Briam (or Briami or Turlu) is a joyous celebration of the vegetables of Mediterranean cuisine. The name Briam most probably comes from the Turkish word biryam which means roasted food but its roots are from the Persian biryan which denotes a roasted food with rice. While versions of roasted vegetables dishes in olive oil exist in most Mediterranean countries; the most famous being the French ratatouille, in Greece Briam is considered a summer dish, as it traditionally used only vegetables in season during those months. The basic dish is a medley of vegetables in which courgettes, aubergine and potatoes have the leading role and are roasted or simmered in olive oil.
Whenever I put my key in the lock, open the door, and am greeted by a wonderfully rich, warm, mouth-watering aroma emanating from the kitchen, I know Dimitri has been making Briam, says Sophie. It really is the smell of home. You feel that everything is alright with the world when it smells like this!
Here at Caruso, we have always felt that Greece has never really exploited the full gastronomic potential of Briam and has rather underestimated it. When you come across the dish in tavernas, the result is generally tasty but comprises overcooked, mushy veg in an indeterminate over-oily sauce where texture and taste is indistinguishable and the tomato is often overpowering. We felt this was a prime example of how we could contemporise this dish, using research and helped by scientific knowledge.
Our goal was to use vegetables from all seasons in order to make our Briam a dish to be enjoyed all year round. Most importantly we wanted to ensure that all the texture and taste of every veggie would be experienced with every single mouthful!
How did we make a better Briam?
Half the game to get firm, tasty vegetables into my Briam is done BEFORE cooking and has to do with the size that each vegetable should be cut into separately, so that they don't over-cook.
Those that tend to soften and dissolve during cooking should be cut into large pieces – ie. aubergines, courgettes and onions, and those that are harder, such as carrots and potatoes, need to be cut into thinner pieces,. The tomatoes, celery and peppers also need to be cut into small pieces as we want them to meld into the sauce. So, the final dish will have vegetables which retain their texture and taste.
It's that simple but it makes a huge difference in the end, especially in conjunction with the next secret # 2.
I substitute white wine instead of the traditional addition of water as the liquid for our veg to simmer in. I do not add any water at all to the pan – only white wine and olive oil.
The reason is not so much the taste of wine, but because I want the final texture, taste and nutritional value of each vegetable to be preserved individually and appreciated within each bite.
Vegetable cells contain vacuoles filled with liquid. These contain most of the flavour and nutritional value of the vegetable. This is also where most of the water is inside the vegetable, which exerts pressure outwards, enabling the vegetable to retain its shape.
In Briam, the water in the potatoes can be as much as 79% of their weight, or 95% of the courgettes and celery. The liquid inside the vacuoles is slightly acidic. Therefore, if we use water, which is slightly alkaline for the vegetables to cook in – once the temperature reaches 60ºC, the osmosis effect will draw the liquid out of the vegetables and thus they will lose both their shape and their flavour which will simply transfer to the sauce. Therefore, if we use white wine instead, which is acidic, we will have minimal loss of liquid – and so all the flavour and texture will remain, and not be lost in the sauce.
Extending the range of vegetables in a Briam (apart from the classic potato, aubergine, courgette, onion and tomato) by adding carrots, leeks and cauliflower creates additional contrasting flavours and textures that really take the dish to a whole new level, and also means you can enjoy this wonderful dish from January til December! A final touch of spice in the form of chilli flakes and/or Szechuan pepper seeds is all my Briam needs to send it into the stratosphere of flavour!
The result is that our contemporary Briam recipe has been embraced by Greeks, reaching the top position in Google and getting a significant number of positive comments.
This is a simple, tasty and healthy dish, ideal to cook a couple of times a month. It requires just 10 minutes of preparation and 2 hours in the oven. You can play about with it, adding your own ideas or changing certain ingredients, but I urge you to try it just as it is in the recipe at least once.
1. Preheat the fan oven to 180ºC.
Courgettes – approx.1 cm thick slices.
Aubergines – approx. 1 cm thick slices, then cut the slices into 4 or 6 pieces 2-3 cm long, depending on the size of the slice.
Carrots – thin 2-3 mm thick slices.
Leek – approx.1.5 cm thick slices.
Potatoes – 2-3 mm thin slices.
Cauliflower – florets, about 5 cm.
Celery – 2-3 mm thin slices.
Sweet peppers – slices 0.5 cm thick.
Fresh hot peppers – finely chopped.
3. Mix the cut vegetables in a roasting pan. Add the tomato sauce, Szechuan pepper, sugar, olive oil and wine, salt and pepper and stir again. Place the pan in the oven on a medium shelf.
4. After 1 hour, stir the ingredients again and then every 20 minutes, until the potatoes begin to brown on their edges, which will be after a total of about 2 hours, depending on the oven. If you want the vegetables to be crispier, put them under a hot grill for 5 minutes and then remove the pan from the oven and leave it to cool for at least 15 minutes before serving.
Take the roasting pan to the table and serve from there, because nobody ever ate just one helping! It should be accompanied by good quality feta cheese, delicious bread and ideally with a cool rosé wine, because you will feel as though you can glimpse the Mediterranean.


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text:
package com.ververica.flinktraining.solutions.datastream_scala.process

import com.ververica.flinktraining.exercises.datastream_java.datatypes.{TaxiFare, TaxiRide}
import com.ververica.flinktraining.exercises.datastream_java.sources.{TaxiFareSource, TaxiRideSource}
import com.ververica.flinktraining.exercises.datastream_java.utils.ExerciseBase
import com.ververica.flinktraining.exercises.datastream_java.utils.ExerciseBase._
import org.apache.flink.api.common.state.{ValueState, ValueStateDescriptor}
import org.apache.flink.api.java.utils.ParameterTool
import org.apache.flink.streaming.api.TimeCharacteristic
import org.apache.flink.streaming.api.functions.co.KeyedCoProcessFunction
import org.apache.flink.streaming.api.scala.{StreamExecutionEnvironment, _}
import org.apache.flink.util.Collector

/**
  * Scala reference implementation for the "Expiring State" exercise of the Flink training
  * (http://training.ververica.com).
  *
  * The goal for this exercise is to enrich TaxiRides with fare information.
  *
  * Parameters:
  * -rides path-to-input-file
  * -fares path-to-input-file
  *
  */
object ExpiringStateSolution {
  val unmatchedRides = new OutputTag[TaxiRide]("unmatchedRides") {}
  val unmatchedFares = new OutputTag[TaxiFare]("unmatchedFares") {}

  def main(args: Array[String]) {

    // parse parameters
    val params = ParameterTool.fromArgs(args)
    val ridesFile = params.get("rides", ExerciseBase.pathToRideData)
    val faresFile = params.get("fares", ExerciseBase.pathToFareData)

    val maxDelay = 60            // events are out of order by max 60 seconds
    val servingSpeedFactor = 600 // 10 minutes worth of events are served every second

    // set up streaming execution environment
    val env = StreamExecutionEnvironment.getExecutionEnvironment
    env.setStreamTimeCharacteristic(TimeCharacteristic.EventTime)
    env.setParallelism(ExerciseBase.parallelism)

    val rides = env
      .addSource(rideSourceOrTest(new TaxiRideSource(ridesFile, maxDelay, servingSpeedFactor)))
      .filter { ride => ride.isStart && (ride.rideId % 1000 != 0) }
      .keyBy(_.rideId)

    val fares = env
      .addSource(fareSourceOrTest(new TaxiFareSource(faresFile, maxDelay, servingSpeedFactor)))
      .keyBy(_.rideId)

    val processed = rides.connect(fares).process(new EnrichmentFunction)

    printOrTest(processed.getSideOutput[TaxiFare](unmatchedFares))

    env.execute("ExpiringState (scala)")
  }

  class EnrichmentFunction extends KeyedCoProcessFunction[Long, TaxiRide, TaxiFare, (TaxiRide, TaxiFare)] {
    // keyed, managed state
    lazy val rideState: ValueState[TaxiRide] = getRuntimeContext.getState(
      new ValueStateDescriptor[TaxiRide]("saved ride", classOf[TaxiRide]))
    lazy val fareState: ValueState[TaxiFare] = getRuntimeContext.getState(
      new ValueStateDescriptor[TaxiFare]("saved fare", classOf[TaxiFare]))

    override def processElement1(ride: TaxiRide,
                                 context: KeyedCoProcessFunction[Long, TaxiRide, TaxiFare, (TaxiRide, TaxiFare)]#Context,
                                 out: Collector[(TaxiRide, TaxiFare)]): Unit = {
      val fare = fareState.value
      if (fare != null) {
        fareState.clear()
        context.timerService.deleteEventTimeTimer(ride.getEventTime)
        out.collect((ride, fare))
      }
      else {
        rideState.update(ride)
        // as soon as the watermark arrives, we can stop waiting for the corresponding fare
        context.timerService.registerEventTimeTimer(ride.getEventTime)
      }
    }

    override def processElement2(fare: TaxiFare,
                                 context: KeyedCoProcessFunction[Long, TaxiRide, TaxiFare, (TaxiRide, TaxiFare)]#Context,
                                 out: Collector[(TaxiRide, TaxiFare)]): Unit = {
      val ride = rideState.value
      if (ride != null) {
        rideState.clear()
        context.timerService.deleteEventTimeTimer(ride.getEventTime)
        out.collect((ride, fare))
      }
      else {
        fareState.update(fare)
        // as soon as the watermark arrives, we can stop waiting for the corresponding ride
        context.timerService.registerEventTimeTimer(fare.getEventTime)
      }
    }

    override def onTimer(timestamp: Long,
                         ctx: KeyedCoProcessFunction[Long, TaxiRide, TaxiFare, (TaxiRide, TaxiFare)]#OnTimerContext,
                         out: Collector[(TaxiRide, TaxiFare)]): Unit = {
      if (fareState.value != null) {
        ctx.output(unmatchedFares, fareState.value)
        fareState.clear()
      }
      if (rideState.value != null) {
        ctx.output(unmatchedRides, rideState.value)
        rideState.clear()
      }
    }
  }

