Sometimes you need to see what the web server is sending back, when I'm working on rspec scripts I can print things out (which messes up the pretty output) but then see where my assumptions are wrong. I needed to be able to see what was in the response so that I could work out what was wrong. It's annoyingly easy when you work out how. You need to add a step that looks like this:

When /^I dumped the response$/ do
     puts response.body
end

Then, in the features that are giving trouble:

Scenario: creator restores fragment
  When fragment 1 exists
  And I am the fragment owner
  And I am on the fragment
  And I dumped the response
  # ...

This allows you to do some debugging on that error you can't fathom out. It helped me greatly when I put in devise authentication and discovered that my code was looping back to the login screen because of a duff password.

Devise

I love this plugin - takes away a ton of work

(Thanks Colin)

This should get you started with cucumber. Note that password is a helper method that just returns something like 'test123'. My code has user roles (I do it differently from the way the devise guys do it) and I took it out, so it may not run straight away as it's untested. Caveat emptor.

def create_my_user(params)
  unless user = User.find_by_email(params[:email])
    params[:password_confirmation] = params[:password]
    user = User.create!(params)
    # This makes the user look 'confirmed'
    user.update_attribute(:confirmation_token,nil)
    user.update_attribute(:confirmed_at,Time.now)
  end
  user
end

Given /^I am logged in as (.*)$/ do |email|
  @current_user = create_my_user(:email => email, :password => password )
  visit new_user_session_path
  fill_in("Email", :with => email )
  fill_in("Password", :with => password )
  click_button("Sign in")
  response.body.should =~ /My Lovely App/m
end
 

This is the Beeb's feeble response to Flash Forward - can't be bother with that either, but at least they have writers who can write.

Best bit was trying to wake the sleeping tanker driver  by standing 50 metres away and shouting, instead of driving right up to the bridge and using the car's horn like a normal person would. But then Tamzin's hair might have got mussed and the cheesy special effect would have been harder to do.

The closing sequence with more photos sent from "the aliens", including her lover looking pretty dead was so clichéd I burst out laughing.

When he started tapping the chair I meant to say "please stop tapping" but what came out was "for fuck's sake" - whoops. Should have said something before I came to the boil. Me bad man. Me swear in front of the children of the inconsiderate and self righteous. I'm sure there's a spiritual message there. I know there is. Maybe he has Tourette's and I'm really in the wrong. It was like he was trying to pick a fight and wasn't even aware of it. I hope that he's not in any position of power or one day someone that works for him will pee in his coffee, or do something even worse!

Thing is, it's two days later and I'm still feeling the karmic shock wave of my anger. Anger does this to me more often than I would like to admit. I didn't sleep properly on Sunday and had this boiling anger thing on Monday evening. I couldn't believe that someone could be so selfish, and have so little self awareness, it was extraordinary. It wasn't arrogance: he just didn't have a clue that invading a total stranger's personal space and noisily flicking a newspaper every 15 seconds or so could be seen as an arrogant and aggressive, in fact downright rude. It was like sitting next to a toddler who needed a nappy change. Really bizarre.

So ok, I'm a Buddhist, by definition a pacifist and someone who will not follow (or at least try not to follow) emotionally destructive paths. So how do I work with this anger and the irrational wave of hatred (it was that strong) that kept creeping up on me? I finally worked out the shape of it on Tuesday morning. In the Tibetan tradition there is a meditation technique called Tong Len, that translates as "sending and taking" or "exchanging self and other". I am not a qualified teacher and will not explain it here, but the essence of the practice is to imagine yourself into various people, usually starting with loved ones, and draw their suffering and pain into you as you breathe in and out - transforming it and taking it away from them. Then you gradually change the focus to people unknown to you and finally to your enemies or people who have hurt you. Go and get instruction from a qualified teacher if you want to try it - quite deliberately I have not given enough information here - you wouldn't give a child matches or let it play with electrical wires. My community's website is here.

