Today is Lizz’s 21st birthday. I felt kind of bad for not having anything left to give her present-wise because she already has her sparkly iPhone, and she opened her cute little card the other day.
Lizz and I are going out for a meal with her family tonight, and she has plenty of things left to enjoy, so I hope that’s enough. đŸ™‚
I was linked to an article on a ridiculous website that cites this Daily Mail article most of the way through.
Basically the article is more scaremongering by The Daily Mail, this time focusing on Swine Flu vaccinations instead of cancer, but it mostly comes down to the same thing: sensationalist journalism intended to do nothing but sell papers, regardless of the consequences.
In 1976 there was an outbreak of swine flu in America. One man died from it, and several others were hospitalised. The USA rushed out a vaccine to 40 million people. Of these 40 million there were 25 deaths from 500 detected cases of Guillain-Barré Syndrome.
Here’s what The Daily Mail has to say on the matter:
- More people died from the vaccination than from swine flu.
- 500 cases of GBS were detected.
- The vaccine may have increased the risk of contracting GBS by eight times.
Let’s think about that for a second. Only one man died from swine flu but 25 died from the vaccination. Surely that suggests that the vaccination actually worked pretty well at preventing the virus from spreading. The side-effects seem pretty bad, admittedly, but I believe they are less likely to kill you than the swine flu the vaccination helps to prevent, especially 30 years on.
The risk of contracting GBS is now somewhere around 0.7 cases per million flu vaccinations.
More than 700 people had died from swine flu without widespread vaccinations when the BBC published the linked article. That figure is based on 125000 reported cases. The number of deaths is now somewhere over 2100 out of 200000 cases. The actual number of cases is higher than the confirmed number because of unreported mild cases, but we can also assume that was the case with GBS back in 1976.
If you have the flu vaccine then you’ve got roughly a 1 in 1.4 million chance of contracting GBS. If you’re one of the fifty incredibly unlucky people in the entire population of the UK that would get it then you can still relax because there’s still only a 1 in 20 chance that you’ll actually die of GBS, and that’s based on data from 1976. You’re probably more likely to be treated for it now, especially since people know to look out for it when flu vaccinations are being given.
If you don’t have the vaccination and you do get swine flu then you’ve got (very roughly) a 1 in 1250 chance of dying from it.
I think I’d rather take my chances on the vaccination.
I ordered Ulysses from an Amazon listed store 9 days ago and it has not yet been delivered to me. Luckily Hayley lent me another book that’s on my list: Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. I’m reading that first now because of this stupid delivery failure.
In the time it’s taken this place (so far) to send me one book Lizz has had something sent to her from 5000 miles away in California. Unfortunately this one is also absolutely insane because the delivery company apparently attempted to deliver it to us at 05:27 this morning and then took it away because nobody was there to receive it. I say apparently because they left no note or missed delivery card. If they actually did attempt delivery at that time then they need to seriously get their shit together.
Why are deliveries companies still so pathetic in the 21st century? They know most people work or go to school or generally just leave the house in the day. Why oh why are the standard delivery times also the times when people are out of the house? Why do half of these places only offer collection on weekdays during regular working hours, or half a day on Saturday morning when people might want to get a bit more sleep than normal?
Work it out guys!
Whenever I’m looking through code at work I come across various little nuggets of wisdom from whoever wrote what I happen to be working on at the time. Usually it’s just something fairly innocuous and helpful, but sometimes it’s just downright funny.
Based on this I decided to take a look around various pieces of open source software to see what kind of things their developers leave behind for future coders. I’ve gone through and come up with a list of some of the better ones. Enjoy:
Linux Kernel – drivers/ata/libata-eh.c
/* most drives spin up by 10sec */
/* > 99% working drives spin up before 20sec */
/* give > 30 secs of idleness for retarded devices */
Linux Kernel – arch/x86/kernel/visws_quirks.c
/*
* Now, we have to map the power management section to write
* a bit which enables access to the GPIO registers.
* What lunatic came up with this shit?
*/
Mozilla – source/build/pymake/pymake/data.py
"""
This insane behavior probably doesn't matter, but we're compatible just for shits and giggles.
"""
X.org Server – dix/colormap.c
/* There are, alas, devices in this world too dumb
* to read their own hardware colormaps. Sick, but
* true. */
Linux Kernel – net/ipv4/ip_gre.c
/* Well, I wonder, rfc1812 was written by Cisco employee,
what the hell these idiots break standrads established
by themself???
*/
XBMC – sources/enca-1.9/src/locale_detect.c
/* NB: this is conceptually wrong, the string returned by setlocale should
* be taken as opaque -- but then we would be in deep shit^Wtrouble. This
* seems to actually happen on Win32.
*/
I decided that three years is far too long to spend “reading” Ulysses by James Joyce. I’ve given it a fair few shots now and again when I have a few spare moments. I’ve probably made it about a quarter of the way through since I started. It’s just so frustrating to read that I always give up and can’t be bothered with deciphering it.
I decided to go to Amazon.co.uk and buy the cheapest copy of the book available. After a bit of searching I managed to get a copy delivered for something like £3.75. Can’t grumble about that. It is a used copy, but the description says it’s in good condition.
