Os’s Blog

Abandon your kids, meet the Pope

This is not going to be a popular opinion, however…

Frankly, I’ve had enough of the parents of Madeleine McCann. Firstly they abandon their children while they go to eat (checking in every hour hardly qualifies them for parents of the year), three year old Madeleine is abducted and hasn’t been seen since.

In other words, it’s an everyday story of really stupid parents, with some poor kid getting the worst of it. But, judging by the coverage in the media anyone would think that their parents are the second coming of jebus and shining examples of piety and good parenting.

Now, they’ve met the Pope, presumably in some way to get more leverage over their invisible sky-pixie in finding their daughter, the self-same invisible sky-pixie who let their daughter be abducted in the first place. Their non-existent sky-pixie to boot.

Don’t get me wrong, in no way would I want anyone to go through the agony of losing a child in this way, but I’ve seen precious little comment about just how irresponsible these two were in leaving their kids alone, in a hotel with creche facilities which they chose not to use, while they went out to eat.

I really hope the kid is found alive and well, though the longer this goes on the less likely this is, if similar past events are any guide.

As to her parents, life sometimes teaches you very hard lessons, and they need to learn from this one.

Post Category: Rants

1 comment June 1st, 2007 at 03:22pmOs

Wikipedia Roulette – Fun for, well, the bored

I like wikipedia, it has its fault – many of them – but on the whole it’s more accurate than not.

One game I like to play with it is to use the random article facility to find an entry that I personally find interesting within five ‘moves’.

Here’s a few typical sessions:

Move 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orgrimmar

I occasionally play World of Warcraft, so that’s a hit on the first go.

New game move 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_in_Singapore

Nope, not interested in that.

Move 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icon_%28album%29

Not a fan of Asia (the band), so another click.

Move 3: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicole_Ohlde

Basketball? No thanks.

Move 4: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangramanjeshwar

A small town in India, not my cup of tea.

Move 5: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Brooke

Not particularly interested in Irish authors, either. So this game was a bust.

Last game for today move 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauritius_at_the_2004_Summer_Olympics

Erm, nope.

Move 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Southpaw

Baseball this time, next!

Move 3: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frans_de_Cort

19th century Flemish author? Non!

Move 4: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pass_Labs

High-end audio equipment, now I find that interesting.

I could play this game all night, but I won’t.

Post Category: Uncategorized

1 comment May 9th, 2007 at 08:03pmOs

Silverlight – Microsoft smacks me with the happy stick

I’ve been following what was WPF/E for a while now, and I have been expecting some kind of CLR implementation to be added to it. But holy shit, Microsoft didn’t just put in some half-hearted brains-kicked-out CLR for basic programmability, they put in the entire bloody thing – and threw in most of the .net framework API with it – and have called it Silverlight.

A lot of people are creaming their jeans over this, out there in blog land (I refuse to use the word ‘blogosphere’, because, frankly, it makes me want to hurt people in interesting ways), and I can understand why – Microsoft have got it right on the money.

Of course, Adobe (nee Macromedia) got there first with Flash, and by more than a few months. Flash has been synonymous with web-based interactivity for years now, and it does it very well, is ubiquitous and has a large developer network behind it – and yet, even though I’m currently writing a heavily interactive web application, I don’t want to learn it.

Call me a lazy programmer (and I am) but I just don’t want to leave the happy confines of Visual Studio when I’m coding, and I don’t want to learn yet another language. In the brief forays into playing with Flash to fix something, I was dropped into an unfamiliar world of timelines and Actionscript that I really didn’t want to be in.

But with Silverlight, Microsoft will let me write everything within Visual Studio (with journeys into Blend to work on the UI side of things, but that is what designers are for), code everything in good ol’ C# and do all the debugging in VS too.

Don’t underestimate the power of being able to work in Visual Studio, it is by far the most productive coding environment I have ever used, the framework helps rather than hinders (they learned from the mish-mash that is the Java library, and the OO abortion that is MFC), and in the ‘Orcas’ release they’re adding language features like Linq that aren’t just syntactic sugar, but real productivity boosts (I’m lazy, remember, I don’t want to spend my time writing crufty code to do all the boring things).

So, is Silverlight a flash killer, and have Microsoft ‘rebooted the web‘? Well, no and no. Flash is pretty much entrenched and I’m sure Adobe will have something up its sleeve, plus all those Mac-heads in designerland won’t be moving to Windows-only developer tools any time soon.

But I’ll soon be able to write lovely interactive websites, that I don’t have to sell my soul to the JavaScript devil to do, in a language and with tools I’m already familiar with – and that, in itself, makes it worth the price of admission.

