All my rantings…
The religious viewpoint makes some pretty clear scientific claims, lately is basically dishonest about admitting to them, and is incompatible with a skeptical and scientific point of view.
All my rantings…
People eager to constrain their identity within a recognisable national sterotype are pissing me off
Last night, just before bed, I saw part of a TV program wherein a NZ performer was upset they could not use their name to promote themself in Europe because someone had trademarked it.
I sympathise, the idea of someone taking ownership of your name is offensive, but that isn't what's got me ranting.
The program was a documentary that then went on to describe (and incidentally tell lies) about I.P laws and generally complain of foreigners owning New Zealand identity by virtue of registering trademarks before it occurred to anyone in NZ to do so and capturing uniquely NZ symbols (primarily Maori names and art).
The topic broadened to include a general bemoaning of indistinct NZ culture and how if it weren't for Maori there'd be nothing but a sallow European colony. The poor guests on the show seemed to think themselves worthless and uninteresting because they couldn't be properly labeled and presented.
The notables passed in front of camera and complained about how hard it was for them. One in particular made a comment about having been asked to appear somewhere in traditional NZ dress and not knowing what to wear (I suggest a blank singlet) that differentiates NZ from Australia.
And all this talk of national identity just drove me mad - I'm not determined to be seen to be the same as my neighbour and I don't give a damn what people around me insist ought define them. People shouldn't be so willing to find a herd.
A nation is best defined by it's laws and the character of it's citizens, not what romantic pretence is represented by costume and make up. All these worthies who worry so much about defining their nation ought concern themselves with the laws that let corporations capture ideas and restrain expression more than what frock goes with 'NZ'.
Funnily enough I saw that doc immediately after watching a drama about the pursuit of knowledge during wartime and among jingoistic pressure to refute ideas raised by foreign nationals. One earnest effort to dispell evils of nationalism followed by embittered whining about insufficient nationalism where I live.Random rant
I don't like the syntactical meaning of Pythons' whitespaces. I think it's silly, but I could live with it as someone elses choice of how to go about things (wrong as they were).
But I can't live with using spaces where one ought be using tabs. It drives me to distraction and rage when I open a script and start editing it only to find out some dork has used an unusual quantity of spaces for indenting. Spaces are gaps between other characters, indenting is the job of tabs!
Here's a test of someones understanding of a concept: find a Python evangelist who works with web pages and extolls the virtues of correct markup, XHTML and presentation through CSS. Question them to find if they understand the similarity between using mal-formed tag soup in a web page and the inaccurrate, imprecise using of spaces instead of more syntacticly useful tabs in Python.
Do you remember how the people of Iraq were saved from being invaded and murdered in droves by the U.S.A by the selflish consistent exposure of lies and propaganda by the mainstream U.S media?
Of course you don't, because contrary to the self serving fantasy publications like to bandy around about their oh-so important role in society they are really just tools of the establishment and not challengers of authority.
If you ever see a story reported about a subject you know details of it stands out how poorly reporters do their jobs.
I don't think it's always because editors are keeping a mind to what benefits their employers but more often is because they think it's their job to reflect and reinforce what they imagine the social consensus to be.
Dope is bad, right? We should always use language that condemns it. The public is angry about something so we should be sure to agree with them that it's bad etc. That and a good drama helps sell so a little war is probably a good thing - lot's of drama in that.
And because of this I shed no tears that their businesses are failing.
Cell phones should receive faxs. Some of the modern screens on phones would be good enough to read them but I'm thinking storing for printing (or transfer to PC) would suffice. Pictures taken could then be sent as faxs.
And when are we going to get Voice-to-text on cell phones? It would be so useful - for updating blogs, sending complex txts or any of a myriad reasons one could want to side-step laborious text input.
Cell phones should record phone calls (I'm guessing some already do). I think of this because of a newspaper article about an emergency call that was mis-handled.
You're not likely to think before hand that any given conversation is going to be important and you might want a record of it, but you may very well think afterwards that it'd be nice to have an accurate record of one.
So I think it'd be a good design choice to record each phone conversation, just record over any previous ones. Have options to save the last one to the side, wipe it if not saved after an hour or two, or demand a decision on saving or wiping at the end of the call or some such.
My take on a date time picker plugin for jQuery-UI. Developed from work done by Martin Milesich.
This years holidays were in Fiji, and I'm creating a page with photo's and videos here about it. Currently I'm editing the material and haven't presented it. Watch this space.
I've written an application to improve the U.I of my new phone (a HTC Dual Touch) called SlideActions.
It lets users decide on how the phone should behave in locking, hanging up and other options when its slide is opened or closed. And although it's written for my phone the code isn't particularly specific - it may work on others.
But it'll need someone a little clued in to configure it for other phones - I've put notes on what's needed on it's homepage.
This article helpfully describes how to get info on apparently unsupported installed devices.
To sum it up once you drill down through Device Manager to find the device instance ID (i.e PCI\ VEN_8086 &DEV_266E &SUBSYS_3006103C &REV_03\ 3 &B1BFB68&0 &F2) you can extract a vendor and device ID (in the example, Vendor Id : 8086 and Device Id : 266E).
Then if you go to PCI Database you can find what's required to obtain drivers.
When you use Thunderbird for IMAP accounts it can be annoying having the Local Folders sitting among your accounts.
To get rid of Local Folders you need to edit Thunderbirds prefs.js file for the relevant profile.
I've written a script to make the relevant edits, even if you've already created more accounts than the default.