}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
Chris Vanjonack
TELL IT LIKE A MURDER MYSTERY
So the whole thing kicks off with this dude lying dead on the floor of a gas station bathroom.
His name was Jordan Baker and he struggled with obesity. For a while he rode around town on a scooter like he was an old person. It was slow moving, but then so was he, and so it scooted along about as fast as it would have taken him to walk, anyway. For three years he got around on the thing but it was not until the final weeks of his life that he renounced it. "I'm 34," he told a friend shortly before his death. "I don't want to be getting around on that scooter like I'm 84."
The friend, a woman named Heather who waited tables at the local Perkins, smiled at this. They had been friends since grade school, and so when Jordan announced that he was giving up his scooter, Heather could not have been more relieved.1 Maybe, she thought, he wouldn't die in his forties, wouldn't fall dead of a heart attack or a blood clot. Maybe he would live as long as the 84-year-olds who those scooters were made for in the first place.
He didn't make it to 84, of course.
Kylie, the chick who found him, was a grungy looking girl who fell in with the Goth scene her junior year of high school. She had a lip ring and a nose ring and a ring piercing her clitoris. Her hair was dyed black and she still dressed like she was trying to piss off her parents. Kylie was not in high school anymore; she was 22. Kylie worked and Jordan died at the Lucky's Gas Station on the outskirts of Black Haven, Colorado.2
The police arrived within the hour in the form of Captain Benson and his deputy, who, for the purposes of this story, will be referred to primarily as Deputy Skeptical.3
"I don't know about this," Deputy Skeptical said as they walked into Lucky's Gas Station. "Sounds like he just died of a heart attack."
Captain Benson shrugged as he opened the door. "It's a slow day," he said, a little bell going off as they stepped inside.
From behind the counter, Kylie looked up and asked, "Are you here about the body?" and immediately, Captain Benson was stricken. This girl—this gas station cashier—was beautiful, unlike anything he had ever seen before, any creature of heaven or of Earth. Everything about her—her metallic earrings, her dark bangs, her pissed-off expression—was heavenly. The sight of her took the breath from his lungs and when she spoke he heard only the trumpets of angels. "Yes ma'am," he said, holding his hat mournfully to his chest. "We're here about the body."
Kylie led them to the men's room. "He's in there," she said.
The men's room door was half-opened and there was a hole bashed in just above the doorknob. "What happened here?" Captain Benson asked, touching a splinter with his index finger. "Some kind of scuffle?"
Kylie explained that she bashed the hole in with a hammer after Jordan Baker had been locked away in the bathroom and unresponsive for over an hour.
Captain Benson nodded as he wrote the description into his 3 x 5 college-ruled notepad. He always had a notepad on him. He bought them in bulk from the internet and in them he claimed to write every detail of every case he ever worked.4 "Good thinking," he said, fondly.
Deputy Skeptical shrugged. "It was all right," he conceded. "It was all right thinking."
They pushed the men's room door open. Jordan Baker was face down on the floor, pants and underwear wrapped around his ankles and his mutilated ass aimed at the ceiling. Blood was everywhere. Even the toilet was smashed, a soaking copy of Men's Health discarded on the floor, blood and toilet water seeping through the binding. A trail of slime led to the back wall, where a hole the size of a small animal had been smashed through the brick.
So yeah, Jordan Baker was dead all right.
Captain Benson looked to Kylie. "We're going to need a statement out of you," he said.
Kylie did her best to explain what happened and Captain Benson marked every word in his notepad. She said that he came in around 5:00pm and parked in a handicapped spot. At the time of the investigation, the best theory Captain Benson could discern as to the nature of Jordan Baker's disability was his morbid obesity.5 Jordan had come in and asked for the bathroom key, to which Kylie replied that the bathroom was for paying customers only. At this, Jordan picked up a copy of Men's Health from the magazine rack and placed it on the counter. Kylie nearly laughed, assuming that he must have been purchasing it in an ironic act of cheeky self-deprecation.6 Jordan paid for the magazine and waddled to the bathroom.
"Didn't you hear any grunts or anything?" asked Deputy Skeptical.
"I mean, yeah," said Kylie. "I just figured he was getting himself off. Glory holes are sort of an urban legend around here. Truck drivers come in all the time, waving their dicks around and asking for the glory hole. I tell them there aren't any, and to get out of here, them and their dicks. But then, sometimes, they'll buy a couple dollars' worth of something and ask for the bathroom key. Sometimes they try to dig their own glory holes—I've caught guys drilling into the wall I don't know how many times—but mostly they just masturbate."
"And what do you do with them?" Benson asked, writing as he spoke. "With the glory holes."
Kylie shrugged. "We fill them."
"Who does?" Benson asked, concerned. "You don't, do you?"
"Hell no," said Kylie. "Management hires kids off the street." She did not catch Captain Benson's palpable sigh of relief, or for that matter, the interested, inquisitive face made by Deputy Skeptical, who was running low on cash and thinking about moonlighting somewhere.
After they finished the interview, Benson gathered the remaining evidence by scraping up the slime and sealing it into the ziplock baggie that had housed his peanut butter and jelly sandwich. As he did this, Deputy Skeptical took a series of graphic photographs of Jordan Baker's corpse on his digital camera. They shook their heads one last time at the crime scene and wrapped the men's room in police tape.
On his way out, Benson turned to get one last look at Kylie. She caught his smile but pretended not to, blushing as she looked back down at the lipstick magazine she had been ironically flipping through. Captain Benson and Deputy Skeptical stepped into the parking lot, where two paramedics unloaded a body bag from an ambulance.
"Well," said Deputy Skeptical, thinking that Jordan Baker's death was just a fairly run of the mill—creatively executed—suicide, and not, as his superior was no doubt already imagining, a disturbing and unexplainable mystery that implied something great and fantastic about the world around them.
"Well," said Captain Benson, thinking only of Kylie.
Two weeks later, on a Friday night, Kylie showed up at a house party thrown by this guy she used to date.7 He had already graduated—so had Kylie, with a degree in history—but his house still looked like it belonged to a college sophomore, with movie posters everywhere, empty PBRs on every inch of counter space and Christmas lights wrapped around columns and windows. He greeted Kylie enthusiastically when she came in and towards the back of the living room, a guy named Perry Pullman who she had never met before but who seemed to know everybody gave her a once over. The house was packed with 20-somethings, only a few of whom Kylie had met previously. Among those she recognized: a bickering couple on their way to a bitter, loveless marriage, a cocky bassist from a local punk-rock band called Vaguely Familiar, and this guy they called Gonna-Die-Greg.8
Gonna-Die-Greg spent most of the night on the fringes, never quite joining a circle of conversation but never quite shutting himself off either.9 Girls kept coming up and offering pity sex but he kept turning them off by pointing out that the intrinsic pain and brevity of existence sort of rendered the whole hook-up thing into something of a moot point. At first, Kylie's ex—the guy whose place it was—worried that Gonna-Die-Greg might put a damper on everything, but he ended up adding a weird, anxious, end-of-the-world energy to the proceedings. Everybody who entered his line of orbit suddenly become painfully cognizant of their own mortality and how fucked up it was that they could just die one day in some stupid car crash and they all got into this really weird mood where they were making out with strangers and dancing in the living room and having quiet, unspoken epiphanies that they were still in love with old girlfriends.
Drinking out of a plastic cup in the back of the room, that guy Perry Pullman snickered at Gonna-Die-Greg and his increasingly large congregation of existentially bummed out disciples. The whole anxiety about mortality thing wasn't his style—Perry Pullman lived in the moment. He pushed pixie dust and preached about the power of positive thinking and he kept calling everyone a maniac and a bastard like he was born into the Beat Generation instead of just awkwardly appropriating their style by talking in long, rambling, run-on sentences and going on and on about Naked Lunch and getting drunk before midday and taking serious, mind-altering, fuck-you-up narcotics that kept his mind spinning and fingers twitching 36 hours even after ingestion. Perry Pullman swaggered from one person the next, making faux-shy talk with girls whose boyfriends were in the bathroom puking up blood or in the backyard swaying back and forth pissing diluted gin onto half-dead patches of grass when finally his eyes fell onto Kylie.
He approached her, said, "Hey," and nodded towards Gonna-Die-Greg, tapping his feet nervously in the kitchen as he explained to some undergrad girl that everything was meaningless. All smooth-like, Perry Pullman asked, "You ever think about death?"
"All the time," said Kylie. "Some guy dropped dead at work just the other day."
"No shit?"
"Found him in the bathroom, asshole torn to shit like it was put through a meat grinder." She smiled. "And here's the strangest thing: there was green slime all over the floor and a hole the size of my fist through the brick wall—the sun shining in like a spotlight."
Perry Pullman laughed. "Jesus," he said. "How the hell did that happen?"
"Nobody knows," said Kylie. She looked around the room, gave a playful grin, leaned forward and said, "It's a mystery," in such a weird, oddball tone that Perry Pullman almost fell in love right then and there for reasons he could not have articulated.
"That's wild," Perry Pullman said, at a loss for anything intelligent to say. "So what the hell happened next?" he asked, and then she spoke at length about the whole ordeal with the police and the paramedics and the pissed-off, improbable way with which her boss treated the whole thing like it was somehow her fault, threatening to dock the bathroom-repair fees from her next paycheck.10 Specifically, she talked in circles about Captain Benson, who she described as being middle-aged, somewhat overweight and balding, but still sort of handsome if you concentrated really hard on his face. "He was kind," said Kylie, and she went on to say that when he looked at her, it was like he was looking past her skin and face and legs and breasts and at the person really truly inside her, because there was something about the way his eyes widened and his mouth curved into the shape of a smile as he said, "Yes, ma'am, we're here about the body," that made her really, truly feel for the first time in her life that there was someone who loved her for the tiny little pocket inside her chest that housed her soul.
Perry Pullman laughed. "Sounds like he's got a crush on you," he said.
They continued to converse through two rounds of shots, six song changes and three enthusiastic strangers wandering in with 12 packs of beer and acting like they knew everybody. Their conversation veered wildly back and forth between small talk and big talk, making no real distinction between a debate over the ascending quality of The Hold Steady's discography and larger than life, faux-philosophical topics such as the practical nature of romantic love. An eventual lull in conversation led Perry Pullman to say: "Did you know that the inventor of the Segway died when he drove his Segway off a cliff?11 Speaking of segues—what do you say we make our way to a bedroom?" He grinned, thinking she'd be so blindsided by the crackerjack nature of his wit that she'd get weak in the knees, wet underneath the panties, and say something like, "Kill me, love me, stuff me in a closet and cut my jugular, do whatever you want to me," but instead she smacked him, turned 180 degrees and stormed out of the house, slamming the door behind her.12
Disappointed and deep in the throes of sexual frustration, Perry Pullman rubbed the spot on his face where her palm hit his skin. "Prude," he said, to no one in particular.13
This guy hosting the party looked up at him from a bean-bag chair pressed against the wall. "That girl's a hurricane," he said, taking a puff of his joint. He coughed.
"Tropical storm, maybe," said Perry Pullman. He followed Kylie outside and found her smoking underneath the full-moonlight at the end of the driveway. "What crawled up your ass?"
She was fucked-up and lonely and had reached the point in the night where she couldn't walk in a straight line to save her life and she grabbed a handful of his shirt and pulled him close and he immediately slipped the tongue when she kissed him.
Their relationship began this way and it would not end until four months later, in October, atop Perry Pullman's tiny mattress in his tiny bedroom in his tiny apartment when he ejaculated onto Kylie's chest. As she wiped off cum with a used tissue, she caught him checking his text messages and said, "I'm sad when I'm with you." They had just returned to his apartment after a brief sojourn to the Black Haven Halloween Festival.14 They did not coordinate a couple's costume and he barely said a word in the corn maze.
Perry Pullman put down his phone and ran his hand through his hair. He really had tried with Kylie. Six days earlier she had said, "I really think I could see myself with you for a while. Like, a long while," and he had said, "Cool," and she had said, "What about you?" and he'd said, "I don't know, ok?" and she said, "How could you not know?" and he said, "I really don't, just give me some time." She gave him a week and had been thinking about it ever since. Really stressing over it. Up all night. Talking it over with the guys. Chain smoking behind the bowling alley.
