Scoville Units Unite

I was initially quite excited by the launch of Google +, mainly due to it separating circles of friends in an easy to manage way.

I have been quite wary of posting things online due to overlapping circles of friends. A number of cases have emerged where people have been fired for gross misconduct for posting on facebook and the like about how their work sucked that day or that they hate their boss.

With the rise of social media, most people seem to look at it as basically an online version of blethering with mates down the pub or whatever. Does anyone know of any case where telling someone in the pub work sucked today ended in them being sacked? No doubt these were hard to prove, with no screencap of you saying it. I always looked on it as if an employer wants to control what I say outside mon-fri 9-5 they can pay me for those hours where they restrict my right to vent. Due to this I was always pretty strict about adding people from work to various social network sites etc.

The other work issue is what if I post to twitter at 10:30am when I am working. Seeing that tweet might be seen as evidence of skiving, what if I am in the middle of running a suite of unit tests though which is going to take 10minutes? Hard to prove.

With my blog I write a random assortment, food, rants, politics, religion, coding, geeky hobbies.

With facebook I have everything set to privacy-Max and went through the rubbish process of adding people to groups so that where appropriate I can only post to a group subset. I also tend to have purges every couple of months of people who I don’t really know, or my current gripe – organisations who set up accounts instead of pages/groups.

With twitter I have it locked down at private and really only allow people to follow me if I know them. I tend to post a mixture of humour, satire, politics. Twitter doesn’t have any way to only post to lists etc though.

With LinkedIn I set up a profile and use it as professional me online. That is a free for all and anyone I know can be added there. I don’t link it to my blog, twitter, facebook etc though.

With Google Plus, separating circles of friends or acquaintances is much simpler though. I think with that I may use it as a free for all and just add people to lots of circles to separate messages.

How do you separate your private, personal, public and family life in the social media age?

I realised today that it’s been about 3 months since I last posted here.

I’ve been reading again a hell of a lot more than before. Since the start of June, I am now about half way through book 4 of A Song of Ice and Fire. That’s about 3,500 pages in 6 weeks. Before that I was trying to get through my pile of magazines which has grown to epic proportions.

Coding wise, I’ve worked on a site and been a bit overwhelmed with the volume of WordPress releases. I really need to look into WordPress MU instead of running about 8 seperate WP installs in various places.

Hardware wise I now have an XBox and Bluray player and will be picking up my decommissioned development machine from work which I intend to turn into a media centre.

So with the amount of stuff I was doing I wasn’t really feeling creative enough to post anything substantial. I have tended to put out short thoughts on twitter rather than post anything more substantial here.

Normal service will be resumed when something pisses me off enough that I can write something about it no-one else has written about it.

A while before the last election I signed some petition about supporting Fairer Votes. This has somehow transferred into me supporting AV, so I get emails from the Yes2AV campaign.

Most of these are really pathetic and concentrate on attacking the No2AV campaign. When they are not attacking the No2AV campaign they are talking about how AV can be used to clean up politics. It is all very bizarre.

Yes 2 AV

The Yes campaign are basing their campaign on 3 nonsensical claims

• 1. MPs working harder to earn – and keep – our support
• 2. A bigger say on who your local MP is
• 3. Tackling the ‘jobs for life’ culture

So lets look at these shall we?

1. MPs working harder to earn – and keep – our support

How? This is a lie, perpetuated by the misunderstanding of what democracy is, or should be. Democracy isn’t just marking an X on a piece of paper every few years, it is also about transparency, accountability and recall-ability. The expenses fiasco showed that MPs are pretty reluctant to do anything about those three. Fiddling about with the voting system does nothing to improve these?

If you want to achieve this you introduce some form of right of recall by ballot or the like.

2. A bigger say on who your local MP is

So if I rank them all, my choice has been minimally met, maybe, depending on the result. But say you only support one or two of the candidates. If they don’t win there’s no difference for you than if it was First Past The Post.

If you want everyone to be covered then you have some form of proportional representation. Like the kind of thing I signed some petition to support that resulted in me being on the Yes2AV mailing list.

3. Tackling the ‘jobs for life’ culture

This will make no difference. Particularly when you have seats where Labour hacks get 70% of the vote. If you want to tackle this culture you institute term limits.

