Parking fine update

Posted on by May 24, 2010

The start of the story is here.

We contacted both the Guardian's 'consumer champion' who got a commitment from Southwark to waive the extra costs, and then published the story in February, as well as our MP, who got the same commitment and who enclosed the details they'd got from Southwark… of the wrong driver / car / fine etc!

We pointed out the commitments to Southwark in yet another appeal letter and repeatedly checking their website revealled that they eventually fixed the case sensitivity issue, but the amount demanded stayed at £120…

… until April, when Southwark sent us another letter announcing that the fine was now £200, with court action the next step!

So we sent two cheques: one for £40 and one for £160 with a letter saying we regarded the £40 as full and final payment and if they cashed the other cheque, we'd be after the money back, with interest.

Last week, nine months after the original ticket was issued, they sent an anonymous 'I have been authorised to refund..' letter with two cheques fror £80 each (presumably that's the limit they can pay per cheque without even more faff).

I did wonder if they had cashed the £160 cheque, because with the level of competence shown so far, it wasn't impossible that we'd end up £120 (or even £160) better off, but alas they had.

Did you miss me?

Posted on by February 4, 2012

When I got this PC in at the end of 2008, I set it up as a dual boot Ubuntu/Windows XP machine. Its hard drive is split into four partitions: a Windows one, a 'most of' Ubuntu one, one for the Ubuntu /home folder (i.e. my data), and the swap partition.

At the time, I was using the Carbonite online backup service which is very very good at 'set up and forget' backup, but a) doesn't have a Linux client and b) is also fussy about what file system formats it will look at. On Windows PCs, if it's not a local FAT or NTFS partition, it won't back it up. (It's trying to stop people using a single licence to back up a whole network, but they never could tell me why they insisted you use file systems they have rejected as too problematic themselves – when they asked Microsoft why NTFS was falling over all the time, they were told it wasn't designed to store lots of files…)

So, partly because of that, and partly because I could, I set up the Ubuntu /home partition as NTFS. It takes some effort, but it's worked fine for the past 18 or so months.

Well, almost fine.

In practice, I've only booted into Windows to do updates: it's running Linux virtually all the time. I also got rid of Carbonite not long after getting the PC and replaced it with something that is OS neutral and doesn't care what format your partitions are.

One reason for having /home on its own partition is that it makes it easier to update / upgrade / replace the Linux distribution without losing all your data. Rather than go from Ubuntu 9.10 to 10.04, I wanted to move this PC to Linux Mint (based on Ubuntu, but 'better' in various ways, from application choice to including various codecs etc by default).

Ah. If I do that, I will need to mess around putting /home on NTFS again (it won't do it via the install routines because you need specific NTFS file system drivers that aren't normally installed).

So I've used this as an excuse to rsync the whole of /home onto an external drive, even the crap, and format /home as ext4 instead. As there's quite a lot of crap, this took a while..

.. but restoring my mail and browser data has been surprisingly easy.

I'll see what else actually gets moved back. One disadvantage of ext3/ext4 compared to NTFS is that you lose more space because of how it does journalling, so as I am always at least 95% full, it wouldn't all fit. Do I actually need 100GiB of videos I will not watch… ? 🙂

It does mean that I am a couple of days behind on reading and commenting though.

In other recent cases…

Posted on by April 29, 2010

USB TV tuners are liable to import duty rather than ordinary boring components.

Usenet binary group search site Newzbin does infringe copyrights:

I have found that the defendant well knows that it is making available to its premium members infringing copies of films, including the films of the claimants. In summary, the defendant operates a site which is designed and intended to make infringing copies of films readily available to its premium members; the site is structured in such a way as to promote such infringement by guiding the premium members to infringing copies of their choice and then providing them with the means to download those infringing copies by using the NZB facility; the activation of the NZB facility in relation to one of the claimants' copyright films will inevitably result in the production of an infringing copy; the defendant has encouraged and induced its editors to make reports of films protected by copyright, including those of the claimants; the defendant has further assisted its premium members to engage in infringement by giving advice through the sharing forums; the defendant has profited from the infringement; and finally, the claimants are not able to identify particular infringements by particular members only because the defendant keeps no records of the NZB files they have downloaded.

If your holiday of a lifetime is ruined, you will not get much in damages.

A shop selling seeds, hydroponics kit, smoking equipment etc may be inciting people to produce cannabis, even if they'll only talk about growing 'tomatoes'. I suspect calling their site 'weedcity' didn't help…

Dismissal of therapist who refused to deal with same sex couples's sexual relationships upheld

Posted on by April 29, 2010

The BBC's story on this is on their news front page, probably because it combines a Christian, gay sex, and the former Archbishop of Canterbury (who submitted a witness statement warning of "future civil unrest" if judges did not rule in favour of Christian belief).

