This is great: keming (via Daring Fireball)

Some of the comments are good too (I especially liked the suggestion of a T-shirt with “Spum bad keming” written on it).

Well I went to the doctor with my left hand, which is still uncomfortable. Apparently the problem is most likely mild synovitis (inflammation of the synovial membrane), or early-onset inflammatory arthritis. I’m told that taking anti-inflammatories (in my case ibuprofen) and taking it easy should clear it up, but if not then I’ll have to get my hand scanned to see what’s going wrong.

Anyway, after a couple of ibuprofen tablets it is hurting somewhat less, which is a good thing because I’ve been feeling pretty miserable about it over the past few days.

One thing that has happened because of all this is that I’ve been out and bought myself an specialised ergonomic keyboard. Not the kinds of things that you see in the shops, sadly, which seem to be stocked primarily with Microsoft and Logitech products (and the cheaper ones at that) as well as various cheap far-eastern units from firms like Mitsumi.

I’m somewhat amazed at the variety of things that are available, especially the more outlandish models from manufacturers like Maltron and Kinesis. In the end, I settled on a Goldtouch for Mac Adjustable Keyboard, which Keytools, Keyovation’s U.K. distributor, who happen to have offices close to where I live, were kind enough to let me try out before purchasing.

Here’s a quick snap, showing the keyboard and its floating keypad:

It’s quite compact compared to a standard keyboard, which is nice because it means my mouse is closer to the main section of the keyboard than it would normally be. It also gives me more desk space. The really odd part is that there’s a ball-joint connecting the two halves of the keyboard, which lets you adjust it according to personal preference.

In a month or two, when I’ve got used to the new positions of some of the keys on the keyboard, I’ll write a more detailed post with my impressions of actually using the keyboard. I may also write a bit about some of the other keyboards I own…

Bill Bumgarner on the G4 Cube (via Daring Fireball).

OK, so my hand is still broken :–(

And last week we had a water leak (a slow one, but enough that the kitchen cupboard was full of water).

So you’d hope that that was the end of it. But no. Last night, the power went off. Why? The RCD on our distribution board had cut in, because—joy of joys—the central heating boiler has developed an earth fault. As a result, it’s currently switched off, so no heating for us.

:–( :–(

I like the way the Archibishop and his friends are now trying to make out that it is all down to people misunderstanding what he said, and trying to imply that all of the controversy is because people thought he was talking about stonings and amputations and all the other wonderful things that Shari‘a is responsible for in other countries.

I never thought he was talking about any of that.

Nor, I suspect, do most of the other people who have criticised his remarks.

Here’s a very pertinent quote from his lecture:

“The danger arises not only when there is an assumption on the religious side that membership of the community (belonging to the umma or the Church or whatever) is the only significant category… There is a position – not at all unfamiliar in contemporary discussion – which says that to be a citizen is essentially and simply to be under the rule of the uniform law of a sovereign state, in such a way that any other relations, commitments or protocols of behaviour belong exclusively to the realm of the private and of individual choice.”

Excuse me?! How is the idea that the law is the law and that it should apply equally to all citizens a “danger”? Religious convictions necessarily must be kept a matter of private and individual choice, because not all of us share those convictions. It simply isn’t acceptable for religious groups to get special treatment of any description under the law¹.

I have no problem with people using Orthodox Jewish or Islamic Shari‘a “courts” to fulfil the role of mediators in disputes if they so wish. But their decisions should be granted no more weight than those of any other mediator. Which is, as I understand it, the status quo.

Additionally, on his website, it says:

The Archbishop made no proposals for sharia in either the lecture or the interview, and certainly did not call for its introduction as some kind of parallel jurisdiction to the civil law.

Yet most of his lecture is in exactly that vein. He may never say it explicitly, but it is clearly what he was thinking; for instance:

…it might be possible to think in terms of what she calls ‘transformative accommodation’: a scheme in which individuals retain the liberty to choose the jurisdiction under which they will seek to resolve certain carefully specified matters…

and

But if what we want socially is a pattern of relations in which a plurality of divers [sic] and overlapping affiliations work for a common good, and in which groups of serious and profound conviction are not systematically faced with the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty, it [‘transformative accommodation’] seems unavoidable.

The simple fact is that religion has no place in law. It is not deserving of special rules to prevent “religious offence” or blasphemy (though many countries, the U.K. included, have enacted such legislation), or of get-out clauses in laws intended to prevent discrimination.

The general principle must be that the adherents of religion should be given no special treatment whatsoever. If they find that their religious convictions then clash with the law of the land in which they live, they should either campaign to change that law (and in the meantime abide by it, however unacceptable they find it), or move to another legislative jurisdiction where the problem does not exist.

I’ve been meaning to mention Steve Tobak’s post on the double standards the public currently apply to copyrighted material for a few days now.

Steve’s post is spot on. People don’t like it when their rights are infringed, or when “the little guy” is the one getting hurt. But if it’s a company, “Well screeeewwww them” seems to be the attitude. And that even applies when said company consists of three employees (believe me, people are quite happy to steal from Coriolis Systems; just yesterday we had 172 attempts to activate known pirated copies that we’ve disabled, and that’s just the attempts that weren’t blocked somehow, and that involve copies we know have been distributed).