AV – the solution that doesn’t fix the problems it claims to fix.

No2AV

The No2AV campaign have been pretty awful though too. Having just received their literature through the door I was appalled by it.

£130 million on electronic vote counting machines – you don’t need any electronic vote counting machines for AV. Even for STV you don’t need it, you can do it by hand, it just takes longer. To count you sort the votes into piles, and then shuffle them around using the elimination rules until a pile is 50%+1.

The second or third best can win under AV – best being defined as? The second person with the most loyal support maybe. But if that does happen it means they can attract wider support than the core of their own supporters. I don’t think that is a particularly bad thing.

[Under FPTP] the one who comes first is always the winner So what this is basically saying is that:

This a good result (FPTP potential)
Person 1 – 12% (wins)
Person 2 – 11%
Person 3 – 11%
Person 4 – 11%
Person 5 – 11%
Person 6 – 11%
Person 7 – 11%
Person 8 – 11%
Person 9 – 11%

This is a bad result (AV potential)
Person 1 who is well liked – 24% at first round (74% at last) – (WINS)
Person 2 who is not liked outside main support – 26% at first round (26% at last)
Person 3 – 25% – all prefer 1 over 2
Person 4 – 25% – all prefer 1 over 2

This is nonsense. Under these results, AV would give a result far more in touch with voters preference.

Here’s why you should vote no – table muddling up voting and counting. This flowchart adequately debunks this nonsense.

The worse part though is the page which insists that it is a principle that whoever gets the most votes wins. This is, frankly, bollocks. For Westminster for example, individual MPs who get the most votes win, but governments can be formed by parties who had less votes than a rival.

Most disgustingly, it insists that the lower choice of supporters of extreme parties such as the BNP are counted again and again. This is a total misrepresentation of how AV votes are transferred.

Round 1
Labour 35% vote
Lib Dem 30% vote
Tory 25% vote
BNP 10% vote

At round 2 the BNP are eliminated and their votes transfer to second preference
Labour 35% vote
Lib Dem 40% vote (30% LD, 10% BNP/LD)
Tory 25% vote

So the votes by the BNP supporters are counted a second time, but so are the votes of everyone else!

Elections

I really really dislike First Past the Post. Reform to the electoral system is needed, but that change is to STV with multi member wards. In the AV referendum I will be spoiling my ballot by adding STV with multi member wards to the ballot and ranking them 1,2,3 as you would in both AV and STV.

In STV, if 1000votes are needed and a candidate receives 2000. Then each vote is counted as 0.5 of a vote for the first candidate and then 0.5 of a vote to the second preference. This continues all down the line so you see transfers of 0.0012 of a vote at later stages etc. Maximising the number of votes used to elect the candidates. This means that right now, 100% of my vote is thrown away, it may instead have 95% used to help candidate A be elected and 5% to help candidate B be elected.

AV is a terrible system, FPTP is a terrible system. Switching from one to the other solves none of the problems that the Yes2AV campaign claim it does. If it did, then it would actually have had people campaigning for it at some point before the Lib Dems sold out electoral reform for coalition power.

Does anyone else see it or is it just me?

Buffy Season 8 was the first proper monthly comic I started reading. I had loved the show, and Angel and figured: “It’s canon, I should read it”. I also started reading Angel, Spike and the various other Buffy-verse spin-offs.

It started off quite strong but towards the end I started to get really pissed off at it. Having read it over the course of 4 years with big gaps at some points I am re-reading it again.

Arc 1 – The Long Way Home

As an introduction this was excellent. Amazingly drawn covers and written by Joss Whedon. Four issues of one story and a one-shot about a Buffy decoy slayer.

The story picks up a few months after the last television series. Buffy and a gang of slayers have relocated to a castle in the Highlands. Dawn is inexplicitly a giant. Willow is awol. The first battle is beating up big demons who had just killed people with a weird scar on their chest. Later it is revealed Giles was on the side of the demons.

Amy returns and Warren animated with no skin. It’s all very weird. You don’t know if these choices have been made because of how much more freedom for the strange and bizarre when your special effects budget is just more pencils.