It's important to stress that Buddhists see no difference between self and other; that all suffering comes from this fundamental misunderstanding (other being everything, not just people). You see something outside you, you start dividing things up into like/dislike/don't care, you see yourself as separate from these things, and suffering follows from it because these "external" things apparently control how you feel and think (again this is simplified, but I hope correct). Ignorance makes us see the other; pushing and pulling makes us angry and confused, suffering is the result. For me meditation practice is about trying to relax the tightness of this spiritual knot and undo it by seeing and feeling the the world properly, viscerally, and without any sense of a barrier (because there isn't one). It can't be forced - the more you push the more things push back.

(Yes, Star Wars fans, Yoda says it, kind of: Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. He misses out the beginning (for a Buddhist): Fear comes from ignorance, from the false concept of self and other - the split making you afraid).

So this bloke is just another process spinning in the empty void like I am, the result of an endless chain of causes and conditions that go back to beginningless time and result in another deluded self hiding in a frail human body. He has no intention of hurting me and my feelings should not be changed by what he does. He can't help his spiritual ignorance, limited self awareness and narrow view that doesn't encompass total strangers like me.

I didn't do the practice, just thought about exchanging myself - one process for another - with him. I thought myself into his head, but kept my critical facilities. Then I realised other people don't exist for him, so why should he show them any courtesy? This is probably overgeneralising, but the nub of it feels right. The guy must be quite broken in his emotional life, and probably isn't even aware of it. So the arrogance is actually an inability to empathise or relate, a fear that feels like an electric shock, the poor sod. On consideration I feel sorry for him, deeply sad that I didn't find something constructive to say that might have shaken him out of his distorted world view and woken him a little. I'm also scared for him: if he carries on winding people up without even knowing it you know it can't end well, it could end extremely badly, and he won't even know why. 

So what I learned (again) is that you can't win because there is nothing to win. But maybe you can grow a little if you aren't afraid of the pain. And the guy who couldn't look people in the eye and was scared of everything, who was afraid to be happy, and comes across as very arrogant when really he's afraid? That was me about ten years ago. So I can't be critical. Still is me when I'm tired or not being mindful.

Next time, I will try to overwhelm whoever it is with gentleness, kindness and a little humour before I come to the boil. At least I know I'm broken.

Oh, and move my seat, even if the train is full. If he wants both seats let him have them - there's more difficult and useful battles to have. Stubbornness doesn't help either, but that's another essay all of its own.

I've helped conduct at least two interviews where you ask a straight question related to a claim on a CV e.g. claims about knowing Object-oriented design patterns, I get what I've come to call the tumbleweed response. As in what happens when someone makes an unfunny joke and there is silence. The idiom comes from the cowboy movie where the wind blows across the silent plains and makes the tumbleweed roll by; there is nothing there! (Reeves and Mortimer fans will know exactly what I mean).

So, if you are going to be interviewed by me, remember the following:

If you claim to have designed databases with hundreds of tables you should be able to explain what foreign keys and lookup tables are. Third normal form? It's a dying art. Look it up or don't make the claim.

If you claim to know PL/SQL then you know the difference between implicit & explicit cursors, probably what ref cursors are and what in, out and nocopy mean and why you would use them. Bonus question - what are PL/SQL tables (hint: nothing to do with database tables, it's a language construct, so don't start talking about database tables - it means you don't have a clue).

SQL: inner and outer joins, foreign keys etc. Why as well as what.

If you know J2EE or Java beyond having attended a one-day course tell me what might go wrong with singletons (have a read up about serialisation)? How and why do you implement an equals method (just look it up)? Bonus question - if you have read about trying to create enumerated types in Bloch's Effective Java are there any problems with it? Double bonus - tell me about synchronisation and the actual order statements can be executed when optimised that breaks it. It's a feature. I'm a bastard question: why haven't you read Effective Java? Do you know what POJO is, and why does it have so much meaty goodness?