He handed Kylie the loose t-shirt that she had taken off moments earlier. "Here," he said. "Put this on." She pulled the shirt over her naked shoulders and Perry Pullman's mouth hung open like an idiot as he realized what he was doing. It was one of those moments where he could see two roads all laid out before him—one, a life lived with Kylie and another without her—each running in his mind's eye like Super-8 style home movies of potential Christmas future.15
Nervously, after a couple false starts, Perry Pullman said: "I don't think we should do this anymore. I'm sorry."
In the 180 days between Kylie and Perry Pullman's first kiss and last sad hand job, Perry Pullman had good moments and bad. In his best, he pulled away from the touch of Kylie's lips, brushed the hair from her eyes, smiled and said, "You know I'm stupid for you, right?", and in his worst, he snuck off to the bathroom to pop drowsy, nighttime cold medication when she spent the night because he always had trouble sleeping with his arms wrapped around her. Off-brand cold medication in his stomach, all night long he would have weird, violent, psychosexual fever dreams and occasionally he would wake up and Kylie would be awake also and they would start fucking without saying anything and the next morning he would be unsure if they really had been fucking or if it had just been another weird, violent, psychosexual fever dream.
In his best moments, though, Perry Pullman was present.16
In his best moments, Perry Pullman took stabs at self-improvement.17
In his best moments, Perry Pullman stayed up with Kylie and listened to her late-night theories about Captain Benson and the look he had given her on his way out of Lucky's Gas Station. She woke him up some nights just to tell him about it. "Hey," Kylie would say. "Hey, are you up?" and then she would go on and on about Captain Benson, working herself into tears that she could never explain no matter how many times he asked her to. Benson had been on her mind ever since she found the body. "I just keep thinking about it," she would say, half whispering. "I think he really loved me."
"I really love you," Perry Pullman would say, running his hand over her cheek, already unsure of whether or not it was really happening.
A few months later, moments after being dumped and just before Halloween, Kylie started shouting at Perry Pullman. She didn't think he was the love of her life or anything, or that she'd marry him, have kids with him or buy twin funeral plots, but she really did think he loved her. And so she was mad as hell, shouting so loudly that the elderly couple living the adjacent apartment called the police.
A bang on Perry Pullman's door interrupted Kylie in the middle of a rant about how much of a coward he was for leaving her. Perry Pullman pulled a pair of jeans over his hips and opened the door. "Yeah?" he asked, zipping his pants.
"We got a call about a domestic disturbance," said Captain Benson, standing triumphant in the dim light of the hallway.18 He scanned the room and caught glimpse of the girl sitting on the futon in the back, wearing only a ratty band shirt and a pair of unwashed underwear.
"Kylie Heselden," he said. "So good to see you." He smiled and Deputy Skeptical could not help but to smirk at the coincidental nature of their reunion.
After calming things down, Captain Benson offered Kylie a ride back to her apartment. His voice was so sincere that even Deputy Skeptical could not have shot down the suggestion.
As Captain Benson drove, he kept both hands on the wheel and made gentle small talk about the weather and The Rockies and kept asking polite questions like, "Where do you live?" and "How old are you, exactly?" and "What are your favorite things to eat?" Turning to examine the backseat, Deputy Skeptical realized that Kylie was smiling.
Captain Benson parked in front of Kylie's apartment. "Walk you to your door?" he asked, and she blushed. She said, "Thank you," and shoved her hands in the pocket of her hoodie as they walked the long stretch of concrete to her door. "You look terrible," she said, and she meant it. He looked sleep deprived.
Captain Benson laughed, sort of. "It's been a long week," he said. "Are you all right?"
Kylie almost laughed. "Everything is so fucked, all the time," she said.
Being 20 years older, infinitely wiser and often kind, Benson gave a weak smile and crouched to sit on her doorstep. As Kylie sat to join him, he said, "Everything is fucked until it isn't," a statement Kylie interpreted to mean that she would continue to be heartbroken by the wrong guys until she finally found the right one. Benson smiled the way he did when they first met, like he loved her not for her body but for the untouchable, unphysical, intangible nature of her soul, and Kylie, being deep down underneath all the dark clothing and dark makeup and vaginal piercings something of a soft-bellied romantic, kissed Captain Benson on the cheek.
Benson took a moment, smiled nervously, and leaned in to kiss her again. He put one hand on her waist and groped her right breast with the other, slipping the tongue as their lips mashed together. Kylie pressed one hand against his chest, pulled away and said, "Benson," in this throaty, desperate whisper like she was in the last act of a romantic comedy.19 She rubbed her fingers against his hand and pretended not to notice the band on his ring finger. "You should come inside," she said.
Captain Benson managed to articulate an "OK," and nodded enthusiastically. All summer, most of fall, ever since they met he had been imagining what she looked like naked. He'd fantasized about it, dreamt about it, and sketched doodle after doodle of her naked body in the margins of his notepad—tits perky, vagina hairless and her name written invariably just past the margins, a little heart dotting the "i".
Kylie took Captain Benson's hand in her own and opened the front door to her apartment. "Come on," she said, leading him inside. "You can do whatever you want to me."
A little over four months earlier, back in June, as paramedics loaded Jordan Baker's corpse into a body bag, Captain Benson and Deputy Skeptical retired to the local Perkins. While waiting for their order, Captain Benson picked up the digital camera and flipped through the pictures that Deputy Skeptical had taken of the bathroom. "What did you think of the girl?" he asked.
"Who—the waitress?" asked Deputy Skeptical.
"No, the one from the gas station," said Captain Benson. "Kylie."
"Oh. She seemed all right. A little shaken." Deputy Skeptical cleared his throat. "So what do you think happened? Suicide, right?"
"That doesn't make sense," said Captain Benson. "What about the hole in the wall? What about his asshole?"
Deputy Skeptical shrugged. "Maybe a squirrel did it."20
"A squirrel?"
"Sure," said Deputy Skeptical. "What do you think?"
"I don't know," said Captain Benson. "I'm not sure yet." He looked back to the camera and paused when he came to a photo that spanned the entire canvass of the crime scene—Jordan's dead body, the busted toilet, etc.
"You know, it's like my mom always used to tell me," said Deputy Skeptical, deadpan.
"Life is like a box of chocolates." He took a slow, measured sip from his mug. "Doesn't last long for fat people."
Captain Benson couldn't help but snicker. "Jesus," he said, setting the camera back on the table. "Jordan Baker."
At that moment, their waitress, Heather, returned to their table with Captain Benson's pancakes and Deputy Skeptical's French toast. She smiled upon hearing her friend's name. "How do you know Jordan?" she asked, placing their food in front of them.
Both men froze. Captain Benson removed his cap. "Ma'am," he said.
Heather's eyes fell to the table, where an image of Jordan Baker's bloodied, half-naked body was still displayed on the screen of the digital camera. She made a horrible whimpering noise, bent over and was sick. She cried very hard and they tipped very well.
In July, Captain Benson and Deputy Skeptical sat across from each other in their usual booth at Perkins, neither saying much about their personal lives or inner-most thoughts. Deputy Skeptical almost never made small talk, would speak up so rarely that his voice would sometimes surprise even Captain Benson. Deputy Skeptical was very professional in that regard but also sometimes unintentionally hurtful. Finally Captain Benson offered up the words, "I can't stop thinking about it," as he pushed the final bite of a pancake back and forth across his plate with the blades of his fork.
"The investigation or Kylie?" Deputy Skeptical asked.
The investigation into Jordan Baker's death had stalled. They had no leads, no motive, no suspect, no anything. Captain Benson brought Kylie up in conversation whenever possible though, going so far as to call her into the station for an additional round of unnecessary questioning. The interrogation offered very little in the way of answers. All Captain Benson got out of the exchange was some stolen moments with his beloved and a few parenthetical asides about how things had been at Lucky's Gas Station in the wake of Jordan Baker's death.21
"What are you thinking?" asked Deputy Skeptical.
"I think that there has to be more to this case than meets the eye," said Captain Benson. "I think that there has to be an angle that we haven't tried yet, or some detail we're overlooking. I don't think Jordan Baker killed himself. I think this case is bigger than both of us." He hooked the last piece of pancake with his fork and brought it to his mouth. "And I think I should call Kylie," he said, chewing.
One booth over, Heather poured coffee into a patron's mug, arm shaking as she listened.
In August, the investigation into the death of Jordan Baker was officially closed by the Black Haven Police Department. The campaign to close the case was spearheaded by Deputy Skeptical, who claimed to have run the slime through a lab examination. "It's just mucus," he told everybody, "nothing to see here," and the Chief of Police closed the case.22
"You can't be serious," Captain Benson said, stopping the Chief of Police in the hallway. "Something happened to Jordan Baker in that bathroom. We can't just let this one go. There could be something really big happening here."
The Chief of Police shrugged. "Either way," he said, turning his attention to an email, drafting a response. "You read the deputy's report."
Captain Benson cursed. As he paced back to his cubicle, muttering profanity, he passed by Deputy Skeptical, drinking from a Dixie cup and standing near the water cooler. Captain Benson stopped and asked, "Just what the hell is wrong with you, anyways?"23
When they got breakfast at Perkins the next morning, neither said anything about the closing of the investigation. They had new, small-scale cases to deal with—some punk had stuck up a liquor store and escaped on bike, a woman had maxed out her unpaid parking tickets and they had received an anonymous, likely false tip that a pint-sized prostitution ring was being run out of the local pinball joint.
"I guess we better start pulling over bikers," said Deputy Skeptical, quietly.
"Yeah," said Captain Benson.
"We should probably check the security footage."
Both men sat, eating in silence. Suddenly Captain Benson slammed his fork and put both hands onto the table. "It's bullshit that we never talk," he said. "That girl, Kylie—I'm in love with her."
Deputy Skeptical gave a weak, pitying smile. "No such thing," he said. "You're crazy—what about Josephine? What about the kids?" When Captain Benson didn't reply, Deputy Skeptical just shook his head. "She probably doesn't even know your name," he said.
One morning in September, Heather approached Captain Benson at his usual booth.
"Can I sit?" she asked. Deputy Skeptical had just excused himself to use the bathroom.
Captain Benson nodded. "The investigation is closed." he said. "It was a suicide."
Heather hadn't been sleeping much. The best part of her day was in the morning before she remembered that Jordan was dead and the worst part was when she fucked guys behind the pinball place and let out an involuntary, broken moan upon imagining his face onto that of her patron. She refused to believe that Jordan had killed himself. It just wasn't like him. He had been trying. He had been eating well. He was being better to his mother. He was taking a stab at actually writing the mystery novel he'd always talked about writing instead of just consuming cheap paperbacks on the daily. And so Heather had to believe instead that Jordan had been murdered, or that something otherwise fantastic or strange or worthy of him had taken him out of this life. That he hadn't killed himself or shit himself to death.24
"You don't really think it was suicide, do you?" she asked.
"No," said Captain Benson. "I really don't." He bit his lip and then promised—off the record—that he would find out what really happened to Jordan Baker. As he finished his sentence, Deputy Skeptical returned, locked eyes with Benson and neither had to say anything.
Captain Benson and Deputy Skeptical crossed paths just before Halloween at the Black Haven Halloween Festival, both on duty but neither in attendance on police business. Deputy Skeptical had picked up a security shift and Captain Benson was there to meet Heather. They had arranged to meet earlier that day; he was going to tell her what happened to Jordan.
"Um," said Deputy Skeptical, stopping as he passed Captain Benson, perched on a park bench, tapping his fingers nervously and ignoring the half-drunk residents of Black Haven stumbling past him dressed as movie monsters.
Captain Benson stood. "All right, Deputy," he said. "Cards on the table." His eyes were bloodshot. His hair was disheveled. He hadn't been sleeping much. "I'm here to meet Heather—the waitress. I've been doing some under-the-table investigative work into what happened to Jordan. I found something; I really need you to listen. I'm going to need your help with this."
Just as Captain Benson began to explain, some girl dressed as a clown started vomiting into the bushes behind him. The grim obligation of part-time security weighing heavy on his heart, Deputy Skeptical knelt down to help her, holding the girl's hair back and telling her it was OK, all while trying his hardest to listen in on Captain Benson's rambling, rapid-fire explanation of his off-duty, off-the-record, off-kilter investigation into the death of Jordan Baker.25
Deputy Skeptical pointed the woman in the direction of the bathroom and called in the custodial team on his walkie-talkie. He turned to Captain Benson, incredulous. "So what the hell are you saying?"
