There's two things about stories in our press about the movie Boy which annoy me right now.
The first is the outright lies they tell that merely echo one noisy parties self interest, because it's both too hard to bother with complex things and the press likes to join in with authorities opinion.
More importantly it's the ignorance of the quoted source and producers of the movie that get my goat up, their self-interested opinion is wrong and self harming.
No matter what happens the media is going to keep on being sycophantic tools, but people looking to get ahead in another industry ought be adapting more.
I want an Android phone. It's the future of smart phones (excepting for those who are happy to be Steve jobs bitches), and I'll buy one as soon as someone makes one I want.
Which is proving a problem. Because manufacturers seem to think it's a ocmputer first, phone second, and the fashion of not having a keyboard is de rigeur no one's making one in the proper phone format.
Which is a portrait slider. And it's so frustrating. Dell has just announced a nince little number called the 'Lightning' - all the hardware anyone could require, and nicely presented with a decent slide out keyboard.
But it's going to run Windows 7 (pfft, give up already Balmer). But wait! Thee's a companion of the same design using Android instead! Hoora.... oh yeah, but it doesn't have the keyboard. Dammit!
Why? There's already a good selection of OLED screen Android phones sans keyboard, but the keyboard, all ready designed, already being built, is the single disginuishing feature that would set the product apart from competitors.
And I want one!
It's Anzac Day, and some moron just always has to piss me off on Anzac Day.
While watching a good documentary on the landings at Gallipoli, where Brit, NZ and Turk historians deliver succint summaries of events an ad-break had a driveling jingoistic slobber over the idea of patriotism and how lucky I should feel to have freedom given to me by past warirors.
As long as, it appears, they were lily white skinned.
I live in a country that like most has issues with the waxing and waning of colonisation and conflict of nationalities and race. A damn sight less disaster and shame than many have to deal with, but there's historical conflicts still shadowing us today. That's no big thing, it's in the nature of humanity and our grasp for wealth.
But for someone today to try some ham fisted socialisation and engineering by insisting everyone should honour past warriors who fight for what we've got, when, y'know, they were white and British (via heavy exploitation of the Union flag) when maybe plenty of people in NZ don't think British warriors are something to be too grateful about - including those of us who had relatives lives squandered in a stupid British war fought over what European power got access to exploit the rest of the world (like y'know, NZ) offends the hell out of me.
I recall Anzac day as the time we learned to tell those sort of jingoistic wankers to fuck off. Not grovel with them.
The unthinking sort of retarded oaf that's been over-priviledged with a brain when it seems their spine is all they need to walk lockstep with orders that imagines flying a flag and aping thankful words to other peoples sacrifices makes them wise in the world drains my empathy for humanity.
First, they've passed a law where employers can fire people before a 90 day probation period is up without cause, ostensibly to improve opportunities for employers to take on new staff at low risk so theoretically more often.
Their next step is their plans to abandon social security responsibilties by switching from tax-to-government-for-unemployment-benefits to compulsory-insurance-(a.k.a tax to private corporations)-to-MAYBE-unemployment-benefits-if-they-like-you.
Private insurance companies doing what ought be the governments work allows citizens to be taxed (compulsory insurance) without guaranteed service (exceptions, denials, anything that helps the bottom line by stopping payouts) so the tax stays in the corporate owners coffers. This is using the power of the state to move money into private well connected pockets.
What do we get? A permanent underclass of citizens impoverished and forced to work for slave wages at menial work with no opportunity to resist. And increasing pressure downward on the non-investing groups of people who rely on their labour to earn income (y'know, most people).
What follows? Crime and increased violence from people excluded from opportunity, screams of rage from the offended, harsher laws, unfair imprisoning, 'get tough of cime' nonsense and a general destruction of community.
Fuck National. They aren't just a little bit right, a slight decision to steer a bit more market liberal. They're evil and they want to destroy New Zealand.
If you vote for National and aren't rich you're a moron.
I was just reading somethng about Jon Stewart and I wondered why it was that right-wingnuts can't be that kind of funny?
And it occurs to me it's because they're liars.
Jon Stewarts humour comes from the juxtaposition of reality to the joke. If you don't recognize the reality you can't make, or get, the joke.
And right wingnuts have no connection with reality to juxtapose humour with. The facts they predicate their talking points on are fantasies, so trying to joke about them falls flat. A person skidding on ice also skidding on a banana isn't funny.
