BatFlattery

This blog has moved

2007-08-15T10:48:00.000+01:00

This blog has moved to batflattery.com and will no longer be updated on this url. Please update your bookmarks and blogrolls (assuming you still want to be dazzled by my bullshit, that is...)

Wordpress is pretty cool...

2007-08-14T18:11:00.000+01:00

Having heard a lot about Wordpress in the past, I decided to take the plunge when I wanted to create my iPhone blog. I downloaded it and installed the virtual server hosting package I use for my other sites, and after setting up the MySQL database things were up and running very, very smoothly.

I chose a nice-looking theme for the iPhone blog initially, Justin Shattuck's Salmon, but I soon realised it had a few bugs. Since there are so many great themes available it hardly seemed worthwhile to go to the trouble of fixing it, so I found another one, even nicer, that you see on the blog currently.

I then decided to re-do my magazine site using Wordpress, and that went really smoothly as well. The more I use Wordpress the more I like it: being PHP-based, it was easy for me to tweak the install a bit to track keywords, and the themes which are widget-aware make fine-tuning the sidebars an absolute breeze.

I'm currently working on a site redesign for a client that will use Wordpress as a CMS for what is mainly a static site (although with the blog functionality there anyway, there will be a blog too), and it's going really well too.

So it's only a matter of time until this blog moves over to Wordpress as well. Blogger has been very useful as an intro to blogging, but now that I have experienced the elegance and control offered by Wordpress, there's no going back. Stay tuned...

O2 and Carphone Warehouse to get iPhone?

2007-07-30T22:39:00.000+01:00

The rumours are starting to get persistent, and now there's some circumstantial evidence as well: O2 and Carphone Warehouse seem to be the two that the smart money are on for iPhone in the UK. More on my UK iPhone blog.

The JewWatch petition again

2007-07-27T14:09:00.000+01:00

Some well-meaning people seem to be circulating a petition which last did the rounds a few years ago. It concerns an anti-semitic site known as JewWatch.com, and the creator of the petition hoped to get Google to remove it from its position at the time as the first result for a search on the word "Jew".

Although the petition easily exceeded its stated goal of 50,000 signatories, Google did not of course censor the results, for reasons which are obvious to anyone who knows how Google's search algorithms work: they did produce an explanation for those who don't.

Of course, that algorithm cuts both ways, and a web campaign of links to the Wikipedia page on Jews or on Judaism, using the link text "Jew", means that a search for "Jew" now returns those pages as number 1 and number 2 results, and not JewWatch.org. So there is no need to continue to circulate the petition email. The problem has been solved, although if you want to include a few relevant links on your web pages, that could help to ensure it stays solved.

Clarkson drives to the North Pole

2007-07-25T22:57:00.000+01:00

Yes! He did it! Clarkson and Captain Slow have become the first people to drive to the (magnetic) North Pole! They did it in a magnificent Toyota Hilux pickup, beating the Hamster in a dogsled. Yay!

It's a great moment for petrolheads everywhere. And, as JC says at the end, about the supposed environmental damage, the inconvenient truth is that they left barely a scratch.

Hotmail is silently destroying mail messages

2007-07-25T19:07:00.000+01:00

I hate Hotmail. I really, really hate Hotmail. A few months ago one of my clients had problems with email being rejected by Hotmail. It seemed at the time just to be a bit of a scam to get people to sign up for their (expensive) implementation of the Sender Policy Framework, but by using a free SPF service, I was able to get things going again.

Fast forward to the present. Over the past few days, my client reports that a number of his clients with Hotmail accounts are simply not getting his messages. No bounce report, nothing. At first I'm quite skeptical that even Microsoft would just silently kill emails with no bounce report. But it seems I was wrong.

A lot of people are reporting just that. Microsoft's SmartScreen is silently killing emails, and tech support won't tell you why. Some people are reporting that email sent from Outlook gets through; other mail apps not so lucky. Sound familiar?

So is that SmartScreen, or We-just-can't-help-baiting-anti-trust-laws-Screen?

