Oh, the poor, poor pope

So, the UK Foreign Office was very mean to poor old Ratzinger, who never has a harsh word to say about anybody. It prepared a joke document suggesting fun things, like associating with the dreadful subhuman queers, or sacking 'dodgy' (one assumes child-rapist-protecting) bishops and indeed singing with the queen (presumably a more awful prospect even than not being horrible to the gays) that the Holy Father could do on his visit, and it leaked.

Of course, the Vatican was outraged, and demanded apologies... and got them! Now. I wonder when Benedict will be making his apology to, oh, half the world, for decades of child-rapist-protection? A proper apology, where he actually admits that the fucking church is responsible? And when will he be apologising for his subordinates blaming homosexuals, Jews, and secularists for his organisation's pro-child-rape policies?

I know that it's tired and unfair and a bit silly to go on about the Nazi pope, just because he was in the Hitler Youth (hard to blame him for this; most Germans his age were), and he's really evil-looking and a bit of a flaming bigot. But at this point, well, the message that clearly the Catholic Church isn't to blame, it is the homosexuals and Jews and so forth to blame for losing the war causing, through their gay/Jew magic, the Catholic Church to protect unrepentant child rapists for a few decades... Well, it's a bit bizarre, really. No doubt it will be the socialists, next, who have stabbed the mother church in the back on this matter. He needs to take responsibility for the crazy things that his underlings are saying, just as he expects the UK to take responsibility for something that a mid-level foreign office official requested be put together as an internal joke. And he needs to, for once in his life, take bloody responsibility for the horrendous actions of the organisation he is supposedly running.

The strangest bit; the sheer outrage from Catholics over this rather mild joke document which should never have been seen outside the Foreign Office. It is somehow fine for Ratzinger to publicly attack anyone he feels like attacking, and yet totally unacceptable for someone in a psuedo-official capacity to lightly poke fun at him. Why is this, precisely?

Microwaves; older than you'd think

From Google Finance, Friday's big gainers on the US market:

The Hittite Microwave Corporation!

But where's the Carthaginian Fax Machine Conglomerate? The Parthian Toaster Cooperative?

Hello, Array!

From one of those silly spammy Facebook apps which puts something that a friend allegedly did on your profile:

Hmm. I'm not sure that I know Mr Array!

This is likely due to the underlying application attempting to use something which it expected to be a string, but is actually an array, in string interpolation. Quite funny, though.

Unfortunate Irish domain names

On Grafton Street, you will find the Swan Training Institute. Or www.sti.ie. What, you didn't know swans needed training? Did you think, perhaps, that they were hatched knowing how to sail around menacingly, hiss, and write for the Daily Mail? (The Daily Mail, and other British I-can't-believe-they're-not-newspapers, are forever claiming that immigrants eat swans. There doesn't seem to be any evidence that immigrants are going around eating swans, and the whole thing is logistically improbable; have you seen a swan? Still, it's clearly propaganda, to assist in the rise of the National Swanulist Party, or something.)

On Youtube, you will find a video of one of a terrifying self-parking Volkswagen. And on that video, you will find this ad...

bjautomation.ie! Vibratory! I'm pretty certain that that's what this Fry and Laurie sketch is about...

Cup of tea?

You know this American Tea Party, or Teabaggers, group, right? A bunch of respectable citizen who are taking a principled stand against Obama because of his terrible, terrible taxes (the ones he lowered), and certainly not because they are a group of crazy racists?

Well, it turns out that 52% of Tea Party supporters, and 45% of Tea Party 'activists', think that the tax they pay is fair, compared to 62% of the general US population. So, what are they so annoyed about, then? Hmm...

Top-security TV License

So, is there a good reason that to renew your TV license, you need, not the number on the actual license, but the seventeen digit reference number and the five digit pin? That's more numbers than the credit card used to pay the damn thing has! Are people randomly paying other peoples' TV licenses really such a problem, An Post? Really?

No doubt it'll be biometrics next year.

Really, Adobe? Really?

