MSPs’ expenses

There was a shameful attempt recently by the Government to try and cover up the detail of MPs’ expenses, which thankfully never happened. Coincidentally, today the Scottish Parliament published MSPs’ expenses.

The Scottish Parliament website has a pretty awful search interface to get details of all expenses claimed. Despite being a bad form, it does allow you to select from the various categories for Expenditure Type. One of the categories is "Website Costs". Here’s the figures for which MSPs claimed how much for their website, in the 2007-2008 financial year.

MSP	Website Costs
Charlie Gordon	£12822.62
John Wilson	£2291.25
Joe Fitzpatrick	£1500
Tavish Scott	£1315.50
George Foulkes	£1011.50
Wendy Alexander	£987.37
Karen Gillon	£940
Pauline Mcneill	£918
Claire Baker	£841.38
Kenny Macaskill	£556.38
Margaret Smith	£544.84
Malcolm Chisholm	£497.57
Alex Fergusson	£429.07
Kenneth Macintosh	£423
Bob Doris	£390
Jamie Hepburn	£360
Bashir Ahmad	£350
Michael Mcmahon	£303.55
Keith Brown	£300
Lewis Macdonald	£293.75
Michael Matheson	£273.69
Fergus Ewing	£252.64
Mike Pringle	£223.33
Jack Mcconnell	£211.32
Robert Brown	£200
Sandra White	£200
Bill Wilson	£200
Alex Neil	£190
Duncan Mcneil	£137.21
Karen Whitefield	£117.50
Tom Mccabe	£99.97
John Swinney	£98.86
Murdo Fraser	£76.38
Ted Brocklebank	£47
Derek Brownlee	£31.75
Stuart Mcmillan	£24.20

Sometimes it’s easier to understand things visually. Here’s a graph of just the top twenty names from the list above:

The most obvious thing you’ll notice is that Charlie Gordon (Labour) is paying over £10,000 more than the next highest for his website. The site’s not too bad, about what you might expect from a typical MP or MSP’s site; a little bit of Flash used for navigation, reasonable design, plenty of content. But is it worth paying more than £1000 a month for? I’m not so sure… however, the plot thickens.

Using the Scottish Parliament site, it is possible to see exactly what each individual expense is made out to. As has been reported today in The Herald and the Evening Times, Charlie Gordon hasn’t just been paying over the odds for his website; he’s been paying it to his son’s company!

He’s since added a statement to his news page, claiming "My website costs for 2007/08 were around £1,700; not £12,900 as stated erroneously on the Scottish Parliament’s website!" Of course, it must be the Parliament that’s made a mistake. I look forward to finding out how they were mistaken to the tune of £11,000!

Interestingly, only 36 out of 129 MSPs claimed expenses under the Website Costs category. Either the other 93 don’t have websites, or have them paid for by their party, or are claiming the expenses in a different category, or aren’t claiming the expenses for the website.

I expect some other interesting figures might be found from the MSPs’ expenses. It would be great if they could setup a proper API to query that data, so the likes of They Work For You could use the information. The same applies to when the MPs’ expenses finally get published.

MPs’ expenses

Members of Parliament make a basic salary of £63,291. Some of them get paid additional salary for other responsibilities, e.g. if they are a government minister. For instance, here’s a few salaries:

• £194,250 Prime Minister
• £141,866 Cabinet Minister
• £141,866 Speaker
• £77,330 Select Committee Chair

On top of that, they get pretty much all their expenses paid for. For instance they can claim up to:

• £100,205 staffing allowance (often with family members being paid from this)
• £22,193 incidental expenses
• £24,006 additional living costs, e.g. for staying away from home while attending parliament
• £10,400 communication allowance
• generous travel expenses

Also, when an MP leaves the commons at a general election, they get a lump sum of between 50% and 100% of their annual salary. I’m not sure if this applies to those that lose their seats, or just to those that stand down, but I’m guessing both.

So in total they get a very healthy amount of money from the taxpayer every year. As do MSPs, MEPs and Councillors.

However, they are very secretive about revealing their expenses. There have been several Freedom Of Information requests in the last few years trying to get MPs to reveal exactly what they’re claiming expenses for. After going all the way to the High Court trying to fight against the Information Commissioner’s decision, they’re now about to decide whether to exempt themselves from having to do just that.

This exemption will prevent us discovering exactly what it is MPs are spending their expenses on. For instance, under FOI requests that have already been published, we discovered that Margaret Beckett claimed £1,920 for plants, Barbara Follett claimed £1,600 for window cleaning and Tony Blair claimed £10,000 for refurbishing his kitchen.

Parliament has already spent about a million pounds preparing for making expense claims public, (mostly scanning receipts by the sounds of things) but all that money, time and effort is going to be wasted. MPs vote on Harriet Harman’s proposal on Thursday 22nd. This will be going against High Court ruling that their expense receipts should be published.