The truth about detox and other food myths

2007-07-25T11:54:00.000+01:00

Pretty impressed with the BBC's Truth About Food programme: lots of scientific rigour brought to bear on some food myths that are prevalent in our unfortunately not-always-rational popular culture.

The one I really enjoyed looked at the food myth that annoys me the most: the "detox diet". They took two groups of young, urban party-type girls, and put one on a detox diet and the other on a normal diet for a week. Result, predictably, was that the detox diet had absolutely no effect, apart from making the detox group feel really awful.

Another complete waste of time is drinking two litres of water a day to improve your skin.

But it's not all about debunking unscientific nonsense. They also looked at some more evidence-based diet ideas, which include eating spinach to prevent or reverse macular degeneration, and eating tomatoes to protect against skin cancer. The trials proved their effectiveness.

Pretty good stuff! You can watch all the programmes on the website.

Pokemon players

2007-07-23T20:32:00.000+01:00

There's a really cute story by Penny Arcade's Gabe this week. It seems he went along to a Pokemon tournament at his local mall, expecting to find a lot of guys his age, way more seriously into Pokemon than he was. Reality was slightly different.

But what I also liked about his story was something I noted myself when my son was majorly into Pokemon: it's a very engaging world, with cute monsters, a good competition ethic, and it engenders in the kids an enthusiasm that is very positive and nice to behold. Nice to see it continues!

The iPhone in the UK

2007-07-18T09:20:00.000+01:00

I've just created a new site to track news about the iPhone's release in the UK. With all the rumours flying around about which network has the contract, and when the launch will be, my aim is to create a dedicated resource for carrying the latest news, speculation and analysis. (If 02 is the winner, why hasn't anything been announced? It could be that Steve wants to do a Europe launch, announcing the launch date and all of the European partners together. Some sources are talking about a September launch, which would fit with Steve's record of under-promising and over-delivering on launch dates.)

Other dangers of the hijab

2007-07-10T17:26:00.000+01:00

From that well-known organ of Islamophobia, The Guardian:

A Muslim woman juror who was arrested for apparently listening to an MP3 player under her hijab during a murder trial is facing jail for contempt of court. She is said to have used the traditional headscarf to hide headphones while ignoring vital evidence from a retired businessman who bludgeoned his disabled wife to death.

Loose screws, more like

2007-07-09T00:29:00.000+01:00

So there's this video that's been doing the rounds on the Internet. Loose Change, it's called. Supposedly an expose of how the American government was really behind 9/11, it's basically a hoax- the guy who made it admitted as much. Or at least he did before it was seized on by the mental cripples who go for conspiracy theories.

Anyway, given that, it shouldn't really be surprising that the weak-minded in the entertainment industry have taken their turn at the wheel. Some twit named Mark Cuban is providing the backing for a commercial release, with the support of the loonily lefty Rosie O'Donnell - and that well-known sharp pencil, Charlie Sheen, will be narrating. Someone should tell them that even Michael Moore has stopped beating the greasy spot where that dead horse used to lie.

iPhone idiocy

2007-06-29T19:50:00.001+01:00

Take a look at this genius: he thinks that Apple will miss the European launch because they have "consistently missed product launches". Also, "They are only making ten million iPhones", so when those run out, Europe will be out of luck.

Wow.

Apple have never missed a product launch. Products are normally in stores the day Steve announces them. The iPhone was an exception because of the FCC regulation. So there is no track record of missed launches.

Apple have not said they will only make 10 million iPhones. They have said that 10 million units is their target. I am fairly confident that once they sell those, they will be making some more. In fact, I daresay they will ramp up manufacturing if they see that iPhones are selling out more quickly than expected. This is because they are not morons.

Career coaching really works

2007-04-11T20:18:00.000+01:00

In this post I wrote about something that Simon Broomer of CareerBalance had told me. Although I didn't make it clear in that post, the context of his comment was a career counselling session that I was undertaking with him, and I want to talk a bit about that experience.

After a fairly unsatisfactory stint of working on my own from home, I decided, before making yet another random career move, that the time had come to properly look at what I wanted to do with my life. So I commenced a series of counselling sessions with Simon about a month ago.

