dave.org.uk

Articles

I’ve been writing articles about Perl for a number of years. Because I have written for many people, the articles are currently spread out over a lot of different sites. I’ve decided to do something about this.

There’s now a new articles section on the site and over the next few weeks I plan to pull all of my Perl articles together in that section.

Currently, it just contains the seven articles that I wrote for perl.com. If you read them, please bear in mind the fact that they are all around ten years old and may well no longer reflect current best practices.

This coming weekend is a long weekend in the UK. This means that I may well find the time to republish a lot more articles.

Moose Course This Saturday

I’m running another Perl School this Saturday (6th April). This time the subject is Object Oriented Programming with Perl and Moose. I ran a two-hour taster version of this course at the London Perl Workshop back in November, but this is the full six-hour version. Tickets are £30 each.

The course is run at Google Campus on the outskirts of the City of London. There’s a full list of topics and a booking form over on the Perl School web site.

Liverpudlian MPs

Back in the day, when I grew up on my Liverpool council estate every member of Liverpool City council was Conservative. The city had eight Conservative MPs.

This is Nadine Dorries writing on Conservative Home a couple of days ago. She should really learn that if she doesn’t check her facts, then someone else will. You’ll be shocked, I suspect, to hear that this information is less than completely true. To me, it looks like Liverpool never had more than six Tory MPs while Dorries was growing up there.

Dorries was born in 1957. So let’s look at the 1955 general election and see which MPs were elected in Liverpool then. Liverpool has nine MPs, six of which are Tory. None of the seats changed hands in 1959. In 1964, however, the Tories lost four seats, taking their total down to two. This number remained constant in 1966 and 1970. The Tories lost another seat in February 1974 and remained steady on only one seat in October. Finally, in 1979 (when Dorries is 22 – so I’m not sure it still counts as while she was growing up) the Tories doubled their number of seats to a rather unimpressive two.

So Liverpool never had more than six Tory MPs – al least not while Dorries was growing up there. But she thinks that she can just throw a fact into an article like that and people will just accept it’s true.

You should never trust a word that Dorries writes. She has frequently been proven wrong on details like this.

p.s. Tim Fenton has run this analysis too and has reached similar conclusions. And, surprise surprise, he finds that her claims about the council are nonsense too.

Doctor Who News

I’m getting bored of the number of media outlets who are taking the slightest of comments that someone makes about the upcoming Doctor Who anniversary special and spinning it into a story packed full of completely unsubstantiated nonsense. Headlines like “No Doctors To Return For 50th Special” which, when you read them turn out to be based on the fact that Colin Baker hasn’t had a phone call from Steven Moffat.

Obviously it’s good for the show that it gets all of this publicity and I don’t, for one second, expect the production team to do anything to put a stop to it. They’ll tell us what they want us to know when they want us to know it. Not a moment sooner.

But in the meantime, anyone who has ever appeared in Doctor Who has to watch what they say for fear of it being overhead by a tabloid journalist and being used to reinforce what ever story the journalist wants to write.

In an attempt to counter this, I’ve set up whonews.tv. The plan is that I’ll read these stories, extract the actual facts that they are based on and explain what we can actually believe based on those facts. Forensic analysis of entertainment news, I suppose.

I’ve also got a page where I list the best current information we have about what is actually happening for the show’s 50th anniversary. I’ll try to keep that up to date as more details emerge over the coming months.

Oh, and there’s at Twitter account too – WhoNews50. You might want to follow that.

Let me know if you find it useful.

Money From HMRC

I got a letter from HMRC this morning – to my company, not to me personally. It basically said “we’ve been looking at the PAYE you paid in 2010/11 and it looks like you’ve overpaid by [a surprisingly large number of pounds]“.

Now 2010/11 was the year that I was having some difficulties with my accountants. The difficulties eventually got so bad that I switched to my new accountants (who I’m still very happy with). So it doesn’t really surprise me that something went wrong that year, although the amount (it’s about 25% of the PAYE/NI I paid that year) is impressive.

What really surprises me is the tone of this letter. Having told me that I’ve overpaid (and, helpfully, pointed out the exact extra payment that I made) the letter goes on to say:

Before I can agree to either a refund or a credit, please let me the reason the overpayment has arisen

And:

Please complete the enclosed P35D giving a full explanation as to how the overpayment occurred.

Below are some example of reasons I cannot accept to justify an overpayment

• Duplicate payments with no evidence to explain why
• Statements such as ‘Payment(s) made in error’ with no further explanation
• The overpayment is due to monthly payments which do not match our records
• Any other explanation without evidence to support it

I’m finding it hard to read that in any way other than “we know we’ve got some of your money but you can’t have it back until you’ve explained in detail just how crap your record-keeping is”.

You’ve got my money. You know it’s my money. Either my accountants or I screwed up in some way. There’s no more detailed explanation than that. Just give it back to me, you bastards.