Woah, shit, someone's been having too much fun with Amazon. Seriously, this is some spooky stuff. Of course, in saying that anybody who reads On Liberty is suspicious indicts everybody who has taken a political philosophy class - including many, many politicians. Wait, that's a good thing. ";->"
Andrew Brown in the Grauniad is writing books in Open Office, but thinks that it's the evidence against Eric Raymond's "Many eyes make bugs shallow". You know what? I think that the reason why OOo is buggy and annoying is because it is recreating unexciting rather than forcing us to rethink. I use LyX, which is software which forces you to rethink. It took me a week or two to adapt to 'WYSIWYM', but I now write better essays as a result.
Good software forces you to mentally reconsider what you are doing, to adapt to the software. The essence of "users and developers partying together" isn't that the developer should be a servant to the user, but that the user should also let the developer take the reins and lead you down different and interesting paths, or at least make it easy for users to do so.
In Dave Winer's description of OPML, he describes how different people see different things: "Every creative person brings his or her two cents to defining what computers are, what they do, and how they do it". When I see OpenOffice, or it's closed source daddy, Microsoft Office, I see boredom, wasting time and hindrances. That's my personal reaction, of course.
I don't want an open source Word. I don't want an open source Word replacement. I want an open source Word destroyer (almost as much as I want an open source PowerPoint or Publisher destroyer). I want something to blow my brains out and carry me to a more creative place. The more something does that, the more I think it's good software.
Austin Cline has a review of a book called Created Equal: Why Gay Rights Matter to America and he says: "The Christian Right regularly accuses gays of trying to 'recruit' young people into the homosexual lifestyle. For such Christians, it's inconceivable that people would be gay simply because it's what's most natural for them - being gay must be something like a movement which one is converted to by current members. The truth, however, is that Christian Right are the ones doing the recruiting." Yep, and certain dispositions - homosexuality being one of them - don't aid said recruitment.
I just unsubbed from Digg. The feeds don't actually link to the stories, and the pages on digg.com often stress my poor old iBook.
Jason Kottke on Dave Winer: "Dave has his finger on the pulse of the part of the web I care most about. He gets links so quickly sometimes that I think he's actually part RSS aggregator". Dude, he is.
Austin Cline has an article about how to blog more effectively about atheism, philosophy and religion. Most of it is sensible advice whatever you are blogging about. It also points out the importance of getting honest views out there. It's far easier for many religious people to create straw men out of us than it is to engage properly (funny, they also condemn worship of false idols...).
Hence how, in the last few months, as the batallions in the "War on Christmas" have been slaughtered by Bill O'Reilly's sword of petty righteousness, we've seen the stereotype of the "Offended Atheist" pop up. The Offended Atheist is the non-believer who objects to religious verbiage and symbolism because it offends them. They oppose "In God We Trust" because it offends their atheist sensibility.
The Offended Atheist can then be dismissed quite simply by saying "Don't be so silly and so Politically Correct - Jesus loves you!". But the objections to the uncritical acceptance and endorsement, by government, of religious crapola like publicly-funded Nativity scenes does not stem from "offensiveness" or "political correctness". It comes from the feeling that the government should stay out of the religion business.
It comes from a strong support for secularism. I don't want to see religious endorsements by government, because it's not appropriate. We all pay for government, regardless of our religious belief. It has some tasks we have given it (if you believe in the social contract - I personally don't, since it's the contractual equivalent of vapourware - it doesn't exist!), and it should try and do those. The rest of us can erect Christmas trees and set up nativity scenes.
In my area, there are two big Christmas scenes set up each year. One is a Nativity scene, set up in the front window of a house by the old woman who lives there. I remember walking past there as a child, and seeing it there. She collects for charity and has a box outside the window for people to drop some cash in there. There is another, which is rather more gaudy and profane - with dancing Santas and reindeer and a very Hollywood nativity scene. This also collects for charity.
Have I, the local friendly atheist, been knocking on their door telling them how offensive these scenes are? Of course not. Get a grip on reality. I actually quite like them. But, at the same time, I support secularism strongly and avidly. If they were government funded, I would have complained. It's not the religion that 'offends' me. It's the combination of government and religion which annoys me. And, whatever your religion, it should annoy you too.
Need a creationist? Free Talk Live talks about giantism and dwarfism, then get a creo calling in. Fun.
Dave has just released newsRiver.root v0.2. It introduces an Export OPML command, a browser-based preference system and so on. The automatic update doesn't seem to work - I had to "curl -O" it in to the Tools folder. Help debug it!
