Inquisitorzak.tk

Well these entries have started to become almost worryingly frequent. Possibly it's because it's the Christmas holidays, and I have nothing better to do. Yep, I'm pretty sure that's it. Things will settle down in another two weeks or so, you'll see. Then it'll be back to my usual laid-back work cycle.
I have just now begun work on the site. All of the changes so far are pretty much not noticeable unless you know what you're looking for, and I think they've worked pretty much seamlessly. I'll be carrying on tomorrow, and hopefully I'll soon have a workaround for the annoying behaviour of the navbar in Opera. Not that any sane people use Opera anyway, but...

Anybody notice the amusing typos on this page on the Union's site? "You can click on the links to see what the motions looked liek beofre the meeting." Notice the striking similarity to the language customarily employed by CS kiddies. What does this say about Nick Seagrave? Normally I'd hate to be so picky about a such a minor error, but you'd think that if they're going to write stuff that's read by however many hundreds of people, they might consider using a spellchecker of some kind. Goddamn noobs.

Edit: It seems that the page in question has now been removed. Nope, not corrected, just removed entirely. This is because the Union is run by a bunch of noobs.

Well, the Union's decision to ignore this referendum result has now been officially announced, with an appropriate amount of spin, of course. From the announcement: "The Executive Committee will be… implementing the spirit of this policy." That's right, they'll be implementing the spirit of the smoking ban, by failing to ban smoking. Riiight... You just watch, next the Union will start killing off some of the less profitable events, which they've been itching to do for ages, with the excuse that they can no longer afford them because of this smoking ban... which isn't being implemented... And on that note, I think it's time to announce Plan B, a.k.a. the Master Plan™: we're going to storm Union North, depose the current dictatorial regime and elect Tim as the Glorious People's Leader. You can read Tim's views on the matter, as well as a rather interesting discussion.

It was leaked today that the Union's executive committee, in a secret meeting, has decided not to implement last week's overwhelmingly popular referendum result. Now bear in mind that some of the executive committee smoke, the fact that none of the reasons they've given are actually true doesn't seem so surprising. More news as it happens...

I think this image neatly sums up the Union's policy towards democracy.

Well, so much stuff has happened in the past two weeks that I felt compelled to write about it here. Compsoc's webserver, Molotov, had a little bit of a hiccup on Friday night, but service was promptly restored on Monday morning, so hurray for whoever got that sorted. The Compsoc Christmas Meal happened on Saturday, which was great fun. Much thanks to Chloe for organising that one. Also, last week was when the voting happened on the Union's referenda. All three of them passed, which was expected. Despite the worries that some people held about making sure the referenda would be quorate, the turnout was actually about three times the quorum, making this one of the highest turnouts for a long time. The referendum entitled "This Union will take No Stance on the issue of abortion" was very nice, because previously the Union has tended to be horrendously pro-choice, and pretty much doesn't acknowledge the idea that people might have a problem with murdering helpless unborn children.
Of course by far the most important referendum was "Banning smoking in the Students' Union". Almost 60% of people voted in favour of this motion, showing an overwhelming level of support. About bloody time, I say. Some of the things that surfaced in the run up to this referendum are quite interesting. Firstly there were all the arguments about the negative finincial impacts of a smoking ban. Lets just say that there were some financial projections of a somewhat dubious nature. I didn't believe them, and I doubt many others did either. Figures from other places that have implemented smoking bans show that we can expect a small dip in income as the smokers all desert, followed by a steady increase as non-smokers cry out in relief at being able to breathe again, followed by further increases as smokers realise that there actually isn't anywhere else to go. All in all, banning smoking is undeniably a move of win. The fact that the referendum's 'against' campaign (written by paid Union employees, unlike most other referenda campaigns) decided to go with the tagline "We don't lie" shows just how guilty they were feeling. Yeah, we don't lie, honest guv. However, much as I'd like to declare this "another great victory for democracy", it isn't over yet. The Union still has many things that they can do to try to sink this ban. The Executive Committee has the power to veto this result, but given that they've already tried and failed to derail the referendum by adding lots of outrageous amendments to it, using their powers of veto would seem a tad hypocritical, and would likely see them in a disciplinary hearing. But there are still other bodies within the Union that can veto the result, so the outcome is not yet certain. For now at least, it feels good that this went through.

