The world (and word) of jaymz

I have been messing about with some gmail accounts with spam and the like, more as a side interest than anything serious and I keep noticing Google AdWords ad’s on the side for all kinds of nefarious sounding schemes. So, treating this throwaway email address like some kind of skanky whore I pimped it out to a number of ‘get rich quick’ style websites whenever it asked for it (which was right before the ‘click here for this mother-fucking life changing information’ link).

One of the websites I landed on is to do with an ‘internet marketting affiliate’ system called Wealthy Affiliate. It offers people W1TH N0 EXPI3RENC£! the opportunity to grow their own e-marketing affiliate and link building scheme. Of course, it sounds reasonable. It offers 75% to 90% on every referral sale. What caught my eye as a nerdy, boring fucking developer though wasn’t the obvious scammy-ness/going-nowhere-sales/fucking-appalling-banal-shite of the business model but the somewhat sophisticated guff they used to persuade people that have just managed to launch that first AOL cd in their Packard Bell Windows ME system that they can be a web designer/developer/seo consultant etc.

In fact, and rather oddly, I have to say some of the tools I saw were quite good in some respects, like the above pictured Site Rubix. The Wealthy Affiliatescammers internet marketing entrepreneurs push one particular tool called Site Rubix. Its basically a WYSIWYG HTML editor not a million miles unlike FCKEditor or the ilk. I actually watched the fucking screencast on it (yes, I have so little going on some times that I sit through spam of my own vocation). Its the sort of thing that you can dig up for free anyway but I was somewhat bemused at the effort put into it – the AJAX-ified editor, the table builder, the drag and drop nav system. Of course they’ve probably just ripped and re-branded an existing CRM editor and this is all academic but at the time I thought ‘crap, thats not too bad’.

In any case, dont take my word for it, heres a testimonial from the site from afucking web developer, who somehow managed to refer to the system he loves and uses daily as Sit Rubix..

“As a web developer I was very refreshed to find a web development system that will allow me to create everything from a Squeeze page to a large multi-page website. As an Internet Marketer, I don’t want to have to focus on code that much. I like the freedom of developing content and getting my project out on the Internet and into my target audience’s hands.

That, to me, is the huge value of a Website Development system like Sit Rubix… it allows me to focus on the more difficult tasks of creating quality content. And guess what?? This wonderful system is free for all of us Wealthy Affiliate members.

What an awesome value-add! Thank you Kyle and Carson — great stuff!

Diana A.”

Here’s hoping I’m never maintaining that motherfuckers code. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been so fucking ‘refreshed’ to use yet another WYSIWYG web editor. Jesus. Anyway, all this nonsense only caught my attention since I’m currently sort of half-building a CRM/doing a fuck-ton of Django work. Django FTW! I ♥ Django/Python

Anyone thats ever been on a London bus before will be familiar with the callous disregard for basic physics that the drivers display. Trying to get from the back of the top floor to the exit when the fucker is in motion is a dangerous pursuit. Drivers seem to accelerate like they’re having a fucking drag race and then slam on the brakes twenty meters from the rather regularly stationed stops.

It’s like none of these bastards has ever heard of the concept of momentum:

p = mv

And I’m near positive they have no concept of impulse:

I = ∫ dp

When you accelerate up a 7-12 ton mass to 30 odd miles an hour thats a fucking huge amount of momentum. You enter a non-intertial frame til the thing stops, all the while bouncing about the place trying not to collapse into some asshole thats been yapping on a phone the whole time. I have no idea how the elderly or women in 6 inch heels, much less a baked version of me, make it down the stairs in one piece.

How these people pass a fucking test I will never know. Still, its better to endure a Lewis Hamilton wannabe bombing it down Oxford street than forcing yourself onto a tube train. Some cunt used my shoulder as a fucking handrailon Tuesday…

I was watching Channel 4 news this evening and they had a report on the massive amount of personal debt that Britain has and they had a couple of case studies which re-enforced my opinion that I’m far from normal. At least when it comes to this shit anyway.

One woman got herself 4 or 5 store cards, a few credit cards and a fucking loan. In total it was hitting over £10,000 of hardcore debt. Another woman re-mortgaged her fucking property so much that she ended up borrowing over £160,000. This sort of shit blows-my-fucking-mind.

When I was at uni I eventually took out an overdraft and I’ve had that with me since graduating. I don’t mind, it’s £2,000 and its handy to have. It’s not a huge amount and its not a fucking credit card. I am at a loss to understand these idiots that decide taking out a credit card to buy fucking clothes & shoes is a good idea. When I can’t afford to buy something I wait. I save some money and then I go and buy whatever shit it is I need. I do not understand how people don’t think ‘credit card = money i have to pay back’.