I’m very close to finishing Wizard and Glass from the Dark Tower series by Stephen King again (because it’s an excellent book) and so before I begin Wolves of the Calla I aim to read Ulysses on the train in the mornings and afternoons until it is done with. Hopefully things will move along a bit more swiftly and I can cast this entire story away for the rest of my life. I think I might actually burn my copy once I’m done. Either that or frame it and put it up on the wall somewhere.
I hope it arrives soon so I don’t have to travel to and from work without a book to read for too long.
Timbaland – The Way I Are is pretty much just a load of garbled rubbish from beginning to end, highlighted by the ridiculous title. The fact that it got absolutely played to death only made it worse. Yet strangely, the title of the song is not the part that annoys me the most about this song. It’s not even this ridiculous line:
I don’t need the cheese or the car keys
No, the part of the song that annoys me the most is the following section:
I don’t got a huge ol’ house
I rent a room in a house
Listen baby girl
I ain’t got a motorboat
but I can float ya boat
Seriously? Rhyming “house” with “house” and “boat” with “boat” in a properly released song is acceptable? This line is said by the rapper D.O.E. who I’m pleased to say I’ve never heard of before or since this song. I just thought rappers were supposed to be good with words. I was obviously mistaken.
Something I’m working on at the moment requires a rather large collection of data to be moved from several places into one clever little table that I’ve created. It’s going to consolidate functionality and make things much easier to script in a few different environments.
Gathering all of this data together has been made pretty damn easy by using a few choice SQL queries. A few months ago I would probably have written a Perl script to do this instead, but that’s really not necessary.
This first query performs a SELECT on one table and uses the values to populate the INSERT statement values. It’s quite simple because all of the required data is in one table on the same database as the table it’s being copied to. All field, table, and database names have been changed to protect the innocent.
INSERT INTO clever_table (id, person_id, email_address, email_type) SELECT NULL, person_id, email_address_1, email_type FROM prefs WHERE email_address_1 IS NOT NULL;
The second query is a bit more complicated. It performs a SELECT on a table in one database that does an INNER JOIN on a table in another database and then an INSERT to get all of the collated data into a different table in the first database.
INSERT INTO clever_table (id, person_id, email_address, email_type) SELECT NULL, person_id, people.email, email_type FROM prefs INNER JOIN other_db.people ON prefs.person_id=people.id WHERE prefs.password_reminder=1;
I was quite pleased to find this worked first time when I tested. It doesn’t seem complicated to me now, but I know it would have done before I started working where I do now.
A song that used to get played on the radio a lot was S.O.S. by Rihanna. Every single time I heard this song it made me think of the exact same thing when it reached the chorus of the song. At first I simply misunderstood what she was singing, but later I couldn’t lose the thought I had come up with the first time. This is the bit I mean:
S.O.S. please someone help me
It’s not healthy for me to feel this
Y O U are making this hard
When I first heard this I thought Rihanna was saying it wasn’t healthy for her to “feel this way” and then proceeding to say “oh you are making this hard.” Some lyrics sites I searched actually came to similar conclusions.
When I realised she was spelling out a word I immediately assumed the “are” was just the letter R. This would mean she sang “your making this hard” which probably a lot of Rihanna listeners wouldn’t grumble about. They can’t use the correct “you’re” or “your” because they’re only 14 and they’re too busy looking after their babies.
Whenever I hear this song that bit annoys me and I’m forced to switch to another radio station immediately. One day all stations will cease playing Rihanna’s music and I will only have to switch stations when one of the other 1000 annoying songs come on.
I use the Google Analyticator WordPress plugin by Spiral Web Consulting on my site because it saves me the bother of checking my stats on the actual Google Analytics page all the time.
Over the last couple of days I noticed that one of the searches bringing people to my site wasn’t showing up in the widget on my dashboard. After going to the Google Analytics page I discovered that the search term was <!– IE 8 quirks mode please –> and it wasn’t showing up because that’s what an HTML comment looks like.
I poked around the Google Analyticator code for a little while and discovered that the data was retrieved from Google and then just included in the output of the dashboard page in WordPress. This could lead to something as simple as search terms not showing up, or turning all of the text after a certain point bold (if a search term was <strong> for instance), or it could lead to particularly nasty people crafting a top search result containing a <script> tag and from there they could do some fairly nasty stuff.
I’ve created a very simple little patch to solve this problem. It basically involves running the data through PHP’s htmlspecialchars() function before it’s printed to the screen.
EDIT
Google Analyticator 5.2.1 has been released to address this issue. Upgrade your installation! đŸ™‚
I was listening to John Barrowman’s album in Hayley’s car yesterday on the way home from work. That’s a strange enough sentence to begin a blog post by itself, but that’s a story for another day, perhaps. Track 2 on the album is a cover of Can’t Take My Eyes Off You. I’ve heard many different versions of this song by a variety of different artists, but I always seem to enjoy listening to it. The one thing really annoys me about the lyrics is something that not all artists do (thanks Muse), but most of them do. This is what I’m talking about:
You’re just too good to be true,
Can’t take my eyes off of you
I absolutely hate the pairing of the words ‘off’ and ‘of’ like that. In this case the title doesn’t even match the line that’s in the song!
99% of the time the word ‘of’ can be omitted or both words can be replaced with the word ‘from’ which is shorter to say and has the added advantage of not making the speaker sound like a 5 year old who hasn’t quite learned to speak English properly.