So far I have completed four sessions, and the results have already been pretty amazing. I now have a much better idea of the things that really drive me, career-wise, and my career history now makes much more sense when I look back with the new understanding that I have. I can see why I made the choices that I did, and the recurring themes come through again and again.

In arriving at this point, I have done a lot of looking back through my career to pick up the achievements that meant the most to me and that I enjoyed the most. Not only has this given the valuable clues to what gives most meaning to my working life, it has also put me back in touch with the excitement, and by reminding me of times when I did achieve things that I was proud of, it has renewed my confidence in my own abilities.

I had been interviewing for temporary positions during most of this time, and the work that we have done has had an immediate impact on my interviewing. Naturally I could easily give examples of previous achievements, but my confidence, and excitement for the opportunities on offer, were vastly improved as well - so much so that I have been offered a new position, and start work tomorrow.

I will still continue with my sessions, not least because the new position is dynamic and subject to change, but also because career counselling is not just about getting a job: it's about doing the work that you were meant to do, that gives the most meaning to your life, and creating your dream job, whether you do it where you are currently working, or whether you find it somewhere else.

Credit where credit is due

2007-04-01T01:56:00.000+01:00

So I ordered a few books from Amazon a little while ago. I chose the free delivery option, naturally, so it took a few days for them to arrive. Anyway, on Thursday the postman handed me the familiar brown cardboard boxy thing. But, despite having my name on the label, it didn't have my books inside.

It contained instead six CDs that had, according to the packing slip, been purchased by another gentleman. Presumably his mailing label had been pasted onto my package, and he was enduring a similar revelation, or would soon.

So I logged on to my account, and found the returns page. There didn't seem to be an option to say "I got someone else's shipment" so I went through the page where they list the shipment, and you can say that you got something else for each item. Since I only had three books, I chose three CDs at random and typed one name in next to each book. Then I printed out the pre-paid return address label (quite cool), stuck it on the package, and dropped it off at the post office.

The surprising thing was getting the books Friday morning. So I only lost a day due to the whole mixup. That's quite impressive.

Fred Thompson on '300'

2007-03-28T10:57:00.000+01:00

Fred Thompson makes some excellent points about Iran's reported unhappiness with the movie '300'.

It does pretty much beggar belief that a regime which sponsors a conference entitled "A World Without Israel" can complain that a work of fiction, representing events that happened thousands of years ago, is an act of warfare against it.

Anyway, I think this guy would make a pretty good president.

Behind the mask

2007-03-27T16:42:00.000+01:00

Today, driving past Kenwood House, the stately home on Hampstead Heath, I saw that barefoot doctor chappie from the telly, getting out of a black Audi TT in a cloud of cigarette smoke. He wasn't barefoot. Obviously.

The market will take care of it. As it always has.

2007-03-26T21:00:00.000+01:00

Was thinking a bit more about the Tesla and my reaction to it, which is similar to my reaction to low-energy lamps. I buy the latter, not because I give a sod about so-called global warming, but because they last longer (hate changing the buggers) and cost less to run. When LED bulbs finally become available I'll buy them because they last forever (yay!).

In the same way, I would buy a Tesla (if I had £50k to spend on a car) because it's a fantastic performance machine, looks cool (you can see Lotus are involved) and it costs less to run. Starting to see a pattern here? If you serve a real need, offer a real advantage, people will want your product. No hectoring required.

And this explains my basic antipathy to the global warming bandwagon. It's stuffed with people who live to hector, who can't be bothered finding out what people want because they're so busy telling them what they ought to want. The antipathy to the market is most marked, I think, in those who have the guilty knowledge, deep down, that what they want is not what most people want. And therefore they have to avoid, at all costs, any mechanism for making that fact known, while promoting any scheme, from socialism to anti-discrimination to environmentalism, that gives them license to tell other people what to do.

Prius damages environment more than Hummer

2007-03-26T17:17:00.000+01:00

The darling of the eco-poser set, the supposedly super-efficient (and super-expensive) Toyota Prius is the most environmentally damaging car to build. And it takes five years for the petrol savings to offset its high price. By which time the battery is probably dead.