Things you can do right now:

• Join the Facebook group and invite your contacts to also join.
• Write to your MP asking them to vote against this.
• Write to your local newspapers to complain.

Some links to find out more:

• My Society
  • 6 days to stop MPs concealing their expenses
• Daily Mail
  • Taxpayers foot £1m bill for publication of expenses but MPs STILL want to cover them up
• Guardian
  • Government exempts MPs’ expenses from freedom of information
  • MPs to be exempt from publishing expenses
  • Ministers face anger over plan to exempt MPs’ expenses from freedom of information
  • Freedom of information takes a battering
  • Expenses spared
  • Nothing to declare?
• The Times
  • MPs defy the judges to keep ‘John Lewis’ expenses list secret
• BBC
  • MPs’ expenses plan ‘outrageous’
  • So now we know …
  • Blair was chased over unpaid bill

Noise

I recently read a great article in the Guardian about increasing noise levels at gigs, with particular reference to recent My Bloody Valentine gigs.

Shortly afterwords, on Facebook and elsewhere, I saw various people are drawing attention to a petition to try and stop the government making ‘noise control devices’ mandatory for anywhere with an entertainment license.

The Guardian article doesn’t mention either the petition or any forthcoming change in the law. The petition page and the other information I’ve seen so far is woefully short on any facts about what exactly is proposed.

I started going to gigs when I was 15. The first gig I saw (Milltown Brothers at the inappropriately-named Caesar’s Palace in Aberdeen) left me with tinnitus for three days. A few other gigs not long after that gave me tinnitus for perhaps a day afterwards. Between the ages of 16 – 19 I averaged a gig a week, and often had tinnitus for a few hours afterwards. The loudest gig I remember was Madder Rose at the Arches in Glasgow. I was standing directly in front of one of the speakers (although some distance away from it) and could feel it. Another memorable one was My Bloody Valentine at the Barrowlands, where they did their twenty minute crescendo of noise. Some people were walking out, but I thought it was one of the greatest moments I’d seen, heard and felt at a gig. That was I think 1992; 17 years later they’re still doing the same thing…

So, I’m sort of undecided on this issue. I recognise tinnitus as a very real risk for regular gig and club goers. I wouldn’t be surprised if I experience some level of deafness in later years as a result of going to noisy gigs as a teenager. I’m no longer a big fan of very loud music; I’d rather sit in a pub where I might have a chance of hearing a conversation without having to have the person next to me shout directly into my ear to be heard over the music. I quite like it in European cities like Barcelona where the pubs don’t set the sound all the way up to 11 once it gets to 9pm (at least not the ones I was in).

However I also appreciate having the personal freedom to go out and destroy my eardrums, if I want to. I think noise limiters are a good idea in theory, but I’d like to know more about how they work and what the limits would be.

Interesting CFMail whitespace trick

I’m sure most Coldfusion developers have come across this situation before. When sending an email using <cfmail>, you might have some code that looks vaguely like this:

<cfif sendEmail EQ TRUE>
	<cfif today EQ "Monday">
		<cfloop query="getEmail">
			<cfmail ...>
				#getEmail.salutation# #getEmail.Name#
				
				#getEmail.message#
			</cfmail>
		</cfloop>
	</cfif>
</cfif>

All beautifully indented as it should be. However the recipient gets an email that looks like this:

				Hey Joe
				
				Where you goin' with that gun in your hand?

To get rid of the extra whitespace on each line, you normally have to un-indent the contents of your cfmail:

<cfif sendEmail EQ TRUE>
	<cfif today EQ "Monday">
		<cfloop query="getEmail">
			<cfmail ...>
#getEmail.salutation# #getEmail.Name#

#getEmail.message#
			</cfmail>
		</cfloop>
	</cfif>
</cfif>

Which just looks a bit ugly in amongst all your other code. However I found a neat trick a colleague was using, which I’ve not seen anywhere else.

<cfif sendEmail EQ TRUE>
	<cfif today EQ "Monday">
		<cfloop query="getEmail">
			<cfmail ...>
				#Chr(0)##getEmail.salutation# #getEmail.Name##Chr(13)#
				
				#Chr(0)##getEmail.message##Chr(13)#
			</cfmail>
		</cfloop>
	</cfif>
</cfif>

Chr(0) is the NULL character. However in Coldfusion it returns an empty string, not NULL. Chr(13) is the carriage return character. Together these have the effect of somehow stripping out the leading whitespace.

This only works if you use both Chr(0) at the start and Chr(13) at the end. I tested it with just Chr(0) and just Chr(13), and it didn’t work in either case. Chr(10) might also work, or Chr(13) and Chr(10) together, but I didn’t try testing it.

This trick worked for me on Coldfusion Server 7 and Coldfusion Server 8, but not Coldfusion Server 5. I didn’t test it on other CFML servers such as Railo or Open BlueDragon. Your mileage may vary.

