It’s just too funny. Don’t be offended, now. It’s a riff on the old…oh, never mind. Via Waxy.

Somehow I’ve ended up watching Judge John Deed for the last few weeks. It’s a weird show. The basic premise is: radical judge takes on authority, while looking handsome and bedding every woman in the legal profession. It’s the kind of programme where all wizened men and attractive women are entirely virtuous, all politicians are schemeing sociopaths, all company professionals are profit-obsessed liars, and all scientists are under the thumb of their employers, incompetent or incredibly arrogant and incapable of empathy (unless they’re actually correct, in which case they’re lone mavericks.) Although it annoys me a little, I don’t really object to any of that - it’s your standard, easy entertainment, and isn’t meant to be taken seriously. I do, however, take issue with the court cases, which are ripped straight from the headlines. Unfortunately, they’re the Daily Mail versions, and it’s just total tat.

Cases in the last few weeks have covered mobile phone masts, the MMR jab, and terminally-ill babies. This wouldn’t really matter, except for the mixture of fact and fiction, and completely bogus arguments.

• “You can’t prove phone masts do any harm.” was followed with “Well, you can’t prove they’re safe either” and everybody nodded sagely.
• Doctors wanted permission not to revive a baby that had been in a coma since birth, and had suffered twenty heart attacks since being born. The parents objected because “we asked God to take our child if He wanted him, and He didn’t.” The eponymous Judge then ruled that this was valid, as without faith we’d just have a “horrible empirical society”. Baby then miraculously came back to life, and all the doctors agreed it must have been divine intervention.
• MMR jabs were linked to all sorts of illnesses, including autism, but in this case the autism scientist was entirely honourable and it was every other scientist in the world under the pay of Incredibly Evil Pharmaceutical Companies, as opposed to the opposite situation in Real Life.

I guess I find it a bit tasteless, especially since these are quite important issues. Or maybe I’m just grumpy I guess if I were actually, you know, out on Friday evenings I wouldn’t have such a problem

Maybe I won’t go for that one.

If you had $100 to invest politically, where would it go?

I’d go with the British Humanist Association (which I just joined, but more about that in a later post.) What about you?

I’ve been thinking on and off about blog comments for a while now, particularly about whether there’ll ever be some clever way to track them. Currently I read many blogs and comment fairly frequently, but I have to remember to go back and check for replies. Goodness knows how many times I leave a comment and forget about it; I’ve been known to be halfway through reading a comment before realising I wrote it! It’d be great if there were some way of tracking comments and replies, but I’ve never been able to think of an easy solution.

The obvious answer would be some kind of ID system. The problem with this is that it would require:

• support from all the major blogging tools / websites
• an infrastructure that could cope with hundreds of requests per second, 24/7, plus graceful fallback¹ if everything breaks
• a centralized database with some kind of security so that the digg/slashdot crowd wouldn’t go completely mental over privacy issues

In short, I couldn’t see it happening. Then, earlier this week, somebody launched just such a comment-tracking service based on a completely different principle: coComment.

The idea is this: coComment give you a ‘button’ for your browser, which you click before you submit a comment on any website. Behind the scenes coComment intercept the text and figure out how the commenting system works. They then put all the information into a ‘Your Conversations’ page. You need only check this page to see all subsequent replies.

A major advantage of this system is that it’s up to coComment to support websites, not the other way around. Currently it works with Blogger, MSN Spaces, MySpaces, TypePad, Wordpress, Xanga, Flickr(!), Kaywa and Mojira, with Movable Type and Digg support on the way. That’s a pretty comprehensive list already, and covers the vast majority of comments I leave, I think. LiveJournal would be a good addition.

coComment are very web 2.0, naturally, and provide RSS feeds of all your replies, as well as javascript code to display x recent replies on your blog, or whatever. They certainly seem to have a decent attitude, and their blog is frequently updated.