If you claim to be well-versed in object-oriented techniques you sure as christmas is coming need to be able to tell me the difference between has-a and is-a relationships, and why they are needed. Plus the usual stuff about abstract classes, interfaces and so on. Maybe, as a bonus question, why dynamic languages don't need interface or abstract - or do they? I like people with opinions.

Ruby - what is duck typing? Can you explain what method_missing does? What does yield do? What's the difference between a string and a symbol? How do you pass a block to a function - why would you? What's a mixin and why do they taste so nice and chocolatey? Bonus: Why is the splat operator so handy?

Rails -  how does an @ variable set in the controller appear in the view? What tools to you use to test model/view/controller code separately and together? Tell me why fat model, thin controller is a good guideline. (This question also works for PHP/J2EE and whatever framework you want).

(I will think up more RoR questions - readers feel free to chip in and I will add them).

Agile: What does YAGNI mean? What does PIE mean? What is TDD? Then, of course, why? Bonus: Demeter/Tight and loose coupling/...

Patterns: Describe MVC (why as well as what). Do you know what the conductor pattern is? If you claim to know patterns such as Factory or Singleton, then expect to be asked "what does a factory give you" (concrete class that implements a known interface, like a database connector or cross-platform representation of a GUI object) or "why would you use a singleton" (global data store, or even a factory!) Bonus question - what does "concrete class" mean? Expect why questions - anyone can implement someone else's pattern - why was it a good idea? 

General Programming: How do you track production system bugs down (this is open ended - no right answer - but have some idea, please!) Why is refactoring old code generally a good idea? Or is it a bad idea? What's refactoring anyway?

I can't be bothered asking questions about XML but there are plenty - I leave that as an exercise for you, dear reader.

Some of these questions overlap, obviously.

Bottom line: If you claim to know something then expect to be asked about it - I will bone up on the web if I don't know to do you the courtesy of being able to shine - I want you to succeed, honest.

Bottom line: Don't make claims you can't back up. Don't waste my time.

Envoi: I don't know is a fine answer, don't be afraid of it. You get more respect for it. Just don't sit there watching the tumbleweed after claiming to be a world expert on something - it makes us all so embarrassed.

MS is a statistical outlier. A lot of its success was accidental and also built on allowing piracy in markets it couldn't control in the early days. Ballmer/Gates so what?

You get one of these companies every generation or so and they hang around for a long time and Wall Street or the City of Lahndahn try to make everybody else be like them when that business model only works in a new market when no-one has any idea what to do next. It happens to be Microsoft because IBM's leadership had no idea what they'd unleashed - it *could* have been IBM or any one of a number of other companies that have now gone to the wall because MS's dominant position stifled them.

We have no idea who the next Microsoft even are. Ballmer's just another guy managing a big company that succeeded despite itself. The market is changing and MS will do its best to protect its equivalent of the pianola until it disappears or is reinvented as a medium sized player in a different market. The idiom of the ice companies making sharper saws while ignoring developments in refrigeration comes to mind. None of the ice companies became refrigeration companies.

I think the next innovation will be in finding a way to consistently write large chunks of software that do useful things. MS aren't even trying to play that game, as their last disaster shows too clearly.

I've been training people on TDD and the *first* thing I said is you need to start from the functional spec and then (maybe) create a technical spec that is used to drive the tests. Understand the problem first - and then the tests are just part of writing the code as a whole, no biggie.

Writing small tests for small bits of code make you think small, with short well focussed methods that *do* stuff. Long linear honkin' bits of procedural code are very hard to test properly. TDD has the accidental but very useful effect that you write stuff that isn't tightly coupled because it's impossible to do efficient TDD with tight coupling, assuming you get how to do it well. That takes practice. I think you should give it another try from the beginning with something simple and notice how the structure of your code is better (IMHO anyway).

When I'm doing demos or quick tracer bullet things then I don't bother, but then there are no consequences.

I agree that agilistas can be far too rigid - don't substitute process for thought. Anyone who ever suffered under RUP (or any big MC company's "method") knows how painful this is.

