Scruffbag.net

Of all the annoyances that may await me whenever I go shopping, the worst is this: I’m queuing to buy something and it turns out that the person in front of me has been slighted in some way by some aspect of store policy. Perhaps they’ve been refused a refund, or been told that their warranty’s invalid, or else they just don’t much like the product that they bought. Many people would complain for a moment, realise they’re going to get nowhere and just remember not to shop here in future, but there are those for whom dignified resistance is not enough. They feel the need to rant, loudly and at length, at the poor, bemused shop assistant in front of them as if said assistant is personally responsible for store policy and is simply being stubborn when they say “I’m sorry, but I can’t give you a refund - the till won’t allow me to do it!” (or, in one memorable case, “I’m sorry sir but the reason that the item which you bought doesn’t look like the power unit on the shelf is that you didn’t buy a power unit - you bought a processor cooler ; the fact that they both have fans in them doesn’t mean that they perform the same task”). Meanwhile, I’m standing behind them and there’s a growing queue behind me; by the time the angry customer has vented their spleen and finally (usually after about ten minutes of shouting and then a visit from the store manager) given up, they’ve inconvenienced twenty people and ruined the poor assistant’s day, all for nothing. I usually wind up wanting to punch them.

It seems that some of those behind the FSF’s DefectiveByDesign campaign don’t share my irritation. In fact, they’ve instigated a campaign which involves doing almost exactly what I’ve just described - they’re encouraging supporters to book appointments with Apple’s in-store support service on a couple of set days, and then spend the entire appointment harassing the poor Apple techie with questions about DRM. Presumably the intended outcome is that all the techies say “oh wow, this DRM thing is the root of all the world’s evils; we must march to head office en masse and force them to remove it!”. I suspect that the actual outcome will be that a whole bunch of Apple techies get rather irritated by the dozens of smart-alec geeks who are insisting upon wasting their time and that many people who have legitimate support requests get frozen out because the FSF have stolen all the appointments.

Some fellow dissenting voices: Neuro, Popey, mgdm.

Over at Spiked, James Panton hits the nail on the head regarding the government’s latest attempt to motivate the electorate (as expressed in a white-paper called “Communities in Control”):

“Communities in Control fundamentally misinterprets why popular engagement is at an historic low. The real problem today is that the politics on offer is largely banal, technical and devoid of ideas that might allow us to make a connection between our interests and our actions in the political sphere. Yet instead of recognising this, and potentially doing something about it, the political establishment simply thinks the general population is too ignorant, too busy or too easily distracted to bother voting. In seeking to entice us with bribes and badges, officials reveal how truly devoid of political ideas or inspiration they are; they don’t give us new ideas or arguments, but cheap gimmicks and prize draws.”

For those who aren’t already sick of hearing me talk about it, I bought (or rather, my dad bought) this (photo behind the link):

2001 Seat Toledo V5

I’ve recently become involved, to some extent, with the Pyroom project. As Bruno Bord  reports, he’s put together a .tgz of the 0.1 release and made it available at pyroom.org.

I’ve never been properly involved with an OSS project before,
and so far this has been a very positive first experience for me. I’ve not done that much - fixed a couple of bugs, submitted or triaged some and been involved in discussions in the IRC channel (#pyroom on freenode) and the wiki, but I’ve felt very much welcomed and my input has been received with plenty of appreciation.

I even got away with admitting that I’m now a KDE user without being tarred and feathered.

We’re implementing a new reports system using MS Reporting Services. Today I spent several hours struggling with the following problem: when you enter a value for a datetime parameter, RS validates the input before trying to run the report. I found that it refused to validate a G.B.-format date (dd/mm/yyyy). It appeared to be trying to use a U.S. format (mm/dd/yyyy).

After an entire afternoon of Googling with nothing to show for it, I finally found the problem: when validating parameters, the web interface looks at the browser’s regional setting, rather than the locale specified in the report or on the server. If you’re using Opera (as I do, though I don’t recommend it in this instance as the RS web interface only works properly with I.E.), chances are that your browser has defaulted to U.S. English. Changing this to British English fixes the problem.

…so, as usual, I started another blog.

One more thing to mention: pyroom