Last time, on OwenCJones.co.uk…

Owen was looking into IHCD ambulance technician training with an aim to move on the be a paramedic and work in the pre hospital field.

Since then, I’ve worked out that:  I could more easily study to be a paramedic than a technician; I could drive a car but not an ambulance (making being a paramedic a bit pointless); and I can instead train as a nurse, which actually has many more possibilities.

In the meantime, I’ve joined the Red Cross, and I’m now working for them as an event first aider, having completed my basic courses, and the first of my enhanced courses (Automated External Defibrilation) recently.  I’ve spent a total of 15 hours working with the Red Cross on events so far, and have mainly treated musculo-skeletal issues with kids who are just plain mental.

Having decided on nursing, I’ve applied to some unis, one of which has outright refused my application and one of which has initially refused before reconsidering when I pointed out that they have not noticed that I have a degree already.  I wrote my personal statement according to the UCAS guidelines and as a result it’s rather inadequate.  Waiting to hear from others.

I’ve been unemployed for about 9 months, and I’m depressed, feel useless, and more or less unable to do anything I want to.  I get criticised for not making friends with dick heads I meet, and having dedicated the bulk of my spare time first to trying to get a job for months, then to learning about the careers I’m looking at in detail and learning to treat injured people.  Pretty much everything has been about getting to do a career that the country is both in need of, and which is universally helpful, and the whole thing has been stupidly demoralising.

I highly recommend, having volunteered for 5 charities, that you don’t bother.  Out of 5, one has managed to get back to me in 9 months.

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I’ve been away from the blog because I’ve been not engaging in the whole Web2 thing, I’ve been busy researching.

I’ve been considering re doing a first aid course and signing up as a First Responder for some time, and I’ve been trying to actually achieve this since I was in Essex about 4 years ago.  For those who are unaware this is what a first responder is:

Firstly, ‘First Responder’ is a term used when reporting incidents.  Used by medical personnel, it simply means the first person to respond to a need for medical assistance, this isn’t what I’m using it to mean.

A first responder in the sense I mean is an Ambulance Service Community First Responder, a volunteer who is supplied with comprehensive training in management of medical emergencies by the Ambulance service in their local area, and who answers so called ‘Category A’ calls made to the emergency operators.  Category A means ‘immediately life threatening’ and to these calls, an ambulance will be sent.  Simulataneously, the dispatcher may send an on duty CFR, and the Responder and Ambulance crews effectively race to the casualty.  Category A calls are largely calls to Myocardial infarctions (Heart Attacks), Cerebro Vascular Accidents or Transient Ishemic Attacks (Both forms of Stroke) and other forms of cardiac crisis like Cardiac Arrest.

Following an incident that causes a Category A call to be made, the gap between the incident and the arrival of aid is the Therapeutic Vacuum, a time during which there is a lack of any therapy for the condition that has ensued.  Ambulance services in the UK aim to reduce this period to 8 min or less, meaning that you should be able to expect an ambulance or alternative response within 8 mins.  A person in cardiac arrest needs attention within the first 10 minutes, and this is why the target is 8 minutes.

In response to the need to improve response times (imagine trying to drive across you home town in 8 minutes!), ambulance services the world over have introduced some kind of alternative responder.  In the UK you may find a response from a motorcycle paramedic, a Fast Response Unit, a Community First Responder or an actual Ambulance with crew.  So the existence of first responders is partly down to a need to tick boxes and meet targets set by government, but is mainly down to a need to get to critical patients ASAP.

I’ve been trying to get to be a FR for some time, and to work in other areas as an event first aider.  Finally this week, I have finally got a response from Wales Ambulance Service with some forms for me to fill out, but it turns out I may need to be a vehicle based FR, rather than the cycle FR I had originally wanted to be (I can cross Swansea faster than any car, and faster than any Ambulance!) so I’m currently in the process of suggesting this idea to the lot at Wales Ambu Trust.  Failing that I guess I have to get a car and so on, although I’m considering a small motorbike, as the license is simpler and the insurance is cheaper.

In the meantime, I’m going to find some cash from somewhere and take the first IHCD qualification, IHCD First Person On Scene, which is a qualification in advanced first aid for people who aren’t ambulance crew, but may find themselves first at an incident.  It carries on after this to IHCD Ambulance Technician, an altogether more complicated course for, guess what, ambulance technicians.  It’s all terribly complicated and so I’m looking into everything carefully before I do it.

