Everythin's gonna be alright this mornin'

Talentless nonentity seeks to displace morose monocular

The papers are depressingly full of it: the oleaginous David Millipede is "pointedly refusing to rule out a leadershit challenge." Whoop-de-fucking-do. Evidently he has a brother called Ed, who is also in the government. Ed is the lucky one, his face doesn't look like he's some kind of spaz. David, on the other hand is famous only for having a face that looks like a Mr Bean mask, halfway through putting it on.

Anyway, David is apparently our foreign secretary or something. Wow. Just look at how important Britain is to the rest of the world, and you'll immediately discern what a super job this fuckwad is doing for us. And he wants to run the country?

Well, of course he does! The talentless little know-nothing has never had a real job in his entire life (he's been a policy wonk and then straight into government) but of course, he thinks he's got what it takes to run the country. Or does he even care?

Is he just going for the gold-plated pension while he sees the overt Labour political project completely buried, and replaced by a covert Labour project of Quangoes, Commissions, Charities, Think-tanks, Progressive Organisations and other septic tanks of high-quality thinking. We're going to be surrounded by a burgeoning swell of unelected busybodies telling us all how to live every fucking aspect of our lives, even more than we already do right now.

And "Call Me Dave" is going to be as much use as tits on a bull for sorting this out. If you put Dave and the Millipede into a dark room and tried to tell them apart by their morals, inclinations and experience, I bet you fucking couldn't.

Dave, Dave or Gorgon. We're fucked, good and proper. But it's OK, we've only got to pay for it.

Update: Trixy is fucked in the head. But sadly for her, that's all.

Streetcorners seem designed to lie in wait

No video, sadly, but a cracking song...

Sounds like a fairly normal day out, really...

Oz man cracks one off while speeding in drug-packed car

An Australian man unsurprisingly faces a spell in jail after cops pulled him for driving at 147km/h (91 mph) in a Holden SV6 packed with 5kg of cannabis, two dope plants, a couple of drug pipes and a loaded .22 rifle.

One of the arresting officers explained to Darwin Magistrates Court that Erhardt became "visibly agitated" when told his car would be searched, but said "go right ahead". Cops accepted the invitation, and quickly discovered "4.96kg of cannabis hidden in a blue esky* in the boot, two cannabis plants on the back seat, two drug pipes" and the aforementioned firearm.

Prosecutor Sergeant Melinda Edwards told the court the father-of-three told officers he'd "masturbated while driving" just before he was stopped. She added: "He also video recorded himself masturbating while travelling at a speed of 150km/h."

In the end, though, the court decided to grant Erhardt a certain degree of mercy in allowing him AU$10,000 bail so he could marry his girlfriend before going to jail. He is due back before the beak on 1 September.

Awww, sweet...

Beep! Beep!

Klimate Kops

Via the Libertarians, I see that nPower has launched a lovely program whereby children are inculcated with noble sounding bullshit, based on lies. Where have I heard of that before?

Children are encouraged to go round and identify the "climate crimes" of their elders, and shop them to the climate police. Adolf would be so proud to know that his methods are still in use.

But I am in an interesting position here: I'm an nPower customer. So, I'd like to advise anyone who works for nPower that thanks to your brilliant child indoctrination program and your disgusting marketing ethics, you've just lost a customer. Tomorrow I am going to do the deed with uswitch.

You unspeakable, loathsome, disgusting, fascist cunts.

Tech Tip du Jour: The Idiot's Guide to Disaster Recovery

Non-geeks may want to look away now.

Well, now that I've stopped laughing, I guess I'd better get on with more serious issues, like what a DR plan should really look like.

A lot depends on what your availability requirements are, how critical your data is, and mostly, sadly, what your budget looks like. For the sake of the argument, I'm going to assume that your data is critical. If nobody cares about the loss of data, cool! I've never met anyone in that fortunate position, though.

So, anyway, here's "The idiot's guide to disaster recovery."

Hardware

Hardware is definitely getting more reliable ... on average! However, it's a brave man who bets the farm on his hardware never failing.

There are things that you can do with hardware to ensure greater availability, such as RAID disks, server clusters, redundant hardware, etc.

It's still a very brave man who bets the farm on his hardware never failing!

Backups

If your budget is low and your data doesn't need to be available all the time, then a backup is a good, simple solution.

You do need to be aware that restoring a backup often is slower than taking the backup, and you need to be aware that restoring multiple levels of backups and restoring hours worth of logical logs are also going to be depressingly slow. For that reason, I always advocate taking only Level-0 (and not Level-1, Level-2) backups if you can get away with it. Secondly, unless you're running a data warehouse that you can rebuild from scratch, ALWAYS back up your logical logs. To a tape. Backing up logical logs to /dev/null is quick, but the restore takes forever!

Another option to consider if you are using a SAN and have a massive amount of data is to take "business continuity volume" backups: you have your disk mirrored within the SAN, pause Informix, break the mirror and let Informix continue. You then take a backup of the off-line, broken mirror copy. When you restore the mirroring, the SAN "catches up" the mirror to the online disks behind the scenes and all is well.

Update: Generally you wouldn’t resync until immediately before you wanted to split again. One reason is that for some advanced SANs (and BCV implies EMC Symmetrix, to which this does apply), the syncing software maintains an list of the pages that have changed between the two copies since the split. This potentially allows for exceptionally fast restore: suppose you had a 1Tb database but a delta of page changes of only 10g a day, you could expect to do an external restore in a few seconds.

Hat tip to Neil Truby of Ardenta for the technology-specific advice.

HDR

If you can spare the extra cash for a High-availability Data Replication secondary, you are onto a winner: you can still take backups to keep things safe and sound in the worst case (and I will assume that you will always take backups!) but you can also keep your data immediately available. It's very easy to set it up, if a little pernickety about how exactly the primary and the secondary have to match up. HDR works by taking an exact copy of what is happening on the primary and applying it continuously to the secondary via the logical logs. The secondary is also available for read-only work like reporting, but you have to remember that it's also doing all the work that the primary is doing, alongside whatever else you're putting on it.

With 11.5 and the connection manager, you can hide failover pretty much completely from your users as well, so they would probably never notice the database going down. (Developers still have to code for a potential failure, though! The connection manager will not re-submit any failed SQL to the "new" server.)

RSS

One of the most common observations I've heard about HDR is "we'd really like to have more than one secondary!" Well, with IDS 11 and Remote Standalone Secondaries, you can. Kind of. It's conceptually the same as an HDR secondary but there are differences: it isn't guaranteed to be synchronised at checkpoint time, it uses a different communication protocol and an RSS cannot be promoted directly to a primary. It can, however, be promoted to HDR secondary. And you can have as many RSS nodes as you like!

RSS is effectively another level of backup, it doesn't do much for availability, but does offer the ability to do a very far off site backup or replicate the database instance out over a WAN, where HDR might suffer because of network latency.

SDS

Shared Disk Secondary technology seemed a bit odd in IDS 11.1, after all, what really is the point of being able to point multiple servers at a shared disk? You'd have to be running very slow servers and/or insanely fast disk to justify it.

However, even with IDS 11.1, there is a fantastic upside to SDS: failing over a primary to an SDS node is very quick and painless.

In IDS 11.5, Redirected Writes make SDS a much more compelling option. You can make a clustered server more or less instantly. Setting up a basic 4-note SDS cluster can easily be done in a day, starting from the IDS install point!

SDS gives you a fantastic availability (and performance) option, but does nothing for recovery if you lose the disk.

ER

Enterprise Replication is the ultimate in flexible replication for increased availability and performance. It is entirely flexible in how you choose to deploy it, you can replicate everything in a multi-node update-anywhere model, replicate some columns of some rows of some tables, disseminate out, consolidate in, forests and trees: "the possibilities are endless."