Captain Benson took a moment to compose himself and said, with just a hint of self-awareness, "Deputy, I believe it was monsters."
Tired, beaten-up, tossed around, forced into submission by the wide breadth of the universe and covered in the stains of wretched excess from a woman who might have alcohol poisoning, Deputy Skeptical just sneered. "No such thing as monsters," he said.
Later that night—after a lengthy debate with Captain Benson, an emotionally taxing meeting with Heather, a call from dispatch regarding a domestic disturbance on the far side of town, a coincidental reunion with Kylie, and a somewhat uncomfortable car ride—Deputy Skeptical will watch from the squad car as Captain Benson kisses Kylie on the porch of her apartment, the whole scene playing out like a silent movie.
He will smile, say, "Well, my God," move over to the driver's seat and turn the key. As Kylie takes Captain Benson's hand and leads him through her front door, Deputy Skeptical will buckle his seatbelt and drive off, overwhelmed suddenly with tremendous hope, not only for his friend but also for everything.
He will think, nervously at first, that if Captain Benson could get Kylie to love him then maybe he can believe in things again. Maybe God is real. Maybe love is real. Maybe something extraordinary really did happen to an obese man in a gas station bathroom. Maybe everyone would start calling him Deputy Believer.
He will dial the Chief of Police. "It's Andrew," he will say to the answering machine. "I'm reopening the Jordan Baker case. Call me." He will toss the phone behind him and accelerate past a stop sign, past Perkins, past Lucky's Gas Station, past the run-down dive bar where he drinks alone most nights. He will howl. Laugh. Smack the roof in fits of adrenaline. Look wild-eyed out the window like everything is new and sweet and otherworldly—unbridled love bursting from the soul of every nameless pedestrian and untapped, innumerable mysteries lurking underneath each familiar storefront.
He loved her and she liked him. She liked him quite a bit actually, but not enough to consider him as a sexual partner. This isn't to say that she was not sexually active. She fucked guys behind the pinball place four nights a week, sometimes loudly and sometimes violently.
Black Haven was founded in 1880 by a miner named Gunther Black who struck it rich during the Gold Rush. He intended for Black Haven to be the pride of Colorado. He thought there'd be gold underneath every household; he thought they'd all be plutocrats.
During Deputy Skeptical's second week at the Black Haven P.D., the station went on a team building retreat to the barren roads of Wyoming to drink beer and look up at the sky and make UFOs out of airplanes. While everyone else was pointing and laughing, Deputy Skeptical said something to the effect of, "No such thing as aliens," which eventually led into, "No such thing as selflessness," and, following that train of thought to its logical conclusion, "No such thing as love". His co-workers began calling him Deputy Skeptical and made hurtful comparison to Dana Scully from the 1993 FOX television program, The X-Files. Deputy Skeptical resented the comparisons. It was Fox Mulder that he most identified with, most felt a kinship to. Deputy Skeptical loved Mulder, cried for him, wanted to believe.
Captain Benson was on his 216th particular notepad. Back home, he had devoted an entire cabinet shelf to them, all arranged in chronological order starting from the day he and his family first moved to the town. He called it, "The Archive of Black Haven."
"Or maybe he was just an asshole," Deputy Skeptical theorized.
The purchase had been made sincerely. Towards the end of his life, Jordan Baker was making an active effort to turn things around. During those final mornings, he woke up before dawn and ran through the suburban sprawl that couched his mother's home. As he ran, he waved at his neighbors, he smiled at the milkman and he ignored the mocking cat calls shouted to him from the backseats of passing school buses. He ran for his health, for his mother, and—tired, exhausted, sweat soaking through his XXL t-shirt and filled to the absolute brim with a quiet, hopeful optimism—he ran for Heather.
They didn't date very long, or at not least long enough for it to be some serious thing that they never got over. After three weeks of coffee dates and nervous shy talk, she invited him up to her bedroom. They stripped clothing and pressed their weird lips together and Kylie said, "Come on, stick it in," and he said, "Shh, let me just come on your tits," and without another word from Kylie he arched his back and beat off onto her breasts, an inaugural sexual act so powerful and degrading that Kylie broke things off with him later that night as he ran his fingers lightly up and down her naked backside.
Everybody called him Gonna-Die-Greg because in May his girlfriend, Jenny McCreary, hung herself in the basement of her childhood home while a repeat of The Twilight Zone played on the television set in front of her and ever since then, all Gonna-Die-Greg ever talked about was death. He would be hanging out with friends and then out of nowhere just tilt his head back and say, "I can't believe we're gonna be dead one day."
It was only June, and so guys kept coming up to him and saying, "Shit man, I'm so sorry about Jenny," to which Gonna-Die-Greg would reply, "Shit man, I'm so sorry about all of us."
"Oh yeah," said Perry Pullman when Kylie gave a description of Deputy Skeptical. "I know him." A while back, Deputy Skeptical had arrested Perry Pullman after finding him loitering late at night within close proximity to a home invasion. He had not been involved with the crime, but despite his repeated claims of "I didn't do it, you gotta believe me," Deputy Skeptical took him in and threatened to press charges until he was finally exonerated by an anonymous tip. "That guy's an asshole," he told Kylie.
Technically, the man Perry Pullman referenced here, one Jimi Heselden, was not the inventor of the Segway but rather the owner of Segway Inc., producer of the Segway personal transportation system.
Perry Pullman had first heard this statement—"Kill me, love me, stuff me in a closet and cut my jugular, do whatever you want to me,"—In a anecdote his buddy Henry told him about Jenny McCreary, Gonna-Die-Greg's recently deceased girlfriend.
Perry Pullman was way off base—Jimi Heselden, owner of Segway Inc., had been her uncle.
The ominous-sounding nature of the name, "Black Haven" had become a kind of inside joke for the residents of the town. This was especially true during the weeks surrounding Halloween, when they went all out on haunted houses and pumpkin patches and half-off horror pictures at the theater on Friday nights.
Among the images that played out in Perry Pullman's head as he imagined a life with her: moving out of his shitty apartment, moving in with Kylie, getting clean, going straight, quitting his job at the hookah lounge, getting a job in hospitality, maybe, or retail, purchasing a loosely fitting button-down from the thrift store for his first day of work, fucking on something other than a twin sized mattress in celebration of his first day of work, impregnating Kylie, smiling nervously as he puts his hand over her pregnant stomach, saying, "Hot damn, hot damn, I can feel it kicking," holding his newborn child, wet with placenta and fragile with potential, exchanging vows at City Hall, coming home every night worn out and strung out and exhausted for weeks and months and years on end until finally he can barely recognize the mature complexion of his face in the bathroom mirror, getting pissed at Kylie over nothing, getting pissed at Kylie over everything, shouting back and forth until both of their voices are hoarse, sharing the same bed each night anyway, holding Kylie as she sleeps, arms wrapped around her soft tummy, throwing the ball around with his child, indulging his classist father-in-law, getting into fights with teachers on back-to-school nights, going all out on birthdays, going all out on Christmas, loving his life, loving his child, and being achingly, desperately, hopelessly in love with Kylie for each of his remaining moments.
An example: once, in July, while walking hand in hand from the downtown movie theater, Kylie and Perry Pullman heard disturbing, otherworldly moans coming from behind the pinball place. Being very much at his best and very much on the cusp of falling in love, he said, jokingly, "Probably just ghosts," and Kylie smiled and tightened her grip. It was the little things.
Another example: after getting blackout drunk at a party one night, he and Kylie really got into it and Perry Pullman—drunk, not himself, the devil inside him—screamed at her, just loud and shitty and forceful enough to scare them both. After an emotional, painful, hung-over next morning, Perry Pullman set aside not only booze but also marijuana, ecstasy and salvia, explaining to confused friends at house parties that he wasn't drinking because, "I want to see what I look like sober," a vague but just charismatic enough explanation to satisfy even his most persistent enablers.
Both Captain Benson and Deputy Skeptical had been in attendance at the Black Haven Halloween Festival when they got the call about the domestic disturbance, although neither was technically there on official police business.
She did not know his first name.
Captain Benson was reminded then, of an old trick that his middle school English teacher had taught him to remember prepositions. "Prepositions," Mr. Ackerman had said, "are things that a squirrel does to a tree." The squirrel goes up the tree. The squirrel goes down the tree. The squirrel goes into Jordan Baker's asshole.
According to Kylie, the gas station had shut down for two days, they still hadn't fixed the men's room, and a week earlier, a fidgety guy wearing a bow-tie came in to buy a box of cosmic brownies, asked her for her name and said, "You, Kylie Heseldon, have the most important job in the universe." Before she could ask him what the hell he was talking about, two men dressed in black who identified themselves as federal agents walked through the automatic door and arrested him on charges of child pornography. As they dragged him out of the gas station, he started screaming, "Keep the holes closed! Jesus Christ, Kylie, you gotta fill the holes!" Kylie told Captain Benson that she didn't have any idea what he was talking about. "We haven't had any glory holes in weeks," she said.
Deputy Skeptical never actually submitted the slime for examination. Rather, the Chief of Police had offered him an incentive to sweep it under the rug. "We don't need any unnecessary attention. You're still pretty new here, but if you scratch my back, I scratch yours, you dig?" the Chief of Police had said. And so of course Deputy Skeptical flushed it. The next morning he found an envelope stuffed with cash in his mailbox. He had to do it. He needed the money. He had even started moonlighting as a security guard.
Captain Benson didn't wait for a reply, but if he had, he might have received the following as a detailed explanation of just what the hell was wrong with Deputy Skeptical: when he was five years old his older sister punched him for believing in magic; when he was six his father revealed—drunkenly—that there was no such thing as Santa Claus; when he was eleven his mother told him that he would never be an astronaut; when he was fourteen Sally Simpson asked him out to the homecoming dance as a practical joke; when he was seventeen his favorite English teacher was dismissed for having sexual intercourse with an underage girl; when he was twenty-two his father died of lung cancer after several months of exhaustive chemotherapy; when he was twenty-eight the Lost finale disappointed him; when he was twenty-nine his wife had a miscarriage; when he was thirty she left him, saying only: "I just don't love you anymore,"; when he was thirty-one he moved into a Motel 6 because he couldn't afford a place of his own; when he was thirty-two he moved to a new town and his co-workers gave him the nickname "Deputy Skeptical", even though he had been trying particularly hard to be social and forthcoming and—holy shit—optimistic with a new group of people.
She arrived at this epiphany following a conversation with her acquaintance, this guy that everybody called Gonna-Die-Greg, but who she insisted on calling Gregory. They had met a few months earlier at a support group. "We're going to keep each other going," Heather kept telling him, but he never wanted to talk about anything but the inevitability of death. Finally, towards the end of August, he interrupted her as she listed off three things for which she was thankful, a daily ritual she hoped might improve her often-negative mindset. "Your friend, Jordan," Gonna-Die-Greg had said. "I know that it's different, sometimes, but it's weird—that's not how Jenny acted at all towards the end. "
Benson's investigation looked like this: immediately following his last conversation with Heather, he started calling shops surrounding Lucky's Gas Station and asking if anything unusual had happened lately. Most of the shop owners had nothing to report, but the manager of the video rental store had a strange story about something breaking through the plumbing in the basement, knocking over the anime rack and smashing through a window. Intrigued, Benson began making house calls and ringing the doorbell of every home within a three mile radius. He eventually came across the small, dilapidated home of Iraq War veteran Samuel McKenna. When asked if he'd come across anything strange lately, McKenna replied, "Oh yeah, I got a doozy in the basement." He led Benson downstairs where he had a small creature the size of a rodent locked in a dog crate. Wings like a bat and all covered in slime. "Jesus Christ," Benson said, taking a step back as it jumped at the bars and growled like a garbage disposal. "Where the hell did you find that thing?" McKenna just laughed and said, "I got a hole in the backyard that you should probably see." He leaned forward. "There's something underneath Black Haven."
Chris Vanjonack is a language arts teacher living in Fort Collins, Colorado, where he enjoys co-hosting a monthly poetry slam and feeding his cat. His fiction has appeared previously in New Haven Review, The Rumpus and After the Pause.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Q: OfficeConverter issue when deploying to Azure App Service I have a web API which simply

