May 2007 Archives

The perils of downloading the new version of Fedora on the day that it is released!

Anyway, the release notes are online. What are you waiting for? Go get it.

Update: It actually took about 18 hours. So I'll be able to start playing with it on Sunday once the Perl Teach-In is over.

Because a conversation on IRC just reminded me of one of them, here are my two favourite pop quiz questions. Feel free to answer in the comments. People who were taking an interest in music in the 70s and 80s may have an advantage.

Question 1 (the easy one): What connects Queen's "Sheer Heart Attack", Led Zeppelin's "Houses of the Holy" and Emerson, Lake and Palmers "Brain Salad Surgery"?

Question 2 (a bit harder): Midge Ure has played in bands whose names begin with every letter of the alphabet from R to V. What were they?

Answers... er... when I get round to it.

Update: Answers here

The Creation "Museum" in Kentucky finally opened its doors to the public yesterday. There are some photos here. It looks a real hoot. I'm almost tempted to go and take a closer look. It's not, of course, a museum by any meaningful definition of the word.

The Times article, unfortunately, has more than its fair share of creationist morons trying to defend the beliefs of that the "museum" promotes.

Update: PZ Myers sums up reactions.

I'm a bit behind here, but I was just catching up on some newsgroups[1] when I saw someone mention Charlie Brooker's Guardian column from a couple of weeks ago. In it he points to the BBC's latest guideline for the production of programme credits. Basically they are laying down a far stricter set of guidelines than ever before because they are going to start mangling end credits in far worse ways than they ever have before. It's going to become common that end credits are squeezed to a tiny rectangle so that the rest of the screen can be used for marketing messages. For example the font used need to be large enough that they can be read when the image is reduced to less than half of the usual size.

Brooker sums up his (and my) objections nicely:

That's it, at a stroke. No more enjoying the Doctor Who theme tune. No more '"You Have Been Watching". No more dramatic coda following the final credit. No more Pythonesque fun-with-mock-continuity. None of that. Instead, shows must slide into and over each other, turning the schedule into one big TV megamix; meaningless imagery gushing from a tap. Because they're terrified you might exhibit free will and turn over.

As ever, it's all the fault of people with charts and computers and expensive shirts and frail imaginations, of course; people who delight in proving beyond all doubt that old-fashioned credit sequences caused viewers to start flipping. And you can't argue with their figures, because numerically they're right. But aesthetically they're wrong. And aesthetics matter in a way that can't be detected in Microsoft Excel.

Slowly, surely, these bastards are wrecking the universe; turning everything into a gaudy festival of tactless shouting. Thanks to their meddling, I'm going to have to stand behind my own end credits, in a stamp-sized window, thronged with virtual hoardings, saluting them and their latest idiotic triumph.

[1] It's a dirty job, but someone has to do it.

If you live in London, then Rachel would appreciate your help.

Update: The story was covered in today's Sunday Telegraph

Excellent article in today's Guardian by Nobel laureate Harry Kroto.

I was happy enough when he was making points like

Thirty per cent of physics departments have either been closed or merged in the past five years. What is one to make of the deafening silence of ministers when, last year, the small Sussex chemistry department - a fantastic department to work in, where I stayed for some 37 years and which has housed some 12 fellows of the Royal Society, three Nobel laureates and a Wolf prize winner since it was created in 1962 - was under threat of closure? It was only through the concerted efforts of staff and students that a U-turn occurred.

Or

Unfortunately, the numbers of young people opting for scientific training has dwindled frighteningly all over the developed world, not just in the UK. It is worth noting that, over decades, the US has been spectacularly successful in making up its homegrown science and technology shortfall by draining first western European scientists, and now eastern European and Asian scientists.

But then he reaches conclusions that had me jumping for joy

It is a scandal that the present system is enabling a car salesman to divert significant government funds to propagate dogma such as "intelligent design" in our schools. State funds are also being used to support some schools that abuse impressionable young people by brainwashing them into believing that non-believers will burn for all eternity in the fires of hell. This policy is a perfect recipe for the creation of the next generation of homegrown and state-educated suicide bombers.