However, the more flexible the topology you choose, the more work you have to put into designing it. Even a simple two-node update-anywhere topology is, relatively speaking, a lot more effort to configure than the comparable "HDR with Redirected Writes" setup. However, ER has one crucial advantage over HDR, RSS and SDS: it allows rolling upgrades, because the versions of Informix on different nodes do not have to be absolutely identical.

Your DR plan

So, what should your DR plan look like?

• Well, you should ALWAYS take backups.
• RAID1+0 is the next step.
• If you can afford it, go for HDR.
• If you can afford even more, go for RSS.
• If availability is critical, go for SDS.
• If you need rolling upgrades and 24x7 uptime, you're going to need an ER update-anywhere stack in there somewhere.

In a truly resilient environment, you'd probably have a number of ER update-anywhere nodes, possibly quite widely geographically dispersed. Each one of those nodes would be an SDS cluster pointing at a high-speed SAN and also an HDR cluster, with the HDR secondary pointed at a different SAN or RAID. Each of the ER nodes would also have at least one RSS server backing it up in yet another distant "bunker". And a lot of money.

The Voters Have Spoken, Part 3

90 people voted in the review of smug authoritarians.

Steve "The Dick" Richards came last, which is hardly surprising, given what a useless Labour brown-noser he is. A frankly pathetic 4.4% of the vote, which is what Labour is heading for next time round ... so Steve is toeing the party line as usual.

George Moonbat got 38.9% of the vote, which is a bit surprising, given how holier-than-thou he is and how his well-documented hypocrisy shines through.

But Polly did the business, which is hardly a surprise, with a convincing 56.7% of the vote.

Hold your head high in your Tuscan villa, Polly: you have been rated a self-righteous, hypocritical, authoritarian shit of the highest order! Congratulations!

Mark Wadsworth

I don't like to pimp other bloggers, but I really do have to recommend Mark Wadsworth. I like his take on stuff, my only gripe is the he seems to cover stuff more quickly than I can, so I look like I'm doing "me too" posts.

The bastard.

The mist across the window hides the lines

Did you know that Joe Jackson is a vocal smoking rights campaigner?

Smoking

Let me start by saying: I hate smoking. I've never smoked, I've never even taken a puff to see what it tastes like. I remember when I was a kid, asking one of my uncles how it could taste different going in than it did coming out, or just blowing round in the breeze. He told me it didn't, which confused the living fuck out of me: why would you voluntarily inhale something that was that disgusting? I don't let people smoke in my house. So, that's me: Mr Non-Smoker.

And yeah, I used to get irritated when I was out somewhere and someone's cigarette smoke was blowing in my face. But I've always accepted smoking as a part of public life. And, if that's what people want to do, they should be able to do that. So I was horrified by the blanket ban on smoking in public places.

The reasoning behind it always struck me a spurious, health fascists were claiming that it's because of secondary smoke, whereas I always thought that if people wanted to work in a smoke-free environment, they could always fuck off somewhere else?

However, it seems it was all a bit of a con, according to England Expects:

WRITTEN QUESTION E-3520/08
by Godfrey Bloom (IND/DEM)
to the Commission

Subject: Environmental tobacco smoke

According to the Commission Green Paper 'Towards a Europe free from tobacco smoke: policy options at EU level' (pdf) (COM(2007)0027), more than '79 000 adults' die in the EU per annum from the effects of environmental tobacco smoke (ETS).

This claim is the driver behind the proposals by the Commission to bring in a binding directive later this year to enforce smoking bans in workplaces.

Given that the impact of such a directive will be considerable, both economically and
socially, could the Commission please name three or four people who have died from ETS within the European Union in the last two years?

Their answer?

E-3520/08EN
Answer given by Ms Vassiliou
on behalf of the Commission
(18.7.2008)

The Green Paper 'Towards a Europe free from tobacco smoke: policy options at EU level" , refers to the estimates of mortality attributable to passive smoking in the EU reported by Smoke-free Partnership in Lifting the Smoke-screen: 10 reasons for a smoke-free Europe . These estimates are based on the international evidence on the level of risk posed by exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) and the estimated proportion of the population exposed rather than individual cases of deaths due to passive smoking. The nature of the epidemiological evidence on all risk factors, be they chemical or other, is such that it does not allow to identify the victims at individual level but only populations.

The Commission is now considering several possible policy options including a possible proposal for a Council recommendation as a follow-up of the Green Paper.

The Impact Assessment currently being carried out will provide a basis for the final policy choice. It will also provide further information on the impact of exposure to ETS on health.

Or, in plain English: we don't know anybody, we've never heard of anybody, we're just guessing that it might.

Typical EU cunts. But (of course!) it gets better, thanks to the Labate case:

The applicant, Mrs. Kay Labate, widow of former European Commission official Mario Labate, on her own behalf and on behalf of her husband's estate, contests the Commission's decisions refusing to recognise the lung cancer of her husband as an occupational disease.

Mr Labate was an official with the Commission for 29 years, during which time he was exposed, according to the Applicant, to a large amount of secondhand tobacco smoke. He was declared permanently invalid following the discovery of the lung cancer which subsequently led to his death. He submitted a request for recognition of the illness as an occupational disease.

So, given that the EU is declaring war on smokers for health reasons, will it, in fact, admit that it may have helped kill Mr Labate?

Er, no:

While acknowledging Mr Labate's exposure to secondhand tobacco smoke and finding no other cause for his lung cancer, the Medical Committee in its decision nonetheless stated that it could not establish with certainty the connection with his professional activities. The Commission accordingly denied the request, following the finding by the Medical Committee that the connection between the disease and Mr Labate's professional activities was not sufficiently established.

"The claims for compensation submitted in the letter of 25 October 2007 by Mrs Labate are dismissed as manifestly unfounded"

So, the EU is claiming that the only possible cause of his death was secondary smoke, and even though he spent most of his waking life at work (as we all do!) ... somehow they are not responsible in any way for his death!

Amazing!

And of course, here in the UK, pubs are closing hand over fist because people can't have a fag with their beer, the expected masses of non-smokers haven't materialised, armies of little Hitlers are empowered to punish people for letting others smoke in pubs, ludicrous laws about what constitutes a workplace allow more draconian enforcement yet our glorious leaders are still allowed to smoke in the Houses of Parliament through a carefully drafted loophole (palaces are exempt and the HoP is technically a palace), despite them promising not to smoke at their work, oh, no.

The Dutch "coffee shops" are gearing up to sue their government for fucking with their business, because only 18% of their customers like to smoke pure Mary-Jane, the rest of them like it cut with tobacco, which is now illegal, but smoking pure weed is not!

How the fuck does that work, then?

This is pure fucking totalitarianism, and as I said at the time, they're coming after the boozers and the fatties next. Soon, this will be an entirely intolerant society of whey-faced, boring, lifeless but healthy drones.

Fuck it: eat, drink, smoke and be merry, cause you're going to fucking snuff it soon enough anyway!

Public Transport

I cannot, with all good conscience, pretend to understand why people prize public transport as something wonderful and desirable.

Yesterday, I had to brave the journey to the Big Smoke and it was a uniformly unpleasant experience, from the dingy station where I started out being completely fucked in the arse by the company, quite literally, "servicing" the route, for forty of my Great British Pounds for a journey of roughly 50 miles. I got through the super-flash and expensive-looking ticket gate, manned by a "Revenue Protection Officer", even though there was only one cashier open and the queue was out the door (can't afford the cashiers, sir!) and stumbled onto a grubby platform where I was further homosexualised to the tune of £1.50 for a small bottle of water.

Amazingly, the first train of the day was on time, and was on time at every stop along the way, although I discovered that it was because the mainline service that shares the ribbon was completely fucked and the stopper had the line to itself. But, the train itself was filthy, not with litter, but with the black grime that comes from never, ever being cleaned. The area where I was sitting smelled like someone had taken a dump in it and it hadn't been cleaned properly. I inspected the seats very carefully before sitting down, but there were no obvious stains.

The train, as usual, was filled with cunts who have no consideration for anyone else in the coach, either playing their iPods at outrageous volume or yakking away on their mobiles at the top of their lungs.

