"Women to be more equal than men" said the headline on the newspaper sitting on the desk where I was working yesterday - and it struck me that we're more and more in George Orwell's world of Animal Farm and 1984, with some crazy doublespeak and perhaps the thought police out to ensure that everything is done their way. Listening to the BBC's radio coverage later in the day, as I drove home, it seems like something of non-story, allowing employers to select a new employee based on their ethnic background or gender provided that the ethnic background is NOT British and the gender is NOT male and also provided that the candidates being chosen between are otherwise equally qualified. I'm not entirely sure I like the sound of this - on one hand, it's very rare that candidate who are so equal as to make it impossible to select between the otherwise offer - at least in our business, so it would be a non-event. But then I recall being in South Africa some three years ago, and talking with a number of young white men who told me that it was supposed to be equal in job applications there now but it wasn't - they were discriminated against - and I have a disquiet of the same thing coming to this country. Much much better to have a true equality of opportunity without laws that even hint at encouraging positive discrimination.

"I only have the same number of officers as the previous chief constable had 10 years ago" whined the Chief Constable of Lincolnshire in an item following on the radio, telling us how hard done by his force is. In fact it put in such a big extra rates demand on the local population that the council is having to re-issue lower tax demands after they were capped. But hang on a minute - why does he need more officers - or even the same number - when technology has moved on so far and should have lead to a system under which each officer can do a lot more work? Perhaps there's something wrong here, too?

And so the radio moved on to a discussion between two Anglicans - one supporting the view that homosexuals should have a full and equal role in the church, and the other the view that The Bible speaks against it, so it should be eliminated from the church. Stopped at Oxford service area, I made a note of some particularly questionable statement made during the argument, but I can't read my own scrawl now so I'm not able to quote it back word by word. In fact, the whole thing seems so irrelevant to me that I can't even recall which side came up with the particular crass piece of propaganda that made up the third news item in a row that left me wondering at the sanity of our leaders, order keepers, and spiritual guides.
(written 2008-06-27, updated 2008-06-28)

 S153 - Sourcing, Running and Configuring MySQL
  [192] Current MySQL and PHP paths and upgrades - (2005-01-28)
  [334] Symbolic links and hard links - (2005-06-02)
  [489] Which MySQL server am I using? - (2005-11-07)
  [515] MySQL - an FAQ - (2005-12-03)
  [535] MySQL permissions and privileges - (2005-12-20)
  [591] Key facts - SQL and MySQL - (2006-02-04)
  [907] Browser -> httpd -> Tomcat -> MySQL. Restarting. - (2006-10-28)
  [1095] Apache httpd , browser, MySQL and MySQL client downloads - (2007-02-28)
  [1123] mysqldump and mysqlrestore - (2007-03-30)
  [1131] MySQL - Password security (authentication protocol) - (2007-04-02)
  [1731] Apache httpd, MySQL, PHP - installation procedure - (2008-08-01)
  [1771] More HowTo diagrams - MySQL, Tomcat and Java - (2008-08-24)
  [1935] Summary of MySQL installation on a Linux system - (2008-12-11)
  [2085] MySQL - licensing issues, even with using the name - (2009-03-16)
  [2209] Monitoring and Tuning your MySQL installation - (2009-05-31)
  [2426] Which version of MySQL am I running? - (2009-09-26)
  [2444] Potted MySQL installation - (2009-10-09)
  [2445] Securing MySQL on a production server - (2009-10-09)
  [2458] Cant connect to local MySQL server through socket /tmp/mysql.sock - (2009-10-17)
  [4390] Checking MySQL database backups have worked (not failed) - (2015-01-10)
  [4406] Fixing damaged MySQL tables - Error 1712 and Error 2013 - (2015-01-25)
  [4487] Starting MySQL. ERROR! The server quit without updating PID file - how we fixed it. - (2015-05-06)

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July to December 2008 - Open Source training schedule
Towards Object Oriented Programming in Lua
Co-routines in Lua - co-operative processing
Conversion of c/r line ends to l/f line ends
Some sideways thoughts on the news
cannot restore segment prot after reloc message - PHP / httpd
Virtual Hosting on Apache httpd - a primer example
FTP - how not to corrupt data (binary v ascii)
Short circuit evaluation (lazy operator) in Lua
Two PHP include files to make easy web site indexing and navigation