And if you'd like to see what others think of this matter, here's a few blog entries for your perusal:
Going through the motions - A vaguely civilised dialogue, probably the best of the three.
No more smoking - Most of the comments here are from smokers who can't accept that they just lost the game.
Union smoking ban - A comment from the guy that proposed the referendum, Tim, the Glorious People's Leader. Not many comments here, except one from a whinging Union officer.

Well that's all for tonight kids, thanks for reading, and remember: democracy only works if you fight for it. We may have won the battle, but the war is still going. It's going to be hard work making sure that the Union respects this result, but the day it does is the the day that I will walk through Union South, happy in the knowledge that my lungs are no longer at risk from the smoke of people who suck.

And yes, as usual, it's been around about a month since my last update. It's quite curious how that always seems to happen, even though I never plan it that way. Ah well, at least it gives me something to do. The last three days have been pretty awesome, I guess, which doesn't happen all too often, so it was good while it lasted. I can't quite remember why Saturday was good, which just goes to show that my memory is absolutely awful. Sunday I spent sleeping, which is always great fun. I always say you can never have too much sleep. Yesterday I just spent talking to people, which I think I don't do nearly enough. I should put more time aside to just talk to people, because it's good to have long and interesting conversations about deeply insightful things. Alas, now I must get back to work, deadlines to ignore, important procrastination to be done, etc.

Well, the title says a lot really. These updates are starting to get almost regular, which is a scary thought. Not quite as frequent as I'd hoped, but oh well. Today's rant topic is: Stupid People. Always good for a laugh, people, eh? If your idea of a 'laugh' means some demonstration of absolute blinding idiocy, or sometimes just pure arrogance, that is. I know that by now I really shouldn't be surprised at how foolish some people can be. And equally, I know that I'm not supposed to rant about it, because they really just can't help themselves. But sometimes it just gets too much, and you can't help but think that maybe, just maybe, if people thought things through before they actually said them, then they might not come out looking like absolute brainless monkeys. Case in point: Some person sends a letter into the newspaper. Since I can't be bothered to dig out the newspaper right now, I'll paraphrase. "Travel West Midlands are teh suck!" says the letter. Ok so far, it's a fairly believeable opinion. But wait, there's more: "I live in Leamington, and there are never any TWM buses here! Stagecoach is teh pwn! But I've already bought a bus pass, so I have to continue to fail to get the bus!" I'm sorry, what was that? Y'know, there's a reason why they call it Lameington. You don't think that perhaps you might have brought this on yourself? I really don't know sometimes. Here's a little something for people that can't be bothered to look things up for themselves: Stagecoach runs a total of four buses to Coventry each weekday. TWM runs three dozen buses to Lameington during the same period. Another letter in the newspaper that amused me, this one from last week, was yet again lamenting the poor standard of bus services in Leamington. It went something like this: "The buses are always full by the time they get to Leamington! But nobody lives in Earlsdon, because Leamington is better." Err, yes, that's right... Leamington is so much better than Earlsdon, where I have seen a total of 1 full bus since the start of term, and that was followed immediately (literally within a minute) by an empty bus. It's not so much the natural assumption of Leamington's superiority that I mind, (keep them believing it, so all the good places are free for those that know to look) but instead the completely unsupported statement "nobody lives in Earlsdon". Yes, that's right, nobody lives in Earlsdon, that's why half the properties that the University's accommodation department has on offer are in or around Earlsdon. I suspect it takes the arrogance of an Arts student, or worse yet, a Politician, to declare that their own views are the One Truth, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary. There was supposed to be something else I was going to add after the end of the rant, but I've forgotten what it was. I suspect it was possibly goatse, so it's possibly for the best that I've forgotten.

Well, violence breaks out in Belfast. Seems like everyone is quick to point fingers and assign blame. Politicians especially are trying to get their version of events accepted as the Truth, as if such a thing exists, but the Government has said nothing about the situation, not even to condemn such violent behaviour. Loyalists were very quick to say that it was caused by police heavy-handedness. Oh noes, the police are being heavy handed! Good thing we thought to bring along these bombs, eh? It doesn't take a genius to figure out that violence has never solved anything.

You really have to feel sympathy for the residents of New Orleans at the moment. But you also have to wonder how the situation got quite so out of hand. The US government could have done a hell of a lot more to help those people, and they could have done it a hell of a lot quicker, too. Well, that's enough ranting about the injustices in the world. Time to move on to the mocking. :)
Fidel Castro has very generously offered the US humanitarian aid. The US has declined to comment. I think one word can sum up this situation: "pwned".

Oh noes! Mo Mowlam is critically ill in hospital!