Some of the comments on Steve’s blog are less-than-intelligent, as you might expect (hey, this is the Internet, after al). I particularly enjoyed

“Let them [the RIAA] die out and a direct artist-to-listener model be born. THEN you can ***** about copyright violation as the people doing the actual work are the ones being harmed.”

<sarcasm>
Erm, yeah. Because that model works so well for the software industry. I mean, nobody steals our software, ever… especially not via file sharing websites like RapidShare, who we’ve been e-mailing every couple of days for the past few months to ask them to remove our software.
</sarcasm>

And this was quite good too:

“The issue is that IP rights have gone too far. U2’s producer just wrote a multi-page rant on the subject as if IP were as essential a right as real property law. The fact is, mozart and beethoven both wrote before IP laws were invented and arguably, no one has eclipsed their accomplishments since.”

Of course, the person who wrote this has completely omitted to mention that Mozart and Beethoven were only able to write music because of funding from rich patrons or posts they held at schools of music. Is that really what we want to happen to musicians, programmers and film-makers? Of course not; such a system supports far fewer people in those professions than the patronage-of-the-masses that is enabled by copyright, with the obvious consequences for the volume (and types) of material produced.

According to the BBC, Rowan Williams, the Archibishop of Cantebury no less, thinks that the adoption of Islamic Sharia law in the U.K. is unavoidable.

Let’s just re-state that:

The head of the Church of England, which is, let us not forget, a part of the British state, is saying that, in the Christian religious state in which we live, Islamic law should apply in at least some cases?!

I think he’s taken leave of his senses. I certainly hope so.

Even if it only applies if Muslims choose to use it, what about disputes between Muslims and non-Muslims? And why should Muslims be able to choose to adopt a different law from the rest of us, if it so pleases them? And what about situations where a Muslim is forced, against his or her will, to seek an opinion from a Shari‘a court?

No, no, no, no!

If Britain’s many Muslim citizens have a problem with English or Scottish law, they are free to emigrate to a country with different laws. As an atheist, I’d prefer it if English and Scottish law was secular, and if it didn’t grant extra rights to people with silly supernatural beliefs (which, right now, it does), but it’s pretty clear that a piecemeal legal system based on whichever religious laws a person finds most acceptable is just plain crazy.

If some idiot politician tries to push through a bill allowing the use of Islamic religious law in my country, I will be on the streets in London demanding their resignation. And so, I hope, will millions of others.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Linus Torvalds reckons that HFS+ is “complete and utter crap”:

“I don’t think they’re equally flawed - I think Leopard is a much better system,” he said. “(But) OS X in some ways is actually worse than Windows to program for. Their file system is complete and utter crap, which is scary.”

Macworld UK is mis-reporting this as a pronouncement that Mac OS X itself was “crap and scary”. Great journalism, Macworld.

Anyway, FWIW, I think Linus is wrong. The design of HFS+ is certainly unique, and it does make concurrency difficult on larger SMP configurations (because of its use of a small number of centralised data structures). However, it wasn’t designed for 96-way SMP boxes sat in a server room, and it does what it does quite well, I think. Perhaps he’s referring to the recent tendency to add features by creating files and folders with unusual names, then having the filesystem hide them from the user? It does perhaps seem a little odd, but it is very backwards compatible which is nice.

I also think that he’s wrong that OS X is worse than Windows to program for. I don’t know how much of either Linus has actually done (one supposes he spends most of his time working on Linux), but my experience has been that OS X is very much more pleasant than Windows. And I really don’t know how Linus thinks that the filesystem impacts on that situation at all.

This week hasn’t been the greatest ever for me. On Monday, I was swamped with support (it was coming in as fast as I was answering it), and ended up still at work at 7:30pm. Ditto Tuesday (7:30pm again), though that was partly because I started the day with a lot of replies to messages I’d sent on Monday (in reply to queries that had come in).

Then yesterday I woke up with a nasty headache.

But today is worse. Today, it has become apparent that I’ve injured my left hand. I’d been finding for a few days that my hand started to hurt a bit in the early afternoon (and I mean, somewhere inside the hand itself, not on the surface and not the muscles that control it). But today it was really unpleasant, a sharp pain, not unlike a bad headache but inside my hand. I tried resting it a bit, and the pain went away, so I suppose it must be a typing-related problem, and since I don’t want to end up like poor Ben Wing, that means typing one-handed and resting my broken hand.

Only, typing one-handed is slow and I make mistakes :–( :–(

I feel about as much use right now as a chocolate teapot.

Matt Webb on an an anonymous declaration of war on the Church of Scientology.

I still harbour the hope that Scientology’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard, may have filed a document repudiating the claims of the Scientologists with a law firm or bank, with the instruction that it be sent to the press a couple of hundred years after his death, thereby giving just enough time to ensure that there is significant recognition of Scientology as a religion before its founder outs the entire thing as the second greatest hoax in human history (the first greatest, of course, being Abrahamic religion).

Sadly I think it’s unlikely.