Testers test functionality. Programmers test assumptions. Not the same.

When ground
Will be dust again

And how happy I will be

To shuck off this old form and its aches and pains
Things done wrong already and for always wrong
It can't forget, just recycle and chew on the
Old bones of pain

To move on to something new
But the mistakes will still belong to this little me
This flotsam
This bubble on the edge of a wave

Lose particulars but not consequences

I can live with that

No choice

If death is sleep then why live at all
If death is sleep there are no consequences
If death is sleep do what you want

If death were sleep
I'd be asleep

To clarify some more:

I'm trying to save a user with the handy "register with Twitter" button supplied by the OAuth plugin and when it tries to do the validation both the OAuth and OpenID plugins call their own versions of save. This calls the block twice. At the moment it's one or the other.

I'm not sure if I'm going to need benefits because there are a few jobs out there but I think it's best to get the ball rolling. I've paid a small fortune in tax and NI over the years and it's supposed to be there when I need it, so we'll see.

Having a row at the moment with some folk from a company called G24 who want me to pay for overstaying on a car park that has no signs saying what the time limit is, or that they will attempt to charge you. I wrote them a letter and they sent a useless form reply saying "my appeal had been denied". I hadn't appealed - I'd told them that they weren't being paid because I didn't know there was a restriction, clairvoyance not being a necessary requirement for a driving licence. It's a racket, scaring people with official-looking letters and offering them a discount if they pay straight away of only £75! The local council only charge £30 if you overstay in a pay and display, they must think the people who live in Birkenhead have gold-plated toilets or something.

Also gonna give the DVLA a rocket for selling my personal details to these dodgy folk. Not amused. I do not remember giving them permission to use my details for any purpose other than legitimate legal ones required by the law. Going to ask for compensation because I believe that the only way to stop the govmint selling your details is to make it uneconomical. Yes, that's a cynical view, but probably correct. Will give the compensation away if I receive any, but the principle is sound.

On a different tack I sent a letter to my MP Frank Field saying I supported his stand against people who were on the now abolished 10p rate of income tax being robbed by the government. About bloody time someone stood up to Brown. When I think of what he gave away to the banks, this dimwitted attack on some of the poorest people on fixed incomes really gets me cross.

Had a job interview last week that came to naught. Up for a contract role based in Woking on Monday. Busy looking for things to keep me occupied and learning new stuff, like for example cascading style sheets, that I haven't had much reason to look at. Funny thing is it reminds me of what I used to do in the old days with tools like Oracle Forms, where you had to mess with pixels and so on to get the layout right. Nothing changes, nothing is new. It's a good time to look at all those hints and tips videos you bought or downloaded and didn't really look at properly, so that's what I'm doing.

I don't want to be an employee any more and am looking for enterprise grants and the like. Will see where that takes me next week.

They have lots of tutorials telling you how to set up your machine once you've bought it.  Start here. Very useful if you've installed Ubuntu server anyway and want to get it all hardened and safe.

Colin also recommended these guys for fixed assets like images and so on to take the load off your machine. Cheap as chips and he hasn't managed to use up the introductory $15 even though he owns a high traffic site.

I've been learning how to set up company email using google apps standard. So there's now a mail on pharmarketeer.com for me and Rosie. Need to spend some pennies on cheapo business cards for when I go to networking events. Pharmarketeer has a lighthouse as its logo, and I haven't the dosh to pay someone who can do logos yet, so will go for Staples basic stuff for now.

But it all works, I'm not scared any more. I've done what I can - I am talking to people and showing what I can do.

Working with Mike on krowdbuy (watch this space - still very early days) and very excited about that too.

Also had a good time at the Kagu Ling opening yesterday and really looking forward to the Karmapa's visit to Manchester at the end of July. 

Having a meeting tomorrow about some contract work that will keep the wolf at bay so that's cool too.

I'm the happiest I've been in years even though I'm broke and facing a ton of work to sort it out. Humans are weird.