I guess the major issues with this system are:

• Ease of use - the button has to Just Work. There’s already a (Firefox-only) script that detects compatible forms automatically, so that’ll help
• Speed - it needs to be fast. Too slow and I’ll get bored. Yeah, I’m fickle like that.
• Mistakes - there needs to be a way to manually add pages to the system, for those times I forget to click the button

Of course, the big question is, does it work? Well, since signing up on Tuesday, I’ve left a grand total of one comment anywhere, so can’t tell you. I’ll test it out some more and get back to you.

It’s not as simple as some overarching ID system, but I really like the idea. If it works properly, I’ll definitely use it.

1. not the right word…what do I mean? [↩]

I discovered this week that this Sunday is International Darwin Day, in celebration of the great man’s birthday. Events are being held worldwide, so this afternoon I was hunting for something to attend.

First there’s a British Humanists’ Association lecture in London by Susan Blackmore, chaired by Richard Dawkins. I’d love to go to this but, sadly, it’s sold out.

Then I spotted was a symposium at Birmingham University. It’s actually happening tomorrow instead of Sunday, but the guest speaker is NCSE staff member Nick Matzke, who wrote the “case for evolution” in the recent US court case in Dover, Pennsylvania, where Intelligent Design advocates were sent packing by a hero judge. There are various other biological talks. This sounded cool, so I looked at the application form to find out when and where it was, and it turns out you needed to have applied by 31st January.

Then there’s the Darwin Day celebrations in Shrewsbury. This includes a lecture by Richard Dawkins, on Sunday. Cool! I eagerly tried to book tickets for this, but it’s sold out too.

There are a couple of events dedicated to the life of Darwin, but I was more interested in the evolution and science side than the man himself. Looks like I’ve left it all too late; I wish I’d found out about it earlier. Damn!

I have an ever-growing list of blog posts half-completed on brain-paper, but they’ll have to wait until tomorrow. Sorry for lack of blogging, I’ve had an exhausting couple of days working on various computers, and am determined to get into bed at a reasonable hour¹ tonight!

I just cooked a meal for Mum, the first time I’ve done that in the flat, and it didn’t actually turn out too badly. Sure the smoke alarm went off (again) but that was only because of all the smoke. I can’t be bothered to wash up, so that’ll have to wait until tomorrow too
I picked up the second episode of The IT Crowd over BitTorrent (watch out for NSFW banner-ads) after stupidly missing it on Friday, so my plan is to watch that and then collapse into bed.

Night!

1. ie. before 0100 [↩]

In the continuing absence of Google Calendar, I’ve today been playing around with 30 Boxes, a brand new online calendar service that launched on Sunday. It’s very swish. Three immediate advantages over other services:

• It’s fast
• It opens straight to your calendar without requiring logins every time
• It works with Opera¹

First impressions are good. The signup procedure was an email verification, and after that I was immediately into the main calendar screen. This appeals too - the layout is tidy and clean. Moving the mouse over any calendar items provides more detail.

I particularly like the entry method. If you type ‘chat with monkeys thursday 10:30′, it figures out what you mean and inserts it straight into the calendar without requiring a page refresh. You can use more standard Outlook-style entry methods too, but the text-based system is surprisingly powerful. Their examples are “lunch thursday 1pm” and “meeting 1/19 2-3pm repeat weekly (bring laptop)”. 30 Boxes also supports tagging a la Flickr, so you could add “tag work” onto the end of that, and it seems fairly easy to highlight all items under a particular tag.

What else…If you add your Flickr / Livejournal / any RSS feed details then any photos/posts from that day will be shown under the detailed day view - not on the main page. There’s also built in social-networking, so any friends on the system can choose to share elements of their diaries².

Annoyingly, 30 Boxes is exactly what I’ve been looking for. It’s a fast calendar that opens itself, sits in its own tab in Opera, shows me all the information I need, and Just Works. Google Calendar’s going to need to be nearly this good for me to switch (I say nearly because contact synching with Gmail will be a large temptation.)

What would improve it? The only quibble I have is that the clever text-based entry form expects its dates in US format. Although I personally think that month/day makes more sense than day/month³ the UK system is so ingrained I’d likely get it wrong every time. A option to change this would be appreciated.

