God knows how the OBR does their sums, but by my research the public sector in the UK employs about 6,000,000 people, the annual staff turnover is 12.6%. So every year 756,000 people leave the public sector. Just by not replacing folk you're going to lose around 3,000,000 folk over six years, without mass redundancies.
Just by not replacing people you could account for the OBR figure in less than a year.
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This would be a database with a difference, it would include details of the police officers involved, their badge numbers and photo.
I understand the Association Chief Police Officers believe that with budget cuts they'll have to reduce the numbers of police officers. If the police are devoting time to stopping people who aren't breaking the law then clearly there's room for cuts, and we can help identify the officers who can go.
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To sum up, some people are effectively being given a pre-tax income of £77,000 for doing nothing, and people far poorer than that are paying for it through taxation. The chancellor claims this is unfair and you disagree. Right.The case point being that housing benefit is paid based on average rents in each area, so in posh Camden unemployed folk, folk on low income, foreigners and the incapacitated can claim £1000 a week or so, paid for out of the tax that everyone else has to pay.
So I was rather surprised this morning to read on the BBC that the government were acting on my suggestion.On the surface, this idea is not bad in itself. Many people do move to wherever a job takes them. But as Mr Balls says, the coalition has already cut millions of pounds from funding for the jobless. He is absolutely right to accuse the Tories and the Liberal Democrats of taking money away from the poorer regions whose economies need regeneration; a move which will, in turn, only serve to slow the overall economic recovery, if not take Britain back in recession.
By encouraging people to move to more prosperous areas where the jobs are more likely to be, that is exactly what the Conservative-Liberal coalition are doing.
GLASGOW INDIE EYESPY: THE MOVIE
01 Int: 13th Note basement, Glasgow
Hector Collectors on stage (drummer from Camera Obscura, bass player from Dananananaykroyd, guitarist from Just Joans)
Adam Smith meets 'Craig' as the first person to come to a show who isn't a school friend or family, Craig downloaded a song from the internet (AudioGalaxy) and thought he'd come down, in effect, their first fan.
video link
02 Int: Cottiers Theatre
Camera Obscura gig, 'Craig' notices people in crowd from Hector Collectors. Also Bowlie internet messageboard people
video link
03 Int: Strathclyde university students Union, Glasgow
Plimptons at the games room bar, Adam and Martin recruit 'Craig' as their manager, all parties are pretty clueless as to what this involves
04 Int: Woodside Social Club, Glasgow
At National Pop Winchester League Club night, Gav from Camera Obscura and The Hector Collectors plays the first Plimptons single, crowd includes Franz Ferdinand's Alex Kapranos who starts tapping his foot, and Belle and Sebastian.
04.1 Int: Craig's bedroom
After spending days hunched over his computer rigging a vote on the BBC website The Plimptons single wins record of the week or something, beating another called Glasvegas who later go on to have a number one album.
video link
05 Int: Starka, Motherwell
Plimptons album launch, They sell lots of copies to friends and family. MJ Hibbett is the support act, Adam introduces him to 'Craig'
06 Int: Cavern, Liverpool
The Cardiff Loves are on stage. 'Craig' has driven down to see them, as Simon Love introduces the band and something about a Peel session, 'Craig' gives them the evils.
07 Int: Nice n Sleazy, Glasgow
'Craig' takes to the stage at the packed acoustic open mic night, straps on the guitar, tries to play one of his own compositions and shits a brick
08 Int: Pleasure Unit, London
Gresham Flyers play the Bowlie Alldayer, 'Craig' has used his well leet internet powers to wrangle himself a slot at the Bowlie internet messageboard's all day gig thing. 'Craig' takes to the stage, launches into one of his own composition, goes down like a turd birthday cake
09 Int: 'Craig's bedroom
Craig hunched over his computer and printer, churning out copies of the Glasgow Indie Eyespy fanzine (Glasgow Indie Eyespy was a celebrity and scenester spotting game, you got points depending on who you'd scene)
10 Ext: Botanic Gardens
Big Belle and Sebastian gig, with people in the crowd playing Glasgow Indie Eye Spy
video link video link
11 Int: Woodside Social Club
Bowlie takes over, people still playing Glasgow Indie Eyespy
12 Int: Students union, Edinburgh
Data Panik on stage, Plimps back stage, Adam introduces Craig to Dave JJoans, who hands over demo tape
13 Ext: Motorway - night
Craig driving,pulls over to listen to JJoans demo
14 Int: Tchai Ovna, Glasgow
JJoans album launch gig, Craig selling caseloads of the album
video link
15 Int: 13th Note
A promoter (JohnDMc) offers Plimps and Craig the Woodside for a night
16 Ext: Glasgow
Putting up posters all over town for Plimptons club night
17 Int: Woodside Social Club
MJ Hibbett on stage, three people in the crowd, 'Craig' stood at door looking sheepish
18 Int: 13th Note basement
The London Loves on stage (Pnos no longer in the band), Plimps, JJoanses and 'Craig' in crowd
19 Int: 'Craig's Bedroom
Montage of Last Night From Glasgow webcasts with various bands playing in 'Craig's bedroom
video link
20 Ext: Glasgow
Craig and bands getting drunk round town during the day
21 Int: Cottiers - night
Band formerly from Last Night From Glasgow now on stage.