And it might come to pass that you are greatly excited about the release of Adobe Creative Suite 5. Bit of a stretch, but I'm sure some people are. So, you head over to the page to order it. And get this:

Okay, so, no big deal, looks normal enough... What is going on with that scrollbar? Well, you see, this ain't a real website. It's an intruder. It's Flash. Still, it's Adobe, right? Surely they're good with Flash? Here it is, scrolling, using a Macbook touchpad:

Beautifully smooth and usable, eh? It actually works okay if you use the arrow keys or click on the scroll bar arrows, but with a scrollpad, it's terrible.

And what about that glorious text rendering? Is that really the best that Adobe, who, you'll recall, make Flash, can do? Zoom in if you don't see what I mean.

Well, maybe you don't want the full version. Maybe you just want the cheaper upgrade. Oh, okay, then:

Is everything clear? By the way, clicking on 'ok' the first time does nothing. The second time, it removes the box, leaving the upgrade section blank. Yay!

To add insult to injury, if you open this in Google Chrome, you get a perfectly usable, though slightly crap, HTML form instead. So they made one. They just thought that non-Chrome users would prefer the Flash monstrosity.

And this is the problem. I think that people who work for Adobe are beginning to believe what they say, that consumers actually like this crap. I don't really understand how they could come to this conclusion, but there's no other obvious explanation for their behaviour. Why else would they use Flash for something like this, where HTML is ideal? Even if it cost them nothing to use Flash, this would be a bad use of it. It does not cost them nothing:

Yes, that's 59% CPU usage, to display that crap.

'More' BBC Quote-mark Fun

I, I can't believe this. Here is a BBC blog entry, highlighting a blog about unnecessary use of quotation marks.

From the article:

Indeed there is precious little more annoying, particularly in news copy. What does it mean to say someone is a "terrorist" for example? I suppose it's a rather limp way of disowning a claim made by others but which you aren't quite sure you should be repeating

This is the BBC. The BBC who use quotation marks in that way, and in other, stranger ways, all the time. Does the person who wrote this not read BBC News?

From the BBC, not the quote-mark blog

To add insult to injury, they referred to the blog as The Blog of Unnecessary Quotation Marks. Its real name is The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks. Not BBC house style, I'll admit; they use single quotes. But really, the one time they miss the random quote-marks they are in error? Argh.

Popes, child sex abuse, and the BBC's quote-mark policy

The naughty old grand inquisitor Pope has been caught defending child rapists again. This time, it's a letter he wrote in 1985, talking about how defrocking some old pervert would be have 'grave significance' and would need careful review. Or was it?

The BBC, ever-cautious, is hedging its bets. It may be a 'letter', and then again it may not be. What else does the BBC imagine it might be, one wonders? Did the pope bring the latest in paedophile-hiding literature down from Mount Sinai, on stone tablets?

How did I do with my predictions on iPhone multitasking?

A few months back, I made some predictions on what iPhone 4.0 would bring, as far as multitasking was concerned. So, how did I do? Well, not totally accurate.

I suggested that, to facilitate fast switching, apps could be left running in the background until memory pressure became too great. This has come to pass, but was a bit obvious.

I suggested that it be made a little easier to send push messages; this hasn't happened.

I suggested that for applications which require a constant data connection, such as ssh, either the app or a part thereof be allowed persist in the background, under certain restrictions. This actually exists in iPhoneOS 4.0, but only for very specific cases, like VOIP apps. It doesn't look like there'll be any persistent ssh, sadly.

I suggested something similar for location-aware stuff, and in fact this is what the new API provides; a process is fed location data as it changes, though there are a number of subtleties to Apple's implementation.

Then, I suggested a cron-job like thing; an application which would be woken periodically to do something. Apple is allowing apps to set local notification messages to be sent at specified points in the future, which is not the same thing but provides some of the benefits.

Finally, I suggested that a restricted background process be allowed for streaming audio and the like; this is in iPhone 4.0.

I thought that the restrictions on background processes would be far greater, in general, than they actually are; I enivisaged them as separate lightweight processes, but in fact the API simply advises the app to stop doing expensive things and save any user data as it is backgrounded.

I also thought that the method of navigating background apps would be something like the Palm Pre, but in fact it's more Expose-like.

All in all, though, it's an impressive release, and multitasking is just one of many things in there. I'm a little disappointed that things like ssh and irc will remain problematic, but I suppose they're minority-interest, and there are ways around the problem. I'm particularly interested to see things like blocks and GCD making their appearances; a lot of the new Snow Leopard stuff seems to be coming across.

