Entries for September 2006

September 6, 2006 at 2:38PM Questions for politicians

Damien’s looking for questions for politicians who stop at your door. A while back, I posted a few potential ones up in a comment. Here they are:

Ireland has become somewhat overdependent on foreign companies. What does your party intend to do to encourage native entrepreneurship?
What’s your party’s position on ministerial responsibility?
If your party came to power, what would it do to roll back laws brought in by Michael McDowell which have eroded our personal liberties? (Obviously, you don’t want to ask a PD this question.)
What’s your party’s position on automatic registration of voters at the age of 18?
What does your party intend on doing to curb the expansion of Dublin at the expense of the rest of the country, especially the counties outside of Leinster?
It’s not possible for we as taxpayers to read many of the government reports, &c., that we’ve already paid for online. The report of the Barr Tribunal is an example here: to read it you have to go to the Government Publications Office and purchase a copy; it can’t be read online. What does your party intend to do to remedy this situation?
ComReg has repeatedly displayed a lack of courage when dealing with eircom’s lack of progress when it comes to opening up to competition, especially in regards to broadband. Is your party going to get ComReg to do their job, and if so, what are you going to do?
There?s a democratic deficit in local government in this country, with town, city, borough, and county councils actings as little more than maintenance bodies lacking any real powers to deal with local issues and local circumstances. Does your party intend on promoting real decentralisation of power from central government to local government? And if so, how?
Leading on from the previous question, does your party intend on turning the position of County Manger from an appointed position into an elected position?
What does your party intend on doing to promote gaelscoileanna?
What other reforms do you intend on bringing in concerning how the Irish language is taught? For instance, to you intend on first promoting oral fluency before written fluency? Currently the opposite is the case, with written fluency and learning-by-rote being promoted before oral fluency.
Concerning the health service, what are your thoughts on why a country like Ireland, which spends quite a bit per head of population on health, has a far worse service than the likes of France, which spend comparatively less and yet provides a cheaper and more efficient service?
Currently it’s possible for somebody to get a moderate payrise at work and end up poorer due to the way our tax and benefit system works? What do your party intend on doing to remedy this situation?
Leading on from the last question, what does your party intend on doing to simplify and unify the tax and benefit system?
We currently have plentiful natural resources off our coasts in terms of natural gas, &c., however the nation benefits little from the exploitation of these resources, as shown by our reliance on oil and the recent substantial rise in Bord Gais rates, which is being blamed on rising prices abroad. What does your party intend to do so as these resources are used to benefit the Irish economy and reduce our reliance on foreign sources of energy?
Leading on from the last question, one of those resources is wind power. What does your party intend on doing to promote the construction of offshore wind farms?

Here’s another few:

There are currently no motorways, no rail service, and very little in the way of dual carriageways along the west coast from Sligo to Cork. Considering that half of the country’s cities are situated there and other major urban centres such as Ennis, Sligo, Letterkenny, and Castlebar, what does your party intend on doing about this?
The south coast is in an equally pitiful state. There is, after all, no motorway between our capital and second city, which makes travelling between them more difficult and time consuming than it ought to be. Does your party have any plans to remedy this?
Cork’s Kent station has been neglected for quite some time, leaving it in a disgraceful state. Cork itself could also do with having its old light rail system brought back and expanded outwards into its satallite towns. What’s your party’s policy on this.
Which do you favour: the expansion of the existing surface Luas system, or instead expanding Dublin’s light rail system using an underground metro system?
What is your party doing to make sure I don’t have to move out of the North West to get work?
Is your party going to abolish private taxation via tolls on the M50?
A major part of the problem with madatory closing times is that it causes a surge of drunk people onto the streets at the same time. This is a recipe for violence, and shifting closing times around does nothing to help it. Does your party intend on scrapping mandatory pub closing time and instead put the decision back in the hands of publicans? How soon will you do something?

I’ll add more as I come up with them. If Damien was to choose a few and post them up, it’s all good. There’s one question I haven’t added here that I intend on writing up as a post. I sketched it out Saturday evening at EP, and just need to edit it first.

September 7, 2006 at 9:10PM TCAL’s Danger, revealed!

I can exclusively reveal that I met TCAL’s Danger at Electric Picnic and that he is, in fact, a carousel horse!

Who’da thunk it, eh?

And on that note, my Electric Picnic photos are up on Flickr.

September 10, 2006 at 12:59AM A rough distribution concordance

This is for my own use. It’s not meant to be perfect, just something to help me understand continuous probability distributions a little better.

Discrete	Continuous
Binomial	Normal
Poisson	Gamma/Erlang

September 11, 2006 at 3:51AM Phlegm... er... sucks

In case anybody’s been wondering, I’m a wee bit sick right now. I’ve barely been near the computer since the seventh. I think I might have picked something up at Electric Picnic (some tens of thousands of people + dodgy chemical toilets = a recipe for getting something nasty). I’m heading to the doctor on Tuesday and I expect a course of antibiotics will clear up whatever I have seeing as I’m certain it’s bacterial rather than viral.

And if you’re wondering why I’m posting this so late, it’s because I really, really can’t get any sleep. Slight case of night sweats, sore lungs, and a very raw throat.

Update (Tuesday): Yup, went to the doctor. He says I’ve a bad chest infection and has put me on a course of antibiotics for the next while. Hrumph.

September 14, 2006 at 2:56AM How I kill spam here

Still phlegmmy and stuff, so here’s a post I wrote ages ago and never bothered putting online. My brain’s still too addled to do anything truly productive. Sorry!

I thought I’d might as well mention how I get rid of comment spam on this site. The main point behind it is to show why you should always give your real email address when you make comments here. After all, I’m not the sort of scumbag who’d sell it on to some asshole spammer.