Israel versus Gaza

I thought it might be illuminating to attempt to visually illustrate aspects of the current Israel vs Gaza conflict.

Deaths on both sides since conflict began:

• 821 Palestinians
• 13 Israelis

Deaths of Palestinians – adults/children:

• 257 children
• 501 adults

Populations of Israel and Gaza:

Country	Population
Gaza	1,481,080
Israel	7,282,000

Population density:

Country	Density (km2)
Gaza	4,118
Israel	324

If the Gaza Strip was a country, it’d have the sixth highest population density of any country.

Country	Density (km2)
Macau	18,196
Monaco	16,754
Hong Kong	6,422
Singapore	6,336
Gibraltar	4,654
Gaza	4,118
Vatican City	1,866

Sources:

• Wikipedia
  • 2008–2009 Israel–Gaza conflict
  • Gaza Strip
  • Israel
  • List of countries and dependencies by population density
• United Nations
  • Security Council overwhelmingly calls for immediate Gaza ceasefire

Lookalikes

I was watching The Pink Floyd Story: Which One’s Pink? on the BBC the other day, and couldn’t help noticing the uncanny resemblance between their ex-bass player, Roger Waters, and the moai of Easter Island.

Were his craggy features perhaps an inspiration to the Rapa Nui people? I think we should be told.

Easter Island statue

Roger Waters

Photos by R.I.Pienaar and Twaize. Inspired by Private Eye.

2009 goals

Following on from what I achieved in 2008, I decided to try setting some goals for 2009.

I had an idea that instead of setting New Year’s resolutions, which could be quickly forgotten about until 12 months later, I’d review these goals periodically through the year. The natural way to do that would be at the Spring equinox, Summer solstice, Autumn equinox and Winter solstice. This year those dates are March 20, June 21, September 22 and December 21.

So, some goals, in no particular order:

• Complete 25 of the Project Euler problems. I’ve done 23 so far, and I think I can get at least a couple more done.
• Get a Master ranking in Experts Exchange for at least one other zone. I’ve currently got Master ranking in the Coldfusion Markup Language zone. I reckon I can get Master ranking in at least one other zone, and perhaps improve the Master ranking to Guru.
• Join the gym. I joined for two months last year. This year I think I’ll get a six month membership, starting in March or April.
• Blog at least once a week on average. I’d also like to do more Coldfusion-related blog posts.
• Get involved in something open source. e.g. look at the ColdFusion Open-Source Project List that Brian Rinaldi maintains and pick one or more projects to get involved in. Criteria should perhaps limit it to projects that have public bug/issues tracking, and that I consider relevant/useful.
• Start using some kind of source control. I’m currently reading the Pragmatic Programmer, which advises that even if you can’t convince your team to use it, you should try and use it individually.
• Install and start using Railo.
• Start using MySQL. These last two goals are connected, as ideally I want to use Railo and MySQL on one of my sites which is currently using an Access database and Coldfusion 5 (!), and just about surviving with a pretty high level of traffic.

Things to keep an eye on in 2009

Some things that are going to feature in the news a lot in 2009 and/or that I will be keeping a keen interest in, in no particular order:

President Barack Obama

Starts his job on January 20th. There seems to be a massive amount of hyperbole and eager anticipation about this. However I think it’s too early to tell; it’ll be a real case of wait-and-see. Will he be any better than Bill Clinton for instance? At least he can’t be as bad as G.W. Bush.

Climate change

This will continue to be an issue globally that most countries will try and shirk their responsibilities for. China is now the world’s largest polluter. Expect freak weather events to become yet more common.

Gaza / Israel

As I write, Israel are apparently gearing up for sending troops into the Gaza Strip. That’s likely to be slightly more successful for them than their invasion of Lebanon in 2006. I’m hoping for an imminent end to their bombing of Gaza, withdrawal of their troops, lifting the blockades on trade and aid currently in place, etc.

Economic crisis

2009 will probably be worse financially, at least in the UK, than the disastrous 2008. Will Britain join the Euro? Which big retailers will go into administration? House prices will probably go down, unemployment will go up, etc.

Iraq / Afghanistan

How will any withdrawal of troops from Iraq and/or Afghanistan go? Will there ever be a full public investigation into the phony WMD claims used to justify the invasion of Iraq?

Pakistan / India

Worsening relations between these two countries could provoke conflict.

Zimbabwe

Incredible inflation, terrible disease, awful leadership. Will Mugabe ever hand over power while he’s alive?

Guantanamo

Currently holding about 250 prisoners of war enemy combatants, whatever that means. Hopefully these men will either be charged and tried in a court of law, or released. Currently about 50-60 detainees have been declared not guilty, but complications over how they are to be repatriated has meant they’re still being held. Maybe Obama will do the decent thing and shut down this prison camp.