2009 goal review – summer

I decided this year to publish some personal goals and then review them quarterly. I didn’t manage to do my summer review when I’d originally intended, due to the complication involved in moving from Scotland to London. So here it is now, better late than never.

Experts Exchange : get one more Master ranking, and improve both Coldfusion Markup Language and ColdFusion Application Server to Guru level.
Half-done; I managed to get those two CF zones up to Guru, but don’t have another Master ranking yet. Haven’t been active on Experts Exchange since I decided I was moving to London and realised I’d be too busy over the coming weeks. Might get back into it now though.

Join the gym.
When I moved down here I thought I’d do this, and had a one day trial at a local gym. However I’ve decided not to bother for now. I have been doing a bit of running though, and my goal is to try and average two runs a week.

Start using some kind of source control.
When I set myself this goal, I’d originally thought I’d have to do this for my personal projects, due to little chance of seeing it being implemented at work. However at my new company I use Subversion every day.

Complete 40 of the Project Euler problems.
I completed my original goal to do 25 of these, and revised it to complete 40. At the time I’d done 33, and I haven’t made any progress since then.

Blog at least once a week on average. I’d also like to do more Coldfusion-related blog posts.
When I moved to London I was offline for about six weeks, so I’ve fallen behind on this, but hope to get back on schedule.

Get involved in something open source.
No progress.

Install and start using Railo.
No progress.

Start using MySQL.
No progress.

Police considering Chinese-style spying measures for 2012 Olympics

Worrying article in the Sunday Times: “Spy bugs may be deployed for 2012 Olympics“.

The police have looked at how the Chinese conducted their surveillance for the last Olympics, and are considering re-using some of their ideas. Such as:

• bugging taxis to listen in to any incriminating conversations
• using microchips on tickets and passes to track the movements of athletes, journalists and spectators
• facial recognition CCTV

What I find most frightening is the final line:
“Alan Campbell, the Home Office minister, has revealed that the Home Office is investigating technology that would allow police to halt a vehicle remotely“

Does anyone seriously consider that might be a good idea? Especially in the hands of the Metropolitan Police, or any other police force in this country.

Thanks to OurWorld OurSay for tweeting this originally.

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Photo from surfstyle‘s Flickr stream. Creative Commons license.

How not to do input validation

Here’s a screenshot from a form I was filling in on the TV Licensing website. I’d just entered the date as 9/6/2009 instead of 09/06/2009. Obviously it’s too tricky for them to work out how to pad 1-digit numbers with a leading zero.

This falls into the same category as sites that insist you enter your username in either lower or upper case. Or that you enter your credit card without spaces or hyphens. Or that you format your phone number in a particular way.

It’s all putting extra work on the user for something that could be done automatically server-side with just a few lines of code at most. Not good practice!

Fife Council publishes councillors’ expenses

Fife Council recently published “Councillors expenses for 2008/09″ [sic]. Although this is never going to be as exciting as recent revelations about MPs’ expenses, or even MSPs’ expenses, it is maybe still worth analysing a bit. If you download the Excel file of expenses, you’ll see it’s been formatted for print, with the page header repeated about half-way down, presumably where the page break occurs. For some reason, in Open Office, the council logo is reversed.

Anyway, rather than try and read through a spreadsheet of numbers, I’ve tried graphing some of the data.  Please click on the graphs to see each fullsize.

Salary
Since the last local authority elections in 2007, councillors have received a salary and not just expenses. Heads of committees, the provost, etc. receive a higher salary.

For some reason Margaret Kennedy received a marginally smaller salary than her colleagues; £15,445.24 instead of £15,785.73.

Travel Expenses
This first graph shows all councillors. You can see the long tail effect, with several councillors claiming zero travel expenses. These travel expenses do not include rail, air or taxi fares. The mileage rate is 40p per mile, reduced from 49.3p.

Unfortunately Google Docs saves the image without all names visible. So this second graph shows just the top 30 names.

Gerald McMullan and Tim Brett clearly have higher claims than anyone else, at least £1000 more than the third highest.

For Councillor McMullan to claim £6993.64 in travel expenses, at 40p per mile, he must have driven 17,484.1 miles in a year. I’ve no idea if that is reasonable. He lives in Crossford, approximately 24 miles from Glenrothes. If we divide 17,484.1 by 48, we get 364.252083. In other words, if he was only doing the return drive from his council ward to the council headquarters, he’d have to make that journey every day for a year to justify his travel expense claim. However he must do lots of other mileage besides, e.g. driving round to various locations in his ward. I’d still be interested to find out more about exactly what mileage he claimed for. For example if we could see his daily mileage claims instead of just an annual total.

ICT Expenses
Only 8 out of 78 councillors claimed any ICT expenses. The spreadsheet says “Communication and IT Costs, Mobile Phone Costs and Provision of Council Cars borne by Fife Council is not generally a cost incurred directly by individual Councillors.” I’m therefore unsure what William Walker managed to claim £670 pounds for. If full receipts were published this would clear things up.

Rail / Air / Taxis / Hotels
Less than a third of councillors claimed for this.

You would expect the council Leader Peter Grant to have the highest claim, on the assumption he’s representing the council at national and international events. Second highest is Mike Rumney (listed as Robert Rumney on the spreadsheet), with a claim of £1,241.31. Again, without more information, it’s impossible to tell how this money was spent.

Total expenses
Again, Google Docs produces an image without all names visible:

And here’s the top 30 names. Gerry McMullan clearly with the highest expense claims due almost entirely to his high travel expenses.

Kirkcaldy swimming pool opening hours

Update: I just discovered that Kirkcaldy Swimming Pool actually publish another leaflet with contradictory times to their Opening Times leaflet: Activity Programme 2009 (PDF). I’ve emailed them for clarification. Until I get it, assume the information below is possibly incorrect.

I was trying to work out the times I could go for a swim at Kirkcaldy Swimming Pool. They publish the opening times (PDF) but it’s not immediately clear when is normal swimming and when does that clash with lessons / aquaerobics / family fun / lane swimming.

So I’ve attempted to re-publish them in a different format, so you can hopefully see what’s on at any time. This information will probably get out of date within a few months, especially when they start building the new pool.

Key:

	Normal swimming
	Adult lane swimming
	Swimming lessons
	Aquaerobics
	Family fun session (last Sunday of the month)

	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday	Sunday
8.00
8.15
8.30
8.45
9.00
9.15
9.30
9.45
10.00
10.15
10.30
10.45
11.00
11.15
11.30
11.45
12.00
12.15
12.30
12.45
13.00
13.15
13.30
13.45
14.00
14.15
14.30
14.45
15.00
15.15
15.30
15.45
16.00
16.15
16.30
16.45
17.00
17.15
17.30
17.45
18.00
18.15
18.30
18.45
19.00
19.15
19.30
19.45