So I'm stuck until the company is wound up or I find another job and write the present nonsense off to experience. Hopefully get the redundancy dosh from the government eventually. This amounts to less than a third of what I'm actually owed if it ever arrives, in ever-decreasing proportions because it's based on 8 weeks at a nominal amount.

The client we did the work for are willing to take us on as contractors and that means there should be something coming in, but it won't fix the hole, just let me start slowly paying my debts off again. The rate is much lower than the usual commercial rate too but that may change once the cashflow starts (another 8-12 weeks though). Or it might not (cynic, moi?). This isn't starting until the 1st July anyway.

The upside of this is that I have started to think like a business owner again and have started up my own company.  This is why I've published my novel and am starting to get my other stuff together - I want lots of small-to-medium income streams rather than one reasonable-but-unreliable one.

I had a moment this morning when I got up and I was in despair. I said that I could see us losing the house and all the things we've worked so hard for over the last 20 years. Rosie's response was oh no we're not. If Rosie says it it must be true, she's much taller than me and I have to do what I'm told! Never cross a six-foot red head.

The Buddhist in me knows that impermanence is the lot of us all and you can't fight having to lose stuff eventually. But I'd rather hang on until I'm losing it because I die of old age or give it away because I don't need it any more, rather than some self-deception on the part of my former (but he isn't, yet!) boss.

If you need a Ruby on Rails programmer with 2 years' Rails experience and 20 years of systems analysis and whatnot, contact me on francis AT francisfish.com.  Here is my CV  francis_fish_short_cv.doc

Onward and upward.

The direct url is here.

Here is the blurb from the back cover.

We find ourselves at some time in the future "After the Revolution", following the trials and tribulations of Jay, an adjuster/investigator for WorldNet. Jay tries to solve the mystery of a priest drowned in his font and is pursued by the shadowy figure of Kervas. Before the Revolution Odine was trying to understand her place in the world. The interweaving of the fragments of her life and Jay's help Jay to find out who and what he is. Odine was made by germ line manipulation and follows the Buddha in her own way.

Go on, buy one, you know you want to!

I created a new version of the book and have ordered 5 copies to see what they look like.

After that I will start on  promoting the book here and other places and see if people will buy it.

Quite excited.

Remarkably painless, I set up email using google apps a while ago so now my vanity project is complete. The old domain will still work. I have lots of google goodness I don't want to lose.

The next thing to do here is put some links up to my books so (hopefully) people will start buying them, or at least reading them. I'm going to spend a bit of time on that now.

I got the first proof copy of Archive Fragments from lulu a couple of days ago and have just about finished realising what fonts work an' stuff. I chose the Royal book size which is slightly bigger than A5 and it doesn't work, the pages are too big. You can revise your project until you're happy so that's what I will do. I got the cover image of the bloody hand from istockphoto and like it. I thought it was a left hand until I had a d'oh moment and realised that it was the print of a right one.

I'm a little scared of publishing AF because it doesn't do a lot of compromising and might offend some people as it is quite violent in places. I feel we have the right to be offensive and censorship in principle is bad, people have the right to their views and weird prelidictions but no right to ram them down someone else's throat - the off switch is a good switch. But then someone talks to me about young teens accessing violent porn on t'interweb and I'm thrown into confusion.

There isn't an easy answer. I think all us adults need to think it through and decide what we're comfortable with, regardless of what the tabloid papers think.

And I still haven't been paid...

We can call them rude names here, and also be angry about the expenses that got out into the public domain. We don't live in a totalitarian dictatorship where even speaking out would get us prison time or our religious beliefs would have us shot like dogs in the street. Sometimes we need to remind ourselves of that.

Myself I also don't think we live in a democracy, either, because most of NuLabour's (and the Tories before them) decisions over the last however many years have not been something I would have voted for and I know I'm not in the minority. The biggest of these being the Iraq war.

