For ages I've been envious of many other bloggers' set-ups, but especially the nice friendly URL schemes that a lot of other people now use. So, starting from today, my website is at alastairs-place.net, rather than the previous www.alastairs-place.net, and you can navigate the articles using the form /yyyy/mm/article_name, or get an index of all of the articles for a given month with /yyyy/mm.

For instance, this article is http://alastairs-place.net/2006/07/url_envy.

Posted by alastair at 7:00 PM Digg It | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

HM Revenue & Customs statistics are apparently expected to show that VAT fraud in the U.K. has reached record levels according to the BBC today.

It's hardly surprising that when you introduce any form of system that relies on the government paying back tax that has been claimed, you're going to get a significant amount of fraud. We've seen it with Gordon Brown's silly “tax credit” system, and we continue to see it with VAT.

What I don't get is why people think we actually need VAT. Sure, it brings in a lot of tax revenue for the government, but:

• It places a burden on business to account for and charge VAT correctly (this is very complicated; the rulebook is well over 300 pages long, and it isn't even a complete list of all the rules that apply).
• It artificially increases the prices of many goods, which can only be an inflationary pressure on the economy.
• It is never adjusted. People sometimes claim that it gives the government an additional knob to twist, but it's been 17.5% here in the U.K. for as long as I can remember.
• It disproportionately taxes the poor. Everyone has to pay VAT, no matter how much they earn.
• It distorts the E.U.'s single market, because the rules and rates differ from member state to member state (and there are 25 different member states, all of which have complicated VAT rules like ours; what's more, they are all free to change them at various points during the year, and the penalties for non-compliance, as well as the time limits for compliance, vary from regime to regime… one or two countries even require you to employ some of their citizens in order to comply with their VAT regime!). The result is that the so-called “single market” is a joke; a hotchpotch of complicated rules administered on different terms by different states. You can even see that it isn't really a single market, since you still have to fill out CN22 forms (under a different name, but it's basically the same form) when sending goods between E.U. countries.
• It creates difficulties for companies e.g. selling services or downloadable goods over the Internet. The E.U. insists that pretty much anything sold to its citizens should include VAT, but not everyone outside of the E.U., unsurprisingly, feels like paying tax to the European Union. Most of the large U.S. operations do, and a number of the smaller ones, but a lot simply don't care, whereas those of us within the E.U. have to do it otherwise we'll be prosecuted.
• It creates additional opportunities for people to defraud companies (e.g. by quoting someone else's VAT number—the E.U. doesn't provide a sensible way for companies to verify that VAT numbers correspond to the identities of the people using them… you can do it, but you have to phone your local VAT administration, sit in a queue for hours on end and then read all the details out to an operator in order for them to tell you one way or another). In case you're wondering, if you quote someone else's VAT number, you may be breaking the law, but do HMRC care? No. They will pursue the company you defrauded for the VAT that you should have paid!
• It creates additional opportunities for people to defraud the government.

There is no credible evidence that VAT is necessary or desirable. Many countries don't have it, and their economies function perfectly well without it. We should forever curse the French, and in particular the late Maurice Lauré, for coming up with the idea.

What we should do is scrap VAT and raise the extra revenue through income taxes (in the U.K., that means Income Tax and Corporation Tax). They're much fairer, since they're calculated as a proportion of income, and (the daft tax-credit system aside) they offer fewer opportunities to defraud, as well as being simpler to account for.

OK, the U.K. government claims that VAT is good because it's easy to collect (apparently), but what they really mean is that it's easier for them.

(Note: I'm aware that VAT is collected differently from a traditional sales tax, before anyone points that out. Both types of sales tax, however, are a bad thing.)

Posted by alastair at 11:46 AM Digg It | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

SQLite is quite a popular library, particularly on Mac OS X where it's actually used to implement some system features.

Unfortunately, some of the filesystems on OS X (AFP, for instance) don't implement advisory locking via the POSIX function fcntl(), which leads SQLite to report that the "database is locked" whenever you try to use it.

Now, SQLite is included with Mac OS X, and Apple have been kind enough to solve this problem for the version that they provide (3.1.3). Unfortunately, that version doesn't support some of the syntax that gets generated by newer versions of SQLAlchemy, which I've been evaluating as part of a new design for my company's website. So I needed to upgrade to a newer version to make it work, and since my home area is on an AFP share, I needed it to work on that.

The upshot is that I've ported Apple's fix from 3.1.3 to the latest version of SQLite (3.3.6). Here's a patch. To apply it, download the patch and the sqlite 3.3.6 sources (1.59MB). Then, in Terminal, do something like the following:

alastair$ tar xvzf ~/Desktop/sqlite-3.3.6.tar.gz
sqlite-3.3.6/
sqlite-3.3.6/art/
sqlite-3.3.6/art/tmp/
...
sqlite-3.3.6/publish.sh
alastair$ cd sqlite-3.3.6
alastair$ patch -p1 < ~/Desktop/sqlite-3.3.6-osx.patch

Then build it as normal. Note that if you run make test on an AFP volume, you'll spot that one or two of the tests will fail. I think this is because of the differences in semantics between POSIX and AFP byte-range locks. If you run them from a local volume instead, they succeed as expected.

