This week's been really busy for me. It's not been devoid of news either...
The UK Terror laws got a smack down by Lord Hoffman, who said they contraviened European Human Rights, and he went on to say, "The real threat to the life of the nation, in the sense of a people living in accordance with its traditional laws and political values, comes not from terrorism but from laws such as these."
Before we get too excited about a Lord who has a clue, we have to remember that politicians in power universally seem to have less of a clue. Jack Straw says the Lords got it wrong. The pressure is mounting though. As usual, the BBC have a run down of people's comments on the subject. Personally, I can't imagine how it's possible to have detention without trial in a civilised country. If these people are really a threat to our safety, then let's understand how and why. A government simply telling us that's the case doesn't really convince anyone. As one of the comments says, if any other country was imprisoning people indefinitely without trial, we'd be over there bombing them.
Of course, this week the big story was Charles Clarke taking over from David Blunkett in the Home Office. I'm not sorry Blunkett had to resign, although the reasons look a bit flaky to me. Sadly though Charles Clarke has no ideas of his own, so he'll be pressing ahead with ID cards.
In more good news, the BBC remind us that the Freedom of Information act comes fully into force on January 1st. In good BBC tradition, they've done us an excellent public service and have written up how to use the Freedom of Information Act. I may well try to librate some information from the Home Office very soon.
(Incidentally, the BBC also link to the mail and telephone preference websites, if you fancy stopping direct marketing coming your way)
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Comments
This is not about this post.
I saw something you wrote about an perl Open2 problem in a daemon. Didn't really know how else to reach you, but I figured you'd see this here.
If you are still having a problem with that, or if you're just curious, I think I found a work around, at least in my case. By redirecting STDOUT, STDIN, and STDERR to /dev/null, instead of closing them, my problem went away. I'm not sure if there are any negative implications to this, seems to do the same thing. if you ever get around to trying this, I'd like to know how it goes.
Yep, you're absolutely correct. The doc you're referring to is way out of date (and I should sort it out). In the meanwhile, try the Proc::Daemon Perl module from CPAN - it does what you suggest, and works very nicely.