Screaming Hordes of Benefit Tourists
Most Brits out there will probably remember the raving hysteria from the tabloid/right-wing press when the EU expanded to include a few more Eastern European countries, explaining that hordes of "benefit tourists" are getting ready to move to England and claim benefit from the state.
Well, that didn't quite happen (source):
The British Home Office said 133,000 people from the eight new EU countries in eastern Europe signed on to its worker registration scheme between May and December 2004.
Of that total, up to 40 per cent were already in the UK before May 1. Poles made up 56 per cent of the total, followed by Lithuanians and Slovaks. The UK has no figures on how many subsequently returned home.
As for fears of an influx of benefit claimants, the UK tightened up its benefit rules before May 1 2004 and only 21 people from eastern European countries have made successful claims.
Twenty one successful claims for benefit. Wow, I bet the system really felt that blow.
Of course the counter-argument is that the new "tightened benefit rules" are too tight, as I believe you need to be working here for a year before you can successfully claim benefit. This implies that the people who claimed benefit were either already in the country or possibly got a job straight away, and results in a number of people in the impossible situation that they can't get benefit as they can't get a job, but they can't get a job as the Job Centre won't give them personal advise (again, you need to be working for a year to get personal advise) about a country and job market which is alien (as seen on Panorama last week).
It's all screwed up, basically.
NP: Best Of, Toots and The Maytals
Tory Madness
The Tories have gone "truth" crazy of late, first by continually banging on about Blair's lies about the Iraq war (but we won't mention how they wanted to go to war before Labour did), and now with libdempolicy.com: a site showing what lies in the small print of their policies. Personally I thought they had been pretty open, but let's see what the Tories can make of their policies.
- There should be no upper limit on the numbers of refugees accepted by EU countries
-
Oh My God.
First, I thought that Kennedy had been saying this for ages, but that isn't the real point. Of course there should be no upper limit: if suddenly there was an atrocity and people were on the run for their lives, we should say "sorry, but the inn is full"? The sheer balls of a party that mixes immigration and asylum into a single über-policy of basically stopping it all, whilst having a leader whose parents are immigrants, is frankly quite impressive. Obviously the spin guys are doing something right as I just can't understand why no-one (apart from the audience in Question Time last week that is) is pointing out that they are totally unrelated subjects.
- Liberal Democrats would 'introduce fair benefits for asylum seekers'
-
This is a terrible policy as asylum seekers are sub-human scum, obviously. Best to leave them in France until we know they haven't got AIDS.
I still don't know why asylum seekers cannot go and get a job, instead of having to try and live on some pathetic token state benefit.
- The Liberal Democrat Home Affairs spokesman, Mark Oaten, says he is 'absolutely convinced that prison is a complete and utter waste of time'
-
Sounds about right. Put a load of sane people in a small boring room for a few years and they probably won't be well-adjusted when they come out, doing the same to people who are not well-adjusted to start with is madness. Most people in prison need assistance which isn't provided by a magnolia wall.
- We will put your taxes up
-
Well, durrr. Is there anyone who didn't know that the Tories only real policy is to lower taxes? Personally I think the Lib Dem policy of a 50% income tax on income over £100,000 is a great idea and have thought so ever since I started nudging the current upper tax boundary, and realised that if my earnings doubled I wouldn't be paying a higher rate. The tax system needs a bloody good overhaul (along with the Council tax, being based on property prices from 1980), and this is a good start.
- They would 'work positively towards the conditions for British entry to the euro'
-
I'm glad at least one main party is actually mentioning the Euro this year, although to be honest if the other two started to talk about it the election propaganda would turn into even more of a farce than it already is.
Well I expect to get a few comments on this posting, so I'll leave it here with a small pointer towards Tactical Voter.
Curse Digital Photo Printers
(not home printers, but places which develop film and normally will do prints from JPEG too)
CURSE YOU ALL.
I've a Canon EOS-300D, and that by default writes JPEG files using the "Adobe RGB" colour space. I don't know what the differences are, but Canon recommend Adobe RGB so Adobe RGB I use. However, when I take the files down to Jessops or Boots the prints are a little darker than I'd expect. On the basis that the developing staff in Jessops generally know something, I tried asking if their equipment handles the colour space specified in the JPEGs correct, and they don't know. They also don't know what colour space the equipment is working in. I'm not even going to bother asking in Boots, and I tried asking dlab7.co.uk to get this wonderful response:
Rgb images are best suited to our printers. We do not offer any colour management of your images. However I can suggest sending us some un 'touched' files for printing and colour match your computer to the prints produced by us.
