Dan Q

Month: September 2009

Your Experience May Differ

To: Daniel Hill <dlh9@….>
From: Dan Q <dan@….>
Subject: Aberystwyth University Is Awesome! Warning: Your Experience May Differ.

Dear Daniel,

There’s an age-old tradition amongst Aberystwyth graduates, and in particular amongst Computer Science graduates. But to truly understand it, you first need to understand a little bit about Aberystwyth University. Also, to understand recursion, you must first understand recursion (you’ll “get” that joke by your second year, if you don’t already).

As you know, your username is “dlh9”. There’s a reason for that: The letters are your initials. “But I don’t have a middle name,” I hear you cry (or, at least, not one that the University know about), “Where’s the ‘L’ come from?” Well, it turns out that Information Services, who look after all of the computer networks, have a System [TM]. And their System [TM] is that staff get usernames like “abc”, undergrads get “abc1”, postgrads get “abc12”.

(this has lead to some awesome usernames: for example, “bed” used to be the username of somebody from Residential Services, and “sad” was once the username of one of the counsellors at the Students’ Union)

Anyway, I digress. I was talking about usernames. The digit in your username is the year you started your course. So, because you’re starting this year, yours is “9” (see, ‘cos it’s 2009 – get it?). You’re not allowed to spend more than nine years getting your degree, so that’s a pretty good primary key (you probably know what one of those is, but if not, you will before the academic year is out). Postgraduates get two digits because they often hang around for years and years. I don’t know what would happen if somebody spent a century getting their PhD, but I’m guessing that it wouldn’t be pretty.

And so there’s been a long-standing tradition amongst Aber grads, and particularly Comp. Sci. Aber grads, and especially particularly Comp. Sci. Aber grads-who-graduated-and-got-jobs-in-Aberystwyth and never got around to leaving… that when their username comes up for “renewal” – when a decade passes after they first started their course – they finger (you’ll learn what that means soon enough, too) the Aber computer systems and check if their username has been re-assigned. It’s a great way to make yourself feel old, as if the annual influx of younger-every-year Freshers didn’t do that perfectly well already.

Over the years, I’ve seen many friends play this little game. Some of them won, but most of them lost – it turns out that the odds aren’t really on your side: there are 17,576 conceivable username combinations each year – from aaa9 to zzz9 – and only 3,000 new students, so odds are less than 50% whether or not you ignore the statistical biases that mean that things like “qxz9” (Quentin X. Zachary?) are basically never going to turn up.

So imagine my surprise when I, for the first time, get to play the game, today… and I not only win, but I get a double-win, because the person to whom my old username has been recycled is an undergraduate in my old department!

Yes: I was the last owner of “dlh9”. I was “dlh9” from 1999, when I started, to 2004, when I graduated, an alumni of the Computer Science Department at what was then the University of Wales, Aberystwyth (it changed it’s name to Aberystwyth University shortly afterwards – this, combined with the fact that I have since changed my name by deed poll, means that I am the proud owner of a degree certificate that contains neither my name nor the name of an existing university!). At the time, my name was Daniel Huntley – I didn’t have a middle name, either – and I spent five years getting a four-year degree in Software Engineering before I started working for a software company here in this very town. I haven’t yet got around to leaving.

It still feels strange to write an e-mail to your e-mail address – my old e-mail address. It feels like I’m writing an e-mail to myself. I wonder what I’d have made of it if I’d have received this e-mail when I first arrived at University. It’s not so hard to imagine: the person I am now would be unrecognisable to the person I was back then, just like I am a complete stranger to you, but writing to you nonetheless. But even if you discard this e-mail and never think of it again, you’ll have done me a wonderful service by allowing me the chance to participate in a fascinating thought experiment that has granted me a great and deep nostalgia for the time I spent at that University.

(by the way; I apologise if your e-mail address is still getting the spam it used to get when it belonged to me)

Like me, Aber’s changed over the last ten years. The University’s changed, and the Computer Science Department has changed too. But I’m sure that you’ll find the place as beautiful and as satisfying as it has always been: this remarkable town on the West coast of Wales, where the mountains meet the sea, full of strange and quirky characters, a million miles from anywhere, and truly unique. I find myself longing for you to have *my* experience of Aberystwyth; to do all the great things I did, to meet all the great people I did – but you won’t. You won’t have the same lovers; you won’t discover the same music; you won’t join the same clubs; you won’t have the same beautiful sunsets while you roast burgers on disposable barbeques and the rising tide laps at your ankles; you won’t have the same hangovers; you won’t scrape through the same exams; you won’t steal the same traffic cones; you won’t climb the same mountains. A different story told differently.