Given that the company is long since dead it’s probably ok to write about the computer systems at Virgin Megastores.

Note: I fully expect to edit this for errors and clarifications when other former employees see this, especially as I can’t remember what each of the 20 function keys did so am making up the specific ones for illustration.

I started work in Virgin Megastore in Dundee in December 2001 and left in 2005. During this time I was at university so started off doing weekend work, more shifts during summer etc before being a supervisor (and the manager on duty Friday 4-6, Saturday 4-7, Sunday all day). I think one of the reasons I was initially kept on (apart from being brilliant, obviously) was I was able to pick up their bizarre computer system so quickly.

The core stock management system they used in stores was called ELVIS (EPoS Linked Virgin Information System) and used dumb terminals throughout the store. The other systems at the time I worked there were the intranet – a PC which had a mouse!, a Ticketmaster terminal and machine used to close and open the store for the day and return sales data at night.

Elvis had terminals at each till counter and in various parts of the back of the shop including the stockroom. It was used to check inventory or whether an item actually existed for customers and rough stock levels – sales were adjusted overnight although I believe it started using real time polling sometime after I left. In the back office it was used to adjust stock, add on deliveries and so on.

I did a variety of jobs in the store, from till duty, restocking, stock management, cash office, returns, customer orders and so on so can see how the system worked from a number of different angles.

The Basics

Your first interaction with the system was probably on the tills. You’ve just been taken on at Christmas thinking yay, some money and CV fodder little realising the sheer hell of the two weeks either side of Christmas in a busy retail store. You’ve had your till training and are confident that you can take a cheque, swipe a credit card with a broken magnetic strip and spot a dodgy tenner. With your encyclopaedic knowledge of real music (stuff you got into in the last year minus anything which later charted) as oppose to the drivel in the charts you’re pretty confident that you can help anyone with their queries.

Someone approaches the till and instead of having a pile of swag in their hand they ask you about the new single by FooBar and when it will be out. (In reality of course they will ask have you got that album by that band, that song by the guy and the girl – you know the one or the VHS of that film which comes out at the cinema next week, but we may return to crazy customers later.)

So someone else has logged in to the account limited to permissions that are safe on the shop floor and you move over to the terminal. So I don’t want to see what’s playing on the shitty in-house radio station I’ll go to the stock inventory search bitty using a function key (F4?). Good, now I can filter by categories, 200 is singles. If I’ve used the system for a while I might know that the band FooBar are in category 216 post industrial grunge funk unless some philistine at head office has added it under industrial grunge funk – 217 instead of course.

So you search for FooBar and you are sent to the index in the entire category starting at FooBar. You weave your way down the entire list of 12 singles on the page in alphabetical order. At this goes up to G and it’s a song starting at H you need.

So you page down by pressing either Page Down or a different function key – F6. You know this because at the bottom it says F1 is back up a level, F4 does something else and F6 is page down with F7 being Page Up. Notice the other ones missing. So you go to the second page and there it is in the second six. You press F9 to see more info and this refreshes the screen with 2 lines about each single instead of one. But you are on the first half of the page. You press F6 to page down and you see a new page with singles starting at S by that band. What was that did you press page down twice? best page up and find it. Ah there it is. You just found your first bug. Page Down always skipped page 3 when zoomed in.

I noticed this bug in 2001 about 5minutes after using the system. It was still there in about 2008 – the last time I asked someone in store to check for me.

You select the singles row using the up/down keys and press F12 to see more info about it. Name, label, release date, price, cat number (on side of case, maybe, alpha/numerals), quantity in stock, grade and SKU (virgins 6 digit numeric code). When I started the SKU for new items was about 800,000. I was really interested to see what happened when they hit 999,999. Well they did a clean up removing loads of old Laserdiscs, Super Nintendo games, cassette singles and so on which were still on the system. Any new items started from the earliest available free code.

Seriously in 2001 they still had SKUs for D&D figures and master system games on the system, in case anyone you know, wanted to order one.

From an items screen you could also, using function keys, see the order history of it, including current orders, future entry into sales or offers (and could advise people, don’t buy this DVD for £19.99, it’s going in the 3 for £18 tomorrow, sometimes they would take the advice…).

