Political Penguin

Or lack of it to be more precise. I’m not quite sure what to make of the speech from the bit that I actually listened to. It was a heady mix of “the country’s gone to pot” with a bit of “here’s a few ideas we knocked up on the back of a fag packet that should be popular” thrown in for good measure. However what really struck me was not so much the lack of depth which I’ve become accustom to from Mr Cameron but moreover his distinct not mentioning a few little things that might be of interest to anyone living in a country with him as Prime Minister.

I was very interested in the line he was taking about a new world of change and freedom. The Facebook example was a classic. Perhaps I’m one of the old dinosaurs of politics that he’s trying to portray Labour as but Dave’s not exactly the best person to be talking about IT related matters but excuse me for being cynical. Facebook isn’t some part of a wider social revolution. Like all social networking it is merely an extension of interaction that takes place in the real world or at best a distraction. Mrs Penguin’s on Facebook, I’m not by the way. As far a I can tell, she uses it to find little games to play. A mate of mine once told me that Facebook’s only useful because it allows him to play Scrabble with his mates. Well yes, a nice little distraction and time waster, hardly the embodiment of a brave new world or is going to change the the future direction or our planet is it? Of course if you really want to know what Davey boy thinks about freedom and the Internet then just have a little read.

The next little bit that pricked up my ears was the comparison to our neighbours on the continent. The French, Spanish and Germans reducing their corporation tax. Now I’ll be honest in saying I don’t follow French or Spanish politics very closely but I do take a keen interest in what’s going on in Germany for obvious reasons.

Dave’s being a bit economical with the truth on this one. Yes, good old Angie’s knocked 9% off German business’s corporation tax, admittedly from a higher starting point but what Mr Cameron didn’t seem so keen to mention was what Mrs Merkel has also been up to. After all, knock tax of here, it’s going to have to go on somewhere else because the bills still have to be paid.

How about the increases in fuel duty? Yep, much as the Tories and their cohorts in various bits of the right-wing media and pressure groups will love having a pop at the Government over the increase on petrol duty here, they don’t seem too keen on leveling the same criticism at Mrs Merkel’s Government. Here it will be hard pressed families struggling to run the family motor because nasty old Gordon wants to take their money and hopefully we can pick up a few votes from disgruntled motorists but I can’t see the same being leveled at Angie.

Then there’s the 2% hike in VAT good old Angie introduced to plug the gaps in her budget deficit. VAT, as we all know is a wonderfully progressive tax that doesn’t hit the poorest in society hardest.

What this comes down to is a simple case of taking with one hand and giving with the other. I’ll do a bit more on stamp duty later in this post but it’s very simple and assuming that Gordon might nip off to see the Queen next week for a cuppa and a chat you can bet that like the last election, one of the core planks of any Labour campaign will be big banners with the deficit in the Tories spending plans.

They’re promising a lot but it’s uncosted so they’ve got a couple of options. Their current proposals financially benefit the better off so either a bigger burden of taxation will fall on the poorer in our society or they’re either going to have to borrow at unsustainable levels or cut back on services. Unsustainable borrowing’s probably out of the question even if it was a particular favourite of the Tories when they were last in power so it’s going to be cuts in services then. Which services is the question, but if anyone wants to have a guess at what goes first then we need to look no further than Tory run Walsall council to get a few pointers on where the Tories will hit first and yes, you’ve guessed it, the services that directly benefit the worst off in our society.

It’s a scary prospect but for anyone under any illusions that cuddly Dave’s turned the nasty party in a caring bunch of softies you only have to realise that all their announcements amount to robbing Peter to pay Paul, and Paul is considerably richer than Peter.

Lastly there’s this whole thing over stamp duty for first time buyers. Now I’ve been meaning to write something on this but let’s get it clear, first time buyers will be exempt from stamp duty on properties up to

I caught the first twenty minutes or so of Davy boys speech today. I didn’t hang around for its entirety because, well, I had something more important to go and do but I thought I’d pen a few thoughts on the style of the speech.

The first thing that I noticed was not what he was saying but his stage performance. This whole walking around the stage thing I found slightly off-putting but it’s not hard to see where it comes from. Straight out of corporate America and a style much loved by the likes of Steve Jobs CEO of Apple and a whole raft of other IT corporation executives.

I was at one point half expecting him to pull an IPhone out of his pocket call up a big background screen and talk us through all of it’s new features and how it was the embodiment of everything we ever needed in this modern world but ironically that’s exactly what he did, in a political sense.

Davy boy obviously has to try this. In a corporate sense he’s simply trying to place his brand in the right position in the market for it to be successful. Did he succeed? Well, here’s where the Apple analogy comes back.

Much like the Apple IPhone, it looks good, it’s all shiny and has some flash features, well one anyway, but the problem is that it doesn’t seem to have achieved popular appeal. It’s popular among its loyal customer base who will buy it because it’s an Apple but when you lift the lid on it then things look decidedly less impressive.

I’ve got a Nokia E65. It was a free upgrade from my network operators and despite the fact that it’s not flash, it hammers the IPhone into the ground on functionality and technical specification.

Much the same as Cameron has attempted to re-brand the Tory Party. Yes, it looks all shiny and new but when you take a closer look, it’s nothing more than a shiny new veneer on what is essentially an old product that doesn’t stand up against the competition.

I’ll do more on what he actually said in my next post.

This is for the miserable little Prick from Prague in the Czech Republic who yesterday had a bash at trying to crack my site. Yes I do know who you are so piss off and don’t come back.

Blogging MP for West Bromwich – Tom Watson came up with this little gem today that I thought needed a bit more attention from the more technical angle. It relates to John Hemming, the LibDem MP for Yardley in Birmingham having used someone else’s code for his website. More specifically we’re looking at this. It’s John’s left hand sidebar menu and very nice it is too. For your delectation here’s the code for it and don’t worry there’s only a few bits of it that we need to examine, I won’t get too technical.

