Tux – the Linux kernel mascotOne item I missed from my list of highs on last week’s Barncamp post was hearing Naomi from Sheffield recite the Linux Lord’s Prayer she’d devised many years earlier; I first heard Naomi recite it round the campfire in June 2010. This year at Barncamp, Naomi performed it on stage during the Open Mic session on Saturday night.
The prayer is reproduced below for those you have yet to come across it. I hope you enjoy it.
Our father, who art in /sbin,
init is thy name.
Thy PID is 1;
Thy children run
In user space as they do in kernel.
Give us this day our daily RAM
And forgive us our interrupts
As we are nice to those who interrupt us.
Lead us not into uncaught exception
And deliver us from SIGKILL
For thine is the system
And thou art the saviour
For ever and ever – until we upgrade yer!
Vater Unser, der Du da bist in /sbin,
init ist Dein Name.
Deine PID ist 1,
Deine Kinder laufen
Im Benutzermodus wie auch im Kernel.
Unser tägliches RAM gib uns heute
Und vergib uns unsere Unterbrechungen
Wie auch wir vergeben unseren Unterbrechern.
Und führe uns nicht in unbehandelte Ausnahmen
Und erlöse uns von dem SIGKILL
Denn Dein ist das System
Und die Kraft und die Herrlichkeit
In Ewigkeit – Bis wir Dich updaten!
Sean Benyon, Labour councillor for Bristol’s Southville ward, has either bought fellow councillor Gus Hoyt’s old mobile phone (posts passim) or has fallen into the same predictive text trap as his Green colleague down the Counts Louse.
Justice Secretary & Lord Chancellor Chris GraylingFormer BBC producer and current Secretary of State for Justice Chris Grayling MP is the first non-lawyer to serve as Lord Chancellor since the earl of Shaftesbury in 1672-3.
His lack of legal training could explain lots: he’s been brought in to do a hatchet job on the justice and legal system; some of the changes he’s planning to implement would never be contemplated for an instant by lawyers.
Whilst in opposition, Grayling became known as a national politician through his “attack dog” pressure on leading Labour politicians.
Grayling seems completely unworried about removing the right of the accused to pick an advocate of his/her choice under the criminal legal system. Indeed, he’s positively contemptuous of those that end up in the dock!
‘I don’t believe that most people who find themselves in our criminal justice system are great connoisseurs of legal skills. We know the people in our prisons and who come into our courts often come from the most difficult and challenged backgrounds.
Yes, you did read that correctly. If you need to rely on legal representation funded by criminal legal aid, Grayling thinks you’re too thick to pick your own lawyer, so why not let the state pick one for you. Furthermore, by lumping together people who find themselves in the criminal justice system with those in prison, Grayling arrogantly seems to be equating being in the dock automatically with being guilty. What happened to the presumption of innocence, Mr Grayling?
However, Grayling’s contempt and abuse is not confined solely to those unfortunates in the dock. Several times in the interview he refers to the provision of legal services as an ‘industry’.
When I did economics 4 decades ago, the economy consisted of 3 sectors: primary (e.g. agriculture, mining), secondary (e.g. manufacturing, industry) and tertiary (e.g banking, insurance, legal services).
By referring to the ‘legal services industry’ Grayling has moved legal services from the tertiary to the secondary sector. In so doing he has reduced the role of the skilled legal professional to that of a mere machine operative and that of their clients to the widgets that the machine produces. Grayling is thus guilty of treating people as objects, which is not just a retrograde step for justice, but for British society as a whole.
In ‘A Shropshire Lad’ published in 1896, A. E. Housman (1859–1936) wrote:
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
It’s a poem that has stayed with me throughout life since I first heard it and memorised it at Market Drayton Junior School in Shropshire some five decades ago: and I must agree with dear old A.E.; the cherry is a lovely tree. The Japanese even have a cherry blossom festival.
Eastertide was early this year in March and was unusually cold, so the cherry trees still had bare boughs then.
They’ve only just started blooming properly in Bristol now.
… and I don’t give a monkeys about the food miles either!
For the credulous, there is an alternative explanation: Gus was let down (yet again!Ed.) by the predictive texting software on his iPhone, but if you’ll believe that, you’re daft enough to vote for him. 😉
I was in London yesterday for an Extraordinary General Meeting of Wikimedia UK, the Wikimedia chapter covering the United Kingdom, held at the British Library.
It was during my visit that I became aware of the existence of the Crown Estate Paving Commission or CEPC as I walked from Paddington to the library along Marylebone Road. The CEPC is a statutory body first set up by act of Parliament in 1813 to manage and maintain parts Crown land around Regent’s Park and Regent’s Street.
One the CEPC’s railings fronting Marylebone Road, I came across the sign below.
A greengrocer’s apostrophe that will last generations
An interesting fact emerged today in an article in Inside Time (masthead: the National Newspaper for Prisoners. Ed.) about the mess that Capita Translation & Interpreting’s making of the interpreting contract it has with the Ministry of Justice (posts passim).
The final paragraph of the Inside Time article mentions last year’s Civil Service People Survey, according to which just 28% of MoJ staff had confidence in their senior management and only 32% said the department was well managed. Moreover, a mere 18% of staff felt changes to services were for the better and only 23% said that change was well managed.
What was even more surprising to me – and I hope to any other reasonable person – was the response of the MoJ’s spokesperson to these damning verdicts of the Ministry, as follows:
These results show that staff are growing in confidence in the leadership and management of change in the department.
What are they putting in the senior management’s and ministers’ tea at 102 Petty France, London SW1? I think we should be told.
Yesterday’s Bristol Post carried a report on the start of building works at Wapping Wharf down by the city docks.
On the whole the report is fairly bland and it looks like a standard bit of blurb produced from a property developer’s press release.
Nevertheless, one sentence in particular drew my attention. It reads:
In recent days large machinery has moved to the site to prepare for the start of remediation and ground works.
After reading that, I began wondering how many of the Post’s readers know what remediation works actually are or what they involve.
Turning to the dictionary, remediation is defined as “the act or process of correcting a fault or deficiency.”
Correcting a fault or deficiency sounds fairly harmless and definitely a good thing to do, doesn’t it?
However, one has to add the word ‘site’ or ‘environmental’ to remediation to get at its actual meaning as used in the Post’s report, which is cleaning up pollution or contaminated land.
There are various means of effecting remediation, depending on the contamination or pollutant involved, but one very common means (and one which has been used extensively in the past by developers in Bristol. Ed.) is the use of heavy plant to dig up the contaminated soil, load it into lorries and cart it off to a toxic waste dump.
The entrance to the Wapping Wharf site in Wapping Road. Picture courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Finally, a small piece of advice: if you know of any remediation works taking place, for the sake of you health do try not to be downwind of them, especially in dry and/or windy weather.
