(PAW2009 29/52)

I had a potter around Belfast at lunchtime, today. Coming in, I noticed how much construction is going on again. In the past month or so, the Obel Tower has started to shoot up again, and is moving quickly. It’s not the only one, either.

I took a walk through Victoria Square. Even though it’s been open for more than a year, today was the first time I went up to the dome and actually had a look out. The views are good enough, but they’re dominated by the roofs of the shopping centre around. It was on the dander back down the spiralling stairs that I looked down and noticed the lines made by the escalators and the walls.

We were there last week, as well. Paperchase was deemed a suitable supplier of birthday cards, so we decided to brave a visit to Belfast’s premier under-occupied premium and luxury shopping centre with a pram and small child in tow. It turns out that the lifts in Victoria Square don’t seem to work to any noticeable pattern. I’m used to lifts where you push the button to indicate whether you’re going up or down, and when a car arrives a helpful light tells you if it’s going your way. Apparently not in Victoria Square.

Rather, the lift arrives and offers no indication of whether it will go up or down. On the ‘Lower Ground’ floor we pushed the down button, to get down one level to the car park. A lift came down, the doors opened and we got in. We pushed the button for ‘B1’ or somesuch, and the lift started to rise. We made it all the way up to the dome before it started back down, stopping at each floor on the way. We got to the car eventually.

I had tried to get the pram up and down the escalators earlier in the day. Up’s okay, but down isn’t as easy as it looks. Next time, the child goes in the sling-carrier-thing.

My current job is my first one since I left school where I haven’t spent most of my time working with ‘children and/or vulnerable adults’, but I do still volunteer in youth work. Because of this, I have a folder full of official-looking pieces of paper from various authorities confirming that no, I don’t have a criminal record and yes, I am deemed safe to work with children, young people and vulnerable adults.

I have, I don’t know how many times, explained to volunteers why it’s necessary for them to fill in the form — and a new form for every organisation — and get their ID signed off on so that someone in an office somewhere can find out if they’ve ever been noticed by the police and might present a danger to children. I’ve also explained that it depends on exactly what’s on record, and a few penalty points won’t be a problem.

I have accepted complaints that volunteers have felt insulted or accused, especially when their organisations have known them for years. I’ve apologised that even though they have a form from somewhere else, this place over here needs one, too.

I’ve even been heard to say that if someone isn’t keen enough on the role to fill in the form, then they may not be keen enough on the role.

I’ve had long conversations with volunteer managers and with other staff in organisations who are worried about the impact of the new regulations and Vetting and Barring Scheme, both on their time and effort and on the recruitment of new volunteers.

I have become way too familiar with a host of acronyms and titles: PoCVA, Taking Care, Safe From Harm, Access NI, Disclosure, CRB, ISA, VBS…

And while I have had the occasional moan, I haven’t complained too much. Because it’s important. It’s an important system, and an important precaution, to do what we can to keep people safe.

All of which is to say that I’m reasonably familiar with the issues. Onward, then, to today’s news.

The BBC is reporting:

Several high-profile authors are to stop visiting schools in protest at new laws requiring them to be vetted to work with youngsters. Philip Pullman, author of fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials, said the idea was “ludicrous and insulting”. ... The authors, including fantasy writer Mr Pullman, say they have worked in schools for years without ever being left alone with children. Mr Pullman told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: “It's actually rather dispiriting and sinister. “Why should I pay £64 to a government agency to give me a little certificate to say I'm not a paedophile. “Children are abused in the home, not in classes of 30 or groups of 200 in the assembly hall with teachers looking on.” Anthony Horowitz - author of the popular Alex Rider series - wrote in a comment article for the Independent: “In essence, I'm being asked to pay £64 to prove that I am not a paedophile. “After 30 years writing books, visiting schools, hospitals, prisons, spreading an enthusiasm for culture and literacy, I find this incredibly insulting.” He added that the database “poisons the special relationship that exists between children and authors they admire”.

On the one hand, if you start making exceptions (because someone is a former Children’s Laureate, say) in implementing this kind of system, then you make the whole thing seem a bit pointless. And if you’re an author whose books I’ve read, does that make you any more worthy or “insulted” than the kind person, volunteer or paid, who stops in to teach some young people a bit of first aid/personal safety/circus skills/improvisational comedy (all real examples)? Poor, put-upon, you.

On the other hand, the authors raise a good point — if not necessarily the one they intend.

One of the considerations for the various vetting schemes has been whether an individual will have unsupervised contact with children, young people or vulnerable adults. In my experience this is almost never the case in a school visit, and when I have seen it happen it’s been where there has been vetting and so on in place. To apply the checks in this instance does seem a little silly.

I can’t think of many people who don’t have “regular”, or even “intense” by these definitions, contact with children. You go to the shops and there they are. The cinema? Yes. Even walking down the street? Of course. Never mind on the bus, where you might find yourself in close quarters with young people, enclosed and for the whole length of a rush hour commute.

Yes, there’s a little hyperbole there, but you see my point?

As I say above, I believe that this kind of system is an important precaution to safeguard vulnerable people. Yet I wonder if it’s got a little silly? At what point do you leave sensible precaution behind and start creating an environment where everyone is afraid of everyone else?

Some of it is driven by the need of various agencies — Government, schools, caring organisations, youth organisations, local authorities — to be seen to be doing something, and much of the guidance that I have seen on working with children and young people has seemed to have more to do with protecting the adult from misperception or spurious accusation than it has to do with protecting children. Few people will admit that, though. (Of course, it does also contribute to an environment where children are less at risk.)