Among the problems creating web pages have fieldsets and their legends are a great example.
The HMTL spec says what a fieldset legend ought look like, but you can't render/specify it with CSS.
A fieldset legend is suppossed to lie across any fieldset border, and appear transparent with regard to background colours but not the border it lies across.
So browsers make up their own mind about how CSS ought effect fieldset legends and they all differ on it. The important part about the differences also involves how the legends are positioned.
To successfully render styled fiedsets and their legends similarly in all browsers fieldset contents have to be wrapped in a block (i.e div) to allow for moving the contents relative to the legend if it's moved itself.
The ONLY reason that div and many many others exist in web pages is to allow for the application of styles to acheive desired appearances and behaviours and their proliferation pollutes markup and actively undermines efforts to reconcile ymantic content and custom presentation.
Which makes me think CSS ought be able to insert 'markup' (nodes in the dom) before styling it so a truer spearation of content and style can be acheived.
Well, that sounds a lot like what XSLT was intended to be used for - if you stream well formed markup to a client it can apply a simple transformation that reorders/inserts markup on the client.
But that means a whole new technology (that's verbose and a little bit complex) for CSS stylers to learn barring the way to improved semantic content. I suggest it'd be easier for the world to adopt such advances by offering them as additional features of CSS rather than a whole new arcane technology.
Maybe the way to do it is with additional psuedo classes like, perhaps div.class:wrapper, div.class:sleave div.class:predecessor or div.class:successor to target 'virtual' initially unstyled elements.
With many companies producing a lot of different Android phones pretty soon there's going to an issue for sellers and buyers of what, exactly, IS an Android phone?
Does an Android phone have resistive or capacitive screens? GPS? Bluetooth 2, 3 or whatever evolves, 802g or n? 4Mp camera or 6Mp? Flash? Physical keyboard?
People buying iPhones know what they're getting, and they know if they buy the next one it's a bit better than the one before. An iPhone 3 is better than an iPhone 2 but not as God as an iPhone 4.
So I was thinking that Android needs a sort of classification to help keep it clear in peoples minds what they're getting or what to look for.
A Marvin 1 phone is gauranteed to have a certain set of features, GPS, Bluetooth, Memory, Processor speed et al.
A Marvin 2 is gauranteed to have a certain set of featrues, the sum of which is better than a Marvin 1, and so forth.
I can't help but feel most things I expereince day to day are getting worse.
Bakeries produce worse food, fruit is all water and no flavour, mumble mumble grumble.
I mention this because I'm watching an old prime time Brit sit-com 'Bless this house' and it's had a silly confusion over who the model was for the sons painting - a nude on which he painted the neighbours face.
Several times the nude painting is shown, and no one gets worked up over the idea of a nude painting although there's some worry that the boy has been dallying with the married neighbour.
Yet not long ago a painting has been censored on 'Antique Roadshow' because it was a nude.
And it's got me annoyed that everytihng seems being driven down in quality in pursuit of improved profits (rather than up in quality in pursuit of higher margins as economics would have us expect) and life being quashed by prudes fearful of peoples passions and expression.
I mention bakeries because there used to be an excellent baker around the corner from my home yet once the owners retired the quality was abandoned in favour of mock cream and flat dough. Yuk. And I've spent some time trying to find a replacement There's nothing within miles to compare.
So I'm in a huff. It's all going to crap.
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'.
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.
Suppose you succesfully create an Artificial Intelligence that has an ego.
How could you ever turn it off? Though not legally murder it'd be ethically the same thing.
I'm getting more and more irritated by the stupidity of broken standards and non-compliance with sensible common API's across the I.T landscape. It's 2010 and we know the Internet is here to stay and a whole lot of devices are going to use it.
We know we all benefit from the low barriers to entry that allow anyone (with the skill and inspiration) to quickly advance the utility of the Internet for everyone, yet businesses continually avoid using common standards in an ongoing battle to capture markets at the expense of broadening everyone's improving situation through inter-operability.
There's an easy way to force open standards compliance on companies. All it takes is for governments to mandate them when soliciting work. Easy peasy.
The hardest part is getting sensible choices from governments about what standards they ought insist on. I think it would be a fine idea for some independent standards body to be formed to investigate those choices for governments. Email standards (including address book formats), document formats etc.
I'm typing on my MacBook, I work on a PC desktop, I carry a windows Mobile phone (to be replaced with an Android one as soon as I find one I like). I use a webmail client hosted on my own Ubuntu Server.
