I'm sure I saw them shake their heads, but they shouldn't judge. Courting is a lot simpler for animals.

Party down and go fuck yourself on throwing yourself at the wall.

Remarkable article in the Pakistan Daily:

Gordon Brown Is a Murderous Two Faced Cunt Brown is appeasing domestic horror at the Israeli massacre in Gaza by calling for a ceasefire. Meanwhile British diplomats on the United Nations Security Council are under direct instructions to offer "tacit support" to United States' efforts to block a ceasefire.

I have been told this directly by a former colleague in the UK Mission to the United Nations. Craig Murray, Writer and broadcasterm As Britain's outspoken Ambassador to the Central Asian Republic of Uzbekistan, Craig Murray helped expose vicious human rights abuses by the US-funded regime of Islam Karimov. He is now a prominent critic of Western policy in the region.

I can't see the article staying up indefinitely, but you have you admire their frankness in calling a cunt a cunt. (Needless to say this doesn't change my mind about Hamas deserving everything they get ... this time.)

Loathe as I am to endorse anything by those dorks at Liberal Cuntspiracy, I fear I am going to have to do so:

Lib Con has picked up on the ongoing case of Hicham Yezza (Hich to his friends and supporters) on a couple of previous occasions in daily news round-ups, but events over the last few of weeks necessitate giving the story a bit more detailed coverage.

And we need your help in highlighting this.

In May 2008, Hich, an Algerian national who’s lived and worked in the UK for more than decade, was arrested at his office at Nottingham University’s School of Modern Languages under the Terrorism Act 2000, as was his friend, Rizwaan Sabir, a postgraduate student researching terrorism at the university’s School of Politics and International Relations.

As for the events leading to their arrest, it emerged, several days after they were arrested, that Sabir had downloaded an alleged Al Qaeda training manual from the website of the US Department of Justice, where it had been openly available since December 2001. Sabir obtained the document in question, which had already been extensively edited/censored by the US DoJ before publication, in order to use it in his research and had done nothing more with it than forward it to Hich for printing to save himself a few quid.

For this ‘crime’ both were arrested and held by the police for six days before being released without charge, at which point Sabir was free to return to his studies, while Hich was immediately rearrested on Immigration charges and, a mere three days later, made subject to a fast-tracked deportation order which was scheduled to be executed on June 1, a mere eight days after it was issued - and all this despite Hich having publicly declared his intent to fight the charges against him.

Hich spent the next three weeks or so being shuttled around from one Immigration Removal Centre to another while his lawyers succeeded in, first, preventing the execution of the deportation order and, subsequently, securing his release on bail. As part of this effort to prevent Hich being summarily slung out of the country in which he’d lived for thirteen years, a deal appears to have been brokered under which the Home Office agreed to back off and not seek his deportation until after he’d been tried on a number of immigration charges, at least two of which have have already been formally dropped by the CPS at a hearing during which the trial judge openly questioned whether it was in the public interest to proceed with the case.

The strategy adopted by Hich and his lawyers seems pretty transparent - give him his day in open court, rather than in the closed and secretive environment of an immigration tribunal, and hope for best; not just an acquittal but also a complete demolition of the whatever justification the Home Office might be working to in seeking to eject him from the UK. It’s a strategy that was, until recently, quite clearly working out as expected.

At the end of November, the Home Office suddenly changed its position, welched on the agreement to lay off immigration proceedings until after the criminal trial, and scheduled a new immigration hearing for January 8 2009. Why they performed this rapid about face is, obviously, a matter on which they haven’t commented but given the circumstances of the case the obvious inference is that their efforts to build a criminal case against Hich have fallen flat and they’re now desperately trying to cover their collective arses by shunting him out of country before they’re forced to admit to their failure by either dropping the remaining charges or having their case thrown out by a court for lack of evidence. The timing of this hearing is, similarly, illuminating - Parliament is currently in recess and remains so until 19 January, effectively precluding any awkward interventions by his MP, Alan Simpson, or other supportive parliamentarians.

This has also, unfortunately, had the effect of leaving Hich without legal representation. While his lawyers had been dealing with both the criminal and immigration proceedings they only have a legal aid franchise for the criminal side of Hich’s case, leaving him to meet the costs of representation in the immigration proceedings from his own funds.