Cunts.

And that's apart from the noise of the train itself, which seemed to be utterly deafening.

Got to the end of that part of the journey and then had to face the most disgusting thing of all, the Tube. Overheated, overcrowded, overpriced, every surface greasy with the filth and sweat of unwashed people, cunts shoving their backpacks in people's faces, iPodogeddon, crying babies, seats that are so dirty that I wouldn't sit in if both my legs were broken, no airflow ... when Alighieri wrote of Hell, he was thinking of the Tube. And, of course, there were delays. Plus the mile-long walks between lines, where you have to dodge, wittering numbskulls who think they're on a fucking beach somewhere.

And out into the open air, where you now have a half-mile-long walk to the place you're actually trying to get to, knowing that in a couple of hours, you're going to have to do it all again, in reverse.

I burn my clothes after a day in London, I don't want to touch them at all, if I can help it.

Forty Pounds, for a journey into Hell itself, via Purgatory. And some people do it day after day.

Blogging will be light today ...

... but for some reason, I suspect I may have a lot to say tomorrow.

No place to be ending but somewhere to start

Handbags at dawn

Ooh!

The chef Marcus Wareing [Editor: who he?] has launched a bitter attack on his former mentor Gordon Ramsay, saying he could not care less if the two never speak again.

The pair, once so close that Ramsay was best man at Michelin-starred Wareing’s wedding, are now fierce rivals.

Wareing, 38, has thrown down the gauntlet by dismissing Ramsay as a celebrity chef and declaring that he is out to seize his crown as Britain’s most celebrated culinary talent.

“If I never speak to that guy again in my life it wouldn’t bother me one bit. Wouldn’t give a ----.

"I admire Gordon. I learned a lot from him. But would I lose any sleep knowing he wouldn’t be there? No chance,” Wareing said.

Ramsay is the only London chef to hold three Michelin stars but Wareing is determined to match him.

“Gordon loves being the only three-star here. He’s milked it for years,” Wareing said.

“Whatever happens between me and Gordon, if he wants me never to get to the status I want then my advice to him is: put a gun to my head, shoot me, put me in a box and bury me because if you don’t, I’ll come back and come back.

Oh, the drama!

"I’ll never give up until I get to where I want to go.”

Wareing is currently head chef at Petrus, the restaurant at the Berkeley Hotel in Knightsbridge which won its second Michelin star last year.

It is currently run by Gordon Ramsay Holdings but the hotel recently announced that it will not renew Ramsay’s contract in September and will hand the lease to Wareing instead.

In a frank interview with Waitrose Food Illustrated, Wareing explained why he is breaking away from Ramsay.

“Very simple. When you wake up in the morning and look in the mirror and all you see is a man who is constrained, confined and trapped, then you’ve got to change.” He added:

“There was a time when my mentor was the person to keep happy. Now I’ve realised there’s more to life than a mentor. I want to be my own man.”

He dismissed Ramsay, star of Channel 4 show The F Word, as a “celebrity” chef who is “not really part of the industry now” but spoke fondly of the days when they were the best of friends.

“Gordon’s an important part of my life, although half of me thinks he’s a sad b------ and the other half still adores him.”

So which is it, you jumped-up, overweening drama queen of a Z-list nonentity?

And really, what the cunting fuck is the Telegraph doing printing this utter fucking bilge?

Janet and Jonah go to the seaside

Janet and Jonah are going to the seaside today.

See Jonah in his sequined jodhpurs, turquoise shirt and beige jacket.

When they get to the park, Janet says 'I'm just popping to the grocery store for something for tea. Will you play nicely here until I get back?'

'Oh yeth' says Jonah, 'I'll play on the thlide and rockinghorse until you get back.' See Jonah skip into the park.

When Jonah gets to the slide, he sees Mr Balls sitting on the park bench.

'Hello Jonah,' says Mr Balls.

'Hello Mr Balls,' says Jonah.

While Jonah is on the slide, Mr Balls calls him over to the swings.

'Would you push me on the swing Jonah?' asks Mr Balls.

'Yeth, of courth,' says Jonah and begins to build up a head of steam as he pushes Mr Balls higher and higher.

'Not too high!' cries Mr Balls and Jonah slows down until the swing eventually stops.

'Thank you Jonah' says Mr Balls, 'that was the best time I've had for ages!'

See Jonah skip off to meet Janet.

'Have you had fun in the park?' asks Janet.

'Oh yeth!', says Jonah.

'I met Mr Balls and we played. I pushed him to the limit and then eased off until he slowed down. He said I was the best swinger he'd ever had!'

Do you know what a beard is? Jonah does!

Proof, if it were needed...

Thanks to the Devil for pointing me at this excellent blog. I commend the whole article to you, but I wanted to highlight a couple of points:

Teenagers are not the source of knife crime, there have been teenagers since the dawn of the human race. They have been going outside in the evenings since the dawn of the human race. They have had knives since the dawn of the human race, before the dawn of the human race actually, but the dramatic rise in crime rates that we are worried about have only been going on since the end of World War 2. 50 years ago there where a lot more youths with knives walking about, but very very few of them using them to kill each other.

Perhaps you don't think that that shows an accurate picture? The definition of what is and what is not a crime does change all the time so you would have point. Literally thousands of things that where not crimes before now are, for example there has been one new crime a day since Labour came to power in 1997. So perhaps homicide rates would be better? There are fewer data, but the trend is identical.

So we are looking for something that had an impact on everybody in the country, but that affected the poor a lot more than the rich. something that happened just after World War 2 (the Home Office paper I linked to above dates it as 1954). Something big enough to change the very foundations of society

As the Devil says: I wonder what that could be?

Still think that safety net hammock is a good idea?

Doctors: the new fascists?

I'm getting a bit tired of these cunts. First, they wanted to tell us what kind of kitchen knives we could buy; then they started endorsing all the government basturbation on smoking, booze, eating anything other than rabbit food, etc.; now I see the cunts are trying to tell us how many kids to have -- to save the planet:

A pair of doctors have said that British parents should have fewer children, because kids cause carbon emissions and climate change. The two medics suggest that choosing to have a third child is the same as buying a patio heater or driving a gas-guzzling car, and that GPs should advise their patients against it.

Writing in the British Medical Journal, John Guillebaud (emeritus professor of family planning at UCL) and Pip Hayes (a GP) raise the spectre of global population explosion, and suggest that the children of the developed world are a particularly severe carbon burden.

Look, you fucking pair of middle-class myopic fuckwitted cunts: a) there is no fucking proof whatsoever that man is causing global warming or that there is even such a thing as global warming at the moment; b) even if there is, it's not clear that focus on CO2 is going to do anything to fix it; and c) fuck you.

Just go fuck yourselves with rusty spades, OK?

In other news...

... some fat, old has-been fuckwit is calling for calm in ZNL ranks:

I bet you never thought John Prescott would end up blogging but I felt this was the best way to talk to ordinary members at this important time.

writes former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott

"Ordinary" members? That's mighty fucking white of him, isn't it?

It’s been quite a year, hasn’t it?

Without any hint of irony.

I’m sure I also speak for all of you in wishing Gordon, Sarah and their boys a thoroughly deserved break and that they have a wonderful time in Southwold. I have every confidence that he will come back refreshed, renewed and ready to lead us through these difficult times.

Actually, I hope that he contracts some disgusting disease to go along with his metaphorical leprosy and spends the next 11 years in terminal agony. And that his beard is revealed as a closet lesbian.

I also hope that my fellow Labour MPs will take a break too - both from the Westminster bubble and divisive talk of a pointless leadership challenge.

Oh, please, John: stop! You're killing me! Do you really think the sleek, greedy, power-hungry apparatchiks, who have been grooming themselves for the highest office in this land are going to pay the blindest bit of attention to you?