And

It is truly disturbing that a well-funded cohort of religious groups - aided, abetted and condoned by the Labour government - is undermining our science education. If they achieve any more success in their subversion of the intrinsic secular safeguards embodied in our democratic institutions and our educational system, there can be no doubt there is major trouble ahead. So my final message is: "Do Panic!"

He sounds like an eminently sensible chap.

p.s. Meanwhile, in the US - Heliocentrism is an Atheist Doctrine.

Oh this is so depressing. There's a petition on the government's e-petition site that calls for the government to continue its support for faith schools. It has a very bizarre set of scare quotes.

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to continue the support for faith schools and to ensure that in all schools the teaching of traditional 'faith' views of origins is included alongside the more recent scientific 'theories' which many scientists 'believe'.

The more details section is more explicit in its ignorance of science:

Evolution and other scientific theories should not be taught as fact but instead along side other 'faith' views of origins.

And then there's this obvious nonsense:

Supporting faith schools will [...] help to promote a fully multi-cultural and peaceful society.

Because religions are always so tolerant of people with different beliefs. I'm more than a little unconvinced by this argument.

The most worrying thing is that over 18,000 people have signed it. Truly we are becoming the 51st state.

So it seems I am cool enough to be invited to Hack Day.

Looks like there's an unofficial wiki for people to attempt to organise themselves before the day. There's also some rather scary-looking small print to read.

All we need to know now is - who is the mystery musical guest playing at the party?

Oh, and... what shall I hack on?

Following requests from a number[1] of readers, I've implemented OpenID for the authentication of commenters on this blog. That means you no longer need to authenticate using TypeKey (although that remains an option). It's worth pointing out that LiveJournal users already have a OpenID account, just use the full URL of your LiveJournal blog (e.g. http://davorg.livejournal.com).

So the usual caveats apply. If you see anything weird going on with comments in the next couple of weeks, please let me know.

If you run a Movable Type blog and you're interested in adding OpenID support, then you might be interested to know that I used this plugin. I had one small problem. The plugin includes a version of the Perl module URI::Fetch which is rather old. Too old, in fact, to work with the Feed.App plugin that I also use. Removing the version of URI::Fetch that was bundled with the OpenID plugin solved the problem.

[1] And, yes, one is a number.

When I added the story about Jerry Falwell's death to my delicious list last night, I commented "Jerry Falwell finally knows that he was wrong".

But that's not really right is it? This is one of those rare occasions when I wish I wasn't an atheist.

See, as an atheist, I know that Falwell doesn't know that he was wrong. He's just dead. He has no idea of what has happened to him. He doesn't know that he was wrong because he no longer knows anything.

It would, however, be far more satisfying if he was able to know how wrong he was. I would like to imagine him perhaps explaining himself to Allah. Or finding that the Hindus are right and he's been reincarnated as a worm for all of the hate and intolerance that he promoted in his lifetime. Or perhaps, it might be best if he found a truly christian god who banished him to hell for not accepting that "love thy neighbour" doesn't have exception clauses if your neighbour happens to be gay or muslim or liberal.

But, tempting as those scenarios are, I think we're better off living in this world - a world where Jerry Falwell is just dead.

Of course I enjoyed last night's Panorama about the Scientologists. John Sweeney's screaming fit was a bit shocking, but I strongly suspect that I'd react in a similar way if I've been subject to the same kind of treatment that he had received.

I've been interested in Scientology for a long time. Fifteen years ago I spent a lot of time hanging round the Scientology newsgroups watching as the cult resorted to whatever tactics they could to prevent people publishing copies of the the science fiction that passes for "holy writ" to them. The stuff that adherents pay thousands of dollars for.