I work with a number of different devices and operating systems from any of which I may need to send an email or otherwise contact someone.
Currently I have to employ a number of synchronizing mechanisms to fake having a centralised address book. Why can't I actually have a centralised book?
There is Ldap, it's supposedly the industry standard for such. It is to laugh.
Thunderbird has it's own idea of the schema for the data, quite different and incompatible from anything Microsoft employs. Even if I did use one rather than the other no applications or scripting framwork (such as the PHP application you're likely to use as an open source webmail provider) has a simple plug 'n play to Ldap address book interface.
It's almost 2010 and there's no standard address book database and API for applications. The I.T emperor has no clothes.
It's a problem with modern movies that they routinely ramp up drama by piling conflict onto the plot. More and more conflict to increase drama until it's really impossible for the movie to end well. That much conflict should have unhappy endings.
But often movie producers seem to think an audience needs a happy ending to feel good about a movie, which is obviously nonsense.
I've just watched John Carpenter's 'The Thing' and it ends superbly - and not at all well for any character. Right now I'm watching the re-mastered 'Warriors' (I don't approve of the comic additions) which ends superbly and well for those who survived.
I don't seem to be seeing movies as often these modern days that I expect will stay with me as long as these.
Am I just being a curmudgeon?
I've just learned something quite interesting - in Auckland there's recently been a big contest between bus drivers and their employers over pay.
The bus drivers, who's income has fallen some 35% in real terms in the last twenty years (I'm told) have decided to press for a healthy increase. Unsurprisingly management is begging poverty in refusing.
The company in question boasts that they aim to return 20% profits to shareholders. Times are pretty good if you can manage that.
Times aren't so good. Apparently the increase the staff want adds up to about $4 million per annum. Shareholders got some $32 million last year, a return of 18%. So staff demands represent (assumming no other changes in income or productivity) 2% of shareholds profit, returning some 16% to shareholders. 16% is still a good return for doing nothing but putting up cash in a well proven and trodden market.
So management, who sees their duty to be returning as much profit as possible for their shareholders and who think 20% is reasonable is supported by the facts - they aren't returning the profit they want so they can't afford more expenses.
The staff, who probably don't see it as their dutry to return maximum profits to shareholders think a 2% reduction in profit to 16% is reasonable. And they're right (if they don't see maximising profits at their own expense their duty). So the facts support both positions.
And it becomes a simple matter of competing desires negotiating with their respective strengths.
But really, where the hell do companies get off expecting to be able to deliver 20% in what ought be tightly competitive industries? They should count themselves fortunate to be able to do better than 5%. I'd be well pleased with myself to get it up to 10%. Being in a position to contemplate amounts like 20% is an indictment of the society they're functioning in. I'm all for a freedom to invest ones capital - but the idea that simply doing so entitles one to handsome profits purely off the back of labour where the investment isn't a risk or in innovative technology or service but simply providing backing for a well established service is untenable.
I was just reading a web sites bemoaning the qualtiy of TV offerings in the U.S when I noticed it said positive things about the documentary Earth.
I haven't seen Earth but I know it's a spectacular production from the BBC narrated by David Attenborough.
Apparently it's narrated by Sigourney Weaver in the U.S.
And reading that reminded me of Meerkat Manor which is utterly charming. When narrated by Bill Nighy. But not when narrated by Pio Terei.
And that just pisses me off. What is the thinknig behind buying something of high quality and then thinking 'you know what this needs, it's excellent narration replaced with someone local who isn't as good, speaking lines not written for them, because quality isn't something we should be happy to leave well enough alone.'
What kind of slow witted oaf thinks Sigourney Weaver is a suitable replacmeent for David Attenborough's narration? When it's already been done!
I mean if you buy unnarrated footage and go looking for someone to write a script for, sure, pick a local trained actor/presenter. But when you've already bought the worlds best...
I't's just ignorant pandering parochialism dedicated to shrinking the world of viewers to the room they're sitting in.
Hoyts website annoys me not just because it's slow and hard to navigate.
It's not just because you have to keep selecting the theatre you're interested in then navigate to a movie you might be interested in, and then to find the session times know to click a button titled 'Buy tickets'. No, it's not just because it's useless and doesn't have a simple obvious url for your local theatre that renders a quick overview of what's on when.
