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.
The UK government has announced that businesses will no longer be able to insist that employees retire at 65. At the moment, an employer is required to discuss retirement with the individual six months before their 65th birthday and while they can continue to work past that date with mutual agreement, the employer can insist that the employee retire.
While it is good news that people are more in control of their working life and how they choose to move on from it, it raises other problems which the government and the pressure groups have not been keen to address. Firstly, a workforce working longer means that younger people coming onto the jobs market have less jobs to choose from. Secondly, there is a probability that ill-health will become more of a factor in a persons life and there must be a framework in place whereby a persons employment can be terminated if ill-health results in unacceptable absence levels. You can argue that this falls within existing employment law but experience has told me that it is no easy matter to end the employment of someone through long-term or repeated absence. Such a decision requires critical attention to procedure and with an older employee may result in claims for discrimination on the grounds of both age and disability.
It’s good news for the individual, but a potential minefield for the employer.
I had a problem this week installing a second copy of WordPress on my server from which to run a personal blog. The installation kept failing to access the database, pointing to a permissions problem. Running a GRANT statement to give the correct privileges to the new database gave no error but on checking the mysql.users table I discovered that no changes were actually being written to the permissions!
check table user
returned an error:
Table ‘.mysql.user’ is marked as crashed and should be repaired.
repair table user
returned
Table is already up to date
and the circle continued……..
So I had a corrupt user table which wouldn’t let me repair it. However, there is another repair utility which is used on upgraded tables from MySQL 4.x which will repair tables in these circumstances. To use it, just navigate to your MySQL data directory and run:
myisamchk -r *.MYI
This will check and repair all tables in the directory. Of course you can repair just a single table by replacing * with the table name.
I have just specced a new desktop for my desk at work and, for the first time in 20 years, I will be using a computer at home or work which I haven’t built with my own hands. I bought an off-the-shelf Acer Veriton and all I need to do is put a dual-head graphics card into it and it’s ready to go.
Does this mean I’ve lost my geek credentials? I certainly don’t have the old passion for tinkering I used to have and I bought this PC because I simply couldn’t be bothered to research the component specifications to assemble a new one by hand. The processor market for one is an utter mess where model numbers mean nothing. At least under the old CPU MHz ratings you had some, admittedly inaccurate, sense of where the CPU sat in the speed stakes. Maybe the technology is passing me by and I can’t be bothered to keep up with hardware I don’t need to use. I’ve gone from geek to informed consumer. As a geek I would have spent hours and £800 putting together a finely tuned PC to match all my needs whereas as an informed consumer, I spent 10 minutes and £450 to get a machine that gets 98% of the way there and the other 2% I don’t really need anyway.
People I know will still call me a geek and it is still a badge worn with at least a little pride, although it seems to get more tarnished as the years pass. 
I don’t really post personal stuff on here as I’m very private, but I’m feeling unusually low today and need to unload a little. This post may even get deleted later if I change my mind. Several things are weighing on me just lately:
- Problems developing between my fiancee and myself. Nothing insurmountable because we love each other, but there is tension which we need to overcome.
- A year of trying to prevent a shop/off-license opening next door to my home. Loads of stress over parking, noise, litter etc as well as the £40k+ and 3.5 years hard work we spent improving the place being wiped out by potentially having an off-license next door. Lots of opposition locally and having done all the research and organised letters/petitions, I have a belief it can be beaten but I feel it’s all resting on my shoulders.
- Almost two years now of dragging two companies through this recession with poor cashflow and only small signs of improvement. The markets this week would have you thinking the world was about to end! Our Chinese supplier is again trying to steal customers direct.
- This morning (it started yesterday but has escalated today), we have petty squabbles between a couple of shop-floor workers over a fan of all things. It’s not even a company-supplied fan but one of the people wants to make an issue of it and is demanding a mediation meeting. I’m sick of these childish antics. It’s like a playground and we’re supposed to play teacher. I’m not in the ****ing mood! She’s even trying to make it a race issue FFS!
Am I feeling sorry for myself? Probably. Am I justified in feeling sorry for myself? Probably not. After all, I have a great life compared to most. I live in a nice home with a woman I adore and have a decent, if frustrating job to pay for it all so I feel very fortunate. I just feel I want some of this stuff to be over so life can be a little lighter.
That’s my bleating over with.