So it says 1 in stock in the new singles bit and you wander along to find it, sometimes with the customer following like a puppy dog, sometimes waiting at the till for your return. You then get it from the place in the rack, unless it’s been stolen, or someone has moved it in a different slot, or into the albums, or it’s sold.

Hold up.

Yep, you could have 1 in stock at 9am, open the store and sell it at 9:01. All day long the system still said 1 in stock.

This was actually useful if you were trusted to do the manual checks of daily sales, popular stock etc, but for dealing with customer enquiries it was a right pain. Every day you would get a print out of everything in the shop which had sold. You sold 1 copy of an old Beatles album so go check the correct amount are in the store and if there is 1 in the stockroom and none on the shelf go check it has the correct price (it may have lain there a year) and put it out for sale.

Old Stock Adjustment

After Christmas Virgin in their great wisdom decided to keep me on as a part-time employee. In January or so I had some free time from uni and there was some overtime available through the week. I turn up and I’m being introduced to our stock adjustment system.

VHS is dying, we still have a whole wall of it – 8 metres or so as well as several metre racks for different genres and only 4 metres of racking of DVD but it’s pretty obvious where the trend is heading. VHS take up twice the space of DVD per item and our stock room post-Christmas is creaking at the seams. There are about 80 boxes of VHS in there which is old and Deleted, 20 VHS to a box makes 1600 VHS. That’s money paid to suppliers for dead stock which is stopping us fill up the back room with lovely pretty new things. This is the task that really let me get to grips with the ELVIS system and Virgins product categorisation strategy.

Each item had a grade, 1 was Chart, 2 and 3 were popular sellers. 4-17 were various grades of obscurity and the smaller stores might only stock up to grade 10 stock sending their bizarre shit to the bigger stores who had more space and more chance of selling that concept album by that band only wanted by collectors and so on. 18 was new release and 19 and 20 were deleted. These were the stock which was impossible to order from the makers of the items, that 10 year old follow up album by a shitty 1 hit wonder who got dropped by their label shortly after and whos singer works in the Fast Food Emporium next door – that’s a grade 20. Grade 20 was also pretty awesome cos it was where you would find such wonderful stuff and amazing prices – Luniz 12″ album for £3.99 and A Man Called E by E from the Eels for 99p were two such gems. The E album was also the last copy of it in the entire Virgin chain and it had been gathering dust in the stock room for who knows how long.

Generally anything in stock which was grade 10 or better had at least 1 copy on the floor, unless it was like a Beatles album or the like and you would probably put that out too. When Biffy Clyro played an instore gig I trawled the stock room for early singles which were now grade 20 and put them out – selling out of loads of old stock which would never have ever sold under normal circumstances.

So anyway, getting back to the task – I had to go through all these old crap grade 20 VHS, check they were on the system so we could sort them to go in the next VHS sale at 99p each. Should they all go that nets the store an easy grand and a half for dead stock.

So I had to go through each item in each box with a big print out of all the stuff we expected to be there. When you had a video you could find it in the system by title, Cat Number, barcode or SKU. Sometimes the cat number didn’t match. Sometimes the cat number of the box said X137 and it was in the system as X00137 etc. Warner Brothers DVDs were amazing they said Z1642 and what that meant was it was really D0642. Little things like that you picked up in the stock room quite quickly.

Sometimes the item had 0 quantity in the system. That’s weird, you have it in your hand, probably someone couldn’t find it before and had adjusted it down by 1. Then you check the back and it has a sticker over the barcode 0123 4568 – 1.99 sale. So you check the system and it says there are 100 of them in stock for that barcode. Great, someone previously made a store specific barcode as a dumping ground for old shit and didn’t reallocate things off. Probably because it hadn’t sold at 1.99 so why waste money on such a useless task. So I then got a list of all these generic sale barcodes and noted how many VHS were already moved to them as I went.

Once I got through the whole box we then adjusted loads of the stock onto these generic codes and made the adjustments for all the discrepancies. This was a logon with a higher elevation than the store front one, say DUNDEE_BACKOFFICE or whatever. This system also shows the price the item was bought for so you could see that the VHS selling for 99p was originally bought for £10.99. This was revealing towards the end of 2004 you would see chart album bought for £10.29 selling for £13.99. You’d grab a paper at lunctime and see Tesco selling it for £9.99.