22 Int: 'Craig's bedroom - night
Something on computer screen, 'Craig' necking bottle of vodka
23 Ext: motorway - day
'Craig' driving, bottle of vodka by his side
video link
24 Ext: Ditch by motorway - day
'Craig' wakes up in drivers seat, car has drifted off road
25 Ext: Buffalo Bar, London - evening
People queuing up, 'Craig' drives past
27 Int: Buffalo Bar
The London Loves on stage, people in crowd, 'Craig' stood at back, weeping
video link
I ordered Ruby on Rails for Dummies, and waited patiently. Fate smiled on me and allowed me to have plenty of free time to get my teeth into it and so this morning I set forth on what I hoped would be an exciting new adventure in programming.At Ken Chu's birthday drinking and football watching session at a pub in Finsbury, at some point in the afternoon I found myself sat at a table in the middle of a busy drinking hall, strangers bustling all around. The table housed some of Ken's received gifts, pool cues and cards. There was only me and another friend of Ken's left at the table, other folk had wandered off to the beer garden or headed home.
The other chap mentioned that he wished to leave, so it wold just be up to me to guard the table, to save it for the return of the party, but before he headed home he would seek out the folk in the beer garden.
For a few minutes I was alone, guarding treasure, fending off advances. "Is there anyone sitting here?", "sorry... folk in the beer garden... Cigarettes... Will be back soon..." Sympathetic nods followed by suspicious glares.
The other chap returned and said he was leaving, just as another mob of people looking for seats appeared.
"What the fuck am I supposed to do?" I asked, standing and leaning across at him.
One of the crowd saw me and said it was okay, they were friends of Ken, we'd met an hour or so ago.
I seated myself and looked sheeping.
I felt a little sick, the bubbling bile of rage that prompted me to ask "What the fuck am I supposed to do?" it wasn't a pretty thing, I am a dispicable and cowardly person.
There rest of the afternoon and evening passed without incident.
Anyhoo, today I had another "what the fuck am I supposed to do?" Incident. At my temp job a few people are on holiday, others work in several different offices. There were only two of us in this morning, the guy who knows the job and me. He was called up to go out to the other office, leaving just me.
After a few moments of twiddling my thumbs checking there was no paperwork or filing to do, I got up for a wander and discovered to my terror, that not only was I the only person in the office, I was the only person on site.
"What the fuck am I supposed to do?"
I suppressed the bile and the outrage of being left in such a position this time.
And what I did was this:-
*Planned out a strategy game in perl on paper
*Used my digital camera to shoot a short post-apocalyptic horror movie set in a construction depot and portacabin office complex
*Wrote the narative intro for the aforementioned perl game
*Made a stop-motion animation of the stuff on my desk coming alive and taking over
Not quite what I was supposed to do I guess, but kind of productive.
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So when the government spends £1,000,000, it takes about 94 people working for a year.
