I just came across this impressive piece of corporate-speak:

 As a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, we at IRIS are committed to assisting you to achieve the transition from XP (or older operating systems) to Microsoft Vista when you are ready to make the move.

However we recognise that the launch also co-incides with the busiest time of year for many customers (self-assessment/ payroll year end). So we have decided to phase the introduction of Microsoft Vista compatibility into IRIS software over a period of some months to enable us to make this transition easier for you.

Aren’t they nice? They’ve seen that I’m doing other things, so they’re kindly ensuring their software won’t work with any new computer. It’ll be less hassle for me, you see - I won’t have to worry about setting it up, doing actual work, or anything.

I can’t help admiring the optimism, though.

It’s 0215 and I’m only just home after trying to fix my parents’ network for much of the evening. It has, to lapse into technical jargon for a moment, gone completely doolally. Their old router makes no sense at all, and a replacement seems to drop to 1/5th of its usual speed as soon as it gets an IP address from the cable modem. I’m hoping it’ll all become clear in the morning.

On the bright side, at this time of night my route home is full of bunnies who stand up and watch as I drive past. It’s like Watership Down, except not so frightening.

Last night I saw Darren Bennett and Lilia Kopylova demonstrate at a social dance. As well as both having won series of Strictly Come Dancing, they’re currently British Latin Dance Champions and are pretty much the best of the best in UK terms. I’ve decided I don’t like them much: they’re both too attractive, pleasant (my dance teachers know them and say they’re lovely) and good at what they do. It’s just not fair

Despite arriving early the tables around the dancefloor were all taken, so we took seats upstairs. At first this was disappointing, but it turned out to be a great position.

There was an hour and a half of social dancing before the demonstration. Lynsey and I went downstairs for the jive, and in the middle of the routine I felt my foot collide with someone’s calf and slide down to slam into their toe. The lady limped off the floor and was in some pain for five minutes, but was very gracious when I apologised - these things just happen sometimes, neither of us had actually make a mistake. I still felt terrible about it, though - I’ve never hurt anybody that much before! After that I tried a waltz, foxtrot and cha-cha, all of which were mini adventures due to the sheer number of people on the floor.

The demonstration started, and most people headed downstairs. Our vantage point above the dancefloor, however, provided a superb view and was excellent for taking photographs without background distractions. Darren and Lilia danced all five Latin dances - the samba, cha-cha, rumba, paso doble and jive - and were unsurprisingly excellent throughout. Lilia changed between each dance, during which time Darren took the microphone and kept everybody entertained. They’re married, and he spent plenty of time winding her up - she got her own back by taking the microphone and telling stories of people recognising her but not him.

I took a whole bunch of pictures, and was very happy with some of the results:

(shame about that left hand, mind). This is definitely my favourite shot:

How on Earth does she do that?

My autofocus struggled slightly, so in some of the pictures I’m hoping the pose makes up for the technical quality. I wish this had been sharp, for example:

Afterwards they spent a long time signing autographs and posing for pictures, so Lynsey took the opportunity - unfortunately I’d forgotten to change back to my wide-angle beforehand, so couldn’t fit Lilia in. At one point afterwards they both looked up and directly at me; it was rather surreal to have the full attention of two people I’d only ever seen on television - I had to quickly think of something to say!

There was another hour or so of blessedly injury-free dances before it finished. I definitely need to work on my floorcraft as I found navigating the busy floor very difficult, and crashed into people on a number of occasions. All good fun, though. Apparently they hold such dances every few months, although not always with such famous couples demonstrating.

There were a couple of technical points I wanted to mention about the photography:

Continue reading ‘Social dance with Darren & Lilia’

Finally:

David Cameron is set to back new laws to force Catholic adoption agencies to consider gay couples, the Tory leader revealed today.

The Conservative leader signalled his personal support for the new regulations but promised fellow Tory MPs a free vote on this issue, which he said was a matter of conscience.

His reasons are a little fuzzy,mind:

“I shall vote for the regulations, because I think it is right to have in this country clear rules against discrimination,” said Mr Cameron.

“On the issue of the Catholic adoption agencies, I don’t think personally that it is right to give them a block exemption from the law, because otherwise we will have other people wanting block exemptions from the law.”

Clever. He doesn’t actually make any comment on the validity of the exemptions other than in the broad sense. To be fair it’s possible he said more and it’s not reported here. What do you think to the chances of his party agreeing?

Mr Cameron’s frontbench colleague, David Davis, has already signalled his opposition to the proposals and said over the weekend he would “almost definitely” vote for an exemption to the Equality Act, for Catholic adoption agencies.