So I've got to send RGB images, which is fair enough. I can't think of any digital cameras which take in CMYK, but I could have produced a CMYK file in Photoshop I guess. Tthey don't do colour matching, so I should send them a photo and then calibrate my monitor to match it, and then edit every image I want to get printed so that it comes out correct. Sigh.
So, does anyone know of a decent (and not expensive) British photo company which actually knows what a colour space is, and will convert the images if required? Of course if someone who actually knows these things can tell me that the machines all use sRGB, I'd switch straight away.
Update: I've done some research, and am not switching to sRGB. Ever.
NP: Best Of, Otis Redding
New version of XChat-Notify
I finally got around to merging a patch sent by Bas van der Lei, so I can now release version 0.2 of xchat-notify. Hooray!
Not a lot of changes, I made a better choice of icon (it now uses the themed xchat icon), and Bas added a tooltip. The next stage is to make clicking on the icon show XChat. After that, I think it's finished.
NP: Fear Of Fours, Lamb
pkg-config files for X.org
If you want to be one of the cool gang and try things like Luminocity and Xephyr, but can't be bothered to build all of those X libraries from CVS just to get the .pc files (after all, Hoary's X.org has all of the extensions needed), why not install xorg-pkgconfig from my Debian repository!
It's a total hack: I copied all of the .pc files from my laptop, which has the complete X platform built from CVS on, and changed the paths from /home/ross/bin/BUILD to /usr. It's a nasty hack, but it let me build Luminocity. My next step is to try and build kdrive and see if this idea actually works...
NP: Lamb, Lamb
Sound Juicer "It's Time Little Sparkle In My Eye To Fly" 0.6.1
I forgot to announce this when I did the release. Yes, it's Sound Juicer 0.6.1. This is basically SJ 0.6 with lots and lots of patches from SJ 2.10 applied, to fix bugs and add features without increasing the dependencies beyond what is going to be in Debian Sarge. As such it builds against GTK+ 2.6 and GNOME 2.8, whereas SJ 2.10 requires the GNOME 2.10 stack. You can get it from the usual place.
- Ensure the pipeline has stopped when firing an error.
- Use gnome-open instead of nautilus when opening folders
- Fix many crashes in the Preferences dialog
- HIGify the Preferences dialog
- Set the default profile to a profile which exists
- Quit correctly when ripping
- Updated documentation
Thanks to everyone who submitted patches since 0.6, you all made this release possible.
NP: Moon Safari, Air
Enid Blyton For Sale
If anyone out there collects Enid Blyton books, knows someone who is collecting Enid Blyton books, or wants to start collecting Enid Blyton books, the lovely Mrs. Burton has put a set of eleven books from the 1950s and 60s on eBay.
Bid my pretties, bid!
Contact Lookup Applet 0.12
Contact Lookup Applet 0.12 is released. I didn't do a lot of work on this, but luckily Bastien Nocera did!
- Change EContactEntry to allow apps to set the fields to search, and take an ESourceList rather than an ESourceGroup (Bastien Nocera)
- Build with libpanel-applet 2.8 and 2.10 (BN)
- Build with libebook 1.0 and 1.2 (BN)
- Use automake 1.9 (BN)
- Depend on GTK+ 2.6, and use GtkAboutDialog (Pedro Villavicencio Garrido)
You can grab it from the usual place. Debian packages should be heading towards Sid shortly.
NP: Mezzanine, Massive Attack
XChat Notification Area Plugin
After installing xchat-systray and then quickly removing it in shock and disgust, I decided to do a quick hack using the XChat Python plugin. Lo and behold, a notification area plugin for XChat which displays an icon in the notification area on interesting events, and nothing else.
It's short, simple, and straight to the point. When someone talks to you, an icon appears in the notification area. When you switch to the relevant tab, the icon disappears. There is nothing to configure, and it does nothing else. Pure simplicity, and a whole 70 lines of source.
It requires the Python XChat plugin and python-gnome-extras, but assuming you have that just drop this file into ~/.xchat2/ and restart XChat. Voila! At this point you'll notice that I've not even bothered to use a decent icon, but I will soon, honest.
Sound Juicer "They Keep Hiding The Truth And Rights" 2.10.1
Sound Juicer "They Keep Hiding The Truth And Rights" 2.10.1 is out as usual, fixing a couple of crashers and adding more translations.