Those funds have now run out and for the past few weeks it’s looked very much as Hich would have to represent himself at the January hearing, although I now understand that a specialist immigration lawyer has been found to take on his case under legal aid, which will hopefully improve his chances but in no sense compensates for the despicable actions of the Home Office.

The overpowering stench of a farce turning rapidly into a stitch-up hangs over this whole case like a starving vulture. The so-called Al Qaeda training manual that was supplied to Hich for printing was so heavily censored by the DoJ before it was posted on their website that its consisted of a mere 180 pages of text - on precisely none of which are to be found any reference to Al Qaeda itself - where its believed that the full Al Qaeda training manual weighs in at a hefty 5,000 pages.

The more you look into Hich’s case the more obvious it becomes that there simply isn’t a case at all, and yet the Home Office persists in seeking to deport him for reasons that are entirely unclear but which appear to have everything to do with simply saving face and keeping the deportation figures ticking over. A more obvious and Kafkaesque abuse of process one couldn’t imagine.

Well, I'm sure I could. But it certainly does tick all the boxes for the state walking all over people's rights and I'm more than happy to believe that the Home Office is capable of deporting someone in order to cover their blushes. The only niggle I have is that an old poof I know who works in the relevant department has pointed out on several similar cases some issues, of which I had not been aware because no-one is giving out the Home Orifice's side of the story.

So although I'm all for sticking it to that bunch of incompetent fucks, I'm keeping my options open.

Was there ever a politician who wasn't a total cunt?

In his book The Cigar, Barnaby Conrad III writes that before John F. Kennedy signed the trade embargo in 1962 banning Cuban cigars he had his press secretary, Pierre Salinger, get him 1,000 cigars. Once Salinger had secured 1,100, the president said: “Now, that I have enough cigars to last awhile, I can sign this.”

... in 100 words or fewer:

Sorted. Watch how fast.

To which I say: "And watch how fast it all falls apart again. Sadly."

Despite the Gorgon's many fucking witterings on the subject, I'd like to assure the cuntfaced monocular snot-gobbling fucktarded freak that doing nothing is very definitely an option, and it's very much the option I'd like him to take, thank you very much.

I just caught the government's tiresome, hectoring, nannying "Change 4 Life" (it's down wid da yoof, innit?) advert. Cunts.

Luckily, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle has a swift rebuttal handy:



(That last one is especially relevant, in so many ways. Isn't it, Gorgon?)

I found this interesting new programming language on Wikipedia. Perhaps Timmy might want to take up writing software now?

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
IM IN YR LOOP UPPIN YR VAR TIL BOTHSAEM VAR AN 10
        VISIBLE SUM OF VAR AN 1
IM OUTTA YR LOOP
KTHXBYE

Britain leads the way in showing the rest of the world how to become a police state:

A blogger from India recently wrote a piece about the new surveillance laws of India and the arguments used to pass it as well as some of the provisions that were mentioned seemed surprisingly similar to that of laws being brought forth to legislators in countries like Australia, Britain and what is currently being talked about in the United States.

Hmmm.

The blogger creatively sums up a number of provisions with the following:

* Thou shall not author a joke. Not even forward one

* Thou shall not surf Bollywood news

* Thou shall not watch porn

Yep, especially not a joke about a politician. And this, well, does that not sound awfully familiar?

As reported by MediaNama, the bill passed the lower house in a hurry and without debate.

Oh yes, when it comes to bad government, the UK shows the world how it's done.

Anyway, if you were hoping to get away from totalitarianism, I guess you can cross India off the list.

Cunts.

... the results are out.

Gosh, what a delightful way to wake up! A quick glance through the papers shows:

0% interest on savings:

Millions of savers are braced for zero per cent accounts within days as the Bank of England is poised to cut interest rates to the lowest level in its 315-year history.

Now, one of the consequences of this is that no-one is going to want to put their money in the bank, so the banks will have less money to lend. I wonder what the consequences of this will be?

Oh. Doesn't look like we'll have to wait too long to find out:

Alistair Darling has been forced to consider a second bailout for banks as the lending drought worsens.