I’ve been honoured to work very closely with the last three leaders - John, Tony and Gordon. I’m also proud to have worked with all of Labour’s cabinet ministers since 1997. We have undoubtedly some very talented men and women. But with respect, none of them at the present moment, has anywhere near the skills and experience, nationally and internationally, to lead this great party and country as we tackle these unprecedented major global problems.

Translation: you're all a useless bunch of fucking gobshites.

It’s only a year since party members, trade unions and MPs unanimously voted for Gordon to become our leader. Let me make this very clear - party members and the public will never forgive MPs and others who force Labour to go through another leadership election in less than two years.

That’s what Tory and Lib Dem MPs do. It’s not the Labour way.

So my message to Labour MPs is this – let’s take a break from feeding Westminster gossip and hostile press prattle, recharge your batteries and if you want to campaign, get out in your constituencies and start campaigning for that fourth term.

That’s what our party wants and what our country needs.

What our country needs, John, is for the trough-snuffling, mendacious, arrogant cunts who have pissed a decade of Tory-provided prosperity against the wall of social engineering; who have treacherously sold this country into EU bondage; who have stolen from us, lied to us, led us into an illegal war; who have put party expediency ahead of any benefit to the people of Great Britain, along with their cohorts in the BBC and the media and those who have profited from unethically-obtained government business, along with those Town and District councillors who have conspired to wage a petty war on us all by means of speed cameras, dustbin monitoring, extortionate charges and egregious snooping, to be hung from a vast array of lamp-posts down Whitehall and down every High Street in every town and city in Great Britain.

The only reason you might escape, you fat, overblown pig, is because there might not be a rope strong enough to carry your porcine bulk.

PS: You clearly didn't write that shit, because it's coherent. More mendacity.

Tech Tip du Jour: Disaster Recovery

Blogging has been light this weekend, as I spent some time with an old (very old, in fact) crony of mine. We swapped a number of war stories, and I had to pass on a couple of amusing ones:

Can you patch us back up? We're in a bit of a hurry!

I just had to laugh. It was that, or cry.

Customer: "Hi, we've had a crash, we're restoring the backup but it's taking too long because we have level 0, level 1, level 2 and eight days of logical logs to restore. We can't wait for the logs any more, can you just patch the system 'up' for us?"
Long-suffering engineer: "Yes, we can, but you are aware that if we do this, your system could be inconsistent?"
C: "Yes, it's fine, where do I sign and can you do it immediately, please?"
LSE: "OK."

Everyone's happy, right? Well, kind of. Six weeks later:

C: "Hi, sorry to bother you, but our data seems to be inconsistent, and we can't figure out why. Is it possible that you could fix this for us?"
LSE: " ... "

We don't have enough disk space, so let's just expire the storage pools quickly.

Customer, proudly walking me through their (not so) massive storage manager setup: "We had a real problem with getting enough space on the Legato servers, but we managed to work around it by expiring the logical logs storage pools after 20 minutes."
Me, edging for the door in a suitably restrained fashion: "And how long did you say it took to restore your level 0? Two hours?"

The moral of the above stories is: don't assume that because you're taking a backup, everything in DR-land is cool.

1. Test your recovery process before you need it in anger.
2. Get your DR plan vetted by a disinterested expert.
3. Assume the worst and don't just depend on backups for getting out of a bad situation -- look at HDR and / or RSS as well.

A depressing picture of Glasgow

Via Guido, this depressing article in the Thunderer:

McAllister enjoys teasing Martin for his aristocratic ways. He calls him “King Henry”, for he has long been struck by Mr Speaker’s Tudor hauteur. “Mairi Bhan” may be grand by Glasgow standards, but it is spartan against the grandeur of Mr Speaker’s grace-and-favour home in Westminster. “The Speaker’s House epitomises the status of the Speaker,” notes the official guide that celebrates an extensive refurbishment of the listed building, its two formal drawing rooms (Corner and Crimson), state dining room and state bedroom. In Glasgow, Martin presides over a formidable Labour-party machine; in Westminster, his authority is unchallenged, for nobody, not even a prime minister, dare antagonise Mr Speaker.

There is a dynastic quality to Martin’s Scottish political empire. Since 1979 he has been MP for Glasgow North East (formerly Springburn); his son, Paul, was elected to the equivalent seat in the same constituency in the Scottish parliament, despite having shown little dynamism while he served on Glasgow council. At election times, the pair of them appear together on the streets in identical suits and shirts. “We call them the Martin mafia,” laughs an SNP activist.

But this is not just a father-and-son political operation. For several years after Martin became Speaker, his wife, Mary, was also on his constituency payroll, earning £25,000 a year for unspecified duties, even though she was living in London with her husband. His daughter, Mary Ann, who lives in Glasgow, was for many years employed as his constituency secretary, and most people in the area assume she still is. In fact, as the autumn deadline approaches for MPs to declare which family members they employ, Mary Ann has been quietly removed from the payroll. The Speaker’s external PR adviser would say only that Mary Ann left her father’s employ “sometime this year”, though it is understood to be a very recent change. Martin declined a request for an interview, and his secretary wrote warning that nothing must be written that is “misleading or inaccurate as to fact”.

Although Paul Martin, according to one colleague, “has not exactly set the heather on fire” in the Edinburgh parliament, he is widely tipped to succeed his father as the Westminster MP when Mr Speaker retires. “Paul is not very bright, but he’s wily,” says Phil Greene, an SNP member of Glasgow city council. “He does the job of keeping the Labour vote up while his dad’s down in London.”

Greene’s Labour colleagues in Scotland are reluctant to criticise Michael or Paul Martin. “Michael runs a tight ship,” says one Labour councillor, who asked to remain anonymous.

He adds that there is considerable resentment of the way they seem to regard the constituency as a family fiefdom.

And how did they get there? Well ...

Apart from the Tesco superstore complex, there are few signs of private commerce. Most economic activity is state-funded, and the business of this part of the city is recycling different types of funding, from Brussels, London and the Edinburgh parliament. Labour lost control of the devolved parliament to the SNP at the last election, but it keeps a grip on the city of Glasgow itself, which it has ruled for as long as anyone can remember. The permanent Labour rule has created a vast bureaucratic operation, state-funded and based on patronage and old-fashioned machine politics. “It’s like Chicago in the 1920s,” says McAllister.

In the mid-1970s, Labour councillors frequently faced charges of corruption; the graft is apparently more subtle these days, but it is there, and many politicians (there is no suggestion that this includes the Martins) have to reach some sort of accommodation with the big family gangs who run the main drug and prostitution rackets in the city. In Michael Martin’s constituency, 60% of children live in “workless households”, where the entire family income comes from the state.

This kind of shit has no place in modern society, even among the sweaties. But the real fucking disgrace is not that Labour has done this, but that Glaswegians have let it be done to them. What happened to entrepreneurial spirit, the roaming urge that made Scotland punch way above its weight in centuries gone by?

Update: The Devil is a bit peeved, too.

Yes we can!

"Gorgon the Leper ... " snicker

Via Guido, via Tory Bear

Nice hair...

Welcome to the BBC, Part 2

Telegraph: New blow to Brown as poll finds meltdown in key seats
Times: MPs campaign to make Straw PM
Graundia: Labour turns on Brown as MPs fear poll wipeout
Independent: Plot to dump Brown
BBC: Labour is focusing on leading the country, not plotting against Gordon Brown, insists Harman

Say, Aunty: your bias is showing.

Cunts.

Polly Toynbee on Glasgow East

Amazing!

If Cameron wins the next election, poverty will deepen, as he warned Glaswegians to their face when he said that the poor have only themselves to blame: if only they knew right from wrong they would not be in this plight. Yet still Labour couldn't win.

Er, Polly? Hello? The Conservatives did better than last time, but actually, ZNL lost to the SNP. Just thought I'd point that out to you.

Apparently, she thinks that ZNL would not have lost Glasgow East if they'd been more forthcoming about all their achievements:

"Ungrateful buggers don't know what we've done for them," a Labour minister harrumphed after canvassing all day. Quite so, because Labour has utterly failed - on purpose - to say whose side it's on or what it believes, so the message never reached every corner of every place that stands to benefit.