I keep things pretty low-tech. I’ve looked at the kind of spam I’ve gotten in the past and the vast majority of it can be caught simply by analysing the comment body and commenter homepage for certain keywords. The rest is ok for weeding by hand.

First of all, I’ve a table called moderated. This stores a list of email addresses I’ve moderated positively or negatively. If your email address is in this table and I’ve positively moderated it, you bypass any further analysis of your comment. So far I haven’t had to negatively moderate against anyone. Negative moderation using this table is a rather weak mechanism and I expect to kill it off some time soon; it’s more useful for allowing commenters who’ve given proper comments through straight away without any extra work.

Next, it does keyword filtering. The piece of SQL I use is this:

DELETE
FROM   comments
WHERE  date_posted > DATE_SUB(NOW(), INTERVAL 1 DAY)
  AND  email NOT IN (SELECT email FROM moderated WHERE banned = 'No')
  AND (body LIKE '%xanax%'
  OR   body LIKE '%cialis%'
  OR   body LIKE '%tramadol%'
  OR   body LIKE '%phentermine%'
  OR   body LIKE '%viagra%'
  OR   body LIKE '%carisoprodol%'
  OR   body LIKE '%wood blinds%'
  OR   body LIKE '%adipex%'
  OR   body LIKE '%penis enlargement%'
  OR   body LIKE '%horse penetration%'
  OR   body LIKE '%kournikova gallery%'
  OR   body LIKE '%austin waterproof%'
  OR   body LIKE '%clindamycin%'
  OR   body LIKE '%lisinopril%'
  OR   body LIKE '%actonel%'
  OR   body LIKE '%bbw porn%'
  OR   homepage LIKE '%poker%'
  OR   homepage LIKE '%casino%'
  OR   homepage LIKE '%gambling%'
  OR   homepage LIKE '%roulette%'
  OR   homepage LIKE '%blackjack%'
  OR   homepage LIKE '%earrings%');

Simplistic, I know, but it gets rid of an awful lot of junk. Sure, it might I get a couple of false positives first, but before I do the delete, I copy them to the spam table, which I periodically check by hand. The above query is built dynamically from a keywords list and executes once every six hours. I may lower this to running every three hours.

The rest I periodically moderate by hand. If a commenter gives what looks like a dud email address--your.mother@altavista.com and me@nowhere.com come to mind--I delete the contents of the email field. I’d really prefer commenters don’t give an email address rather than giving me a dud one because duds just clog up the moderated table with rubbish, and that’s just not cool.

Finally, I check if there’re any new commenters who’ve submitted ham rather than spam. Those have their email addresses copied to the moderated table so their later comments can escape moderation.

Now, the moderated table had one last purpose: to determine whether, when displayed, any links in the comments get a rel=”nofollow” or not. If you’re not in moderated or you’ve supplied no email address, no Googlejuice for you.

Update (2008-04-23): It’s been a long time coming, but any POST requests with a dodgy or non-existent Referer header will get binned too.

September 18, 2006 at 3:48PM Feeling better

I think I’m mostly over the chest infection. I’m still feeling a bit drowsy, but I’d say that’ll be gone by the end of the day.

I’ve checked my mail and I’ve an awful lot to catch up on...

Oh, and is there anybody in Cork willing to put up with me for a couple of nights on Friday 29th and Saturday 30th? I want to head to BarCamp Ireland, and I need somewhere to stay between bouts of yakking about technology and drinking.

September 25, 2006 at 7:48PM What the government really ought to do about Local Loop Unbundling

The Irish government needs to take a leaf out of Spain’s book. Back in 1997, the Spanish government started down the road of telecoms market deregulation, part of which involved privatising Telefonica, the then state-owned telecoms company. Much like eircom here, Telefonica abused its position as the dominant market player.

Today, Telefonica, like eircom, is still by far the dominant operator in its market. But Spain, unlike Ireland, enjoys a pretty competitive broadband market. Why is that? Here’s why:

Spain’s regulatory body (the CMT), in agreement with the EU mandate to provide access to the “last mile”, forced Telefonica to start the unbundling process in 2001, with the first local loops in place at the end of that year. Telefonica was not very collaborative at first on the co-location process, and was fined twice by the CMT for not allowing effective competition on the local loop. The CMT has intervened and has facilitated co-location. It has set as well a precise description of the service and a price list for Telefonica’s co-location access services. At year end 2002, three fourths of the sites were open for co-location.

The Spanish government ended up imposed a rising daily fine to force Telefonica to co-operate. The result? In a year, LLU was virtually complete, making it one of the fastest unbundlings in Europe. Money talks, and as a business, a telecom operator is there to make money. Anything that impedes that goal has to be routed around. In Telefonica’s case, that was a prohibitive fine that could only be avoided by completing LLU.

So, what are the Irish government and communications poodle doing? Nothing. Noel Dempsey can say we’ve “smashed” the broadband target he set, but frankly, you can achieve anything if you set your goals low enough. Cop on, Noel, and do something right.

Note for people people coming here from The Inquirer

Much as I’d like to say that you can treat this article as authoritative, don’t. It’s correct, as you’ll see if you look up the details, but do that before accepting everything here. Anyway, this article is a comparison between LLU in Ireland and Spain, and has nothing really to do with Argentina.

September 29, 2006 at 2:50AM Off to BarCamp Ireland tomorrow

BarCamp Ireland is on Saturday, so I’m heading down to Cork to meet up with Pete tomorrow. Living on the other side of the country and lacking any other way to get down there besides the bus (which takes almost seven hours, as I constantly whine), I have to go down the day before and crash on his sofa.

Should be lots of fun!

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