You won’t have any of the things that made my time here in Aberystwyth so wonderful for the last ten years, but don’t dispair, because you’ll have something far better – you’ll have all of your own marvellous experiences. Mine are mine in nostalgia alone, but yours are yet to come. And I hope you have an ass-kickingly good time, because that’s what every Aber Comp. Sci undergrad deserves when they come to this magical corner of the world.

When you get as far as your lectures, tell Richard Shipman I said “Hi”. That’ll put you in his good books, I’m sure. ;-)

And if you see me around town, give me a wave and I’ll buy you a pint. If you got nothing else from reading this old man’s drivel, you just earned yourself a free pint. When I was a student, I’d have called that a win-win. Your experience may differ.

Good luck, and best wishes;

—
Dan Q

Home

Article posted at UTC on .

3 comments

Feed Proxy Bug Fixes

BREAKING NEWS: On 1st October 2009, LiveJournal blocked the Feed Proxy bot. I don’t know when they’ll unblock it and it’ll come back up: see the latest here.

I’ve fixed a handful of bugs in the popular Feed Proxy tool (which, as you probably know, allows you to read LiveJournal and Dreamwidth “friends-only” posts in Google Reader or your favourite RSS reader tool, even where that RSS reader doesn’t support the necessary authentication systems to normally be able to pick up these posts). These include:

  • A number of users identified a problem relating to some mixed-case LiveJournal usernames having to be entered into Feed Proxy in lowercase to work. These usernames are now automatically corrected to lowercase as necessary.
  • Feed Proxy now automatically detects those passwords whose characters may cause problems with the cURL library, which is used to fetch the feeds from LiveJournal/Dreamwidth, and produces a warning message, rather than the previous unfriendly error message. A better solution will be investigated in the future.
  • Downloading an OPML package of some or all of your feeds now works correctly in Google Chrome. I didn’t know so many of you used it!
  • The FAQ has been expanded with a few more common questions, including the (very) frequently-asked question about multiple source accounts of the same type (which will be properly supported at some future point).
  • It’s now possible to read the FAQ without having an account or logging in. Sorry I forgot that – whoops!

I’ve finally gotten around to responding to all of the e-mails I’ve received so far from users: sorry about the delay, folks, but a lot of you had questions to ask!

To those that have asked about open-sourcing it: yes, I still fully intend to open-source the project (as I did with it’s predecessor, LJ-To-Google Reader) so you can run it on your own server if you like, but only once it’s reached a point of stability. Follow this RSS feed if you want to hear about updates to Feed Proxy, including when the source code becomes available.

Article posted at UTC on .

7 comments

A Day On Campus

I’m going to be up on the University campus all day tomorrow (Monday 28th September), helping out at the Samaritans stand at the Freshers’ Fair. If you’re on or near Penglais, come by and say hi, or drop me a text and we can hook up for lunch.

Article posted at UTC on .

2 comments

Too Busy To Blog

So I shan’t tell you about all the fun and exciting (read: horrible and exhausting) things I’ve been up to lately. Instead, to keep you amused, here’s an animated GIF that amused me.

That is all.

Article posted at UTC on .

2 comments

LiveJournal-To-Google Reader Back Up

BREAKING NEWS: On 1st October 2009, LiveJournal blocked the Feed Proxy bot. I don’t know when they’ll unblock it and it’ll come back up: see the latest here.

The LiveJournal-To-Google Reader service is back up again, rebranded as Feed Proxy. It’s pretty much bare-bones right now, but I’ve got a meaningful framework that I can add to in the future, and I’ll try to keep it up-to-date by adding all of the features that everybody requested back when it was LiveJournal-To-Google Reader (I’ve already added a few, as described below).

My sincere apologies to everybody affected by the day and a half of downtime that was involved in this change-over.

Here’s what you need to know:

If you already use LiveJournal-To-Google Reader

All of your feed links have now broken. Sorry, but this was necessary! You’ll probably want to delete your subscriptions to all of the old links, because they won’t work any more. You’ll also need to set yourself up with a new account on the new service, Feed Proxy. Choose yourself a username and password, log in, and associate your account with your LiveJournal account. Then you can click “show feeds” and start subscribing to your LiveJournal friends’ feeds using Google Reader.

New features:

  • Where possible, shows how many comments, link to comments, poster’s “mood”, and security status (public or private [i.e. “friends only”]) of each post.
  • OPML export, so you can easily get all of your feeds back into Google Reader (or whatever RSS reader you prefer) again.
  • Links that don’t change for no reason
  • Better support for communities

If you don’t have a clue what this is all about…

Feed Proxy is a tool that I originally wrote because I didn’t like having to go to my LiveJournal “friends page” to catch up on all the “friends-only” posts being made by people I knew. I already used Google Reader for every other blog in the world; why should I have to go to another site? I also didn’t like that I couldn’t “group” my friends on my friends page, so I could see which ones were related to my different interests and just focus on those at once. I also wanted to be able to easily mark which posts I’d already read. Google Reader already does all of this.

