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I took my iPod into work on Monday, as per usual, and got it out ready to listen to some music. I usually listen via WinAmp, with my headphones plugged into the computer, but playing the music straight off the iPod. Unfortunately, this time something was wrong. My iPod was displaying an icon something like this:

After a bit of Googling, I found out that it was the iPod’s “Low Battery” indicator (well, it was obviously a battery-related problem…) and the recommendation was to plug the iPod in to a computer or charger and charge it up for about half an hour.

This I duly did. I charged it for at least two hours, in fact, but all that kept happening was that the iPod kept alternating between the “Low Battery” icon and the “Apple” icon. Very strange. I tried resetting the iPod, but that didn’t work – it just goes back to the same old cycle.

After a bit more Googling, there are a number of things that could be wrong with it. It seems that this is mostly my fault – I should have followed Apple’s Battery Recommendations, but it is still annoying.

Anyway, what I think I’m going to do is try a wall (power socket) charger, to see if that makes any difference (by the way: if anyone has one of those I can borrow, let me know…) and if that fails, try leaving the iPod for a few days to see if it will completely lose its charge and trigger a hard reboot.

If THAT doesn’t work, I might have to pay stupid money to have Apple repair it – it does seem a little ridiculous though, given that I’m sure the battery is perfectly serviceable and probably would last another year or two.

If anyone has any bright ideas, let me know…

It’s been a fairly busy weekend, once again! On Friday, I spent the evening sanding down the radiator in our bedroom (what fun!) to prepare it for painting. On Saturday, I spent most of the day painting the last wall in our bedroom which needed to be painted… it took a long time, but I think the fruits of our labour are paying off! It now looks much better than the mushroomy kind of colour which was in there before. The room feels a bit bigger, certainly a lot fresher.

On Saturday evening we went round to Wivenhoe for Alison’s birthday do. Matthew has already written about it, so there’s no need for me to re-iterate what he said! The only thing to add is, I was “Derek the Decorator” and Phil was “Brenda”… it was slightly unimaginative as I’d been decorating all day, but still!

Yesterday, we went to church in the morning for the family service and then came back home to finish off the decorating. Then we had lunch, didn’t do much for the afternoon, and then went to the Bengal Spice in the evening for dinner! It was delicious, as always. Afterwards we came back and watched Top Gear, it was a really good episode this week 🙂

And… that’s all for the time being!

I recently watched (or at least listened to) a debate between Alister McGrath and Richard Dawkins, which you can find on here if you would also like to watch it. One of the things which Richard Dawkins mentions there, and also Christopher Hitchens mentioned in his debate with McGrath which I mentioned earlier, is the quite fundamental question: “Does God intervene?”

Dawkins, in this debate, gives the example of a natural disaster where tens of thousands of people are killed, except one child is saved. The parents of that child then thank God for saving that child. Dawkins asks whether God did actually save that one child – and if he did, why did he not save the others?

This, for me, was probably the strongest of Dawkins’ points in this debate, and in general one of the toughest questions to answer. Does God intervene, and if so, why does he not intervene more often? And if not, why not?

I’ve been trying to think over the past couple of days how I would answer these questions – specifically about the issue of God ‘intervening’, or not. I can’t claim that the following will be particularly clever or coherent, it’s just me trying to make sense of a jumbled mess of thoughts! With that disclaimer, here we go.

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A guide to overcomplicating things, taken from my experiences recently:

1. Become the webmaster for a church website.
2. Add a new “Listen to Sermons” section to the website where MP3s of sermons go. People just browse sermons by directory structure.
3. Decide that it’s not good enough, and re-write it using a MySQL database.
4. Decide that it’s too much hassle to follow the process of ripping CDs and uploading them every single time, and write a shell script to do it. Because of the database, sermons still have to be added using a special page on the website.
5. Decide that the shell script isn’t good enough, and re-write it again using Python – the primary benefit being, this can talk directly to the database and add sermons without having to go to a special page on the website.
6. Move the website to another hosting provider, who don’t provide remote access to the MySQL database.
7. Remove the database section of the script and go back to the special page on the website.
8. Think “There must be a way of solving this problem with XML”…
9. Implement an XML-RPC web service, and modify the Python script to call it to add a sermon.

I kid you not – I am currently working on the last one in that list!

The good thing about being solely responsible for a site is that you can just make a solution as ridiculously overblown as you like (well, within reason…) 🙂

This weekend, we went down to see Phil’s parents. Phil went down during the day on Friday (she took the day off work), and I drove down on Friday evening. On Saturday we had a fairly relaxed day. There were a few little bits and pieces we needed to do in town, but it was actually a nice change of pace to just take it slowly for a while! In the afternoon we went out to a little nature reserve in Knockholt, which was very enjoyable despite the cold weather. In the evening we went out to the pub to meet up with some of Phil’s friends.

On Sunday we went to St Nicholas’ in the morning, and then back home again for a huge roast dinner! – we have very few roast dinners these days, so it was a real treat for us. After lunch we headed off again and met up with another one of Phil’s friends at the pub for an hour or so, and then began the drive back home.

It was not a nice night to be driving, it was very wet and drizzly! The M25 was pretty horrible – the Dartford Crossing was really busy and slow! It took a bit longer than usual to get home, still — at least we got home in time for Top Gear!