Post Category: Technical

May 5th, 2007 at 01:42pmOs

Prediction: Global warming not as bad as they’re telling you

The whole global warming panic has just never felt right to me. It is a matter of historic fact the Earth has been both much warmer and much cooler than it is now – in the past 1,000 years alone we’ve had both the little ice age and the medieval warm period. I’m not wholly convinced by the more extreme climate theories that claim that there could be a catastrophic 4 – 5 degree Celsius temperature increase in the next 100 years, causing the ice-caps to melt and a whole barrel of horrors to be unleashed. In fact, I’m far more inclined to believe there will be a 1 – 1.5 degree Celsius temperature increase, largely caused by wholly natural events; no meltdown, no catastrophes, no need to panic. However, we will have been forced to pay billions in so-called ‘green’ taxes to offset our carbon usage.

But, since guessing the temperature 100 years hence isn’t much of a testable prediction, I’ll make one now: the 2007 hurricane season will not be noticeably worse than preceding years. I’m not entirely on new ground here, since the predicted 2006 hurricanes failed to materialise, even after post-Katrina warnings of doom.

I’m not a scientist, nor do I play one on TV, but I am a fan of science and feel that it is being used increasingly as a political bludgeon instead of a tool to learn the truth of things.

So, if there is a lack of major hurricanes this year, try to remember not all the claims of upcoming climate doom are going to be correct and, sometimes, they’re going to be wrong. Not just about hurricanes, but about other things as well.

Of course if Florida is flattened by several category six’s, then it serves you right to listen to some non-scientist’s blog.

[I’m not in the pay of petrochemical corporations, though if Shell would like to give me a few hundred litres of V-Power, I’d be grateful]

Post Category: Science

April 8th, 2007 at 07:01pmOs

Happy 50th, The Sky At Night

The Sky at Night is celebrating its 50th year on television, in all but one case presented by Sir Patrick Moore (caused by food poisoning by a rogue duck egg).

This low-budget monthly programme has introduced millions of people to the wonders of astronomy, the only ‘big’ science in which amateurs still play a major role, and I’m a huge fan.

Back as a callow youth, I basically thought I had three career paths in front of me, electronics, computers or astronomy; in the end computing won but I’m still hugely interested in astronomy (and all science in general). I don’t, however, own a telescope for the simple reason I live in a severely light-polluted town and I’d be lucky to see the moon let alone anything fainter. However I still try to see as many episodes as I can, even given the frequently-absurd times they are shown (they have been edging closer to 2am recently).

I cannot understate the importance Sir Patrick plays in both the show and my continued interest in it, although he decries that it’s the interesting material that keeps people viewing – in part he’s perfectly correct – but I also admire the man personally. He’s one of the few remaining great British eccentrics but he is also knowledgeable, witty, self-effacing and curmudgeonly, and, let’s face it, he’s presented a monthly show for 50 years that has covered every astronomical subject imaginable, and still has far more to cover.

He is no longer a young man, but his mind is as quick as ever, and I’m proud to come out and say he’s one of my personal heroes, and although their numbers are dwindling, their influence will survive them for decades (and more!) to come.

So, happy 50th year, Sir Patrick and The Sky At Night.

Post Category: Science

April 2nd, 2007 at 02:22pmOs

Yet another ip to put into the firewall

202.83.212.236 has been hammering the blog posting comments, all caught by Akismet, naturally.

So now they're a new addition to the firewall.

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Will post something new soon, I'm just up to my proverbial eyeballs in it at the moment.

[Edit 30th April 2007]

Added 66.232.101.20 to the ever-growing list. I'll probably update this post with the most obnoxious and persistent spam-sewers. 

Post Category: Blogging,Technical

March 1st, 2007 at 01:00pmOs

An angsty atheist country music star? Is that even allowed?

I don’t like country music. I’m being up front and honest here but I can’t stand it, and my prejudiced ears ache whenever I hear those steel guitars sliding up and down and the southern drawl singing. To repeat something I heard years ago, everytime I hear country music I can feel myself become more stupid. It’s the musical equivalent of fingernails scraping down a blackboard.

If you asked me to sum up country music in words I’d say “god, america and apple pie”. Then while listening to podcasts of Penn Radio, a caller mentioned an atheist country star called Robbie Fulks.

I downloaded a few of his songs, including one called “God Isn’t Real” which is a heartfelt song about the evident non-existence of any god, a viewpoint I completely share.

But it’s country music, with steel guitars.

I could feel myself become more stupid the longer I listened – even though they lyrics were intelligent and I actually agree with them.