Wish me luck!

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The problem is this:

When making elements of a web page semi-transparent, a web designer uses code like the below to make an element semi-transparent:

<div style="opacity:0.5; background:white; width:100px; height:100px;">
  Some text
</div>

Different browsers use slightly different code for opacity, but the above is one way.  The problem is that whilst this will make a black division of 100 pixels square with a 50% transparency, it will also make the text within it inherit the transparency.  You may think the solution is this:

<div style="opacity:0.5; background:white; width:100px; height:100px;">
  <span style="opacity:1;">Some text</span>
</div>

…and you’d be wrong.  This will make the text 100% of the 50% inherited from the earlier command.  So that’s not good.

Another solution is to make the div in one bit of code, and then use positioning and floats to float the content over it, but this is quite a lot more complicated and can lead to loads of messing about making code cross browser compatible and so on.

Not perfect, but I use 2 fixes for this:

PNG fix

As is well known PNG (Portable Network Graphic) files have a built in transparency ability that can be useful in website design.  Firefox and the Mozilla browser support PNG transparency for the last few versions at least, and the latest two versions of IE also support it.  For the next 2 versions of IE down, you can use the Javascript Unit PNG Fix or similar, which does the job nicely by applying IE specific commands to all included png files.  If you want to avoid Javascript, you could include these yourself, have a look at this article on A List Apart.

Why is this relevant?  Well, it’s pretty simple, in cases where you want to make a box on screen have a semi-transparent background but not text, you can create a 1 pixel by 1 pixel PNG file of the relevant transparency and colour and add this as a background to that element.  And problem solved, the transparency works already on all up-to-date major browsers, and can be made to work on that last 4 versions of them all too.  As the ALA article points out, it even works on the Sega Dreamcast built in browser.

JS is sometimes your friend

If you want to make different things different transparencies, and not just affect backgrounds, you may need to bow to Javascript.  Whilst you could write this code yourself, making it cross browser is again an unnecessary hurdle that others have overcome for you already.  All major JS effects libraries have something along these lines, but I’m going to stick with my favourite, JQuery, in which this is a major piece of cake.

Imagine you have an element, as before and you want it (but only it, and not it’s child elements) to be semi-transparent.  Having included the JQuery library all ready (You can even include the version hosted on GoogleCode, if you want to be stingy with your bandwidth.) all you need do is this:

JQuery is so called because it operates on a system of queries like a database might, these queries match elements on the page, rather than entries in a db, but the idea is similar.  If you want to select a div with the id “bob” then the query you enter is “div#bob” and if you want to match all italic text then the query would be “em” you see?  These queries are contained within a direction that looks like this:

$(QUERY)

and then directions are performed on them thereafter by using functions upon them, like this:

$(QUERY).ACTION

This isn’t a JQuery tutorial, but there are plenty out there, and it’s really easy, so much so that it can make returning to JS a challenge.  Instead of explaining how it all works, I’m going to explain how you would make an element with class “opacity50″ be 50% transparent:

$(document).ready(function() { //Checks the page has loaded before doing anything

$(“.opacity50″).fadeTo(0,0.5);

});

Looking at the middle line of those three, this is what it does:

$(“.opacity50″) 

Selects everything with the class “opacity50″.

.fadeTo(0,0.5); 

Fades selected items to 50%, expressed as 0.5 here.  The first zero is how long to take to do this, I’ve put ‘0′ as in instant, but you could put any amount of milliseconds, and watch elements fade to 50% over time.

So that’s it.  My solutions to inherited opacity in CSS.  Hope it helps.

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In my adult life I have spent 5 years working and 3 years studying, and during this time have lived on council estates with kids running around called ‘tangerine’ and whatever that year’s winner of Pop Idol was called, have had to put up with kids kicking footballs at my windows, and throwing stone through my other windows and frequently I’ve had to conclude that some of these kids need a bit more parenting.  Whilst living in Essex on an 800 pound a month job, I constantly got annoyed by kids; kids I would happily have slapped, but never kids whose parents I would’ve deprived of help.

