Badly Run Projects

Only the government would let all work stop on a project before it was completed because the contract end date came up and nobody bothered to extend it. That's exactly what happened to the project I was working on, and I had an entire week to bum around the house doing nothing in particular.

That ended a few days ago when I was assigned to help with some finishing up work on another project. Luckily, all I was expected to do was write some missing HTML help pages - the actual code work is mostly done.

I say "luckily" because I'd normally be slightly annoyed at doing web pages instead of Java coding, which is really what I do. Not in this case, though, because the way the project is being run I'm actually glad I'm not part of the core development effort.

Allow me to explain that.

The way we worked on the previous project was like this: I'd make my code changes or write new code, then I could test it in isolation by running it on a Tomcat server installed on my own machine - that way if my code broke something it didn't affect anyone else. Once I was happy with the way my code was working I would commit my changes to the Subversion repository, and the Cruise Control software running there would build the complete system and deploy it to the development server once an hour. That way the development system had an up-to-date version of the system containing the most recent code from all the developers, never more than an hour old.

The project I'm working on now isn't set up that way. We don't have local Tomcat servers, so we can't test code locally. When code changes are committed to the repository, someone has to kick off the build and deployment process manually. In fact I have no idea how the developers do their testing - they must either upload their changes manually to the development system, in which case they risk conflicts (what happens if two developers make different changes to the same code, then one uploads his changes overwriting the changes made by the other?) or they must be committing untested code changes to the repository. Either way is very, very bad.

That's the main thing that's a problem for me. There are some other niggling points, such as that they're using Java 1.4 when they could (and should, in my opinion) be using at least version 5, and that they use CVS instead of Subversion for source control. These are minor, insignificant points compared to the major problems I've already mentioned.

As I already said, I'm just adding new HTML help pages so I'm not directly affected. But there have been hints that I may be expected to make code changes too, sometime in the near future. If that happens I'll have to talk to the developers to find out how they get round the limitations and work without wrecking each others' code. I may need to have a long, hard talk with the Project Manager. Apparently there was some disagreement about the above-mentioned work process when the project was started; in my view the PM shouldn't have been given the option to do it his own way, because it adds unnecessary risks.

At least for now, my work is complete - there were nine missing pages to be created and I did five while another developer took care of the rest. I'll probably have to do some tidy-up once they've been reviewed, but this coming week could be another slow one.

iLove/iHate

Love my iPod...

I really don't know what I'd do without my iPod. If I didn't have it I'd have to carry around a CD player and a stack of CDs a foot high, and even then I wouldn't be able to play podcasts while I'm in the car, say.

The sad news is that it looks like my iPod is dying, like Jennifer Jason Leigh's squishy game pod in eXistenZ.

I had a few problems with it when Apple released version 1.1 (I think) of the internal iPod software without testing it properly, but the 1.2.1 release seemed to fix most of the problems.

The recent problems have been much worse. The poor darling's screen keeps popping up a message saying that Firewire isn't supported, and it sometimes takes five or six hits on the centre button to get that to clear; occasionally I've had to reset it. Then last night something pretty bad happened; I updated podcasts as I do most days, and this morning I picked it up so that I'd have something to listen to in the car while I drove into town for milk - and the battery was flat.

I've got too much music and stuff on the pod to risk losing it all. Most of the music is held in iTunes - stuff I've bought from the iTunes Store, and stuff I've imported from CDs - but there are a fair number of home-made movies, MP3s and WAVs of older music, and a load of podcasts that I keep for reference, that aren't in iTunes. So I bought a thing called MediaWidget that lets you do a full backup of everything, took a backup, reset the iPod to factory settings and restored from the backup. So far so good. I'm hoping that's going to fix the Firewire warnings, and I really hope the battery doesn't go flat on me again, but we'll see.

...hate Apple

Apple's support stinks. Let me put that another way: Apple's support really stinks. You pay $300 for an iPod but when you have problems the only real support option is to go onto their support forums and post a message. I have never had a single response from Apple answering any question I've posted on the forums. If you want to call, it looks like you have to pay $35. I can't think of any other item I own for which the manufacturer's support is so shitty.

