You meet a woman and ask how many children she has; she replies “two.” You ask if she has any boys, and she replies “yes”. What is the probability of the other child also being a boy?

There are no tricks here, it’s pure logic (assume a 50% chance for each gender). From The Skeptics’ Guide. The answer raises an interesting further question, which I’ll post in due course.

Bit tired, so this may make little sense, but I’m entertained by quotes from possible contenders for the Labour leadership. Alan Johnson, when asked if he will run for leader, says:

“There’s not a campaign team in place for anything, not deputy leader or leader. There’s no team in place,”

Which is a yes. John Reid, meanwhile, says he has:

“no personal ambition to attain any other high office”

Dude. I have ambition to be Prime Minister (not seriously, obviously). Doesn’t everybody? You’re a politician within striking distance, and you don’t want the job? I don’t believe you.

I just upgraded to the new version of the Democracy plugin that powers the poll in the sidebar, and in the process lost all existing votes. No problem, I thought - I’ve two separate daily database backups, so extract the sql and re-insert it manually.

Or, you know, not.

My first port of call was BackupMyBlog.com, which I set up in May. In theory, it uses locally hosted .php files to backup the mysql database every night. They say that locally storing the .php files means they never have access to the database passwords. I don’t have enough php knowledge to know whether that’s true, but it seemed useful and trustworthy enough to be worth the risk. I checked a couple of weeks after setting it up and it seemed to be working fine, even if it never actually sent the promised weekly email reports, nor formatted the RSS feed properly. But, when I went to download the latest file just now I was shown a message saying:

Backup of your account has been disabled because the backup client was not found on your blog server.

Damn! It hadn’t backed up since June, nor emailed to let me know, which sucks. The php files were actually still in place, so I reset their settings and it’s still not working, so I guess the whole site is broken.

Not to worry: I’ve another system. Used in conjunction with wp-cron, the built-in (or not) wp-backup plugin is set to automatically email a zip file to my gmail account every night. Except it seems that it inexplicably stopped working at the end of July, after chugging merrily along for months. I’d gotten so used to not even thinking about the emails that I didn’t notice them stop. This *might* coincide with the upgrade to Wordpress 2.0.4, thinking about it.

At least this happened with something relatively minor, and not a complete database loss. It still sucks utterly, however. I know it’s up to me to check that backups work properly, but I don’t think I was particularly lax in this case! I’ll post again when I’ve found another solution.

My sister let me know about the upcoming Stratford Writers Festival, which has a retro website. I particularly like the Contact Us page, which says:

For further information, including a timetable and booking form, please send a stamped, self-addressed envelope to[…]

A stamped, self-addressed envelope? I don’t think I’ve heard that phrase since early ’90s Blue Peter…How is this easier than just putting the info online? I don’t mean to poke fun at people who undoubtedly mean well, it just made me laugh

A vivid dream just before waking up this morning had my ex-girlfriend demanding we have a talk, then indicating her complete contempt for anything I had to say and being generally upsetting. I slowly came to consciousness and eventually realised I haven’t even seen, let alone spoken to her in well over a year. Thankfully. It took ages to get the argument and associated emotions out of my head, prone as I am to continuing such confrontations in the imaginary world where I’m articulate and eloquent in such situations. I guess it’s related to a lingering sense of unfinished business - does that ever go away? The world still seems slightly shifted; I think I’ll go dunk my head into a bucket of cold water.

I enjoyed that a lot Spoiler break…

Continue reading ‘Lost Finale - Season Two’

I was struggling with a friend’s laptop that refused point blank to even detect the wireless network I knew was up and running. It turns out that there’s a button on the laptop itself that needs to be pressed before wireless access is enabled. I guess it’s to save battery life, or something. XP doesn’t seem to know about it and continually reports no wireless networks detected by the built-in device, but everything springs to life once the button is pressed. New one on me.

After a very fast turnaround my non-murder mystery The Strange Case of the Disappearing Presents is up for sale at Kids’ Mysteries. Here’s the blurb:

The people of Spruce Valley were nervous. Two days of heavy snow had kept everybody inside their houses, as well as cutting off the town from the outside world. Nobody wanted a third snow day to spoil preparations for the Christmas celebration. Happily, the weather broke early on Christmas Eve morning, and snowplows began clearing the town’s streets even though the roads into and out of town were still clogged with snow.