Me, I'm buying a Tesla. As soon as I win the lottery.

Recruitment agencies and finding a job

2007-03-26T12:04:00.000+01:00

My friend Simon, who runs the CareerBalance careers consultancy, said something interesting the other day. In his experience, only about 20% of the available jobs at any one time are in the hands of recruitment agencies, like Robert Walters and Martin Ward Anderson. Far more jobs are found through networking, direct application to companies, graduate recruitment, and headhunting.

This means that those job-hunters who simply sign up with the agencies and do nothing more, are focusing their efforts into a relatively small bit of the market, and the most competitive bit as well. Plus, many are under the misapprehension that the agents work for them. Of course, the agents work for the companies, and so put their interests before those of the candidates.

The reasons are not hard to see though. In the first place, the agencies, being businesses, put a lot of effort into promoting themselves, whereas the other methods are not the subject of such promotion. Headhunters, for example, are not interested in being approached by candidates; they do the approaching.

Secondly, the most effective method by far, networking, is poorly understood by most people. It's either seen as something that only works for some well-connected elite, who have gone to the right schools etc, or as pretty desperate job-begging of hapless friends and relatives.

In fact networking is simply about relationships, and the fact that people trust people they know, or who are known by people they know, more than complete strangers. It's usually best to take a slightly more systematic approach to your networking if you want to use it to find a job, but the principle remains the same, and it is most definitely not about phoning up everyone you know and asking for a job.

But it is about staying in touch, and making sure your network of friends, family, ex-colleagues, business associates, suppliers, customers, etc, are aware of your situation, so that if they should hear of an opportunity, they will have you in mind. That's it.

One way to think about it is this: if you knew a friend of yours was looking for a job, you would want to help. If another friend mentioned he was looking for someone, or a vacancy was posted at work, you would be sure to pass it on. All that's required is that you know your friend is looking. If he just went to an agency and didn't tell you or any of his friends what he was doing, you wouldn't be able to help him.

Yahoo! sponsored search to become like Adwords

2007-03-23T12:08:00.001Z

So I got this fairly interesting email from Yahoo! sponsored search
(ie pay-per-click) support, about the "new" sponsored search they've
been threatening for some time now.

For those of you unfamiliar with Yahoo! (formerly Overture), it works
completely differently from Google Adwords. In the latter, you write
an ad, then pick a number of keywords that you want the ad to show
for, and it's usually up and running within a few minutes, getting
clicks (and costing you money, of course).

In the Overture/Yahoo! universe, things are a lot less simple. First
you choose the keywords. Then you are supposed to write an ad for each
keyword. Now it's true that there are buttons to copy down your first
ad to all the other keywords, but it's still a bit of a pain to do.
And the user interface is really unresponsive and unintuitive compared
to Google. Plus, your ads don't start running immediately. Oh no. You
have to wait anything up to three days for a human to "approve" your
ads and keywords. And if they don't think your ads properly describe
your website, they reject the keyword. Seriously.

Anyway, it's quite funny to see Yahoo! explaining the New Search.
What's new about it? "Fast Ad Activation", for one: ads online within
minutes! Wow! What a unique and brilliant idea!

But there's more! " Individual titles and descriptions will apply to
multiple keywords." I see. For those confused by this, Yahoo!
helpfully explains that " Titles, descriptions and URLs" will be
"known as "ads" in the new Sponsored Search". Uh huh. And "Keywords
and ads will be organised into ad groups" - exactly as they are in
Adwords. And then "One or more ad groups will make up a campaign". You
don't say.

They could have saved everyone a lot of time by saying, "You know
Adwords? Right, that's what the new Yahoo! Sponsored Search will be
like." And about time too.

It's the Sun, stupid!

