Monthly Archives: August 2010

Education

Five Things You Would Have Seen Today

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Today was A-Level results day, so during the day on TV and in the media you probably saw this:

  1. A carefully selected “representative cross section” of students, pre-checked to ensure they get good results of course, to open their A-Level Results live on TV.
  2. Newspapers and newspaper web sites with lots of pictures of carefully selected groups of girls leaping excitedly having got their A-Level results – hey look here are loads and loads of them.
  3. Pundits saying that A-Levels are easier than they were in the past, heightened this year by the arrival of the new A* grade because too many people are now getting A grades.
  4. Politicians highlighting that the results are a triumph for their policies better educating our children, or alternatively an indication of the failure of the other lots policies and a fall in standards.
  5. Lots of advice on what to do if you didn’t get your grades and have to go through clearing.

I probably should have written this list yesterday, because the whole results day routine is depressingly familiar. The media do the same thing every year – in fact they do the same thing on almost every Thursday in August every year as the different exam results come out on different weeks. This year was amusing by the appearance of the Sexy A-Levels blog, which highlights that unlike the TV channels who have to show a representative cross-section of students – so you get a mixture of boys and girls, a couple from an ethnic minority and so on – the impression that you get from the newspapers is that most A-Level students are overwhelmingly white, young and pretty girls.

This year the annual “A-Levels have got easier” discussion was boosted by the arrival of the new A* grade which was needed to distinguish the increasing numbers of students getting an A grade – certainly if you look at the graph of percentage of students awarded an A grade on the graph on this BBC News story the growth is striking, even compared to when I took my A-Levels back in 1991. Having said that, the difficult thing about any comparison like that is the effect it has on the young people today. There may be more people getting the top grade, but they still have to work hard to achieve those grades, so it is important to try to have the debate without denigrating their achievement. Having said that, not least from the point of view of people who have to distinguish between applicants, whether that be for university or job applications, there needs to be more delineation. The A* grade helps, but it does seem a bit like adding an extra large to a range of sizes, whilst simultaneously making all the other sizes slightly smaller.

All of that aside, I know some young people who have achieved the grades they needed, and are now excitedly looking towards starting at university in the autumn, many congratulations to them. I also know a few who missed out on what they needed, and are even now trying to work out what to do, and going through the stress of clearing, to them commiseration’s, but don’t feel downhearted – I also know plenty of people who had similar results, and whilst it seemed like the end of the world at the time, came through it, and in a number of cases said it was probably a good thing in the long run, taking them places that they weren’t expecting. Whatever happened, good results or not so good, it is a big change for everybody, and I’d just like to wish everybody who got their results today good luck for the future.

Backup, Photography

Why You Shouldn't Totally Trust Time Machine

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Over the past month or so we’ve had a bit of bad luck with our unibody aluminium MacBook. About a month ago it was midway through backing up, and suddenly we started to hear a worrying crunching noise coming from the hard drive. We then got the spinning beachball of doom, and the machine became unresponsive. Rebooting produced nothing, the machine just wouldn’t boot. We managed to get a Genius Bar appointment for the same day at the Apple Store in Bath, and headed down to get the bad news that the hard drive was totally gone. The team in Bath replaced the drive and we picked it up a week later.

However whilst it was a pain, it wasn’t too much of a problem as our trusty Time Capsule had been quietly backing up using the built in Time Machine software. Having got the MacBook back all I had to do was hook it up to the Time Capsule, boot the machine off the OS installation DVD, select the restore option, point the machine at the relevant drive and a few hours later the machine is restored – well almost. Following advice from Parallels I had been excluding the virtual machines we had installed – whilst this speeds up the Time Machine backups, it’s a total pain when it comes to a full rebuild.

Anyway, we hadn’t lost any data, as that sits in shared folders on the Mac side – it just took the best part of a week to rebuild the virtual machine, in between Beth using the machine. I also made sure that the virtual machines were included in the backup just in case it happened again.