Welcome to the 19th Century

What the hell is wrong with State government?

All I want to do is get our car registered in Colorado. You'd think something like that would be fairly straightforward, right? Wrong! Because of a local bureaucracy that's still working with twentieth-century technology and nineteenth-century attitudes, it's taken me two days and it still isn't done.

To register I need (1) proof of insurance, (2) confirmation of the VIN, and (3) the old state registration or title from Texas (and of course (4), a f*cking great pile of cash).

Proof of insurance - well that one at least was easy.

VIN confirmation - now, the car was parked ten feet from the building entrance and the VIN is stamped on it in at least three places, of which two are extremely easy to get to. Can someone walk outside and write the number down? No. Can they take a photo? No, instead I have to take the car to a dealership and have them fill out and sign a paper. (How do they know I didn't fill out the damn thing myself? I have no bloody clue.) It's a good thing I'm not driving a Tatra - I'd probably have to go to Czechoslovakia to find a dealership.

Title document? Well, the bank has that. So I called the bank to have them send a copy - and they can't do it because they're in the middle of a merger and the title document hasn't been scanned into the system yet. Yes, scanned. The title document is paper - not a paper record of a database entry. Computerization of records means scanning the paper in as an image. Christ know what happens if the building housing the paper records catches fire.

Okay, what about the registration? I called our old local tax office down in Texas and asked what I need to do to get a copy of the registration real quick. VTR-275 form, they said, and $2.30 fee. Fine. I wanted it real quick so I sent the form and the fee express overnight ($16 and some cents), and asked them to fax the copy. The form went out yesterday; I got the fax this afternoon. So far so good. But when I got to the county clerks office, they wouldn't accept it because it was a fax. They have to have the original.

Message to local government: This is the twenty-first century.

We have digital cameras. We have databases. We have high-speed Internet communications with unbreakable security and digital signatures for verification.

So What the F*CK are you playing at?! Why are you still using paper copies? Why isn't a fax good enough? Why the hell couldn't I just have asked the tax office to send the registration document in a digitally-signed email to the clerk's office here? Better still, why couldn't the clerks office just look up my registration online?

This, folks, is why our local taxes are so goddamn high. I've been running around for two days chasing this stuff and the job is still not done because of local government procedures that were set in stone in the Pleistocene Era. Isn't it about time we fixed that?

What the hell is wrong with the FDA?

This is disgusting:

September 21, 2005

The American Food and Drug Administration has recalled operational rations (MREs) donated by Britain to help survivors of Hurricane Katrina. The majority of the 400,000 rations donated by Britian, at a cost of millions of pounds, are set to be destroyed at a plant in Little Rock, Arkansas.

The move has infuriated aid workers who hasten to point out that "Under Nato, American soldiers are also entitled to eat such rations, yet the starving of the American South will see them go up in smoke because of FDA red tape madness." One aid worker was quoted as saying:

There will be a cloud of smoke above Little Rock soon - of burned food, of anger and of shame that the world's richest nation couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery and lets Americans starve while they arrogantly observe petty regulations.

Everyone is revolted by the chaotic shambles the US is making of this crisis. Guys from Unicef are walking around spitting blood.

An FDA spokesman said the rations had not been inspected but were automatically deemed "unfit for human consumption" due to Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE or colloquially "mad cow disease") fears. He observed that 70 pallets of vegetarian MREs were inspected and approved on September 13th. Aid workers claim that, today, BSE is much more of a problem in the U.S. than in Britian.

Food donations from Spain and Italy are also being held by the FDA due to similar concern, as well as thousands of gallons of pear juice from Israel.

Source: Wikinews

How can this happen?

Armed looters in the streets, shooting at the police and helicopters.

A sniper taking potshots at a hospital with 200 patients waiting to be evacuated.

Men robbed and women and girls raped in the bathrooms at the convention center; now people defecate on the floor rather than risk using the bathrooms.

Bodies riddled with bulletholes; a man with his head shot off.