There was a lot of shite talked about Blair "needing to lead the people to make uncomfortable decisions" when we went in to that war and the majority were and still are against it. I feel that our armed services were severely let down by this and a lot of people who are willing to die on my behalf were used up like tissues by these cynical people. This offends me far more than the odd chancer taking advantage of their expenses, they should just be paid an allowance and be taxed on it and done with it. End of story.

Also in our unwritten constitution Parliament is actually only tasked with domestic affairs. Foreign wars are the remit of the monarch and the PM/cabinet. No amount of voting in parliament can change this. This is why those of us who have thought about this want the abolition of the monarchy and a written constitution. I'd also like a recall election like they have in the US, when Arnie got in (haven't laughed so much in ages, but the principle is sound).

We don't live in a democracy, just a place where we can argue about the colour of the bike shed, but at least we don't go to prison for dissent, and that's a good thing.

My magnum opus is called Archive Fragements and is about 200 pages long, I've been writing it off and on for ever, usually in sustained bursts of a month or so's free time and then going back to it after a year or so, editing that material, and then writing some more.

I've decided that I'm going to self-publish this using lulu (I'll probably also pay for an ISBN so people can order it from places like Amazon), after I have revised the current draft, and use some targeted adsense and this blog to promote it. I think I will also release an electronic copy of it under the Creative Commons non-commercial share-alike licence, probably on Feedbooks. While some extra cash is welcome I'd also like people to read the damn thing. 

It also tracks my internal journey as a Buddhist over the last 10 years, to some extent.

I had the idea for a site where you could roll your own version of Archive Fragments by either using a random number generator where you set the seed for the numbers or assembling it in what you felt was the best order, plus adding new material of your own if you wanted to. This would all be Creative Commons NC, with me as the final arbiter on any commercial stuff (benevolent dictatorship being my favoured model, and paying lawyers fees to whiners not). I was trying to do this first and realised it was a waste of my time and much better just to finish folding the little paper boat and let it go downstream.

I've spent most of my waking time over this bank holiday editing the book ready for publication. I think some of the writing is pretty good, and some not. I feel excited about what is an interesting adventure and have more projects I can look at in the future if this one pans out.

I need a picture of a bleeding hand for the cover, preferably one that looks like it can easily be painted on a flag or banner, for reasons that will become clear if you ever read the book.

Archive Fragments: The back cover

We find ourselves at some undetermined time in the future "after the revolution" looking through the eyes of Jay, an adjuster who represents a vague computer system called WorldNet. It uses him as a check and balance to ensure that its decisions are correct and humane. As part of this he also catches and punishes people who misuse resources. Jay believes that he is an amalgam, a person who committed terrible crimes and was punished by having other people's memories forced into his head until he gained a sense of empathy and understood what he had done. The implanting process leaves particular marks on the body so everybody knows that he was, himself, adjusted. He is trying to atone for what he did by helping and preventing others from committing crimes against the commonality.

In Jay's time there is an historical figure known as Odine. She was one of the architects of the revolution and quotes and musings from her many writings appear at various places in the book. Her story (or parts of it) are in the narrative. She became a national hero after she persuaded a child abuser who was above the law to end his life and was accused of his murder. She was also made, this time by people hunting for wisdom, on or around our current time frame. Her rise to fame and influence was the beginning of the process that resulted in the society that Jay lives in. This event is known as the Attack of Common Sense.

As the book progresses we get pieces of Jay's attempts to unravel the mystery of a priest drowned in his font and flashbacks from the fragments of other people's memories that are stored in his brain. They range from being a PoW in the Second World War, to suffering from a weak heart in hospital, to nearly drowning in a kayaking accident. Jay discovers many things about himself, and is pursued by the shadowy figure of Kervas, who helped make Odine.

We're waiting for some venture capital money to come through at the moment and I haven't been paid for April and probably won't see any cash until the end of May.

I ran out of overdraft at the weekend. 

We're having a month's holiday from the mortgage and I've arranged to welly one of the credit cards for something to live on, plus it turns out NPower owe us a lot of money on the gas bill but they have a rep for being extremely hard to get money out of, so I'm not holding my breath.

