2006.12.29

I have managed to get my PC to boot. It was making funny noises at me the last time I tried - it seems to be working now. For future reference, here is a guide to firewall, anti-spyware and AV software for Windows. I really need to fix my Windows install - it's seriously messed up. 2006-12-29T16:15:13ZUntitled entry permalink

Are you a TextMate user? TeXMLMate is a plugin for TextMate to let you validate XML documents using DTD, XSD, RNG and Schematron. It uses libxml2 on OS X 10.4. Enjoy. (Via TUAW) The same guy has also written Cocaotron, Automator plugins to do XML 'stuff' with, including XSLT, XInclude, XQuery and validation against DTD, XSD and RNG. 2006-12-29T14:54:31ZUntitled entry permalink

I didn't post about this last month when it happened, but Matthew Taylor, Tony Blair's former chief strategy adviser really is a halfwit. Blogs aren't creating a political crisis - when they work, they're a corrective. Mr. Taylor, if you want us to be nice, why don't you just piss off home and stop ruining our lives with ID cards, CCTV cameras, waffly management speak about "communities", the gutting of our right to expression with regard to religious belief, hyped-up terror scares and all the other illiberal bollocks your government has been serving us in the last few years. Truth is to politicians like sunlight is to vampires - so the message for bloggers is simple - keep on shining that light at our so-called leaders. That means you guys. 2006-12-29T12:39:09ZUntitled entry permalink

Richard Dawkins rebutted the criticism that Eagleton and his kin have been making, back in 1998 "Theology is a respectable discipline when it studies such subjects as moral philosophy, the psychology of religious belief and, above all, biblical history and literature... But insofar as theology studies the nature of the divine, it will earn the right to be taken seriously when it provides the slightest, smallest smidgen of a reason for believing in the existence of the divine. Meanwhile, we should devote as much time to studying serious theology as we devote to studying serious fairies and serious unicorns." I've attempted to post a comment over at Shawn Anthony's place saying words to similar effect in response to Eagleton's yawn-inducing review. 2006-12-29T12:30:24ZUntitled entry permalink

Keep out: serious theologians at work 2006-12-29T12:59:24ZTitled entry permalink

Want to see something ridiculous? The Mormon Church recently removed Simon Wiesenthal from the list of people to be posthumously baptised by proxy. (Via Bitch Ph.D.)

You can't make this stuff up. The Mormons believe that people only go to heaven if they have been baptised, and so baptise people posthumously, even though they aren't Mormons. So they have Mormons take a "proxy baptism" in the name of another person (rumour has it that John Perry Barlow of "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" fame was once proxy baptised for Napoleon).

Then the Simon Wiesenthal Centre then takes offence because they believe that Simon Wiesenthal is going to heaven without the help of the Mormons.

The executive director of the LDS Church Family and Church History department said back in '95: "It is important to stress that the freedom of choice remains a prevailing concept behind baptism for the dead. No ordinance is administered by compulsion. The freedom of the recipient to accept or reject the ordinance is an overarching principle... The result of a proxy baptism is not binding on the recipient"

Sorry? But, of course a proxy baptism is not binding on the recipient - they're dead, for crying out loud!

Oh, wait, the Mormons say that what happens is that when you are baptised posthumously, you are offered a choice whether to accept it or not. But doesn't that destroy the idea of faith? Once you've died and seen that non-Mormons go to hell, surely you don't need to have faith any more?

This religion stuff sure is confusing! But, then, who am I to say that this is ridiculous? I haven't plumbed the depths of Mormon theology. I just don't get it, you see. This Joseph Smith guy must have been quite something! I really ought to read a library full of Mormon thought before I can say that it's ridiculous.

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Predictions for 2007 2006-12-29T16:39:49ZTitled entry permalink

I have to disagree with James Corbett's predictions in a number of places.

I think that IPTV is a distration. TV itself is a distraction from what's going on. Television content and the platform which hosts them are going to be disconnected. Like, Lost. You know, Channel 4 showed Lost. How do I know that? Only because a few people I know used to watch it on the television rather than on BitTorrent.

My laptop has a DVD burner built in and connection to the 'net. I have a 21" monitor sitting in my bedroom and some nice stereo speakers. This is the best television setup I've ever used. Do I care about HDTV? No, I care about 'interestingness'. And my MMORPG subscription provides a lot more interestingness per pence spent than my Sky box ever did.

I think that Second Life is only a proprietary fore-runner to what VRML started off back in the day. I'm waiting for the decentralised, semantically marked-up, XMLish way of doing virtual environments. Smile and a wink

I haven't tried the Wii, but I can tell you why it's successful. It's trying to be a gaming console and not a "media platform". The Internet is the multimedia platform, so why do I need an Xbox or PS3 to give me multimedia? I kicked that habit long ago. The Wii is successful because Nintendo didn't try and play jack of all trades, it sat down and built a console.