I’d also like to be able to import existing Outlook data, but that’s not too big a deal since it mainly consists of birthdays. If they add contacts, I’ll be a very happy bunny! The only downside I can see is that, completely understandably, there’s no sync with Outlook like (the slow and awkward) Plaxo, so it’s unlikely to appeal to anybody entrenched in that system. Also there’s the continual issue with web-based applications: if the site goes down, you’re scuppered. They do offer iCal and CSV exports, however, and a pleasant feature would be a daily backup email of one of these.

If you’re in the market for a decent calendar, I’d recommend you take a look. I’m certainly impressed. Oh, did I mention it’s really fast?

1. probably, anyway - I don’t know whether it’s officially supported, but it works so far! [↩]
2. My ‘buddy page’ is here, if you want to try out the sharing features [↩]
3. and boy does this get me insulted if I bring it up. Sorting anything paper-based by date is far easier and faster if the month comes first [↩]

I have a hyacinth sitting on top of the tv, and I can hear it growing. The buds are pulling free of their, um, green protective shoot things, and the creaks are audible as they do so. Cool!

This plant comes with a small instruction tab, which reads ‘keep top layer of soil damp’. That is the best direction I’ve ever heard, plant-wise. I can do that! ‘Water regularly’ and ‘do not overwater’ have always been completely useless

Christopher Hitchens takes on the cartoon affair in a brilliant column. I kept picking out bits to quote, until I realised I wanted to copy and paste the whole thing.

So, these cartoons. I went off on one the other day and don’t intend to repeat myself, but here’s how I see the issues falling:

Why did the newspapers re-print the cartoons? Was it in response to something specific, or was it just to piss people off? If the latter, then they deserve to be criticised. If the former, why hasn’t that been revealed?

The rights and wrongs of the re-print, though, seem to have become all mixed up with freedom of speech. Somebody on television phrased his point nicely: “freedom of speech, yes, but not for religion”. The Vatican weighed in with the same thought:

The freedom of thought and expression, confirmed in the Declaration of Human Rights, can not include the right to offend religious feelings of the faithful. That principle obviously applies to any religion

I see that as dangerous nonsense. You can’t give religion special treatment for no reason, and the violent reactions to cartoons (even though it’s by a militant minority) show why this shouldn’t be the case - some people just do not act reasonably when their unjustifiable beliefs are involved.

I also find it rather strange that no UK newspapers have printed the cartoons. It would be entirely reasonable of them to do so, since people will want to know what all the fuss is about. Every blog in the world is linking to the (now locked down) Wikipedia entries, after all. The intent wouldn’t be to offend, but to inform, so there shouldn’t be a problem - surely that’s what freedom of speech means? Just because some people would decide to be offended shouldn’t matter.

Speaking of which, one blog (can’t remember which, now) pointed towards the increasingly creepy redefinitions of ‘respect’ and ‘offense’. I’ve avoided using the word ‘respect’ for the past couple of years or so because I think its definition is too fuzzy. I know people who think that ‘respecting’ other people’s opinions means you shouldn’t argue with them. I simply don’t know what ‘respect’ means, so I use other words instead. As for ‘offence’, it’s like Stephen Fry said:

So you’re offended. So fucking what?

Pickled Politics points to the reactions of non-crazy Muslim bloggers. Pharyngula makes some very good points, and says what I’d like to say, only better. Butterflies and Wheels is similarly clear. And I think the final word should go to Skuds, who points out that the cartoons weren’t even all that funny.

Not content with attacking evolution, creationists are now turning their attention to astronomy. Bad Astronomy has an excellent write-up, but I’ll paraphrase here.

The New York Times reports that a NASA public affairs official, appointed directly by the Bush administration, wrote the following:

In October, for example, George Deutsch, a presidential appointee in NASA headquarters, told a Web designer working for the agency to add the word “theory” after every mention of the Big Bang, according to an e-mail message from Mr. Deutsch that another NASA employee forwarded to The Times.

