“More than 1,000 employees working for a North East call centre have been made redundant.

Garland Call Centres, based at Hartlepool Marina, Middlesbrough and South Shields, announced it had gone into administration on Monday.

The centre employed 1,158 people – 178 based in South Shields, 621 in Hartlepool and 359 in Middlesbrough.

Administrators said the company was unable to support trading after the “termination of key contracts”.”

– BBC News: “Jobs blow for Garlands North East call centre staff”

I feel awful for anyone who worked there and got fired the way they did, but at the same time I’m highly amused they went under.

I told them years ago that they cared more about targets than customer satisfaction, and that it’d cause them problems in the long run. They should’ve listened.

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Just found an awesome guide from Mattias Kretschmann on how to create a perfect AFP file server for Mac clients that supports Time Machine backups over the network out of the box. It worked for me with a Mac OS X 10.6.3 client and an Ubuntu 10.04 server, with just one small change to the /etc/netatalk/afpd.conf file. The final line simply needed to read:

- -transall -advertise_ssh

Beautiful, thanks Mattias. :)

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It seems that things have progressed into the ridiculous in the YouTube vs Viacom spat:

For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately “roughed up” the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko’s to upload clips from computers that couldn’t be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt “very strongly” that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.

Viacom’s efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.

– Zahavah Levine, YouTube Chief Counsel, YouTube Blog

This sort of mess surely can’t look good for Viacom?

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From an Associated Press article:

Twelve administrators of the website Formspring.me, including CEO Mark Baxter were arrested on Monday for data phishing and misleading the public, when the site was revealed to be a “social experiment,” which will culminate in the automatic revealing of users’ private data on April 1, 2010.

Update: seems like this is a hoax…

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I’m reposting this from an email I received from the people over at 38 Degrees, because it’s important.

The BBC Trust has now launched an official consultation on its proposals for massive cuts to its services. It’s asking us to email to say what we think of their plans to cut their website in half and scrap BBC 6 Music and Asian Network.

We need to make sure the BBC gets an overwhelming number of responses against these plans. The more of us who send an email against the cuts, the more chance we have of changing their mind.

It only takes 1 minute to email the BBC Trust and speak out against the cuts using this online tool – please click here to add to the pressure:
http://www.38degrees.org.uk/email-the-BBC-Trust

There are already signs that our pressure is starting to force a rethink behind the scenes. Sir Michael Lyons, Chair of the BBC Trust, has accepted that, “if we find that there’s massive public concern that we need to take account of, then we will go back to the Director-General to rethink the strategy.” You’ve already helped with that by adding your name to the petition, but it would help even more if you also sent a quick email to the BBC.

38 Degrees isn’t the only organisation campaigning to stop these cuts to the BBC. Last week campaigns sprung up across the web – on facebook, on twitter, and on petition sites. To have the biggest impact, we need to work together. So this week we’re teaming up to make sure as many emails get submitted to the consultation as possible. 38 Degrees, and the organisers of the biggest other petition against the cuts, and the biggest facebook group, can work together to spread the word about how easy it is to send a formal consulation response against the cuts. That means that this morning nearly 200,000 of us are getting a message like this – if we all take action, our impact will be huge.

Please send a quick email to the BBC now and tell them what you think of plans to cut 6 Music and the Asian Network:
http://www.38degrees.org.uk/email-the-BBC-Trust

Thanks for getting involved,

David, Hannah, Johnny, Nina and the 38 Degrees Team

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Hold on tight, this one’s a wobbly electro treat with a bit of dubstep thrown in for good measure with sounds from the likes of Ellie Goulding, Joe And Will Ask?, Riton, and Hostage. Crank the volume way up, and get your weekend started with some serious oomph!

If you love the Unadopted Podcast, please add Unadopted on Facebook and tell your friends about the podcast!

Want to send music in to the Unadopted Podcast? Now you can! Visit the Unadopted Soundcloud and send your music in (it’s dead easy). If I like it, I’ll try and get it into one of the sessions!

1. Hostage – Valhalla
2. Joe And Will Ask? – Monster
3. Fake Blood – The Dozens
4. Mylo – Drop The Pressure (Rex The Dog Remix)
5. Kidda – Everything Bad Is Good For You (TLGB Remix)
6. Riton & Seiji – Computer Juice (TAI & D.I.M. Remix)
7. Project Bassline – Drop The Pressure (Jack Beats Rinsed Out Rave Remix)
8. Fake Blood – Mars (Jack Beats Remix)
9. Riton – Oh Super!
10. The Temper Trap – Sweet Disposition (Doorly’s Dubstep Mix)
11. Ellie Goulding – Starry Eyed (Jakwob Remix)

Listen now over at http://unadopted.co.uk/podcast/. If you haven’t already set it up, click the “Subscribe” link
on the right-hand-side when you get there to get the podcast automatically delivered right into your iTunes or RSS reader whenever I release a new session!

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So. It’s been on TV now so I’m allowed to talk about it.

The BBC just showed an episode of Horizon called To Infinity and Beyond, and I got a credit at the end of it. Shiny. :)

Why? Because I made something shiny that helps answer the age old question: If a monkey sat at a typewriter for an infinite amount of time, how long would it take to write the entire works of Shakespeare. You can even download a copy of the shiny thing yourself from Google Code, and do pretty much whatever you want with it as it’s been released under the BSD License.

Enjoy!

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Just over a year ago, I created a bunch of SSL certs following the instructions here: http://www.devklog.net/2008/05/25/generating-ssl-certificates-that-will-make-firefox-3-happy/

I’m having some interesting problems creating a new certificate to replace an expired one.

When I created a new certificate (as a leaf of a self-signed CA cert), to replace the expired leaf, I got a message saying that the certificate already existed.

I backed up and then deleted the expired cert and tried again, to no avail.

I saw this old thread which seems related to the problems I’m having, but the solutions there didn’t help me (I’m already manually picking serial numbers in the format yyyymmddnn, where nn is the number of certificates I’ve created that day, and deleting the Certificate Authority folder from Application Support in my home library didn’t make a difference either).

Anyone else had similar trouble? How did you resolve it?

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I really really really want to retake my profile picture (below).

The original image was a bit of a fluke, taken on a crap cameraphone about six years ago, and is only 288×352 @ 72dpi. I need a need a better quality version, really soon. Any tips/ideas welcome.

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