The fact is parenting is a full time job, and because people are fickle and want everything for themselves, the accidental children are necessary to keep the planet full of humans.  Think about it, how likely is it that you were accidental?  It’s pretty likely whoever you are.  Unless you parent only had sex to conceive, it’s likely.  And you turned out ok yeah?  Of my friends who have kids, three things are noticeable.  Firstly, they are instantly different people; other people aren’t as important anymore.  You’d be the same, so shut the fuck up, and treasure what time they have for you.  I guarantee they’ll also make more time conciously for you than they used to, so it’s all good.  Secondly, they are knackered as I have said, it’s hard work.  If you want to know how hard you could try a parenting course, but it’s not even close, so you may want to consider having a kid.  If you’re brave enough then goferit, you’ll find stuff you never knew was in you, including mistakes you never knew you could make (if you don’t believe that bit, ask anyone with a kid or think back over your childhood!).  Thirdly, parents are grown-ups.  Be they 14 or 27, a parent is either a grown-up or not really a parent.

This blog post rants and raves and meanders on and on, but the real point of it is catalysed by something that is happening soon.  Currently in the UK, parents are considered validly out of work, and aren’t required to look for a job while they have children under 11.  Soon that drops to 7.  Being a mum is a fucking job damnit, kids need their parents.

I’m not a parent, I’m a kid who has parents.

Parenting is a job.

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Let’s be clear here, one of the latest arguments against Obama’s healthcare reforms is that he will insure what the Americans call ‘illegal aliens’ for healthcare.  I mean what the fuck dude?  You must be out of your tree there!

Putting aside the fact that, knowing that his country had way too many shits willing to oppose it, Obama never suggested that aliens should be allowed healthcare too (The truth is a minor point in this whole row), what kind of monster would suggest that everyone should be allowed healthcare?

Well, I would.  Here in the jolly old flawed (apparently) socialist UK, where we all wait four years to have our appendix out and literally seven people die every second from medical neglect because of an Obaman health care system that is coincidentally almost nothing like what is proposed in America anyway, anyone can enter a hospital emergency department and request treatment for an injury and receive it.  Whilst it’s true that this may expose illegal immigrants in the country, they are at least offered this help if it’s necessary.  Fucking socialist wankers that we all are (It’s true, some Texan communist said so on the news.  I mean, he doesn’t call himself a communist, but that’s their clever trick isn’t it?  Burn the witches while we’re at it!).  Why would we offer health care to immigrants? Well…

Putting aside the fact that this was never actually suggested by the Obama administration, (I would call it an inconvenient truth, but Al Gore ruined that phrase by inconveniently lying, the inconvenient twat), the main reason to offer health care of at least some sort to everyone is because it’s a fundamental human right.  The Geneva convention includes bits about not aiming at health care targets, and offering health care to prisoners of war and the UN Declaration of Human Rights, to which the US is of course a signatory, if only by default (i.e. they’re a member of the UN).

25.1 Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

It looks to me like the US is already in breach of this requirement of UN code, with it’s “Better hope you’re not too poor for health insurance system”, but fortunately for them everyone is too poor to do anything about it.

As so many protesters against the reforms have said, it’s “un-American”, and so am I.

Thank fuck for that.

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I sat watching it for the first 20 minutes thinking I could predict what would happen, as if watching an episode of the painfully predictable Casualty spin off, Holby City. As I watched, each med student got a little worked up, and gradually started to get used to what they were doing, and I sat a played video games as the programme lulled me into a false sense of security.

The programme went on, one student said a patient who died a quarter of an hour ago would be “up and about in no time”, another wimped out of a crashed patients resuscitation, another claimed her patient had no veins, and the leadershippy cock reassurred them all it was ok, before going to check on his Psych case who needed to see a psychiatrist.  Then all the shit in world hit some kind of reverse wind farm type fan as the patient the young doctor had been arguing for a psych consult for all day stabbed him, leaving him bleeding on the floor, for his housemate on the crash team to deal with.

So, it took me by surprise and slapped me back from the edge of WoW, and left me with one profound thought as I watched the dead doctor’s housemate sit down by the bottle of champagne they had left out at home to celebrate their first day.

What must the guy who played the dead doctor have thought when he first read the script?

“Hold up.  I die in the first episode?”

“I fucking die in the first fucking epi-fucking-sode?”

“What the fuck?? I’ve cleared my schedules for the next 8 weeks!”

Anyway, BBC Wales is looking up, and I say that from my bedroom which overlooks one of the Torchwood locations.  I bloody hate Torchwood.