People went about their business. There was much to catch up on! The festivities were to take place in the town square with its huge Christmas tree. Every year, Hamley-Schwarz, the largest toy shop in town, wraps 100 presents and arranges them beneath the tree. After carols and Christmas cookies, the much-loved Mayor Bailey, dresses as Santa and arrives on a sleigh, then hands out the presents to the town’s children.

By six o’clock everything was ready, and a soft snowfall welcomed the townsfolk to the beautifully decorated square. The town clock chimed six times, and the music began.

But behind the scenes is panic. Christine Cringle, the person in charge of the presents, has discovered that all of the presents have vanished! Only a small group of people knows about the theft, and it’s hoped that the case can be solved without having to cancel everything.

Everybody is a suspect, and Christine has asked a group of trustworthy citizens to quietly investigate the incident. Mayor Bailey is due to arrive at 7:30 and nobody wants to let him down.

How could this have happened? Who would be so cruel as to steal the children’s presents on Christmas Eve? It’s up to you to solve the mystery and save the Christmas celebration.

Like the others on the site, this lets ~25 children take part. Eight perform as characters with written answers to the questions asked by everybody else, who are designated as investigators. It’s not 100% my copy - when I’m done writing I hand it over to the owner of the site, who Americanises the dialogue a little and checks over the plot etc. - but is pretty close.

I’m just back from seeing Patrick Stewart in Romeo and Juliet. He wasn’t actually starring in the play, just sitting a few rows ahead of me - I liked the chinese whispers that went around the audience when he was spotted. I was there with Mum and Dad, and happily they both seemed to enjoy the play. I didn’t, really. Mainly, I think, because it was done in the classic Shakespearean style of over-acting. Emoting every word and shouting and yelling and crying loudly and…I just find it over the top and irritating. The comedic characters - the nurse particularly - were played as bumbling and dimwitted almost to the point of slapstick, which isn’t at all to my tastes, and even Romeo himself came across as a whining teenager. I also didn’t empathise with any of the characters, other than maybe Benvolio.

It’s odd that I was disappointed as I really like the play itself! Still, there’s always something to be gained from any performance, and the interpretation, if not really my cup of tea, was at least interesting. And I did see Patrick Stewart Coincidentally the Baz Luhrmann version of Romeo and Juliet arrived from my DVD rental club this weekend, so I’ll watch that and compare the two.

I was fascinated to see various actors from Much Ado About Nothing, which I saw a few weeks ago. I couldn’t imagine how you’d fit a schedule around actors starring in multiple performances occurring in the same month. Looking more closely at the programme reveals that in fact most of the actors are starring in the current performances of Much Ado, Romeo & Juliet and King John, but nothing else throughout the season. I guess that explains how the scheduling works, but it’s a hell of a workload!

The Flying Spaghetti Monster gets a mention in Richard Dawkins’ Newsnight interview from last Friday, in which he talks about his latest book: The God Delusion. Jeremy Paxman does a better job than most by asking some interesting questions, and I think the answers do a great deal to clarify the usual misconceptions about criticism of religion by atheists. The best Dawkins interview I’ve heard was on the Point of Inquiry podcast, where the humanist presenter raised the most reasonable counter-arguments I know of, and there was a genuine discussion between them.

Like Ophelia Benson, I didn’t know about richarddawkins.net - not sure how it managed to slip under the radar. I think it was launched a few months ago as a companion to his new book, as well as a front for the new foundation. I really like books with accompanying websites that provide responses to criticism as well as links to related material and reactions to recent events. The Freakonomics blog is a great example of this.

I picked up The God Delusion at the weekend¹ and it’s certainly an entertaining read thus far. The second chapter has some fascinating information on the religious proclivities of the USA’s founding fathers. I’m trying to take my time as I find I don’t absorb information when I read this kind of book too quickly. I read Blink on a single plane flight, and now find it’s all a muddle in my head. RD is at my local civic hall in a couple of weeks - I did a double-take when I first saw the newspaper ad - and I’m hoping to have finished the book by then. He’s being interviewed by David Freeman - anybody know who he is?

