In January 2008 I contacted Tele Atlas to tell them that their data on where Carnedd Llewelyn and Carnedd Dafydd are was wrong. They emailed me back and said.

“To insure [sic] that the quality of our data meets the highest standards, the change you have suggested may take several months to be completed. Tele Atlas makes updates to its database every day and the application providers receive new versions of our product every three months. They will integrate the new data into their products and update their maps, which usually takes from a few weeks to a few months, depending on the application provider. Once we inform you about the change in our database, please contact your application provider to learn when the update for your application will be available.”

20 Months have passed since they sent me that email. I’ve climbed both mountains since then and can guarentee to you that they have not changed much in that time, neither however have Tele Atlas’s labels for them, which are just as wrong.

Here are some links to maps that have the Carneddau in the correct locations.

• Open Street Maps
• Ordnance Survey (next to Google Terrain map from Where’s the path)
• Ordnance Survey (on Multimap)
• Bing Maps

The Doctor

“I’m voting BNP because I see what immigration has done to the NHS. As a Doctor I want to see an end to ‘health tourists’ and to make sure British nurses are employed and paid fairly.”

Search for this image on tineye and you’ll quickly find out that this image has been used on a number of websites and that you can buy it to use royalty free from a stock photo website. The image was taken by an American photographer probably in 2006.

The Pensioners

“We’ve seen how this country has declined under the present government and we’re voting BNP because they will put pensioners before asylum seekers and ensure our future.”

“We’re with the British National Party because it’s not fair that people who’ve worked hard and paid in all their lives are pushed to the back of the queue behind bogus asylum seekers.”

Search for this image on tineye and lo and behold it is available from the same stock photo website.  Looking at the stock photo website you can find out the models are called Deanna and Mario.

The Soldier

“We’re fed up of being sent ill-equipped into foreign wars. The BNP will bring our troops home and ensure that British soldiers are not abused on the streets of our cities by Muslims.”

Again, search using tineye you can find that it’s from a different stock photo website. What’s particularly amusing here is that the photo is of an Irish guardsman, which is funny because the Irish are not British, Britain is made up of England, Scotland and Wales.

UPDATE: At least one commenter has pointed out that this is actually a Scots Guard, I assumed that the picture’s title was correct when I wrote the article. The photo has since been reported by the Sun to be Stuart Walker who has stated he does not back the statement attributed to him in the leaflet.

The Mother

“As a mother and wife I want to ensure that our children have a future. Our taxes should be invested in education and job creation, not wasted on paying bureaucrats or bankers’ bonuses.”

Searching tineye once again tells us this photo is entitled “Love my Mommy!” and was taken by another American photographer.

The only conclusion I can make is that  no real BNP voters were keen enough to appear on the leaflets.

The BNP are not the first people to send out leaflets with fake people on, when there was a decision to be made on whether Manchester should have city centre congestion charging leaflets were printed encouraging people to vote ‘YES’ with case studies showing how people would be better off, again, none of the people were real (Manchester Evening News: C-charge ‘locals’ don’t exist).

Images of Broughton can be found on Panoramio and loc.alize.us.

1. Click ‘Settings’.

2. Click ‘Mail, Contacts, Calendars’.

3. Scroll down to ‘Signature’ and click it.

4.  Delete ‘Sent from my iPhone’.

There, now you just need to get some some better in ear headphones that aren’t white and you won’t look like an Apple fan boy.

I also want to do Via Ferrata,(Italian for “Iron road”) which is somewhere between walking and rock climbing. There are things permanently attached to the rock to make your climb simpler and quicker. Like ladders and steel cables to attach yourself to.

Another nice photo that I can’t embed

I think I will need to get a bit fitter to get the most out of it.

import random

def main(argv):

    if len(argv) < 2:

        sys.exit(1)

    f = file(argv[0]).read().splitlines()

    name = [random.choice(f).lower()]

    letter = name[0][0]

    for fn in argv[1:]:

        words = file(fn).read().splitlines()

        words = [w.lower() for w in words if w.lower().startswith(letter)]

        if len(words) == 0:

            return False

        name.append(random.choice(words))

    return " ".join(name)

if __name__ == "__main__":

    import sys

    result = False

    while not result:

        result = main(sys.argv[1:])

    print result

In my .vimrc I have “set shiftwidth=4″ this means that when I indent by pressing tab, using the ‘>’ command or using the new trick I’ll show in a second it is the width of 4 characters and because I have “set expandtab” it uses four spaces rather than a tab character. Without getting into the whole debate over which is better, spaces or tabs, the reason I do this is because I like to follow PEP 8 when I code Python which is the programming language I use most. PEP 8 states, amongst a whole load of other things, “Use 4 spaces per indentation level” and “Never mix tabs and spaces”.

So you can indent 4 lines in “Normal mode” by sticking the cursor on the first line, then type either >4> or 4>>. To indent just the one line you can do >> without specifying the number. You can also press ‘>’ followed by a movement (in vim use “:help usr_03.txt” to learn more about that) so to indent everything from this current line to the first blank line below the current line I would type >/^$ and press enter.

If you are in insert mode editing text it can be annoying to have to go into “normal mode” and back to editing again afterwards just to indent or unindent a line. So to indent the current line whilst editing press Ctrl+T anywhere on that line and to unindent press Ctrl+D, easy. Unfortunately you can only do one line at a time that way.

I found a way of doing this for Python here and it shows how to map to a better shortcut (the same as is used in Visual Studio in fact. Unfortunately this only works for python and I was really hoping to have a way that works for as many languages as possible as I know Vim must support more and I use quite a few languages.

I did manage to find a simpler way that works for all of vim’s supported languages here. Combining the two approaches gives an easy to use auto completion for loads of languages.

Just add the following to your .vimrc

filetype plugin on

inoremap <Nul> <C-x><C-o>

Then you can use Ctrl+Space to autocomplete your programming language keywords and the names of variables, functions and modules.

Sorting Lines

I actually learnt two new tricks to be able to do this. The first is selecting lines using visual mode.

By placing the cursor on the first line you wish to select then pressing Shift+V and moving the cursor the last line to select you select the range of lines between the two and you can do any of your normal ex commands on just the selected text.

To sort the selected lines type :sort, this runs the sort command and replaces the selection with the result. You notice if you try to sort lines with numbers they will be sorted alphanumerically, ie. 700 would come before 8, if you want to sort numerically use :sort n. You can also remove duplicates from a list by using :sort u, to remove duplicates and sort numerically use :sort un.