John's Blog

Well, it’s the day before the 2010 General Election in the UK, and I thought I’d pop up and air my views in public for the last time before the event.

I wrote a nice long note on Facebook the other day about it but, when I pressed the “Submit” button, it said I had to log in and then the text disappeared – what a bitch!

So – who shall I vote for?

To tell you the truth, I’m not sure but I know it won’t be Labour or Liberal Democrat. The choice really is between Conservative, just to make sure I can’t be blamed for them not winning my seat, or UKIP because I think Conservative will win my seat and it pains me deeply to even consider voting for them. The socialist Scottish upbringing has a lot to answer for!

So why not Labour or LibDem? Well, it’s a long story. In 1997 Labour inherited one of the strongest economies in Europe and look at us now! Thirteen years later and we’re close to bankrupt. Gordon Brown regularly claims “global economy blah blah blah” yet how come we seem to have been hit the hardest of the major economies in Europe? How come it was our currency that was diving against both the Euro and the US Dollar? If it was such a global economy, why wasn’t everyone hit much the same in which case I wouldn’t have expected to see any significant changes in the exchange rates. At this point I have to admit that I’m really not that clued up on how all this finance stuff works but my point is really that, if there’s a global economic downturn and we’re hit harder than most other developed nations, then surely that would point to something in the way the country is being run being sub-optimal!

I read a number of interesting statistics the other day. Admittedly they were in The News Of The World so I’m not sure whether to believe them 100% or not, but they were very intriguing. The stats are related to spending on the NHS and education, both places where Labour claims they’ve increased spending “in real terms” by significant amounts. In Education we’re spending something like 3 times as much money now compared to when Labour took over government, yet there are still 250,000 children leaving primary education unable to read or write. In the NHS spending has increased significantly yet the rate of increase in the number of managerial roles is 3 times that of actual nursing roles. To me this all sounds like wasted money and it seems that a lot of the money used to cover these increases has been borrowed!

As for LibDem, well, as a number of people have pointed out, their manifesto and policies remain as those of a party who were not expecting to govern and therefore they could say what they like. Despite their claims that they’re the only party to publish figures to back up their budget claims, they still seem very naive. Their policies may sound nice, at least some of the ones they’ve mentioned in debates, but will they work? Other than the obvious policies which could lead to even futher loss of sovereignty, my main concern with the LibDems is that, despite so much compelling evidence coming to light recently questioning the anthopogenic origin of “global warming”, they still seem to be embracing AGW as fact in a big way. They have policies like extracting billions of pounds from the roads budget and investing it in public transport. Now there are 30million drivers in the UK who will be affected by this. We’re not talking about the cost of fuel here, we’re talking about cancelled road building projects, maintenance budgets slashed and so on. Those who live in little villages who are campaigning for bypasses will be stuffed; you won’t be getting one under a LibDem government. Furthermore their idea that they can make tax fairer seems to me to be rather naive. They think they can close loopholes to prevent the rich avoiding paying tax – yeah, right! Given their clear lack of experience of government, I can see that ending up in a right mess, similar to how the Labour government’s handling of IR35 has been.

In case you’re not aware, around 10 years ago the Labour government decided that they would review how contractors worked. The gist of it was that they decided that people who were the sole employee of their own company, working under contract for a client (perhaps through an agency), on the client’s premises and somewhat under the client’s guidance should be treated as an employee for tax purposes. The last bit is important. In most cases the client/agent would be invoiced by the worker’s company, and the payment would be made to the worker’s company. The worker would often be paid a nominal salary, but would be a shareholder in his/her company and the rest of the company’s income would be issued as dividends. So what is the advantage of that? Well essentially it reduces the amount of National Insurance the worker pays. The change meant that essentially all, give or take a little bit, of the company’s income was treated as salary. The irony is though that, prior to that the person’s company would be paying Corporation Tax and Employer’s National Insurance contributions as well as the (admittedly minimal) Employee’s National Insurance contributions. Not only that, unlike a real employee, the worker would miss out on any benefits offered by their client (i.e. they party they were being treated as an employee of for tax purposes) such as paid sick leave, paid holidays and so on. Even worse, when things start to go pear shaped for the client, it tends to be the contractors who get the boot first. So essentially you were treated as an employee but had none of the benefits. Intriguingly there were a number of small companies whose founders had started off in this way and could only have grown their company because of the way things worked prior to this being brought in. Shouldn’t a government be trying to help small businesses to grow rather than hindering them? Right at the start it was unclear what conditions had to be met for a contract to come under the IR35 rules; as far as I know, ten years on the situation is no clearer! Surely a fair tax system should be clear – I can’t see anything the LibDems propose providing any more clarlity than the IR35 legislation.