- Initialise audio profiles earlier (John Palmieri)
- Remove bad checks which can crash (Andrei Yurkevich)
Translations by Adam Weinberger (en_CA), Ahmad Riza H Nst (id), Canonical Ltd (xh), Jyotsna Shrestha (ne), Mugurel Tudor (ro), Raphael Higino (pt_BR), and Steve Murphy (rw).
GObject/DBus Magic
I am Colin Walters's fanboy. That is all.
I suppose I should elaborate on that. I've just build a shiny new DBus release (from CVS, but for all intents and purposes it is 0.32), and had a quick experiment with the new GLib bindings. In the good old days the GLib bindings provided mainloop integration and not much else, but not any more... I started by creating a simple GObject which has an echo method, this is pretty standard stuff but the echo prototype is:
gboolean echo_echo (Echo *echo, const char in_s, char **out_s, GError **error);
It's nice and simple, out_s is set to a reversed copy of in_s. I then wrote an XML file which describes the object. In the future I believe this will be generated by parsing the C code just as gtk-doc does now, but I can handle writing it manually for now:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<node name="/com/openedhand/DBus/Tests/Echo">
<interface name="com.openedhand.DBus.Tests.Echo">
<annotation name="org.freedesktop.DBus.GLib.CSymbol" value="echo"/>
<method name="Echo">
<annotation name="org.freedesktop.DBus.GLib.CSymbol" value="echo_echo"/>
<arg type="s" name="string" direction="in"/>
<arg type="s" name="echo_string" direction="out"/>
</method>
</interface>
</node>
This file defines the names of the interfaces, objects, and methods in the DBus world, and also how they map to the real GObject. This file is then used to generate two header files: server-side glue for the GObject to the bus, and client-side wrappers around the bus. Ignoring the boring connecting to the bus and error checking, connecting this GObject to the bus is pretty simple:
#include "EchoObjectGlue.h" /* Defines dbus_glib_echo_object_info */
...
obj = g_object_new (ECHO_TYPE, NULL);
dbus_g_object_class_install_info (G_OBJECT_GET_CLASS (obj), &dbus_glib_echo_object_info);
dbus_g_connection_register_g_object (connection,
"/com/openedhand/DBus/Tests/Echo",
obj);
No more manual argument parsing on the server, which is excellent. Even more exciting is what happens on the client (without error handling but nothing else removed):
#include <dbus/dbus-glib-bindings.h>
#include "EchoObjectBindings.h"
...
DBusGConnection *connection;
DBusGProxy *proxy;
char *s_out = NULL;
connection = dbus_g_bus_get (DBUS_BUS_SESSION, NULL);
proxy = dbus_g_proxy_new_for_name_owner (connection,
"com.openedhand.DBus.Tests.Echo",
"/com/openedhand/DBus/Tests/Echo",
"com.openedhand.DBus.Tests.Echo",
NULL);
com_openedhand_DBus_Tests_Echo_echo (proxy, "Hello, World", &s_out, NULL); /* Defined in EchoObjectBindings.h */
printf("Got '%s'\n", s_out);
The tedious create message-add arguments-send message-wait for reply is gone, and wrapped up inside auto-generated code and introspection frameworks. I believe this is going to make a massive difference to the rate of DBus adoption in GNOME, as until now the prospect of putting complicated structures and methods on the bus wasn't very appealing. Now it's simple and doesn't result in massive code bloat from duplicated code to manipulate the bus messages.
Update: I've put a tarball of the source online. I've also been informed by Colin that Havoc wrote half of the code, so I'm now fanboying both Havoc and Colin.
NP: Babylon Rewound, Thievery Corporation
More Tees
I think this is becoming an addiction... I just placed another order with Threadless, specifically Fred and the Giant Eel, Game-Set-Match, Are Trees Electronic?, and He Lives By The Ocean. Soon I'll have more t-shirts than I could ever need...
NP: Dub Fever, King Tubby
FontConfig Hacking
Last night Keith Packard gave me commit access to fontconfig and I committed the first iteration of my patch, which reduces memory consumption and speeds up pattern matching by ensuring pattern keys are canonical. For my system, 25Kb was saved and strcmp called 25% less, which isn't bad for a patch which changes 6 lines.
The next step is to expand the scope of the patch to pattern values as well as keys. I have a working patch which reduces the memory footprint of fc-list by another 140Kb, but it's a little ugly at the moment.
NP: Buena Vista Social Club
