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.
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.
The enquiry into Bloody Sunday has cost the UK taxpayer £195m over 12 years. Half of this has gone directly into lawyers pockets. What an utter waste of money for an enquiry which will be worthless. Everyone will have lied and covered-up to make their version of events the way they want it to be seen and the truth will be buried under layer upon layer of half-truths, opinion and hearsay. They spent £34m on IT when even at the peak of the enquiry there were only 38 staff. Just to put that into perspective, it’s enough to buy each of those staff 75 new £1000 laptops EVERY YEAR! What kind of IT infrastructure did they blow all that money on?
People moan about the wealth of bankers but these public enquiries and quangos are squandering huge amounts of public money without any real controls being placed on them. This should be the last of them, a lesson learned once and for all.
I’ve been so busy in recent weeks with work that I’ve had little chance to post here. The finance side of my job is taking front seat at the moment with financial and tax year ends to sort out, financial account audits being carried out and general cashflow pressures as the businesses show some signs of improvement. I have some IT-related projects coming up which will be some relief as I find accounting extremely tedious. It justifies a chunk of my salary but I have no passion for it at all. Every accountant I have met is great at providing figures and they’re very accurate, but they are incapable of making a practical decision. I would much rather have less tedious accuracy and more business and market acumen.
Still, onwards and upwards! The UK should have a nice weekend this week so nice time at home with my fiancee. I don’t care what your attitude to work is but you should always work to live not live to work. If you’re living to work, you have something missing from your life!
Just made a few minor tweaks to the layout and design. I’ve given the sections on the right-hand side some more prominent headings and moved the Twitter section nearer the top instead of the bottom.
I’ve always taken issue with “social networking” sites such as Twitter and Facebook. Twitter seems to be full of useless posts about people taking their dogs for a walk or telling us what they had for dinner and Facebook is for people desperate to be in a group of any kind and is mostly used for self-promotion and ego-stroking.
Whilst I maintain my stance that I will never have a facebook account, I have decided to dabble with Twitter a little to see if I can make any use out of it at all. You can see my latest tweets at the bottom of the right-hand sidebar or on twitter under the name AMindLost. It may be a short-lived experiment and be either deleted or left to slowly rot into oblivion but I’ll try to post some meaningful content to it which is not substantial enough to warrant a full blog post.
We will see…… 
Since a lot of my posts have sections of commands or code in, I wanted an easy means of highlighting a block of text within a post without using the quote block which I want to reserve for actual quotes. I found Stephen Cronin’s post which seems to do what I want with a simple css edit. I’m using his settings for now while I play about with it a bit.
You simply find the .css file for your theme or style (I’m using the K2 theme so my .css is NOT the K2 style.css but the .css file in the styles/amindlost sub-directory of the K2 theme) and add the following entry to the bottom:
.textbox {padding: 2px 6px 4px 6px; color: #555555; background-color: #eeeeee; border: #dddddd 2px solid}
When you want to highlight a block simply type the text in, go to the HTML design tab instead of the Visual design tab and put <p class=”textbox”> in front and </p> at the end.
The UK votes today in European and local elections and just like every other election since 1992, I won’t be voting. More than ever now, I believe that our political system is broken. We basically have two parties (ok there’s a third but they are so far behind they are almost irrelevant) who will do absolutely anything to score points against each other and gain power for themselves and that’s all it’s about, gaining power. We have a 4-5 year cycle in general elections and the purpose of each party is to make sure that they win the next election. The public good comes a very distant second.
The recent response to the economic downturn has been a prime example. It is a case where the best solutions have to be debated and put into practice for the good of the nation and it’s people. Instead we’ve had our two main parties bickering and sniping at each other trying to knock each others ideas and score power points. As I’ve said so many times in the past, recession is more about confidence and public psychology than anything else. The Conservatives in opposition have publicy talked down the economy because “it’s all Labour’s fault” and the more damage they can do to Labour the closer the Conservatives are to power at the next election, an election which they might even be able to force the country into early even though that might not be the best thing for the economy or the country. For their part Labour have shouted down any decent ideas or policies the Conservatives have had to improve our economic situation.
What I want, and it’s for more qualified people than me to speculate as to how it could be brought to be, is for a system of consensual politics whereby the best solution is the target, not power. People need to have confidence that their elected officials are working for them, making their lives better and safer, and not simply giving platitudes while chasing power and wealth (do i need to mention MP expenses!?) for themselves and their colleagues.
What it ultimately boils down to is that I don’t belive my vote means anything, it is a means to the politicians end, not mine.
I’ve been very busy at work the last few months and most of it has been pretty boring mundane stuff. As such I’ve neither had the time or the subject matter to post to the blog. However, I’m catching up with the crap at work and looking forward to some more interesting things ahead. Hopefully that will lead to a little more dedication to “A Mind Lost”!
All last week I managed to get to work despite the snow and ice here in the Midlands. However, this morning I’ve been beaten. We had a layer of snow yesterday evening and it’s frozen solid overnight. Having left for work early this morning I gave up after 25 minutes having completed only a mile of my 10 mile journey. The area is grid-locked and the roads are like glass.
I’ve been pretty supportive of the councils and highways agency in their gritting strategy. People seem to think that laying grit while it’s snowing will magically clear the roads instead of the grit just getting covered with snow! However, my local authority and the one where I work have no fear of running out of grit/salt because they haven’t used any! I live on what is considered a main road and although the snow stopped before 7:00pm last night, there is not a grain of salt on the road outside my house and people are doing suicidal speeds, oblivious that the shine on the road is actually ice until they try to stop at the roundabout just down the road!
Hopefully, once the rush hour has come and gone, I’ll be able to get to work sometime today. If not, the VPN to the office will have to be get the work done today.
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