Author: Rory

You know the way Douglas Adams—the author, for any hypothetical reader that wasn’t aware of this, of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy—was very strongly atheistic?

If you describe yourself as “Atheist,” some people will say, “Don’t you mean ‘Agnostic’?” I have to reply that I really do mean Atheist. I really do not believe that there is a god – in fact I am convinced that there is not a god (a subtle difference). I see not a shred of evidence to suggest that there is one. It’s easier to say that I am a radical Atheist, just to signal that I really mean it, have thought about it a great deal, and that it’s an opinion I hold seriously. It’s funny how many people are genuinely surprised to hear a view expressed so strongly.

Isn’t www.hitchhikersguide.org really ironic?.

I had a somewhat easier experience with Vivendi Universal Games than Stephen described. It was probably due to the fact that I had seen his struggle with them so I replaced my usual "your product doesn’t work as expected, I would like it if it did", with the much more effective:

The hoops you make us jump true to prove our legitimacy are bad enough when they work. They are utterly unacceptable when they fail. I expect to be issued with a new [CD] key immediately and I believe I have given you more than enough information to enable this to happen.

which got me a hole in one.

It’s 2:43 and I’m up removing craneflies from my bedroom. I don’t mean to belittle the hardships of others but these things are the worst enemies humankind will ever meet. The spindly-legged Satan-spawn were designed by a conglomerate of evil geniuses with the sole purpose of being as big a nuisance to humanity as you can imagine. It wasn’t a serpent that told Eve to eat the forbidden fruit, it was a daddy-long-legs. They act stupid while you’re awake, flying not only into windows – which I can accept; those things can’t be easy for an insect to see – but into walls too. But they’re not stupid. They wait until you fall asleep and then they finish their one true mission in this world, they cause you to wake up with a bad taste in your mouth and no cranefly in sight.

This particular fiend stole a magazine from me aswell. I clobbered it a few times with a Linux Format I had lying beside my bed (stop sniggering) until it couldn’t fly (hah! that’s what it wanted me to think). Then I ‘encouraged’ it onto the mag and slung it towards the wide-open window (it could find the open slit to get in but mysteriously dodged the gaping window I opened to get it out – like that Dutch navigator who missed Australia on his way from New Guinea to New Zealand). In my attempt to prevent it from flying back in I ended up dropping the magazine onto the roof below and the damn creature managed to climb back from the brink. They are resourceful little gits. But I had the last laugh, I made sure to kill it the second time round. Then I bitched about it on the Internet. And what sweeter revenge is there than that?

The inventor of VD cards, practitioner of disappearing blog magic and generally fun person to read – and apparent owner of two disembodied feet – Meg is almost back from wherever it is she’s been for the last however long it’s been. Which is probably a good thing. It’s nice to know that some people have lives. Gives you something to aspire to.

Yes, I’m continuing the ‘cool kids’ fixation I displayed in my last post. Susumi. I just wanted to draw attention, if it needs to be drawn, to my partial redesign. As with all things SoylentRed it was done on a whim and therefore almost certainly fails to meet any reasonable standard of quality. I don’t suppose it helps that many of my regularly visited blogs belong to professional designers who actually bring some effort and ability to their sites. Witness the recent redesigns of Mezzoblue and Stopdesign.

For anyone who’s interested, which I have a strong suspicion is in fact no-one at all, I have a new Atom feed. All of the cool kids have these – including Stephen, who I now remember asked me to explain what it is to him quite a few weeks ago. Well I’m not the kind of person to break a promise, even if the relevant party is out of the country and completely unaware that I’m now getting around to it. Keep in mind that of all the myriad pages talking about Atom, this may well turn out to be the least informative.

Atom is a syndication format, based on XML. That means that it consists of the content of (usually) a blog and very little extra fluff to tell the syndicator (thing that republishes the content elsewhere) or aggregator (thing that collects Atom "feeds" together for easy reading) what to do with the data. A reasonable impression can be got by looking at the source – just click on the Atom link in my navigation bar to see the source code, as my feed is so far unstyled. It starts with a little bit of info about this site – name, tagline, copywrite – then has a list of recent entries with similarly little information about them – permalink, author, content. It’s layed out as XML which means it’s easy to write a program that can parse it and manipulate it, since XML handling is pretty much ubiquitous these days. Like I said, all the cool kids are doing it.