But if you subscribe to a LiveJournal account using Google Reader, you don’t get the “friends only” posts. It’s just not possible.

Feed Proxy makes it possible. And now, it adds a lot of other nice features, too.

If you use LiveJournal (or your friends use LiveJournal) and you’d rather have the slicker interface of Google Reader at your disposal, give it a go.

If you want to hear about updates…

Please subscribe to this RSS feed of Feed Proxy-tagged posts on my blog.

Open-Source Shaving

Recently I saw a Basic Instructions comic in which the author/protagonist, Scott, weighs up his shaving options. You can read the full comic here, assuming you don’t read Basic Instructions already (and you should).

As the folks leaving comments on that comic quite rightly note, the comic covers only two of a number of different solutions to shaving: disposable razors, and cartridge razors, neglecting at least three other alternatives (even if you don’t count “just let it grow” as an option). Thanks in part of many of these comments, he’s now going to experiment with a few different options.

I’ve tried more different approaches than most gents, I suspect, so I thought I’d share with you a brief history of my shaving experience:

Electric Shaver

Surely I can’t be the only person who’s found these to be quite so useless as they appear. I’ve owned two in my time: a basic one that my dad gave me during my teen years in lieu of the iconic father-son bonding experience that I’m lead to believe that many other boys found in learning to shave from their dads; and a second, more-fancy one given to me in a gift box which also contained other male grooming tools (some of which are actually really quite useful: it’s just a pity that the shaver itself isn’t up to much).

I don’t hear anybody else complaining, so I’m probably in a minority: perhaps it’s the the softness of my skin… or the prickliness of my hair… or maybe I’m just “doing it wrong.” The net result is much the same: if I use an electric shaver it cuts my facial hair down just enough to still be slightly stubbly, it’s near-impossible to make a good effort of the area under my jaw, and there isn’t the control to be able to work around the outlines of a partial beard, as I have nowadays. Perhaps worse yet, it always feels like they “pluck” almost as much as they “cut”. The first few times I used one I took it apart to try to work out if I’d perhaps missed a crucial set-up step, like pulling out some kind of secret pin that actually engaged the razor blades. I hadn’t.

Disposable Razors

So I ended up using disposable razors. They’re cheap and simple and they work, right? They’re not the easiest things in the world, with their flimsy little plasticky handles and their strange shape… Although there is the fact that they’re not actually very sharp.

You know how they say that you’re more likely to cut yourself with a blunt blade than a sharp one, because of the increased pressure you have to use? Well there’s a limit to that logic, and the limit is when the blade is so dull that you’d be hard-pressed to cut yourself if you were trying. I don’t know if it’s an anti-suicide measure by the Bic company, but wow are their blades ineffective. Sometimes you feel like you’d be better using the edge of the shitty plastic handle than the metal blade edge.

Cartridge Safety Razor

One day, back in in my first year at University, an unexpected parcel arrived for me. It turned out to be from Gillette, and contained a Gillette Mach3 (which had been launched a year-and-a-bit earlier). Their thinking, of course, was that as they’d given me a free razor I’d use it and then continue to buy the blades. “The fools,” I thought, “I’m perfectly happy with my twice-a-week-if-I-can-be-bothered shaves with these throwaway plasic things!” I planned to use the new razor ’til I’d blunted (all three of) it’s blades, then I’d just throw it away. No problem.

It turns out that giving away free razors like this might have been one of the smartest marketing promotions that Gillette has ever done, because, for me at least, it worked. A three-blade cartridge razor is a fabulous way to shave, and it’s a huge improvement on disposables. I’m sure that over the nine years or so I used my Mach3 – even if you don’t count the extra one I bought when I lost one – Gillette more-than made their money back in all of the cartridges I bought.

It’s got a proper handle with grips that work even when it’s wet, a funky button-release to let go of spent cartridges (and for me, at least, the blades would last a reasonable amount of time, presumably aided by the fact that the work was shared amongst three cutting surfaces), it tilts gently to work around hard-to-reach spots… it’s just a really well-designed bit of technology.