*

*clone a .docx file

*convert that cloned .docx to a .pdf format

using DocumentFormat.OpenXml.Packaging;

[HttpPost("clone")]
public IActionResult CloneBillFromTemplate()
{
     var templateFilePath = System.IO.Path.Combine(Directory.GetCurrentDirectory(), "Bill", "PaymentTempl.docx");
     var clonedFilePath = System.IO.Path.Combine(Directory.GetCurrentDirectory(), "Bill", "ClonedBill.docx");
     var pdfFilePath = System.IO.Path.Combine(Directory.GetCurrentDirectory(), "Bill", "FinalBill.pdf");

     using (WordprocessingDocument wordDoc = WordprocessingDocument.Open(templateFilePath, true))
     {
         var clonedDoc = wordDoc.Clone(clonedFilePath);
         System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(500);
         clonedDoc.Save();
         clonedDoc.Close();
     }

     using (var converter = new OfficeConverter.Converter())
     {
         converter.Convert(clonedFilePath, pdfFilePath);
     }

     return Ok();
}

Everything works fine when debugging (for sure :3) and also on IIS
But when I deploy to Azure App service, I got this type of error (stack trace + exception message).

Could not read registry to check Word version

Could not find registry key Word.Application\CurVer
at OfficeConverter.Word..ctor()
at OfficeConverter.Converter.get_Word()
at OfficeConverter.Converter.Convert(String inputFile, String outputFile, Stream logStream) at ....

Could you guys help me on this? Thanks all!!!
**feel free to ask for more information you need to detect this issue
Update
Looks like this is the issue with the pdf converter pacakge I'm using, not the OpenXML

A: It seems your application is relying on the Windows registry in a way that is not supported. If you are running on a Linux App Service, that would be the first thing to swap out, though my guess is that you are already running on Windows.