Anyway, that’s all for the time being…

I had a thought one my way into work this morning. Why don’t Essex County Council set up a new website in the style of Wikipedia, with lots of information about Essex in it.

What could they call it?

Ricky-pedia (said in a Southend style accent)…

… no, I’m not going completely mad.

You just can’t make this sort of thing up — flaming squirrels blowing up cars!

Well, OK, one flaming (on fire) squirrel. Setting fire to one car (which thus caused an explosion of sorts). Still, it wouldn’t make quite as interesting a headline otherwise!

Last week, Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon” was released. I started the upgrade procedure yesterday.

Now, the upgrade procedure is one of the things I have a serious gripe with about Ubuntu. You can’t just start it upgrading and then leave it for the duration. You actually have to be there the entire time, in case some stupid confirmation dialog comes up asking you if you want to (for example) overwrite a custom configuration file (If you have a customised apache2 configuration file, for example I’ve added mod_dav_svn to mine). If a confirmation dialog box pops up, it actually halts the entire installation process while it waits for you to select an option.

What Ubuntu really needs is a checkbox that says “Do not interrupt me during this upgrade” (or something like that). The default options should be enough. For example, in the case of a customised configuration file, it could save the updated file to config_file.new and leave you a message at the end of the installation telling you to check it.

If they absolutely *must* have confirmation dialogs, could they make it “non-blocking”, i.e. the installation will continue? Or at least, put all the steps which require confirmation in one place, i.e. at the beginning / end? Leaving Ubuntu to upgrade overnight or during the day, only to find out that it requires confirmation, is incredibly annoying and I think deserves special attention.

Aaaanyway. Apart from that, Ubuntu 7.10 seems to be pretty good so far. They’ve given it another visual makeover, and the new features list looks pretty decent (for example, auto-configuration of printers).

So if you’re a Ubuntu user, there’s no reason not to upgrade! The only thing to mention is, your system will probably run at 100% CPU usage for a while after upgrading. This is due to a service called tracker, which is a file indexer. It initially has to run through all of your files, which takes up the time. Once the files have all been scanned, however, I think it doesn’t use much CPU. Just in case you’re wondering why your CPU is being hammered after upgrading!

I’ve just found a link on Richard Dawkins’ website to a video of a debate between Christopher Hitchens and Alister McGrath. Christopher Hitchens is the author of a book entitled “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything”, which I believe they were discussing (I didn’t bother reading the introduction, I skipped straight to the meaty stuff!).

I’ve watched the first half (Hitchens’ and McGrath’s first talks) and I just have one or two comments to make about what Christopher Hitchens said. The gist of what he was saying basically amounted to: “misrepresent what Christianity says, and then proceed to knock that down”. According to Google, his analysis is based on “… a close and erudite reading of the major religious texts”. I can only assume that he’s not reading the same religious texts (the Bible) that I am, or knows something I don’t!

I’ll keep watching when I can, and if I get time I’d like to post up a proper response, but then maybe I should just buy the book!

Last night, I heard a talk by Andy Saville about “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins. Now, I will admit up-front that I haven’t actually read “The God Delusion”… I have, however, read through a couple of articles on the subject as well as listening to Andy’s talk. I don’t think you necessarily need to read the book in order to understand the arguments presented in it, although of course please correct me if I am misrepresenting Dawkins at any point!

The main argument of the book seems to be based around the ‘Who made God?’ argument. If what I have been reading is correct, the argument goes something like this:

1. Everything complex starts from something simple
2. Only evolution can create complexity from simplicity
3. If there is a God he would be more complex than his creation
4. A complex God must have evolved

And, just to prove that I’m not completely pulling this out of nowhere, see this quote:

any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything, comes into existence only as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution. Creative intelligences, being evolved, necessarily arrive late in the universe, and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it. God… is a delusion.

In the above line of reasoning, points (1) and (4) are assumed rather than argued. God, by very definition, surely, cannot have evolved. How can a being who exists outside of time, who created the universe ex nihilo (from nothing), have evolved? It just doesn’t make sense!

Dawkins also puts forward a few supporting arguments as well. For example, he says that Darwinian evolution disproves the God hypothesis. Well… forgive me, but I don’t think it does! The argument goes something like this:

1. The design argument is the main argument for God;
2. Evolution explains the illusion of design;
3. Therefore God is unnecessary, and probably non-existent.

This seems to me to boil down to the whole “Science vs Religion” argument, which has been thoroughly debunked by many scientists and theologians. For example, try “Rebuilding the Matrix” by Denis Alexander, or “Dawkins’ God” by Alister McGrath (I’ve mentioned it here before).

There are a few other arguments but, to be honest, those have all been covered elsewhere (as have the ones which I have mentioned) so there’s no need to go into it too much.

The only other thing I’d like to mention is one thing that Dawkins says, on Jesus: ‘there is no good evidence that he ever thought he was divine.’ Really? Searching for “was jesus divine” turned this up as the first result.

Aaaaanyway. I’ve rambled on for long enough now. I think the best thing, if you’re interested, is to have a read of one of the following books, they have a far more detailed critique of Dawkins than I could ever give!

“The Dawkins Letters” by David Robertson
“The Dawkins Delusion” by Alister McGrath (to whom I apologise for shamelessly nicking the title for the title of this blog post)
Also “Dawkins’ God” by McGrath is good, although it was written before “The God Delusion” and deals with Dawkins’ earlier books.