Back in town after Christmas

And rather bored; anyone fancy a drink or something?

It's weird being back, actually; I've had quite a relaxing few days.

Natural life?

Question for any of you who may know a bit more about the law than me. The phrase 'natural life' is sometimes used in criminal sentencing. Erm, why? What does it mean? Does it raise issues for someone who is sentenced at a time when symptom X is considered a sign of medical death, if 20 years later people can be revived after suffering symptom X?

The Internet is oddly unhelpful on the subject.

Oh, no! The Church Van!

Please note the last piece of hate mail (addressed to Richard Dawkins) here. "I hope you get hit by a church van tonight and die slowly."

THUS DIE ALL ENEMIES OF SISTER MARGARET.

Happy Christmas. Have a Glitter Melon.

Behold, a Glitter Melon:

It's actually a normal (albeit enmeshed) melon onto which glitter from a very glittery Christmas decoration has fallen.

Yay!

Excellent news! (figures apply to the UK)

Christian Research, the statistical arm of the Bible Society, claimed that by 2050 Sunday attendance will fall below 88,000, compared with just under a million now.

You could, I suppose, call this mean-spirited of me, but I really think that it is no bad thing that people are losing interest in Christianity. Why, in a mere 40 years, it may be obscure enough that bigots will no longer be able to hide behind stuff written thousands of years ago by people talking to shrubbery in deserts, and will instead just have to say things like "I dislike gay people/women in the workplace/science because I am almost terminally stupid" or similar. Is there actually any non-religious reason to deny gay people rights, actually? I haven't heard one.

I realise that obviously most Christians are perfectly nice people, but I'm pretty certain those ones would still be perfectly nice people if they didn't believe in the beard in the sky. Organised religion does seem to provide endless cover for bigots, prudes and censors, though, and I can't honestly shed a tear for its passing.

Letting the censors in through the back door

From the blurb before some random crap Christmas show on Channel 4: "This programme contains strong language, irreverence, and adult humour".

Wait. I'm sorry. Irreverence? The poor little oh-so-sensitive viewing public must be warned of irreverence now? Whatever about 'strong language' (cursing) and 'adult humour' (reference to naughty adult things like naughty bits and fucking, as opposed to decent wholesome things, such as war) , irreverence is a good healthy concept which everybody should be exposed to from a young age.

But now, it would seem, it is something which must be warned of. Someone might watch it not prepared to hear somebody making jokes about Jesus!

Oh, dear. Must we now be sensitive to the special needs of every fanatical nut-job? I see a future where showing torture and murder is perfectly acceptable (we're getting there; ever seen '24'?), but questioning society in any way whatsoever is taboo (again, it's happening; a lot of Americans seem to be of the opinion now that 'respect for the office of the president' is more important than factual reporting on that president's war-mongering and torture).

On a related note, you've got to love the response of the American right to criticism of the wars and the torture and the 'abstinence-only sex education' and other such evil nonsense; to scream at doubters that they should be grateful that they live in a country where such criticism is allowed. Well, quite. Seems perverse to use the concept of freedom of speech to justify demands that people shut up, though.

Oh no they didn't!

Eek. The Americans bailed out their collapsing auto industry. Now, government bailouts are all very well, but really. The auto industry. This is the same auto industry that couldn't make money during the boom with the low oil prices and cheap credit, the same one that under-performed auto industries in such economic powerhouses as France, Spain and Italy. Have you ever seen anyone driving a GM car in Ireland? No, of course you have not. For, yea, they are ugly, and use a lot of fuel, and offer no discernible benefits over better, cheaper cars.

There are industries in the US which, while teetering at the moment, at least seemed vaguely sustainable during the boom. Let the car-makers go. It'll be better in the long term.

The Birdcage

A really wonderfully funny film. A remake of La Cage aux Folles. Basically, a gay couple's son wants to marry the daughter of a revolting Republican Senator, the vice-president of some moral group. The best bit is, there's somebody for everybody to loathe. Either you'll hate the lovely gay couple, or you'll hate the horrible, reprehensible Senator.

Representative sample (the Senator's colleague has just been found in compromising circumstances):

Senator on phone: He died in bed?

Senator on phone: With a prostitute?

Senator's wife: No!

Senator on phone: A minor?

Senator on phone: A black?!

Senator's wife: Gasps.

Later on in the film:

Senator: Well, I'm not saying that abortion doctors should be murdered, but it's only fair.

Also, in the end, the Senator is more shocked that the parents are Jewish than that they're gay.

Makes you want to vomit, eh? They really are the most dreadful WASPish bigots.

Bizarrely, there's a happy ending.