Apps have read-only access to much (though not all) of the registry of the virtual machine they are running on. In practice, this means registry keys that allow read-only access to the local Users group are accessible by apps. One area of the registry that is currently not supported for either read or write access is the HKEY_CURRENT_USER hive.
Write-access to the registry is blocked, including access to any per-user registry keys.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service/operating-system-functionality#registry-access
If you can't refactor your code to not rely on such dependencies, I would suggest you put your application inside a Windows docker container. If you can run that locally, it should run on App Service as well.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
Difference between revisions of "Portman Group"
Melissa Jones (talk | contribs)
m (→Independent Complaints Panel: typo)
Claire Harkins (talk | contribs)
[[Category:Alcohol]][[Category:Alcohol Industry]][[category:Alcohol Lobby Groups]][[Category:Alcohol Science and Scientists]][[Category:Alcohol Front Groups]] [[Category:Front Groups]]
[[Category:Alcohol]][[Category:Alcohol Industry]][[category:Alcohol Lobby Groups]][[Category:Alcohol Science and Scientists]][[Category:Alcohol Front Groups]] [[Category:Front Groups]][[Category:Alcohol Industry in the UK]]
This article is part of the Spinwatch public health oriented Alcohol Portal project.
Portman Group Logo
The Portman Group (TPG) is an organisation financed and founded by the alcohol industry that claims to promote social responsibility within the industry, primarily focusing on responsible marketing, labelling and speaking for its members.
TPG acts to "show leadership on best practice in the area of alcohol responsibility" and to "foster a balanced understanding of alcohol-related issues."[1][2]
Professor Nick Heather, former Director of the Newcastle Centre for Alcohol and Drug Studies is one of many alcohol experts who see its role differently: "The attempt to distance alcohol as a drug from other kinds of drug and to give it a good face is the main activity of groups like the Portman Group." [3] There is little doubt that the group has been beneficial to the alcohol industry. Reflecting on the role played by the Portman Group in the development of the English public health white paper in 2004 an alcohol industry executive told The Grocer magazine, "The Portman Group was set up as our insurance policy. Getting all the different competitors to work together has not been plain sailing but the creation of the group has definitely benefited us all. There was nothing in the White Paper that was a surprise we are already ahead of the game in most areas" [4]. The same article reported on the desire for some within the food industry to develop a PMG for food. Hugh Burkitt, CEO of the Marketing Society, a former member of the Portman Group's independent complaints panel, sees the development of such a group as essential to the food industry. He argues that the self regulatory and promotional roles undertaken by TPG for the "piffling sum of £2million a year" would benefit food corporations. [5] Coincidentally, The Grocer reported that as Burkitt was giving his presentation in London, Jean Coussins, [then] chief executive of the Portman Group, was telling a conference in Beaconsfield organised by European sugar industry body CEFS why the organisation had been so successful. She pointed out that the Portman Group was a truly independent body, with a clearly defined role. And it had benefited the alcohol industry in a number of ways such as: the fostering of political trust and co-operation; the avoidance of statutory controls; and the generation of positive media coverage. All of which has been achieved because the Portman Group is definitely not a trade association that lobbies on behalf of its members. [6]
2 Portman Group's Role
3 Independent Complaints Panel
4 Policy Positions
5 Working in Partnership with Government
6 English Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy
7 Funding Members
8 PR Companies
9 Criticisms
10 Directors
The following extract gives some insight into the context in which the Portman Group was established.
"In 1989, a new public relations alliance was formed by the UK's leading alcohol companies. Instrumental in setting the ball rolling was (Lord) John Wakeham, a Tory peer and then chairman of the Ministerial Group on Alcohol Issues. According to Anthony Hurse, civil servant at the Department of Health: "Lord Wakeham made it clear to the alcohol industry that he would like the industry's collaboration. He spoke to Peter Mitchell Director of Strategic Affairs at Guinness who agreed he'd do what he could. As a consequence of Wakeham's suggestions, the UK's seven leading alcohol companies including Whitbread, Bass and Seagram, launched a new PR organisation from the headquarters of Guinness plc in London's Portman Square" [7].
Portman Group's Role
The Portman Group claim that their purpose is to promote responsible drinking; help prevent misuse of alcohol; encourage responsible marketing; and to foster a balanced understanding of alcohol-related issues [8]. Its former chief executive, Jean Coussins, rejected any suggestion that the group "represent[s] the industry" or acts as a "trade association or lobby group." [9] However, the evidence of its involvement in research and policy consultations indicates that it is not independent of the industry and that it lobbies on behalf of the industry. In its statements the group emphasises individual responsibility, blaming a minority of heavy drinkers for alcohol related problems. This ignores many aspects of alcohol related harm and is inconsistent with the evidence base that supports current public health thinking. [10] [11]. The group recently flexed its muscle in the debate around the Scottish government's plans to introduce a minimum price per unit of alcohol—a policy that is supported by public health professionals worldwide but that has been criticised by the group. [12] [13][14]
The group also attacked recent work from Sheffield University that found that minimum pricing in England and Wales would reduce the number of deaths directly attributable to alcohol by 3400 and the number of unnecessary hospital admissions by 100,000 a year. [15] [16]. The chief medical officer for England, Liam Donaldson, supported the Sheffield University findings and minimum pricing in his annual report on public health. [17] The group claims that alcohol advertising has no effect on the level of sales and therefore is not a driver of consumption but only of brand choice. It subsequently criticised Sir Liam, the BMA, and Alcohol Concern for their evidence based calls for such a ban.[18]. [19]
The Portman Group regularly comment on scientific or public health research, they challenge findings that do not fit with the alcohol industry's perspective on drinking alcohol and related issues. In August 2011 Local Alcohol Profiles for England (LAPE) were updated, these profiles estimate levels and patterns of alcohol consumption and subsequent levels of harm on some measures across England. The figures for the five year period up to 2009/2010 show a 24.6% increase in alcohol related hospital admissions. [20] They also highlight differences in consumption levels across regions, finding that despite a rising number of abstainers, alcohol continues to be a high risk factor in hospital admission, poor health and crime. The Portman Group claim that the figures are misleading in a letter sent to all newspapers who reported on the findings. In this case The Telegraph, The Daily Mail and The Daily Express recieved letters of complaint. [21]. The Portman group do not accept that alcohol realted hospital admissions harve increased by almost 25% and point out that hospital admissions across the board are rising beacuase of increasing population size and life expectancy. The argue instead that alcohol related hospital admissions have increased by only 0.02% but do not disclose where the figures they use come from. [22]
Independent Complaints Panel
Complaints raised against the industry's self regulatory code mediated by the Portman Group are heard by an independent complaints panel. In 2009 a member of the public complained about a promotion run by brewer Greene King ran a buy 3 pints get one free promotion, the panel ruled in favour of the brewer. David Poley, Portman Group Chief Executive, said "The Panel decided that nothing in the promotional material encouraged consumers to drink four pints in one session". [23] In another case Tokyo beer manufactured by BrewDog, a small eco-brewery in Fraserburgh, Scotland was banned under the code for this wording on the label "Everything in moderation, including moderation itself. What logically follows is that you must, from time, [sic] have excess. This beer is for those times". [24] Alcohol Focus Scotland and a member of the public complained about the 18% ABV beer. When Portman say they "ban" products what they mean is that they circulate an alert to their members and other retailers to encourage them to enforce a voluntary ban on the product in question.
Independent Complaints Panel Members
Sir Richard Tilt (Chairman)
Laura Hyrapetian
Revd. Canon Professor Martyn Percy
Barbara O'Donnell
Jane Keightley
Ron Finlay
Nigel Long
Jon Eggleton
Hugh Burkitt
The Portman Group believe that alcohol harm reduction should focus on education and prevention rather than on controls advocated by public health advocates in tackling alcohol misuse. "Alcohol harm reduction measures should target the minority who misuse alcohol rather than the responsible drinking majority" [25]. The evidence that underpins the public health approach is that controlling availability and increasing pricing are the most effective measures to reduce alcohol related harm [26]. Calls for such measures have been heard from Alcohol Concern and the chief medical officer for England and Wales Sir Liam Donaldson [27] Introducing minimum pricing is strongly opposed by the alcohol industry and, in turn the Portman Group [28]. Unsurprisingly, the Portman Group also share the alcohol industry's position on advertising. Further restrictions on alcohol advertising are advocated by public health professions, Alcohol Concern [29] and the British Medical Association [30] have called for a total ban, and have subsequently been criticised by The Portman Group for these evidence-based calls for a total advertising ban on alcohol. Furthermore, TPG has used a recent report from academics at Sheffield University to defend its member companies' right to 24-hour television advertising, on the basis that a ban on advertising could lead to fierce price competition – which the Sheffield report says could lead to increased consumption. TPG doesn't accept the link between price and consumption but still uses it as a defence of current advertising practice [31].
Working in Partnership with Government
The Government's Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy (England) was launched in March 2004 (and subsequently reaffirmed in the Choosing Health White Paper) one of the aims was to develop a fund with broad based support, financed voluntarily by industry to tackle alcohol misuse and alcohol-related harm. "It was envisaged that the fund would be used to finance community and national activities across the UK and would be administered by an independent board, wholly independent of Government" [32] The alcohol industry opposed government plans to create an independent national fund for projects aimed at combating alcohol problems. Eventually, it agreed to reform an existing industry fund - the Drinkaware Trust- giving it greater independence from the industry. The Department of Health was approached by the Portman Group, which hoped its charitable arm, The Drinkaware Trust, would be a suitable vehicle to deliver the proposed new fund. After consultation and considerable negotiations between a variety of stakeholders between 2005-2006, "a Memorandum of Understanding between the Government, Devolved Administrations and The Portman Group was signed on 29 June 2006, whereby it was agreed that, as soon as was "reasonably practicable, the governance, funding base and activities of the existing Drinkaware Trust will be re-structured to fulfil the educational, community and awareness campaigning role envisaged in the Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy for a fund, voluntarily financed by the alcohol industry (producers and retailers), but with broadly-based support to tackle alcohol-related harms". [33]
English Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy
The UK government, in response to escalating levels of alcohol related harm, consulted a group of experts to provide evidence on which to base a strategy to reduce the growing problem. Seventeen independent experts provided evidence which supported raising the price of alcohol and limiting availability. However the strategy which emerged from the government did not accept the findings of the expert group. Instead the government referred to only one "alcohol misuse" group, the Portman Group. The strategy ignored the original expert group's recommendations and adopted the "language and ideas of the alcohol industry" [34]. Alex Stevens at the European Institute of Social Services at the University of Kent noted "This seems a clear example where external pressure on government by a powerful group has influenced the use of evidence in policy" [35].
Funding Members
Full Members who fund the Portman Group are as follows:
Bacardi, Brown Forman Brands
Beverage Brands (UK) Ltd
Carlsberg UK
Coors Brewers UK
Diageo Great Britain
InBev UK Ltd
Pernod Ricard UK
Scottish & Newcastle
Another 140 companies are signed up to the Portman Group Code of Practice, which encourages responsible marketing by the drinks industry. The on and off trade retailers in particular play a vital role in helping to enforce the decisions of the Independent Complaints Panel.
PR Companies
The Portman Group has worked with a range of PR and advertising companies including [36]:
M&C Saatchi
Iodine Media
Criticisms
The Portman Group stand accused of being dominated by alcohol producers in funding and governance. The Portman Group reportedly, offered several British scientists a fee of £2000 to write anonymous critiques undermining a publication calling for more controls on the sale of alcohol namely higher tax and more restricted availability. [37](see Marcus Grant)
Then came an episode that Plant describes as "very serious" and an "enormous ethical problem". The Portman Group, a lobby organisation set up by several big drinks manufacturers, was funding Plant's team to the tune of Pounds 500,000 over five years. In 1995 an employee of the Portman Group invited at least one researcher to write anonymous reports commenting on a World Health Organisation book about alcohol problems, edited by London-based addiction expert Griffith Edwards. Nick Heather, director of the Centre for Alcohol and Drug Studies at Newcastle University, was approached and declined. 'This was unacceptable because it was anonymous and because I was being offered a relatively large amount of money (Pounds 2,000) to do it,' says Professor Heather, who was then phoned by John Duffy, a statistician within Plant's group, who wanted the names of alternative reviewers.
The incident featured on a Dispatches television programme and was a factor in the breakdown in the relationship between Plant and Duffy. 'We reported this to the university and dissociated ourselves from Duffy,' says Plant. 'The issue was anonymity. Researchers have to maintain a transparent and open relationship about their funding agencies.' Duffy later left and now works in the Chief Scientist's Office at the Scottish Office in Edinburgh. As a civil servant he says he is not permitted to speak to The THES. [38]
'As a kind of psychotherapy we got together with an academic from Newcastle University after that incident and wrote a paper about ethics, research and funding,' says Plant. But over the past three years the fall-out has rippled through the team, affecting its work. In October Plant finally severed his ties with Edinburgh. Both he and the university agree that the psychiatry department's research plans (for biological and genetic research) do not conform with the type of social science research the alcohol and health research group was carrying out. When the team's core funding, from the Portman Group, ran out last year, Plant made a move.[39]
Other criticisms include its lack of independence from the alcohol industry evident in it ignoring or discrediting evidence that does not fit with the industry's perspective. The educational campaigns fronted by TPG, now done by the Drinkaware Trust place too much emphasis on personal responsibility and ignore the cultural or social aspects of alcohol culture and furthermore, underplay the risks associated with alcohol.
Overall many critics are concerned that the group is a Social Aspects Organisation whose aim is to manage issues that threaten the alcohol business [40] Perhaps the most serious criticism regards the influence the Portman Group has over alcohol research, particularly following the decision to appoint its then chief executive Jean Coussins to the Alcohol Education and Research Council. Professor Robin Room argued against Coussins appointment: "In my view, an organisation which has taken such a partisan position specifically on research findings should not be on the board of a semi governmental organisation which is supporting alcohol research with public money." He added: "If a Portman Group staff member remains on the AERC board, it will severely compromise the AERC's reputation and capacity to function as a scientific funding body operating in the public interest." Other prominent alcohol researchers agree including Griffith Edwards, professor of addiction at the Institute of Psychiatry, London, and editor of Addiction, agreed: "Jean Coussins is not a representative of the brewing industry but of a lobby group. The Portman Group has lobbied government intensively on behalf of the drinks industry, arguing that it is not drinking that matters, but drunkenness. [41]
All of the directors of the Portman Group come from the alcohol industry and hold current directorships with large corporations who produce and distribute alcohol, with the exception of the chief executive who only sits on the Portman board. Many also are directors of trade associations such as The British Beer and Pub Association and the The Drinkaware Trust. On 14th August 2009 the group announced a new chairman, Seymour Fortescue making him the first chair to come from out with the alcohol industry elite. With a background in self regulation and health education Fortescue is the ideal candidate. Current Directors
Henry Ashworth Replaced David Poley as chief executive in October 2011 [42]
Karen Salters joint managing director of Beverage Brands, which owns WKD,
Stuart Macfarlane, InBev's global director of customer standards [43]
Stefan Orlowski
Peter Litherland
Mark Hunter chief executive of Carling brewer Molson Coors (UK)
Mark De Witte
Issac Sheps
Jean Spriet
Former Directors
David Poley joined in 1997 and became Chief Executive in September 2006- September 2011 [44]
John Dunsmore
Christopher Searle
Douglas Clydesdale
Joseph Woods
Richard S. Evans
Benet Slay
Peter Swinburn
↑ The Portman Group About US accessed January 2010
↑ The Portman Group History accessed January 2010
↑ Jim Carey, 1997. Recreational Drug Wars: Alcohol Versus Ecstasy Extract From the book Ecstasy Reconsidered Accessed April 2007
↑ The Grocer, November 27th 2004, Do we need a Portman for food? accessed via Nexis UK May 23rd 2008
↑ Jim Carey,1997. Recreational Drug Wars: Alcohol Versus Ecstasy Extract From the book Ecstasy Reconsidered Accessed April 2007
↑ The Portman Group Promoting Responsible Drinking Company Web Site
↑ Coussins J. The Portman Group does not represent alcohol industry. BMJ 2004;329:404 accessed January 2010
↑ BMA Scotland Written response to the Scottish government's proposed strategy to tackle alcohol misuse in Scotland accessed January 2010
↑ School of Health and Related Research, University of Sheffield, Model-based appraisal of alcohol minimum pricing and off-licensed trade discount bans in Scotland: a Scottish adaptation of the Sheffield alcohol policy accessed January 2010
↑ Portman Group Website Changing Scotland's relationship with alcohol: a response from the Portman Group to the consultation document from the Scottish government accessed January 2010
↑ Scottish Government Changing Scotland's relationship with alcohol: a discussion paper on our strategic approach accessed January 2010
↑ Portman Group WebsiteBMA ignores world class regulations accessed January 2010
↑ Donaldson L. (2008) 150 years of the annual report of the chief medical officer: on the state of public health 2008 accessed January 2010
↑ Hastings G. BMA Under the influence: the damaging effect of alcohol marketing on young people accessed January 2010
↑ Alcohol Concern, Leading health charities call for ban on advertising alcohol price promotions accessed January 2010
↑ LAPE 2011 Topography of Drinking Behaviour in England accessed 29th August 2011
↑ The Portman Group Letters to the Editor accessed 29th August 2011
↑ Portman Group 28th May 2009, BREWER'S PUB PROMOTION NOT IRRESPONSIBLE accessed January 2010
↑ Portman Group 3rd December 2009 TOKYO* BEER BANNED accessed 10th February 2010
↑ The Portman Group What We Believe accessed 10th December 2009
↑ ScHARR, University of Sheffield, September 2009 Model-Based Appraisal of Alcohol Minimum Pricing and Off-Licensed Trade Discount Bans in Scotland: A Scottish adaptation of the Sheffield Alcohol Policy Model version 2 accessed December 12th 2009
↑ Sir Liam Donaldson (16th March 2009) 150 years of the Annual Report of the Chief Medical Officer: On the state of public health 2008 accessed 17th December 2009
↑ The Portman Group (September 2008) Changing Scotland's Relationship with Alcohol: A Discussion Paper: Response from The Portman GroupAlcohol: A Discussion Paper: Response from The Portman Group accessed 3rd December 2009
↑ Alcohol Concern (19th June 2009)available LEADING HEALTH CHARITIES CALL FOR BAN ON ADVERTISING ALCOHOL PRICE PROMOTIONS accessed 14th December 2009
↑ The British Medical Association (September 2009) Under the influence The damaging effect of alcohol marketing on young people accessed 14th December 2009
↑ The Portman Group (13th July 2009)Alcohol Ad Rules Effective accessed 15th December 2009
↑ The Drinkaware trustBackground and Origins Last accessed January 2007
↑ The Scottish Government October 27th 2006 Memorandum of Understanding between The Portman Group, the Department of Health, the Home Office, Scottish Executive, Welsh Assembly Government and Northern Ireland Office Re: The Drinkaware Trust accessed October 2009
↑ Alex Stevens, Survival of the Ideas that Fit: An Evolutionary Analogy for the Use of Evidence in Policy, Social Policy & Society 6:1, 25–35, 2007 Cambridge University Press
↑ Alex Stevens, Survival of the Ideas that Fit: An Evolutionary Analogy for the Use of Evidence, in Policy Social Policy & Society 6:1, 25–35, 2007 Cambridge University Press
↑ Marketing, March 29, 2006 DRINKAWARE TRUST IN LINK WITH STATE accessed via Nexis UK May 23rd 2008
↑ Rob Baggott (2000) Joseph Rowntree Trust Alcohol Strategy and the Drinks Industry: a partnership for prevention?
↑ SIAN GRIFFITHS Over the limit?; Perspective; Profile; Martin Plant The Times Higher Education Supplement January 2, 1998, Issue 1313, Pg.13
↑ Colin Drummond, Alcohol and Alcoholism Vol. 35, No. 2, pp. 217-218, 2000 Oxford Journals Book Review of Drinking Patterns and their Consequences Last accessed April 2008
↑ Susan Mayor, British Medical Journal 10 July 2004"Researcher objects to drinks industry representative sitting on alcohol research body" Accessed March 2007
↑ Marketing Week 19th September 2011 Portman Group hires public health expert as CEO accessed September 2011
↑ The Morning Advertiser 18th Feb 2008 Macfarlane named InBev UK & Ireland president accessed 11th January 2010
↑ FAME Company Report The Portman Group Accessed December 2009
Retrieved from "https://powerbase.info/index.php?title=Portman_Group&oldid=168849"
Alcohol Industry
Alcohol Lobby Groups
Alcohol Science and Scientists
Alcohol Front Groups
Alcohol Industry in the UK