I'm especially annoyed by it because there's no mobile version. So every time I'm out to dinner and I think "I know, let's go to a movie. what's on?" I can't find out.
In this era that's just careless stupidity by such a business.
To solve the problem for myself I've written a screen scraper to maintain a nice simple XML file of movie times at my local theatre here.
Same thing goes for the White Pages and Yellow Pages in NZ. Hello? It's 2009, how likely do these people imagine it is that a person wanting a phone number might be using a phone to try and find it?
How does Firefox's location service know where I live? I thought it'd use my IP address and maybe figure out it was in a block assigned to customers of my ISP in my city, but it pinpointed my address exactly.
I don't expect my ISP publishes that informtion, so how the hell did Firefox know? If you're using Firefox 3.5 (or any other borwser offering Geo location services) check out what it's telling the world here.
Apparently it's Google that supplies the information, Firefox just hands reponsibility for Geo location requests to pre-configured providers of such information. By default that's Google.
So how does Google know where I live? Is this an exampe of data mining and matching disparate information found on websites with activity from my IP?
That would be worrisome. But according to Google that's not how it's done. It apparently uses information gleaned from Wireless access points seen by my notebook.
But thinking about this still worries me - exactly when did a piece of software on my PC access Wifi information and send that info to Google, attached to my IP?
I suppose it was when Firefox asked me if it could pass Geo-location on.
Firefox was thoughtful enough to let me know when a site asked for Geolocation information. How many other applications will be so kind? I don't think there's anything in my operating systems structure that protects whatever interfaces Firefox thought to ask to use to glean geolocation revealing information.
I wonder how long it'll be until sites check outs are pre-populated with delivery details, even befroe you tell them anything?
And how does sniffing Wifis provide that information in the first place? There's no business WiFi near me broadcasting loction infomation, only my own and neighbours Wifi. Did Google sniff Wifi station identities at the same time they drove by to produce street views?
For some reason designers thought it was a cool idea to put blinking blue lights on nearly every operating bluetooth device.
My HTC Dual Touch phone has a fairly innocuous and pleasant blue blink that reminds one it's bluetooth is on. It's small, infrequent and not at all intrusive.
But my Jabra BT headphones have bloody great blue circles that I see, in my darkened office, reflecting off walls.
And my Netcom earpiece has a constant flicker of blue. Both those devices sit on my ears and the lights are only visible to me if they're reflectng off something.
What moron thought distracting blue blinks visible only to people NOT using the devices was ever a good idea? I am not a 1980's stock broker who thinks of himself as a big swinging dick needing everyone to know I'm using some oh-so-fey hands free technology.
It's like twats that dress actors in silver jumpsuits cause it's futuristic man.
It boils my blood to see people saying New Zealanders shouldn't go to Gallipoli because it might be dangerous.
I've been there, I've seen how respectful the Turks are of the history and people at Gallipoli and know there's no way they'd suffer assaults on something as important to them
It seems to both insult Turks by presuming Turkey is some sort of backwards and full of uncontrolled violence place when it's a very hospitable country (I particularly like their fruit and breads) even if it does has conflicts alien to the Pacific, and insulting to me (and other New Zealanders) for presuming we're hapless babes swaddled in decadence and ill-able to confront the world .
I've a great uncle buried at Gallipoli and while I never knew him I am descended from the same family. I suspect attitudes persists. And I feel it a personal insult for anyone to assume I ought cooperate with small souls in feeling fearful of some improbable assault.
Especially insulted if I'm suppossed to feel fearful of assaults against me because I choose to remeber sacrifices made on my behalf by people who took themselves half a world from home to a wet puddle where thousands tried enthusiastically to kill them.
I took Economics 101 in my first (or maybe second and last) year at university and quickly became disenchanted by it.
The logic on which a lot of what we were being instructed (I've since learnt was classic Chicago School of Economics) was obviously fallacious.
It was predicated on completely rational economic behaviour, which while somewhat useful for constructing models wasn't going to suffice across broader palettes.
So okay, it's a consistent issue of mine that I don't want to be 'educated' in the basics before being taught where they fail (something I find common in academia). If the basics are wrong I don't want to be conditioned with them at all.
So I was reading Jeremy Grantham's latest Quaterly letter to his investors and he makes the point that the current economic crisis has a lot to do with the fallacious concepts of rational markets and impossibility of irrational market behaviour.
I knew it was all bollocks decades ago.