Not all that high, I suspect.

Radio 2’s record of the week is ‘Stay the night from ghosts’. I thought this was a pleasing phrase and a great title, then later found out it’s actually ‘Stay the night’ from ‘Ghosts’, which isn’t anything like so poetic. Still, I can now steal it without feeling guilty.

Apologies for the lack of blogging - I’m having a busy weekend. I had a wonderful day yesterday, which included seeing a great performance of Richard III in the company of somebody truly lovely, and this evening I’m off to see Darren and Lilia demonstrating at a social dance in Malvern. I’ve seen them twice before - at a social dance and Strictly - so we’re practically friends now

Happy Birthday to Opportunity, the Mars rover which landed safely three years ago today. I was sitting in a York car park when I heard the news, and had to cheer. Despite the design aim of 90 sols (Mars days), it’s still going 1000 sols later, and has travelled 6.1 miles. Brilliant. Far from becoming decrepid in its old age, it’s actually getting smarter due to software upgrades.

Is there anything cooler than space probes?

In TV news:

The BBC is to launch a reality series which will follow a group of children learning magic at a Harry Potter-style boarding school.

It sounds like a good idea, except modelling it after the deathtrap that is Hogwarts may not be wise. I’m terribly biased, but I think magic is a wonderful skill to learn. It’s great for building confidence, can be very satisfying, and has an inherent link with critical thinking. However:

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, which will air later this year, will show the children learning card tricks, Latin spells and illusions.

Latin spells? Like transubstantiation? Ick.

But enough of politics and religion. On to the important stuff. We all know the Eurovision Song Contest is a highlight of any year, being a sublime mix of camp, sarcastic commentary and ancient nationalistic grudges. What could possibly improve this?

A spin-off Eurovision Dance Contest!

This new international production consists of a ballroom, latin and freestyle dance competition between mixed couples.

We should so get Morrissey to enter. It’ll apparently be broadcast by the BBC on 1st September. Via Strictly Come Blogging.

The Progressive brings up something interesting regarding the adoption debate: where is David Cameron? The Conservative Party are notable by their absence. Fun as it is to make fun of David Cameron, he has been good at (at least appearing to) present reasonable arguments at times like these. Yet there was no mention of it at yesterday’s PMQs, and I’ve seen no official comment.

The blog points out that an Early Day Motion expressing concern over proposed exemptions has currently been signed by 101 Labour MPs, 19 Lib Dems and 1 Conservative. The MP in question is John Bercow, who has publicly expressed his support. The only other Tory comment I’ve heard was on the radio this morning, where the MP¹ said gay couples could go to different agencies if they wanted. Charming.

Given the Prime Minister’s apparent vulnerability in this area, the silence is telling.

(update: EDM link fixed)

1. I only heard a highlight, so don’t know who it was or which show. I’ll update if I can track it down. [↩]

I increasingly loathe Tiscali. I’ve been struggling with their email systems for literally years, with all sorts of different problems. Their website is also extremely frustrating to use and seems unable to deal with completely un-paranoid cookie settings, requiring multiple logins to navigate account information. There’s also their webmail system, which logs you out after fifteen minutes of inactivity¹. Typing an email = inactivity, and if take any longer than that to compose a message it’ll throw you out without any option to save.

Recently a friend of mine’s email address topped working. Emails to her bounced back with ‘unknown user’, and she could no longer login to webmail. She was still using Tiscali’s service, and her account was still fully active, working in other ways, and indicated the email address was still valid. At a loss, I emailed their support desk. I had a reply the next day giving me the standard troubleshooting regarding logging into webmail. I replied, emphasising the ‘unknown user’ error that suggested they had a problem with their system, and just received this:

I understand from your email that emails sent to [removed] are bounced back and you are facing logging problem in webmail. Also when trying to connect Outlook Express you get invalid username and password message.

Please ask the sender of the emails to check if he/she has blocked your email address, if found that it is not blocked than you need to report this fact to the Abuse Team at abuse@tiscali.co.uk.

Makes no sense. How would the sender blocking the email address result in a bounced message? And why would the abuse team care? I’m going to try to talk my friend into changing to a gmail account.

1. or thereabouts, it’s hard to find an exact number [↩]

A large organisation has today signalled its support for the Catholic Church in demanding exemptions from anti-discrimination legislation. Is it the NSPCC? Childline? Save the Children? Non-Catholic Adoption agencies? Perhaps a letter from a large group of philosophers, arguing for the inherent goodness of discriminating against somebody on the basis of their sexual orientation? Who would possibly want to be seen standing up for bigotry? It is of course the Church of England.

