Month: February 2006

We’ve been having a Discussion on Crossring recently about Dominionism. I don’t want to get into what Dominionism is, but one of the things someone posted today caught my attention. It’s a quote from C.S. Lewis on theocracy:

the higher the pretensions of such (uncontrolled) power, the more dangerous I think it both to the rulers and to the subjects. Hence Theocracy is the worst of all governments. If we must have a tyrant a robber baron is far better than an inquisitor. The baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at some point be sated; and since he dimly knows he is going wrong he may possibly repent. But the inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience and his better impulses appear to him as temptations. And since Theocracy is the worst, the nearer any government approaches to Theocracy the worse it will be. A metaphysic, held by the rulers with the force of a religion, is a bad sign. It forbids them, like the inquisitor, to admit any grain of truth or good in their opponents, it abrogates the ordinary rules of morality, and it gives a seemingly high, super-personal sanction to all the very ordinary human passions by which, like other men, the rulers will frequently be actuated.

On reflection, I see this bearing out to be true. Can governments force ‘Christian’ behaviour on their subjects? And, I suppose a more interesting question, can you enforce Christian behaviour whilst at the same time upholding Christian standards of behaviour? Is it possible to truly love our neighbours whilst forcing them to uphold our take on what it means to be “Christian”? What about free will – does it fit in with all this?

All this makes me quite worried about what’s going on in America at the moment. I’m really not sure about trying to enforce a certain view of Christianity on a country is (a) going to help the Christian cause at all; (b) ethical. I can see what C.S. Lewis was talking about, in that a government which sees itself as acting in a ‘Christian’ way will probably be more blind to its flaws… witness the way GWB has run the “war on terror.”

Worrying stuff indeed. I think it’s at times like this it’s good to have a hope that is steadfast and certain!

So… what did I get up to this weekend? Well. On Friday evening, I didn’t do much at all really. Basically just had the evening in! On Saturday afternoon I went into town with Philippa and did a bit of shopping. Then we had dinner together, and went to Asda in the evening (oh the exciting life we lead!). I bought a copy of “Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit”. I’d actually looked for a copy in town and decided to wait for it to come down in price, but the DVD was cheaper at Asda than it was at Virgin so I made an impulse buy!

I went to Fordham yesterday morning as per, and then home for lunch. In the afternoon I watched W&G — it was definitely just as funny on a second viewing! I’d actually forgotten just how good it is, but it is a fantastic film. And then in the evening, I went round to Matthew, Anne-Marie and Esther’s house for pancackes. You can see some photos of that on various other blogs, including Matthew’s.

One more thing to mention – Zeth has returned from his hiatus, and has been updating Commandline Warriors as if it’s going out of fashion. He’s written quite a few articles, including one about Apple DRM which linked to this article: “iTunes, One Billion Suckers Served.” It raises a few interesting points although (as you’ll see if you read through the comments) isn’t 100% accurate. Worth a read though!

Zeth’s been updating his Command Line Warriors blog recently, and made an interesting post a couple of days ago: Would Jesus Run OSX on a white box?. It’s an interesting post, worth a read!

Anyway, he made a point which I didn’t really agree with, which I just wanted to respond to, so I’ll quote the original bit here:

I personally do not believe that Jesus would use proprietary software at all [snip] Is it sinful to own or sell any proprietary software, regardless of whether it is wrapped in a bittorrent or in vacuumed plastic?

This of course goes back to the deeper question of whether our energies be should be devoted to increasing the social good or increasing the wealth of the corporatist elite?

… and then goes on to quote Matthew 6:24. So I just wanted to talk about proprietary software – is it ‘ethical’? How does it fit in with open-source software?

Let me start out by saying, I do not believe proprietary software in and of itself is wrong. Why? For the same reason I don’t have a problem with buying a CD or a DVD or a book (etc). People have all got to make livings. If someone has worked hard to make a piece of software, I don’t mind paying for it. To an extent, it’s the actions of the software company which make the software ‘ethical’ or ‘unethical’. Now I don’t want to mention The Beast of Redmond in here, so I won’t. There. (Do you like what I did there?!)

However, certain large corporations have taken to rather unethical tactics in the marketing and ‘protection of intellectual property’ departments. (One good thing about open-source software is that it doesn’t really suffer from these problems, because there is no “marketing department” for open-source software, and no protection of intellectual property because it’s under an open license.) I do not believe that using proprietary software is unethical, but perhaps using proprietary software from a company you know to have some unethical practices is.

On a bit of a tangent, I just briefly want to mention the quality of FLOSS and commercial (proprietary) software. Developers of FLOSS have the goal of making good software. Developers of commercial software have the goal of making a profit. Does this have any impact on the quality of the software? Well, sometimes I think it does. If you do some programming as a hobby, you don’t really have any reason to make a piece of software particularly good apart from your own personal satisfaction – of writing a good program, and (presumably) seeing people find it useful. However, for a commercial developer (or team of developers), writing a good program is actually much more important: whether you go home at the end of a month with a paycheck depends on whether the program you write is any good! This is a much higher incentive.

Now, for big projects I don’t necessarily know whether this makes much difference: quite a few big open-source projects such as Fedora Core have a lot of developers working on it, with a regular release cycle etc. This is similar to a commercial software company (I don’t really understand how it all works but I presume so). But for smaller projects in particular, the guy who does spare-time development is often going to lose out to the guy (or guys) who does (or do) full-time commercial development. The evidence for this? Compare open-source software with commercial software. For example, the only graphical FTP client I’ve managed to find for Linux is gFtp. It’s pretty good, but still feels a bit rough around the edges compared to my favourite Windows FTP client (Smart FTP).

