Justice was done at the weekend, Alexandra has won this year's X-Factor in a victory for talent over popularity.

Quite how the (not very good at) singing chipmuck (Eoghan) got into the final three I don't know, but whoever thought it would be a good idea to put him on stage with Boyzone needs shooting, Ronan and co. totally drowned him out, not that I've ever really managed to hear him over his backing singers anyway. Either way Boyzone showed him how it's done and made painfully clear that as a vocalist he just doesn't cut it.

The same was partly true of JLS, though to be fair they do actually look like they could cut it as a boy band, bearing in mind boy band success is often a triumph of style / looks over content.

Alexandra by comparison was paired with one of the most powerful and famous vocalists in the World (Beyonce) and more than held her ground.

European judges have declared that keeping DNA samples of people suspected of crime but not convicted is a breach of their human rights and millions of samples currently held by British Police will have to be destroyed.

I can understand that, as innocent people don't have to provide DNA samples, having yours kept on file by the Police could be seen an "accusation" of some kind, especially as people often adopt a "no smoke without fire" attitude to these things. But surely the answer to this problem is to require EVERYONE to provide a DNA sample so there's no longer any difference between innocent and guilty?

Apparently 114 murders, 116 rapes and 68 sex attacks have so far been solved using the DNA of innocent people, and DNA (together with finger-printing) provide Police with 3,500 matches a month. Wouldn't having everyone's DNA lead to even more convictions?

So Ruth Lorenzo is out of X Factor having received the least votes this week. At least it wasn't tactical voting by the judges this time! Unfortunately for Ruth she's Spanish and doesn't have a region (or in Eoghan's case an entire country) voting for them for reasons other than talent.

Quite how the 2 one-trick ponies (Eoghan "High School Musical" Quigg and Diana "wavey hand girl" Vickers) are still in I don't know, they're both beginning to really annoy me, but since when has X Factor been a talent competition?

Anyway, here's Ruth's stand out (for me) performance from last week...

I love post-apocalyptic television programmes / films, and another has just started on BBC1 called Survivors ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/survivors/ )

I guess I'm into these kind of shows because I imagine what I'd do if something like this really happened (assuming I survived of course!). And I guess I imagine what I'd do because I'm disillusioned with modern life and would welcome a chance to revert to a more basic way of living, certainly one without the constraints of modern society.

Of course I gloss over how truly horrific it would almost certainly be, and I suspect once the last remaining vestiges of modern life passed away and I was required to quite literally scrap a living from the bare soil I'd find it all too much like hard work and yearn for the days of comfort modern society provides.

Yes, this is yet another "web log", commonly known as a "blog". The only difference I guess between this one and the gazillions of others out there is the software that powers this site is all my own work!

During the day I work as an I.T. Manager for a small capital equipment distributor, and in my spare time I write PHP / MySQL based software for websites. This one uses a CMS (Content Management System) I've recently developed as a backend for whatever data driven dynamic websites I care to run on top of it. In this instance it's a simple content "plug-in" which enables me to add articles / blogs / news or really any type of content I like, and it uses a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) in-place editor so that adding nicely formatted content is a straight-forward painless process.

If you click the "Read More" link below this article you'll see the complete text of this article and, if you register on the site, you'll be able to rate and comment on articles.

I'm a big X Factor fan. No idea why mind you, it's hugely formulaic, you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference between one week's show and the next, with the host (the usually excellent but not on X Factor) Dermot O'Leary and the judges seemingly reading from the same script week after week.

What's more, the exit on November 8th of one of the favourites Laura White demonstrates one of X Factor's biggest flaws. The show is supposed to be a competition between would-be recording artists. Instead it's actually a competition between the judges, with Louis Walsh once again demonstrating he's perfectly capable of indulging in spot of blatant tactical voting if it benefits him, sod whether it benefits anyone else, let alone the integrity of the show.