BBC News outdoes itself

If there's a prize for best article title, well... this is it.

By the way, the offending article, and various spam copies of same, seem to be the only occurrence of the phrase "the sexiest whales" on the whole Internet. A shame.

The election broke Ann Coulter's brain-analogue

From Ann Coulter, noted batshit insane non-human:

"Like Sarah Connor in "The Terminator," Sarah Palin is destined to give birth to a new movement. That's why the Democrats are trying to kill her. And Arnold Schwarzenegger is involved somehow, too. Good Lord, I'm tired."

Seriously, she said that. I'm thinking that this is like the scene in any science fiction story of a certain vintage just before the computer goes totally off the rails. Expect her to kill a few uninteresting characters, then catch fire, before the end of the month.

One of these things is not like the other

Here's a lovely list of seven major imperilled US newspapers and how likely they are to survive. Please note that all but one use minor variants on the same really dreadful font. Why? What on Earth is wrong with variations on Times?

Update: Okay, it turns out that every paper in the US, just about, uses this horrible font. Why?!

The economics of iPhone apps

Here's an interesting piece on the proliferation of very cheap iPhone applications on Apple's iTunes App store. It's written largely from the perspective of the company trying to make money in this space, but I suspect that this is slightly misguided.

The thing is, considering the volumes involved, it is entirely possible for authors of good apps to make decent money even selling at these prices - if they are operating on their own. Companies have overheads; there seems to be a tendency for software companies to employ a lower and lower percentage of actual programmers as they get larger, instead hiring project managers, artists, accountants, marketing, sales and PR people... and the list goes on. Now, I'm not for one second saying that these people don't have a purpose (though I am dubious about some of the more vague forms of middle management; you know, those people who do something in a company, but it generally impossible to figure out what), and indeed I suspect that most large software companies would founder without them.

However, somebody writing iPhone apps, which are, generally, not of any great complexity, doesn't need this overhead, provided they're a competent programmer and can manage their own GUI (project managers are not generally needed for one-person projects, accounting is pretty simple at that scale, and to a large extent a decent iPhone app with market itself; Apple handles sales and distribution). And this means that they can undercut the companies. I suspect that iPhone applications, and Facebook apps, and even many web-applications, are dangerous spaces for even vaguely large companies to be at the moment; they can't generally do the things which need to be done better than freelance programmers, and they can't afford to do them at the same prices.

For what it's worth, I think that this is generally a positive development, and one which should spread to other fields (music, books etc) as the traditional publishing model, with large companies required to handle distribution, collapses. It is, however, probably not a good thing for companies who want to make millions off these pastures new, iPhone apps and so on. I'd guess that the only big companies who will be involved in iPhone app development in the next few years are those who are writing iPhone apps to complement existing properties (Facebook etc) and those who have to license lots of content for their app.

Interestingly, this has already happened to a large extent with MacOS desktop applications, and to a lesser extent with Windows ones. Take a look at the software on an average Mac; if you discount large packages, games etc, most of the simple stuff is probably written by single developers, and sold, where commercial, on the 30 day free trial model. iPhone suits this model particularly well, though; while most 'licensed' copies of small-producer desktop applications are not legitimately licensed or paid for, Apple will enforce this for you on the phone.

Murder most Web 2.0

I thought I'd seen it all...

Here, someone has modified the Wikipedia entry on Ibuprofen, a painkiller, to increase the normal dose by four times. Erm, charming.

One good thing from the 'credit crunch'

Or 'recession', as it is called by grown-ups.

Reuters no longer seems to have a full-time person covering absurd old Second Life! Yay!

In other virtual world economic crisis news, Eve Online had one. Apparently, there was some material which was meant to be rare, but which some machine would make for free under certain circumstances. This went on for four years, with trillions of in-game money worth of the stuff created out of thin air. And now, suddenly, the bug has been fixed. That'll be interesting...

Eek! Need a haircut!

This photograph is disturbing because (a) I have no recollection of it being taken (apparently at some party last weekend; it's flatmate's bear) and (b) because I had no idea my hair was remotely that long. Oh, dear. Better get a haircut on Saturday, I suppose...

Warning; leap second approaching

This year is getting an extra second, apparently because of the naughty ol' Earth's wobbliness.

This last happened a few years back, causing kernel panics on countless UML (User Mode Linux, a now largely obsolete form of virtual machine infrastructure) machines. See here; I had a VM at that very company at the time, and was hit.

Of course, since then, a lot of water has rolled under the bridge, a lot of kernels have been modified, and a lot of VM host software systems have received upgrades. So, will your system survive the leap second? No particular way to know, really. Nice thought, eh?

