ZOIS Blog

This is the main News site for ZOIS. Things will appear here on a reasonably regular basis, so long as I’m interested. Although the rest of the ZOIS sites have News type entries, I think I’ll use this as a central consolidated point for it all. I’ll have to be careful, this sort of Blogging software generally makes drivel writing easy. Not that I write drivel, of course.

The original ZOIS sites were largely concerned with On-line Transaction Processing (OLTP). This has been joined by the Jobcentre Plus Database Mirror, a pro-bono effort that seems to attracted some attention. The chief distinction with former efforts is that it won’t be confined to just just these worthy topics, but to other things as well. Eclectic things. Things which interest me. Oh Dear, self-opinionated introspection, I’ve gone all Bloggy now too.

– Martin Sullivan, Cockermouth, October, 2011.

This week we’ve seen ten new Twittering Jobcentre accounts. This together with other activity brings the total up to 395.

• @JCPfalkirk (Office code: FHH)
• @JCPDumbarton (DMT)
• @HFJCP (FUL and HJN) — Fulham and Hammersmith
• @HayesJCP (HAY)
• @Alexandriajcp (ALE)
• @JCPgrangemouth (GRA)
• @jcpclydebank (CLY)
• @JCPalloa (ALL)
• @CanveyJCP (CAL)
• @JCPHELENSBURGH (HLN)

@jcpgreenock has changed its name to @jcpinverclyde. It is still representing Greenock and Port Glasgow’s Jobcentres.

Elsewhere, a specific set of jobs has now got its own Jobcentre Plus twittering account @JCP_Crossrail. A Welsh langauge version of @WrexhamJCP has appeared, @JCPWrecsam. Hayes Jobcentre has started twittering independently as @HayesJCP. Shirehampton Jobcentre, in Bristol, twittering as @ShirehamptonJCP has started a second account, @ShireJCP. It’s not clear why.

Twittering Jobcentres are listed on @JCPM_Feedback/jcp/members, save those who’ve taken to blocking me (and those are listed on this Blog). A comprehensive inclusive list of Internet-active Jobcentre Plus Offices, including those that are using Twitter, can be found as a CSV file on the FTP server.

Every week I find an interesting job. I’m posting the result on the @JCPM_Feedback Twitter account, and it appears here too.

Martin’s interesting job of the week — Communicate enthusiasm for Astronomy in Jodrell Bank: http://zois.com/RHM17349.

You will work within the Office of the SKA Organisation, based at Jodrell Bank Observatory, UK, in a team co-ordinating a global collaboration to build the Square Kilometre Array, a 1.5 billion next-generation radio astronomy facility. This is an opportunity to lead the Company’s communications activities. You will have: A university degree or equivalent. Experience in corporate or scientific communications Experience of establishing and managing an international network of media contacts. Ability to proactively identify communications opportunities, particularly within new online media. Experience of working in an international, multi-disciplinary team environment. A proven ability to work with a broad range of stakeholders, including scientists and engineers. Excellent communication and interpersonal skills.

The position is styled as a Chief Communications Officer and the original reference may be available. I’ve put in some missing apostrophes and full-stops.

After last week’s border-line rant about non-jobs I thought I’d best return to some whimsy, however I found this and I thought, yes, the Jobseekers Direct does sometimes have genuine, interesting jobs.

The SKA, that the post mentions, is the Square Kilometre Array, an ambitious Radio Telescope project that will see three vast radio telescopes built to monitor a variety of frequencies. There’s more at their own web-site and in a Wikipedia article, but if you’re interested in the vacancy you’ld probably be reasonably knowledgeable about this thing anyway.

I liked Astronomy, and I always found myself distracted by that section in the library when I was supposed to be grinding out an essay on cell biology as an undergraduate Biochemist. I’m therefore pleased to see that one of their ambitions is to look for intra-cellular amino acids and extra-terrestrial biology.

Well, it was that or a return to my old friends in the Lion King.

I’ve started analysing, in a rather crude way, the vacancies that have been posted over the past week. We can see:

• Jobs posted last week (Week Number 19): 34735
• Vacancies were still live this week: 31917 (92%)
• Anonymous postings: 3557 (10%)
• Appear to be ‘apprenticeships’: 637 (2%)
• Temporary: 8343 (24%)
• Postings declared as made by third-parties: 2191 (6%)
• Postings declared self-employed: 3375 (10%)

The most popular vacancies by SOC Code were:

1. Care assistants and home carers (6115): 2388 (7%)
2. Cleaners, domestics (9233): 2360 (7%)
3. Sales representatives (3542): 1881 (5%)
4. Sales and retail assistants (7111): 1390 (4%)
5. Chefs, cooks (5434): 1310 (4%)

The gory detail about how all this is classified is found elsewhere on the Blog. I am expanding this exploration in future weeks, and will examine other aspects of the weekly postings. I’ll try not to be judgemental about these things and leave conclusion-drawing and ranting to others. In spite of this your feedback is appreciated, as ever.

This post is automated, but I’m open to feedback.

