tory to remind me of why I have voted Labour in the past. Hell, I was even a card carrying member back in the 1980s until Kinnock weaseled his way in.

Anyway, the Tory who reminded me of why I don't vote Tory is the flavour of the month Dan Hannan, the MEP who derided Gordon in such a fantastic way. He's opened his gob and put the boot into the UK National Health Service. If there was ever a sacred cow to be preserved then this is it.

Here's the clip of Dan Hannan on Fox News.

Thanks to John Prescott's clip I found on gofourth.co.uk highlighting this. Seems Tom Watson has also noted this.

Spideroak Online Backup For Linux

2009-04-09T23:42:00.004+01:00

In the bad old days when I had Windows on my laptop there were a couple of applications I used to ack my data up - Mozy and Carbonite.

I've never been able to find a nice gui equivalent in linux. Until now. Having a browse round the web recently I came across a link to a product called Spideroak. Clicking through I came across what I consider to be the Holy Grail for linux on the desktop - a gui application for linux that does your backups for you. And as with Mozy 2Gb of storage free. And the cream of the crop is the availability of a Slackware package!! Most useful as I run Vector Linux.

So a quick

# pkgtool

allowed me to install Spideroak with no issues. Clicking on the menu entry and it was simply a case of selecting which directories and sitting back and letting the application do it's magic!

Perfect!

I'm Buying French Wine

2009-04-03T22:19:00.005+01:00

Image by mickiky via Flickr

Having been on a global search for the best combination of quality and price in a red wine I've moved from South Africa to Australia, to California and Greece, to Spain and Italy. Sometimes the results have been good, often superb!

But a news item on the BBC News website "French Wine Withers On The Vine" brought a tear to my eye.

So for the sake of Monsieur Tremoulet, today I winged closer to home with a bottle of Le Chasse Du Pap. I don't think I'm going to be disappointed.

Vive La France!

Firefox - images showing as black

2009-03-28T11:38:00.005Z

Image via CrunchBase

An issue I've had since Firefox 3 and above is that some, not all, images are rendered as black squares. If I select the image and display as full size then I can see it. Bit of a nuisance really.

However, I have found a solution!

Simply add the follwing to th device section in your xorg.conf file:

"XAANoOffscreenPixmaps" "true"

I'm running Vector Linux 6 with XFCE, graphics card is an ATI M9600, xorg driver is Radeon, Firefox 3.0.7.

Hope this helps someone else.

Trees - Polly on the Shore

2009-03-27T22:30:00.003Z

Sometimes a song just grabs you. Polly on the Shore by Trees is one such song.

Enjoy!

Official Gmail Blog: New in Labs: Undo Send

2009-03-20T11:53:00.002Z

Official Gmail Blog: New in Labs: Undo Send

As the title says, GMail has now introduced the useful ability to stop emails being sent when you pressed the send button but didn't really mean to! Only gives you a few seconds though!

The main competitor to GMail, in my eyes at least is Zoho Mail. Zoho Mail has the much more useful ability to set a timed delay between send and sent.

http://blogs.zoho.com/general/gmail-undo-send-vs-zoho-mail-outbox

Zoho Notebook Alternative to Google Notebook

2009-03-15T00:07:00.006Z

Those nice people at Zoho.com have thankfully updated their Mozilla Firefox add-on to finally enable it to be a suitable alternative to Google Notebook. Previous versions you had to have the Zoho Notebook page open in another tab to work. This time round it works as intuitively expected. Be aware that it is a beta at 1.0b2 but I've not noticed any issues. You can find it here.

Zoho.com continues to release innovative web based applications such as online document editing, a number of which I use. If their Zoho Mail was able to deal with remote accounts like GMail does then it'd be a no brainer to shove all my web based cloud applications over.

Save the BMW workers at Cowley

2009-03-07T19:53:00.009Z

Image via Wikipedia

From the website www.savemanufacturing.co.uk/cowley

"BMW's decision to sack 850 agency employees at its Cowley factory in Oxford, giving many of them only an hour's notice and with no intention to offer any of them a penny in redundancy pay, is an act of sheer industrial brutality. This is no way to deal with the worldwide difficulties in the motor industry."

Go sign now!

Vector Linux and RipperX

2009-03-05T07:05:00.003Z

I'm currently running the latest Vector Linux 6 Standard, and very nice it is too. One issue I came across which took abit of fiddling was with the default ripper and encoder, RipperX.

The issue was that the default call to cddb was returning an error. After a bit of tinkering I had to search the internet to find the correct url for accessing the freedb system. You can see the url in the screenshot below.

How do you listen to your music?

2009-02-21T14:51:00.007Z

Technology has given us, and continues to give us many new ways to listen to the music we own.

Wax cylinders
Bakelite disks
Vinyl
Magnetic tape
Digital

And the same technology allows us to expand just how we listen to that music using the digital technology. We are no longer constrained by physical storage media but we now have many ways to listen via digital and especially though the internet.

When I was young I had vinyl. To make it portable I would record it onto cassette tape with a microphone up against the speakers. Then this became more convenient with the rise of the music centre with its inbuilt connectivity. The Sony Walkman and other devices of its ilk enabled portability to fantastic levels. Then the CD arrived with its durability, small size and dependence on less mechanical players than for cassettes. Couple this with the rise of the personal computer and you have the most fluid and portable storage medium - digital!

So if you're like me you buy CDs and immediately rip them to your hard drive. Or you buy music online and save it immediately to your hard drive.

A slight detour here - never, ever buy music in a restictive format or where it is restricted by DRM. The recording industry looks at DRM as 'Digital Rights Management'. It's nothing of the sort, it's Digital Restriction Managment with the recording industry restricting your rights to play and store your music how you want. I once bought an album from Napster many years ago. It was an album that I already owned in vinyl but I didn't have the ability to transfer it to my pc. All was well until I changed computers. I copied the file across but it wouldn't play. So I went to burn it to CD to move it across and it refused, said I didn't have the right to do that. So I've now paid for the same music twice but can't listen to it because I'm being restricted by the recording industry. Whose rights? Certainly not mine.

Back to the issue at hand! So I have my music all encoded alowing me to play it or to copy it to other devices and play it through them. It also acts as a backup facility if you like. I'll burn a CD to play in the car and when its worn and scratched I'll throw it out and burn another.

The increase in the spread of the internet also offers me new ways to listen to my music - streaming. All my music is also stored online in a password protected server that I can access using various protocols. I can now listen to my music on my phone and on any web enabled device. I know have my head firmly in 'The Cloud'.

So to sum up where my music is and how I listen to it:

Physical - CD
Digital - hard drive and flash memory
Online Digital - www.mp3tunes.com
Mobile - lastfm.com plugin in Fring or directly using www.mp3tunes.com