syniqal

This LiveJournal is friends only. Please leave a comment on this post if you wish to read my locked entries.

So, the general bollocksness that is 2011 continues with me logging in to LJ to discover that another of my friends has died. :( This is shaping up to be a really, really shit year.

Goodbye, mhw. You will be sorely missed.

Hugs go out to stgpcm.

Also: Phwoar! :o

A bit macabre, but I want this arrangement of Scarborough Fair sung at my funeral. (I'll dig out the score soonish...)

Happy 1234567890 day!!

From my other blog:

Well, I want to point out in advance that this post is going to be somewhat more serious than the usual subjects with which I intend to fill this blog. I’ve just found out about something which has me rather worried about the future of the United Kingdom, especially in light of projects such as the ID card scheme and the unified barcode database which will accompany it.

It seems that the UK now has its own Great Firewall.

Read more…

This really does worry me quite a lot. It sets a very bad precedent for the future of the Internet in this country.

The last week has been an experience I would prefer not to repeat. On Monday, 24th November, 2008, Her Majesty’s Treasury announced a 2.5% reduction in VAT to enter into effect on Monday, 1st December, 2008, for a period of thirteen months. Implementing this change in a well-designed computer system is fairly simple: Alter a setting in one or two configuration files or a database and test for unexpected results, fixing any bugs which appear during the process. Unfortunately, a lot of computer systems are not well designed, and herein lies the source of a very major problem which is currently affecting businesses across the country.

Most of my employer’s business activities are centred on two core systems: An e-commerce website through which all our customers manage their services, and an interface which provides white-label access to our services to resellers and other service providers. These were both designed and maintained by my predecessor – a man who taught himself to programme over night with a book named to that effect. Considering this fact and the scope of the system he eventually built and managed, the code he wrote is impressive, and it does work. To an extent.

On Monday morning, I began the process of devising estimates of the length of time this VAT change will take to implement on our systems. Most of this process involved divining the amount of code that would need to be changed. Our main web servers contain 6 gigabytes of files, not including backups. This is about equivalent to a modern computer game or every piece of coursework and thesis submitted by the students of the University of Kent for the last two years. Of these files, about 200,000 contain code which is of interest to me. This is an extraordinary amount of files, to the extent where I actually re-checked the results I was getting five times.

So, after working out how many files were relevant to the problem at hand, I did a search of these files for “1.175” – the number by which a cost is multiplied to append VAT to it. The number of results returned by this search made me want to curl up in a ball and hide. Of those 200,000 files, two thirds contain that value. Half returned matches for “0.175”, and another quarter contained “17.5%”. All of these values, and the countless other combinations in which 17.5% was expressed in our system, need to be changed to reflect the new rate, preferably in a manner which is easily updatable in the future when the rate changes again.

That the VAT rate is written directly into files at all is unforgivable. That it is done so in so many different ways is even worse. I have spent most of the last three days hastily scouring this code and replacing the hard-coded VAT rates with something which we can control globally for all our software. It is now Friday, 28th November, 2008, and I am having to put live code which is not ready for deployment or properly tested because, if we don’t have it done today, we will be charging our customers 17.5% VAT on Monday, and that way be dragons.

It seems the one thing which Alistair Darling and his team failed to take into account when deliberating this VAT cut was the amount of time it will take businesses and software engineers like myself to implement. I have lost the last five days’ development time to the VAT change – time which neither I nor the company for which I work will be able to get back. This time could have been spent fixing other, more serious problems with the system, or developing new features which we will need to offer our customers to remain in business through the recession. Instead, we are hurriedly implementing a poorly tested solution to a problem which never should have existed because of a lack of notice that it would need to be changed.

To date, the VAT change has cost this company £2,500 in development time across my team and has taken 100 hours of our time, not including lost lunch breaks and unpaid overtime from when we’ve stayed late into the evening to work on this issue. There will be problems with invoicing and billing for at least the next two weeks as we iron out the remaining problems in the system, and this will require time from our Accounts department as they manually process refunds and re-calculate order totals to make up for the errors in the code. The true cost of the VAT rate change will not become apparent to us until well into next year.

All over the country, people like me are reaching for the headache pills and preparing for a long week and weekend of late nights. By the time this rate change is complete, I believe it will have cost this company more than it could possibly make us through new and continued business.

Oh, and how long do I think it would take to properly change the VAT rate in our system? Fifteen working days. That puts the VAT change date on Monday, 15th December, 2008. Thanks, Darling.

© Benjamin Nolan, 2008.

My train's arrived at Blackfriar's early! But wait, something is amiss.



Whujfu!! IT'S EARLY!!! Why is it sitting at the station until five past instead of leaving on time? :(

Useless bloody Train Operating Company.

My dear Ms. Smith, it is not that we take the security of this country lightly; it is that we value our status as citizens of a free country above propaganda and fearmongering, and believe that correcting the mistakes this government has made by tying this country's police forces' hands with beaurocracy would be a much more productive course of action than threatening any and all of the inhabitants of the United Kingdom with unjustified and unqualified incarceration.

A PRIEST has demanded that gay men have health warnings similar to those found on cigarette packets tattooed on their bodies.

The Rev. Peter Mullen said it should be obligatory for homosexuals to have 'their backsides tattooed with the slogan, "sodomy can seriously damage your health" and their chins with "fellation kills"'.

He is now under pressure to step down after the controversial comments on his internet blog - since taken down - came to light yesterday. Gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell demanded Mr. Mullen, chaplain to the London Stock Exchange, resign or be sacked.

'Given his quite outrageous homophobia, not only would lesbian and gay employees feel unable to approach him but even heterosexual staff would find what he said deeply offensive and off-putting,' said the OutRage spokesman.

The Bishop of London, the Rt. Rev. Richard Chartres, said Mr. Mullen's comments were 'highly offensive' and 'in no way reflective of the views of the Diocese of London'.

Mr. Mullen, who is also rector of St. Michael's Cornhill and St. Sepulchre-without-Newgate, yesterday insisted his comments were a joke.

He added: 'I certainly have nothing against homosexuals.'

'Many of my dear friends have been and are of that persuasion. What I have got against them is the militant preaching of homosexuality.'

-- Rhianna King, Metro, Tuesday, 7th October, 2008.