TVs and computers should not converge, that's a silly idea.
A TV is a dedicated display device and should remain so but what it displays will change. What the world needs is an open protocol for addressing content for TVs that they can then be directed to use.
What's required is a wafer thin touch sensitive tablet PC (think of a big iPod Touch) that happens to have a TV as a alternate display.
Only the TV isn't an actual alternate display - your tablet doesn't fetch then stream content to it - but it can direct the TV using the protocol I speak of on what to fetch and queue for viewing.
So users can sit calmly on their couch, look up what content is currently interesting, the top YouTube clips of the day and flick them off to their TV. The tablet shouldn't even be able to display full screen its content - that's the TVs job.
Driving home I passed a Polytech today and saw what I presume wer students bustling along to school. I assummed they were students because the building they were entering is a design school and they appeared to be carrying portfolios.
It got me thinking: Where's the market for so many designers?
Once upon a time it was thought improved automation would free people from drudgery and allow them to indulge themselves in the arts. IT strikes me there's a few things seriuosly wrong with that idea.
I was just reading an article about some scientists theory that instruction given with religious authority can make people more aggresive.
These people used some admitted religious and not so religious people in an experiment where they were tested (using some games) to find how agressive each person was. Then they were read passages of what they were told were biblical, or for some simply historic, text. And some people were read passages that explicitly ended with divine commandments of violence (such as "go forth and smite the whatits commanded the lord").
Then the participants were tested again. and the result was that people who were read texts commanding divine violence, no matter how religious or aggressive the person, or the presumed source of the text, became more agressive.
This doesn't surprise me, but not because I think it says anything about peoples religion. I think I already know what religion is and this fits with my theories about people.
Let's talk about Milgram, he of the famous experiments into authority. Milgram's the guy who got people in lab coats to tell participants in experiments to keep turning up the current on shocks being given to people to see how far they would go. And plenty of people keep going up to apparently lethal levels as long as an authority figure told them to.
Milgram was trying to find out how previously assummed peaceful and civilized citizens of Germany could not only abide but actively participate in the crimes of the fascists. He wanted to understand how someone could undoubtably see evil we're sure they'd been taught to reject but still cooperate with it.
Turns out people can be unreasonably cooperative with authority. And I think it's obvious why.
Humans are gregarious creatures. We are hard wired to desire company and acceptance. Subordination to leadership looks and feels to our hind brains like valued membership in a tribe.
Priests try to define the tribe granting themselves a valueable ledge on its totem pole and they use millenia of well practiced threats and rewards to encourage people to settle into a given, lower, place on that pole.
They recognize that the suggestion of command by authority speaks directly to our ape brain and that people simply find it easy and rewarding to obey.
It's annoying but's it's just how we are. People aren't that complicated.
Patenting software is stupid. Particularly stupid is the idea that something with no prior art would be by definition non-obvious (because if it were obvious someone would have done it before).
In such a young field where people are daily learning it's implications whether anything is obvious or not is simply a matter of time.
New ideas, concepts and abilities become obvious day by day as infrastructure to support them becomes available.
A simple web based idea can only be obvious once the web exists and just because the web is created and some obvious uses of it appear is absolutely no reason to priviledge the first person to do the obvious over others.
Which is moot because patenting software (let alone business ethods) is plain stupid protectionism for lawyers and an impediment to all others.
I don't actually hate flash, I quite like it. I enjoy plenty of nice flash games for instance, and it's proven itself a very effective customizable way of delivering streaming media.
But websites that rely on it as their whole interface are very, very annoying. Right now I find I can't link to a manufacturers page on a product of theirs because it's buried within falsh.
So I can't direct people to their authorative data on a product, which, y'know, maybe someone might buy.
Stupid, simply stupid.
I've just bought a set of Bluetooth headphones, and they rock. I"m very impressed with the interface design even if the sound is a bit weak (but I expected that - Bluetooth isn't really a good medium to boradcast stereo sound over).
But I can't use these headphones where I really want to - with my notebook. I've got a MacBook on which I run Windows. I can live with Microsfot currently having a brain dead Bluetooth stack on Windows XP (although shockingly they apparently haven't improved it much in Vista) but for Apple to have no support for A2DP (Advanced Bluetooth Audio) does surprise me.
I thought 'so okay, if windows doesn't let me use these headphiones I can boot to OS X for most work', but nope, no can do. If Leopard doesn't include A2DP I'm gonna be right brassed off with Apple.
