Out of the corner of my eye

Excerpt from the House of Commons debate:

“In recent times, a lot of attention has been paid to what it means to be British. Well, one thing it means is that we British do not allow the police or politicians to lock people up for a long time without charge. That is not some trendy, fashionable bit of political correctness; it was laid down in Magna Carta in 1215 AD, and it has been followed in the English-speaking, common-law democracies ever since. In Canada, the maximum is just one day. In the USA, South Africa and New Zealand, it is two days; in Ireland, seven days; and in Australia, 12.

Here in Britain, we already have a maximum of 28 days—more than twice as long as anyone else—yet the Government are saying that a further extension is necessary because anti-terrorist investigations can take a long time. However, as has been made clear today, other people equally involved and equally well informed believe that the current limit is quite long enough. In any case, there are alternative and better ways to deal with the problem of protracted investigations.

The Government have accepted the proposal, which I made some years ago, that the law should be changed to permit suspects to be questioned after they have been charged. So, suspects could be charged with lesser offences related to terrorism and, if appropriate, charged with greater offences later. That has also been made easier by the lowering of the threshold for deciding that a suspect should be charged, and we have to remember that all this is set against the background that no one can be arrested unless there are grounds for suspecting them in the first place. Yet the Government now propose on top of all those changes, which would strengthen the hands of the police, to allow the Home Secretary—not in a crisis, but in individual cases—to hold suspects for longer than 28 days without charge on the say-so of the police and the Director of Public Prosecutions.

It has been suggested that that power would be constrained if it were subject to a parliamentary debate. It certainly would be a constitutional novelty: Parliament being recommended by the Government to deprive an individual citizen of their liberty, presumably on a whipped vote. To describe that as a kangaroo court would be an insult to kangaroos. Such a change would not be a defeat for terrorism; it would be a win for the terrorists.”

- Frank Dobson (Labour)

Source: TheyWorkForYou.com

I don’t think any more needs to be said, really.

Ugh

It appears that IE8 not only installs over IE7 by default (the VS 08 team got this one right - it installs side-by-side), it also appears to break my other IE browsers too (I have multiple IEs installed).

Pretty big news, the IE team have listened and reversed their original decision regarding whether to render standards compliant pages in “IE7 standards mode” or the latest, best “IE8 standards mode”.

Now the question some in the community are waiting to be answered, is will IE8 support XHTML?

Er… lol?

From the article it’s not even clear what “virtual worlds” or “web worlds” are being considered. World of Warcraft is not a “web world”, but perhaps that’s just the usual journalistic laziness when differentiating “web” from “internet”.

“Codenamed Reynard it aims to recognise “normal” behaviour in online worlds and home in on anomalous activity.

It is likely to develop tools and techniques for intelligence officers who are hunting terrorists and terror groups on the net or in virtual worlds.”

Hmm. So how exactly will they “establish baselines” when there is no way to eavesdrop on private conversations or guild chats besides subpoenaing Blizzard? Somehow I doubt a “seedling effort” would warrant such legal power. (But then it is the US I suppose).

I find the whole idea quite hilarious to be frank. Imagine the CIA listening to a typical day in the Barrens:

“where is mandriks wief??”

“lol near camp t noob”

“stfu, chuck norris owns u”

“omg, ur momma owns me”

“lol”

“how i mine copper???”

Good luck recognising that “normal behaviour” and finding those wily terrorists!

(Pssst, it’s the undead rogues, I heard them talking about bombing the Pentagon!)

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of—wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air….

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark nor even eagle flew—
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

You know how you can sometimes accidentally “hide” methods in C++ if you don’t overload them in the same way and it can cause lots of pain?

PHP has something even worse…

class Dog
{
protected $voice = 'Woof';

function Bark() { echo $voice; }
}

class Chihuahua extends Dog
{
protected $voice = 'Yip yip yip!';
}

$d1 = new Dog();

$d1->Bark();

$d2 = new Chihuahua();

$d2->Bark();

Outputs:

Woof

Yip yip yip!

…But be careful with those data access levels! If $voice is declared private in Dog, the declaration in Chihuahua is “hidden”, presumably because php fails to assign it because it’s private. You’d think you’d at least get a warning, but no… you just get two woofs. One of those “shoot yourself in the foot” features that every language has…

This is one of those tricky XML things that can trip up the unwary. Looks like a lot of people have had trouble with this as there’s plenty of hits on Google with people asking questions but I couldn’t find an answer.

You’ll be seeing something like:

Warning: DOMDocument::load() [function.load]: Extra content at the end of the document in Entity, line…

The reason this happens is because your XML is in fact not well-formed. Because in XSL you often use HTML tags in your XML, it can catch you out though.

My problem was I had a table with some results in it from XML. The XML was well-formed because the table tag was the root of the document. However I then added some more markup after the table, and got the “extra content at the end of the document” warning. It took a few minutes of head scratching before I realised what the problem was - I was thinking of it in terms of the output I wanted: an html fragment, not what it actually was: an XML document. Tags are arbitrary in XML so the table tag was the doc’s root node. To stop the warning, all I had to do was move the extra content inside the root of the document, which I did by adding a div around everything.

Hope this helps other people learning the dark arts of XSL transforms!

A dark musical with occasional comic elements to keep the mood from sinking too far, this gloomy story describes the revenge of Sweeney Todd the barber, a blood soaked tale of anguish, rage and damnation. Starring Johnny Depp as Sweeney and Helena Bonham Carter as Mrs. Lovett, his tragic partner in crime, this film is a must see!

Characterisation was simply beautiful; the plot wove the innocents of the cast in and out of the main plot line with deftness and believability, while the villains danced their sombre waltz of complete moral breakdown: lust, vengeance, blackmail, murder, and betrayal. The depiction of Todd carrying out his grisly work caused exclamations of dismay from some of the audience in the cinema. Excellent!

Fancy a pie, sir?

I am the windrider!

It was very gusty this morning on the way to work, though the part I feared would be the worst - going across the bridge over the Trent - was relatively calm.

The news this morning announced that there were up to 70mph gales battering N. Ireland and parts of Scotland and Wales, and that the weather front was moving down over the rest of Britain. They also said part of the M6 past the Lake District had been closed, which doesn’t surprise me. I’ve ridden in high winds a few times now, and by far the scariest road is the M6 through the north lakes, where the mountains start to come down again and the wind comes howling unobstructed across the Irish Sea. I think I did about 40-50mph through a lot of that stretch of road, constantly battling against being shoved into the hard shoulder.

Spare a thought for high sided vehicle drivers and motorcyclists today.