tl;dr? Here are some exerts showing the school’s correspondence to the Ombudsman and the mother and child in question:

’Do not try to blame this school for having a moral code. You have no business coming down here to single us out – we are a Catholic school and shall remain so’.

‘Your letter surprises me. A neighbour called at your request and stated that your daughter was pregnant. I was shocked and told her that I did not take in such girls. She conveyed the message to you’.

’This is the first correspondence I have seen from you. We do not take single young girls who are mothers. This is not a suitable school for such’.

‘Neither am I obliged to have any other frills that you mention. This school is NOT a haven for young pregnant people or for young mothers who, in particular, have been in two other post primary schools. The school has an uncompromising ethos and will not become a dumping ground for those rejected elsewhere”.

‘it was always our policy not to entertain pregnant girls and that of some other local schools’

Wow. Queue outrage from various Ministers which, as always, will be soon forgotten and this issue (and the bigger issue of school enrollment) will be side lined and buried.

How did the girl in question feel? In her own words with additions from the Ombudsman:

‘felt put into a low category, .that I was not good enough to be in his school, I felt ashamed and embarrassed that someone could make me feel this was for being a single young mother. I wouldn’t wish this feeling on anyone else, I was very emotional
and stressed by it. I felt hurt and discriminated against as my child wouldn’t stop me having an education’.

She said it also made her upset for her baby. She explained that this initially made her not want to go back to school at all. She felt that the school did not see that she wanted to complete her education for her and her baby and worries that no one thinks she wants to make a difference for her child. She spoke about worrying about what people will think of her, that they may be judging her and thinking that she will get nowhere.

Her mother stated her view that the actions of the school impacted on her daughter’s self-belief, that she has no self-belief and does not believe in her abilities. She reports that as a result of the school’s actions, ‘the damage to her self esteem is immeasurable’.

As a side note, this investigation further highlights the good work of Emily Logan and the benefit and absolute need for having a strong and independent Ombudsman for Children.

Finally, we come to Joel’s last piece for the Stargate franchise, that beautiful closing theme to the SGU finale, Gauntlet.  …  When we received the director’s cut, the sequence had included a gorgeous piece that I felt was nothing short of perfect.  I loved Joel’s work, knew what he was capable of but, I have to admit, I doubted even he could trump the music that accompanied the director’s cut.  But Joel wanted to try.  He did.  And succeeded.  If that original piece was nothing shot of perfect, then the closing piece Joel came up with was beyond perfection.

As a huge Stargate fan – (can you believe it’s three series, 17 seasons, 354 episodes) – it’s fair to say that Joel also provided the soundtrack to quite a chunk of my life! Here’s that closing sequence of the final episode of Stargate Universe (and the franchise) Joe was referencing (which was perfectly paired with the opening sequence of the first episode of Universe):

There is upgrade path available though via a PPA (Personal Package Archive) from Ondřej Surý at https://launchpad.net/~ondrej/+archive/php5.

I’ve just installed it and it’s working fine with Apache:

$ php -v
PHP 5.4.0-3~precise+4 (cli) (built: Mar 27 2012 08:50:50)
Copyright (c) 1997-2012 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.4.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2012 Zend Technologies

• PDF version: IPv6 – Engineers Ireland – April 25 2012
• PowerPoint (2010) version: IPv6 – Engineers Ireland – April 25 2012

The first thing I do is a fresh install of Windows to remove the crazy and ridiculous amount of bloatware that comes pre-installed and makes the system as slow as a wet week. Then after re-installing Windows and the necessary hardware drivers (Windows Update will get most of these automatically), I then:

• go through Windows Update (a number of times) until all essential and important updates are complete as well as any optional updates you want;
• install Microsoft Security Essentials – why pay third party companies for their security protection racket?;
• ensure automatic updates for Windows and Security Essentials are enabled;
• install the appropriate language version of Firefox (and I then remove all shortcuts and obvious links for Explorer to try and discourage its use);
• install the appropriate language version of Thunderbird;
• install Google Chrome;
• install Microsoft Office (if you have a license) or LibreOffice if you don’t / if you prefer or even both!;
• install Adobe Flash Player; Adobe Reader; Adobe Air; and Shockwave Player;
• install Skype; ensure webcam and audio work; and disable autoload on boot;
• install Google Earth;
• install PDF Creator;
• install DivX codecs;
• install Java;
• install 7-Zip.

• Optimised row based replication (documentation here) – replication used to mean execute the exact same queries on the slave server(s) as the master. This, as you can imagine, was incredibly inefficient. With row based replication, the resultant changed row of an INSERT, UPDATE or DELETE operation was replicated saving significant resources on slave servers. This was a big win. It now looks like it’s been further optimised in that only the changed elements (and a primary key) need to be replicated.
• Introduction of Global Transaction Identifiers (GTIDs) allowing the source and sequence of a replication statement to be globally unique within a replication cluster. This with some cool new utilities (mysqlfailover and mysqlrpladmin) create a lot of native options for failover for maintenance or failure (see more about GTIDs and the utilities).
• Time delayed replication allowing a slave to purposefully remain behind the master for any given delay. This may be a life saver for that table you accidently dropped!

There’s a lot more too and you can read about it all here.

• it’s now possible to restrict access to a mailbox via either IMAP, POP3 or both. See this page on the wiki for more information.
• it’s our first release requiring a database migration. But it’s really really easy – see this page for those instructions.

As always, a live demo is available at: http://www.opensolutions.ie/vimbadmin/.

His own tl;dr version is:

Open-source is awesome, sometimes work is hard, be excellent to each other, do what you love, fuck yeah.

Then on Saturday I got my over the air upgrade to Android 4 (Ice Cream Sandwich).

So yes, HTC are definitely back in my good books

PS: I had to send my HTC for repair earlier in the year. I came back in a cool package: https://twitter.com/#!/barryo79/status/167522921143746560

HTCSense.com is undergoing a renovation to improve the services and value we deliver to customers like you.

Until the new services are ready, features previously available on HTCSense.com will be shutting down. If you have been using HTCSense.com to sync your Contacts, Messages, Footprints or Call History, you can download your data through April 30, 2012. After April 30, your data will no longer be accessible and will be deleted.

Wow.

I imagine Footprints was a popular app for many people which seemed useful and was preinstalled in all HTC’s I’ve had (except my latest Sensation).