And, of course, this operating system isn't just for the iPhone. It'll hit the iPad in Autumn, making it much more like a real computer.

You are likely to eat a Grue

In case the title is a little obscure.

Anyway, this is a US Supreme Court case about naughty prisons. From the findings:

Although some prisoners suffered from infectious diseases such as hepatitis and venereal disease, mattresses were removed and jumbled together each morning,

Page 437 U. S. 683

then returned to the cells at random in the evening. Id. at 832. Prisoners in isolation received fewer than 1,000 calories a day; [Footnote 7] their meals consisted primarily of 4-inch squares of "grue," a substance created by mashing meat, potatoes, oleo, syrup, vegetables, eggs, and seasoning into a paste and baking the mixture in a pan.

So there you have it.

Puzzling new HP thing

Remember a few months ago, when Microsoft was going on about the Slate thingy? Oh, dear. Microsoft was rather hoping that you had forgotten. Anyway, alleged specs and pricing have leaked.

It'll supposedly cost $549 for a 32gb version, have a 1.6GHz Atom processor, weigh a little more than an iPad, and... have 5 hours battery life and run Windows 7. Oh, dear.

The thing is, since time immemorial (or, around 2000), Microsoft has been trying to convince consumers that what they'd really like is an expensive laptop with no keyboard, where they would operate applications not designed to be used with a pen with a pen. Microsoft was not notably successful in doing this.

So, Windows 7 now has some form of multitouch thing. And they are building tablets on it. Doesn't sound too bad until you think about it a bit; do they really imagine that your average Windows application will be vaguely usable with a touchscreen? It's going to be Windows Mobile all over again.

The thing is, it's really a very strange device, neither one nor the other. Tablet PCs were spectacularly expensive, and unusable, but were clearly general purpose computers. iPads are relatively cheap, and apparently usable, but don't even pretend to be general purpose computers. This thing is trying to fit in somewhere in the middle; a normal operating system, but with apparently no terribly deep special provision made for multitouch. The battery life of a laptop. The price of an iPad. The slow processor of an iPad. The weighty operating system of a laptop.

I suspect that by trying to be both things, this will end up being neither, and will be quietly swept under the carpet in favour of Windows Phone 7 (itself no great shakes; no sockets? Pah!) based tablets in a few months.

I'm also inclined to suspect that it was designed with the idea that the iPad would be very expensive; most analysts were claiming that it would start at $800 at the lowest. HP have taken a few weird economies; the Slate lacks n-band wifi, for instance.

Oh, and it has that thing most loathed by all Apple-despisers... the dreaded non-user-replaceable battery! That these batteries give greater capacity for a given volume (though dispensing with the docking mechanism and allowing more awkward shapes) is beside the point; they are EVIL, as we all know. I wonder will they still be evil now that they are blessed by Redmond, by Ballmer himself?

Real farming with the BBC

The BBC recently had one of these rather tedious 'are social networks eating our children?' articles. This one asked was Farmville (oh, yes, Farmville) giving people a 'real sense of farming', and was accompanied by this charming image:

I mean, really, what?! Is this what the BBC thinks that Farmville might be teaching children farming is about? Is it what the BBC thinks farming is about? Is it actually what farming is about? Do new EU regulations require that sheep be slaughtered by having bales of hay dropped on them? What, precisely, is going on here?

Ratzinger just asking to be made fun of at this point

I mean, really.

The BBC Have Your Say comment posted page!

This was in BBC's most viewed articles for today:

They must be doing it specifically to annoy the users.

(A bit of context; BBC Have Your Say attracts a lot of mad racists...)

Implosion of Catholic Church accelerates

Two interesting pieces of news of the religious front. First, Herr Ratzinger has seen the need to declare that he has diplomatic immunity. This seems odd; presumably something absolutely dreadful is about to leak. Also, why should he get diplomatic immunity? It's not really a real proper country, after all...

The second piece of news; Ireland's ridiculous ban on the sale of alcohol on Good Friday is crumbling! Alcohol will be on sale in Limerick today. Baby steps...