In response to Boris Charmatz 10000 Gestures Emily has produced an animation that was a depository of imagery with no visual consequence. Something alike to a moving doodle. She was inspired by Boris' choreography with the movement of the familiar gestures and tapped into what the familiar is for her when she draws. The short animation contains hand drawn lines and scribbles centred around the sharp fast movement of what is vaguely human and performing a dance. As she produced the work it slowly became a visual representation of her own thoughts and feelings when watching the performance.


Ubisoft has revealed its post-launch plans for the upcoming ahistorical assassination game Assassin's Creed Odyssey, which will include a season pass featuring two multi-episode storylines and separate story missions called The Lost Tales of Greece that will be free for everyone.
Free content will include The Lost Tales of Greece quests that will be released between season pass story arcs, "providing a constant flow of new stories for players to discover" with "familiar faces and new characters from the world of Assassin's Creed Odyssey," plus free in-game events, new monsters and creatures, and a New Game Plus mode.
The Assassin's Creed Odyssey season pass is included with the Deluxe, Gold, and Ultimate editions of the game, which are available for $80/£59/€70, $100/£84/€100, and $120/£92/€110, on Steam. It comes out on October 5.


Achieving that moment where your guests walk in the door and gasp — that "wow factor" is the ultimate in event design and its not just for the rich and famous. How do you give your guests the unexpected? Video: How Do You Achieve Wow Factor For Your Event?
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text:
Q: How to refresh the position of a datepicker UI when it's already displayed? I have several input fields for dates in a form. The targeted data field name is displayed via placeholder which disappeares as soon as the input value is entered. For that reason I display the name in a 0px high div above and as soon as the input value is not empty I set the height of it to 24px. But the position of the poped up datepicker doesn't follow the input position.
Relevant HTML:

Target Name

    <input placeholder="Target Name" name="target_name" type="text" class="fomt-control date" maxlength="10">

Relevant JS:
async function placeholder_func() {
    if ($(this).val() != '' && $(this).val() != null) {
        if ($(this).prev() != null) {
            $(this).prev().css("height", "24px");
        }
    } else {
        if ($(this).prev() != null) {
            $(this).prev().css("height", "0px");
        }
    }

    //await new Promise(r => setTimeout(r, 200));
    //alert('refresh');
};
$("input[type=text][placeholder!='']").change(placeholder_func);
$("input[type=text][placeholder!='']").keyup(placeholder_func);

I got it working by setting the top distance of the Datepicker, but i also realised the position is correct adjusted if i uncomment the commented lines. I would rather like to let the datepicker library do the refresh instead of handling the position myself. So how can i trigger a position refresh?
Thanks for your help!