Intriguingly, despite their claims that they’re being more honest than everone else, LibDem still appear to be trying to pull the wool over our eyes. Take their position on airfare taxes…

Ensuring pollution is properly taxed by replacing the per-passenger Air Passenger Duty with a per-plane duty (PPD), ensuring that air freight is taxed for the fi rst time. We will also introduce an additional, higher rate of PPD on domestic flights if realistic alternative and less polluting travel is available.

So what they’re saying is that you’ll no longer have to buy flight tickets for, let’s say, £0.04 and pay £25 tax on it. Wahey – isn’t that great? Well, no. The money for the “per-plane duty (PPD)” has to come from somewhere, the airlines aren’t going to just pay for it out of their own pocket, so the tax will go on to the airfare. Of course that may make the cost of air travel clearer (as it is a bit of a pain at the moment seeing you’ve got cheap fares then having to work out the actual cost and seeing it’s not so cheap). But then won’t it make sense to tax air freight? Well no. Freight basically means “goods”. Many day to day provisions are carried by air so where does the money come from to pay for those taxes? Well it will come from the freight lines, who will add it to the cost of carriage to their customer who will in turn add it to the cost of the goods at the point of sale, i.e. you will pay more in the shop for goods carried by air than you do now.

One thing to consider though As I understand it, at the moment air travel isn’t subject to VAT however if that were to change would you prefer to pay VAT on the price of the ticket, or the price of the ticket including PPD. Certainly, from precedent with VAT on petrol, if VAT was introduced on air fares, you’d most likely pay VAT on top of the duty rather than before it.

Finally this seems to be based on the premise that air travel contributes to global warming; interesting then that the figures showed an increase in global temperature during the period immediately after 11th September 2001, when there were no flights for days – shouldn’t it have got cooler!

Still, it really doesn’t matter; LibDem are not going to win the election, the real issue is whether voting for them results in a hung parliament, which isn’t good for anyone.

So to sum it up, the major party I see as having the least wrong with them is Conservative. There are still a number of Conservative MPs who fought in Thatcher and Major’s cabinet so they have some experience to fall back on. Many people say “but look at what the tories did the last time”. What they seem to forget is the last time the tories were in power they were cleaning up the crap from the way Labour left it in 1979! The other thing I remember about the tories is that the last time they were in power (i.e. when Major won the election) there majority was so low that they really couldn’t get any stupid bills passed. That, to me, is an ideal situation and the closest thing to democracy that we’re ever likely to get in this country. It has to be Conservative though; I can’t face another term under those halfwits in the Labour party!

There you have it – I can’t wait to see what the outcome is!

As you may know, I’m in a band called Tamakaze. We’ve been together for about 2 years now and playing the odd gig around about. We’ve played in various towns and cities around the Worcestershire, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire area, and a couple of gig in Newport.

We generally try to achieve something a little bit different in what we do and, as far as I can tell, it’s not that easy to ‘pigeonhole’ us as being of a particular style. Sometimes this takes a lot of effort, and there are loads of ideas we’ve gone through and decided that they don’t really work so they get abandoned.

I know that there are probably loads of people out there that unfortunately don’t like what we do; we’re never going to please everyone but we hope that some people genuinely like the music we produce or at least appreciate what we’re trying to do.

Over the last couple of years we’ve generally found it not exactly easy to get gigs. As we play original music rather than covers that rules out quite a lot of places and, as I mentioned above, there are probably some people who just don’t like what we do!

Speaking personally though, and not on behalf of my bandmates, what really frustrates me is that I see and hear comments about how brilliant some other bands are, or particular songs they’ve done that have been played on the radio, and keep hearing about the gigs they’re getting.

To my ears though many of these bands are just trotting out the same old musical styles that have been done to death over the last 40 years or so, namely classic and prog rock.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who thinks that way; some time ago we had a comment after one of our gigs. We’d played at the same show with two other bands, one classic rock, and one heavy metal. The person who said it shall remain nameless obviously, but the gist of it was that he said we were the only band who played that night that was doing anything different whereas he couldn’t really see any difference between the other two bands and the hundreds of others in the area doing the same sort of thing. That one comment has really had an impact on me and it’s the thought that there are others out there who think the same thing that really helps to keep me motivated.