…

In October 2005, Mr. Deutsch sent an e-mail message to Flint Wild, a NASA contractor working on a set of Web presentations about Einstein for middle-school students. The message said the word “theory” needed to be added after every mention of the Big Bang.

The Big Bang is “not proven fact; it is opinion,” Mr. Deutsch wrote, adding, “It is not NASA’s place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator.”

It’s the same old nonsense about the definition of ‘theory’. And this is likely to cause uproar, because this is a religious agenda directly interfering with a scientific body. And, again, the main aim is to alter education.

The Big Bang¹ is also most definitely not “opinion”. There’s a very large body of evidence supporting it, and no other reasonable explanation. The only other contender, steady-state theory, has fallen by the wayside because predictions from BBT have been shown to be accurate.²

I suspect that creationists will have more of a struggle attacking astronomy, and that’s why it’s remained unmolested for so long. 1% of the static on an untuned television is directly caused by the afterglow of the Big Bang - the microwave background radiation originally attributed to pigeon droppings. The presence of this radiation was predicted thirty years before its discovery, and it’s the kind of accessible fact that newspapers love to print. Creationists may have a hard time getting around that with ‘god did it’. But then I continually underestimate their skill at manipulating language, so what do I know

1. or, as the more enlightened know it, the Horrendous Space Kablooie [↩]
2. sentence edited as it didn’t make sense [↩]

Just back from a local dance club’s Winter Ball at Stratford Civic Hall, and I had a great time. I even entered a competition! Didn’t win anything, but it was good fun nevertheless Nod took some photos of Lynsey and I dancing, which is interesting as I’ve never seen any footage or photos of us before. I’ll write up the evening properly, but right now I’m wondering what on earth warranted this expression:

It reminds me of Superman tv shows where he’d surreptitiously avert crises with his x-ray vision while nobody was looking…Sadly, I wasn’t doing that. Ideas on a postcard, please.

If you were wondering, that is indeed a bow tie.

I’d been wondering about online backups recently. My current backup system involves a complete hard drive replication onto an external drive. This is fine for your average HD crash, but if the flat is burgled / catches fire I’m screwed. Sending a copy of all files to some server in a fire-controlled room in the USA has always seemed like a good idea, but the sheer amount of data involved has always made it seem impossible. I have ~100GB on my hard drive, and at 256k upload speeds, this would take around 60 days to transfer. Even if I cut this down to just photos etc, that’s still a major amount of data. Last time I really looked at online backups was a year ago, and there wasn’t anything that could

This year things are different. My emails are all stored on Gmail. Assuming Google don’t go under, I can be pretty sure that’s safe. All my music is backed up onto my iPod, which is almost always with me. The iPod also has reduced-res versions of all my photographs, and high-res versions of all the best are stored on Flickr. If the worst happens then I don’t mind being stuck with smaller versions of my photos, so that’s 50gb of data I don’t have to worry about backing up remotely. So what’s left that I’d be upset to lose?

• Pre-Gmail emails
• Business documents, letters, invoices etc.
• Outlook calendar and contacts data
• The occasional short story or other creation
• Microsoft Money financial data

I realised that they take up very little space, so I could start thinking about the data it would be a shame to lose, which include:

• Strange little short films I’ve made over the years
• Personal documents from the last fifteen years, including random notes, ideas, letters and large amounts of school and coursework.
• Settings files for various applications that require large amounts of configuration
• Save games from computer games

Of the above, the short films are all that need some processing for online backup. The uncompressed files are much too large, but I’m happy with an mpeg or similar. The total amount of data was small enough to make online storage feasible, so I started looking for the best solution.

There were various options¹, and most of them involved a small monthly fee for x amount of space and bandwidth transfer. I was happy with this - $10 a month is more than reasonable for that kind of service, I think. I’d have to set up an automatic backup to happen overnight one day a week, or something. It would take a while, and would eat into my monthly broadband bandwidth allowance. Hmmm, this was going to be a fair bit of work to get set up smoothly.

Enter Mozy.