... Labour doesn't get any credit for what it has done so invisibly.

What? You mean all those headlines about our money spent of social engineering, all those soundbites on BBC/Pravda, all those Labour Party billboards ... I was the only one who saw and heard them?

Anyway, even she's had enough of the Gorgon, albeit not his policies:

Two hundred Labour stalwarts gathered at the national policy forum yesterday after the shock of the byelection. They were briefed that Gordon Brown would have no text, and would walk and talk hands free; he needed to show that he can in extremis speak human and express feelings to an audience willing him to be the leader they yearn for. A loyal audience gave a dutiful ovation, but it was a dismally mechanical performance. If this was Gordon does Dave, the comparison was excruciating.

He could do it without notes because it was an autopilot compilation of the dullest parts of every speech he has made, mantra after clunking mantra, pacing up and down to the same old tropes. With oil and food prices rising by the day, his party in ruins, his future in jeopardy and the country about to fall to the Tories, out came the same old figures: a hundred new airports in China, a million new cars in India, globalisation, environmental technology, the manufacture of iPods. In time of economic meltdown, his boast that world-beating "Britain can be the best in the global economy" sounds not aspirational but delusional. Toe-curling homilies to "hard-working families" are as tin-eared as his politics-light paeans to "opportunity". He bypassed the by-election as if it simply hadn't happened.

This is what she thinks we need:

Here's their scenario: in early September Jack Straw, with authority as Brown's campaign manager, rallies together at least 10 cabinet members to tell him they will resign immediately unless he goes gracefully, and at once. However much some allies urge Brown to stay for fear of worse disaster, he could not survive a mass resignation and would go. An orderly leadership election would follow, the two views of the future fighting it out. The Blairite extremists would be seen off and either Alan Johnson or David Miliband would come through - whoever emerged as the stronger in open contest. Both would fight on a more radical agenda to win the party vote, and a general election would follow within months.

Why not start with that windfall of the oil companies' extra profits, using that £10bn to ease the pain of those on the lowest incomes? Let's see who dares support the bolder resolutions for the manifesto in Warwick this weekend, to put some fight back into Labour.

For fuck's sake, Polly, are you really that fucking stupid? Do you really think that by further fucking business confidence in Britain you're going to encourage businesses to stay here? Who the fuck do you think chips in the money that the Gorgon spends? Is your knowledge of economics really that weak?

Quite apart from the fact that the Gorgon has also made a rich haul out of the extra petrol prices, let's assume that the oil companies part with an extra £10 billion. Once this incompetent bunch of cock-sucking goat-felchers has processed it through the government machine, half of it will just be lost on the the process itself. So, what are you going to do with another £5 billion? It's not even twice what the Gorgon gave away to try and keep Crewe and Nantwich, and look how little that achieved for the poor.

Polly: socialism has been tried repeatedly. It has failed everywhere. Despite your passionate belief in the goodness of government, and your own wisdom, the evidence is everywhere, from Italy in the 30's to Britain in the 00's. Socialism is not the solution, it's the problem.

Why not try a truly new and radical experiment: "my life, my responsibility". Let the government do as little as possible and trust the people to do the right thing. Or does that not accord with your repulsive authoritarian instincts?

Welcome to the BBC: toeing the line since 1997

Telegraph: Ministers plot to force out Brown after poll disaster
Times: Shape up in two months or go, Brown warned
Graundia: Senior ministers urged: tell batter PM it's time to go
Independent: Cabinet turns on wounded Brown
BBC: Senior ministers get behind Brown

Christ, even the Independent has pushed their vital campaign to put tips in the pockets of waiting staff off the top spot for this. So why is Pravda still so blatantly sucking the cock of our great master of tractor production, who is the right person to take us through these difficult times and just wants to get on with the job?

Quote of the day

Toynbee is an embarrassment to the Guardian’s great traditions.

She would chop down a tree and stand on the stump to make a speech about conservation.

-- "Socialist" Councillor Terry Kelly

Strange?

Media luvvie in nasty email shock

It seems that Giles Coren, son of the legendary Cricklewood genius, has been caught saying rude things to his sub-editors:

Chaps,

I am mightily pissed off. I have addressed this to Owen, Amanda and Ben because I don't know who i am supposed to be pissed off with (i'm assuming owen, but i filed to amanda and ben so it's only fair), and also to Tony, who wasn't here - if he had been I'm guessing it wouldn't have happened.

I don't really like people tinkering with my copy for the sake of tinkering. I do not enjoy the suggestion that you have a better ear or eye for how I want my words to read than I do. Owen, we discussed your turning three of my long sentences into six short ones in a single piece, and how that wasn't going to happen anymore, so I'm really hoping it wasn't you that fucked up my review on saturday.

It was the final sentence. Final sentences are very, very important. A piece builds to them, they are the little jingle that the reader takes with him into the weekend.

I wrote: "I can't think of a nicer place to sit this spring over a glass of rosé and watch the boys and girls in the street outside smiling gaily to each other, and wondering where to go for a nosh."

it appeared as: "I can't think of a nicer place to sit this spring over a glass of rosé and watch the boys and girls in the street outside smiling gaily to each other, and wondering where to go for nosh."

There is no length issue. This is someone thinking "I'll just remove this indefinite article because Coren is an illiterate cunt and i know best".

Well, you fucking don't.

This was shit, shit sub-editing for three reasons.

1) 'Nosh', as I'm sure you fluent Yiddish speakers know, is a noun formed from a bastardisation of the German 'naschen'. It is a verb, and can be construed into two distinct nouns. One, 'nosh', means simply 'food'. You have decided that this is what i meant and removed the 'a'. I am insulted enough that you think you have a better ear for English than me. But a better ear for Yiddish? I doubt it. Because the other noun, 'nosh' means "a session of eating" - in this sense you might think of its dual valency as being similar to that of 'scoff'. you can go for a scoff. or you can buy some scoff. the sentence you left me with is shit, and is not what i meant. Why would you change a sentnece aso that it meant something i didn't mean? I don't know, but you risk doing it every time you change something. And the way you avoid this kind of fuck up is by not changing a word of my copy without asking me, okay? it's easy. Not. A. Word. Ever.

2) I will now explain why your error is even more shit than it looks. You see, i was making a joke. I do that sometimes. I have set up the street as "sexually-charged". I have described the shenanigans across the road at G.A.Y.. I have used the word 'gaily' as a gentle nudge. And "looking for a nosh" has a secondary meaning of looking for a blowjob. Not specifically gay, for this is soho, and there are plenty of girls there who take money for noshing boys. "looking for nosh" does not have that ambiguity. the joke is gone. I only wrote that sodding paragraph to make that joke. And you've fucking stripped it out like a pissed Irish plasterer restoring a renaissance fresco and thinking jesus looks shit with a bear so plastering over it. You might as well have removed the whole paragraph. I mean, fucking christ, don't you read the copy?

3) And worst of all. Dumbest, deafest, shittest of all, you have removed the unstressed 'a' so that the stress that should have fallen on "nosh" is lost, and my piece ends on an unstressed syllable. When you're winding up a piece of prose, metre is crucial. Can't you hear? Can't you hear that it is wrong? It's not fucking rocket science. It's fucking pre-GCSE scansion. I have written 350 restaurant reviews for The Times and i have never ended on an unstressed syllable. Fuck. fuck, fuck, fuck.

I am sorry if this looks petty (last time i mailed a Times sub about the change of a single word i got in all sorts of trouble) but i care deeply about my work and i hate to have it fucked up by shit subbing.

Personally, I think he was too soft on them -- he didn't call them "cunts" once. Stick it to them Giles!

Idle revelry

It's not often that the Graun causes me to bask in a gentle glow of pleasant revelry, but they managed to get me there today:

On this result (admittedly unimaginable at a real general election) Labour would be reduced to 25 seats: Andy Burnham and Harriet Harman would be the only cabinet ministers to survive. They would share space in the Commons with the likes of Frank Field and David Blunkett - but Brown would lose his seat.

