Month: February 2005

You’re not really a blogger until you’ve posted a recipe. And a cat picture. Since I don’t have a cat—and the other option is to sneak around my neighbours’ gardens with a digital camera, some clunky lighting equipment and a handful of dead mice—I’ll have to give that a miss. As for the recipe, I don’t think I’ve yet reached the peak of my culinary potential so I’ll give that a miss too, making this post entirely useless but for ("what’s a buttfor?", "for pooping, silly") the all-important link.

Revisiting two recent posts, IE7 and Religion as Software: what role does Internet Explorer 7 play in the religion as software analogy? After throwing it about a bit it has occured to me that a comparison with the Reformation fits reasonably well. Firefox has nailed its 95 theses (make that 101) to the door of the cathedral and Pope Bill III has decided to stop selling indulgences (and start selling security). The Reformation (eventually) led to the possibility of a whole host of religious freedoms in Europe; the Open Source Reformation will lead to interoperable file formats that will then give us true platform independence and therefore, crucially, choice. How long before Microsoft Word supports the Open Office XML format?

I’ve just put up a page on the DIT juggling society website about the Dublin Juggling Convention 2005. It’s on at the beginning of March, Friday the 4^th to Sunday the 6^th. It promises all the usual goodness: workshops, fire show, Renegade show (which I’ve been capitalising; should I have been?) All for the low low price of just €15.

It seems a man by the name of Ryan Air is the most popular man in Ireland, at least according to Google’s new zeitgeist for Ireland.

Occassionally when I drop a skittle on the floor when at the computer I’m tempted to leave it there. They’re very hard to find, particularly the purple ones. Maybe I should just let them pile up there for a week or two and then go find them in bulk.

In the words of WWE‘s Jim "JR" Ross we have some huge news for you ladies and gentlemen. In common with the news we usually get out of Good Ol’ JR this news isn’t actually particularly huge, nor is it at this stage particularly new (I was away from my blog feeds most of the day so I’m only reading about this now).

It seems the fact that over 25 million people have downloaded Firefox in less than 100 days since 1.0 was released has pushed Microsoft to release Internet Explorer 7 sooner than they had planned. The old plan was to release the next version of IE as part of Longhorn, no sooner than 2006. It seems the current plan of releasing a beta this summer will push that forwards by at least a few months (even if Longhorn isn’t delayed; who’ll give me odds on that happening?) Equally importantly the beta (and therefore the final release) will work on Windows XP. On a side note it seems that all the most visible aspects of Longhorn are either now planned for some sort of XP release (IE, Avalon) or shelved altogether (WinFS).

Since Microsoft always refuses to comment on features in development we don’t know if they’ve fixed any of the most frequently annoying bugs that they’ve been spamed about on their IE team blog since it launched. I’m thinking of support for things like PNG alpha transparency, position: fixed, and display: table and its kin.

The best sources on this, from Firefox’s perspective, are Asa and Blake; they seem to have all of the major sources linked.

There’s been a thought bouncing around in my head for the last few days, patiently waiting for me to get around to properly formulating it into some idea that other people might understand. Since I don’t anticipate that I’ll ever actually write something coherent I’m just going to throw it onto the page in whatever form it takes and hope that it’s understandable. Like vomitting alphabet soup, only without the rank odour.

Essentially the thought is this: I’ve been comparing software to religion and, in particular, open-source to atheism. Most importantly at this point I should point out that the only reason in this analogy that open-source is atheism is that those happen to be the aspects of these two fields that I support. It’s nothing, so far as I can see, to do with Godless communism.

Here’s my take on open-source: I support it, I want it to succeed, and I think that the world wouldn’t be a bad place if all software was open-source. I aknowledge the improbability of this, so I take heart in the fact that real competition in software tends to create an environment where open-source can thrive. When Microsoft controls most of the office productivity software, with Word as the de facto standard, it creates difficulties for Open Office and other packages. They have to work harder just to work at all. When most people use Internet Explorer to browse the Web, and consequently many websites only work with that browser, it makes it harder for other browsers to compete. When there’s competition, from Firefox, from Opera, from Safari, developers are forced (eventually) to code to standards. Imagine the number-two browser right now was Opera instead of Firefox, so the market was still controlled by closed-source prorietary software vendors. Wouldn’t it still be creating a better environment for the open-source browsers?

So that’s where religion comes in. I’m finally coming around to the idea that it’s not the religion that’s bad, it’s the monopoly. Fundamentalist Christianity holds a monopoly on American religion; Catholicism has the same thing here. If that monopoly was to be diminished somehow, by atheism or otherwise, it would be good for atheists. When people have to live and work with people of different or opposing faiths, it’s not a huge leap—or indeed any leap at all—to start behaving themselves in the presence of people without faith too.

Because James Ben seems to be very keen on getting this Google bomb up to the top spot, and because I hate pseudoscience as much as the next man (unless the next man is PZ Meyers or Richard Dawkins, in which case I may not hate it quite as much but only because I haven’t had as long a run up as either of them) I bring you Penta Water, or at least the Guardian’s Bad Science take on it.

I noticed during my endless window-staring on the cursed 84x in to college this morning that a few of the shops I passed were closed. There weren’t that many, but seeing as it was about 10 o’clock on a Wednesday morning I was surprised to see any shops closed. You have to wonder why their proprietors chose not to open up this morning. Of course I didn’t wonder, because the reason was immediately apparent from the fact that all of these mysteriously-closed establishments were off-licences. Ash Wednesday. One of the (thankfully) few days left in this country when it becomes okay for the Catholic majority to opress the rest of us.

Last time I checked—which was, incidentally, just a few moments ago at the census website—over 11 percent of the population of Ireland was composed of non-Catholics. Maybe I should be thankful I’m still allowed to eat meat (note to Catholics: fish is meat).

I have four installations of Firefox—one each on Windows and Linux in college and at home—each with slightly different settings, extensions, and bookmarks. None of them (until just a few seconds ago) had a bookmark for the posting page for SoylentRed. This may be part of the reason for my infrequent posting. Alternatively it may just be a symptom.