2007.06.21

Valleywag has a snarky look back at the times of ex-Yahoo! boss Terry Semel. I know that various folks at Yahoo! London were quite pleased by Semel's departure. 2007-06-21T08:36:49ZUntitled entry permalink

Digital Web has questions for Brighton-based CSS deity Andy Budd. 2007-06-21T08:33:50ZUntitled entry permalink

Wired has a write-up of HackDay. 2007-06-21T08:33:16ZUntitled entry permalink

Online office suites are pointless 2007-06-21T08:13:39ZTitled entry permalink

Read/Write Web has a round up of online office suites.

Mashable and Valleywag have articles on Google's buy-out of Zenter, an online PowerPoint.

I cannot see the point, to be honest. The best thing about the Web is that it's made all these office and productivity suites irrelevant. XHTML and XML have just supplanted all my document needs. More often than not, I'm needing to move data around and manipulate it. I'm finding that, more often than not, storing it as some kind of XML document and then using XSLT to transform it to a Formatting Object or XHTML+CSS file does the job.

As for spreadsheets - what is the point? What can I achieve by using a spreadsheet that I can't achieve by writing a Python script, for crying out loud, except that I'm limited to data being in two dimensions ratehr than as many dimensions as a multi-dimensional array (sorry, dictionary/tuple combination) can be in.

Presentations are handled excellently by S5.

I'm not sure what the point of porting outmoded 'office/productivity' paradigms to the web are - productivity software makes me a lot less productive because it's designed for some mythical average user. If I have an XML document or a Python script, I can run it however I want. All I want is a really great web-based ASCII and XML editor which supports things like XSLT natively. How about it?

The future of web applications is simple - stop making generic tools and start makign specific tools that aggregate togeter. For instance, if you are creating a business form, don't bother with a word processor - have a specific component that is designed for making forms well - perhaps a decent, web-based XForms editor.

Beyond testing, I have never used Google Docs or any of it's equivalents for anything. It's utterly pointless. Whatever machine I'm on has a text editor. I've got a brain. I can format my own goddamn documents.

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Council of Ex-Muslims Launch 2007-06-21T09:55:40ZTitled entry permalink

I'm at Portcullis House (which is security theatre a-go-go) in London for the press launch of the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain. I'm hiding away at the back, feeling very underdressed, waiting for Salman Rushdie to wander in trying to avoid a nutty mullah or ayatollah trying to slit his throat - only to find out that the majority of the speakers on the panel are women.

On the way in, I saw that at noon there are prayers inside Portcullis House. I think that anyone who thinks that there is a divine being up in the ever-further-away ether of space is too delusional to be put in charge of milk montior, let alone given a seat at Parliament.

Having established themselves in a number of other European countries, it seems like a jolly good idea to set up in Britain. The first speaker, Mina Ahadi, being translated from German brings up the important point that people are just that - people - not Muslims just by dint of living in countries that are ruled by Muslims. We also have to criticise all religions (I love the fact that Christians often try to defend their faith by saying they are not as bad as Islam!).

Mahin Alipour described (in translated Farsi) a similar experience in Scandinavia where human rights are being superseded by religious special privilege.

"A Muslim is always a Muslim" writes an e-mailer to Maryam Namazie. A challenge to Islam and it's presuppositions and aspirations to power seems to be what is required.

Well, I think that this is a stunning idea. I've seen so many Muslims (and Christians) who keep quiet about their non-belief or doubts for fear of condemnation from society around them and even their parents and family. Anything to try and fight the psychological dementia that religion causes in certain people.

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No. 597
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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