And happen again it did! Barely two weeks later, just I had finished the rebuild, the drive died again, and the machine went back to Bath. The team carefully checked over the machine and concluded that it was just bad luck, a manufacturing fault on the drive, no problem, it was replaced for free and I brought the machine home and did the same rebuild process.

All appeared well until today, when Beth decided she wanted to upload some pictures from iPhoto and tried to open the application. However the application came up with a dialog saying it couldn’t find her library. Looking around the drive, mine was intact, but Beth’s was nowhere to be found. No problem, check the backup – again, nowhere to be seen – however the backups only went back to the rebuild, nothing from before. All Beth’s pictures from the last year were lost!

A surf around came upon this discussion on the Apple Forums – the only use of the computer Beth had made between the two rebuilds had been uploading pictures in iPhoto, and whilst Time Machine would have picked up the iPhoto database eventually, in the short time between rebuilds the database had not been picked up at all, and the older copies had dropped off the backup drive due to the volume of changes that the virtual machine rebuilds had produced.

So the really, really, REALLY IMPORTANT point to take away from this is that Time Machine CANNOT BACK UP CERTAIN FILES IF THEY ARE OPEN, the iPhoto library being probably the most important item. Whilst over time changes will be picked up, if you spend most of your time in iPhoto, you’re obviously running a massive risk that you will lose your valuable pictures.

There are ways around it – firstly, make sure that you take regular backups with iPhoto closed. I’d also recommend not putting all your eggs in one basket, and having a parallel backup strategy, which is what I do on our iMac G5. Alongside the same Time Capsule and Time Machine combination I use the excellent Super Duper! from Shirt Pocket software. The two bits of software are complementary. Whilst Time Machine is great for picking up accidentally deleted files, it is a bit tedious for a full rebuild. Super Duper! creates bootable clones of drives, which if the worst happens and a drive dies, you can just boot the clone. I have had a drive fail on the iMac G5, and Super Duper! was my saviour – one cloned drive copied swiftly back. Indeed Shirt Pocket software themselves describe such a complementary solution on their blog. Whilst obviously they want to sell software, I’m happy to recommend the strategy as well.

Sadly, whilst many of Beth’s pictures were safely uploaded to Flickr or still on the camera, they weren’t all there. Equally all the keyword, faces and places classification she had done is lost, so it is definitely a case of learning the hard way that we need the same complementary backup solution on the MacBook that we’ve been operating on the iMac G5.

Finally, just in case you didn’t get it TIME MACHINE CANNOT BACK UP IPHOTO WHEN IT IS RUNNING!

Housing Policy, National Politics

Should Community Right to Build be a Right to Refuse?

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There has been a bit of debate in the media today over reaction by the Rural Coalition to the governments proposed Right to Build scheme. The scheme was announced by Grant Shapps (@grantshapps) back in July, and is claimed will put the power back into the hands of local communities to get the development they want – indeed the follow up press release today is under the heading “Power to Local People to Preserve Rural Life”. When you have a read of some of the reactions from villages across the country the headline policy seems popular with villagers, the problem being that when you look at the detail of the policy, it wouldn’t help many of the people in the article.

Cliff Jackson who lives in St Osyth in Essex is battling plans to build 164 houses in his village and makes the following comment:

“We live in a democracy and it is supposed to serve the majority. If we choose to live in a village, why should someone be able to march in a build a load of houses? If that was to happen we would all have to move because we wouldn’t want to live here any more.”

Whilst in Arborfield our battle is on a larger scale, fighting 3,500 houses rather than 164, his statement echoes the feelings of many in the village. There is a clear need for some housing, but as I’ve written before the scale of what is proposed in our village will transform the lives of the villagers, destroying a rural community. Whilst the local council frequently points to consultations across the borough supporting strategic development locations, what they fail to mention is that the choice has always been over how housing is to be delivered not the numbers, i.e. it’s presented as non-negotiable that we have to build 12,500 homes.