2007-03-11T16:35:00.000Z

LGF has the recent Channel 4 global warming documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle. Not nearly as fact-free as A Convenient Untruth, it's actually pretty good. You come away marvelling at the ability of grown people to so studiously ignore the pretty obvious truth of the role of the Sun in determining the climate of the Earth, something that was actually discovered a century or more ago! And it also highlights an inconvenient truth that Al Gore forgot to tell you: the Arctic ice cores that form the centre of his presentation clearly show that rising temperature causes an increase in carbon dioxide, and not the other way around.

The final ten minutes are pretty heart-breaking, actually, showing the awful reality of the peasant lifestyle romanticised by the anti-human environmentalists, and how the West is once again betraying Africa. Not content with tolerating or colluding with the kleptocratic thugs in power, the environmentalists are now moving in to deny Africa the use of its own mineral wealth, and thus progress, in the name of saving the environment. Very sad viewing.

Hasta la vista, Firefox

2007-03-05T18:36:00.000Z

OK, I've finally given up on Firefox. I know I'm supposed to like it, I know it's the hope of the free world, the Rebel Alliance fighting the good fight against the Microsoft Empire, etc etc, but I'm just tired of it killing my PowerBook all the time. I'm tired of my Mac feeling like a 486 PC with 8 megs of RAM, struggling to run Windows. I'm tired of the exhaust fan coming on every time I move the mouse, because Firefox has eaten up all the free memory AGAIN, and OS X has to shunt more pixels into and out of virtual memory to redraw the screen. I'm tired of waiting for Gmail to catch up with what I've written. I've had enough.

It's not like Safari is that bad, anymore. It has tabbed browsing. It doesn't screw up so many sites anymore. And if you have to have a Mozilla-based browser, Camino is pretty darn good. I've been using it for a couple of weeks now, and I like it a lot. It uses the Keychain to store web passwords, which is really nice: it makes me feel much more secure about my important passwords, and I can find them easily if I want them for another browser. Plus, it has an "update stored password" function if you're trying to log onto a site you haven't accessed for awhile, and your first password guess turns out to be wrong: it simply notices that you've typed a different password the second time, and offers to update. Nice.

And it looks pretty nice too.

Of course I'll keep Firefox on the machine, to check the appearance of my web pages, etc, but at the moment I mostly use Camino and Safari for actual web browsing. No more painfully-slow Mac. No more periodically shutting down Firefox just to get it to let go of all the memory it hogged. No more worrying about opening Photoshop with Firefox running. Oh joy!

A risk they're prepared to take

2007-02-22T23:15:00.000Z

I was reading this bit by Norm, and I remembered the bit at the end of Dumb and Dumber, where the cop is explaining to Jim Carrey's character that, even though they had put him in danger, he had been safe, because he was wearing a bulletproof jacket. So Jim Carrey's character thinks for a bit, and says "What if he'd shot me in the head and not the chest?" and the cop says "That's a risk we were willing to take".

That's kind of how I see all these people who are so anxious for Israel to "give Hamas a chance" and take the first step, end the boycott, etc. Like, don't worry that these people continue to talk about liberating the entirety of "occupied Palestine", we're sure it'll turn out alright in the end.

Except, if they're wrong, nothing will happen to them. Just to Israel. Which makes a slight difference, I think.

Print this post and grow more trees

2007-02-21T00:50:00.000Z

I've been getting a snide little footer in some of my emails recently:

Do you really need to print this email? Please consider the environment and save a tree.

Which makes about as much sense as saving wheat by not eating bread. Paper manufacturers plant trees so that they will have something to make paper out of: cutting paper consumption will thus lead to fewer trees being planted. So if you love trees, print this post! And anything else you want to print.

Cause for complaint

2007-02-20T15:53:00.000Z

According to The Economist, a report by the Arab Association for Human Rights and the Centre Against Racism has accused airport staff at Ben-Gurion Airport of discriminating against Arabs.

I'm very happy to see that Arab organisations are taking an interest in human rights and racism. Maybe I should contact them, to tell them about an experience I had recently. I met with an employment agent to discuss job opportunities, and he started to excitedly tell me about a very lucrative position in Bahrain. Then he suddenly stopped, probably having noticed my yarmulke, and said, "Sorry, I've just realised that wouldn't really work, now, would it?" Because of course anyone with an Israeli passport, or even just a stamp of entry into Israel, would be denied entry into most Arab countries. How's that for discrimination? A bit stronger than so-called harassment by airport security, I would have thought. (And as anyone who has been to Israel can attest, airport security is pretty stringent for everybody, Arab, Jew, Gentile, it doesn't matter.)