A: I kind of solved it with using hide and show again. The input value gets cleared by the hide method, so i have to store the input value in a variable before. Still searching for a better solution though!
async function placeholder_func() {
    if (($(this).prev() != null && $(this).prev().css("height") != '0px' && $(this).val().length > 1)) {
        return;
    }
    if ($(this).hasClass("date")) {
        var val = $(this).val();
        $(this).datepicker("hide");
        $(this).val(val);
    }
    if ($(this).val() != '' && $(this).val() != null) {
        if ($(this).prev() != null) {
            $(this).prev().css("height", "24px");
        }
    } else {
        if ($(this).prev() != null) {
            $(this).prev().css("height", "0px");
        }
    }

    if ($(this).hasClass("date")) {
        await new Promise(r => setTimeout(r, 200));
        $(this).datepicker("show");
    }
};


text:
BBVA Compass has Partnered with Dwolla to bring in Real-Time Banking
FINTECH PARTNERSHIPS
BBVA Compass recently announced that it has entered into an agreement with Dwolla, as part of which, it will open its technology platform to Dwolla. The agreement would allow customers of the bank to leverage Dwolla's real-time network for money transfers. The recent agreement comes at a time when BBVA Compass is already trying to transform itself into a digital bank, keeping up with changing banking customer behavior.
The deal makes BBVA Compass the biggest bank yet to partner with Dwolla. It is also the only major bank to have opened up its platform to such an extent to digital developers. The real-time payment services would be available to BBVA Compass account holders probably in Q1 2015. Dwolla's architecture and tools allows any organization, business or individual with a U.S. account to transfer money at a very competitive price. Dwolla charges a flat fee of 25 cents for transactions for amounts of $10 or more.
Manolo Sanchez, Chairman and CEO of BBVA Compass, said in an official press release: 'We've set our minds on being the best bank in this digital century, and we believe strongly that the best way to get there is to combine our in-house capabilities — our real-time core banking platform, for one — with startups whose very existence is designed to redefine the financial services industry. Dwolla, and its real-time payment infrastructure, is leading the modernization of the payment process, and we expect their technology to accelerate our own vision for banking in the digital age.'
During the early phases, BBVA Compass will leverage Dwolla's FiSync protocol to enable funds transfers through Dwolla's real-time network. The protocol has been specially designed for banks and credit unions. The use of this protocol would deem useful for startups, enterprise companies and small businesses that are seeking quick and inexpensive ways to handle B2B payments. In later phases, additional features and updates would be rolled out.
Ben Milne, CEO and Founder of Dwolla, said in an official press release: 'As new technologies push the limitations of the existing batch payment infrastructure and federal level initiatives champion the call for real-time payments, it's the financial institutions that are working to bring true streaming payments to their clients, today, that will have the competitive advantage tomorrow. BBVA Compass shares Dwolla's vision for a modern payment infrastructure — one that helps financial institutions and their account holders create new products and services, streamline and improve business processes, and stay relevant in an increasingly digital and customer-centric landscape.'
Banks in the U.S. usually rely on the Automated Clearing House or ACH for money transfers. ACH can take days to transfer money between two accounts at different banks. It also imposes fees of 15 to 95 cents per transaction which is higher than that of Dwolla. With its biggest deal yet with a major bank, Dwolla is disrupting the payments space by becoming a prominent challenger to traditional routes like ACH. If other banks start following in the footsteps of BBVA Compass, we may witness a radical transition in the banking sector.
FINTECH · BANKING · B2B
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Rufo wrote a post on his blog about a model for the democratic control of telematic services. In a nutshell, he is trying to close the ASP loophole of GPL (v2 and v3...) with something quite more elaborate than a simple license.
He is envisioning a world of free services based on Software as a Service (SaaS), where Reviewers can be appointed as Auditors for the software behind the service. And Modifiers can modify the code of the service and obtain free or at cost hosting.
It is a very interesting approach. The issue behind the reasoning seems to be enforcement of the license. I heard about it before, many times. If your software runs behind a firewall, how can you (the user) know what really is the service running? What if they change the code and do not tell you? What about your freedom as a user to see the code?
Rufo's answer is: let's appoint Auditors. Mimicking the voting process, where Auditors are making sure nobody votes twice. These people might have conflicts of interests, but the entire system usually works (unless you live in Florida).
I have never been a fan of enforcement. Maybe because I trust people by nature. Or because I am just pragmatic. Enforcement is tough to achieve. For example, the Affero license has a provision that forces the hosting service to give a user a way to download the entire source code while accessing the service. I always found it too restrictive. Forcing software implementations through a license seems odd and hardly applicable to the millions of different cases we are going to see in the future (think about a mobile phone accessing email on a Funambol server... How can I give you the entire source code to download on your device?) .
Is the old good GPL enforceable? In theory... If I take a GPL library in C, modify it and I compile it with my product, then ship the binary in a commercial product, who can tell I am violating the GPL? Probably nobody. Does it mean GPL is useless? No, it is based on trust. If you do not GPL your code, you are violating the license. We could catch you and enforce it.
The same for SaaS. If you run a service based on HPL, you must open source your code. If you don't, you are violating the license. We could catch you and enforce it.
To me, a piece of paper that says YOU HAVE TO, is enough. It is practical. It is based on trust. It simply works. Anything more complex would work as well, and maybe limit open source thieves, but adds so much complexity to also limit adoption. Which would turn people to use something else, less restrictive, even giving up copyleft (which would mean the death of open source). I am willing to give up on enforceability, to see open source also thrive in the SaaS world. That's where the world is going.
Mobile is a super fast paced market. I have been in Hawaii for seven days enjoying sunsets with Mai Tai on my Lanai, and a million things happened (although they definitely did not ruin my vacation ;-) Let me try to recall some of the more important news.
After announcing it is opening some APIs, RIM came up short in the analyst call and the stock collapsed 8% in one day. The two news are not related but highlight the two main issues RIM is facing: first, RIM does not have a developer community (instead of opening some random APIs, why don't they go open source or, at least, help our community which is struggling to interact with the APIs they are filling with bugs to kill the competition?) and probably won't ever have it (while Microsoft and Linux do...). On the other side, they are trying desperately to move into the consumer space. Unfortunately, people are not buying enough BlackBerry Perl, which is their critical path to consumers. Therefore the forecast is bad and the stock value sinks. The Perl is not a consumer device. It is a cool replacement for older BlackBerries. Unfortunately, the iPhone is also a cool replacement for older BlackBerries, which makes their outlook even worst. Bottom line, RIM is not a consumer company and it is not likely to become one soon. They are likely to miss the train.
In the meantime, Apple announced it will delay the shipment of OS X Leopard from June to October (that's four months...) because all the Apple QA people are testing the iPhone. I have the feeling they made the usual mistake of thinking "well, it is a small device, it won't require the same QA cycles of a server...". Oopss, it is actually the opposite. A small device, when it is a smartphone (a not a single purpose device as the iPod) requires way more QA cycles than a server. The sad reality of mobile. And they are using one single network (Cingular) and are not planning to allow developers to add applications, which cuts QA by 90%... Anyway, it also shows how much effort Apple is putting on this device. It simply cannot fail (but it might...).
Going with Mobile Linux, argues Capobianco in a recent blog post, would enable Palm to cut its ties to Good and to Microsoft, to solve its OS issues, and to go after the consumer market in a new and effective way. The alternative is continued stagnation and eventually acquisition.
So... one very good for Palm (it was about time... and it is probably too late as well), one good for Sun, one bad for Apple and one ugly for RIM.


Huawei-owned Honor isn't trying to battle the iPhone X ($655 at Walmart) or Galaxy S8 ($396 at Amazon) with its latest phone. Instead, the Honor 7X is aimed squarely at those of you who don't want to splash the cash on elite handsets, but still want some of the pizzazz that comes with them.
With an expected price somewhere under the £300 mark, the 7X is more closely related to the similarly affordable Moto G5 Plus ($300 at Amazon). While the G5 has a water resistant design (which the 7X does not), the Honor's great screen and slicker overall design makes it the more compelling choice. How the two truly stack up remains to be seen in our full review.
There's no official price as yet, but it's expected to be below £300 (the previous Honor 6X ($255 at Amazon) went on sale for £225). There's no word on when the phone will land in the US or Australia, but for reference, even an estimated £280 price converts to $369 and AU$485.
The screen is where the excitement lies. It's a massive 5.93-inch affair, with tiny bezels on all sides. With a fingerprint scanner on the back, rather than the front, the display has been able to take up all available room in the chassis. Sure, the Galaxy S8, Google Pixel 2 XL ($641 at Walmart) and Huawei Mate 10 Pro ($525 at Amazon) have all done that, but they'll both cost you hundreds more.
First off, those slim bezels make it look like a much more premium device than the affordable price suggests. It's wrapped in a full metal shell, which looks slick and feels great to hold. The deep blue colour stands out nicely against the slew of black and silver phones knocking about. The 2,160x1,080-pixel resolution makes text look pin sharp and it's easily bright enough to use under our harsh office lights.
It's loaded with a quad-core, Huawei-made Kirin 659 processor with 4GB of RAM. It's certainly no match for the S8 or Pixel 2 ($315 at Amazon) in benchmark scores, but in my tests I found it to be perfectly nippy enough for all your everyday emailing and Instagramming. It handles demanding games like Riptide GP: Renegade and N.O.V.A Legacy well enough for casual gamers too.
The rear 16-megapixel camera takes colourful shots with plenty of detail. Colours can be on the cold side, but there's a manual camera mode where you can adjust the white balance to get a nicer tone.
A second lens provides depth information, letting you capture photos with shallow depth of field, and indeed there's a 'Portrait Mode' just like you'll find on the iPhone 8 Plus ($500 at Amazon) and X. It does a decent job of isolating your subject by giving the background an attractive blur. The cut out of your subject isn't as neat as the iPhones ($640 at Walmart) manage, but it's more than good enough to add some cool effects to your portraits on Instagram.
The 8-megapixel front-facing camera takes sharp shots and has quite a wide angle of view so you won't need to squash your friends in too closely to get everyone in view.
What you won't find on the 7X is any kind of water resistance, something that is becoming a standard on higher-end phones. Keep it away from any potential splashes and be careful taking calls in the rain. It charges using the older micro USB, rather than USB-C, which isn't much of a problem as it means you can keep using the charging cables you had from your previous handset.
It also launches with the older Android Nougat software, rather than Oreo. It's a shame not to see the latest version on board, given that it's been available for some time, but I can just about forgive it, given the price of the phone. Honor is currently looking at early next year for an update to Oreo.
The 3,340mAh battery (non-removable) is pretty sizeable, although that large screen will be an energy hog. I would expect to get a day of power with careful use, but we'll test that fully in the review.