It's a prettty cheap VBScript thing I just knocked up in a hurry so it isn't very pretty or cross platform (I may swap it out for a Perl version sometime). Just copy it into the directory prefs.js is in and run it.
It automatically creates a backup before over-writing prefs.js. Your prefs.js file will be somewhere like:
If you know what the lagoonarium is and you want a copy of the video contact me, because I've lost your address.
No, really, I really did. And here's the picture to prove it. That's me up on the monument at Thermopylae a few years ago on a trip from England to Istanbul (and most of the way back). I saw 300 last week and, eh, it was okay. The best bits were stylish stagings of the comics panels - but comics transcribed as movies don't have good scripts or dialogue (Sin City also demonstrates this).
The most interesting thing I noticed, given the debates and anger the movie aroused, is the addition of some dialogue: when Leonidas meets Xerxes emissary early in the story he warns the emissary he'll be held responsible for his words as if they were his own - a clear warning that this messenger may be blamed for the message he is about to deliver. This is not in the comic. So the producers demonstrate they know there's something unseemly about Leonidas in this story and attempted to defuse it by inserting language to moderate his character. If they now reply to accusations of producing propaganda with claims to only have been reproducing another work of art in a different medium, without responsibility for the story, they will be lying.
Finally the weather cleared up enough for me to get out and have a look at McNaught. About four days after it's peak appearance it's still mighty impressive. Supposedly the second brightest comet ever measured for brightness it covered about 20 degrees of sky. Much more impressive than Halleys or Hyakutake
Took my camera out and made my first astronomical pictures. At first I left it's battery in the charger. And after getting it I took the wrong lens. Oh well, they didn't turn out too badly.
While driving to work today I saw a ~four meter long fibreglass model of Thunderbird 2 parked on the roadside. Très cool!
Some reef sharks and rays in the Bora Bora lagoon.
While snorkeling in Bora Bora I found this moray. He was gorgeously coloured (underwater photography without lights washes colours out a lot).
He was something like six to eight feet long and I remember his eyes as being richly coloured and beautiful flecked with gold.
A short clip from my camera to test video streaming. I'm quite impressed at how well this comes across from the original just off my happy snappy Canon IXUS.
I recently bought these Jabra BT-620S headphones.
And I think they work quite well - the sound isn't all that good but I didn't expect it to be (I've got a good stereo for when I want to hear music at it's best). Bluetooth just isn't a good medium for high fidelity music and it would be foolish to expect excellent sound.
I didn't buy with any intention of using the microphone so I offer no opinion on that, but the review I linked to is correct that they can get uncomfortable (not enough for me to mind, but a more sensitive person could get easily irritated).
I approve of their user interface, very well thought out, just pressing the ear pieces does what you need in most contexts.
I also bought Jabras Bluetooth dongle to go with them, but also wanted to make A2DP (the Advanced Bluetooth Audio Profile) work on my Windows XP machine with my existing Bluetooth kit (so I could have these headphones paired with both my laptop and my PC). My cheap Bluetooth dongle I discovered (by looking at it's driver details) was manufactured by CSR, and it happens that Blue Soleil manufacturers Windows drivers that provide A2DP functionality to CSR Bluetooth chips.
I have downloaded and tested the latest Blue Soleil software and it did indeed work with my cheap Bluetooth dongle. Only I can't buy it - because you do that via the applications Help menu and it won't enable 'Buy' for me.
And it seems they offer no option to buy via their wesite (I guess they want to tie your purchase to the applications detection and identification of a particular Bluetooth device). So apparently they don't want me as a customer.
Sometimes you need a lot of columns in a table, and sometimes the plain language headings are too wide - they push the tables edge off any reasonable sized screen.
It'd be great if you could just rotate the headings a little so the colunms could be thinner. But you can't rotate HTML text (not even using the new Canvas element of modern browsers).
So I created a little code to generate text on the fly as an image, rotated and in the colours one might want.
I thought, for the fun of it, and because I'd Stumbled over it, that I'd implement OpenID as identity verification for logging in to this site. How hard could it be, I thought.
I know how these authentication schemes work, and being an open source project I expected there'd be some scripts I could grab and mutilate to my ends. But nope, I could find nothing except the original demo by danga.com (the folks responsible for LiveJournal) that suited my purpose (as light-weight as possible) and a crucial part of that is a Perl file whose source I could not view. For some reason the downloadable source file was missing. But I fortuitously found their CVS repository and snagged a copy.
Then I had to make sure I had all the supporting packages. And discovered that Crypt-DH (an essential part of SSH communications) wasn't readily available. But that's just a typical little installation glitch quickly sorted with a few choice searches.
More annoying were substantial changes required to the Perl source because it was originally written to make use of some sort of framework danga.com uses and I do not. But hey, what's a little tweaking and debugging among friends?
So now I have a sample of using OpenID to verify identity.
I like the idea of XUL. A mark up language for web applications (as distinct from HTML which was intended for marking up documents) is a great idea. Unfortunately it's unlikely to be widely adopted by browser publishers, although it's probably worth insisting users install Firefox just for it's XUL abilities when you can (Microsoft's XAML is pretty much the same thing but within the dot.NET framework, so not such a compact or cross platform option).
Anyway, because Firefox is itself a XUL application it can be modified with changes to it's markup. This is how extensions work. And to help out a developer who prepared some pretty animations for Firefox (see this page for a new 'throbber', a.k.a 'busy', animation in Firefox) I packaged this extension to answer the authors request for such a thing (they've since tweaked it and updated it for Firefox 2.0 it seems).