A large software development company can throw a lot of programming resources at a problem, open-source … well, whilst there are a lot of open-source developers, there isn’t so much the structure outside of the bigger projects!

Right, I’ve rambled on for quite long enough… that’s all from me!

Well, a couple of items of blog news, first about mine, and then about someone else’s! Firstly, this blog is now three years old! It started during my second year of university, (in February 2003), and kept going through the trials and tribulations of graduation, unemployment, employment, and (constantly) the boredom of the regular readers. By way of a mini-celebration I thought I’d post up an especially boring blog post (this one).

Aaaaanyway. The other news I had was that I got a mention on Max Barry’s Blog. I sent him an e-mail, and he mentioned it (very, very, briefly) in an update. I told you this was a boring blog post, didn’t I?

Ah well. All for now…

I’ve been looking around for a CMS which could be used for the Fordham website. I’ve downloaded and installed Joomla!, but that seems really complicated for the type of thing I’m looking for. Matthew suggested to me MODx CMS. It looks pretty good, but what I liked about it was the following:

MODx is 100% buzzword compliant, empowering you to build engaging “Web 2.0” sites today.

That really made me laugh! – it sounds like something straight out of Dilbert. I’m going to have to try it now…

And so… what did I get up to this weekend? Well. On Friday evening, Philippa and me went to Ipswich to see my parents, and we stayed overnight. On Saturday, we went into town, and had lunch there. In the evening we had a take-away curry from the Kismet Balti House. It was very nice, I don’t think it was quite as good as the Bengal Spice in Wivenhoe but still not bad! Afterwards, we watched “Robin Hood: Men In Tights”, a very silly (Mel Brooks) film. It was quite an enjoyable way to spend the evening!

Yesterday, we went to Fordham in the morning and heard the last of the “Two Ways to Live” series that they’ve been doing. I think I will try and get a copy of the series on CD – I’ve found a lot of the talks very helpful, there were a lot of very useful things in there. Afterwards we went back to Philippa’s for lunch. In the evening we went to Sunday @ 7, where the theme was “Quiet Time M.O.T.” I found it very helpful, there was a lot of good practical advice there!

After coming back, we had some dinner and watched “This is Spinal Tap.” I’d just like to finish with a quote from:

David St. Hubbins: Well, I don’t really think that the end can be assessed as of itself as being the end because what does the end feel like? It’s like saying when you try to extrapolate the end of the universe, you say, if the universe is indeed infinite, then how – what does that mean? How far is all the way, and then if it stops, what’s stopping it, and what’s behind what’s stopping it? So, what’s the end, you know, is my question to you.

All for now!

Firstly, I read that a man attacked police with a digeridoo, and now I read that a nurse attacked a colleague with a frozen fish (a trout, actually, if you’re interested. I always thought frozen trout made better weapons than frozen salmon).

The last paragraph of the frozen fish story is fantastic:

Jamie Foster, for the Nursing and Midwifery Council, said Ms Jennings also lied about her training record, misled staff about the availability of beds on Ward 8, and bound a clerk’s head and mouth with bandages while he was on the phone.

Monty Python would be proud…

There have been a few articles on The Register recently, talking about Wikipedia. Basically, the argument boils down to this: Wikipedia “fanboys” (did you appreciate the irony of me linking to a Wikipedia article?) argue that Wikipedia is a good thing, because anyone on the internet can edit an entry, and make it better.

Wikipedia detractors think that it’s bad for the same reason, just that the internet is full of people for which anonymity gives them license to do anything in the name of being annoying. A lot of experts have become disenchanted with Wikipedia simply because although they know what they’re talking about, when they make an entry there it just gets edited by a bunch of people who don’t know what they’re talking about. It gets completely watered down.

And for an artist like Aphex Twin (who is apparently known to be a compulsive liar in interviews), it is difficult to keep the page clean from fans of his who believe absolutely everything he says in interviews 😉

Anyway, I’d find the original articles, but I can’t be bothered. There’s dedicated for you!

We’ve been having a few discussions on Crossring recently, and it’s caused me to think a bit about theology. I’ve noticed a bit of a pattern emerging (and this isn’t just on Crossring – it’s much more general, I just noticed it first there).

Theologian A: x must be true because it says y in the Bible here.
Theologian B: Ah, but that can’t be true, because of z (where z is usually a way the Greek / Hebrew work is used originally, but could be any number of things).

This strikes me as rather a negative way of doing things. Surely theology is about finding out what the Bible does say, rather than what it doesn’t? Ok, so (as is so often the case) there are multiple meanings to a word. But surely that gives license for being broadly positive rather than broadly negative?

There’s not really a point to this post, just random musings…

You may remember me talking about the FTP Client that I was writing in Java a couple of weeks ago. Well, I’ve done a bit more work on it… I have to say, as a way of learning SWT it seems to be a good little project! There are a couple of things about SWT which surprised me, not having done any GUI programming since my University days…

The main thing is, the thread model: in SWT, the GUI is all controlled through one thread. If you want to perform an action that is going to take some time (for example, uploading a large file…) then you need to start up a new thread to handle it (so that the GUI didn’t freeze). This isn’t anything unusual, you’d do the same thing in Swing. What is unusual is the fact that you can’t update the GUI from the thread that you started, it all has to be done from the GUI thread. This caused me a fair bit of frustration to start off with! I think it’s OK now, but just something to watch out for.

Anyway, I’ll probably post the source code up here at some point, when it’s a bit more complete (at the moment the ‘features’ include being able to browse a directory structure and upload a file — not download! Not yet ;-). It might help out a few other people, I don’t know. At least as an example of how NOT to code an application!

That’s all for now…