I can say something for the new system, though. From my reading of the ISA website linked above, some lessons seem to have been learned from the previous arrangements: the new scheme will be phased in over an extended period of time, hopefully not repeating the overloaded early days and months-long waiting lists that were our first experiences of Disclosure Scotland and of Access NI; and under the new scheme one form will cover one person for whatever they do, so my fat folder of returned checks will be only one sheet thick.

I’m trying to read charitably the phrase, “When a person becomes ISA-registered they will be continuously monitored and their status reassessed against any new information which may come to light”, but that’s for another day.

If the title of this post doesn’t mean anything to you, you’re pretty safe to skip it.

Like many others, I’ve been using Subversion for source code management and version control. I have mostly been happy, but over the weekend I’d had enough of some of the foibles by which Subversion shows its age. After playing about with it for a while, I decided to move to Mercurial.

Distributed VCS is all the rage right now. All the cool kids seem to be using Git, but Mercurial appealed to me more. There are other options, as well.

Migrating from Subversion to Mercurial should be easy. Mercurial includes the hg convert extension, which takes your Subversion repository and converts it to Mercurial while maintaining all your branches and tags as well — if you can get it to work. I tried for an afternoon and couldn’t get it to fire. (I was working with a remote repository. You may have better luck working locally.)

I decided to try hgsvn, which I installed from MacPorts as py25-hgsvn. It aims to allow you to use Mercurial to manage a repository and then push and pull from a Subversion repository. I didn’t take it that far, though if you try it please let me know how it works. I was mainly interested in making the switch completely, which I managed reasonably well.

Before we go through the process, here’s one thing to bear in mind: if your Subversion repository contains tags and branches, these will appear in your new mercurial repository as directories containing a bunch more source code, with the whole directory structure making up one big working copy. This makes sense if you think about it, as branching and tagging in Subversion is nothing more than making copies of your files and promising yourself (and your collaborators) that you’ll treat them a certain way.

Because of this, I found that this will work best if you select a certain branch (maybe your trunk, maybe not) and convert it only. So this process will work best for you if you’re working on your trunk, or only want to bring over one branch with its revision history.

With that in mind, here’s what you do. (I’m on Mac OS X, but this should follow for most *nix-type systems. On Windows, it may well be a bit different.)

Set up the conversion using, for example

$ hgimportsvn http://yourrepo.com/trunk/

In this example, the new Mercurial repository will be in a folder called ‘trunk’, so you may want to rename it by

$ mv trunk MyProject

Move into that directory and grab the contents of the repository with

$ cd MyProject
$ hgpullsvn

At this point, you will be able to run this as a Mercurial repository without any trouble. However, there is a little cleanup we can do to make everything neater.

First, because hgsvn is designed to allow Mercurial and Subversion to coexist, but that’s not what we want, you can get rid of the .svn cruft and the file that tells Mercurial to ignore that cruft, using

$ find . -name .svn | xargs rm -frv
$ find . -name .hgignore | xargs rm -frv

(By the by, if you’re planning to pipe find into rm, especially with the -f switch, it’s best to run the find first to check you’re only going to delete what you want to, and only then run it with the pipe in place. Man, am I glad I checked it first!)

Second, if you run

$ hg branches

You’ll see that your main branch is currently called ‘trunk’ instead of ‘default’ — which is what a new mercurial repository would have. You can correct this by running

$ hg branch default

By now, you’ll have made a few changes to the contents of your working copy, so commit them with

$ hg commit -m "Cleaning up after migration to Mercurial"

And that’s that. It’s easy when you know how.

(I found useful clarification on a little of the cleanup from samhart.com.)

It’s coming up on three years since we moved from Edinburgh back to Northern Ireland. Part of me still misses what is a fantastic place to live, although we are, by now, very happily settled back home. One of the things I miss (and I have mentioned this before) is BBC Radio Scotland, which has some brilliant programming. Two of the DJs who were on Radio Scotland while we were there — Iain Anderson and Tom Morton — became some of my main sources of new music.

Both shows, at the time, tended to occupy the space between easily accessible rock, folk and country, which explains much of the music I picked up during the six years I was in Scotland. One of the artists I enjoyed was Josh Ritter, and my first conscious encounter with his music was with this song.

“Girl In The War” is the first track on Ritter’s Spring 2006 album, The Animal Years. It sets the tone for the album: it sounds pretty sweet, and pretty gentle, but the whole thing has bite. There’s politics in there, and protest and bitterness. “Girl In The War”, so far as I can figure, is about the seduction, and the frequent foolishness and hypocrisy, of war — aimed squarely at the war in Iraq and the ‘War on Terror’. It’s also proof that a politically charged song can be beautiful, too, and can have a seductive quality of its own.

The rest of the album is worth listening to, also. The other key track, I think, is “Thin Blue Flame”, which picks up some of the imagery from “Girl In The War”. It’s the penultimate track on the album, but is the climax and the companion to the opener.

Ritter’s music has appeared on a few soundtracks. (If I remember correctly, another song off this album featured in an episode of House a while back.) He deserves a listen, especially if you like American, slightly country, slightly folky rock.

“Girl In The War” [YouTube]

“Girl In The War” [Spotify]

And a freebie:

“Thin Blue Flame” [Spotify]

(PAW2009 28/52)