In this higher permissions account you would also see some of those missing functions from the shop front. As well as that access to other areas of the system which used different keys. F12 as more info on all the screens and F1 as back – that’s crazy talk. Lets allocate function keys to different functions on different screen and keep those damn till monkeys on their toes.

The night before the sale arrived and the stock was put out. I went in the next day and it was all in strict alphabetical order (genrefication of stock happened and was undone all the time, I actually think it was one of the causes of Zavvis failure, having a Film A-Z instead of Sci-Fi, Horror, Anime, Kids etc). This was especially amusing as there were 4 copies of some gay porn VHS flanked either side on the bottom shelf by kids movies. One copy was still there the last time I saw back-stock of VHS in the storeroom.

Stockroom

I was later trained to work in the stockroom. I got my own logon for the system with even higher permissions and the username DUNDEE_AG. Brilliant I get set up and go to enter my password “PASSWORD” – Error. Oh it’s because I used the same character twice. Your password then went through rotations every 28-30 days and you couldn’t choose any of the last 9. This inevitably led to you thinking up some seven letter word and appending a number to it cycling through them all.

Now I had my till log on (2 digits, 42 obviously) and my 4 digit password to remember. The password and account for front of store and my own log on and account. Later I would also have the ticketmaster info, safe combination and the alarm code to remember too. As well as all my online stuff and uni passwords etc which was great fun. Especially when you went to work hungover. (not that I ever did of course as that would have meant drinking on Thursday, Friday and Saturday night which just so happened to be when all the rock nights and gigs were on in Dundee.)

In the stockroom you had barcode scanners. You would get a parcel or packet in and find it’s order number. Bring it up on the system, check the invoice and each item. If it was all correct you would enter the correct quantities next to the order details on the system and save it. If there was an item missing you would fill our a form to send back to the supplier. If there was a wrong item – they send 2 copies of 1 item instead of 1 of a different one you would mark up that mistake so that the item was still outstanding. Depending on the item and it’s likelihood of selling you might keep it or send it back. If they sent an extra item then you adjusted that on and robbed some small supplier whilst making pure profit for Richard oppose unionisation whilst giving a million pound to the Labour Party Branson, mwaahahaha, mwaaahah mhhahahahaa! etc.

Customer orders also came in and you had to faff around and find the paperwork and then phone or write to the person letting them know that the order had arrived. Sometimes these would be days after an order, sometimes years after an order. Later pre-orders were handled the same way and you had to shrinkwrap the order form to the Spiderman DVD and keep separately so that the fanboys would make sure they could buy it on the day of release.

Supervisor

Around a year later I was promoted to supervisor and had my account upgraded to the Supervisor level of security. Actually that’s a lie. It was upgraded to Assistant Manager which put a couple of the other supervisors noses out of joint now I remember about it. Especially when they couldn’t find the manager to do something 1337 and had to ask me to do it for them. This gave me so much more power mwaha. To be honest I can’t remember much except now only 1 main option screen was out of action for me and I had pretty much full function permission on the other screens. This let me see the full extent of the weird UI decisions. Sometimes F1 would be back, sometimes F12 would be back. Sometimes F12 would be more info and sometimes F20 would.

It was truly bizarre and worst of all there seemed to be no way to feed back bugs about the system and so on. The fact that more functionality was added later shows it was being maintained at some level.

Where did Elvis go?

I really have no idea what happened to Elvis or where else used it. Zavvi still used it and probably Head as well. There are still some Head stores so perhaps it is used there. Was it made by Virgin or did they get the makers of some system to customise a core package with HMV getting a similar customisation made. I really have no idea but if you know leave a comment below with more info.

I also have no idea what language it was written in and so on. I remember seeing some old modems in the back which sent back the info and the whole kit looked pretty ancient. I first saw it in 2001 and it was apparently made in 1991. I would have no trouble believing some of the hardware (especially keyboards) had been in operation longer than that.