How I wish!

Labour have no excuses for this fiasco, turnout was higher than expected and they got absolutely hammered. The chickens are coming home to roost, and none of the shower of shit currently in power deserves it more than the monocular fuckwit who is running this country ... into the ground.

Is the curse of Jonah the only hope for the free world?

I've previously blogged about what a disaster Obamalamadingdong is going to be for the US in particular and the world in general -- Tony Bliar, Mark 2. However, there is one small glimmer of hope: the curse of Jonah.

Because Obamalamdingdong is going to be shaking the snot-encrusted hand of Jonah tomorrow. Let's hope the curse is still active.

Obama, don't forget to wash your hands afterwards ...

Oh dear ...

Oh dear, oh dear. The SNP have managed a 20% swing and taken Glasgow East and ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!

I think we're heading for complete and utter annihilation of the Labour Party: they can't sack Gordon without holding a general election, which they will utterly lose; Gordon doesn't want to go after having waited for a decade for the top job; and the longer he stays, the more crushing the ultimate defeat will be. Labour will be consigned to the rubbish tip of history.

Good.


Update: I've just spotted this delicious image in the Independent:



Good riddance, you crapulent old harpy!

Paedo granny happy snapper whacked!

A sick, perverted child-molester yesterday:



Via the ever-amusing Mark Wadsworth comes this tale of perverted old-age filth:

An amateur photographer was told she could not take snaps of an empty paddling pool because she might be a paedophile.

Betty Robinson was ordered to put away her camera by a council worker when she began snapping the outdoor pool.

'It's absolutely ridiculous – it's bureaucracy gone mad,' said the 82-year-old widow from Southampton.

She was with friend Brenda Bennett as she took pictures of the city's common – where the pool is situated.

'We're a couple of old ladies. We're certainly not paedophiles,' she added.

Southampton City Council apologised but said: 'It is appropriate that our staff are aware of who is taking photos.'

What the fuck?

a. If it's a public place, no-one can stop you taking photos.
b. It is most certainly not appropriate of council staff to be aware of who is taking photos in a public place.
c. It's entirely not the place of council workers to stop people taking photos in public places (see a. above)

This kind of fatuity is a combination of petty authoritarianism (as encouraged by the socialists in Westmonster) and the paedogeddon alarmism evident in the kind of red-tops that council workers read. I think that both the spokesman and the bossy council worker need to be taken out the back and given summary double-tap justice for encouraging and defending this kind of shit.

More 80's goodness...

SOA what?

Yesterday I had an amusing trawl through various Oracle-related blogs, most of which confirmed my preconceptions about various online Oracle personalities. But I digress!

The one blog entry that stuck with me was this (Aussie) one:

Just before Christmas, InfoWorld published an article quoting Larry Ellison on the slow uptake of SOA. Among other things, Ellison said "It takes about 10 to 20 years before [you can] rewrite all of your applications [to take advantage of SOA]" therefore implying the benefits of SOA are a long way off yet.

I'm not surprised Larry has had to go on the defensive here. Admittedly as CEO of Oracle I wouldn't like to announce the huge investment in the SOA Fusion Middleware is seeing poor growth (well, at least the criticism of poor growth).... I'm guessing my shareholders wouldn't want to hear that either.

I was quite taken aback by this. I mean, Larry, for all his sins, knows a thing about getting stuff sold. He knows about backing winning horses. As a user of IBM technology, I'm quite used to seeing them witter on about stuff that is supposed to make stuff easier but actually makes it worse, but why is Larry getting involved with this shit?

More from our intrepid Oracler:

I'll give you an example from my past.

We built a Web Service system to take purchase-orders (PO) from numerous point-of-sale (POS) systems, and distribute them to 3 distinct suppliers to complete. The POS systems were all under our control and the POS interfaces were clearly defined.

With the suppliers it was a complete mess. While each supplier did have a web service interface and we were able to use XSLT to transform our invoices into whatever format they required, what they each did with the invoices was completely different.

One supplier did exactly what you expected. Given a PO, they raised an invoice and an out-of-stock record (if necessary) and sent them back. Easy.

Another supplier took the PO, and returned multiple updates to a single invoice as they discovered stock. Our understanding is this is against Australian laws, where an invoice is meant to be a binding document. But never mind.

The final supplier took the PO, sent an invoice record for what they could find, and an out-of-stock record for what they didn't have. However over time the PO would roll out to other warehouses where they could submit an invoice for the remaining part, or then an out-of-stock for what they didn't have. And so on. Groan.

Yep, that sounds about right. It's fucking easy to do this shit when all you have to do is stand up in a room presenting PowerPoint slides, or have a meeting-room bullshit session without thinking anything through, where marketing buzzwords are much more important than anything useful.

Now the SOA advocate will yell well that's great! SOA will take care of this mess, as you can build different solutions for each supplier. True, but each supplier wasn't guaranteed to maintain these modes of operation. In fact behind the scenes they had manual processes sometimes that dynamically changed the result. And in time we wanted to add over 50 suppliers, all with "interesting" legacy system based processes. It was very conceivable we'd just need full time person to keep track of what mess 1 of those 50 suppliers had got us into this week, changing interfaces, changing processes, making mistakes and so on.

Sounds about right, too. So SOA is going to make your life easier, eh? I think it might be more about keeping vast armies of body-shopped consultants off the bench, myself. Or I would if I were cynical, but luckily I'm not.

In addition only 1 of the 3 suppliers actually had test systems we could build our application against. And for the supplier that did have a test system we literally had to phone them to ask them to flush the data each time we did a test. So much for quick agile development.

Ah, well, that's simple: only do business with people who meet your exacting standards. That's what any consultant would tell you.

You could argue they should just standardise their systems!? But that's a pretty immature attitude. Most organisations have trouble establishing standards internally, let alone have enough clout and smarts to boss around external organisations; not many of us are a Walmart. In turn those external organisations may have big $$$$s invested in their IT systems, and won't or can't or just change over night. Maybe that's years from now.

More eminent sense.

I've long since given up with IT panaceas, I think it was Java that finally burst my bubble. I had lived through "PCs will fix everything", then "methodologies will fix everything", then "4GLs will fix everything", then "CASE tools will fix everything" and then someone said "Java will fix everything" ... and then I realised the whole thing was just like the South Sea Bubble, endlessly repeating these wild and delusional claims. Nothing will ever be a panacea, they will just nibble away at one or other aspect of the total problem.

I think SOA is a particularly malign form of this problem because of the level of complexity it can lead to and additional work it demands. People will be cursing SOA for decades to come.

And it looks like Larry's going to be one of them.

That much is true...

Tech Tip du Jour: Fragmenting Strategies

Thanks to some wittering from the peanut gallery, I've decided to get onto this a bit earlier than anticipated. Bastards.

There are a number of reasons why you might want a fragmentation strategy:

1. You may want to eliminate dbspaces from being queried in order to increase throughput or concurrency
2. You may want to invoke parallelism
3. You may want easier data maintenance

There may be other reasons, but that's all I can think of for now.

Fragment Elimination
The reasoning here is that you would say "we'll put all department X's data in dbspaceX and all department Y's data in dbspaceY" (or some other strategy) and then when a user from department X logs in and does work, the engine will automatically exclude dbspaceY from being queried.

The problem is that in real life, data rarely gets separated out so clearly. And while that approach might work for application A, application B might have a different fragmentation requirement, rendering the given approach utterly useless.

But it's great if you can get there.

Parallelism
It doesn't really matter which fragmentation strategy you use, parallelism is always a gain. If you can't work out a fragment elimination strategy, use a mod function for even data distribution, or use round robin fragmentation. You will find that bulk operations like index builds become massively quicker, especially if you also fragment the index that you are building. You can also get dbspaces scanned in parallel, which is great for big aggregation operations.

However, don't use round robin with attached indexes -- this effectively renders the indexes useless.

