I couldn’t defer it any longer, so its time I held my annual C.V. update. This year, I’ve been doing more web-agency work with Head London, working on a grocery website, a classroom presentation tool and a celebrity competitions website. I also worked on the redesign of the TouchLocal website and its sister project Wefinda.

Take a look at the latest C.V. on my cv page.

I’m pleased to say that my dear old Grandmother has started to use the Internet on her laptop, in particular to use Skype to keep in touch. I take for granted what a technological leap this must be. When she was born, the fastest you could go was 60mph on a train, now there are rockets that travel through space; likewise the most data you could store was in an archive, now we have petabytes on a space no bigger than your little toe. Amidst this tidal wave of change, let’s not forget the frightful difficulty our seniors must dodge. By means of example, I pasted this snippet from a skype conversation I just had:

June Elizabeth Garland: Have just had visitors leave after 6 days – they have taught me a lot about laptop
June Elizabeth Garland: How are you we are fine
Dan Garland: hi gran
Dan Garland: good thanks
June Elizabeth Garland: cANT BELIEV E IT i CAN ONLY TYPE IN CAPS – WHAT ON EARTH HAVE i DONE
Dan Garland: caps lock button
Dan Garland: left-hand side
June Elizabeth Garland: Thankgoodness it has come right

Let’s not forget what we take for granted and be nice to our silver surfers!

You know when your brain is just not co-operating when you type ls into the mysql client console.

Not strictly a tech post, but I made some back-of-a-fag-packet calculations on how many seats parties would have won in yesterday’s election had their vote had some form of proportional representation. I simply took their percentage share of the vote, as reported by the BBC, and multiplied it by 650.

N.B. I didn’t vote in this election so you could consider me ‘non-partisan’. I’m just interested in the outcome of PR…

UK General Election Results
Figures from the BBC, with an added column to show how many seats each party would receive if their percentage share of the vote was reflected in the number of seats they received.

Party
Seats
Gain
Loss
Net
Votes
%
+/-%
#seats as % of vote
+/-

Conservative
306
100
3
+97
10,706,647
36.1
+3.8

235

-71

Labour
258
3
94
-91
8,604,358
29.0
-6.2

189

-69

Liberal Democrat
57
8
13
-5
6,827,938
23.0
+1.0

150

+93

Democratic Unionist Party
8
0
1
-1
168,216
0.6
-0.3

4

-4

Scottish National Party
6
0
0
0
491,386
1.7
+0.1

11

+5

Sinn Fein
5
0
0
0
171,942
0.6
-0.1

4

-1

Plaid Cymru
3
1
0
+1
165,394
0.6
-0.1

4

+1

Social Democratic & Labour Party
3
0
0
0
110,970
0.4
-0.1

3

0

Green
1
1
0
+1
285,616
1.0
-0.1

7

+6

Alliance Party
1
1
0
+1
42,762
0.1
+0.0

0

-1

UK Independence Party
0
0
0
0
917,832
3.1
+0.9

20

+20

British National Party
0
0
0
0
563,743
1.9
+1.2

12

+12

Ulster Conservatives and Unionists – New Force
0
0
1
-1
102,361
0.3
-0.1

2

+2

English Democrats
0
0
0
0
64,826
0.2
+0.2

1

+1

Respect-Unity Coalition
0
0
1
-1
33,251
0.1
-0.1

1

+1

Traditional Unionist Voice
0
0
0
0
26,300
0.1

1

+1

Christian Party
0
0
0
0
18,623
0.1

\
1

+1

Independent Community and Health Concern
0
0
1
-1
16,150
0.1
+0.0

1

+1

Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition
0
0
0
0
12,275
0.0

0

0

Scottish Socialist Party
0
0
0
0
3,157
0.0
-0.1

0

0

Others
1
1
1
0
319,891
1.1
0.0

4

+3

Turnout
29,653,639
65.1
4.0

After 649 of 650 seats declared.

Conclusions

• From what I can see, some form of PR would give UKIP and BNP substantial gains, while actually in first-past-the-post these far-right parties have been kept out of parliament.
• Scottish and Welsh nationalism is under-represented under first-past-the-post
• At least twelve parties would benefit from PR
• The only people who stand to lose are the two mainstream parties the system is designed to elect each time, with the addition of the DUP.
• With 36% of a 65% turnout, the Tories have the support of 23% of registered voters, or, 77% do not support the Tories.
• With 29% of a 65% turnout, Labour are even worse, with 19% support, or less than one in five people in the country supporting the incumbent Government.

… but how many people might have voted differently, and indeed voted at all if they thought their votes would be counted in this way?
Have I made any mistakes in my assumptions or calculations here? Please leave a comment and let me know what you think.

I’m currently bug-fixing on a Rails project, and encountered the need to convert the default UTC date-formats into local times, seeing as we’re enjoying our extra hour in our glorious British summer time. The documentation is a little confusing on this point, but I found that a good solution is to keep UTC for use in the database, and to just convert the string representation in the front-end:
<%= some_model.created_at.in_time_zone(‘London’).to_s(:short) %>

This would be good enough to work with sorting, and finds too, provided you were a little careful about which date representation you were using. There is also the ability to change the timezone with Time.zone = “London”.