As mentioned in earlier posts, as time permits I’m migrating an old SQL Server 7 installation over to a new SQL Server 2005 installation. One of the things I came across was that even though I had Users, Roles and Permissions set up an looking OK, I was unable to run even a simple SELECT query against the database without an error stating that the user didn’t have permission. After checking all of the users/roles/permissions for the database and its tables and finding nothing wrong, I noticed that the properties for the user did not show a login name and any attempt to change the properties would demand a valid login name even though the field was greyed out and not editable!
The problem appears to be that when restoring an older database into SQL Server 2005, the login name can be assigned a blank entry. The easy fix if your user names map to logins of the same name, i.e. login user1 maps to user user1, is to run the following query for each database user:
USE [database_name];
GO
EXEC sp_change_users_login ‘Auto_Fix’, ‘Username’;
GO
You should get the following response:
The row for user ‘Username’ will be fixed by updating its login link to a login already in existence.
The number of orphaned users fixed by updating users was 1.
The number of orphaned users fixed by adding new logins and then updating users was 0.
More info can be found here.
According to this article today, if you want to pay by card for London Olympic tickets and merchandise or withdraw cash from machines at Olympic venues, you will only be able to do so with a VISA branded credit/debit card! This is part of the sponsorship agreement between the London 2012 and VISA whereby VISA paying a load of their money stomps all over the concepts of legal tender for the public! It’s shocking to what extent the Olympics has completely abandoned all principles in recent years in order to sell their soul to large corporations.
I particularly like this statement: “Visa points out that non-Visa card holders can buy a pre-pay card for the duration of the Games”. Why the hell should we?!
The Office of Fair Trading is looking into the agreement which in my opinion should be branded illegal.
I wanted to take a quick look at Ubuntu 10.04 so I downloaded the latest VirtualBox VM software and grabbed the Ubuntu ISO so that I could just run a test on my local PC inside a virtual machine so I could play with it while doing other things. I haven’t used VirtualBox for a while and while the guest OS install went fine, I couldn’t get the screen resolution to increase so my Ubuntu desktop was fixed at 640 x 480, even in full screen mode. It turns out the additional functionality is available through installing Guest Additions. I’m not going to go into the details of how to do it because there’s several straight-forward How-To’s on the web, for example here.
I see we are in typical American indignation mode at the moment. How dare BP cause this environmental disaster on our doorstep. Lets call their CEO in and give him a dressing down. Like any disaster, a long period of investigation is required. It was BP’s operation but the rig was managed by Transocean, which is an American company which moved it’s HQ to Switzerland to avoid paying tax and there is also some involvement in the mix of Halliburton, another large American company no stranger to controversy around the world.
American politicians always act like this when something they’ve been doing for years finally bites them in ass on their home turf. Environmentally, they are the largest polluter in the world and constantly refuse to sign up to any international environmental agreements. American companies have been at the centre of disasters for decades. How about Exxon Valdez (Exxon Shipping Company) or Bhopal (Union Carbide) just for starters? Now it’s off their own coast and drilling for oil they themselves hunger for, it’s somehow much worse than anything that’s gone before. No-one is arguing that this is a huge environmental incident which will live on for years and that BP and its partners, including the American authorities who license the operation and take tax revenue from it will have to answer questions and do what is necessary to correct the results of their actions. It is the grand-standing my senators and Obama which is irritating me.
It was the same with 9/11. For years Irish Americans willingly and knowingly funded IRA terrorism on British and Irish soil. Only when terrorism knocked hard on their door did it matter. According to them no-one had experienced terrorism until Americans had. Their response was to go stomping round the world starting wars with everyone that didn’t ‘get’ the American way of life dragging Britain along to sacrifice its soldiers in the name of a ‘war on terror’.
America – the most self-important, arrogant nation on earth.
I produced a basic website for a group company and included a Google Map on the contact page. It was reported to me this morning that the map points to the wrong area. I obviously thought I’d made a mistake so went to correct it. However, the fault seems to lie with Google Maps embedding of it’s own maps. In this case I wanted a map for post code OL10 4HP in Lancashire and on Google Maps website it gives me the correct location. However if I then click ‘Link’ then ‘Customize and preview embedded map’ it changes it’s location to over a mile away. Now I’m sure it’s possible to somehow manually edit the embedded code to give me the original and correct map, but it’s a strange error on Google’s part.
Anyone else had this problem?
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