Every week I find an interesting job. I’m posting the result on the @JCPM_Feedback Twitter account, and it appears here too.

Martin’s interesting job of the week — Sell Magnets in Horsham: http://zois.com/HOQ37478.

This is a self employed vacancy. Financial commitment required £200 to purchase stock, you may be asked to provide a fee if you are successful in your application. You are advised to seek independent financial advice. No previous experience necessary but a willingness to train on a net based course essential. Must be able to purchase stock that will yield the seller a 20 – 30% commission on sales. This therapy is suitable for use on humans and pets and is a self administered treatment.

The original reference may be available.

A bit late this week, I’ve been rather preoccupied with other stuff, as you may have read elsewhere.

The job is stereotypical of a number of postings that I’ve seen on Jobseekers Direct recently. Not only is the subject matter a red rag to Ben Goldacre and his ilk, but it would appear that the employee has to make a contribution before any remuneration is forthcoming. In this particular example you’ve got to buy stock, and if you don’t sell it …

Such ‘vacancies’, once the preserve of the backs of newspapers and the more dubious parts of the Internet, are becoming increasingly common. I believe that they’re posted, possibly through agents, on the Business Link web-site. I doubt very much if Horsham’s Jobcentre knew very much about it.

It is a vacancy, so it appears in the official Statistics. Good for them.

I’ve started analysing, in a rather crude way, the vacancies that have been posted over the past week. We can see:

• Jobs posted last week (Week Number 18): 42897
• Vacancies were still live this week: 39015 (91%)
• Anonymous postings: 4475 (10%)
• Appear to be ‘apprenticeships’: 940 (2%)
• Temporary: 10161 (24%)
• Postings declared as made by third-parties: 2580 (6%)
• Postings declared self-employed: 3945 (9%)

The most popular vacancies by SOC Code were:

1. Care assistants and home carers (6115): 3112 (7%)
2. Cleaners, domestics (9233): 2570 (6%)
3. Sales and retail assistants (7111): 2033 (5%)
4. Sales representatives (3542): 2020 (5%)
5. Chefs, cooks (5434): 1421 (3%)

The gory detail about how all this is classified is found elsewhere on the Blog. I am expanding this exploration in future weeks, and will examine other aspects of the weekly postings. I’ll try not to be judgemental about these things and leave conclusion-drawing and ranting to others. In spite of this your feedback is appreciated, as ever.

This post is automated, but I’m open to feedback.

This week we’ve seen six new Twittering Jobcentre accounts. It brings the total up to 370.

• @DagenhamJCP (Office code: DAG)
• @BrightonJCP (BWH)
• @HorshamJCP (HOQ)
• @LAUNCESTONJCP (LAU)
• @WembleyJobsPlus (WEM)

Also seen, @EmploySheffield is a new twitter Account from the folk behind @Sheffield4Jobs, but aimed at employers, and potential employers. @BudeJCP has undergone a name change, it was twittering as @BudeJCPBudeJCP, which looked like finger trouble.

Twittering Jobcentres are listed on @JCPM_Feedback/jcp/members, save those who’ve taken to blocking me (and those are listed on this Blog). A comprehensive inclusive list of Internet-active Jobcentre Plus Offices, including those that are using Twitter, can be found as a CSV file on the FTP server.

Chunks of the ZOIS web-site were off-line on Friday. Here’s why.

In a system that seems, with a great deal of hindsight, overly-complicated and Byzantine, the content for the Jobcentre Plus Mirror Database is distributed overs several machines. One of these machines, Red, suffered a major disk crash in the early hours of Friday morning. This disk served up DNS internally, so we know where red.zois.co.uk is, and other things like Network Information System (quondam Yellow Pages) and several variety of Networked File system. These things are backed up, so a failure should be relatively seamless fail-over event. Sadly it wasn’t, for in the process of failing, sizeable chunks of various databases were incorrectly skulked to their mirrors leaving them baffled and confused too.

As soon as I realised that a failure occurred I tried some corrective actions, which appeared to get things going again, only for them to fail shortly after. Exasperated by this I’ve resorted to restoring from a proper full back-up from the 1st of May on an entirely new machine and re-installing this into the system as a ‘new’ Red.

All these shenanigans meant that the Jobcentre Plus Database Mirror was not being updated through-out the day, on Friday 4th. The automated Twitter feeds stalled and, I can hear you yawning, the web interface for all the ZOIS sites, including this Blog were off-line for considerable parts of the day too.

All I can do is apologise for these outages. Things should be back to normal, for their normal less than normal normal. The Jobcentre Mirror Database should have caught up with itself and the FTP feeds were OK through-out. If you notice something odd, however, do let me know.

Well, if you’re a Linux fan, and who isn’t, then you’ll have seen the announcements. We now have a new Long Term Support (LTS) release of the popular distribution Ubuntu. This, 12.04, code named ‘Precise Pangolin’ will be supported for five years with fixes and upgrades. As much of the ZOIS estate, including this Blog is kept on machines with the previous 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) LTS version, an upgrade needed to be explored.