Man, I love Final Fantasy games. Just on Google Videos, I've found some pretty cool stuff. First of all, the the opening movie from FF8, which kicks ass. There's an AMV of FF with Linkin Park's "Somewhere I Belong" (though I'm not a huge fan of Linkin Park, look at the concept - Final Fantasy with a kickass rock soundtrack - very MTV). There's also a strange AMV of a rap track combined with FF7/AC and FF8 scenes. Never thought you'd see Final Fantasy 8, 9 and 10 mashed up with System of a Down's "Chop Suey"? Think again. And here's another rock take on FF8.
Then I found this video of a whole load of different video game music and video mashed together. See if you can work out what games are in there.
Then there's some FFX/FFX-2 stuff: well, there's the American commerical, another Linkin Park AMV, a fan-made video for "1000 Words" from X-2 (but using some images from X), the original ingame version of "1000 Words" and an Evanescence AMV.
For Final Fantasy 7, there's some cool ingame footage: the opening, some of Diamond Weapon, some French battle footage of Titan being summoned, Cloud's Omni Slash move and, of course, Aeris' demise. Oh, how much I enjoyed playing that game the first time around.
From the "only in Japan" department, woman shaves legs and gets changed on the train. I commute daily. I see some weird shit, but nothing like this.
TomCruiseIsNuts.com. Too true.
I really want to find some good science links blogs. I found the Physics Blog from the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, but they don't have any syndication.
apophenia has a comparison of the tag clouds between LiveJournal, Technorati and del.icio.us. One thing that I think that may skew the results is that on del.icio.us, tags are almost the only way of organising data - compared with LiveJournal, where tagging isn't such an integral part of the experience. On LJ, it takes an extra click to tag something, while on del.icio.us, it's built in to the main form. Technorati, of course, varies by the tool you use.
According to the recent Pew Internet report, 11% of home broadband users in the United States have created a blog. Phenomenal.
A great thing about my mobile company: I just phoned them to set up my credit card, and to top up my account balance, and they just told me that I will get a free 3Mb GPRS bundle (worth £12). This, combined with the fact that my phone works perfectly at my desk now (with four bars of service) - as long as it's plugged in to my laptop (I think it's probably using the USB cable as some kind of external aerial - anybody who knows anything about this, please email me).
So, I've got three megabytes this month for free. Then I can buy megabytes for £1 each or pay £1 and use it all day long. This is probably the cheapest GPRS access on offer from any of the UK phone companies, and is pretty competitive internationally.
The great thing also is that when I top up £15, I get 600 minutes of off-peak for that month included as a result of topping up (and I use off-peak most since I call mostly to organise social events).
It's extremely competitive especially if you compare it with paying for WiFi at Starbucks and other venues where it's usually £4 an hour. Why would I want £4 an hour when I can get £1 a day? And I have the advantage of not even needing to be in Starbucks (a place I generally don't like - it's overpriced and rather identikit). With GPRS, I can use the 'net while on the train or in the library (phone to 'silent', of course). I can use it in many circumstances where I couldn't before.
Orange users, you may want to try and phone customer services today if you're a GPRS user, since you may be able to get some kind of special deal by topping up. Web developers, make your applications fit on my mobile screen. Gmail do so. You should too!
Orange, keep doing this sort of thing - I like it! And you'll keep hitting Technorati if you do. ";->"
BBC News: "The question is what happens to social cohesion in this quickly evolving landscape and how can the government negotiate consumer-led media". Negotiate? Hell no. They can keep their filthy hands off my weblog. They screw enough stuff up without screwing up the Internet any further. Oh, the author, Dr Jo Twist, is an IPPR-er. Why doesn't that surprise me?
I just joined Scoopt, which advertises itself as a picture agency for the citizen's media. Guess they are living up to old media standards of accuracy though, since they have this in their information pages (you have to be a member to read it): "Sometimes sensational and unexpected things can happen at these events, like Janet Jackson exposing a breast at the MTV awards, but this was seen and captured the world over". No, it was the Super Bowl. But close enough, eh?
Yes, folks, the previous was posted on my Mac via my mobile using the OPML Editor. Now, with the special deal that Orange are now doing, I can blog from anywhere. When I start commuting, after the holidays finish, I'm going to get myself the special priced GPRS 'Extra'. Not enough bandwidth, and too expensive, to use frequently - but for aggregator pings and the odd urgent email, it's not bad. Ross Barkman has the details - the set up took maybe ten minutes. Shockingly, I actually have service here, which is a first. I must remember the position I have my phone in, since it seems to work there.
Mobile test post.