But then I suppose my buying habits are far from normal. I live in a tiny flat, I don’t mind, I’ve come to terms with that fact that I’m living in London and am lothe to spend more than £700 on rent. Fuck that for a game of skittles. If anything I’m only really ‘using’ my room at the weekend and for 5 hours a night. Sure it would be nice to have a bigger place but fuck it, I can wait til I’m older and earning more.

Secondly I buy very little. I buy a lot of shit, but I have a formula that seems to work quite well:

wages – (rent ∧ shit) ≡ money for (weed ∨ beer ∨ games ∨ blank dvds)

This is a great formula. It would appear that fucking loads of people have however been using this formula:

wages – (rent ∧ shit) + ℑ(magic pony) ⇒ money ≥ ∞

One of the women on the C4 report said ‘I know its my fault, I took it, I took this credit’ and I thought ‘cool!, someone that fucking takes some bastard responsibility’ but she then added ‘but they gave me it, they let me have it’. Wow. good argument there. Yes I know, banks are cunts but fuck me how the fuck are these people even making it to adulthood when they dont understand credit != free. How the fuck do they not understand its a fucking loan.

Woah… plenty of swearing there. Im so sick of hearing about these people and we’ve only just started the big bad recession. Righty-oh, time for the last episode of the restaurant… Bollocks. Even less good TV to watch next week.

Yesterday I was on my way home taking the C2 from Regent Street. The reason I like getting that particular bus is that I make it on at the first stop and hence have my pick of the seats. I like the front (duh) and since I’m on the bus for a while I might as well have a good view. One thing that really pisses me off is when people sit on the outside of the seats leaving an empty seat on the inside. I don’t understand this behavior but its fucking annoying.

So I always sit on the inner seat and half expect someone to sit next to me eventually… normally by the time the bus is hitting Euston road. Rather oddly more often than not the person on the opposite side always seems to do this ‘outer seat’ trick and I spend the first ten minutes of my journey muttering under my breath the word ‘asshole’.

Thankfully last night the people boarding the bus all seemed to conform to my seat ettiqutte so instead I got wound up by something completely different. This time some girl sat next to me and I swear to god she fucking yapped from the minute she sat down til the time she got off in Camden. When she’d finished one call she preceded to scan through her contacts looking for someone else to talk to. I can’t for the fucking life of me understand why people insist on having banal conversations loudly on public transport.

Between Great Portland Street and Parkway I looked in the reflection of the front window and could see 4 or 5 women nattering away to someone that must’ve given a shit about absolute crap. I don’t know if it had something to do with all the weed I got through the previous evening but my brain started going into overload trying to seperate out the individual threads of conversation. In the end it started to give me a headache so I just turned up the music I had on (at that point Ministry – The Last Sucker).

I really wish people would shut the fuck up when they’re on a bus. Can you imagine the tube with all these pricks going off on one…

I have spent the past 3 working days bug fixing google checkout code and it has been, to put it mildly a total headfuck. Fixing bugs & code refactoring is of course the mainstay of the working programmer. It’s fun when you’re working through something, you can see progress, but bug fixing is like travelling through London. You feel like you’ve gone miles when really you’ve only made it a couple of stops and it would’ve been quicker to walk.

First off it took the best part of an afternoon to realise that the code I was modifying wasn’t actually being called. Now I’ve never worked with googlecheckout before so you can probably chalk a few hours up to that. For googlecheckout you set the callback code in the account preferences for the store’s account. Why on fucking earth that can’t be passed in the calling code I don’t know. After working that out and seeing that the myriad of tests I’d been doing had actually screwed up a live database the majority of the blood drained from my fingers.

The next two hours where spent looking through log files in a terminal prompt. That was fairly thrilling. At the end of the day I felt like I’d done ten minutes work. Thats sort of the problem with fixing bugs, you can spend hours looking at code, logs and status numbers and when you finally find the error, which is probably something easy, the sheer simplicity of the fix and the few lines of code you need to modify make you feel like you’ve not done much.

So in that way you can kind of compare fixing bugs in source code (especially source code that involves 4 separate processes to actually run) to sex. To get sex you do hours if not days of monotonous, boring work for what boils down to 15 (or maybe 30 if you’ve had a good meal beforehand) minutes of payoff. Obviously this metaphor breaks down rather quickly since fixing source code bugs is a productive pursuit…

Thankfully, on the third day and several hundred tests later (at one point I charged my card over £600 when I got so used to mindlessly clicking through purchase screens) I started making actual progress. In the end I’ve probably changed or moved around about 15 lines of code. I’m now a lot more familiar with code igniter and google checkout but I can’t help but feel the past few days have been slow going and unproductive. Tomorrow I’m bugfixing yet again but now that I have a setup thats working these last few bugs shouldn’t be anywhere near as bad.

One last thing, the documentation for the PHP api of googlecheckout is fucking abysmal.