Data Maintenance
One of the more common uses for fragmentation is the ability to detach fragments into separate tables, archive them and then drop the detached tables. This is a way doing very quick data purges. This is most common in data warehouses where data is dropped on a month by month or year by year basis. Just remember that your indexes either have to be attached, or fragmented on a similar strategy (the dbspaces can be different, but otherwise the strategy for the index must be the same as that for the data) or the index will be dropped and rebuilt by the engine when you detach a fragment.

Placement
Even if you don't want to make use of any of the above, there is something to be said for placing your data and indexes explicitly so that indexes for a table are in different dbspaces to the data (although this is probably more true of JBoD setups, where you know exactly where things are in disks -- it's probably not so relevant on RAID or SAN.) This will at least make it possible to use onstat -g ppf properly, though!

I somehow feel that this subject might get re-visited.

Er ...

It does take rather a lot to leave me speechless. This guy managed it:



From here.

What?

Just ... what?

Just Plain Stupid

What a cunt!

A campaigner against Heathrow Airport's third runway has attempted to glue himself to Gordon Brown at a Downing Street reception.

Dan Glass, a member of Plane Stupid, was about to receive an award from the prime minister when he stuck out his superglued hand and touched his sleeve.

Plane Stupid says Mr Glass, from north London, then "glued his hand" to Mr Brown's jacket as he shook his hand.

Spokesman Graham Thompson said Mr Glass - a 24-year-old post-graduate student at Strathclyde University - had smuggled a small amount of glue through Downing Street security checks in his underwear.

He met the prime minister during the reception.

Mr Thompson said his organisation was attempting to make Mr Brown "stick to his environmental promises".

How corny is that? What a gaylord!

Downing Street confirmed an exchange had taken place but denied that Mr Glass had glued himself to the prime minister.

"There may have been something sticky on his hands but it was only for a few seconds that he touched the prime minister," a spokesman said. "There was no stickiness of any significance."

He added: "This was certainly not seen as a serious protest. It was very light-hearted. This was not a serious incident."

Speaking afterwards, Mr Glass said: "My left hand was covered in superglue and I stuck it to his sleeve.

"I just glued myself to him and after 20 seconds he tore my hand off - it really hurt. He had to give it a couple of tugs before it came away.

"He was just grinning about it. He didn't seem to take me seriously."

No fucking shit, huh?

After the incident Mr Glass was allowed to stay in Downing Street for 40 minutes.

When he left the building he tried to glue himself to the gates of Downing Street but had his hand detached by a police officer.

"I didn't have much glue left by that point," he said.

What an amateur! Dan, I just hope your superglue dribbled its way into your underpants and blocked up your reproductive equipment so that you don't fuck up the gene pool with any equally stupid children.

It takes a special kind of man to get me to take the Gorgon's side on anything, but Dan Glass, Plain Fucking Stupid Cunt Extraordinaire, has managed it!

Just because I can...

The Voters Have Spoken, Part 2

The poll has closed and I'm afraid there are a lot of liars who read my blog.

I asked how you vote in a general election. 29 people voted:

• 2 (honest people) said that if you stuck the right colour rosette on a turd, they'd vote for it
• 7 said they'd vote tactically to damage the cunts they didn't like -- I'm calling at least 6 of you liars
• 8 said they analysed all the relevant data and voted accordingly -- I'm calling at least 7 of you liars
• 7 (honest people) said they'd analyse all the relevant data and still vote for their "tribe"
• 5 said they wouldn't bother -- I'm calling at least 3 of you liars

Shame on you!

(Still, at least I know my audience now...)

Continuing the 80's theme

Very under-rated, I thought they were...

Time for a heated debate?

I've put it off for as long as I can, but I can't hold back any longer. As you might expect, it's the sainted Moonbat who's triggered the urge:

So here we go again. For the second time, Channel 4 has been fiercely criticised by the broadcasting regulator for a programme attacking environmental science. For the second time, the director was Martin Durkin.

He then goes on:

Ofcom has ruled that the programme he made last year — The Great Global Warming Swindle — treated two scientists and an organisation (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) unfairly.

But while the new ruling exposes some of the channel's practices, it also exposes the limitations of the regulator. The programme was peppered with distortions and misleading claims. But despite being presented with a vast dossier of evidence by climate scientists, Ofcom decided that it could not rule on the matter of accuracy. While news programmes are expected to be accurate, other factual programmes are not, and Ofcom "only regulates misleading material where that material is likely to cause harm or offence."

It decided that The Great Global Warming Swindle had not caused actual harm to members of the public: merely misleading them does not count. In fact, it is precisely because "the discussion about the causes of global warming was to a very great extent settled by the date of broadcast", meaning that climate change was no longer a matter of political controversy, that a programme claiming it is all a pack of lies could slip past the partiality rules. The greater a programme's defiance of scientific fact, the less likely Ofcom is to rule against it. This paradoxical judgment allows Channel 4 to keep getting away with it.

The irony of this man's hypocrisy is beyond staggering. Every charge he lays at the feet of this program can be laid at the feet of the global warming True Believers. But, of course, George is away with the fairies again. Here is a more impartial reading of the Ofcom ruling.

None of the complaints alleging lack of due impartiality in the science portion (sections 1-4) was upheld. Not one. The only bone thrown to the complainants was a finding that there had not been due impartiality in the portion talking about Africa - an issue that Bob Ward and the Myles Allen 37 didn’t even mention.

Ofcom’s reasoning here had a fine touch of irony, which will appeal to connoisseurs of irony, as I hope most CA readers are.

In order for section 5 due impartiality requirements to come into play, the issue had to be one “of political or industrial controversy”. The Code explains that these are “political or industrial issues on which politicians, industry and/or the media are in debate.”

But if the science was “settled”, as the complainants elsewhere argued, then the matter necessarily ceased to be one of “political or industrial controversy”, leaving section 5 inapplicable. As confirmation, Channel 4 introduced statements from the Stern Commission and the former Environment Minister that the science was “settled” and thus the science matters discussed in sections 1-4 were no longer matters of “political or industrial controversy.”

Rather a bold gambit and one that left the Complainants on the horns of a dilemma. In order to sustain their section 5 complaint, they would have had to reverse the position argued elsewhere in the complaint and argue that the science was not “settled”, hardly something that they wanted to do and a position that they did not adopt.

In their decision, Ofcom noted the views of the Stern Commission and the former Environment Minister that the science was no longer a matter of “political or industrial controversy” and threw out the section 5 complaints in relation to the science sections. Didn’t I tell you that the irony would appeal to CA readers?

The only bone that Ofcom threw the program complainants was a mercy bone in relation to the Africa segment, which was hardly a matter of big controversy, having attracted no ire from Bob Ward and the 37 professors. Ofcom concluded that the Africa segment did involve a matter of policy and that the GGWS producers had an obligation to have been more impartial on this topic.

The usual horse-shit about "the science is settled" is trotted out again by Moonbat, just to make the useless cunt feel a bit more certain of his case. The science is not settled, and it's not settled about any fucking scientific endeavour. Einstein's General Theory of Relativity is unravelling, and I'm pretty sure he was a bit more rigorous and generally smarter than Moonbat. No science is ever settled. Anything can be disproven if some uncomfortable fact comes to light. Real scientists accept this.

Yet for some reason, every pro-MMGW fuckwit insists that the science is settled. When you raise the concerns about even simple, hard science being subject to refutation, they then say: "It's so important, it doesn't matter if we're right."

I'm sorry?

Anyway, let me lay out my reasoning for not giving a shit about all this eco-wibble:

1. I haven't seen any compelling evidence that global warming is happening at all. There is a preponderance of land-based temperature measuring stations that are in heat islands, making land-based measurements suspect. Some of it is made up. Satellite measurements all show no indication of global warming. There are currently nine authorities currently involved in providing a dataset of monthly global temperature anomalies. Eight of them say there is no evidence of global warming. The only satellite temperature monitoring organisation who claims that their satellites do show global warming is NASA's GISS, home of True Believer James Hansen.