Traditional “Double-Edged” Safety Razor

Back in the early years of the 20th century, the removable-blade safety razor appeared to fill the demand for a razor that was easier than straight razors, which required such care and attention to both use and maintenance that many men just said “fuck it” and went to the barber’s instead. For decades, the double-edged razor was king, until it started to give way in the 1970s to cartridge razors and electric shavers. There are two major reasons for this change: firstly, cartridge razors are easier to use than double-edged razors – you can use them even if you’re tired, or drunk, or stupid. Secondly, cartridge razors (and, to a lesser extent, except approaching Christmas, electric shavers) have been very heavily marketed for years and years: this makes sense from the perspective of the manufacturer, because of the principle of vendor lock-in. Vendor lock-in, more often discussed in the context of electronic goods and computer software, is about forcing the users of your product to continue to use your product: to remove from them the freedom to go elsewhere. It’s particularly obvious in the marketplace of cartridge razors, because each manufacturer can manufacture blade cartridges which fit only it’s own products. An entire marketing strategy, the razor-and-blades business model, is named after this approach.

At the tail end of this hundred-year history of razors is now, 2009. I’ve gotten good use out of my Mach3, but there are a few things over the last year or so that have really put me off continuing to use it:

  • Actual good-old Mach3 blades became harder and harder to find as the manufacturer began to focus production on Mach3 Turbo and M3Power cartridges, both of which cost more.
  • Mach3 Turbo is basically the same thing as Mach3, only a little more expensive for the privilege of “anti-friction blades”, which seems like a marketing gimmick – I certainly can’t tell the difference, and if there’s anything to learn from this blog post it’s that I’m reasonably picky
  • M3Power blades are identical to Mach3 Turbo, only more expensive still(!). What do you get for your money is “even more lubrication” (yeah, right) and blades that are compatible with the micropulse (i.e. vibrating) feature of the M3Power handle, which virtually everybody says is a scam.
  • Seriously, the marketing is bullshit. It was proven in court.
  • As the Onion predicted back in 2004, we’re starting to see the first five-blade razors getting serious marketing treatment: the “Gillette Fusion Power Stealth” (presumably targeted at men who like awesome-sounding buzzwords: seriously, what do any of those words have to do with removing hair?) have five blades and a sixth “precision trimmer”. That’s six blades every time you buy a cartridge: how much does that cost? I don’t even want to know. And someday, they’ll stop selling Mach3 blades entirely and they’ll try to force me to switch to an even more profitable razor, probably with seven blades and a lubricating, vibrating strip that sings the blues.
  • Gillette’s razor blades are sold at 4750% profit. Four fucking thousand seven fucking hundred and fifty fucking per cent. That’s like me going to Sainsburys and buying a loaf of bread (85p), a small pack of margarine (44p), and a medium-sized pack of cooked ham (£1.64), making ten ham sandwiches, and then selling them for £14 each. For a ham sandwich. £14.

So, a month and a bit ago, I decided to escape from this trap, and go open-source with an old-school double-edged razor.

Going Open Source

Sick of the marketing nonsense and the overinflated (and rising) costs of cartridges, I bought myself a traditional style safety razor (it looks a lot like the one in the photo in the last section), brush, soap, and a sackload of blades: and wow, blades are cheap.

It turns out that learning to use a double-edged safety razor is just a little bit like learning to shave all over again, with plenty of opportunity for self-injury along the way: although it doesn’t take so long – despite managing to clip myself the first few times I used it (nothing that a quick application of titanium dioxide couldn’t fix, albeit in an ouchy-ouchy way). It also takes quite a bit longer than shaving with a cartridge razor: rather than the eight minutes or so I’d spend shaving with my Mach3, I spend about 18 minutes in the bathroom with my double-edged safety razor. That’s not the end of the world, because I only bother to shave about one day in three anyway, and adding ten minutes to the time it takes to do something so infrequent isn’t going to kill me.

It’s actually remarkably good for the extra time it takes, though: I’m suddenly all remarkably-smooth, having shaved with this scary-looking implement: better than I’d ever managed with a cartridge or with a disposable, and far, far better than I ever got out of an electric.

So: cheap as chips to get blades for, and a better shave, at the expense of taking longer to actually have a shave. It’s a good deal in my book, and I’d recommend giving it a try, gents, if you haven’t already. Plus, you get the same kind of fuzzy feeling you get from using Linux or OpenOffice.org because it’s just a little bit more like using something that’s genuinely free of vendor lock-in.

Plus, it looks cool.

(I’m considering trying a proper straight razor at some point – or, more likely, one which takes snapped razor-blades in an injector, because I don’t particularly feel like having to learn how to sharpen and hone a true razor – anybody got any experience of them?)

Keeping Me Up

Had another strange dream a few nights ago (my blog posts are being published with a bit of a delay on them, at the moment, for reasons I might discuss in another blog post!) that I thought I’d share, before waking up early and being unable to get back to sleep.