Just to remind you that this site sells really great T-shirts. Buy one. Or two. Hell, buy a dozen, they're great.

I shall have to remember to reinstitute the Links page at some point, so that I can have somewhere sensible to put all this stuff. Not right now though, I have far too much procrastination to do at the moment.

I had an interesting conversation about blogs the other day, and reading an article in the Times this morning reminded me of it. What possesses an otherwise rational person to pour out this nonsense that is a blog? Speaking for myself, I never really intended to write a blog. I just wanted a little corner of the internet where I could put little amusing things, and occasionally make a witty comment. But it just sort of happened. The witty comments became increasingly lengthy diatribes and endlessly droning commentaries. I think it's important that people should have a way of expressing what they feel, and certainly a blog is a very effective way of doing that. After all, there are no restrictions on a blog other that those we put on ourselves, and this is certainly a contributory factor in the plague of blogs that continues to sweep across the internet. But this of course leads us onto the dark side of blogging. If there are no restrictions on what we write, who is to stop people from spouting some complete bollocks that they have no idea about, and then claiming that it's journalism? And don't even get me started about those ones that insist on sharing their narcissistic drivel with us. Ahem. You will tell me if I start to bore you, right?

Just a compsoc variant of the ordinary Wikipedia Game really. Except better, naturally. And not for the faint of heart. Essentially, the aim of the game is to get from a Random page to Goatse.cx in the least number of clicks possible. All the other rules of the standard wikipedia game apply, i.e. No dates, No searches, No external links. I personally would replace no searches with only links in the main definition, as the navbar on the side is far too useful. So far my record is six clicks. If you're really interested, here's how I did it.

I've removed the forums because quite frankly nobody was using them, and it was more trouble than it was worth.

So, it looks like the First UK Hurd User Group now has a website. And yes, the acronym of that is FUKHUG. That is all.

Well, the results are in, and it seems that we're all set for another four years of lies, deceit, and manipulation. The BBC describes Blair's victory as 'historic'. Yes, it'll go down in history as one of the lowest 'majorities' ever achieved, with less than a quarter of the population in favour of the Labour Party. The fact that a party with such a thing can occur reflects rather badly on Britain's electoral system, IMHO. Having said that, it's not the Labour party itself that I have a problem with (other than the fact that they're the complete opposite of everything I believe in), it's Tony Blair personally I dislike. He has repeatedly shown himself to be a shameless liar, and a bad one at that. Ok, so all politicians are liars, I can't really be too hard on him for that. But he also breaks all of him promises. How the fuck are you supposed to trust someone like that? And who the fuck actually voted for this idiot? All those nice things he promised? He didn't deliver on them during his last two terms, what makes you think this next term will be any different. I mean even before the election, experts were screaming about how the figures in Labour's pre-election budget didn't even add up! For crying out loud people, have some common sense. Hmm, I seem to have got distracted halfway though writing this rant. Did you know that there's an Elvis party? And did you know that it's nearly impossible to find out what IKHH stands for, even though they actually won a seat? The nearest I've got is "Ind Kid Hosp", from the BBC website, which sounds relatively benign, I guess. And so much for the Green party's hopes of winning a seat in this election. Close, but no cigar. Well, it seems that across the board, Labour got less votes than at the last election, even in traditionally strong Labour areas, which shows that there is yet hope, just not much of it.

And this now brings me neatly onto my next topic: Voter Stupidity. I like to beleive that when people vote, they know what they're getting. There are a some people I know who look at what Labour has done, and yet they still vote Labour. I don't understand them, but I can respect their choice. Then there are others who simply vote Labour because Tony Blair told them to. Uh, hello? You don't think he might have a slight bias here? One comment that I read got me particularly annoyed. "Keeping the political landscape on the left... Tony Blair has got it right in moving us left and keeping the guiding principles of the left as a vision for the longer term." Now who can see what's wrong with this? And by wrong I don't mean incorrect, I mean absolutely completely brain-dead stupid. Let me produce a graph for you. Err, scratch that, let me steal a graph from Political Compass for you.

Now, who can tell me which direction Labour is moving in? And here's a hint: It ain't left. The comment above was one of many that just made me despair for the state of this country. I think I'll finish here. Politics makes baby Jesus cry.

Well, I've been meaning to update this for a while now, but I could never find the time to get around to it. This is probably because World of Warcraft has stolen my entire life. If you haven't got it yet, then why the hell not? Other than that I was meaning to say something significant, and possibly even meaningful. Having dredged the deepest recesses of my memory, I seem to recall that it was something about the issue of John Cross. John Cross is innocent. I think I'll cut this update short there, as I have now been awake for 30 hours, the last 6 of which were spent playing DDR. Also, I have found a new quote for your perusal.