I wouldn’t want anyone to think for a minute that I was criticising anyone’s musicianship; some of these guys have superb musical skills and really know what they’re doing on their instruments but I am, of course, jealous of the success they’re having at getting gigs.

‘Original’ though can be defined as “new; fresh; inventive; novel”. I believe we’re an originals band – at least we try to be.

Anyone who’s been my ‘friend’ on Facebook for a while may have seen my almost annual rant about the X Factor. Right since it began I’ve seen it as an overblown karaoke competition, with the winners being generally fairly average (at best) performers whose success relies on the massive hype of the X Factor, and the huge financial backing of SyCo/Sony Music. Not only that, but it’s always struck me as a cynical attempt by Simon Cowell to control who gets to number 1 at Christmas time in the UK.

It therefore struck me as one of the most hypocritical things I’ve ever heard in my life to hear Cowell describe Jon and Tracy Morten’s Facebook campaign (to get Rage Against The Machine’s “Killing In The Name” to number 1 instead) as “quite a cynical campaign geared at me which is actually going to spoil the party for these three [X Factor finalists].” I was totally speechless for days! What an idiot that guy is.

Not only that, his fellow X Factor judge Louis Walsh was quoted in the Irish Times as being even more idiotic saying “this is taking the fun out of the race for Christmas number one”! For god’s sake, The X Factor over the last 5 years has taken every ounce of fun and excitement out of the Christmas number one race; this campaign has, in fact, put all the fun and excitement back in!

What Jon and Tracy Morten, and all the real music fans on Facebook, have done is quite an achievement and they should all be congratulated on it. I’m aware that there was a similar campaign last year but, for some reason, it didn’t take off like this year’s. I have no idea why that was, perhaps it was due to the overriding mediocrity in this year’s X Factor contestants, or perhaps the number of people who’d just had enough had reached a critical mass. Perhaps though, it was just the inspired choice of a Rage Against The Machine track that fitted so well with the “Rage Against The X Factor” motto chosen.

Whatever it was, I hope that it makes a difference and that it can be followed up with next year.

I’ve only really cottoned on to RATM over the last few months, primarily due to Colin Murray playing “Renegades of Funk” late one Friday night but I’ve now realised that, while I don’t like everything they’ve done, some of their work strikes of utter brilliance. However I can easily see why anyone who’s what I’d call a “passive listener”, that is, someone for whom music is just a distraction, not someone who really gets engaged in the music, finds “Killing In The Name” to be much like noise. It’s a track that demands concentration to be enjoyed. Personally I love it, it has a fantastic groove and I don’t need to mention the message in the lyrics. I’m pleased that it has found a wider audience, even if many of them aren’t interested, but more than that I’m so incredibly pleased that it has broken the stranglehold that the crap coming from the X Factor has held over the Christmas number 1. I’ve also been particularly impressed with the way RATM themselves have taken the whole situation.

Ultimately though, I am so, so glad that the X Factor boat has been rocked, ever so slightly. Perhaps this is the event that will make people wake up and see the X Factor in the same way as I’ve always seen it; a glorified karaoke competition, with winners who are incapable of sustaining a career any longer than the time it takes for Cowell and his cohorts to get bored with them and on to the next year’s event! Perhaps this will, in its small way, contribute to the downfall of this sort of crappy reality TV show, I certainly hope so; I’m sick and tired of nearly every TV program I see asking for people to phone in and vote for some numpty or another. Isn’t it time the TV stations got back to providing real, educational entertainment rather than just trying to make a fast buck from premium rate phone lines!

As one final note though, I have to give masses of kudos to Will Young . The winner of the inaugural Pop Idol competition, basically the forerunner of The X Factor, has gone on to massive critical and commercial success, primarily due to his innate talent, his personality and his choice not to continue being a pawn in a game played by people like Simon Cowell and so on. He’s shown what’s needed to succeed from that sort of start, and it clearly takes a lot more than just being able to hold a tune that someone else wrote!

I’ve just installed Wordbook by Robert Tsai, so thought I’d see how it goes!

Sometimes I wonder at the stupidity of people. In this case it’s in relation to eBay. I’ve been looking for a Behringer FBQ1502, 15 band graphic equaliser with feedback detection. What with the UK <> EU exchange rate fluctuations recently, the prices have gone up a bit, but quite a few have gone on eBay for around £35 recently.