Dream – Putting a Cap on Liz and I

I was out at a pub with my friend Liz, her partner Simon, and a load of other people, mostly the old Abnib/”Chess Club” crowd. The pub was noisy, and I felt a little claustrophobic, so I excused myself and went and sat in the deserted beer garden at one of the wooden benches. I was also hoping that Liz would pick up on something I’d said earlier in the evening and come and join me where we could talk privately, and sure enough, she did – she came out and sat next to me on the bench.

She and I had had an evening some months prior in which we’d gotten drunk, confessed an attraction for one another, and ended up kissing, which had led to a not-insignificant number of awkwardnesses within our social circle. From some hidden pocket within the table I produced a battered (yet somehow, also laminated and pristine) sheet of A4 paper on which we’d written down, that night, how we felt about one another. My bits were typed in Javascript using Courier New; hers were handwritten in a cursive type. We both sat closely and re-read our words.

A young man we didn’t know came and sat on the bench opposite us, asking only half-politely if the seat was free (despite there being many completely free benches). We ignored him and tried to make it obvious that we were involved in a private conversation which he was not welcome to join, but he didn’t take the hint: he just sat there and lit up his cigarette.

Liz and I reminisced about our flirtatious evening together and talked about it. Realising that neither of us wanted to make anything more of it than had already happened, we decided that “that was that”, and we’d put and end to whatever romantic inklings either of us might have had. We hugged, and there was a brief moment during which we looked at one another, undecided about whether or not we should kiss, but then we didn’t, and instead exchanged a glance of agreement, and walked back inside to our friends.

Significance:

  • The kisses and snuggles with my friend Liz happened only in the dream, in case anybody’s unclear. Not that I wouldn’t – Liz is hot! – but I think Liz represents any number of other things going on in my life right now, as discussed below. Just thought I’d clear that up, not least because she’s likely to read this!
  • The pub was reminiscent of The Cambrian, in Aberystwyth, but the beer garden (accessible through a door where the door to the toilets ought to be in The Cambrian) was very similar to the one that nobody seems to know about out the back of The Fountain.
  • I was recently in a pub in which it was too loud to reasonably talk. I was told at the time that the noisy groups near us had only first appeared right after I did.
  • I’ve been perhaps working a little too hard of late, including writing a lot of Javascript, which is probably why it made an appearance in my dream. Seeing my code was when I realised that I was dreaming: not because I’d written about my intimate feelings in a web-centric scripting language (though unlikely), but because the appearance of writing is often a dead giveaway to me that I’m actually asleep (a so-called “dream sign“). Like many people, if I look at a piece of writing twice in succession in a dream, it’s appearance changes. Through a combination of self-awareness and making a habit during my waking life of often glancing twice at any writing I see (thereby increasing the chance that in my dreams I will do the same), I’m often able to notice that I’m dreaming through making this observation.
  • I recently crossed paths with somebody with whom I once (well, okay, perhaps twice) had a brief sexual fling, after which I insisted that that would be the end of it, and there was no chance of a relationship of any sort other than “just friends” thereafter.
  • I’ve also recently spoken to somebody (else) with whom I’ve always been somewhat flirtatious, and who has once or twice reciprocated, but of which nothing has ever come.
  • I was quite horny when I went to sleep.
  • I have no idea what the table-slot nor the stranger on the other side of the bench are all about.

Sometimes sharing what I’m dreaming about with you guys leaves me with the maybes. I record virtually every dream that I remember, but I only blog about the ones that I don’t think will make anybody who reads my blog feel uncomfortable. When I first wrote about this dream, I thought twice. Let me know if I thought wrong!

Right, now I’d better get on with some of that work I’ve been doing too much of!

Article posted at UTC on .

4 comments

Four Things That Evolution Isn’t

I read this Chick Tract comic, recently. I’d seen them before, but for some reason it was this week, and this particular article, that riled me so much. I can honestly say I don’t think I’ve ever before been quite so agitated by something as harmless as a comic.

In the comic, an arrogant and obnoxious biology professor argues in front of a class with a Christian student on the topic of evolution. By a combination of bad science, straw man arguments, a veiled ad hominem attack (the lecturer really is a model of intolerance) and the ultimate false dichotomy – that the only alternative to the theory of evolution involves the implication that Christ must have died for our sins – the student persuades his teacher that his acceptance of evolution is incorrect.

It’s a weekend for pet hates, for me, and I suspect that the thing that really got my goat with this comic was this particular panel:

In this panel, the student makes the premise that there are “six basic concepts of evolution”, and the professor agrees, listing them. But most of the concepts have nothing to do with evolution at all!