OK, it doesn’t look like anything particularly special but when compared to this bit of code written by this guy it does start to look strange.

Now we’re not looking at all the menu items as John’s obviously tailored them to his own needs but moreover we’re looking for one thing that is there and a few things that aren’t. The big giveaway is in the title of the script. They both identify it as ‘JSwitch Slide Menu’.

If we look further down on the original we find this, the license agreement:

“LICENSE:

YOU ARE GRANTED THE RIGHT TO USE THE SCRIPT

PERSONALLY OR COMMERCIALLY. THE AUTHOR, WEBSITE LINKS

AND LICENSE INFORMATION IN THE HEADER OF THE SCRIPT

MUST NOT BE MODIFIED OR REMOVED.”

Which relates to this:

“Author: Eric Simmons
Website: http://www.jswitch.com
Version: 2.1 04/2006″

That for some strange reason seems to be conspicuous by its absence from John Hemming’s script.

For the record, I’m an Open Sourcer, this website was built entirely though the use of Open Source code and software and I’ve acknowledged everything I’ve used. In the techie world openness and honesty is always the best policy and if someone else has toiled over a bit of code for hours and requests that you acknowledge the author or have a customary link back to them then that just good manners and techies with bad manners who thieve stuff and deliberately exclude the originator are considered the lowest of the low.

That’s not to say you don’t find some strange requests by authors at times. I remember once coming across one where the author requested that his code shouldn’t be used in anything that might in some way be offensive to God. Not knowing exactly what would be offensive to God I decided to steer clear of it, but that’s another story.

What it does show is that John Hemming has gone down considerably in my estimation (not that he could go much lower, he is a LibDem after all) and shown himself to be a disingenuous person happy to nick other people’s code but not acknowledge it.

Note: I’ve used the term Script Kiddie as although I know it is generally used in relation to software and not web based code and although some use the term Web Monkey I feel that Script Kiddie is a better description.

Not literally of course. I’m one of those people who has always sought out knowledge and tries to work things out. Much in the same way that I possess the knowledge and skills to illegally rip DVD’s, I also have also over the years accumulated what could be defined as the slightly darker side of the techie nature. I’m not a hacker per say, nor a cracker either so much in the same way that I possess the knowledge to undertake what are decidedly illegal activities, I simply choose not to because it’s against my own principles.

That said, and one of the reasons I’ve been very busy was that I had something rather complicated to sort out with Walsall MBC the other week that required me to pop into their OneStopShop up at the Civic Centre in Walsall.

I’ll start by saying which will not be a surprise to regular readers that I don’t hold Walsall MBC in particularly high regard. I’ve visited the OneStopShop twice before and on both occasions I’ve been dealt with by a member of staff who really didn’t appear to know what they were doing and subsequent problems that arose after those encounters only went to confirm that. I also find it a bit of a pain that I should have to go all the way up to Walsall to sort these things out because they are too inflexible to sort out the issues any other way but there you go. In time past I could have gone to the Neighbourhood office in Willenhall which is a whopping couple hundred yards walk from the house but since the Tories closed them all down and centralised everything (note to self, don’t believe Tories that talk about communities) now us poor residents of Walsall have to wade our way through the complete mess which passes for the road system around the town.

While I was at the OneStopShop waiting my 38 minutes to be served (yes I did time it) I noticed that they’d got some public terminals for web access so I decided to check them out. They’re a bit pants really. Anything interesting or useful like Google are inaccessible along with it seems most blogs so that probably explains why the computers are sitting there unused while their highly inneficient Pentium 4 processors burn up electricity for no reason. Strangely enough this site isn’t restricted which is strange given how critical I’ve been of the council but there you go.

What I did notice however, being the curious Penguin that I am is the setup of the machines. They’re quite restricted in what you can use on them for obvious reasons but with two glaringly obvious exceptions.

First up, there are various bits of the Window XP operating system running and available which if you know what you’re looking for would provide any would-be hacker/cracker a good starting basis for trying to break into their system. I won’t obviously say what but as my blog is read by a number of people up at yon council I’m sure someone will tip-off the IT bods to have a look.

Secondly, and probably more indicative of the times is the rather easy access to the DOS prompt. Now for those under 30 who are not techie bods you probably won’t remember this but back in the days before all these cute little icons that you click to load stuff there was what’s called the Command Prompt. It’s easily recognisable as a black screen with a little flashing white cursor where you can actually type stuff to tell the computer what to do. I was very amazed to find it easily accessible on the public machine and in the hands of someone who knows what they’re doing can be an absolute dream for getting in and causing all kinds of mayhem. Perhaps the techie bods at the council are young and don’t know what it’s for or what it can do, or perhaps they’re just schooled in the click an icon approach of a Windows system but someone tell them that this isn’t really a good idea.

In fact, having the computers set up in such a way really isn’t advisable. I mean have they never heard of ‘dummy terminals’ or hey, they could always be really kicking and up to date and run bloody virtual machines through an entirely different server than leaving their system open to attack like that. Just a thought really, never mind, it is only Walsall Council after all.

Well, regular visitors might have got that impression of late due to the distinct lack of activity. It’s true with all the myriad of other things I’ve had to do lately that I’ve let the blog slide a bit. For some strange reason I’ve been particularly busy this last fortnight or so, someone would think there’s a General Election on or something but there you go, the demands on me from the wider world have dragged me away from the blog.

That said, I’ll try to get a quick post in now and cover a few things I haven’t got round to, some of which I really meant to write about over six months ago, such is life, other distractions always get in the way.