OPML won't be the new RSS, I'm afraid. Much as I enjoy working on OPML projects, OPML is just one tiny component of a much larger play here. OPML will be one entry point for the web as data platform. OPML as an introduction, not an endpoint.

James, you are right about the comments. But they've always been dead. They are a bad way (linear, spam-ridden threads) of serving a good end (conversation). They are begging to be replaced. Unfortunately, TrackBack isn't much better than comments. But still, we persist in keeping them around because nobody has sat down and built something better.

Web 2.0 is a research project. It's cheaper for Google, Yahoo, Microsoft et al. to have the Web 2.0 petri dish set up in Silicon Valley to test ideas out and then either acquire or steal the good bits. It's far cheaper than a research division, and far more competitive than Google's 20% time.

As for the mobile web? Please, spare me. The providers will start innovating when unicorns and faeries breed. The mobile platform is closed and far, far too expensive. It's only because of a special offer that I use GPRS. If that special offer were to disappear tomorrow, my phone would become a useless lump of metal and plastic. At Le Web, there were three levels of folk - the geeks, the business folk and the mobile phone folk. The geeks were all in jeans, the business folk were all in business casual and the phone folk were in suits. That's a pretty good clue as to the level of innovation in the mobile phone business. Smile and a wink

Okay, now that I've knocked James about a bit (sorry mate), I've got to make some predictions of my own. It's only fair.

1. MySpace will stagnate. The advertisers will realise that they're not getting good value for money, and the kids will get fed up with the eccentricities in design and function. Bands will find better ways of promoting their music. Kids may realise that online social networking is way bigger than MySpace, just as real-life social networking is way bigger than the school disco.

2. Widget hype will die down. Sorry folks, but I don't think widgets are actually wildly important. They're okay as an introduction to the syndication web, but they are a temporary solution at best. I'm currently subscribed to 284 feeds on my Macintosh newsreader. Information is only going to increase - widgetspace isn't. Widgets will either have to scale up or realise their limitations.

3. Microsoft will realise that the Zune is rubbish, and it'll be for all the sort of reasons I've been waffling about for months on end. Nobody will put out an iPod killer. Shame - Apple needs to be kept on it's toes even if I'm unlikely to switch away from the Pod.

4. MMORPG subscription costs will have to change. Monthly subscriptions don't work for most people. I hope that games will try to reward users for getting their friends to join. Communities in MMORPGs will cross out in to the wider space through web services.

5. At least one of the current social network/ Web 2.0 sites will do something unforgivably evil. Who will it be? My money is on one of the video sites - YouTube, perhaps. Since this is almost a given, I'll narrow it down and say that one of the non-huge brands (ie. not Google, Microsoft or Yahoo) will do something really evil and stupid.

6. TechCrunch will decline in influence. The need for article-length TechCrunch style journalism in the tech business will disappear and be replaced with briefer links. del.icio.us provides for me more Web startups than I need to know about.

7. Conferences will shift towards a BarCamp/unconference model. Those which don't will die out. Bloggers will wield more power at conferences.

8. Nothing significant will happen with regards to the UK media's relationship with the Internet. A few upstarts at the Guardian will still get it, but the rest will continue in their drunken, dead-tree obsessed stupour. Local media really won't get it. The BBC will continue to have debates about whether or not to put the video that the licence payer has paid for online. Duh. It's only one call to Brewster Kahle, dudes, and it's done. Smile and a wink

9. People will still put up RealVideo files, and people will get pissed off about it.

10. Nobody in the UK will change their wi-fi charging policies, and the use level will stay about the same - it'll be just folks with expense accounts.

So, I'm extremely cynical. I think that the innovation is going to come from individuals and very small startups. On the negative predictions, I'm hoping that they come out not to be true.

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No. 437
Tom Morris
Currently in: East Sussex, England
Usually in: East Sussex, United Kingdom
AIM: tommorris
YIM: tom.morris

I am a , an , like to code in and noodle about with and the . I also have a BA in philosophy from London, and am studying for an MA. My philosophical interests are in Victorian-era German philosophy, Kierkegaard, Robert Nozick, hermeneutics and current approaches to the demarcation problem in the philosophy of science. Musically, I like jazz fusion, soul and P-Funk. My musical nirvana would be a mixture of Beethoven, Miles Davis and George Clinton topped with a side-serving of Erykah, Jill and Angie.

I also write for the Citizendium, an online encyclopedia project. If you know about stuff, you should join in.

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