1. it’s rather a lot cheaper on Amazon! They seem to think it’s not released yet, mind [↩]

is one hell of a film. There’s also a running camera shot towards the end that’s just nuts. In recognition of this achievement, I have named Orange Monkey ‘Alfonso‘:

I saw the bbc article on 82ASK, a company who answer questions via text message, so figured I’d test them out. It took them nine minutes to get back to me with the chord sequence for the chorus of “I don’t feel like dancin’” - it’s DGACGD - so I guess I just paid somebody £1 to go to ultimate-guitar.com…Still, it’s an inspired business model, even if I can’t see myself using it very often. Other people had better questions According to the article they get most questions during the traditional time of pub quizzes. Amateurs. If you’re the kind of person who’s going to cheat, why cost yourself £1 each time when you can put Wikipedia on your iPod?

Modern, Cool Nerd
73 % Nerd, 52% Geek, 47% Dork

A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia.
A Geek is someone who is passionate about some particular area or subject, often an obscure or difficult one.
A Dork is someone who has difficulty with common social expectations/interactions
You scored better than half in Nerd and Geek, earning you the title of: Modern, Cool Nerd.

Nerds didn’t use to be cool, but in the 90’s that all changed. It used to be that, if you were a computer expert, you had to wear plaid or a pocket protector or suspenders or something that announced to the world that you couldn’t quite fit in. Not anymore. Now, the intelligent and geeky have eked out for themselves a modicum of respect at the very least, and “geek is chic.” The Modern, Cool Nerd is intelligent, knowledgable and always the person to call in a crisis (needing computer advice/an arcane bit of trivia knowledge). They are the one you want as your lifeline in Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (or the one up there, winning the million bucks)!

Congratulations!

THE NERD? GEEK? OR DORK? TEST

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I think my geek score would increase if they knew how much I edited the HTML to make it work on my site

I was thinking: you know what Bloggers4Labour needs? A dance routine! But who should take part? Obviously it would be bad form to nominate others and avoid it myself…and who else would be appropriate but #1 Labour Blogger Kerron? As a result of these deliberations, I present to you:

The unendorsed, completely unofficial B4L dance routine.

It’d liven up the conference, anyway…

(the site’s a little slow right now, but does load eventually)

Feb ‘07 Update: I’ve posted details of a way around this without changing email address. It’s a little fiddly, but should work…

—

I’ve been trying to trace a problem with emails not reaching one of my clients. Emails from the same sender would sometimes get through fine, but often bounce back after a few days. I eventually managed to get a look at one of the bounced emails, which was very helpful.

It turns out that Freeserve have managed to get some of their email servers blacklisted in spam databases. Any ISPs that operate even basic spam filtering check all incoming email against the SpamCop or SORBS databases, to see whether the originating server is registered as a spammer. If so, the email is rejected and a few days later the sender will receive an undelivered mail report.

Fyi, Freeserve = Wanadoo = Orange, but I’m going to use Freeserve because I keep mistyping ‘wanadoo’…

I did a little digging around, and unsurprisingly many people are having problems with this. It’s flared up in recent days, but there are reports of problems with the servers - I looked up 193.252.22.157 - as far back as January of this year. This isn’t the fault of the spam databases, nor is it difficult to get yourself removed from them. Freeserve seem to be entirely to blame.

This is a particularly annoying problem, as it must affect anybody with a Freeserve / Wanadoo / Orange account. It’s unreasonable to ask every ISP/email host in the world to make an exception / disable their spam filters because of this, although that’s what I’ve had to do in my client’s case.

According to the SpamCop information page, the Freeserve servers are commiting the cardinal sin of bouncing back external emails, which afaik is quite an easy thing to fix! Freeserve presumably have a number of email servers of which only some are blacklisted, explaining why emails sometimes get through and sometimes don’t. There doesn’t seem to be any way of specifying which server you want to use, however.

I always used to like Freeserve, but given the long-running nature and severity of this problem, I can only recommend that nobody create a new Freeserve/Wanadoo/Orange account, and anybody on their system move to a different ISP.