Mozy have recently started offering their services as an online backup system. They differ from other services in that they’re tailored for backups rather than remote storage and access. They provide you with a small program which performs one full backup, and from then runs in the background and compares remote and local files, only uploading those which have changed - a differential backup. This saves vastly on both time and bandwidth for me, since much of my data is static.

The deal is that you get 1gb of space for free, in return for advertising emails from their sponsors. This can be upped to 2gb if you provide more personalised information. You’re also only allowed 4 ‘restores’ per month, presumably because they don’t want to be used as an online file repository.

I set up an account on Monday, downloaded the software, and set about configuring it. After scanning your drive for likely files you’ll want to include, the first question it asks is whether you’d like Mozy to secure your data with their own 448-bit encryption key, or whether you’d like to set your own key. In the latter case you are warned that if you forget this key you’re ‘hosed’, which made me smile. I chose to use my own key. I then selected the folders and files which immediately sprang to mind, set the backup to happen automatically when the computer isn’t being used (you can configure a specific time and schedule, if you like), and went to bed.

Unfortunately, the backup hit a snag 200mb into the transfer and stopped. I don’t know whether this was just a communications blip or something else, but I started it going again before I went out for the day. When I returned 540mb of data had been transferred (it must compress it before transfer, I guess) and Mozy was happily displaying its ‘backup complete’ message. Since then I’ve run it a couple of times, with transfers of 20mb or so, much of which is my iTunes music library XML file, which changes on a daily basis.

I’m impressed with both the software and the idea behind it. The main issue, I suppose, is whether I can trust Mozy. Who’s to say that they’re not lying about encrypting the data, and will sell it on to whoever they like if they run out of money? I tend to think that’s just paranoia talking. There’s no less reason to trust them than any of the other online storage companies, and various satisfied customers of Mozy can be found by googling. What happens if they go under? Well, my data will be sitting on a hard drive somewhere. Again, the chances of this data then falling into the hands of somebody who would use it for underhand schemes are remote. I imagine privacy nutjobs will stay well clear, but personally I see no other choice than to take this (imho, very small) risk, in return for the peace of mind of having my data backed up.

I haven’t yet had any advertising emails, and these are related to my only other worry: that their business model is open to abuse. If I wanted I could easily filter out any emails from Mozy and not bother looking at them. I won’t do that, as I don’t think that’s fair. I think it’s unlikely they’ll tempt me to buy anything, but Mozy are providing me with a free service and I’m happy to spend thirty seconds looking at an email in return for it. I imagine there’ll be a fair number of people, however, who will set up a filter and not bother. For this reason I’d actually be happier to pay for the service, and if they set up some kind of non-advertising but $5/month option I’d happily switch over to that, if it helped ensure their continued existence! But maybe that’s just unwarranted skepticism on my part.

Any other problems? Well, their software took a good few minutes to scan for files and I had to wait for it to finish before I could start configuring; it would be nice to have the option of skipping this, since I selected all my files manually anyway. I’ve had a couple of dropouts during large transfers and then had to restart manually, so a ‘retry after x minutes on fail’ would be helpful. Also, the display of how much data remains to be uploaded isn’t clear, and the time remaining is a little temperamental. The software is in beta, however, so I’m sure this is the kind of thing they’re looking at.

All in all, I’m impressed.

1. There’s a comprehensive review of online storage providers here, although without any focus on backup particularly. [↩]

For Googlers, since I had terrible trouble finding this. Information originally from here.

How to set Outlook to always reply in plain text, regardless of the original email format:

In Outlook, click Tools -> Options
In the Preferences panel, click “E-mail Options”
Tick the boxes for “Read all standard mail in plain text” and “Read all digitally signed mail in plain text”
Click OK

The above instructions work for Outlook 2003 - the link has instructions for other versions. It requires that emails are always read in plain text, but it’s the only method I can find that doesn’t macros, weird HTML stripping programs or reconfiguration for every email.

I looked at that options panel at last twice while trying to figure it out, not sure how I missed it!