So it turns out that the new Pope, Benedict XVI, is an Inquisitor. Sweet. Oh wait, we're not supposed to call them Inquisitors any more...

Tony Blair has announced the he will be introducing emergency legislation to counter the recent postal voting fraud... but he won't be implementing it until after the general election. Remind me again, which was the only party to have fraudelently acquired postal votes? If Labour wins a third term then I think I might just lose all faith in democracy. Tony Blair is (statistically) one of the least liked prime ministers in all of history (based on number of votes won at general election), so how the hell did he manage to get even a second term, let alone be contesting a third? I tell you, it's democracy at fault here.

This whole thing with the graphs has got me to pondering. What really drives political parties these days? It used to be that political parties would have a real motivation, something that you could consistently rely on them to support. For instance, the Conservatives are, well, conservative. It's what you expect from them. And similarly, the Liberal Democrats are fairly liberal. But what the hell has happened to Labour? Labour was supposed to be a party of the people. They were supposed to be about social freedoms, and all that jazz. But you look at Labour these days, and all I really see is a cheap clone of the Conservatives. Yes, that's right. I see Labour as being a second rate knock-off of an increasingly ignored party. But then perhaps that explains how they managed to win two elections. They stole all their policies from the Conservatives, and nobody even noticed. Not that I'm trying to support the Conservatives either, of course. Both New Labour and the Conservatives are completely antithetical to my own political outlook. So in this year's elections, take a good long think before you vote. Do the unexpected. There are more than three parties out there.

Edit: I have reinstituted the Quotes of the Week. There's only one quote so far, so it's looking a bit lonely, but I'm sure there'll be more to join it soon enough. In the mean time, why don't you amuse yourself with some of CompSoc's finest.

Well it seems that CompSoc is no stranger to random graphs with lots of dots on them, as this interesting graph of CompSoc's political leanings clearly shows. The red dots indicate raving Communists Linux users, and the blue dots indicate Windows users. The correlation is very clear. And no two guesses as to the identity of CompSoc's resident Thatcherite.

Edit: We now have an updated version of the graph showing comparisons with some political parties.

I also found it incredibly amusing that in a recent survey a majority of Americans said that the price of pertrol was causing them financial hardship. The reason I say it's rather amusing is because ultimately they have no-one but themselves to blame. Nobody told them to live an hour away from work and buy enormous SUVs, did they? And on a wider scale, nobody said that they had to base their entire economy on oil, did they?

Having now kinda finished the CSS, I have begun the long and painful process of inserting PHP into the site. So far it seems to be going OK. Which is nice, to say the least.

Also, I've just heard some great news on Microsoft's upcoming contribution to the OS market. "Longhorn blurs the distinction between applications and documents. In this case, the attachment on the email is a full blown application which features single click installation." No two guesses as to one of the major infection vectors for viruses/malware. Yup, looks like Microsoft still doesn't get it. The security of the internet is far more important than making some stupid fucking idiot users take two less clicks to open their attatchments.

Earlier this week, Alberto Gonzales, who is famed for attempting to justify the torture of US prisoners, told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he wants certain temporary provisions of the Patriot Act to be made permanent. These provisions, which are temporary for a reason, are hugely controversial, and some say they should never have been allowed in the first place. What Gonzales didn't give, however, was any form of justification for this permanency. Effectively, what he's saying is that the FBI have got used to the powers that the Patriot Act has given them, and they aren't going to give them up without a fight. Among the things that the FBI would like to keep is the authority to forcefully break into and search any house without even telling the owner. Sure enough there is opposition to the move, and some Senators have put forward the Safe Act to negate certain objectionable bits of the Patriot Act, but this will be vetoed by the White House. I'm so glad I don't live in such a fucked up country. For all the lies, backstabbing, and broken promises, Tony and his cronies don't nearly compare to the US administration.

Ok, so I lied, there aren't actually any smurfs. But I've begun archiving the rants from this page on a separate page all of their own. So pretty soon you'll be able to find all my rants in one place, categorised by date and subject. I've also added a HTML anchor to each of these little update boxes, so that I (or anyone else) can link to each individual box, like so.

Edit: This great little flash animation about the new perpendicular shiz.