(if anybody thinks it’s strange that the thing that annoyed me about this piece of propaganda wasn’t it’s conclusion but one of it’s premises, they could stand to know me a little better – I have no objection to a belief in whatever you like, so long as it doesn’t tread on my toes… but I’m not keen on people mis-representing one another’s positions)

The first four of the six basic concepts of evolution expressed in the comic are:

  1. Cosmic Evolution – the Big Bang making hydrogen. The theory of evolution has nothing whatsoever to say about the appearance of the Universe and all of the time, space and matter therein. The author seems to have confused the theory of evolution with, perhaps the big bang theory and and other cosmogenic theories.
  2. Chemical Evolution – the appearance of higher [heavier] elements. Again, the theory of evolution has nothing to say about the fact that there’s more than just hydrogen and helium in the Universe. On the other hand, nuclear fusion it’s reasonably well-understood physics by now: we can do it in a lab, and we have strong, experimentally-backed theories about how it happens in stars and the like.
  3. Evolution of stars and planets from gas – yet again, the theory of evolution has no statement to make on the formation of heavenly bodies (a term I use with no irony whatsoever). This time the author’s gotten confused, probably, with the nebular hypothesis, the most popular contemporary explanation of the development of solar systems and galaxies. It must be admitted: the hypothesis isn’t without it’s faults (to do with stuff like the conservation of angular momentum in accretion disks, and other stuff you don’t want to have to think about without either a degree in space physics or, at least, a pint in front of you). But it’s still got nothing to do with evolution.
  4. Organic Evolution – as it’s put so crudely in the comic, “life from rocks”. This still doesn’t have anything to do with the theory of evolution, which only describes mechanisms by which organisms can change (with the potential to form new species as well as to produce adaptation within a species). This time around, the author seems to be getting the theory of evolution mixed up with theories of abiogenesis, of which there several, and of which many are mutually-compatible (i.e. two of them could, perhaps, both be factual).

Only the last two concepts – macro-evolution and micro-evolution (which are only generally described in separate terms for the benefit of those who would argue that one is possible while the other is not: in scientific circles, it’s virtually unheard-of to discuss the two as if they were separate ideas, as they are in fact the same idea based upon the same scientific understanding).

I could spend time picking apart the rest of the comic, but it wouldn’t achieve anything: all I really wanted to do is to point out that there are a number of very different and unrelated theories that seem to be often misunderstood – sometimes by both sides – in debates on the subject of creationism, and in debates on the subject of atheism.

I’ve come across it a lot myself, as an atheist: people have told me that, as an atheist, I must believe in certain things, and then proceeded to attack those things, when these premises may well be flawed (especially if they’re coupled with a misunderstanding of what those premises actually mean, as was the case in this comic).

  • Yes, I’m an atheist – which to me means that I have observed no compelling evidence for the existence of any deities (as defined by any non-naturalistic, non-pantheistic explanation, on the subject of which I’m ignostic). I’m also agnostic – which means that I believe that I do not know for certain, which I maintain is a perfectly rational position and is perfectly compatible with atheism. Don’t agree? This is the diagram I’m working from. While I find the concept of the existence of a deity ludicrous and implausible, it’s impossible to disprove, just like Russel’s teapot.
  • I also happen to accept the theory of evolution, because it’s a strong model with a lot of compelling evidence for it, and I haven’t yet seen a stronger one, although I’m open to the possibility that one exists – Lamarkism, an alternative theory that could describe some of the evidence we’ve seen so far, is probably due a comeback.
  • I accept that abiogenesis has almost certainly occurred (that there was a point at which there was no life, and now – ta-da – there is!). I don’t know enough about molecular biology to make a statement in any direction about which of the competing theories is the strongest; however, all of the scientific explanations I’ve heard have always appeared to be stronger, to me, than any of the superstitious ones. I accept in principle the notion of a biogenetic start to life on Earth (life from elsewhere), but haven’t seen any evidence for it that is not speculative.
  • Despite great strides in cosmogenesis in recreating theoretical early-Universe conditions that form functional and consistent models, I – like, I believe, every other human – do not know “what happened before that?” (or even if such a question is valid at all). I’ve always had a personal fondness for the cyclic model, although I appreciate that it’s riddled with faults and, in fact, raises as many questions as it resolves – I just like it for it’s almost-poetic completeness. I gather that it’s hard to accept modern understanding of the cyclic model without also accepting loop quantum gravity, which I don’t even understand, but as a model, it still makes me feel comfortable. Regardless: fundamentally, I don’t know “what happened first,” and I dispute that anybody else does, either.