I can't believe this is happening in the USA. It's difficult to believe that people can sink so low as to prey on the victims of Katrina. As one source said, when the Tsunami hit, the people helped each other, but that's not happening here. As Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco said:

What angers me the most is disasters tend to bring out the best in everybody, and that's what we expected to see. Instead, it brought out the worst.

John Who? (repost)

Bush has now endorsed the idea of teaching Intelligent Design, a.k.a Creationism, in schools as if it was science. The ID proponents (or "IDiots", as I like to call them) must be jumping up and down shouting Hallelujah and Perraise the LOOORD! like there's no tomorrow.

Enough has been said by others about the stupidity of this, and the stupidity of a "president" that would believe it.

This week's big question is this: Bush has a scientific advisor - John Marburger. Does this IDiot "president" just not ask his advisors anything, or does he get all his answers from prayer and reading the bible?

Note - I deleted the original post because some spamming w@nkër posted an ad comment to the original. Unfortunately it means I lost the original comments (but there were only two and one was mine anyway). I have now switched on word-verification to avoid that problem in future. Sorry for the inconvenience, friends.

Cruise, control yourself

Let's face it, most actors don't have a background in science. It's understandable because you'd expect that they got where they are by learning "the craft" and probably never had the time for much outside that.

Even so, that doesn't stop them having at least a smattering of common sense. There are a whole bunch of actors who at least appear to have some: Anthony Hopkins, Sandra Bullock, Morgan Freeman and George Clooney, for example, come across in interviews I've seen to be reasonably smart people.

Not so Tom Cruise, however, and that's a shame because his soapboxing about scientology (sorry, I can't bring myself to capitalize that "s") just makes him look more and more like a total goon. Cruise's tirade against psychiatrists is straight from the spirit of L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of $ciento£ogy. I just hope I can take my mind off Cruise's crap when we go to see War of the Worlds, because I'd hate it if being reminded of scientology spoils the movie for me.

Cruise was studying to be a catholic priest before he became an actor and I suppose that might explain part of it, but when you think about it you might realize that there's something not quite right; if he knows something about religion, how is that he can't tell scientology from the real thing? Because, sure as eggs are eggs, scientology is not a religion. It's a scam that messes with people's health and minds to make money.

A long time ago L. Ron Hubbard said that the quickest and easiest way to make a lot of money was to found a religion. Then came his book "Dianetics", in which El Ron claimed to have scientific proof that every disease, from the common cold to cancer, is caused by nasty racial memories and that we can be cured of all illnesses by just cleaning out these memories. After the book came the "church" of scientology. Voila, El Ron had founded his religion. And it's still with us today.

You might think it's harmless for people to believe what they like. If you think that, you should read this. Or this. Or this. Or most especially this. In fact, take a look at the Operation Clambake homepage to find links to a wealth of information.

(If you think those pages are biased, check out the Wikipedia entry - Wikipedia is open to all to edit and as a result articles that are contentious tend to balance out over time, and these articles have been there a long time.)

With all the bad experiences of people who have been victims of scientology you'd think something would have been done about it, but of course that's not so (at least, not in the USA - the governments of Germany and Greece aren't as easily fooled, though, and those countries have outlawed scientology). The "church" continues to pretend to be a religion so that it can maintain its tax-exempt status; it continues to persecute ex-members that speak out against it, sometimes to the grave; and it still makes money hand over fist (generally by persuading its victims to give them all their money). And, it claims that all the bad publicity it gets is unfounded smear campaigning, and its own members fall for it. Including, it would seem, Tom Cruise.

Well, I suppose there is one good thing about Tom speaking out and that is that he raises the profile of the whole "church". Maybe with the lights on them, a few more people will take a good look at scientology and start asking some tough questions. We can hope.

Last one to leave the country, please turn the lights off

This article about how they might repeal the 22nd Amendment and make it possible for Dubya to stay in the White House for yet another destructive term is just plain scary.

Kate pointed it out to me yesterday and to be honest I thought it was some kind of joke at first, but Kate was adamant that it was for real so I thought I'd better do a bit of checking.

It's for real. A bill was introduced in February that if passed will repeal the 22nd amendment. This makes it possible for a President to serve more than two terms.

