Yearly Archives

40 Articles
Posted by Dave on

Hitler rant from Downfall

Hitler rant from Downfall

As you know, a number of people have set alternative words to the scene in Downfall where his Generals tell him that there are no more soldiers between the Red Army and Berlin. I am particularly taken with this one which explores the funding of the UK Police and has clearly been written by someone who knows a lot about it and feels very strongly. There’s also some swearing. It seems now that there is a web service/site that will build one for you from text. I must give it a go.

Posted by Dave on

How to unpivot in Excel

How to unpivot in Excel

The need to unpivot data is a common requirement. There are a number of reasons as to why. I and my customers are primarily using  Excel on Windows and so the examples below are shown in excel and rely on excel functionality.

Posted by Dave on

Wajig

Wajig

Wikipedia says, “Wajig is a simplified wrapper to Debian’s package management system dpkg/APT. Wajig provides the functionality of apt-get, dpkg, dpkg-deb, apt-cache and other tools. These tools launch as a subprocess. Wajig also provides extra functionality beyond that of the stock apt and dpkg tools.”.

Posted by Dave on

Boundary Reviews

Boundary Reviews

Im wrote in 2016, “As we know the Tories are having a second go at rigging the General Elections”. It seemed they didn’t need to and have dropped the plans. For some reason I originally made this private but lifted the constraint in Nov 2020. Here are my notes and links,

Posted by Dave on

UK Immigration

UK Immigration

I was thinking about the Brexit vote and the way that Immigration came to dominate the debate; there were a couple of factually based articles which examined the numbers, and some economic analysis which argues that like a deficit, immigration is a good thing. Anyway, despite the fact that evidence is of no use in a post truth environment, I decided to have a look at the figures. It’s also a good opportunity to repeat Luke Sorba’s joke, that Socialists treat immigration as the Victorians did sex, we know it happens but don’t want to talk about it. Here are my notes. The number of economic migrants coming to the UK from the EU over the last 5 years is under 30,000 p.a. Given the amount of noise made by the outers,  I was expecting the numbers to be much higher. Is this really accurate i.e. have I made a mistake? I’d be grateful for any comments. (It looks like my numbers are 10% of others, so I need to check this out.) When I say, I’d be grateful for comments, I’d be grateful for comments on my methods.

Posted by Dave on

Analysing the 2015 General Election

Analysing the 2015 General Election

I am fed up hearing about the PLP’s 9m votes mandate. A large number of these 9m votes will have voted for Labour candidates that lost. So I decided to calculate the number of votes cast for the PLP. So something for both political geeks and excel nerds. Here’s how I did it.

Posted by Dave on

Site Blocking

Site Blocking

The BBC have got themselves a change in the law to charge a licence fee if you use internet devices to watch BBC’s on-demand and catch up content. This was originally written before I restated my No TV declaration. Their web site makes it clear that mobile devices are covered by any licence paid irrespective of the billing address.  Before discovering this, I was considering writing a browser extension to warn when accessing iplayer’s tv sub site, but I came to the conclusion that it will be better to program the hub to block the iplayer site. Here are my notes.

Posted by Dave on

Fedora 24

Fedora 24

This is quite different, in particular the System V init files don’t work any more and so I need to implement a systemd solution to mount the virtual box shared folders. I think these need to run after the vboxaddclient service. Some documentation suggests that LSB compliant scripts will work. I am about to stop and give it a rest; I am definitely of the view that this was a problem not worth solving.

Posted by Dave on

Dictatorship and Plebiscites

Dictatorship and Plebiscites

For people casual acquainted with political theory, we know that dictators quite like plebiscites in a way that they dislike parliaments. We can see in the UK, the way in which some of the Brexiteers, but not their leadership, are frightened of both parliament’s consideration of interpreting the referendum result and/or running a second one.