Could be worse, though; before Julius Caesar, the Roman year was a few days shorter than the solar year, and was periodically brought back into sync when the Pontifex Maximus felt like it. This last happened some decades before Caesar attained that position, which may explain why he rationalised things.

Ireland in Pork Crisis

The Irish government has just recalled all pork products produced since September, due to contamination with dioxins, toxic carcinogens. So don't eat those, then.

Ironically, I find out about this just after I had rashers and eggs...

Hmm, I wonder does this cover pork byproducts like gelatin and various medical products? Far messier, if so.

Update: Hmm, no ham for Christmas, then, I suppose. Just as well, really; it isn't very nice.

Is YOUR data centre ready for the recession?

Dell is giving hints on how to make data centers cheaper. Summary; run at 25 degrees, virtualise (this word is mandatory in all discussions of data centres), and replace power equipment.

The last two are fairly uninteresting, but the first is... odd. Expect to see things a lot less reliable as the world's servers teeter on the brink of meltdown. 25 degrees really seems quite warm.

Also, why is Dell giving people advice on virtualising to save machines? Why are any of the manufacturers, for that matter? Perhaps there's something wrong with it that we don't know about, something that'll cause a sudden machine demand surge as all of these virtualised setups run out of capacity...

Well-known blog abruptly turns into Sun brochure

I've been reading highscalability.com for a bit. It's a blog about, well, scalability. The high type. In general, it tends to link to and comment upon performance studies.

The last eight or so posts have all been about either MySQL or Sun T1/T2s. I wonder what happened there? :)

Seriously, though, I'm not too sure. Just coincidence, or Evil Sun Takeover?

Really weird spam

So, I appear to be a member of the conservative blogosphere now. Or so 'Americans for Limited Government' would have me believe. I do hope the unsubscribe works. I'm wondering is this someone trying to irritate me, or just them spamming; their mail doesn't say where they got my address. Tsk.

I like to think of myself as the opposite of an American for Limited Government, actually. I'm a foreigner for unlimited government!

Atheism - your new target for legal hatred!

(Please note that when I started writing this, I had no idea who Mary Kenny was, and assumed that she was your average dim bigot who writes things in the newspaper. After looking at some of her other articles, however, I'm more puzzled. They seem generally very reasonable and sensible, and not at all bigoted, and certainly I couldn't find another example of something like the article in question. This doesn't mean I'm any happier that the offending article appeared in a real newspaper; I'm really just bemused. 


Also, please note that as a member of the 'group' which apparently leads to the killing of children - an atheist - myself, I may not be entirely objective.)

There was recently an article in the Irish Independent, supposedly a broadsheet newspaper, about the Atheist Bus Campaign, by one Mary Kenny.

It's, well, read it. It's amazing. First of all, apparently most atheists are 'miserable blighters'. But that's just the start! It turns out that atheism is directly responsible for the increase in drug abuse, crime and suicide in the UK and Ireland. Or, erm, maybe those are symptomatic of a wealthy, urbanised industrial society with a deepening rich-poor divide? Nah, got to be those naughty people who don't believe that the magic fairy in the sky created the world, arbitrarily killed most of its population, then shagged a Judean girl 2000 years ago. That makes far more sense.

She also blames atheism for the 'Baby P' thing, and apparently it is atheism's fault that there is a high level of alcohol and drug abuse and single parenthood amongst economically disadvantaged people. Right. Can I suggest, perhaps, that she re-reads her Dickens, if not her Dawkins? This stuff isn't new. Really. She does point out that people abuse vodka these days, and in fairness, the god-fearing working class in 19th century London abused gin. They were classy! Please note, by the way, that the US, last real developed-world hold-out of Christianity, has far more of a problem with this stuff than we do.

in which fathers walk away from their children because the state provides all welfare;

Erm, right, I'm not sure where to start on this one. Is she seriously contending that the idea of assisting single mothers is a bad thing? Or that this is an atheist thing in the first place? I'm pretty certain, actually, that until the rise of the welfare state in the middle of the last century, looking after the disadvantaged was largely the province of the religious, and only the most paranoid McCarthyist would seriously link the welfare state to atheism. Anyway, aren't these Christians supposed to be bloody charitable? Maybe she's one of these new-fangled 'greed is good' 'prosperity theology' ones. Incidentally, the US has more single parents than we do too, despite the wacky evangelical Christians, and a welfare state so paltry as to be practically non-existent.

