Category: Uncategorized

There seems to have been an explosion in MySpace pages recently. Every man and his dog has got one. In fact, the entire extended family seems to have got one. There’s even a MySpace page for Tom Cruise, Pamela Anderson… in fact, just about any celebrity you can mention. (even Jesus has a page). They’re all fake, of course.

But beyond that, all MySpace pages share a fairly common theme: they are a masterclass in how not to design a web page. I really don’t know whether this is just MySpace restricting people on what they can do with a page, but almost invariably every single page on there looks rubbish! It’s so bad that Ishkur started a blog about it.

Some of the pages are so bad they make Firefox cry. If Tim Berners-Lee was dead, he would turn in his grave! (If you don’t know who he is, Google it).

So, let me make this perfectly clear: If you’re thinking about getting a MySpace page — DON’T DO IT! Keep some freakin’ credibility and STAY AWAY! Just in case you’re slightly blind, once again — DON’T GO THERE!!!!!11111one

*ahem*

Thankyou, and goodnight.

I went round to Matthew‘s last night to do some publicity for the forthcoming mission week at church. We accidentally stumbled across a rather random website. The ‘article’ that we found was called the “Texas-Chile Conspiracy”. Quote:

There is a conspiracy going on. Texas and Chile are in it together to take over the world. I’ve studied both countries thoroughly, and I think you’ll find the similarites disturbing…

Why don’t you go ahead and read it… 🙂

So… what have I been up to this weekend? Well, not a whole lot really. On Friday evening, I didn’t do much. On Saturday, I didn’t do much. Yesterday, I went to Church, then came back for lunch, then went to church again in the evening. Then had dinner with Philippa, and we watched a couple of episodes of Family Guy. Ok so I did a bit more stuff, but none of it is interesting… it’s all fairly boring! (But what else did you expect from my blog, really?)

Anyway. Lent. I don’t usually give stuff up for lent. This is for a variety of reasons… I think the point of lent (in the Christian sense) is that in giving something you like up, you spend more time on God. It’s more complicated than that, but I think in general the whole “spending more time on God” thing is a key factor 😉 So, I’ve decided to do a couple of things: (1) — as a token effort of giving stuff up, I’ve decided to give up eating biscuits at work! That will be more tough than it sounds but it’s not like I’m giving up something major like tea, caffeine, or chocolate… (2) in the evenings, I’ve decided to spend the time when I have a hot chocolate praying / reading the Bible (or other Christian book — see Dawkins’ God, below). I’m always saying I need to read more (I’ve got a lot of books I’d like to read again, just never seem to get around to it). So this is the ideal opportunity! And it’s working pretty well so far.

So, that’s my take on what I’m doing for lent… and that’s also all for now! Ciaio! (or chow, or however you spell it).

I tried to resist it for a while, thinking that I didn’t need it. But this morning, I came to realise (upon browsing round to about five or six different websites) that I needed a blog ‘aggregator’ or reader. Basically they’re pieces of software (either that you download or look at on a website) which retrieves the RSS feed for a variety of blogs that you like, and consolidates them into one. So, a bit like reading one blog, made up of all the blogs that you like. It’s quite handy! Hopefully it will stop me keep doing the rounds of various websites all the time to see if people’s blogs have been updated (except for Simon’s blog, which I can’t read automatically because it’s behind a password).

During the course of setting up the reader, I discovered that Blogspot blogs do have feeds, just not all the templates publish the URL to them. You can find them at a URL like: http://blog-name.blogspot.com/atom.xml

I’m using Google Reader to read the blogs, mainly because it integrates with my GMail account (which is pretty cool). It’s also good because it means I don’t have to download a client to my PC – I can login and use Google Reader anywhere I have a net connection (i.e., I can use it at home and at work).

Technical note: Ok, I know there are more types of blog feeds than RSS, but I just like using the <ABBR> HTML tag 😉

I received a copy of Dawkins’ God from Amazon yesterday. I’ve read the first couple of chapters, it seems very good!

Basically, it’s a critique of the ideas Richard Dawkins has put forward in his books (including “The Selfish Gene” and “The Blind Watchmaker”) — the idea that because of the work which originated with Darwin, we now no longer have any need for God.

If you’re interested in the debate between Atheism and Christianity (specifically, Richard Dawkins’ version of atheism) then it would be well worth reading. I’ll try and post up a more detailed review when I’ve finished the book!

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…