Well, I figured it was about time I put up a rant that wasn't MS-bashing, but until now I just didn't have the right subject material. Rewriting an entire website to use CSS makes me want to find whoever decided that IE should be a useless POS and unleash some stabbity fury on them. But then there's only so much you can say on that subject before you start repeating yourself. And so, on to the main feature, as it were.
The Pope. As you may have noticed, he's dead. The Pope died at 7.37PM (GMT) last Saturday night; and over the next few days the newspapers were filled with glowing words for his work, with gushing reports of his past accomplishments. But flick past the first few pages and into the real meat of the paper. There you will find that even (especially?) such highly respected people as John Paul II are not immune to the vicious barbs of an unfortunate few.
The Pope preached against the use of condoms. Of course logically this means that the Pope is personally responsible for the death of every single AIDS sufferer on the African continent. I mean, come on folks, the body's barely gone cold and already you can't wait to start tearing chunks out of it. Lets blame everything on the dead guy, because lets face it, he's dead, what's he gonna do? It's this kind of shoddy reasoning and half-baked pseudo-logic that really ticks me off. It's the sort of thing you expect from internet trolls, not journalists writing in respected newspapers. Clearly people in Africa are going to unquestioningly follow the advice of an old white dude who wears a funny hat. Never mind the fact that in many places in Africa there's only a single priest to cover a huge district. Never mind the fact that traditional beliefs prevent the use of condoms. Lets ignore the myriad other non-Pope causes of AIDS. Unbiased journalism? Gimme a break. There were less dodgy facts and figures in Saddam's Iraqi elections. 'Oh yes, 100% of the people voted for me, and there was a 100% turnout, honest guv.' Honestly, the state of the media these days really makes me sick.

Did some more work polishing off the CSS. I've now implemented the neat little pop-out menus, for those whose browsers support this. Which at the moment is, erm, Firefox. Hmm, I'm not showing any bias here, not at all. It's a shame really, as I was specifically trying not to optimise this site for any particular browser. For this purpose IE does not count as a browser, since it's hard enough to get things actually working in IE, let alone looking pretty. I'll also have to see how well this site works in other browsers, Konqueror and the likes. Unfortunately I don't have access to a Mac, so Safari will have to wait. Anyway, I'm sure I have better things I could be doing.

Fixed. It's all sorted now. Everything works. Unless you're using IE, but then I expect you'd be used to that now. A lot of stuff probably won't ever work in IE, because I'm taking advantage of some of the niftier features of CSS, which IE simply doesn't support. Of course it's possibly better that IE doesn't support these things, because otherwise I wouldn't be able to use dodgy h4x to display different things to IE. Anyway, the major part of the CSS is completely done now, and it's a good thing too. I'll probably continue tweaking things to make them look nicer in IE, and any other browsers that I haven't tested yet, but the main part of the work is done. Really though, I shouldn't have to do this much work. People shouldn't be forced to tweak their CSS just to get it to do what it should. These sort of things should Just Work, first time, every time, exactly as it says in the spec. In the not too distant future I'll probably be putting up some details of which browsers this has been tested in, and any known issues with them.

Edit: On the off chance that you actually wanted this location's previous content (strange you), it is still located here.

Yeah, I've finally got around to doing something with this, which is nice. All the old content is still available until I can be bothered to migrate it over here. (Like that's gonna happen soon.)

Edit: Given that the basic design is now approaching something like where it ought to be, I've started testing it in Internet Explorer. As expected, it doesn't work. So for any of you that are still using IE, all I can say is: Please, do the right thing. Get Firefox. As I've mentioned in the past, I probably won't be 'fixing' this site to be IE friendly. It's just got to the point where I don't feel that people like me should have to put in extra effort to make up for Microsoft's shortcomings. (Read: I'm lazy.) In summary, if people are going to use a defective browser then f*ck 'em.

Edit: Having been messing around with this for quite a while now, I think I'm almost ready to give up. It's now two days later, and my conclusions are: CSS support in browsers SUCKS! And this isn't just a Microsoft-bashing rant; the implementation of CSS across different browsers has been so shockingly inconsistent that it's practically impossible to get anything done. Now I'm going to specifically exclude IE from this rant, because nobody expects IE to work. It's just the tiny little differences that get to you, like when you want this line of text to be in this exact place, but Firefox puts it 8 pixels further down than Opera... Yeah.

Edit: Ok, I know I said I wasn't going to do this, but I couldn't just stand by and watch IE horribly mangle my beautiful CSS. I've started to add in a few horrible h4x to make things look less un-good in IE.