Now, the thing is, if I were to come along and replace the word 'atheist' in her article with something else, I'd be saying that black people, or Polish people, or fat people, or Protestants, or Catholics, or Muslims, or mentally sub-normal Irish Independent writers, were directly responsible for drug and alcohol use, depression, suicide, and the murder of children, and in general the downfall of society, and published it as my own, then I would be, at very best, considered a vicious, deranged bigot, and at worst engaging in illegal incitement of hatred. And if I were to say that the presence of Jews caused the murder of children, well, then... wait. Somebody already did. It was called the blood libel.

Clearly, then, the gays having finally gotten themselves the right to exist, and everyone having gotten tired of hysterical tabloid nonsense about the evil Polish people, atheists are the Next Big Target for the dolts who apparently staff our national newspapers. You may now, nay, must now, slander atheists with no regards for truth, decency or logical consistency! Why, even alleged non-tabloids like the Irish Independent can do it! I wonder who it'll be in another 20 years... Sadly, probably not idiot newspaper 'reporters'.

There's another more subtle issue.

It was all started up by -- predictably -- Professor Richard Dawkins, the neo-Darwinist scientist and atheist campaigner. He put down a deposit of some £8,000, and the rest came from public contributions -- mostly from readers of The Guardian newspaper, in which the campaign was publicised.

Every 'fact' in this paragraph besides the assertion that Dawkins is a scientist and atheist campaigner  is incorrect. Whether this is merely Kenny not having been willing to actually research the topic to the extent of, say, reading the Guardian article about it, or a deliberate sinister series of lies to blame the whole thing personally on Darwin and those evil Guardian readers - who probably don't even make sure never to wear more than one type of fabric at the same time - is unclear. Just to resolve any confusion, it was started by a Guardian journalist, after a while Dawkins said he would match donations up to a certain sum, and there is no evidence whatsoever that most of the donations are from Guardian readers. In fact, given the diverse origins of the donors, as seem on the donations page, this seems highly unlikely.

One oddity. I wasn't familiar with Mary Kenny, and assumed she was, well, the usual sort of person who writes articles like this. You know the type. Hates the gays, hates the immigrants, hates brown people in general (though probably won't say that in a newspaper these days). It turns out, though, that most of her other articles seem to be written by a right-thinking person? They're not amazing, but they're fair, they're un-bigoted, and they don't seem to make the incredible leaps of faith that this one does to demonise a rather inoffensive group. Is this the same person? Can she really be this frothingly crazy about atheism and nothing else? Shouldn't she be off writing articles about how the dirty foreigners will eat our cats? What's going on here?

However, regardless of the author's track record, this article is unacceptable for publication anywhere but the Daily Mail, where such things are expected. Even if the attacked party had been someone genuinely bad, like, say, paedophiles or Neo-Nazis or Daily Mail 'journalists', it would still be a terribly unfair article. As it is, the wrongs of our world have been heaped upon a group of people who are generally just as moral and good as your average Christian, and a damn sight better than those people who hide behind their 'Christianity' to attack the vulnerable.

In conclusion, Mary Kenny, How very dare you?

(Update: There is an interestingly sanitised version by the same author on the Guardian's own site. See, this is a more appropriate article. In my opinion, Kenny is still wrong in this article, but it does not look like something that belongs in 'White Pride Weekly'. I wonder why the articles are different; was the editor in the Guardian leery of the first version, or was Kenny just worried what sort of publicity such a hate piece would result in if published by a higher-traffic news source?)

Pointless Common Lisp wxWidgets binding now multi-platform!

Remember my nascent wxWidgets binding for Common Lisp that I mentioned before? Here's the Mac version from the previous article:

Something about this one looked odd to me when I put the picture up, by the way, but no, it turns out that native MacOS dialog boxes do tend to have their titles like that.

Here it is on Windows (excuse the watermark):

And here on Linux (GTK++).

Both Linux and Windows versions are wxWidgets 2.6.x; the Mac one is 2.8.4. Windows one is using pre-built wxc from wxHaskell, while the other two are using wxc from source from the same project.

Please note the varyingly broken stages of Unicode. For the Windows version this was because I didn't have an up-to-date CFFI with built-in UTF16/32 conversion; installing Lisp libraries on Windows is a pain. The Linux version is a bit more of a puzzle. I suspect that I was using the wrong endianness, or possibly that the older version I was using supports only UCS-4, not proper UTF-32.

Please also note that Windows, in this case, is pretty inarguably the ugliest of them all!

It's nice to see it running on all three major platforms, though, even if it is rather limited at the moment. And even if te Unicode handling clearly needs a little more work outside the wonderful world of MacOS. wxWidgets also supports X11 using its own widgets, WinCE, OS/2, and DOS. I don't plan on addressing any of those.

Well, maybe the X11 one; for the retro mismatched Unix desktop look.