So maybe this Centre Against Racism could help! Maybe they could get newspapers like The Economist to highlight this pretty blatant racism. Or how about the law in Jordan which specifically denies citizenship to Jews? I'm sure they'd be up in arms against that.

Wouldn't they?

Leander Kahney is an idiot

2007-02-20T12:58:00.000Z

Not that it's news, I suppose, but his latest bit of Jobs-hate is just laughable. In an article entitled "Steve Jobs, Proud to be Non-Union", which sounds like something to be proud of in my books anyway, he's in full swing, displaying a masterly lack of sense.

The teachers' unions, Jobs believes, are ruining America's schools because they prevent bad teachers from being fired.

Well? Isn't that what any sane person believes? Apparently not:

I know for a fact that Jobs' ideas about unions are absurd, he's-on-a-different-planet bullshit.

Hmmm, tough talk. Let's see some facts:

But don't you love it when a billionaire who sends his own kids to private school applies half-baked business platitudes to complex problems like schools?

Would those be the same half-baked platitudes which have seen Apple's stock price go up like a rocket? But of course, building and selling simple little things like iPods and MacBooks are nothing compared with the complex problem of, um, teaching kids to read and write. (How long have we as a civilisation been doing that? Three thousand years? More?) In fact, it's such a complex problem, more and more Americans are doing it themselves, at home. Just like those Americans building their own MP3 players and laptops at home.

And don't you love it when some smug journo slips in the "sends his own kids to a private school" bit. Hello, moron: that's the whole point. Private schools are run to give a good education, by hiring the best teachers. That's why people who can afford to, send their kids to them. By restoring choice to parents who cannot afford to do so, you could get some of the same benefits in the public school system.

Jobs has also been a long-time advocate of a school voucher system, another ridiculous idea based on the misplaced faith that the mythical free market will fix schools by giving parents choice.

Ah, isn't it wonderful to dismiss realities you don't like by labelling them "mythical"? And why isn't Steve grateful to the State which created his company and anointed him CEO? That's what happened, right? Because there's no free market? And who are these stupid parents to want choice, anyway? Choice is fine for choosing a Big Mac or a QuarterPounder, but education is too important to be left to their simple little minds; only the State in its infinite wisdom can decide for them.

Well, Leander, here's a suggestion: why don't you emigrate to the socialist holy land, Sweden? Whoops, scratch that: Sweden has a school voucher system! The horrors!

Kahney then goes wittering on about the real crisis in education being caused by the awful disparities in income in the US, as evidenced by a crackpot UNICEF report which was comprehensively demolished by The Times. The UN, lying. I know. Who'd have thought?

You can't make this stuff up

2007-02-20T10:59:00.000Z

What happens when you deliberately destroy your country's once-strong, food-exporting farming infrastructure, condemning millions of your people to years of starvation? Why, you become the front runner to lead the World Food Programme.

But I suppose that's what happens when "democracy" means letting a bunch of kleptocratic thugs run Africa as though it were their own personal fief, all in the name of emancipation. And unfortunately South Africa is heading down the same path. All the democrats and anti-racists cried foul when cynics branded the first non-racial elections in Zimbabwe as "one man, one vote, once." But unfortunately the cynics were right. And for South Africa, I fear it's just a question of time. If they really cared about the welfare of Zimbabweans they would force Mugabe out. By pretending all is well, they are making clear what their priorities are: solidarity with a dictator, because he is black. But then again, racism's only bad if you're white, I suppose.

Being bad effectively

2007-02-14T17:49:00.000Z

You may be familiar with some of the techniques that are advocated for being more effective in getting things done: for example, if you feel overwhelmed by a task and therefore keep putting it off, one technique is to do a deal with yourself that you'll just work on it for ten minutes, then stop if you want to. Usually, you won't want to: once you're over the initial hump of resistance, you actually get into it, and start to have fun (or at least build up some momentum).