But fun I'm not having. When/if I get paid things should look up a bit but this is not good for the nerves.

I need to start working on other forms of income like my writing and so on.

Hey ho.

When I worked for (a well known database company) one of the consultants told me the following story about a bank in the US:

They did some data mining and customer profiling to identify who was "expensive", as in they complained a lot and had basic accounts that didn't make a lot of money, i.e. the cost more to serve than you were ever going to make from them.

As per the terms of service these customers were put into "special" accounts that reflected the real cost of serving them.

When they complained (surprise) they were given application forms for the bank's main competitor!

The other bank didn't understand what was going in until most of these customers had left and they had to increase the size of their call centre to deal with the load.

Call me cynical, but maybe if you can't make any money let people leave and make it your competitors' problem?

I could get arrested if I leave my power hungry iPhone charging and forget to pick it up?

Plus integrating credit cards and ID cards is being thought of at the moment too.

In Franco's Spain you had to show ID when you bought anything. I once heard an ex-policeperson say that we should emulate a fascist state and do the same here. It's already arrived in all but name. Maybe buy a SIM from a car boot sale?

Have a read of Doctorow's Little Brother, particularly the bit about data mining false positives. You need a data mining technique that is as reliable as the thing you are trying to find, or you will waste a huge amount of time and resources chasing the innocent. No, wait ...

Don't they do that already?

 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/06/dna_deletion/comments/

"My utterly unique fingerprint will be on a database that police can use to exclude me from suspicion"

... and all the members of your family?

... and get you a £60 fine for that fag end you dropped?

... deport you when a Nazi group gets in power and decides it doesn't like your racial background?

... and, of course, the old false positive. One in a hundred thousand means there are (60m/100k) 600 people that might have the same match (not counting shared genes with the family). The more non-"perps" in the DB, the greater the likelihood.

and don't forget they quite often have to "multiply" the DNA to get a usable sample, very easy to "multiply" contamination too.

Plus, personally, I'm just sick to death of the useless gits wasting tons of my money on crap like this and ID cards. SORT OUT THE FUCKING ECONOMY and OBEY INTERNATIONAL LAW - IT'S WRITTEN THAT WAY FOR A REASON, or do we have to another genocide like world war II before they finally understand that no-one cares if *they* can be trusted, it's more that can unknown the people in the future can be trusted? Not that we trust them anyway.

Not hard, eh?

IBM managed to make money from Java, and Sun never really did

So, there's an irony here. IBM picked Java up, wrote better tools, more popular (although horrible to code against) J2EE server.

It does make sense for everyone, the engineers married to the people who can actually sell things and still understand engineering.

Fiorina destroyed the innovative base at HP and Hurd wouldn't know innovation if it bit his bits off.

Here we have two competent innovators, a great sales team, a consultancy arm with a reasonable rep. I'd be scared if I were HP or Microsoft. very scared.

I would like to see some reporting of the Japanese contention that "climate change" is on a par with astrology. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/25/jstor_climate_report_translation/

Also it changed its name from global warming (which couldn't be proved) to climate change - that's the inconvenient truth - I want science not religion from scientific publications.

I don't want to see the bogus "hockey stick" curve on the cover of your reputable magazine ever again, I was going to renew my sub after a long time without reading it regularly except certain editions bought from the news stand and decided not to. It was ill-advised and totally innumerate.

Humans add about 10% to the global amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. It's reported like we make *all* of it. Some sense of proportion would be useful. It makes all of your other reporting suspect.

I honestly don't know what the real issues with CO2 are - but you aren't helping me find out, are you?

Bootnote

I did some digging on the web and discovered that we actually contribute less than 5% of the annual CO2 production. There are other greeenhouse gases that are produced in much bigger proportions by humans, but we need some properly funded, peer-reviewed research with evidence. No more anti-technology, screw-the-poor-we-can't-do-anything dystopian nonsense.