So you hopefully get what it is now, but what’s it for? It’s for two things in theory, only one in practice I reckon. Atom (and other feed formats like RSS) is called a syndication format which would imply that it’s used to supply raw, or nearly raw, data to other publishers – without such extras as navigation, style, and other cruft – so that they can republish it themselves. Of course there’s nothing, short of copyright, stopping you from using it for this purpose but where Atom and its friends shine, and the reason they’re so popular with the cool kids, is aggregation. There are a range of programs available for grabbing these feeds from all sorts of sites and cramming them together for the user so they don’t have to waste time visiting sites individually. Some of these are web-based, you visit a single site and are presented with new entries from your favourite blogs; some are desktop-based, you start it up and it grabs all of your feeds like an email program. I’d recommend an aggregator except that I don’t use one so I don’t know what’s good. I assume there’s a pretty good open-source one available; there’s always a pretty good open-source program available.

In short, you have one more way to be semi-frequently bored by me. But faster.

I’m wavering close to the live-journal-esque trait of latching on to any passing meme with this post, saved only by the fact that Dunstan Orchard’s Two favourite posts idea doesn’t seem to have been adopted by anyone else (nor does it appear that it will since it’s now a month old, an age in these circles). The idea, simple but potentially interesting as many memes are, is to identify your favourite blog posts; one by yourself and one by someone else. The comment thread in Dunstan’s original post has some good ones, many comedic, some informative.

As for my own favourites, a pretty clear winner is Mark Pilgrim’s ‘The right ones in the right order’ and of my own writing the only one that comes close to being labeled decent is the recent (that rhymes and you know it rhymes) ‘Pharyngula’. Maybe that’s harsh. A run through most of my old posts (172 of them) turned up ‘Eircom Nicks Customers’, ‘Content with Content’ and the bizarre discussion that ensued after the embarassing ‘The Wonders of Being Single’.

I will try harder in future.

There’s a cool little scripting and PNG demo that Internet Explorer users will look at and say, "why doesn’t this page work?" (because Internet Explorer users don’t yet realise that they have only themselves to blame), but that Mozilla or Opera users will look at and say, "It works, but why did Rory send us here?" Such are the mysteries of the Universe.

A few years ago, after I first created a website by copying the HTML from a HTML folder on an Internet Explorer 4—infested Windows 95 machine (it was a BtVS site which never saw the light of day), but before I created a site about the only subject close enough to my heart to motivate me to continue — me — I read a personal site which formed — along with Aquarionics — the inspiration for this site. None of this is really important except that I wanted to tell you that it was this site that used the term "elseweb" for it’s external link list. Now I’m co-opting the word to describe all the stuff I do online that you don’t always hear about. It’s sort of an excuse you see, for not being here as often as you are.

You see that list of sites under the heading of ‘linkroll’? Not a nice name is it? I thought it sounded nicer than ‘blogroll’ which itself sounds too much like something used to sanitise the rear end after… desanitising it. Anyway that list features about half of the personal blogs that I read daily, or more than daily depending on how much it takes to keep up. Thanks to Aquarion’s new league table of commenters you can see that I’m in joined 37^th place (and joined 144^th place since I forgot to use my whole name once).

Not only that but at Pharyngula I’ve just finished a long debate withassault on a creationist, I’m just starting what promises to be a very long discussion with, surprisingly, not a creationist and I’m trying to help with and diagnose two software bugs that resulted in me getting no less than ten reply notifications for a single comment.

Outside of the blogosphere I’m trying to keep my Slashdot foes numbering fewer than my friends. I’m at eight and 16 respectively and I think that’s a fair difference. Thankfully my fans (five) outweigh my freaks (two) aswell (fans are people who mark me as a friend, freaks are people who mark me as a foe.) I have my display preferences set up so that I’m more likely to see my friends’ and my friends’ friends’ posts, I’m almost guaranteed to see my fans’ posts and I’m almost guaranteed not to see my foes’ or freaks’ posts. I’ve also given a huge bonus to new users for a reason that made sense at the time but I can’t remember what it was now.

My process for deciding on new friends is intricate. In essence I have to be convinced by the quality or content of one post to consider the possibility. Then I look at the poster’s history, specifically at the comments that I didn’t see because they were below my threshold but that I would have seen if the friend bonus was active. Then I decide whether or not I ould have liked to see those posts at the time. If I would have, they make the cut. Otherwise they’re forgotten. Of the people on the list right now, one is Wil Wheaton one is a member of the Mozilla Foundation, two others are well-regarded Open Source advocates, the rest just impressed me with wit, style or substance.

At Wikipedia I’ve been contributing to a few of the professional wrestling articles for the simple reason that pro wrestling doesn’t have a huge number of literate fans.

Also, big shout out to Mom, who walked past the door and said, "Are you blogging? Am I in it?"

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.