Month: May 2004

There are few things in the computer world as frustrating as having to choose between two applications which between them have all of the features you want or need but neither of which is enough on its own. It’s even worse when one of them is clearly far more complete than the other but lacks the one critical feature that you can’t or won’t do without. Conversely there are very few moments that can compete with the satisfaction of discovering the final critical feature your ideal product of choice.

To skip neatly from generalised ramblings to a specific case: I have discovered the iPod plugin for WinAmp (thanks to this interview with Justin Frankel). Initially it seems like I’ve gained a single feature – namely synching my iPod from WinAmp – but by all practical measures I’ve really gained a whole lot more. This plugin allows me to finally ditch the frankly pathetic iTunes and its features I can list on the fingers of one finger in favour of WinAmp and its global hotkeys, system tray minimisation, and general get-out-of-my-way-ness.

I have to question the widespread praise of Apple’s usability. I’ll grant that the iPod has about the easiest and simplest user interface I’ve seen on a portable music player. My experience of Apple’s software is somewhat less favourable. Though I have been limited to Windows-based software I can’t see why it should be any worse than their Mac versions of the same software. iTunes and Quicktime for Windows are truly appalling. iTunes is riddled with holes. It’s missing almost every feature I want in a music player. On the fly playlists? Equaliser? Minimal mode? Minimise to tray? The whole thing feels like it was designed for someone who doesn’t know what a computer is. I always get the impression that it was designed to stay in the foreground, as if I’m meant to be using my computer as a €1,400 hi-fi system.

Quicktime is even worse. It won’t autoplay movies. If I want to play a quicktime movie I have to double-click the file and then click the play button. Who’s ever going to want to open a movie in a movie player and not play it? Of course I can’t hit play until I’ve dismissed the Lie-to-Me ad screen that Quicktime throws at me every time I launch it. "Do you want to buy me?" No! I don’t want to buy it now, I don’t want to buy it "Later" (the only useful option on the box), I don’t want to buy it ever. Then there’s fullscreen (what’s that?), keyboard access (useless cruft as far as Apple is concerned), persistent volume accross sessions (it always starts on full volume – I keep my media players close to half volume so I can adjust from the player itself, windows volume control or the speakers depending on what’s most convenient), File->Open. Where are all of these things? These aren’t features, they’re basic functionality that’s completely missing from every version of Quicktime for Windows. Worst media players ever.

Back to the main point: Yay WinAmp.

If you’ll allow me to gloss over my completion of four years of college and a full month of finals I’ll move onto the more pressing matter of my planned changes to SoylentRed and Scatterbrain. You see I’ve been strategising over the last few months and I have put in place plans for a major overhaul of Scatterbrain. This has historically been braught about by learning so much more about the area than I knew when I started that I find fault with just about every design descision I’ve made in the past year. New features will include:

• Syndication feeds (some flavour of RSS, Atom) – this could probably be done within the confines of the current template system but I’ll probably end up rewriting much of that with these in mind.
• Simpler content creation part I – Entries – I don’t want to have to type all of the XHTML by hand, particularly <abbr>s.
• Simpler content creation part II – Comments – I already have linebreak-to-paragraph tags convertions; I want Scatterbrain to make links out of URLs and to allow simple markup.
• Trackback – I don’t have this; I would like it.
• Technorati, weblogs.com, blo.gs pings – Scatterbrain will soon inform these blog-tracking sites of updates automatically every time I post.

I’m also going to change the administration pages to a seperate design from SoylentRed, clean up URLs so they don’t have ‘.php’ and ‘?’ all over them and possibly add a caching ability so that pages are only regenerated when necessary. I have four months to do this, not counting the fact that I will have to get a job.

I guess I have to write something because not writing today would invalidate the whole journal aspect of blogging. I should start by noting that I feel no different than I did yesterday except for the marginally more pressing urge to prepare for Thursday’s exam. It’s marginal in that neither the old nor the new degree of urgency is particulary extreme.

I don’t like being the centre of attention, not because of some inbuilt humility but because it always means more work. "We’ll do what suits you." That just gives me responsibility I don’t want. How about just letting me veto other people’s descisions about dinner? The remuneration is good though.

Anyone who pays more attention to what goes on around here than they should will have noticed that the linkroll is no longer in alphabetical order. This hypothetical attention-payer — and I know him to be hypothetical — will also have noticed that this is a result of me having added some new names to the list. I’m usually quite lax in introducing new sites but in this case I wanted to draw particular attention to the name that currently sits at the bottom of the list.

Pharyngula is the blog of Paul Z. Myers,associate professor of biology at University of Minnesota, Morris. In brief, he’s another vocal proponent of critical thought, which is reason enough to add my low-value micro-vote to his swelling Page-rank. I think it’s becoming increasingly clear from some of the articles and opinion pieces that Stephen and I have taken to linking to that critical thought is a rare commodity. See the UCD Coke fiasco from last year, the effects of which still haunt me; the Iranian religious dissident facing death; the whole John Gray thing (and I seriously mean that everything to do with John Gray is lacking in critical thought).

Stephen often has an edge over me in finding and analysing these sorts of stories since his study seems to give him a close working knowledge of the Middle East and America, the two centres of the degrading capacity for thought. Unfortunately, despite the necessary closeness of science and rationality — indeed science seems at times to be nothing more than a complex formalization of rationality — the study of science appears to have wholly removed philosophy. It could be that the philosophy of science is generally accepted without saying by scientific minds and that any further discussion merely detracts time from more important equation-solving, though that view doesn’t seem to fit very closely with the fact that many scientists still harbour rogue religious beliefs (I use the term rogue because I have never known them to be at all compatible with the scientist’s day-to-day view ofthe world). Whatever way, an appreciation for the intellectual basis for science seems largely overlooked in favour of pulling out a microscope. This is unfortunate, as I find the concept of the existence of a truth separate from human perception is often more intriguing than a deep exploration of what that truth is. The fact of its existence is more important than the details of its existence, at least after some minimum level of familiarity is achieved. I often find it more engaging to observe and lament other people’s lack of acceptance for the truth of science than to iron out finer and finer imperfections in its description as modern physics does.

The relationships between science and religion, between politics and religion, and between sociology and religion (alternatively, for religion read superstition) reach an interesting confluence when a population’s prevailing religious beliefs result in the application of immoral sanctions to right-thinking people. Whether this is a senator reprimanded by a colleague for omitting the ridiculous "under God" suffix from the US pledge of allegiance or a man facing death for questioning religious teachings it should be clear that a society that can punish rational enquiry or outright atheism is in need of reform.

I’ve always appreciated Stephen’s approach to such issues from a political mindset. I’ve taken every opportunity to approach them myself from a scientific mindset. It isn’t even clear whether there’s a significant differentiation to be made between these mindsets, besides a possible difference in cited examples — the politician finding human rights issues and the scientist finding frustration with popular superstitions of the kind that so irritate Richard Dawkins. The similarity is obvious when you consider the basis for politics and science, the aim of understanding and controlling our surroundings. Both require critical thought, education, self-motivation and scepticism. We would each prefer to learn, question and speak out than to wallow in the ignobility of ignorance and subservience.

Ultimately it appears that considered thought is limited to a small part of our society and we should take every opportunity not only to spread this most necessary of qualities but also to educate ourselves and learn from the most expressive of our own. Plus, you’ve got to love a guy who has a Godlessness category for his blog.