Another way is to plan what needs to be done minutely, splitting it up into very small sub-tasks, each of which leads to the next. It's a lot easier to start a small, easily-done task, than a huge job that will probably take days to complete.

It occurred to me recently, while analysing why I ended up doing something I didn't actually want to do, that my Evil Inclination is already pretty adept at doing this, but to a bad end, obviously. So if I decide that I don't want to go out drinking, but would rather stay in and get some work done, the obvious course of action when the friend I usually go drinking with phones up is to not answer the phone. But the Evil Inclination will say, "Oh, just talk to him. You don't have to go. Just talk." So I do. Step one along the path.

Then my friend will say, come on down, the gang's all here. And the Evil Inclination will say, "Just one drink. Then you can leave. Easy!" And there's step two.

And of course the momentum builds up, and I end up staying till closing time, and that's the end of the evening. I end up doing what I decided I didn't want to do, and every step of the way the Evil Inclination says "Don't be afraid of taking the next step. You can stop whenever you want!" Which is true. But unlikely to happen.

So I guess the trick is to catch out the Evil Inclination, and tell it that there is no point in taking the first step: if you've decided not to do something, there's no point in flirting with it. Don't do it. At all. Not even the first step. In fact, especially not the first step.

Some good global warming science for a change

2007-02-12T17:04:00.000Z

An interesting article in The Times about new evidence for the solar hypothesis, which posits that fluctuations in the solar wind affect cloud formation by influencing the influx of cosmic radiation, which in turn affects temperature. An experiment has confirmed a key element of the hypothesis. Now this is real science: come up with a theory and then test it. Interestingly, it was difficult to find funding for the experiment. With all that money going to the pseudo-science that is climate modelling, you'd have thought they could have spared a few bob for the real kind. But I guess science is out of fashion now: much easier to climb on the funding bandwagon. Time was, science fuelled technological progress. Now the new faithful have managed to pervert scientists into supporting their neo-Luddite, anti-tech pseudo religion. Marxism is dead. Long live environmentalism- the new hope for destroying capitalism! (And getting people to behave the way we think they ought to.)

Screenwriting on a Mac

2007-02-12T12:12:00.000Z

I've been trying to complete my Great Movie Script for a while now, and one of my excuses for the lack of progress has been the state of screenwriting software for the Mac. Well, free software, to be precise: I don't want to shell out a couple of hundred for Final Draft just yet, it'd be too much like inviting failure.

I tried this "free" Word template that I had already paid for with my TV licence fee money, but typically for a forced purchase, it doesn't work very well on the Mac version of Word, and the Beeb have no plans to improve said compatibility (I suppose there's only so much you can do with a few billion pounds, after all, and Israel-bashing doesn't come cheap; one must prioritise). And then there's the fact that it's for Word. Yuck.

I had been wishing that someone would do a plugin for my favourite editor, BBEdit, when ironically enough I discovered that someone had done just that for the Other Mac Editor, namely TextMate. And I'm starting to think that TextMate is pretty good for HTML editing as well: I'm loving the tab-completion feature.

Of course TextMate isn't free: but if I buy it for web editing, then the screen stuff comes free, right? Only I'll have to come up with another excuse for not writing. Either that or finish the script.

Like apartheid? Don't make me laugh

2007-02-11T11:52:00.000Z

It's sad that while supposed intellectuals and people who ought to know better sign up to the ridiculous "Independent Jewish Voices", a Muslim can see the realities in Israel with far greater clarity than bandwagon-hopping Jews. I mean, how hard is it to find this stuff out? How long does it take to mentally compare apartheid South Africa with Israel?

Oh wait; I know what you're going to say. She's an Uncle Tom, a traitor to her own people. Unlike the noble IJV, who are brave dissenters, standing up for a view of Israel that is held by only, what, 90% of the British media? For which they face no threats of death; unlike Ms Manji and anyone else who dares to point out the uncomfortable truth about Islam.