Thrilling stuff, I'm sure you agree.
sub enteringTransactions {
$transaction_date = "01/01/2000";
$transaction_account = "dummy";
$transaction_value = "9999";
$transaction_payee = "dummy";
$transaction_category = "dummy";
$notes = "dummy dummy";
&bar;
print " Entering transactions\n";
&bar;
print "Please enter the date of the transaction dd/mm/yyyy:- ";
chomp($trans_date =);
@transaction_date = split /\//, $trans_date;
$trans_day = $transaction_date[0]*1;
$trans_month = $transaction_date[1]*1;
$trans_year = $transaction_date[2]*1;
$ninday = $trans_day+($trans_month*31)+($trans_year*12*31);
print "Please enter account name (cash, hsbc or credit):- ";
chomp($transaction_account =);
print "Please enter value (xx.xx):- ";
chomp($transaction_value =);
print "Please enter payee:- ";
chomp($transaction_payee =);
print "Please enter category:- ";
chomp($transaction_category =);
print "$trans_day/$trans_month/$trans_year\t$transaction_account\t$transaction_value\t$transaction_payee\t$transaction_category\n";
$entry_time = time;
my $filename = "chriscounts.poo";
open LOG, ">>", $filename or die "Can't open '$filename': $!";
print LOG "$entry_time, $trans_day, $trans_month, $trans_year, $ninday, $transaction_account, $transaction_value, $transaction_category, $transaction_payee, $notes\n";
close LOG;
print "Transaction logged\n"};
However, understand that, via Raedwald, Glasgow City Council needed to make 4,000 people redundant, so they asked for volunteers and got 3,000 folk taking up the offer.
Is this a symptom of a workforce who hates their job, or people confident they can find work elsewhere, or who have enough in savings to take time out from paid employment?
If its highly skilled folk, then surely this takes skills away from the council, leaving only the incompetant people left to provide council services, so you get a lower quality of service. On the other hand, in the great scheme of the enconomy, the highly skilled folk will find new jobs quickly so them and the incompetent folk still get paid, still spend their wages and keep the economy ticking over. Whilst if it was the incompetents who got redundancy and were unable to find new employment, then they'd just be a drain on the economy.
This is still too general, you don't want to lose an average number of people from across your entire council sector, you just want to lose people from the services that the council are crap at or shouldn't be providing. Like parking inspectors or diversity co-ordinators, whilst keeping social workers and garbage collectors. But offered the chance of voluntary redundancy, its going to be the folk in non-jobs who grasp most tightly at job security, and the folk with the most valuable skills who jump ship.
Its a difficult one, how you prioritise lowering the cost of local councils and maintaining the quality of service.
It would be interesting to see, in Glasgow, the spread of redundancy volunteers by department, just as a sign self-confidence and skills.
Anyhoo, back to double-dip recessions, if everyone, in any sector was offered voluntary redundancy, would this inherently lead to a recession, or by making the labour market more liquid, would it speed up the recovery?
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Sure, it'll be a mammoth task, but I can easily break it down into bitesize chunks. Thusly:-
And then a neat menu thing.
I shalled call it NinAcounts or maybe NinAccounts.
Anyhoo, I started ploughing through last night, aned have gotten the log file business sorted. I'm just working on some data sanitising routines.
What I'm a little stuck on is where I get user input for the transaction date. I can easily chop up dd/mm/yy, dd-mm-yy or dd/mm/yyyy into the constituent $day, $month and $year scalars or a neat @date array, but to then convert this into a single unixtime number its not working proper.
I want to be able to convert from human dates into unixtime and back again dead easily, but it no working...
Any ideas?
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At home I currently have no broadband internet, I can only survive by going to a nearby friend's flat and using their wifi. If only there were a way to boost my friend's wifi, so I could use it from the other end of the corridor. At Best Buy I put this problem to their Geek Squad and as I'd previously predicted they sucked their teeth and said no.It amazes me that any shop anywhere manages to sell Loewe tvs.
At Best Buy they had several demonstration rooms for hi-fi, high end audio and home cinema.
A few times when I was young my pa took me to hi-fi shops, they were quiet, dusty places, lots of wood panelled speakers and turntables decked in smoked perspex. People studying specifications and quietly asking attendants if they could listen to certain systems.
When I worked at Linn Products and Roksan Audio, again, listening to things was a quiet and patient experience, setting up the system, listening to a piece of music, adjusting or changing the system, then listening again, comparing contrasting, adjusting and deciding.
Not so at Best Buy, demonstration rooms blasting out blockbuster movies, endless arrays of speakers blaring out whatever kids listen to these days.
My ears aren't delicate flowered but I couldn't bear to stand in the demoroom for more than a few seconds before retiring. It was just too stressful and unrelaxing.
Is a fight scene from Transformers 2 really the best thing for demonstration surround sound, or is it just designed to bewilder and confuse customers so they buy any old crap and escape as quickly as possible?