The scary part is of course just as I said: there's a danger that Dubya could stay in power to continue his policies of destroying the economy and the rights of individuals, and taking the country back to the middle ages in terms of scientific progress and religious tolerance. What a lovely thought.

However it seems that the guys that wrote the bill are Democrats. The interpretation is that they're hoping that this will open the door for Bill Clinton to put Dubya's crap in black sacks on the White House steps.

Me, I hope they're right. In the last election I thought Dubya's record (like lying the country into a fake war and hyping terror threats to give the government an excuse to attack personal freedoms) would be enough to clear him out, but thanks to his other record on rigging election results he got in despite all that. So, I'm not going to get so overconfident in 2008.

If they repeal the 22nd amendment but the Dems get in regardless in 2008, fine. If the Repuglicans stay in - and especially Dubya - I don't think we'll be staying here to watch what's left of the place crumble around us. Rats leaving a sinking ship we may be, but when the rats are leaving because the captain's blowing holes in the hull with a shotgun and hoping a crucifix will save the crew, that's a different story.

Facts and Theories and Lies

Let's get something straight: despite what you may be hearing from Kansas, evolution is a fact, not a theory.

Gravity is a fact. If gravity wasn't a fact, we'd know about it pretty damn quick - people, cars, patio furniture and so on detaching themselves from the ground and floating up into space would be a bit of a giveaway, I think. But there are several theories of gravity. Theories don't dispute the facts - a theory is an idea about the underlying causes that explains the facts. In this case, one theory is that all the atoms that make up matter emit particles called Gravitons that carry the gravitational force. The more matter, the more particles, and therefore more gravity. The Earth contains so much matter, six thousand million million tonnes of it, that the gravity it generates is pretty strong.

The graviton theory is just one of several theories about what makes gravity work. At most one theory can be the right one but they're all good theories - that is, they explain the facts and we can design experiments to test theories against observations. If an experiment shows a result that is not what the theory predicts, then that theory is wrong. We may need to make modifications to the theory, or discard it altogether in favour of another theory. What's important, in scientific terms, is that any good theory is falsifiable - that is, that it's possible to design an experiment that could prove the theory wrong.

Now this is important: while it's easy to break a theory by performing an experiment that proves it wrong, it is not usually possible to prove that any theory is correct. When an experiment shows the result that the theory would predict, that result supports the theory but does not prove it. In fact, the result of the experiment may be as predicted by several competing and incompatible theories (including theories that haven't been thought up yet); in that case the result of the experiment supports all those theories but doesn't prove any of them correct.

For the everyday we don't need to know exactly how something works to be able to make use of it. We know enough about gravity to be able to weigh things and predict the motion of comets and asteroids, for example, even though we don't know for sure which of the available theories is closest to the truth. We don't fully understand quantum physics but we know that it's real and we know enough about it to be able to create television and computers and lasers. We don't fully understand light but we know it's real (or you wouldn't be reading this) and we know enough about how it interacts with matter so that we can make solar cells and telescopes.

Evolution is real; we see it all the time. It happens slowly, so that we don't usually notice it, but over decades and centuries it becomes more and more apparent. The usual example that schoolkids are given (at least, this is one that my biology teacher taught many many many years ago) is a species of moth found in northern England. At the beginning of the eighteenth century most of these moths were light grey, a natural camouflage that made them difficult to see against the light-coloured bark of the trees they landed on. In the middle of the century the Industrial Revolution came to town and with it, the soot of ten thousand coal-burning factories covered the bark of the trees of the region. By the end of the century the moths were predominantly dark, so that moths were still camouflaged against the soot-blackened bark of the trees. The species had evolved - adapted to the changing conditions of its environment. That's just one simple example but there are countless others.

Evolution is a fact, as undeniable as light and gravitation and the quantum.

There have been a number of theories to explain how evolution works but by far the most successful is the one that began with the ideas of Charles Darwin - the theory commonly called Natural Selection, or Survival of the Fittest.