I probably also got some of the function keys wrong as it is 6 years since I used it so corrections are welcome for accuracy. A quick Google search didn’t reveal any images of the terminals either so I couldn’t check on them or include any for illustration purposes.

Nate Dogg has died at just 41. Details haven’t been announced yet but he previously had two strokes.

if you listened to any early-mid 90s hip hop you probably heard him crooning in the background. Although he generally appeared on others work he also released or compiled his own work. The one I loved most was G-Funk Classics which is pretty much the guide for G-Funk artists.

Most people would probably most recognise him from Regulate where he featured alongside Warren G.

He had started his career with Snoop and Warren G in the group 213. The group were referenced a lot in their early records and an album was finally released in 2004 with another one due this year.

I think the song where I like his singing the most is in Annie Mae

If he had been born 50 years earlier I think it’s safe to say he would have been a pretty amazing Jazz singer.

I saw this video a few days ago and meant to post it. Having checked it appears to have spread like wildfire.

You can buy the single on iTunes

And see the singers reaction to the attention on the Fear the Boot forums.

Originally written December 2011

To quote the Hives Hate To Say I Told You So. Tommy Sheridan has been convicted of perjury. To his acolytes this is a surprise. Even the ones who know he did and also committed perjury on his behalf. To anyone paying attention this was inevitable. To those involved in these issues at the start of them, it was inevitable at the time and he was told it was so. Reckless doesn’t begin to describe his chosen course of action.

A lot has been typed in day following the court case analysing, spinning and putting out the party/ies line on the issue. The SSY have written about some of the facts/logic of the case in their own yoof style.

And to tangent already that gives a great example of the kind of stuff written about the issue.

The SSY in the second paragraph of their 10,000 article state we have no desire to see him punished by prison. People who have read this and are unhappy can be spotted saying The SSY blog is just the endpoint of this kind of scabby logic – outright celebration that “mad shagger” Sheridan is off to the nick..

Given these demonstratable lies and inability to read/understand what has been written in public space, the general public are out of the loop as to the kind of bile being spewed in semi-public lefty discussion space etc by his fan club.

This includes lumping abuse on some witnesses and accusing some of discracefully lying in court and discracefully telling the truth!

Note: I did intend to write more on this but the vile abuse and logical fallacies being spewed by Sheridans sycophants all over the internet reduced my interest in even engaging with them enough to collect some of their nonsense. The post so far is probably enough of a taster on it’s own and I may return to this topic later.

Note: this post was sitting in my drafts from February 2009. No idea why I didn’t publish at the time.

The RIAA (Recording Industry of America) has had a potted history of cases against individual alleged file sharers. They have sued children, people who don’t own computers and dead people.

Their only courtroom victory was later thrown out. Every time they have won it has been by extortion – threatening people with court if they don’t pay up.

The latest attack on file sharers is taking place in Swedish courts where the 5 people who run the Pirate Bay are on trial. The Pirate Bay site hosts links to torrent files and details of who is sharing files. The important part of this set up is that they don’t actually host any of the files being shared themselves.

They have been threatened before, and generally post abusive messages to the letter writers on their site. They have had their computers siezed and set up quickly in a foreign country. Each of the five is now facing 2 years in jail and up to $180,000 in fines if found guilty.

The case isn’t going so well for the prosecuters, on day 2 of the trial half the charges were thrown out. It looks likely the Pirate Bay will win – the admins don’t even know the new location of the servers.

But leaving aside the actual court case the argument for the court case is bogus. The claim is that copyright infringement costs the companies money.

But

Carina Rydberg

Because I want to watch movies that can neither be rented anymore nor bought on the Internet. I want to read books that are out of print and will cost you £750 eBay. For that reason, I want The Pirate Bay to stay. At the moment, I’m trying to download John Schlesinger’s ‘The Day of the Locust’; it takes time and it’s not even certain I’ll get a copy that is watchable – but at the same time I have no idea how to get the drat flick any another way…

The Pirate Bay is an invaluable source for content that publishers, record labels and movie studios for some reason can’t or won’t offer. If someone on The Pirate Bay chose to download the book I wrote in 1989 I would have no objection to that. That novel is practically impossible to get hold of and as an author I want to be read.