One of the demonstration room was kitted out with the walls decked with every single speaker they sold. Do you know how speakers work? They have a cone that moves in and out, to reproduce sound, how the cone moves is precisely controlled by the amplifier/ preamp playing whatever mp3/CD/record you're listening to. The waves of sound pressure come from the speaker, bouncing off walls and the floor and ceiling to varying degrees until they reach your ears. This is something people rarely need to consider, except if you work testing high end audio or if you are about to spend a lot of money on speakers. By a lot of money, I mean anything more than what you earn in a week.
Anyhoo, these waves of sound pressure will bounce off smooth surfaces and get absorbed by soft or furry surfaces, like carpets, curtains and sofas. Try listening to music with they curtains in your room open or closed, the music will sound different. Try standing in the corner and speaking and then moving into the middle of the room and doing the same, you'll sound very different. Imagine if the walls moved freely, this is essentially what happens if you have loads of speakers in one room and only listen to two at a time.
For each speaker for any room there will be a sweet setup, the distance its positioned from the walls, the angle it's toed in at, the distance it is from its partners.
In Best Buy you can't listen to any speakers or any sound system and make an accurate judgement about which sound better than others. No matter how much money you throw at them when you get those speakers home they're going to sound completely different to how they did at the store.
They may very likely sound better than they did in the store, they couldn't sound much worse. Best Buy's setup seems design to get the worst performance out speakers on the home cinema side of the store.
I might have got the wrong end of the stick with the speaker, mind, that in the demonstration room with hundreds decked out on the walls, you're not supposed to listen to them, and its merely just to see what they looked like. If that's the case then I apologise for the ranting of the previous few paragraphs.
Oddly though, on the other side of the building they get it right. In the games console demonstration room, the speakers are set up perfectly, the screen is set up great. They're doing it right. Pick any game you want to play, and you can have a go in the best gaming, video and audio environment I've seen in a long while.
It only half makes sense. In the gaming room, they're doing it right, but not trying to sell speakers or tvs, and in the home cinema/audio room, where they are trying to sell hardware, they're doing it wrong.
I fear there's nothing I can do to help them.
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#!/usr/bin/perl
# Program to
# open shagtimes
# provide a word count
# count unique words
# provide top ten most popular words
# provide all single occurance words
# calculate average word length
# find longest word
use Text::Wrap;
sub hashValueDescendingNum {
$occurance_list{$b} <=> $occurance_list{$a};
}
# Opening Shag Times and processing it a bit
$filename = "shagtimes.txt";
open BOOK, "<", $filename or die "Can't open '$filename': $!"; my @book =;
close BOOK;
foreach $book (@book) {
$allbook .= $book;
$allbook .= " "};
$allbook = lc"$allbook";
# $allbook is a long string of Shag Times
# Code to remove full stops and commas and stuff
$regexp = '[\W]' ;
@book = split /\s+/, $allbook;
foreach $book (@book) {
$book =~ s/$regexp//g };
print "\n=======================================\n";
# Doing the word count
foreach $book (@book) {
$wordcount += 1 };
print "The document contains $wordcount words in total\n";
print "=======================================\n";
# Doing the unique count
foreach $book (@book) {
$was_this_in_uniques = "no";
foreach $uniques ( @uniques ) {
if ($book eq $uniques){
$was_this_in_uniques = "yes"}};
if ($was_this_in_uniques eq "no") {
push @uniques, $book}};
foreach $uniques (@uniques) {
$uniquecount += 1 };
print "The document contains $uniquecount unique words\n";
print "=======================================\n";
# Finding top ten popular words
print "The top ten most used words:-\n";
foreach $uniques ( @uniques ) {
$was_this_in_book = "no";
foreach $book ( @book ) {
if ($uniques eq $book) {
$occurances += 1}};
$occurance_list{$uniques} = $occurances;
$occurances = 0 };
foreach $key (sort hashValueDescendingNum (keys(%occurance_list))) {
push @ranked_occurances, "$key \($occurance_list{$key}\)"};
foreach (0..9) {
print "$ranked_occurances[$_]\n"};
print "=======================================\n";