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The first friend said she was “getting worried” by what I told her about what could be found out about her online, the workplace at which the email server crashed doesn’t use Google Applications because the system administrator doesn’t like the idea that Google have control over what people privately to each other.  This post is why you shouldn’t worry as much as the likes of the online media might have you think.

What’ve you got to hide anyway?

The first question in all of this is above, what do you have to hide anyway?  I don’t mean this as a kind of “What are you? A criminal?” way, more as a catalyst to actually make you think it over.  Yeah Facebook knows what you think of your boss, do they care?  Google or Microsoft can possibly read you email, do you write anything worth reading?  Your doctors surgery knows what illnesses you have, other than wanting to keep them quiet for your own personal reasons of vanity, does it actually matter? No. It doesn’t.

It’s the modern way

Contrary to what it seems, this isn’t about the increasing storage of personal information in the modern world.  Whilst the amount computers the world over know about you has increased dramatically in recent years, it has been the case, even before computers, that many people will have access to your data as part of the course of their jobs.  In the 1950s, your doctor’s surgery would have all of your medical data stored on paper in their office, where a secretary, receptionist, administrator, nurse, doctor or casual burglar could read it.  The access to info was more easily obtained, and less trivial.  What’s changed in the modern world is that information stored is on a wider span of things, but in fact for getting on towards a century, the really sensitive data about you has been stored where some people could see it.

Halt! Who goes there?

In this modern age of databases and huge HDD banks storing all your data, it’s surely a bad thing that so many people can potentially see your data, yeah?  Well no.  Let’s go back to the doctor’s surgery of the 50s for a second, and have a look at the differences again.  Then, upon fetching your records (on paper), whoever had them had access to all the information the the practice had about you (which at a doctors would be quite extensive).  Now, when you go to make an appointment, you give you name, maybe some other identifying info, and make an appointment, the admin staff can instantly see your past and future appointments, repeat prescriptions and address info, maybe even hospital appointments and so forth, they can’t access doctor’s notes and medical records (on the ideally set-up systems at least) and they have less access than they did in 1950.  Whilst this is not always the case, sometimes they will have full access, you see that computerisation has created the equivalent of a piece of paper that checks ID before being read.  A stolen record, if encrypted, is nigh on useless.

Distributed storage

Assuming you didn’t like my “who cares anyway?” argument, and well you may not, purely on principle if nothing else, have a think about how information could be misused.  The nightmare scenario, as shown in films like Hackers and The Net is to have hackers alter your data to somehow change your life.  Maybe your credit rating would be dropped, or your existence changed entirely.  But let’s actually think about this for a second:

Nowadays, all of your data is stored many times over on the computer systems of many different organisations and individuals.  If a deviant hacker changed something, then they would have to change it in many locations.  Imagine that your credit records agency security was comprimised and your credit rating altered.  Putting aside why anyone would bother targeting you, what could you do to correct this?  Well…

In order to change your credit rating negatively, the hacker in this case would have to add bad debts, unpaid arrears and so on to your credit record.  (Contrary to what people seem to believe, your credit rating isn’t just a number, it’s a record of events)

Once you have bad debts against your name, your tenure with lenders will fall, but you’ll notice this won’t you?

A bad debt in actual existence would involve records on the computers of a lending company, a credit agency and a bank.  So once you’ve noticed your credit is low, you can ask to see your credit report, in the UK you can do this for £2 at a bank.  Having found fraudulent entries, you can ask the agency to remove them, and having not found any records to confirm them with a lender, or a bank, your record will be corrected.  It’s a pain, but it’s cost you £2 and an hour of time.

The duplicity of the records, their ability to confirm or deny each other, sets up a system that can correct itself.  Admittedly it needs a bit of paperwork done to do this, but because the records support each other, the system can easily recover from a single hack.

In case you’re wondering whether the hacker could just alter all records concerning that, no, not really.  Hacking anything takes a while, hacking both a credit agency and a lender takes two whiles, and hacking a bank generally takes your freedom.  Banks have some of the most monitored networks in the world.  Yes, I know people have hacked them in the past, but what the news generally fails to mention is that they were almost always caught, and that people hack banks to steal from them, not to create false transaction records.

So there you go, Facebook knows everything about your social life, and Google everything about your business life, Google Latitude knows everything about your mobile and your bank knows where you are.  All-in-all it doesn’t matter, because people’s locations make for pretty dull reading.