It would appear that ‘the big 6′ ISP’s in the UK are agreeing with proposed government policy to punish file sharers. They’re going to identify repeat offenders by IP address and so on and so on ad nauseum. There’s loads of detail about this not least on the BBC, Slashdot, ZDnet, The Register.

What I’m more interested (or I should say annoyed) about is the brigade of people that compare bittorrent to actual physical theft. If you read the Have Your Say (BBC) page on the topic its split between people saying it is not theft, its copyright infringement and the others that say ‘would you walk into Tesco, take what you want and walk out?’.

Now no matter what your opinion of people downloading movies, tv shows, music, games, whatever for free is, what it is not is theft. We have laws, laws like ‘dont murder’ and so on and the law says its not theft. People don’t seem to understand that. It makes for circular arguments on those sort of discussion forums and I can only read so many pages before I start to go crazy but a few weeks ago one of the BBC’s own editors put out a blog post on the Technology section of the site comparing file sharing to theft. When people pointed out in the comments that this isn’t legally/technically correct he still proceeded to say:

UPDATE: A few people have questioned my use of the word stealing. Arguing that it is copyright infringement and not stealing. There may be a point here but to my mind this is semantics. It’s a bit like breaking into a car, driving it around and then abandoing it. I believe it’s called Taking Without Consent in legal parlance. Stealing to everybody else.

No Defence for Stealing Music.

The ‘in my mind this is semantics’ bit is what annoyed me the most, so much so I actually bothered to complain to the BBC:

Dear BBC,

As much as I find the reporting across the BBC excellent this particular post angered me so much as to write in and express my grievance with which the manner of this particular blog post came across.

There are numerous comments below the article in question that refute the central message of Darren Waters piece but it is his shear ill-informedness that is so perplexing for someone supposedly clued into how technology and presumably law as it applies to the area works.

His comment that, despite the many arguments to the contrary, the notion that copyright infringement and stealing are merely ‘a question of semantics’ is ridiculous. It is these sort of statements that create mass-confusion with regards to this area. If anything, it is rather irresponsible for someone high-up within the BBC’s technology team to have such a warped view of what is legal reality.

I expect to find this sort of rhetoric on a BPI funded blog, not a public service broadcaster.

Thank you for your time in reading this,

Regards,

James

I got a reply a few days later saying it had been noted and added to the pages of internal feedback that gets passed around.

There’s this fallacy amongst the people that argue that it’s theft that is perfectly demonstrated in Waters’ explanation. He compares downloading music illegally to taking a car, driving around a bit and then leaving it as is. There is a problem with that argument though and that is that you’re taking a physical possession. When you steal/borrow the car the rightful owner has been deprived of their resource. File sharing on the other hand involves no deprivation to the creator of the work in that sense. That’s why its copyright infringement and not stealing. I haven’t taken anything from the producer of the media, I’m playing their music unlicensed. Comparing it to taking a physical car is stupid.

What you could compare it to is walking up to your friends car with some sort of replicator device they had in Red Dwarf and make an exact copy with your own materials. In the case of music piracy the materials are the magnetic tracks of your hard drive that when you arrange in a certain order happen to be the same as some crappy bands new album in MP3 format. The only person I’m physically depriving is myself, of bandwidth and disk space…

Note I am not talking about the loss of revenue here, I’m talking about the actual MP3 file itself. This is the problem with people that compare file sharing to full on ram raiding a supermarket. In any case I wouldn’t have a problem if file sharing was classed as theft in law, but its not, so don’t compare it to nicking a car.

Northern Ireland has always been somewhat polarised over religious differences and we’ve got our share of nutcases and extremists on both sides but its good to see the greater majority coming out in condemnation of this idiot. Iris Robinson (DUP) is an MP, and not just an MP, she’s the first lady of Northern Ireland. That’s right, this person who considers child abuse a lesser offense than being gay is about as high up the pecking order as she can get.

Quite rightly the PSNI are now investigating her claims that gays are worse than paedophiles and that with the right counselling they could be ‘turned around’. It’s also rather sad that in a country that has been so damaged by religious divides we have someone near the top of the political tree advocating that it is ‘the government’s job to enforce God’s law’. Last time I checked Northern Ireland wasn’t an off shoot of Iran or Saudi Arabia.

Thankfully there is still some sense left at Stormont, I finish with a quote from Martin Mc Guinness (SF), deputy first minister:

“In the society that we live in now with many newcomers to our shores, and in many democracies throughout the world, we have a situation where many people within society believe in different things and believe in different gods. So what god are we talking about?”

“Is it the Free Presbyterian god, is it the Church of Ireland god, is it the god that Catholics adhere to, is it the Mormon god, is it the Jehovah’s, the Islamic?”

Oh and she’s totally opposed to pro-choice.