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From the BBC:
Norway's Princess Martha Louise says she has psychic powers and can teach people to communicate with angels.
Now that is exactly what I was just talking about the other day.
If you, like me, despair of this rubbish, James Randi’s website should at least convince you that we are not alone.
The BBC just published an article about the risks of using social networking sites.
Unfortunately, it’s got the usual “don't give out your personal information” spin on it.
The fact is that we should be able to give out our personal information free from worry about banking organisations allowing other people to open accounts or government departments letting them apply for documents in our names. The security hole is on their side of the problem, not on ours, and if they want to close it then the right way to do it is for the government (or the banks) to issue identity cards and for the banks (and the government) to use those as our canonical identities. Or, better yet, chip us all (like we do with pets), and use the chips as our identity; that’s much harder to copy, if they do it right.
For those of us not yet able to own an iPhone, it has been interesting reading the remarks from our U.S.-based brethren. The most interesting post so far, though, to my mind, must be John Gruber’s blog on the fonts installed on the iPhone.
I think he has hit the nail on the head with many of his points. I can only wonder what drove them to include the awful Courier New, whilst leaving out Courier. Or why they included both Arial and Helvetica, but left out the wonderful Gill Sans and Futura.
The only thing I disagree with in Gruber’s post, I think, is the part where he laments the inclusion of Trebuchet MS. iPhone clearly had to include all of Microsoft’s “standard” web fonts (well, the ones that aren’t just clones, anyway), because otherwise some websites wouldn’t have rendered correctly. This one included, incidentally (I use Trebuchet for some of the sans-serif text).
Of course, with any luck, this problem will go away all by itself as browsers gain support for SVG fonts. Maybe I’m being over-optimistic about that, though, given the past history of not properly supporting standards in some camps.
I've just read a very interesting interview with Richard K. Morgan, in this month’s edition of Interzone. In it, Morgan decries the worrying rise of superstitious beliefs in recent years, noting that
…it’s not religion per se – you get the same kind of thing from otherwise apparently intelligent people who believe in rubbish like homeopathy, the power of crystals and the Gaia hypothesis (these people include the Prince of Wales and, apparently, John Gray, for f**k’s sake).
Incidentally, I think he’s talking here about John Gray, the U.K. academic, rather than John Gray, author of Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus or any other person of that name.
He then goes on to say
It’s one thing to be ignorant: that’s a circumstance that those who suffer are often powerless to change. But it’s quite another to emerge from ignorance, and then choose of your own free will to sink back into the slime. Why? Because enlightenment is just too complicated for your poor ickle head?
He’s right, of course. There seems to be mounting evidence that many members of the human race have an unshakeable desire to believe in fairy stories, no matter how obviously (or even how recently) they were constructed by the hand of man. Often it doesn’t even take much work to see the origins of these misguided beliefs, but there has been a worrying tendency amongst our political leaders to pander to them, seeking to put them on an equal platform with scientific theory under the pretence that doing so is somehow even-handed.
In some cases, things have gone even further, and now those with an officially recognised religion are granted rights over and above those afforded atheistic or agnostic citizens. In the United States, for instance, it is illegal to use, possess, manufacture or distribute (without a license, presumably) the drug dimethyltryptamine, except—under a ruling from the Supreme Court, no less—if you belong to the Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao do Vegetal, a church in New Mexico. They didn’t even need to provide evidence to back their case, which centred around a belief that drinking hoasca tea enhanced their understanding of God. This was, of course, the same Supreme Court that has ruled that it is illegal for people to possess cannabis, even for medicinal purposes, even if they believe that it is helping them.1 The only difference here is that one group claims to be religious; the other does not.
We have also seen the resurgence of the “creationist” movement, both in the United States and more recently here in the U.K., even attracting tacit support from no other than Tony Blair (further proof, if it were needed, that the man should never have been Prime Minister in the first place). As Morgan says,
What’s next? Re-instate prosecution for witchcraft? NHS checks to make sure your baby is not a faerie changeling?
Quite.
Earlier today, whilst reading Omni Group’s Mac OS X dev list, I saw someone remark that they didn’t like the fact that Subversion doesn’t preserve Finder labels.
Helpfully, of course, Subversion allows you to set arbitrary, versioned, properties on your files, so it’s actually pretty easy to store the Finder labels and retrieve them when you want them. Or it would be if there were any command line tools that could read and write them.
Well there are now (download the source code).
Once you have that installed, it’s just a matter of doing
svn-save-labels
to save your Finder labels as Subversion properties (a change that you can then commit to your repository), or
svn-restore-labels
to restore them after an update.
Or you can do
getlabel myfile.txt
to see the colour of a label, or
setlabel myfile.txt red
to change its colour to red.
The getlabel and setlabel programs are provided with man pages. The Subversion scripts are not, but they should be self-explanatory anyway.