What it misses out is made clear in the actual judgement: the therapist signed up to a non-discrimination policy which explicitly included sexual orientation on starting the job in 2003 and only announced that he would not "endorse" "sinful" same sex sexual activity in 2007.

The judges' polite 'fuck off' to the former Archbishop and his call for, effectively, a religious court ("a specialist Panel of Judges designated to hear cases engaging religious rights") is particularly good:

The promulgation of law for the protection of a position held purely on religious grounds cannot therefore be justified. It is irrational, as preferring the subjective over the objective. But it is also divisive, capricious and arbitrary. We do not live in a society where all the people share uniform religious beliefs. The precepts of any one religion – any belief system – cannot, by force of their religious origins, sound any louder in the general law than the precepts of any other. If they did, those out in the cold would be less than citizens; and our constitution would be on the way to a theocracy, which is of necessity autocratic. The law of a theocracy is dictated without option to the people, not made by their judges and governments. The individual conscience is free to accept such dictated law; but the State, if its people are to be free, has the burdensome duty of thinking for itself.

So, Ian, how did you vote?

Posted on by February 4, 2012

Lewisham has a separate mayoral election, thanks to a very narrow win (51%-49% on something like a 25% turnout, so about one in eight voting for) in a 2001 referendum. What this means is that one person (it's been the Labour candidate since 2002) runs the borough. The council can pass motions, but the mayor – who has chosen not to have a 'cabinet' with any responsibility – can ignore them.

When a petition was submitted in 2007 to have a vote on getting rid of the system, it turned out that the rules had been 'misunderstood' by the local government department and that, in fact, a council vote was necessary. Lewisham has been a balanced / 'no overall control' / 'hung' council since 2006 and the only Tory to turn up to the vote was the council chair who voted against another referendum. Since then, the rules have been changed again, and you need to wait ten years to have a referendum to abolish the system after the one to introduce it. As, typically, the first election will happen about a year after the first one, that means you'll have three mayoral elections in that time: in years one, five and nine. And, incredibly, the sitting mayor can veto the decision to have the second referendum!

The contrast with the recent rush from parties to offer 'recall' votes for naughty MPs is incredible. With a directly elected mayor, you are stuck with them, no matter what, for four years. This means in Lewisham we have had eight years of broken promises relating to a new school (there are hundreds of places too few, particularly in the north of the borough, but partly because the catchment area there would include bits of Southwark and Greenwich, the sites the mayor has proposed are elsewhere), leisure facilities, and more… and there is nothing councillors can do.

I see that Tower Hamlets is having a first referendum this time – if you have a vote there, or anywhere else considering this system, vote against.

Continue reading →

Show me the other one!

Posted on by April 27, 2010

At some point between last year's snooker world championships and this year's, did the BBC lose / give up one of their two 'red button' channels on Freeview? Why? I am sure both tables were covered on them last year, but it's always been only one throughout this time.

Given that there's only one, whoever picks the table to be shown needs shooting too, because some very odd decisions have been made, including this morning.

Still, it does mean I can be amused that the volume on the BBC website's coverage goes up to 11.

Two films much better than Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland #2

Posted on by April 3, 2010
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I suspect I am late to this particular party, but I bought Death List recently.

It is staring, written, directed, filmed, edited, produced, dubbed, and most other things by Ara Paiaya. On one level, it is pretty awful: I'm going to skip lightly over the plot and some of the acting. But with a budget of a thousand pounds or so, it is funnier, shows more imagination and takes more risks than TB's AiW.

Physical risks, certainly, because this is a home-made tribute to the Hong Kong films of the 70s (that, plus not being able to afford decent sound equipment is why everyone is dubbed). Not even the glass being broken is stunt glass – they used real glass, and they break a lot of it.

He's done a series of these micro nano budget films, and I want to see more of them.

You just have to be first out the door

Posted on by February 4, 2012
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People may remember that I am a fan of the author Christopher Priest. (The Prestige is a particular favourite, and much better than the film adaptation of a couple of years ago.)

Many years ago, he told the story of how at one SF con, Larry Niven was being a very boring 'guest of honour' so Brian Aldiss (someone else who's career has suffered by being pigeon-holed as 'just' a SF writer) pretended to have a nosebleed in order to escape. A few years later, Christopher is guest of honour and sees that the front three rows all have handkerchiefs at the ready!

Anyway, I've never needed to have a 'Niven nosebleed'.. until last night. I was very pleased to see that they do work, especially when the alternative is interrupting something that doesn't want to be told it's a complete load of crap.