Having trouble accessing your Wordpress Stats today for your blogs? Me too and it seems we are not alone. Clicking on ‘Site Stats’ ask me to login again and then just loops through the login again and again. My Dashboard page doesn’t render properly either. It steps the WordPress Logo down out of line and places a dark grey bar at the top of the page. This happens on both my blogs. Only had time for a quick scan for the reason this afternoon and it looks like it is a problem at Wordpress.com’s end, possible connected with some new code to render the stats graphically. I’m just going to leave it for now and hope it sorts itself out.
Update (@22:38) : Just checked the stats and everything appears to be working again.
If, like me, you’re curious about the performance and usability of Amazon’s Kindle e-reader, Paul Stamatiou has posted a useful review on his site that’s well worth a read. With the price of the Wi-Fi enabled device not down to £109 it’s starting to look like a useful addition to the gadget hoarder!
Following on from yesterday’s post, photos have been released of the Athletes Village facilities in Delhi, India for the Commonwealth Games starting shortly. These are images showing our “cultural differences” in attitudes to hygiene!
The current state of India’s facilities for the upcoming Commonwealth Games is all over the news at the moment and it is abundantly clear that they are a shambles. What is absolutely astonishing is the statement by a senior Indian government official, Lalit Bhanot, secretary general of the Delhi organising committee that the complaints are due to “cultural differences” and “different standards” of hygeine:
Everyone has different standards about cleanliness. The Westerners have different standards, we have different standards
The buildings are not watertight, are surrounded by mosquitoes and have rubble, stray dogs, rubbish and human excrement in them! That is an acceptable standard in Indian culture? What the officials are basically saying is that some huge racist stereotypes are true? It is a breathtaking thing to say on the international stage. I’m almost speechless!
Figures recently released on UK unemployment and retail sales for August are clearly open to interpretation. I’ve been looking at two major news websites, BBC News and Sky News, and their spin is entirely opposite.
Firstly, the employment figures:
BBC – Unemployment Falls by Less Than Analysts Forecast
Sky – Record Rise in People Getting New Jobs
Now the retail sales:
BBC – Retail Sales Boosted By Back-To-School Clothing (Rising 1%)
Sky – Retail Sales in UK Down 0.5%
Even now, it still amazes me how the media choose to spin these reports. In the case of the employment figures Sky chose to concentrate on only a specific element of the figures whereby the BBC headlined the overall. On the retail sales, the BBC used the British Retail Consortium’s (BRC) figures which compared sales to last year whereas Sky chose to use the Office of National Statistics (ONS) report which compared sales to last month (July).
Where’s the truth? Who knows?!
Update: The BBC are now reporting on the ONS statistics so the rising sales previously reported are now falling sales!
For years, unions have claimed that workers in the public sector, i.e our councils, public services and government departments, enjoy better retirement and pension benefits because their pay is poor compared to those in the private sector. Public workers enjoy early retirement at an earlier age and on a significant final salary ratio.
Today, a report has blown the union myth apart. Average pay in the public sector excluding pension contributions is £4000 per year better than in the private sector. When you take those nice, and increasingly unaffordable, pension perks into account this gap rises to £7000.
The Labour government created some 900,000 of these jobs during it’s time in power and now there are plans to bring this back to reasonable and manageable levels through job cuts but also through pay freezes and pension changes, the unions are calling for coordinated, national strike action. Even through the last two years of recession, public sector workers still enjoyed wage rises and job security whilst those in the private sector lost their jobs or had wages frozen or even cut. Sick time taken in the public sector is also massively higher than in private companies.
I fail to see how the public sector can be allowed to escape the recession intact while the private sector suffers. The coalition government is right to want a smaller and more efficient public sector focused on front-line services to the taxpayer. The number of people employed and the amount of money that is spent simply to keep those people employed and to spend that money and to generally keep the machine moving is no longer maintainable.
I see the idiot who wanted to burn the Koran has now put his plans “on hold”. Of course he has. He’s a nobody in the grand scheme of things and managed to garner the whole world’s attention to his rather lame little church and it’s agenda. World leaders spoke out about him and the world’s media fell over themselves to give him free publicity. Now, no doubt having attracted large numbers of other lunatics to his cause thanks to the ridiculous world condemnation, he has apparently cancelled his plans. The guy is an idiot but not so much of an idiot that he didn’t know how to push everyone’s buttons to get their attention.
Well done to the all the self-righteous leaders and media around the world. You just made a superstar out of a bigoted fool!
Update: Finally, some logical questioning of the response to this ‘incident’:
But how come an extremist planning a book-burning that would disgrace any time after the Middle Ages has some of the top politicians in the West jerking around like puppets on a string ?
Google recently decided to put a default background on their search homepage which resulted in the seventh most popular search term worldwide being “how to remove Google background”. They backtracked on that policy but I notice that today they have an annoying “Spinning Balls” animation in place of the usual google artwork. Many users are reporting a ridiculously high CPU load of up to 60% just for this animation!
I just did a basic test and left Firefox open with the Google search page loaded. It’s CPU usage was 2%. When I moved the mouse cursor over the animation and it activated again, the CPU varied from 64% up to 97%! That’s on an Athlon 64 3200+ with 2Gb RAM running Windows XP and Firefox 3.6.8.
Granted, users only visit the Google homepage for a short while so it’s not the end of the world but that page is an icon of the internet, a testament to getting the job done without fuss. When will Google learn? Users don’t like change, especially change for it’s own sake and exceptionally when it is detrimental to their experience. Leave the search page as it is, you are actively pushing users towards your competitors!
Update @ 12:10pm – This post has only been active for about 2hrs and my blog is not exactly up there in the popularity stakes but so far it has been found using the following search terms:
- google animations are annoying
- what are the annoying google balls 7 sep
- annoying balls on google today
Changes to the requirements for apps connecting to Twitter have resulted in the update of the Twitter Tools plugin used in this and many other blogs to provide a twitter feed in the sidebar. There is now a requirement for a a sequence of keys to authorize access to your twitter account.
Unfortunately, when I updated and configure the new version of Twitter Tools, it would not connect to Twitter, instead giving a
Call to undefined function curl_init()……….
error. This is because php was not configured with curl support. To fix this on a Debian-based system, do the following:
sudo apt-get install php5-curl
then add the following line to your /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini file:
extension=curl.so
finally, restart Apache:
/etc/init.d/apache2 restart
Twitter Tools (and any other php Twitter app) should connect to your Twitter account correctly.
OK, that’s a blindingly obvious statement. But if a reminder was needed, an interesting fact reported here is that just two Chinese Internet Service Providers serve 20% of the world’s broadband users, and they’re still growing! OK so it’s not a completely open market like in other countries but that’s still a huge proportion of the internet-connected population.
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