It is clear from many of the stories presented that they see preserving their rural life as being to stop unsuitable developments rather than propose new ones – the proposed legislation is very one sided and gives villagers the opportunity to “preserve their rural life” by building, but no opportunity to vote down unwanted and unsuitable developments. Of course it’s obvious why – if you asked pretty well anybody around here if they want 3,500 homes built on their doorstep, much of it on green fields, pretty well all of them would say no.

Local Government, National Politics

Standing Up for England's Counties

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There is a bit of a double act going on between Grant Shapps (@grantshapps) and Eric Pickles (@ericpickles) on Twitter at times with one promoting the other. One such bit of promotion came last week when Grant Shapps tweeted the following:

Eric Pickles standing up for England’s counties and 1,000 years of English history – http://bit.ly/aD1Z0Z

The link points to the Telegraph letters page of August 11th which part way down features this letter from Eric Pickles:

SIR – I share the public’s concern (Letters, August 9) at the recommendation of the Postcode Address File Advisory Board to delete counties from the Royal Mail’s address database by 2016. It speaks volumes that unelected officials regard our counties – and over 1,000 years of English history – as a “vanity attachment”.

But the new Government is taking steps to defend our counties. We have scrapped Labour’s gerrymandering which sought to break up the counties of Devon, Norfolk and Suffolk for electoral advantage and we are dismantling the tiers of regional assemblies and development agencies.

It is a response to the recent news that the Royal Mail will no longer include counties in official addresses – and as you can see Eric Pickles uses it as an opportunity to pledge to protect English counties.

I have to say I greeted that with a good deal of amusement, the reason being that I live in what was once the county of Berkshire one of the oldest in the country, which exists now purely as a ceremonial county, and it’s not been Labour gerrymandering for electoral advantage that has reduced the county to a mark on the map, it was the Tory Local Government Act 1972 that transferred a chunk of the county including the former county town of Abingdon to Oxfordshire in 1974, and then the previous Tory administration gerrymandering for electoral advantage that abolished the whole county in 1998 – John Gummer chose to ignore the recommendations of the commission leaving Berkshire with six unitary authorities.

So what is the effect? For us in our little village at a simple level it means significantly less representation. We have a single local councillor, who we can only vote for once every four years, for the other three years our opinion counts for absolutely nothing. Under the old two tier system we had representation at both local and county level, and many more opportunities to vote.

Looking wider, we now have six authorities fighting with each other. We saw it with the endless debates over housing allocation where Wokingham District fought and lost the battle with the other authorities – each authority purely focused on their own people. Even government documents such as this concede that the six small unitary authorities don’t work in the best interests of the people, check out this paragraph on page 5:

The unitary structure of local government across Berkshire makes it difficult for other stakeholders to engage on issues that cut across boundaries. This is further complicated by the range of political views and agendas within and across the local authorities, and by the fact that changes across other public sector bodies do not align with the Local Authorities or each other (e.g. Police, Primary Care Trusts and Learning and Skills Council)

The size of the authorities causes problems too, I remember a number of discussions with local teachers of the problems, for example the peculiarities caused by Wokingham outsourcing much of their education to next door Surrey, or the fact that school repair projects that were approved by Berkshire were dropped by Wokingham who had more limited funds. We still have the effects now more than a decade later with many students being educated in schools in adjacent authorities rather than their own, purely because villages in the west of Wokingham are closer to schools in West Berkshire, students in parts of Reading are closer to schools in Wokingham.

That also highlights a missed opportunity – Reading still doesn’t have one authority overseeing a strategy for the whole town. A large chunk towards the south east of Greater Reading is in Wokingham, indeed most of the University of Reading is in Wokingham. Over in the west another chunk of the town is looked after by West Berkshire. In both cases there is no clear divide between the areas, but the historic borders were retained.

So will the Tories stand up for England’s counties? I don’t know, but as a resident of the former county of Berkshire their past record doesn’t bode well for the future.