This morning though, one I was watching, went for £75.50 with £10 postage, so £85.50. It was a used item from a private seller with no returns listed (and also not subject to the Distance Selling Regulations, which allow you to change your mind within 7 days).

Now two things strike me as odd on this.

First of all, even on eBay you can get a better deal on a new one of these. Just Add Music, the eBay arm of Blue Aran are currently selling these for £76.99 with £6.90 postage, so a grand total of £83.89, £1.61 less that the bidder paid for the used one.

Not only that, if you go to the Blue Aran website today, they’re on sale at £65.11 with £5.88 delivery, a grand total of £70.99, a full £14.51 less than the used version.

Funnily enough this happened before when I was watching something. It was an effects pedal coming to the end of production. A used one went on eBay for £63 on the same day it was in a half price sale at ~£32 for a brand new one in an online shop.

So, are people really so stupid that they assume they’ll get a bargain on eBay? Or is there more to it?

Once upon a time I rode a motorbike (a Honda CBR600) all the way from Southampton to Portsmouth without any gloves on. It was a nice summer day in 1993, and I only had winter gloves then, and all that happened was my hands got a little sunburnt.

I have, since then, realised what a very stupid thing that was to do.

As far as I can see, when I fall over, the first thing I do to save myself is to put my hands out to reduce the impact of the fall. I’m not sure if this would be the first thing I did if I fell off a motorbike, but I’m pretty sure it would be one of the first things! I dread to think what would happen to my hands if I did that at a reasonable speed; I’m pretty sure they’d be torn to shreds!

So what’s the big deal?

Well, as you know, I’m a software engineer. That means that I do lots of typing with these things on the ends of my hands called fingers. If I were to lose the use of those because of accident damage, I wouldn’t be able to do my job. Worse than that, what job would I be able to do?

Whatever it was, it would have to be one that didn’t involve the use of my hands, but I can’t really think of many jobs where that’s the case.

Not only that, but my favourite sport to play is volleyball which, as you’ve guessed, involves a lot of use of hands so, if I lost the use of them, not only would I not be able to work, I wouldn’t be able to play the sport I most enjoy.

All in all, it would cause me all sorts of problems if my fingers and hands didn’t work, so I always wear gloves when riding now. They might not provide absolute protection, but they will certainly go a long way (if I were to fall off which, touch wood, I won’t!) to protecting my career and my future.

So the moral of the story is, if you ride a motorbike (or any powered two wheeler) wear gloves!

My first rant on #include in C++. I”m sure there’ll be more but let’s just start with this one…

#include "level1/level2/level3/level4/filename.h

What are we trying to do here? Let’s say filename.h includes something like:

class MyClass
{
public:
   int x;
   int y;
   void DoSomething();
};

Clearly then, what we are trying to do is make the code we’re currently writing or editing have access to the details of the class MyClass.

So why can’t we just say that? Well, in a way we can. If we called the file MyClass.h instead of filename.h then we could potentially have:

#include "MyClass.h"

as long as we’ve set up our compiler’s include path correctly. So what’s the problem?

Well, it’s not really the same thing is it? Unfortunately C++ is designed to use a very old style technique where the source file is king. This is something it inherited from C but that was never really abstracted out. As Ian Joyner puts it in his C++ Critique:

“The programmer must also use #includes to manually import class headers. #include is an old and unsophisticated mechanism to provide modularity. #include is a weak form of inheritance and import. C++ still uses this 30 year old technique for modularisation, while other languages have adopted more sophisticated approaches, for example, Pascal with Units, Modula with modules, Ada with packages. In Eiffel the unit of modularisation is the class itself, and includes are handled automatically. The OOP class is a more sophisticated way to modularise programs.”

The crux of it is that we have here a system where source code effectively defines what other source code is included in a build of a system. A more modular approach is that the source code requests a particular module and we use the build system to define where that module comes from. My problem with C++ is clearly that, if I wanted to move an include file from one place to another then not only would I need to update the build system (i.e. potentially change include paths on my compiler settings) but, in the example above, I would also have to change source code that should not need to be changed!

In essence C++ pollutes the source code with file structure implementation dependencies that should be kept for the build system.

This is truly a poor way to manage code structure.

Welcome to my blog.  I thought I’d use this as a place to get things off my chest, if anyone cares to listen. This should be an interesting excursion through the way my mind works and you’re welcome to tag along.

Have a nice day!