I'm not going into detail about it here because that's not the point. I will say, though, that I thought I understood the theory but I didn't really, as well as I should have. The whole thing became far more clear - and elegant, and beautiful - after reading Richard Dawkins' book The Blind Watchmaker, which I can't recommend highly enough. If you haven't read this book, you should.

Natural Selection may be "just a theory" but it's a damn good one; it explains the existence and diversity of life on this planet better than any other theory currently available. It's testable and falsifiable, and over three hundred years of challenges and tests have not shown it to be wrong. Other theories, such as Lamarckism, were proved wrong a long time ago.

Now we have something else. It's called Creationism and basically it says that the Biblical account of the creation of life is literally the one and only true explanation. In an attempt to make it scientifically acceptable creationism has... well, evolved, into "Scientific Creationism" and more recently "Intelligent Design", or "ID". Its proponents are trying to convince school boards and others that it is as scientific a theory as Natural Selection, but it isn't; ID is not a scientific theory. The very nature of ID is such that there is no experiment that can be devised that would prove it wrong; in essence, everything becomes evidence that supports ID.

For example, ID proposes that the Earth was created by an intelligent power (read, "God") about six thousand years ago. When presented with fossils and carbon-dated samples that can be proved older than that, a truly scientific theory would crumble, but not ID; to get around this minor wrinkle, ID'ers say that the intelligent power deliberately faked the old rocks and fossils to test faith. Why an intelligent power would deliberately set juvenile traps like this is not explained, but the point is that it doesn't matter what evidence is presented, ID always has some way to "explain" the inconvenient facts.

Having failed in the past to persuade the school boards that ID is a valid scientific theory, its proponents have resorted to dirty tricks such as getting their supporters voted onto those same school boards so that they can rewrite the rules. Now, in Kansas, they're trying to not only rewrite the rules but change the very definition of what science is so that they can have their ideas taught to children as if they were as valid and scientific as Natural Selection. The children, who don't have the skills to tell truth from junk, will end up believing the ID doctrine and most of them will carry those beliefs through to adulthood.

In an scientifically advanced country this is a scandal. The problem is that, as scientifically advanced as this country is, individual citizens have for the most part not been educated in science well enough to tell the difference between real science and pseudoscientific claptrap. As a result, the legislators and parents (and in many cases the teachers, sadly) are just not able to tell the ID crowd where to shove their doctrine.

The ID'ers have a right to their beliefs. What they do not have a right to is to demand that those beliefs are taught as scientific fact in science classes. These teachings should be kept in religious classes, where they belong.

Lies and Disinformation

Petco

We were in our local Petco a couple of months ago to pick up a few bits and while I was there I saw that they had some young pythons in a glass tank. I stopped to take a closer look at the snakes and I noticed a small red speck above one of the snakes' eyes. As I looked, the red speck moved. Then I noticed lots more red specks all over the snakes. They were infested with mites.

We mentioned this to a manager and she seemed concerned but since then we've been in the same Petco several times and nothing much seems to have changed - the place is still not as clean as it could be and I've noticed that rats, mice, guinea pigs and other small animals scratch themselves more than is normal, and they still have too many to a cage. At the time I just assumed that our local Petco was an isolated example.

This morning I was googling for pet supplies and I came across this site which in turn links to this one. It makes for pretty horrific reading but to sum it all up, it's plainly obvious that Petco neglects the animals they sell because it's cheaper to let animals die of disease, hunger and thirst than to pay for treatment to keep them healthy. It stinks. Kate and I will never be going into another Petco and if you're in the US and have pets, we urge you to read the linked pages before you consider buying from Petco.

Check out Kate's words on this subject here.

Microsoft

The April edition of Scientific American has an interesting article about spam and what's being done about it. There's some good stuff about spam filtering but then it goes on to describe Sender ID. And that's where it goes a bit pear-shaped, because (1) it mentions only Sender ID and does not even acknowledge the existence of CSV and DomainKeys as alternatives, and (2) it says that Sender ID is "a new industry standard" - which is a total crock because Sender ID is not a standard and never will be as long as it needs a license agreement from Microsoft.