Your biggest weapon against computer security breach is your lack of interesting phenomena.

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Purporting to be a course in which you can investigate and work out from the “facts” what religion means and is and everything, the Alpha Course is presented as a philosophical course that is coincidentally held in your local church hall, run by Christian leaders and doesn’t include so much of the Qu’ran, Torah and Flying Spaghetti Manifesto as it does the Bible (yes, before you comment, I’m aware that the bible includes the torah, I’ve read it).  Finally by true investigation you can meet those who believe one way and those who also believe that way, and some more people who agree and make up your mind objectively.

The Alpha Course traditionally advertise on buses, with white backgrounds, little religiousness and a simple message of come and find out.  Well and good but they’ve kind of shot themselves in the foot with their latest bus advert:

“]

“Does god exist?” followed by tickboxes: “Yes”, “No” and “Probably”.  This follows on from the “there’s probably no god” adverts on buses by an atheist campaign group some months ago.

Two little issues, Alpha Course.  Out of the three options you offer, two are positive, showing an obivous bias.  Where’s my “probably not” bitches?  Second issue is so much more fun.

They’re fucking tickboxes!  What do you do to a tickbox?

You only bloody tick it.  I’ve taken to carrying a sharpie with me at all times, and I’m not saying why, ’cause you already worked it out.

Watch this space for packs of “ticker stickers” which I will be vectoring up and Zazzling in the next day or two.

=)

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The great thing about me, is that none of this is down to me. Aren’t I just a god amongst men.

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So what of the merely annoying stuff?  I’ve found this is constantly ignored, people having installed a firewall and anti-virus will have missed many of these mostly just annoying little scams, many of which are only risks from your own housemates.

The router thing

It’s necessary to understand the router thing to get why your housemates are at least more likely to have the ability to do some of this whacky stuff.  This is why:

Unless you plug directly into a modem, your computer accesses the net via a router which allows a few computers to share access to the net through one connection.  When this happens each computer is assigned an address on the local network, not the internet.  This means that accessing a single computer on the network is difficult (not impossible, but generally not worth it for anyone who knows how).  Computers already on the network will have an address relative to yours, and so they can more easily access yours.

And, onto the pranks…

Remote fun

Whether you have a PC or a Mac or something else, running Windows or a linux flavour or whatever, you may well have a feature called something like “Remote Desktop” or whatever.  This is exploitable on some systems, and surprisingly it’s not Windows that’s the worst offender.  On a mac, when you set up this system, you don’t have to enter a required password, and nor does it suggest you should.  Switch it on, and anyone on your network can take control of your computer.  Granted you can stop them, but with it still on, they can do it again.

Admittedly, often this is blocked by an Allow Y/N type dialog box, but again on Apple’s MacOSX, this isn’t necessarily the case.

Linux fun

If your housemate has a linux computer, they may well set up a housemate account for you to use.  Some versions of Linux include this in setup (only the really homey ones).   If you are lucky enough to have a housemate who has done this, you may want to check if they have installed OpenSSH server too.

By way of explanation, OpenSSH server is a remote access server for getting to the system command line.  Linux is so flexible that this can leave some interesting tricks to play.  My favourite is below.

For linux you can get a few speech simulation engines.  There are one or two that will run without installation so even as a low level user you could give them a try.  Or, you could just get your housemate to install them when drunk.  Let’s now imagine the computer has a speech eng installed, and it’s command is “speak”.  Doing the following is immense fun.  Imagine your housemate’s computer is called “Bobs_laptop”.

From command line do this:

ssh housemate@bobs_laptop.local

You’ll be asked for a password, but just enter the one you actually have for using the machine.

Then you’ll see a command prompt.  Brilliant.

Wait for a good point, preferably at 2AM when your housemate has just finished a revision marathon or very involved project, type:

$ speak Hard Drive failure, all data erased

Or, if, like me, you’re altogether a bit more macabre, type:

$ speak If not for you, I’d have survived.

That last one gets an amazing reaction.

Other pranks involve remotely turning on webcam via this kind of method and rooting it’s output to a file on the web.  It’s a bit complicated, but the ‘cat’ command is really useful for it.

Unexpected webcam sexytime.

For those of you who want to avoid these issues, remove your housemates’ logins from the ssh server group, and put a bit of tape over your webcam.

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