Every so often I trial a new release of a Linux distro. And they continue to get better.I still get annoyed at how much I have to learn the moment I want to reconfigure something but the simple horrible design aesthetics that just depress me are waning.
Kubuntu 7.04 is the latest I've been mulling over. It's not looking too bad - but it has motivated me to rant about those really annoying cursors it uses.
When I open the KDE menu a KDE icon starts bouncing up and down below my cursor. I've found what I want, I'm exploring menus for the option I'm after but my eye keeps getting distracted by an idiotic icon jumping up and down.
It's exactly the same sort of childish stupidity in design the HTML Blink icon represents. It has no purpose, it does nothing except annoy.
The lack of U.I smarts and cohesive design discipline this represents abounds on Linux desktops. It, rather than functionality such as missing games, is what ultimately destroys my enthusiasm for embracing Linux.
People in the U.K believe crime and violence is rampant and growing although it's been trending down for decades.
Why the disconnect? Because the government keeps telling people crime is a problem so as to win support for their simply fascist plans to enslave citizens by making their every movement and action accountable to the State. And all the idiots who can't think for themselves and fear independence march merrily through a very dark door.
In the U.S the Republican Party has become the Monarch Party where they believe the purpose of elections is simply to chose monarchs who will rule without accountability or responsibility between elections.
These are connected, and not just by the fact that politicos are by nature insane egomaniacs. The assault on individuals and social liberty is a constant and ever present threat inherent in the lure and corruption of power.People need to remember to have the courage to say 'No, I am not afraid to be free. You may not scare me into servitude'.
I've decided to invest more time in using Ruby than Python, and any new scripting projects that I don't do in JScript or Perl will happen in Ruby.
This isn't because I've become a fan of Ruby. I see good things in Python and Ruby but neither of them impress me terribly much and I still feel ECMAScript is the best scripting language. But ECMAScript isn't cool enough for the kids or more importantly meant and supported for the non-browser scripting environment so I have to choose another.
As no-one has had the good sense to blend the best of ECMAScript, Perl, Python and Ruby I find myself having to select Ruby even though I see more reasons to use Python.
One thing has made up my mind for me - that bloody whitespace nonsense. I find that working in Ruby just happens faster because I don't have to worry about mismatched whitespaces from anything I cut and paste or edit quickly and messily in notepad.
And that's about the only reason.
One thing common in computer languages, especially interpreted or "scripting" languages that annoys me is conditional tests written AFTER the statement they refer to.
i.e (from Ruby) include Tracing if $DEBUG
It drives me nuts to read through code trying to comprehend it, looking for logical errors or simple mis-stated code for bugs, to read a statement but then have to backtrack my understanding of program flow because AFTER the statement is a condition affecting it.
It strikes me as plain silly and totally unneccessary. There's a reason RPN isn't the standard on calculators. It seems to defeat the purpose of interpreters/compilers to create a sort-of-kinda-like English language at a high level to work in and then deliberately screw up the parsing.
Civilisation, the word, means living in cities. It's supposed to describe places where people have found ways to live together peacefully.
You can only do that if you live without the corruption that cripples opportunity and rewards the thuggish and vile who oppress everyones chance of bettering their situations. That cancer undermines the health of every person and institution it infects and destroys hope by constantly sapping freedom, vitality and eventually the will to move forward.
The enforcement of the rule of law by disinterested courts is the best gaurantee against corruption. Thus corruption will only be repressed by authorities who don't indulge it personally and who respect the rule of law and never imagine themselves above it. And only such authorities, who are able to truthfully speak with moral authority, can improve the opportunities of others.
I literally screamed at the news presenters on TV last night. The idiotic, inaccurrate, scare mongering nonsense they were presenting drove me over the edge. I was just waiting to see some footage from the world cup and mistakenly sat through the sorry excuse for information TV news is.
Talking heads perkily lecturing in fifteen second bursts is a useless medium for explaining complexity. Tv just isn't any good at anything except showing pictures and they should stick to that. When they try and explain something they try and do it from the point of view of some sort of imagined social consensus they believe their audience shares and end up doing nothing but sprouting propaganda.
Latest sports, plays of the day, spectacular vistas, imploding buildings, pretty girls, damage and destruction. That's what TV is for. When I want to think or learn something I'll consult the Net.