And who are the authors of this masterwork? Why, none other than three guys who work for (you guessed it) Microsoft.

In other words the whole article is nothing more than a disinformation piece to try to trick readers into thinking that Sender ID, a Microsoft product, is not just an Internet standard (not true!) but is also the only antispam technology (also not true!). Hey, if they fool enough people that Sender ID becomes a standard (even an unofficial one) that's another great big pile'o'cash from the developers of all the mail servers that will be forced into paying fees to implement the licensed technology.

I don't know who Scientific American had review this piece, but whoever it was either has little or no knowledge of the current state of anti-spam, or works for Microsoft.

Destruction of the ANWR a step closer...

The senate has voted by a narrow margin to leave open the possibility of drilling for oil in Alaska - just another example of the current administration selling the country by the pound.

Sierra Club press release

Carl Pope, Executive Director of the Sierra Club, said:

Even the oil companies know that America’s energy future does not lie in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

A word from our sponsors

Random thoughts about communications:

The telephone was invented in 1876 and it's usually Alexander Graham Bell who gets credited with the invention. I'm sure he thought that the ability for people to communicate over long distances must have been like magic. Last year, four calls out of every five that we had at home (especially in the evening) were telemarketers trying to sell us junk we didn't want. Thank goodness for Do Not Call registers.

Fax: great idea. I'm sure the inventor thought so too. Half the fax messages we get in my office are advertisements from people we've never heard of.

Email: I started using email in the late eighties. At that time the Internet was in its infancy and it was pretty much unheard of for private individuals to have connections at home. As such, email was exclusively used for real mail. The Internet boom and the invention of the Web changed all that. These days many people get more spam than genuine email.

You see where I'm going. Every form of communication ever invented soon gets used as yet another channel for marketing and advertising, often to the point where the commercial traffic hinders the flow of real information. Some TV channels seem to use at least half the air time for advertising - five minutes of the show we're trying to watch (paying to watch, since we have cable) then five minutes of ads; rinse and repeat. Radio is the same - I sometimes have to scan through five or six music stations before I can find one that's actually playing music. Magazines often have more pages of ads than actual copy.

As soon as a new communication technology is developed, it seems to be just a matter of days before somebody figures out how to flood it with advertising. Microsoft's Windows Messenger (not MSN/.NET Messenger - that's similar but not quite the same thing) was developed to allow network administrators to broadcast important messages to the network users; it is also used to pop up adverts. The ICQ client downloads advertising graphics. A few days ago, when I was casting around to find an RSS reader, one of those I tried included a frame that was filled with advert graphics (need I say that I uninstalled it immediately).

The marketing people that jump on any new communication channel seem to think it's their right to do so. When the national do-not-call legislation came in, people like the Direct Marketing Association were sobbing about how "they wuz robbed" and how many telemarketers would be out of a job (my response: Tough!).

They say that advertising keeps the economy moving. They say that without advertising we'd be stuck with state-controlled TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, you name it.

Maybe that's true. But they way I see it, when every communication channel we have gets flooded with adverts to the point that the real messages are lost in the noise, something needs to be fixed.

We've got bigger fish to fry

I wouldn't normally weigh in on the subject of the Ten Commandments being displayed on government buildings and in any case it seems that it's all over, with the supreme court saying it's ok "because they pay tribute to America's religious and legal history". That's fine by me, but I should point out that it would have been fine by me either way. The reason I'm saying something now is that with all the heated words from both sides I haven't seen anyone mentioning the point of view I lean toward: that the whole thing was a waste of time and taxpayers' money.

The main argument against allowing the displays is all about the separation of church and state - something that I agree with heartily. The danger, apparently, is that displaying the commandments is tantamount to an endorsement by the legal system. To me it's plainly obvious that there is no danger.

Consider: normal, well-adjusted people know that it's wrong to steal or commit murder. We don't need a book or a stone tablet to tell us that. It's also wrong to commit rape or molest children - but I don't see a commandment forbidding either. As for "no other god before me", that's just plain silly in a country that is not exclusively christian.