My point is, though, that all of these things can be taken independently, and I think it’s important that people understand and accept that. I’ve met evolutionist theists, biogenetic anti-evolutionists, and even folks who believe that while a creator deity exists, created the universe, set life in motion, and then ceased to exist – they’re atheist abiogenetic creationists. And that’s fine. I think they’re all wrong, and they probably think I am too, but that’s not a problem: we’ve a right to be wrong.

So next time somebody tells you what they believe about the existence or non-existence of a god or gods, their acceptance or not of the theory of evolution, their idea about the initial appearance of life, of their belief in the quintessential beginnings of the universe, please don’t assume that you can guess the rest: there are some surprising folks out there with whom you might have more in common than you think.

(and look, I managed to avoid mentioning my thoughts on ethics and morality and on determinism entirely!)

Article posted at UTC on .

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jQuery Is Awesome. Yet Again.

I know that this probably isn’t news to any of you who care about such things and follow the world of web development even a little… it’s not even news to me, really – I’ve been an advocate of this particular programming library for a while now. But today in particular, I just felt so enamoured by the elegance of the jQuery Javascript Framework that I had to tell you about it.

This line of code:

$('.alpha').not(':has(.beta:visible)').hide();

Hides all elements with the class “alpha” which contain no visible elements with the class “beta” (i.e. if it contains any visible elements of class “beta”, the “alpha” is not hidden).

And it’s just beautiful. Just to compare how elegant it is to something else, here’s the equivalent code in Prototype, another popular Javascript framework, which in itself still shortens the amount of code that this would take in plain-old vanilla Javascript:

$$('.alpha').each(function(element){
var has_visible_beta = false;
element.childElements().each(function(inner_element){
if (inner_element.hasClassName('beta') && inner_element.visible()) has_visible_beta = true;
});
if (has_visible_beta) element.hide();
});

(okay, that Prototype code could probably be a hair simpler, but you get my point)

Wow.

Article posted at UTC on .

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My New Pet Hate

I have a new pet hate.

A personal pet hate of mine for a long while has been that often, when I ask somebody for a screenshot to show me what’s going wrong with some software they’re using, they’ll take a screenshot or two, then paste them into a Microsoft Word document, and then e-mail me the Word document.

Why would you do such a thing? You’ve got Paint: paste it into Paint and save it, and you’ll get:

  • A faster result. Paint loads a lot faster than Word.
  • A smaller file. Even a Bitmap saved in Paint (the default) will usually be smaller than a Word document. A JPEG or a PNG will be even smaller still, which means it’s more suitable for e-mail and be faster still.
  • A more-compatible result. Just about anybody can open whatever you produce with Paint, without requiring a word-processor that’s compatible with the version of Word you’re using).

And that’s without even looking at the benefit directly to me: that I don’t need to re-extract your pictures so that I can upload actual pictures, not a document, to our bug tracking system, or the benefit that I can view thumbnails of your screenshots to sort and manage them easily.

But no; I have a new pet hate:

It’s when somebody who’s using Microsoft Outlook sends me a HTML e-mail with several screenshots… each one of them inside a separate Word document attached to the message. WTF?

  1. You could just have pasted the image straight into Outlook. Less work for you, easier for me, faster for everybody. It’s just like pasting it into Word, except you don’t have to open Word (or create a new document), and the images end up stored more-like actual images attached to an e-mail.
  2. One Word document per screenshot? Why? Do you just enjoy thinking about the fact that I’ll now have to open 15 – yes, 15! – different Word documents just to extract the screenshot from each and save it as an image file like you should have in the first place!

Sorry; it’s probably just me who gets bugged quite so much by this.

Update, 15th June 2011: almost two years later, I’ve revisited this topic having found something even more annoying than using Word documents as a medium for screenshots…

Uncommon Occurances

I didn’t sleep well; I woke up several times throughout the night. On the upside, I have a strong recollection of three distinct yet inter-related dreams:

Dream I: Alex and the Accident

I came into work as normal and spoke to Alex, my co-worker. He’d been in some sort of car accident in which he’d hit and killed a man in an electric scooter. There was a lot of ambiguity about whose fault it was – the man had apparently accelerated his scooter right out into traffic… but Alex had been driving too fast at the time.

Significance:

  • My mum’s partner’s son, I recently learned, was in a car crash a week ago.
  • At work yesterday my boss was telling me about expensive repairs to his car.
  • I re-watched the shocking new don’t text and drive video yesterday.

Dream II – In The Red

I was a Western spy during the Cold War, attempting to infiltrate a Soviet University. With some difficulty, I was able to become enrolled at the University, but soon came under suspicion from the administrative management (all Party members, of course) after my luggage was found to contain a British newspaper. The newspaper contained details of Alex’s car crash, from Dream I, and this was later re-printed in the local newspapers, but with a suitably communist spin.