One person killing someone else not threatening or assaulting them (or others under their protection) is a murderer - wether or not they happen to be obeying their own rules (any damn jackal can write their own rules).
Oh sure, we're all adults and know that the exigencies of war sometimes have unpleasant consequences. It's a fact of the violence that bystanders are going to be caught up in the carnage. But that really doesn't wash if there was never a good cause for the 'war' in the first place, does it?
It especially doesn't wash if the reason innocents are being obliterated is because invaders and thugs use overwhelming and extensively destructive force because it keeps themselves safe. A pilot who drops a bomb from the safety of his aircraft in uncontested airspace thousands of feet in the air and by happenstance kills innocents off to the side of an intended target that posed no threat whatsoever to his family, nation or even his damned dog is a no good murdering thug.
"Under their protection" I said. So yeah, it looks like people have wriggle room to justify their actions. But they're not fooling me.
In Canada a religious sect known as the Hutterites has been granted an exemption from having photos included on their driver licenses.
Apparently most Hutterites take the Christian first commandment instruction against graven images very seriously and think it is wrong to render pictures of people (while others aren't so worried, as long as the images aren't idolised).
Now, I don't have a problem with photos on a drivers license, it makes sense to me as a way of confirming the person with the license is the person it was issued to. But I do have a lot of very strong objections to other ideas a government might have about regulating me.
But I'm not a member of any religious organisation, so if I make an objection to some requirement - let's say routine finger printing - I won't be doing it by saying 'my faith does not allow it'. Even though in practice that's equivalent to my saying 'my ethics do not allow it'. I have to argue as an individual for my position.
Arguing as an individual doesn't get you very far against entrenched interests, ever. I'd need to band together with others who agree with me into a pressure group and functionally behave as if we were a religious denomination. Which to my mind is all any religious sect is (and probably ever should be) to authorities - a well delineated group of specific opinions, easy to identify and count.
Does this mean it would be a good idea for any sizeable group of dissenters to form an ad hoc religious body for the express purpose of being recognized? Screw electing a president of your society, appoint a pope!
If we get bad laws because we don't actively keep politicians honest then to get good laws we must monitor politicians. But monitoring isn't enough.
If I put time aside from my life (all that bothersome work, family, study, entertainment, arts and relaxation that gets in the road of politics) and manage to observe a politico in the process of pushing a bad law it won't matter, not unless I protest. And one person protesting achieves little, I need to organise others to raise their voices with mine.
In short I need to be a politician to protect myself from politicians, and only us politicians will have rights if only those who participate deserve them. So I don't think only people who participate in the process deserve rights and I do think people have a right to react and protest after they've been betrayed and caught by some idiot law.
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.
I bought a Minolta Dynax 7D for Christmas and discovered a very annoying detail after first using it. I put many of the photos I take on my webserver and to make my life easier I wrote code to automatically thumbnail and orientate photos when requested.
But Minolta didn't deign to use the correct Exif standard for indicating orientation and secreted the information away. It turns out that it's hidden in the 376th Byte of the "Maker Note" property (ID 927C) as the ascii for "H", "R" or "L", meaning Horizontal, Right or Left rotation.
Bleeding obvious really in't it? And in no way related to any kind of standard - while being embedded in Exif properties alongside a completely useless and inaccurrate actual Orientation property.
If I hadn't been able to locate this obscure detail I'd have been right brassed off and looking for my money back. If New Zealand consumer law says something must fulfill the purpose for which it's purchased do you think I could argue my expectation of standards support?
My attitude to totalitarian laws advertised as protection against terrorism: More people will die on the roads in the next month than have been killed by terrorists in the last five years. If I won't accept totalitarian government to protect me from cars why should anyone expect me to accept it as 'protection' (as in 'racket') from a far less urgent threat?
You might have noticed that the changing quotes at this site generally express observations about religion. I chose them to reflect my attitude to religious authority.
The only legitimate authority to govern is that granted by the governed. This is the purpose of democracy. Religious rule does not acknowledge this, it claims authority to govern from elsewhere.
That is a bad thing, as anyone who governs without the authority of the governed will inevitably make decisions not in the interests of the governed. In this all dictators, aristocracies, churchs and other restricted and isolated groups of rulers are alike.
English is not the gendered language prescriptionists are trying to make it when they insist there is no gender neutral pronoun. 'he', as any English speaker knows, is gendered - no matter what might be claimed otherwise. The English gender-neutral pronoun is 'they'.