# Finding single use words
print "Words that were used only once:-\n";
foreach $ranked_occurances ( @ranked_occurances ) {
$_ = $ranked_occurances;
if (/\(1\)/) {
s/\s\(1\)//;
push @singles, ("$_");
$single_use_count += 1}};
@singles = sort @singles;
foreach $singles ( @singles ) {
$single_paragraph .= "$singles, "};
print wrap("", "", "$single_paragraph\n");
print "=======================================\n";
print "A total of $single_use_count words were used only once\n";
print "=======================================\n";
# Finding average word length
foreach $book (@book) {
$chartotal += length($book) };
$avechar = $chartotal/$wordcount;
my $printy_avechar = sprintf "%.3f", $avechar;
print "The average word length was $printy_avechar letters long\n";
print "=======================================\n";
# Finding longest word
foreach $uniques ( @uniques ) {
if (length($uniques) > $longlength) {
$longlength = length($uniques)}};
print "The longest word was $longlength letters long\n";
print "These words were that long:-\n";
foreach $uniques ( @uniques ) {
if (length($uniques) == $longlength) {
print "$uniques\n"}};
print "=======================================\n";
1,612 Absolute Unique VisitorsLets compare that to the past couple of months
2,446 Pageviews
April
1,264 Absolute Unique Visitors
2,009 Pageviews
March
1,494 Absolute Unique Visitors
2,413 Pageviews
Well, Absolutes are up by loads since April which was a crap month and still better than March which was okay. I think I've set myself a new record for hits in a single day. Some chap on twitter got fined £1,000 for tweeting, I wrote a blogpost with the right keywords in the URL and got all the googlejuice, which sent a mammoth 517 visitors in one day which kind of raised up the average for the month.
Statcounter reckons I had 2,542 Unique Visitors, and an average of 98 pageloads per day, the highest ever. Still not quite breaching the 100 ppd barrier, but getting better man. Maybe next month.26 subscribers - GoogleReader (same as like forever)Small improvement, I'm glad.
4 subscribers - Bloglines (same as like forever)
10 followers - Blogger (two more than last time)
1. Facebook - 139 visitors (220 friends)Lets take a brief moment to consider which were the most viewed posts during May.
2. Twitter - 47 visitors (182 followers)
3. UK Bubble - 17 visitors
4. Rob Dyke - 16 visitors
5. Jack of Kent - 14 visitors
6. Mark Wadsworth - 12 visitors
7. Dick Puddlecote - 7 visitors
1. Paul Chambers Guilty - 489 viewsThe top five most popular posts that I wrote in May were:-
2. The Holly Greig Story - 184 views
3. iPod Daleks - 124 views
4. What Have I gotten myself into - the TFTA scam - 71 views
5. Budget 2010 Working Tax Credits - 59 views
6. Bookcase Dreams - 39 views
7. Origami flapping bird animation - 38 views
8. Indiepop Eyespy - 29 views
9. Tories have no mandate to rule Scotland - 29 views
10. Diane Abbott on Andrew Marr - 28 views
1. Paul Chambers Guilty - 489 viewsThat's it belatedly for May's stat pron, until next time, take care space cadets.
2. Tories have no mandate to rule Scotland - 29 views
3. Diane Abbott on Andrew Marr - 28 views
4. Diane Abbott for Labour Leader - 17 views
5. Python text stats script - 16 views
We chatted and introduced ourselves randomly, the phrase "Do you blog?" starting to sound like some 1970's swingers party fetish as we nibbled on canapés.
Tom Tired talked about political blogging, he works in politics, talked about political blogging, how we have no rules or conventions to abide, only bloggers can compare John Prescot's schlong to a cocktail sausage. The talk was about three minutes too long but rather entertaining.
The second speaker was the CEO from BestBuy. There was a prize draw, where the prizes were Dr Dre headphones and Bon Jovi tickets, as I didn't win my coverage of his talk will revolve round how the chap is very nasel, but nice message. Gotta quote the word "Cushtomer".Didn't speak to (8)
I think I may have set myself a new record there
but if we consult the graph we can clearly show that apart from February's plumbing the depths of solace, my London Blogger Meetup socialising has kind of plateaued.
In Python doing that was easy, but in perl, I'm running into problems as there is no 'in' qualifier, that is, I can't just say "foreach $word ( @book ); if $word not in @uniques; push @uniques, $word"
So instead I'm thinking I need to go through each $book in @book and compare it to each $uniques in @uniques, then have some kind of flag it waves if it doesn't match to tell it to add the word to the unique word list.
Christ, you'd think sort of this word be easy, but no no.
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