There are times when I truly wonder whether our CTO (Chief Technical Officer) really has any clue at all when it comes to websites and the like.

The company currently runs about 30 websites, one of which has a large forum for users of the software to comment on it, make suggestions, bug reports and the like. That’s fine, even when it’s run within the sack-of-festering-shite known as Mambo. However, he insists that it’s also left wide open, so that people can write a post on it without registering themselves on the site. Naturally this has come to the attention of a bundle of scumbag spammers, who are currently blasting the thing into oblivion. (About 15,000 posts today so far) Oh dear.

Now, because the CTO is a knob slightly under-represented on the IQ front, he still wants the forum to be left open, rather than insisting that people register before posting. He feels that registration will mean people don’t make comments, and would apparently rather leave the site open to spam-scum. Seems bizarre to me, and I’ve said so in no uncertain terms. But he’s still insistent on this policy, although he has then said “But I want you to bar the IP addresses that the spammers are using, and block their accounts” It doesn’t seem to have sunk in yet that they don’t have fucking accounts, they’re logged in as “Guest”. Gah.

It makes life interesting, to say the least.

Other than that, the current stuff I’m working on involves user registration, which he’s fine with in this case because it’s fundamental to how the site works. (There’s a logic there somewhere, fighting to get out and be understood.) However, he’s also heard the expression “single sign-on” somewhere, and so wants me to check my users when they log-in/register against the user tables of four other websites in order to make sure that if they’re already registered on those, they can use the new one without any problem.

I’m now on the fifth re-write of the log-in/registration script, as the goalposts change. Which, again, makes life interesting…

For some reason, this week I’ve been incapable of actually organising myself properly at all. A prime example of this would be that I had a day where I’d simply a) forgotten to charge up my phone, then realised this in the morning, thought “I’ll put the charger in my bag”, followed by b) utterly and completely forgetting to pick up the charger. And there’ve been things like that all week.

Last night I took my headphones home for the first time in ages, as we were going to the gym and I needed them for the MP3 player. Only I forgot the MP3 player. This morning I’ve remembered the MP3 player but – you’re way ahead of me here, aren’t you? – I’ve left the bloody headphones at home.

Fortunately, my work stuff has been a lot more organised, so it’s only the domestic bit that’s chaotic. Hopefully I’ll be far more together after the weekend, although I’m not currently convinced of this…

The BBC today has been banging on about how Britain is ‘failing’ on Hepatitis C, and failing to diagnose it in the majority of cases.

Now OK, I’m sure I’m just being thick here, but how can a story say something like this?

[the study estimated] 500,000 UK people had the virus, which attacks the liver, but only one in seven knew. Only 1-2% of those with the disease in the UK had been identified and treated with approved drugs, which can cure between 60-80% of those treated, it said.

They estimate 500,000 people may have the virus, but they don’t know. I don’t see how you can come up with such a seemingly arbitrary figure as “we’re only diagnosing 2%” (or 10%, or 20% – the figure doesn’t matter) – because in honesty you have no fucking idea how many people actually carry the virus. That “2% diagnosed” could actually be 50% of the people with the virus – you don’t know, because you haven’t bloody well diagnosed them all.

Short of making it a compulsory test – and that would be too expensive to be feasible, I suspect – the figures are bollocks, and it all comes down to hype.

Or am I missing something relevant?