The Chancellor will decide within weeks whether to pump billions more into the economy as evidence mounts that the £37 billion part-nationalisation last year has failed to keep credit flowing. Options include cash injections, offering banks cheaper state guarantees to raise money privately or buying up “toxic assets”, The Times has learnt.

Will do more of what he's been doing to no effect help out? I don't fucking think so.

Still, the world is grateful for the Gorgon economic acumen and respects his brilliant strategy. Er, no:

Tour operators have increased the price of summer holidays by up to 40 per cent this year, raising the cost of an average family break to the Mediterranean by as much as £500, according to research for The Independent.

Sterling's slump against the euro and other currencies and rising prices in "bargain basement" Turkey and Egypt will put the cost of a week on a foreign beach in August beyond the reach of hundreds of thousands of families hit by the downturn.

Looks like the market hasn't taken at all well to your fucking genius, you Scottish tosser. (I'll leave it to to you to guess which particular Scottish tosser I mean.)

Even the LibDumbs think the VAT fiasco was a fucking pointless gesture:

Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg has added his voice to concerns that the government's temporary 2.5% VAT reduction has been a "waste of money".

(Although to be fair to the Brown Darling, Cleggover's idea for what to do with the money is even fucking dumber: The party would have spent the £12.5bn cost of the measure on creating jobs through investments to make schools, hospitals and homes greener, he said.)

In other news, Peter Oborne reckons that the Gorgon is going to co-opt the useless LibDumbs into a coalistion of centre-left, statist, pro-EU, incompetent dildoes to beat the centre-right, statist, pro-EU, incompetent Troy dildoes in the upcoming election.

It's so good to have such a diverse set of options facing the electorate, isn't it? Are we lucky?

Another day, another dildo:

Almost one in ten records within the Inland Revenue's frameworks database contain errors the government has admitted.

The frameworks database feeds information into various other databases held not just by HMRC but other departments too.

The problems came to light after enquiries by Tory MP for Putney Justine Greening concerning a constituent who found errors on their records. Mistakes were found in 3.5m records from a total of 47m.

Jesus wept. That's a pretty high rate of error for something so important. But it gets better (of course!)

The frameworks database only contains quite simple information - first, second and surname, title, sex, data of birth, address and NI number. Which begs the question of how many errors more complicated government records contain.

So: first name, middle name and surname, title, gender, date of birth, address and NI number.

It costs £7.5m a year to maintain it.

At a stab, I'd say lookup tables on title, post code, validation of gender, date of birth, address and NI number.

Because it's a piffling amount of data, we're talking about a Linux box with 2GB RAM and a 100GB disk drive. Because it's mission critical, we're talking about pairs of blade servers and RAID disks. £100,000 is insanely generous for the hardware, even allowing for generous failover sites distributed around the country. Let's make an insanely generous £100,000 for the software as well (because you'll probably need messaging interfaces and stuff.) Then we'll chuck £100,000 at development of the application and integration with the government's other systems and £200,000 at a team of 6 overpaid data-entry folks. I see a cost of £500,000 for the setup and first year's running and then a very generous £250,000 per annum thereafter.

So where the fuck does £7.5 MILLION per annum come from?

Via the legendary Leg-iron, this fantastic tale of someone doing something good:

When Will Pike tried to escape the terrorists in Mumbai by climbing out of his hotel window, he fell and broke his back - and therefore had to give up his tickets for the Eddie Izzard show. Will's father wrote to Mr. Izzard and asked him to send a note to his son to cheer him up.

Well, Mr. Izzard sent no note.

Do go read the whole thing and see why Eddie Izzard cheered up my New Year so greatly.

Thank you, Mr Izzard and well done!

I reckon it's going to be a great year, what with the Gorgon and his merry band of jolly elves leading us forward. We are well-placed to face the recession, so the prospect of losing 1600 jobs per day shouldn't concern us at all. Or pay cuts.

Plus, despite the fact that we live on an island where it pisses down all year long, we're running out of water. The government is planning new ways of regulating this, of course, which means that there will be more quangoes and more quangocrats and more people sticking their fucking nose into how you live your life.

Despite all the government hullabaloo, there are now record numbers of fatal stabbings. So perhaps it will merely be a quick, painful death by blade, rather than a protracted, excruciating death by thirst.