What about coveting? For one thing the way it's worded provides more than a hint that the writers considered wives as no more than the property of their husbands. In any case I covet all the time - for example, I often see a Chrysler Crossfire and a new Thunderbird in the office parking lot, and I can't go near them without my brain's Coveting Lobe firing up. I think the people who wrote "thou shalt not covet" down thousands of years ago must have thought it was a brilliant way to control the believers - make a sin of something that is totally intangible, unprovable and universally practised, then you can tell everyone they're all miserable sinners and must be saved.

The point is that unless the courts decide to make coveting a crime, with death by stoning as the penalty, I don't think we need to worry too much about what gets displayed on government buildings. As such, arguing about whether or not to allow the displays on the outside of government property is about as important as arguing what kind of wallpaper is right for the inside.

If we want to talk about separation of church and state, consider this statement:

I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.

This is the oath of office that US senators have to swear. Note that the part I've italicized is not optional (the oath the president takes is different and doesn't officially include the "So help me God" part, although it's customary to add that in practice).

Now perhaps this is just as pointless as the "commandments on buildings" argument, but it seems to me that the nature of the oath makes it impossible for someone to be a senator unless they believe in the christian god, and in principle that it is equally impossible for someone to be president unless that person is a christian.

So much for separation of church and state, then.

A Message to Bush-Bashers...

...and in fact, president-bashers of all administrations - red, blue, whatever: Keep on bashing.

Here's why you should

In 1939 Germany under Hitler annexed Poland. Shortly afterward, France was invaded. Hitler wanted to control all of Europe and things could have gone that way. Had that happened Europe would have been under the control of a militaristic dictatorship - citizens would have lost the right to choose who led them, the right to free speech and more.

If you've ever wondered why Britain and the US went to war against Germany, here's the answer: it was to preserve our rights to vote, to speak out against the actions of our leaders without recriminations, and much, much more. Many thousands of men and women died protecting those rights so that we would still have them today.

For US citizens the right of free speech is embodied in the text of the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

You have the right to voice your thoughts; you have the right to be heard. Nobody - nobody - has the right to stop you speaking out against the government when they do something that you don't like, think is a bad idea, wrong, or just plain stupid. You should speak out against your government, loud and often, when things are wrong in your view. That's how democracy works. Keep your mouth shut when things are going down the toilet and you may as well join the ones pulling the chain.

This is why I get annoyed when I hear someone saying that it's "unpatriotic" to criticize the president. My answer to these people: YOU are the ones being unpatriotic. YOU are the ones being unconstitutional. If you only want freedom of speech when you like what's being said, there are are still plenty of dictatorships to choose from. Don't forget to revoke your US citizenship when you get there.

The current climate seems to be quite anti-Bush. There is a lot of commentary criticizing the current administration, and from where I sit the main pro-Bush response to this seems to be calls for the dissenters to shut up, rather than any reasoned argument about why they're wrong. As far as I'm concerned this speaks volumes.

My own opinion is that Bush is an undereducated religious-right redneck in a suit, ready to sell the country's every natural resource and welch on every agreement that hampers big business, just so that his big-business friends can make a fast buck, in office because of a bogus ballot based on a bogus war based in turn on lies. That's what really pisses me off; Clinton was impeached, not because he had an affair with an intern, but because he lied to the American people about it. Bush lied to the American people about weapons of mass destruction in the middle east - lies to justify a fake war that cost the lives of over a thousand soldiers and thousands of civilians. When are we going to see him impeached?

Pseudoscience and trash

Pseudoscience

Florida State University is planning on spending nine million dollars a year on a Chiropractic School. This is what happens when the people who manage something as important as an educational institution have little or no relevant education themselves. Two of the nobel laureates there are rightly opposing the move, saying that it will damage the university's academic reputation. Parody maps of the FSU campus have appeared showing a Bigfoot Institute, a School of Astrology and a Crop Circle laboratory.

I'll be watching what happens with this. FSU could find itself on the growing list of places (including Dayton, TN and recently Dover, PA) from where any employment applications we receive are summarily shredded.