And we should never forget that the man who started Scientology, L Ron Hubbard, was a science fiction writer, and was once (pre-Scientology) quoted as saying "If a man really wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion". He invented a fascinating backstory for his new "religion" based on the life of the galactic overload Xenu. It was a shame to see Scientologists in the programme denying all knowledge of this story.

It seems that the BBC has made an enemy of the cult. I didn't see this as I came in this morning, but apparently a bit later on there were Scientologists outside the building handing out DVDs (presumably their version of the documentary) and filming people.

I suspect that this story isn't over yet.

I used to quite like Marina Hyde. I still find a lot of her Guardian columns witty and well-written.

But now I find (via Lloyd) this snippet from her Guardian showbusiness blog. If you read the comments you'll see exactly what she thinks about blogging.

For the benefit of those confused, I write three columns a week for what we Luddites still refer to as “the newspaper”. These are all imported onto the web, and now I will be dashing off the odd facetious gobbet of nonsense for this too. I find telling my boss they can whistle for every internet-related request they make of me very satisfying, but ultimately one has to come to heel on some front or risk a Pyrrhic victory. Ultimately, I try not to get too exercised about any of it, in case for one second I fool myself into thinking it actually matters.

So we'll file her with the list of journalists who think that blogging is beneath them. And ignore anything further she writes on the subject.

The paperback edition of The God Delusion is published next week. This edition has a new preface which Dawkins uses to respond to some of the common criticisms that have been leveled at the book. Normally I'd find it far too tempting to by the paperback just to read this. But happily, the article was published in Saturday's Times. Here's an extract where he makes a veiled reference to Terry Eagleton's review:

You can’t criticise religion without detailed study of learned books on theology.

If, as one self-consciously intellectual critic wished, I had expounded the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus, Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace or Moltmann on hope (as he vainly hoped I would), my book would have been more than a surprise bestseller, it would have been a miracle. I would happily have forgone bestsellerdom had there been the slightest hope of Duns Scotus illuminating my central question: does God exist? But I need engage only those few theologians who at least acknowledge the question, rather than blithely assuming God as a premise. For the rest, I cannot better the “Courtier’s Reply” on P. Z. Myers’s splendid Pharyngula website, where he takes me to task for outing the Emperor’s nudity while ignoring learned tomes on ruffled pantaloons and silken underwear. Most Christians happily disavow Baal and the Flying Spaghetti Monster without reference to monographs of Baalian exegesis or Pastafarian theology.

And one where he reiterates one of the book's basic premises:

You’re preaching to the choir. What’s the point?

The nonbelieving choir is much bigger than people think, and it desperately needs encouragement to come out. Judging by the thanks that showered my North American book tour, my articulation of hitherto closeted thoughts is heard as a kind of liberation. The atheist choir, moreover, is too ready to observe society’s convention of according special respect to faith, and it goes along with society’s lamentable habit of labelling small children with the religion of their parents. You’d never speak of a “Marxist child” or a “monetarist child”. So why give religion a free pass to indoctrinate helpless children? There is no such thing as a Christian child: only a child of Christian parents.

Of course, it's terrible that Madeleine McCann remains missing over a week after she disappeared. And we'd all like to see her returned to her family as soon as possible.

But let's not forget that Alan Johnston is also still missing. And he's been missing a lot longer than Madeleine. For some reason you don't hear about celebrities offering huge rewards for information on his whereabouts. Perhaps that only happens for photogenic children.

It was Maddy's birthday yesterday. She was four. So today's tabloids have photos of her all over their front pages. It'll be Alan's birthday on Thursday. He'll be forty-five. Who wants to bet that any of Friday's tabloids will all have him on the front page?

I'm not saying that people shouldn't be doing all they can to find Maddy. I'm just saying that perhaps certain newpaper editors are letting emotions cloud their judgement.

Update: Oh look. I'm not the only person who thinks along these lines. I should read my Bloglines feeds before composing blog entries.

Looks like it's quite the day for shiny new things. Google Analytics has had a major redesign too.