2. I have never seen any compelling proof of the argument that man-made CO2 emissions are causing global warming. Whenever I ask a proponent for this proof, they a) wave their hands around; b) point me at "peer-reviewed science, like the IPCC"; c) talk about computer models.

a) isn't compelling;
b) the IPCC does not instigate any science, it selectively endorses reports that support its politically-defined agenda;
c) computer models are useless in complex environments and there is evidence that they are tweaked to get rid of results that don't fit the objective.

Data is selected around time frames that fit the hypothesis, the hypothesis is not amended to fit the data. The Medieval Warm Period is ignored. Many studies start in 1850, coincidentally when the northern hemisphere was coming out of a little ice age (LIA). The IPCC describes the LIA as a period of "modest cooling", when the Thames froze every year and New Yorkers could walk across a frozen harbour from Manhattan to Staten Island. The reverse of this "modest cooling" would, however, somehow become apocalyptic for us now.

Furthermore, Australian scientist David Evans, who worked for the Australian government developing their models for carbon emission tracking and who was an IPCC reviewer, has pointed out that if CO2 was causing global warming, there would be a significant build-up of heat at about 10km above sea level. This has not been found, so CO2 in general is not causing global warming, so man-made emissions can also not be a factor. Some Kiwi wingnut thinks it's a load of crap, as well.

3. I'm not convinced that the Kyoto Protocol will achieve anything except increase government interference in everyone's lives. If fully implemented, the Kyoto Protocol would exchange vast sums of money for maybe a 30-year window before whatever was going to happen, would happen anyway. But the other thing that Kyoto would do would be to transfer money from first world economies to third world economies to compensate them for the horrors that MMGW would inflict upon them. A much easier way of doing this would be to remove trade barriers. But then I guess governments wouldn't be able to get their sticky fingers into the pie, would they?

4. If this was a real problem, people would be crapping all over China in a big way: Britain's annual CO2 emissions are about one-tenth of China's. Russia, Japan and India all way more than us. But China and India would actually be winners under Kyoto, because they are not Annex I coutries -- they would get our money!

How the fuck does that work, then?

5. True Believers claim that global warming will only bring negatives: more hurricanes, more tornadoes, more droughts, more floods, more malaria, more starvation, etc., etc. One small example: it's claimed that the projected increased rainfall would only occur as floods, the IPCC did not project that any of the increased rainfall would bring benefits. However, analysis of history and pre-history seems to indicate that warmer periods are actually times of plenty on earth: more vegetation, more variety, and general good times.

6. I have not seen any compelling proof that trying to limit carbon emissions is the correct way to attack the problem. I'm not alone, environmentalist Bjorn Lomberg disagrees with me in every way, but this: he says that we shouldn't be trying to curb carbon emissions, we should be trying to prepare the world for the consequences. He thinks this is a much more effective way of working around it. Cheaper, too.

Needless to say, he was duly excommunicated from the Church of the True Belief for his heresy.

7. Most "greens" actually seem to be watermelons: green out the outside, red on the inside. Every green agenda brings with it the dead, heavy, controlling hand of the state. Individuals are not capable of doing the right thing, and global warming seems to be a great excuse for the state to fuck us around more. No signs that they're actually achieving anything "green", but plenty of recycling sorting, reduce services, extra taxes ... the list goes on.

I'm sure some True Believer will be here soon enough to tell me I'm wrong, but unless you being something new to the table (like concrete proof, that isn't just the opinion of some fuckbubble True Believer) I'm afraid I'm going to have to call you a cunt and tell you to fuck off.

Ant Invasion

Millions of the little fuckers, all using my dining room exterior wall as dinner and shagging all over the place.

Cunts.

Tech Tip du Jour: The RIGHT Index

I frequently post about queries not only using an index, but using the right index.

So, what is the right index? Well, it's an index that supports your query as fully as possible. For my examples, I'm going to consider the stores demo database that ships with IDS. It's tiny and it's pretty much optimised, but I'm going to use it to show examples of what I mean.

So, here's the schema:

{ TABLE items row size = 18 number of columns = 6 index size = 30 }
create table items
(
item_num smallint,
order_num integer,
stock_num smallint not null ,
manu_code char(3) not null ,
quantity smallint,
total_price money(8,2),

check (quantity >= 1 ),
primary key (item_num,order_num)
);
revoke all on items from "public";

alter table items add constraint (foreign key (order_num)
references orders );
alter table items add constraint (foreign key (stock_num,
manu_code) references stock );

Here's my test query:

SELECT order_num FROM items
WHERE stock_num = 8
AND quantity > 3
ORDER BY order_num

Here's my first query plan:

select order_num from items
where stock_num = 8
and quantity > 3
order by order_num

Estimated Cost: 1
Estimated # of Rows Returned: 1
Temporary Files Required For: Order By

1) items: INDEX PATH

Filters: items.quantity > 3

(1) Index Keys: stock_num manu_code (Serial, fragments: ALL)
Lower Index Filter: items.stock_num = 8

Filters are generally a badness. They indicate that the data row is going to have to be inspected. This isn't a problem with a 67-row table, but it can lead to a lot of pain with a 67-million-row table.

Now I: CREATE INDEX foo1 ON items (stock_num, quantity);

And the plan changes to:

select order_num from items
where stock_num = 8
and quantity > 3
order by order_num

Estimated Cost: 1
Estimated # of Rows Returned: 1
Temporary Files Required For: Order By

1) items: INDEX PATH

(1) Index Keys: stock_num quantity (Serial, fragments: ALL)
Lower Index Filter: (items.stock_num = 8 AND items.quantity > 3 )

Notice that there is no longer a filter needed to satisfy the query. But I can improve this query even further: although all the restriction is done via an index, I still have to go to the data rows to get the projection.

If I now: DROP INDEX foo1; CREATE INDEX foo1 ON items (stock_num, quantity, order_num);

The query plan is now:

select order_num from items
where stock_num = 8
and quantity > 3
order by order_num

Estimated Cost: 1
Estimated # of Rows Returned: 1
Temporary Files Required For: Order By

1) items: INDEX PATH

(1) Index Keys: stock_num quantity order_num (Key-Only) (Serial, fragments: ALL)
Lower Index Filter: (items.stock_num = 8 AND items.quantity > 3 )

Notice the new "Key-Only" expression. This means that in order to get everything that I needed, I only accessed the index pages, I did not have to access the data pages at all. This is generally optimal.

Now, that was a fairly straightforward case. A more subtle case arises when you have to accept that you can't create an index and you have to choose between indexes:

For the sake of the argument, let's say I can't create any more indexes. We revert to the original index structure and my new query is this:

SELECT order_num FROM items
WHERE stock_num = 8
AND item_num = 1
ORDER BY order_num

My query plan is:

select order_num from items
where stock_num = 8
and item_num = 1
order by order_num

Estimated Cost: 1
Estimated # of Rows Returned: 1
Temporary Files Required For: Order By

1) items: INDEX PATH

Filters: items.item_num = 1

(1) Index Keys: stock_num manu_code (Serial, fragments: ALL)
Lower Index Filter: items.stock_num = 8

Is this my best option, given that I have a unique, primary key index on item_num and order_num and a non-unique, composite index on stock_num and manu_code? Well, in this case, yes, because the composite index will be much more selective. Every order will have an item_num of 1, so using the primary key index would be useless. However, if 99% of orders only had one line and we were looking for things on line two, then the primary key might be more useful.

Good optimiser statistics would be your best hope for the engine getting this decision right, but I have on one or two occasions found that the optimiser gets the decision wrong, possibly because of the comparative size of the index or some other, subtle consideration.

Know your data, know what the query is doing and make sure the optimiser is doing the right thing.

Never assume that just because a query is using an index, it's using the correct index.

Update: a minor correction to one of my CREATE INDEX statements, thanks to Ian Goddard for spotting it.