The housing market is fucked in the extreme, so you can't sell up and bail out.

The government looks like it's launching a massive crackdown on blogging and there will be more salami-slicing of a thousand years of civil liberties. And because the cunts are going after the drinkers and the fatties now that they've fucked the smoker, you won't even be able to drink yourself blotto to forget.

Twenty-five years after it was predicted, I reckon 2009 will be the real 1984.

Happy New Year!

The New Year's Eve Special Edition!

Informix kicks out Oracle (so good I had to put it in again!) Same for the No 1 rating.

Another ex-Informixer gets a namecheck.

Ispirer supports Informix.

SQLAPI++ speaks Informix. But do you speak Japanese?

Interesting geek blog (also mentions Informix.)

IBM Database Mag has an article about hot backups.

Connection strings for Informix.

Rose::DB::Informix for Perl. Apache::Session::Store::Informix for Perl.

Fancy reviewing software maintenance for OnLine?

ASP.NET DSNless connections.

Spam people with Informix. Yay! Update: Apparently the link contains viruses. So I broke the link, but you can still work it out.

Sequel database toolkit for Ruby supports Informix.

Inguma penetration testing toolkit supports Informix.

Informix programmer job in Hong Kong.

O'Reilly book covers Informix backups (among others.)

Eric has some strong advice for SAP.

These days, all big companies — and most medium-sized companies — are software companies. By this I mean that the company’s software (particularly custom software they’ve made) and associated data is integral to the success of their business.

And:

The fact that every company is a software company has implications. The most important is that software is something companies have to understand. A company can’t hope to just outsource its computing operations and that way the managers not have to deal with or understand it.

I've said this since the dawn of outsourcing. IT is not just a golem to stave off manual work, it can and should be something that differentiates you from your competitors. Embrace bespoke stuff, it gives you an edge. Don't just look at cost savings, look at revenue generation and retention.

As Thomas J Watson famously said all those years ago: "Fucking think, you cunt."

And so late in the day as well!

He may lounge around in a tracksuit all day, but the Cunto di Tutti Cunti can, at least, see clearly now:

It is true that we had ten years of record growth when I was prime minister. I have, unfortunately, come to the conclusion that it was luck.
- Tony Blair, in a lecture to Yale University
"Cunto di Tutti Cunti". Heh.

... which is why I'm freezing my cock off and the heating's been on non-stop for the last 48 hours.

We've definitely reached a tipping point. The next cunt who opens his yap to witter on about global warming will be bludgeoned to death with the nearest frozen tree and have icicles shoved up his arse.

And no, I'm not being facetious:

The Government's Qualifications and Curriculum Authority admitted the rush to find a company to run exams in 2009 meant there was "no guarantee" results would be delivered on time.

It said a lack of time to draw up detailed plans, run trial tests and ensure markers were up to the job "could well result in failure" to meet deadlines.

The hiring of a new firm was carried out in just nine weeks - instead of the nine to 12 months normally spent finding a contractor, the QCA warned.

Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, appeared to accept the possibility of a delay, saying he "understood" concerns the deadline "may not be met".

The admission - in series of letters between the QCA and Mr Balls - represents the most stark warning yet of further disruption for thousands of schoolchildren across England.

Fears will be heightened by the decision just a fortnight ago to axe the QCA's testing wing - the National Assessment Agency - and suspend its two top civil servants following a damning official report into last summer's marking blunders.

Jesus. Why does this fucking government insist upon farming out operational responsibility to managerialist "experts" who can't organise the fucking proverbial pissup in a brewery?*

There is a long fucking line of cock-up after cock-up, and this from the party who insisted the key issue was "education, education, education."

The only consolation for the kids is that the education is so fucking shit anyway, it doesn't matter whether they get streamed or not. They'll still be illiterate and innumerate at the end of it all.

Nice going. I hope all you Labour tribal voters are fucking proud of yourselves. And I hope you all get fucking face cancer.

Cunts.

*I know: it's so that they can't blamed for anything when it goes wrong, but can still crow in the unlikely event of something going right, the cunts.

If that's not an ad hominem attack, I don't know what is:

Ritchie:

But Tim comes from a very different part of the political and, might I say it, social spectrum.

Whooooo ... hark at her!

(The backstory.)