The Guardian has released a new version of the front page of its web site. Apparently it's the first indication of things to come. My initial impression is that I like it, but I'll almost certainly have more to say once I've lived with it for a few days.

Emily Bell goes into more detail about the reasons for the change, Mark Porter writes about design decisions and Nik Silver has more technical information.

I few weeks ago, I wrote an article that briefly reviewed a few Balham restaurants. This morning I found that entire article reposted on another site.

Now, I don't mind people reposting my articles. I license all of this blog under a Creative Commons licence that allows them to do just that. But I do insist (or, rather, the licence insists) on attribution. I don't want people passing off my work as their own.

I've left a comment over there asking for a link back to my original article, but I doubt it will be posted. Does anyone have any further advice? And what do people gain from doing this? There don't even seem to be Google ads on the site so it can't be a financial thing, can it?

p.s. Google news is a wonderful thing. The link to the plagarised post just fell into my RSS feed reader.

Update: Whoa! The people at Wordpress (where the blog is hosted) are pretty efficient. Within an hour or so of me mailing them about the problem, the blog had been suspended for violation of their terms of service.

The Sun is searching for the greatest living Briton. Apparently that would be "the ultimate accolade", though I don't really understand how being the seen as the greatest living Briton would be a greater accolade than, say, being the greatest Briton of all time.

All in all, it's typical Sun nonsense. At least they included Tim Berners-Lee on the list (even if they did describe him as the "creator of the internet").

If you're going to vote. Please vote wisely.

May the Fourth be with you!

The clue to the usefulness of the world wide web is in its name. It's a web. You click on links to follow your thread through many different sites.

A well constructed site will expose precise web accessible addresses for all of its content. Occasionally you'll hear about a site (generally a large corporate site) that objects to people linking to "deep links" (where you link directly to the content of that you're interested in rather than going via the front page of a site) but generally web site owners seem to have understood the benefits of the web-like nature of.. er... the web.

Enter Iain Dale and Paul Staines, who are two of Britain's most successful political bloggers (or so they like people to think). They don't like deep linking. Or, to be precise, they don't like deep linking by particular people. So they've added some javascript to their sites so that anyone following a deep link from either Bloggerheads or The UK Today (two sites that have been critical of Dale and Staines and who have used deep linking into their sites to back up their criticism) is redirected to the front page of the site in question. The code was apparently donated to the cause by their tame script kiddie.

Tim Ireland goes into more detail and the Ministry of Truth also covers the topic, pointing out that the bar can be circumvented by the simple expedient of turning off javascript.

It's nice to know that Tim and friends are getting under their skins enough to justify them implementing these changes. But I wonder where it will go from here. I'm pretty sure that Tim and co. have far more techie friends than Dale and Staines.

What were you doing ten years ago today?

I was still a member of the Labour party back then, so I took the day off and did some canvassing for them. I think I spent a lot of the day standing outside the polling station collecting polling numbers from people as they voted.

And I watched the TV coverage deep into the small hours of May 2nd. It was thrilling. After eighteen years of Tory rule, things really were going to get better. The next day wandering around Balham, it really did seem like the world was a better place. People were smiling and talking to each other. Everyone was completely blown away by the size of the majority. We went away to Brussels for the weekend, but we didn't really want to go. We wanted to stay in London and soak in the atmosphere of the new age that was dawning.

It didn't last long though. Within months the Labour government was piling disappointment upon disappointment. And whilst I still believe that the country would have been worse off under the Tories for the last ten years, at time it's really hard to persuade myself of that.

The list of the Labour government's trangressions could (and, no doubt, will) fill books. We'll all have our own personal last straw when we realised that the party had forgotten its traditional supporters. For me it was their behaviour over the London Mayoral elections. That was when I tore up my membership card.

It could have been so different. Tonight I shall watch my video of the BBC's election coverage, flick through the pages of Were You Still Up For Portillo? and remember what might have been.