If you want the new build to match the version supplied by Apple, remember to configure it with --enable-threadsafe and --enable-tcl to turn on thread-safety and Tcl support.

Posted by alastair at 2:41 PM Digg It | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

John Gruber's Mac OS X Tipping Point article remarks that

The myopic view of the classic Mac OS held by OS X era switchers, I suspect, stems from a thought process that runs like this: I wasn’t using a Mac in the late 90s, and I care about computers, and a bunch of my friends and colleagues feel the same way, so therefore no one who cares about computers was using a Mac in the late ’90s.

As a member of the group of “OS X era switchers”, I think this is manifestly unfair. It is a gross generalisation, and fails to take account of a number of factors affecting people like me. For instance, in the late '90s, I would have loved to have been using a Mac. As someone who previously used Atari ST machines through the late '80s and early '90s, the Mac was a case of a familiar (but slightly better) user interface, familiar (but slightly better) hardware and generally better (but more expensive) software. There are, of course, exceptions—anyone familiar with the latter days of the Atari ST range will remember remarks in the press about the number of Calamus DTP users decrying the lack of functionality in Quark Xpress, and many of the high-end music packages that today are run on the Mac and PC platforms originated on the ST platform.

However, as a student without a proper income, I wasn't able to afford the new PowerPC Macs, and didn't see much of a future for the admittedly attractive 68040-based machines that were still on sale. Nor were the clone machines particularly competitively priced (indeed, had I bought one of those, I would probably have regretted it, since they had the price point of Apple's hardware but without any of the finesse).

So I was forced into the world of the PC and thereby Windows. And let me tell you, it is pretty horrible having to switch from an operating system that has a Mac-like UI with a mix of UN*X and DOS-like underpinnings (in the latter days drifting ever closer to being UN*X-like) to the frankly ropey UI of Microsoft Windows. Not that the Mac UI was perfect, but it was a lot better than Windows. I actually think that the Mac UI has got a bit worse, rather than better, with the introduction of OS X, but I'm hoping that Leopard will go some way towards resolving that.

You may ask why didn't I then buy a Mac for ages after that? Well, although my income had increased somewhat, I had an investment in PC software at that point. The thing that originally tempted me into the world of the Mac was the fact that the titanium PowerBook was the best UN*X-based portable available. I wasn't necessarily expecting to shift completely to the Mac, but when I found it so much less annoying to use than my PC, that's what happened. And now, my business is based around the Mac too.

Ironically, perhaps, given that the ST was moving towards a model with a UN*X-like base and a Mac-like UI, modern Mac OS X has done exactly that! Though there are still a few things, to my mind, that Apple could have usefully learned from buying an old ST and looking at the software on it. For instance, being able to use windows that are not on the top, or the way that dragging a file from one window to another has the same meaning wherever the file is coming from or going to (on the ST, this would always copy the file… to move it instead, you had to hold a key; the Mac, like Windows, uses a ridiculous heuristic based on whether the file is on the same disk, forcing you—unnecessarily—to watch for UI cues that tell you what you're going to do and modify your behaviour accordingly). Tear-off menus are quite handy too, as is a send-to-back button on the windows and the ability to resize from any side or corner. (I am aware, before anyone points out, that the original GEM didn't have many of these features… but later GEM replacements, including Geneva, MagiC, nAES et al., certainly did/do).

Posted by alastair at 12:31 PM Digg It | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's interesting to read Daniel Jalkut and Jonathan Rentzsch's opinions of Apple's new Dashboard auto-update mechanism.

What really annoys me about this particular issue is the sort of government-is-out-to-get-me, tinfoil-hat kind of hysteria that seems to affect both the press and many commentators on the Internet.

Let's step back for a moment and consider.

Continue reading “Phone Home Hysteria” $raquo;

Posted by alastair at 3:52 PM Digg It | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm too hot. And yes, I'm going to whinge about it to you :-)

It's currently at least 25°C (air temperature) in this room (the thermometer I just fetched is still heading slowly upwards), and the Met Office people on the TV said this morning that it was going to be over 70% humidity. The air surrounding me feels like it's probably gone over 90%, but then I'm a sweaty customer in this sort of heat so that's hardly an objective assessment of the situation :-)

Of course, people in some parts of the world will look at this post and think “Hey, that's a pleasantly cool day, what's this guy talking about?”. Equally, in temperatures I feel more comfortable in, they might don ski-wear when I was still wandering about in jeans and a T-shirt. Funny how even peoples' impressions of temperature are relative.

Posted by alastair at 2:45 PM Digg It | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)