Later, after my cover was blown, I made plans to flee the country and return to the West.

Significance:

  • Second dream references the first dream.
  • The University campus was familiar; it was a little reminiscent of the University Of Worcester campus where I was at BiCon almost three weeks ago.

Dream III – Going To Work

I woke up, got dressed, and went to work. I discussed with co-workers Alex and Gareth a dream I’d had the previous night, in which Alex had crashed his car (as per Dream I) and about a film I’d seen the previous evening, about the infiltration of a Soviet University by a Western agent (as per Dream II). I explained that apparently the film was supposed to be about drugs, but maybe I’d failed to understand it because I didn’t see how it was supposed to be about drugs at all.

A client of ours paid a deposit on a reasonably-large job we’d quoted for, and I begun laying the foundations of the work as described in our technical specification.

Significance:

  • Third dream references the first two dreams, but as different media: one as a dream, the other as a film!
  • I’m expecting to get started on a new contract within the next couple of weeks, similar to the one referenced by the dream.

It was quite disappointing to be woken by my alarm and to discover that I still had to get up and go to work. While I’m usually quite aware that I’m dreaming when I’m dreaming, I somehow got suckered in by Dream III and had really got into the groove of going to work and getting on with my day, probably because I’d so readily assumed that Dream I was the dream and therefore that the same mundane things happening again must have been real life.

I was prompted to wonder, momentarily, if I might still be dreaming, when an unusual thing happened on the way to work. Just after I passed the site of the old post office sorting yard, about a third of the way to the office, I came across a woman crouched in a doorway, reaching out to a blue tit which was sat quite still in the middle of the pavement. Still half-asleep, I only barely noticed them in time to not walk right through them.

The bird must be injured, I thought, to not be flying away, as the woman managed to reach around it and pick it up. I stopped and waited to see if I could be of any use. Seconds later, the little creature wriggled free and flew off to perch on top of a nearby fence: it was perfectly fine!

The woman seemed as perplexed at this as I was: perhaps we both just found the world’s stupidest blue tit. I double-checked the clock on my phone (this is a reasonably-good “am I dreaming?” check for me, personally, as is re-reading text and using light switches) – but no, this was real. Just weird.

Edit: changed “Callbacks:” to “Significance:”. This is the format in which I’ll be blogging about the dreams I share with you now, I’ve decided.

Foods That Begin With The Letter Q

To mark the second anniversary of QParty, I thought I’d cook Claire and I a meal consisting of foods that begin with the letter Q. How hard can it be, right? Turns out it’s more difficult than you might first expect.

My first thought was quails with qvark dumplings, but, would you believe it, both of these things turn out to be hard to get in Aberystwyth. Not wanting to have to resort to Quorn™, we ended up having a quirky mixture of foods that have probably never before been seen on the same plate:

  • A quarter-pounder burger
  • Pasta quills
  • Quesadillas
  • Quiche

I’d have liked to have put quinces in the desert somehow, or else flapjacks made from Quaker oats, but in the end we just had cherry pie and cream, which I insisted on calling queam.

Aside from those listed above, and quinoa, of course, what foods have I missed? Is there anything that you can eat that begins with a “Q” that I haven’t thought of?

Article posted at UTC on .

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My Mum’s Partner Slept With Sarah Michelle Gellar

I’ve got your attention now.

It’s true, but it’s not like you’d think. My mum’s partner, otherwise known as Andy – or, sometimes, as Slightly Weaseldump – was working in the USA last week and when he was due to fly back his ‘plane was cancelled by bad weather. The alternative flight offered would take him not to the UK but to Paris, where he’d be able to get a short-hop flight back to Manchester (I suppose by the time you’re crossing the Atlantic Ocean, hitting Europe is considered to be a “hit”). They’d run out of regular, second-class, Irish-dancing-in-the-bowels-of-the-aeroplane seats by this point, of course, so they upgraded him to the rich people’s part of the ‘plane, right up at the front (although behind the pilot, obviously). And right next to, he soon discovered, Sarah Michelle Gellar, better known to many of us here in Aber as Buffy Summers.

Apparently she was on her way to Paris to take part in some kind of promotion relating to some perfume or something. And she has a little red mobile phone. And she’s friendly. Although he didn’t get her to autograph.

And being an overnight flight, they naturally ended up taking a kip. So, by technicality if by nothing else, he can now claim to have slept with Sarah Michelle Gellar. He called my mum to tell her so, but it sounds like she was neither as amused nor as impressed as I was to hear the same news.

Edit: Please see the discussion in the comments regarding the believability of this story.

Article posted at UTC on .

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