It’s all to do with ‘rights of conscience’, you see. Imagine if the fire brigade said they wanted to refuse employment to homosexuals - ‘freedom of conscience’ wouldn’t wash for a minute. There’s a petition on the Downing Street website asking the Prime Minister to implement legislation as it stands, without exemptions. I don’t know whether these kinds of petitions are all that useful, but I’ve signed it. Pass it around.

I was interested to see yesterday’s letter from Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor’s letter (thanks to Tom in the comments for finding a copy) as I wanted to know whether he attempted to justify his position. He did. The key paragraphs are:

We place significant emphasis on marriage, as it is from the personal union of a man and a woman that new life is born and it is within the loving context of such a relationship that a child can be welcomed and nurtured. Marital love involves an essential complementarity of male and female.

We recognise that some children, particularly those who have suffered abuse and neglect, may well benefit from placement with a single adoptive parent.

However, Catholic teaching about the foundations of family life, a teaching shared not only by other Christian Churches but also other faiths, means that Catholic adoption agencies would not be able to recruit and consider homosexual couples as potential adoptive parents.

I’m finding this strangely difficult to get my head around. Firstly, I think he’s saying that marriage is always preferable, but he doesn’t back this up with anything. Then he says marriage is always between a man and a woman because only a man and a woman can have a child, which doesn’t follow. That’s just an arbitrary definition; ‘two people who love each other’ would make more sense. It has the insidious implication that same-sex couples cannot love each other as much. He then says that sometimes it’s ok to put a child with a single parent, despite the lack of ‘marital love’. Finally there’s the ‘I think this because I think this’ argument, without any attempt at justification - why should we listen to ‘Catholic teaching about the foundations of family life’ if you can’t explain the reasonings behind it? I’m not in your club! As justifications go, it’s pretty pathetic.

The Archbishops of Canterbury and York today sent a letter supporting the Cardinal. It makes no attempt to justify bigotry, instead resorting to…well, let’s see.

Many in the voluntary sector are dedicated to public service because of the dictates of their conscience.

In legislating to protect and promote the rights of particular groups the government is faced with the delicate but important challenge of not thereby creating the conditions within which others feel their rights to have been ignored or sacrificed, or in which the dictates of personal conscience are put at risk.

The rights of conscience cannot be made subject to legislation, however well meaning.

Bullshit. Everybody acts according to the dictates of their conscience, but the problem is that people contradict each other. If somebody thinks it’s fine to murder people they don’t like, would the Archbishops argue for freedom of ‘conscience’ there? If not, why? How is it different? Presumably because there would be demonstrable harm that justifies taking action against them. Everybody would agree (including them, apparently) that unfair discrimination against homosexuals constitutes demonstrable harm, but their counter-arguments show no such evidence of harm to themselves. What would actually happen if Catholic adoption agencies gave children to same-sex couples? Who would suffer? The churches have provided no evidence at all that this would harm anybody, aside from baseless insinuations that children need the love of both a man and a woman. Even they don’t have the nerve to come out and say ‘it offends God’, because they’d be rightly ignored. Instead they come up with this ‘rights of conscience’ nonsense, which is just ‘I want to behave like I do because I just do’, and in this case is a thin veil for ‘I don’t like gay people’. There are no ‘rights of conscience’ - they made them up.

On numerous occasions in the past proper consideration has been given to the requirements of consciences alongside other considerations contributing to the common good, such as social need or human rights - the right, for example, of some doctors not to perform abortions, even though employed by the National Health Service.

So what? Mistakes would never be rectified if precedent were a valid argument. Good to see that human rights are at least something to be weighed against freedom of conscience, though, even if they lose out in the end.

It would be deeply regrettable if in seeking, quite properly, better to defend the rights of a particular group not to be discriminated against, a climate were to be created in which, for example, some feel free to argue that members of the government are not fit to hold public office on the grounds of their faith affiliation.

Ah, we should stop criticising Ruth Kelly. I’m not criticising her because of her faith affiliation, I’m criticising her because her arguments make no sense. Again, we’re meant to assume that criticism of arguments from faith is in some way shameful, when it’s actually completely reasonable. But I wouldn’t say she’s not fit to hold public office - she gives every impression of being a very intelligent and competent woman, it’s just that the evidence seems to suggest she has a blind spot when it comes to faith-related matters.

As you approach the final phase of what has, until very recently, been a careful and respectful consideration of the best way in which to introduce and administer new protection from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in England and Wales, we hope you, and cabinet colleagues, will do justice to the interests of the much wider grouping of interests within the nation that will be affected.