Being relatively conservative in my approach to these things, a couple of likely candidates were selected to experiment with. The first was ‘Orange’. Machine Orange, formally orange.zois.co.uk, and only accessible internally, is used as a staging machine for Apache experiments. It is quite elderly, but copes well with the demands of the HTML servers, PHP and Database client work. It has a 2.66GHz Intel Celeron, and 200Mbytes of memory. Although pedestrian and tiny by today’s standards it is representative of much of second-hand machinery that runs ZOIS‘s various pro-bono efforts including the popular Jobcentre Plus Database Mirror. The second was a small, cheap, but relatively recent lap-top, Machine Scarlet (scarlet.zois.co.uk).

A gentle upgrade path was chosen for Orange. The Upgrade Manage tool, chosen from the System menu, was configured to allow all the upgrades between 10.04 and 12.04 to be applied serially. This was a rather long-winded process that saw a lot of downloading. It seemed to work initially, with upgrades being applied successfully up to 11.04, but the introduction of Unity user interface seems have caused problems. The installation process claiming that the hardware, presumably the graphics card, was insufficient to this new user interfaces needs. The ‘classic’ interface, which seemed to be the now traditional Gnome one was presented instead. The next upgrade, the crucial one to 12.04 failed completely, leaving a blank screen. Installation from scratch using the CD image similarly failed. Some light investigation was undertaken, but the conclusion is that the graphics controller, given by lspci as “VGA compatible controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 65x/M650/740 PCI/AGP VGA Display Adapter”, is too old and obscure for this release.

Machine Orange was thus returned to 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) by a reinstall.

Machine Scarlet, faired better, initially. This is again, a relatively modest lap-top with an Intel Atom CPU 1.6 GHz and 1GByte of memory. After the frustrations of the graded upgrade on Orange, it was decided to install this from scratch. Since this machine was lacking a CD-drive, a USB memory-stick installation was used, and this proceeded successfully. Unity, in all its glory, could be interacted with, for the Intel 945GME graphics controller seemed to be able to cope.

Unity itself proved to be an experience. No doubt fuller reviews will present themselves on the Web, which will be more closely aligned to your particular prejudices, but in the end I found it all rather frustrating. It seems to be largely inspired by Apple’s Aqua User Interface, without being too close as to be accused of a direct rip-off. So instead of a row of icons at the bottom (the Apple ‘Dock’) we get a row of squarish icons down the left-hand side of the screen. Launching an application, or giving it focus (clicking in it, for example) causes the rest of the screen to behave in that applications specific way; the top tool-bar icon strip becomes the applications. All very Apple. And quite pleasant, even to an old XDM/twm hand like I, once I’d managed to make the icon bar less obtrusive.

Problems only really presented themselves when some modest extensions were attempted. Here at ZOIS Towers we use Network File System (NFS) and Yellow Pages, now known as Network Information System (NIS). These things aren’t the most fashionable way of distributing Users but I’m very familiar with them, having used them most of my computer-programming career. So having set them up I found it frustrating that the Unity Greeter, the login screen, seemed to be ignorant of them. Frustration compounded frustration as I attempt to configure an ‘Other’ login, just like the old Ubuntu. The Unity Greeter documentation seems to be a series of helpful and not so helpful posts on a variety of Ubuntu forums and some comments in a configuration file. Just prior to launch the system appears to have changed too, invalidating some of this helpful advice. Well, I gave up, and Scarlet is now back under 10.04 too. I’ll put it back under Unity-boosting 12.04 when there’s at least a man page for the Unity Greeter.

So, executive summary. I tried to install Precise Pangolin, but both machines are back under Lucid Lynx. I know that my efforts were hardly extensive, no blood sacrifices or Winged Monkeys, but it is supposed to be easy. I may have a stab at re-doing this at some stage in the future, but for now I’ll leave the exploration of this new version of Ubuntu to others.

I’ve started analysing, in a rather crude way, the vacancies that have been posted over the past week. We can see:

• Jobs posted last week (Week Number 17): 42417
• Vacancies were still live this week: 38756 (91%)
• Anonymous postings: 4251 (10%)
• Appear to be ‘apprenticeships’: 906 (2%)
• Temporary: 10055 (24%)
• Postings declared as made by third-parties: 2520 (6%)
• Postings declared self-employed: 3786 (9%)

The most popular vacancies by SOC Code were:

1. Care assistants and home carers (6115): 3122 (7%)
2. Cleaners, domestics (9233): 2486 (6%)
3. Sales representatives (3542): 2072 (5%)
4. Sales and retail assistants (7111): 1726 (4%)
5. Chefs, cooks (5434): 1371 (3%)

The gory detail about how all this is classified is found elsewhere on the Blog. I am expanding this exploration in future weeks, and will examine other aspects of the weekly postings. I’ll try not to be judgemental about these things and leave conclusion-drawing and ranting to others. In spite of this your feedback is appreciated, as ever.

This post is automated, but I’m open to feedback.