However, I am pleased that there’s an out-atheist in the country music scene, statistically there should be lots of them but like being an atheist politician, being an atheist country musician is probably seen as a bad career choice.

More power to him, I hope he does some good, but it’s really not for me.

Post Category: Music

1 comment February 2nd, 2007 at 01:56pmOs

Bigots demand the right, in law, to remain bigoted

This is an interesting one, on many fronts. The Catholic Church is demanding exemption from anti-discrimination laws so their adoption agencies aren’t forced to allow homosexual couples to adopt. They say it is against their beliefs to adopt children with homosexuals, and since the Bible is pretty consistent with its disdain for gays, I can’t argue with them on that one.

However, there is quite a telling phrase from the Archbishop of Canterbury (Anglican, not Catholic) “rights of conscience cannot be made subject to legislation, however well-meaning.”

Hang on a minute, rights of conscience are always being legislated against, and in many cases it’s the religious community demanding the laws in the first place.

For example, there are laws against discriminating against women, different races, the handicapped and so on, yet I have met people who sincerely think black people are inferior and should be removed from the country, or that women should be barefoot and pregnant in the house looking after the kids, not working, or that the handicapped should be euthanised for the greater good. These people hold these views as a matter of conscience, yet they are prevented (as far as possible) from acting on those views by law.

There are also laws that discriminate against other groups in society, smokers, drinkers, drug users, criminals etc.

So what’s the difference? Why can you discriminate against one group of people and not others? It’s simple – women, the handicapped, homosexuals and different races have no choice in what they are! You don’t choose to be a woman, or black, or gay; you choose to take drugs, or smoke, or steal cars. Discrimination against people over that which they have no control of, and in no way effects what they’re trying to do is wrong.

But, some may argue, colour-blind people aren’t allowed to become pilots, and they have no choice over that, but they are stopped from being pilots because they couldn’t do their job; similarly gay couples should be disqualified from being adoptive parents because, by their definition, gay people can’t be good parents.

The trouble with that argument is there really isn’t any good evidence to show that gay couples are inherently bad parents, whereas a colour-blind pilot is a danger to themselves and others. There are plenty of single-parent families who are doing fine, and probably an equal number of couples in dysfunctional relationships causing far more harm, even though they meet the church-approved criteria.

So I propose this: anyone who is going to indoctrinate children in any religion should be prevented from become adoptive parents.

Religion is not something you’re born into, you choose your religion, or, in the overwhelming majority of cases, you are brainwashed into a religion based upon the beliefs of your parents. I view the latter as a form of child abuse, as does Richard Dawkins and espouses this view in his excellent book The God Delusion. Indoctrinatin children into believing that an invisible man in the sky is looking over their every action, and that other people who believe in different invisible men in the sky are evil (or at best, deeply misguided) and actively discourages critical thinking in later life. It’s that kind of power over children that the Jesuits used to lust after (“Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man.“), and, in another context, allows people to willingly blow themselves and others up in the name of some non-existent god.

Frankly, I view that as being much more damaging to a child’s future than what their adopted parents do in the bedroom.

Post Category: Politics,Rants

January 25th, 2007 at 02:51pmOs

I’m surprised…

According to this quiz:

And, as I have said before, I’m a hardcore atheist.

Nearly 20 years ago, after being goaded into it by some fundies I used to like arguing with, I read the Bible (King James version). Cover to cover.

It was the most grueling, uninteresting, unbelievable chore I have ever voluntarily endured. Some people see great poetry, some see the it as the ultimate form of the English language. I just found it to be an impenetrable mess of deliberately-obfuscated language designed to give the impression of great insight while in fact telling mediocre stories that a seven year old would find hard to swallow (much like Jonah’s fish).

Amazingly enough (indeed it surprised the fundies) I came out the other side as much of an atheist as I was before I started, if not slightly more contemptuous of those who actually believe that the guff presented as literally true.

I have also skimmed the Quran (like with the Bible, nothing there was remotely believable), and glanced at the Bhagavad Gita; as works of literary history they are valuable, but as works of history they are flawed at the very best.

Show me a quiz about football, however, and the score would be in single digits…

Post Category: Amusing,Personal

January 21st, 2007 at 08:22pmOs

Another one for the firewall

89.149.209.160 is another unremitting comment-spam-spewer. Just toss it in the firewall and forget it ever existed. If nothing else it will reduce the load on akismet.

Remember kids, comment spam is neither big nor clever, just say no, m’kay.

Post Category: Uncategorized

January 19th, 2007 at 01:44pmOs