There are more of us religious people than there are gay people! I’m not actually sure that’s true. How many people are gay? About 1 in 10? And how many people are practicing Christians? Only 7% of people attend church regularly, and how many of them are actually as homophobic as their leaders? I’m not convinced the wider grouping of interests isn’t being served perfectly well, although that hardly matters - what’s important is that the arguments make sense.

It is vitally important that the interests of vulnerable children are not relegated to suit any political interest.

Political interest? What? This is just emotional blackmail.

And that conditions are not inadvertently created which make the claims of conscience an obstacle to, rather than the inspiration for, the invaluable public service rendered by parts of the voluntary sector.

If your conscience tells you that there’s something wrong with being gay, I’m perfectly happy for you not to work in the voluntary sector. But you can, of course, do what you like as long as you have reasonable arguments to back it up. It’s nice, being able to do what you like, don’t you think?

I’m warming to the petition. 753 signatures so far.

A while ago I was asked to help with a website for a relative’s company. I’m not so hot at all-round website building; the technical aspects aren’t too bad, but I’m no graphic designer and it takes me a while to produce decidedly average layouts. I suggested she take a look at the many online template stores, who employ designers to build attractive layouts and then sell the results reasonably cheaply (on the basis that the design can be used by multiple parties - if you want an exclusive license it’s a lot more). She picked out a template and asked what I thought. My brain was yelling ‘form follows function’, but short of hiring an expensive graphic designer it seemed like the best option, so we bought it. I don’t mind playing around with something that looks good to begin with - in fact, it’s quite good fun - but the main problem in this case was the table-based nature of the design.

The world-wide-web was never designed to be world-wide. It just happened that way. Because of this, the methods for laying out elements on a page were, to begin with, very basic. Every web browser in the world understood different sizes of text, bullet points, tables etc., and this was fine when most websites displayed data and technical information, but as the WWW spread people wanted their pages to look pretty. The simple methods weren’t up to positioning graphics with desktop-publishing-like accuracy, but you could make a reasonable approximation using tables. Make a large three-column table and you’ve got a page layout where you’re able to line up pictures and text relatively neatly.

For a long time, this was the best way to do things. But nobody liked it much. Tables within tables quickly get complex, and the inability of any browser to reliably draw individual cells to a specified height meant blank ’spacer’ images had to be used to ensure everything lined up correctly. This could, and usually did, become horribly messy. It was normally possible to fudge a solution, but the slightest tweak would send the whole design out of whack, and trying to make sense of your own code, let alone anyone else’s, could be nightmarish.

Eventually a standard called CSS was developed, which was far superior. There was far more scope to position elements precisely, and the background code became much more manageable due to the brevity of CSS - for example, it allowed you to say ‘all images on this page will have a black border’, rather than having to set each image individually. For all the quirks, inconsistencies and outright errors of individual browsers, CSS is still better than tables for positioning. But, admittedly, it’s equally frustrating while you’re learning - tables do at least work the same in all browsers and operating systems.

This particular template company, unfortunately, were sticking with the tables. And it was a horrible, horrible mess. So this morning, after a week of prodding around and finding that every change I made would break something else, I decided I’d keep the design but re-build it from scratch using CSS. Eight hours later and I finally slipped out of the weird daze I go into during web design sessions, but thankfully it’s all finished. Of course, to my client’s eyes it looks exactly the same as it did this morning, but when I have to add something in six months’ time I’ll hopefully be glad I changed it.

Does anybody know whether there’s a public archive which might have a copy of Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor’s letter to the Cabinet? It apparently says:

We believe it would be unreasonable, unnecessary and unjust discrimination against Catholics for the Government to insist that if they wish to continue to work with local authorities, Catholic adoption agencies must act against the teaching of the Church and their own consciences by being obliged in law to provide such a service

but I’d be interested to see the whole thing…

Sensible things to do at 2330 probably don’t include upgrading blogging software, but the new Wordpress 2.1 release has so many whizzy bits that I’m itching to try it out. Immediate notables include:

• Autosave makes sure you never lose a post again [hooray!!]
• Our new tabbed editor allows you to switch between WYSIWYG and code editing instantly while writing a post.
• Much more efficient database code, faster than previous versions
• Completely redone visual editor [wonder whether it’s any more user-friendly…]
• More AJAX to make custom fields, moderation, deletions, and more all faster.
• New version of Akismet.

Plus over 500(!) bug fixes. I’ll take the blog down while I upgrade, just to be safe…back in a bit, hopefully.

Update: All done. Looks most swish so far. I’ll properly try it out tomorrow, but the visual editor immediately seems far superior. The whole thing feels much snappier too, but that could be my imagination.