26%

While blogsurfing I've come across a bunch of blogs with links to various tests. I tried not to bother with them but in the end I had to have a go, just for fun. The result:

I AM 26% WHITE TRASH! The white trash in my blood will not keep me from becoming a doctor or a lawyer, but it will keep me from a good haircut and any sort of fashion sense. Take the WHITE TRASH test at Fuali.com

In an effort to make 100% I'm thinking of buying a few old rusty car bodies, washing machines and so on to scatter round the front yard. Then I need a F250 truck, and I think I'll change my name to "Bubba", join the NRA and start extolling the virtues of the Bush administration. That ought to about do it.

Steamed

Kate bought me Half Life 2 for Christmas - not just the "ordinary" game, but the Collector's Edition including a T-shirt. Nice!

I installed the game yesterday, and the chances are it's going back to the shop. The game itself may be a masterpiece but I may never know because, despite following the installation instructions (such as they are) I can still not get it to run in "offline" mode; that is, without being connected to the Internet.

The problem is the Steam software that installs along with the game. Its primary purpose is to stop anyone with an illegal copy of the game playing it, and it does that by registering on their servers, decrypting the installed files and other things as you install. You must therefore have your network connection up during installation. While it was installing the game it downloaded about twenty megabytes of something or other (it gave no clue about what it was doing) which, because I use a 56K modem, took about two hours.

If that's all there was to it there wouldn't be a problem - it's annoying but I could live with it. Unfortunately though, that's not all. Having installed the game I tried to play it but it wouldn't start - instead, I got a message saying this game is not ready to play in offline mode.

No indication of why it wasn't ready.

No clue to what I needed to do to make it ready.

So I reconnected to the net and tried again, and this time it started downloading upgrade files which took another twenty minutes or so. This on top of the two hours of downloading that I'd already had to wait through. When that was done I disconnected and tried starting the game again. I got a message saying this game is not ready to play in offline mode.

No indication of why it wasn't ready.

No clue to what I needed to do to make it ready.

At that point it was after 11pm and I'd been messing with it for around three hours and still couldn't play. I wrote a mail to the Valve's tech support then called it a night and played Doom 3 instead.

I asked Donny about it, because he's been playing HL2 on his machine which is at a friend's house with a broadband connection. He said you have to play the game for a few minutes online before the server unlocks it and allows the offline mode. This morning I hooked up again and started the game. The first thing Steam told me was that it was going to download Half Life 2: Deathmatch - it didn't ask if I wanted it; I don't, so I cancelled the load. I got HL2 started and played a few minutes to give it a chance to unlock. I don't know if there's supposed to be some signal that says it's unlocked, so I just gave it five minutes then saved and exited, then disconnected and tried to play offline. I got a message saying this game is not ready to play in offline mode.

No indication of why it wasn't ready.

No clue to what I needed to do to make it ready.

I'm a programmer by profession and as part of that I have to perform system upgrades fairly often. At work I have never had to perform an installation or upgrade that has given me as much trouble as this game has. I'll give Valve's tech support the rest of today to come up with a solution, and in the meantime I may try giving it just a few more minutes to see if it'll unlock, but if I can't get it running today it goes back to the shop tomorrow, T-shirt and all.

Valve are shooting themselves in the foot with Steam. Gamers are used to installing a new game from CD and then playing it right away (I installed Doom 3 in under twenty minutes), and not having to spend three or four hours waiting on downloads only to find that they still can't play. If you have a broadband connection and you're always online anyway, lucky you - but not everyone has broadband, and not everyone can be burning phone time to be playing a single-player game.

I also don't like that I have to have the Steam software running on my system soaking up CPU and memory while I'm playing a game. And I don't like that Steam will leech off my narrow-bandwidth network connection to tell me about new games and even perhaps start downloading them when I don't want them.

I play games to relax. Valve have traded their paranioa and insecurity for a system that makes playing a game a chore. I think Valve are going to be refunding quite a lot of cash unless they rework Steam to have it work the way their customers want, or better still scrap Steam altogether.

So whether or not I decide to keep HL2 I will never buy another game that uses Steam, and I probably won't ever again buy anything that has the Valve label on it.