It could be our choice

2007-02-11T11:27:00.000Z

Norm has a problem with a refinement on one of the arguments traditionally advanced to explain the existence of evil. The argument is that free will requires a genuine choice: a creature incapable of acting evilly cannot choose good in any meaningful sense. The question is why, if in the World to Come, when we will be free of pain, suffering etc, can we be in such a state then but not now: it seems possible that G-d can reconcile free will with goodness then, so why not now?

The refinement goes as follows: G-d follows a rule which says that no creature can have that state imposed on her without first going through a probationary period where some level of personal choice is allowed; that probationary period is life in this world.

Norm rightly asks why the rule only applies to moral state, and not to physical characteristics which are clearly imposed without consent. It seems an arbitrary distinction to make.

There are two things which immediately spring to mind. The first is, the physical characteristics can be completely arbitrary, because the physical world is an illusion, like the Matrix: our true self is the soul. Imposing arbitrary physical characteristics is simply one of the many clues that G-d leaves to enable us to see through the illusion.

The second thought is that, on the view that our souls are eternal and exist in the World to Come both before and after our journeys on Earth, our physical characteristics are chosen by ourselves, before we come down from the eternal world to the physical world. So that our lives in the physical world are journeys voluntarily undertaken, in order to achieve growth (which is not possible in the eternal, unchanging world) and so we choose our physical characteristics and circumstances in order to work on some particular aspect of growth in character.

The second thought obviates the need for the refinement of the argument. On this view, life in the World to Come is free of pain and evil because it is free of any change whatsoever, it is frozen and static. To achieve any movement or growth, one needs to descend to the physical world. Unfortunately, growth is not automatic: one may fail in the challenge one has set oneself. One may end up doing evil instead of transcending one's self-imposed physical constraints.

A pretty bad Jewish joke

2007-02-07T13:30:00.000Z

Norm on the Independent Jewish Voices launched with such fanfare yesterday. Not much to add really: except continuing amazement that these people have the chutzpah to characterise criticism of their viewpoint as "oppression", when non-Muslims (and even non-Sunnis) in the Arab world cannot even practice their religion except in secret. Ha. Aha.

Security in Vista

2007-02-06T11:31:00.000Z

This is probably just a coincidence, but shortly after Bill Gates' frankly laughable accusations against OS X security (broken on a daily basis?? Yeah, right. Whatever.) the new Mac ads poke fun at Vista's heavy-handed security model. I haven't used Vista, but the satire rings true for anyone who has tried to open an Office document containing a macro: Microsoft's idea of "security" is to shield themselves from responsibility by asking you if you want to allow the potentially risky action, without giving you any information that would allow you to make a meaningful choice. So you can choose yes, and get what you have to get done, done: if a virus is unleashed as a result, Microsoft can shrug and say "we warned you". If you choose no, you're safe, but you can't actually do anything - but Microsoft can say it's made you "secure".

More things I've been doing

2007-02-04T17:09:00.000Z

At the risk of the blog turning into "what I'm doing workwise"... (but then again, why not?), I've been doing some affiliate marketing for a little while now, with varying degrees of success. But one area that has been quite successful is magazine subscriptions.

I started promoting magazine subscriptions via a new website, Discount Magazine Subscriptions, from late November last year, and I must say it went quite well, making a tidy little chunk of cash from all the people buying subscriptions as gifts.

Quite surprising were the top sellers for me: by far and away the most successful was Woman and Home subscriptions, although Good Food Magazine subscriptions, National Geographic subscriptions, Red Magazine, New Scientist, The Economist, and Delicious Magazine also put in good showings. Oh, and Gardener's World.

Things have obviously quietened down a bit in the new year, but there's still some activity. I've got a few other things on the go, though, will talk about those a bit later...

New site completed

2007-01-30T20:38:00.000Z

I've just completed a new site for a client, an optician practice in nearby Finchley, North London. I think it turned out quite nice. My aim was to make a site that fitted in well with the pre-existing logo, which is quite clean and modern, so I made a site with simple, solid colours for the most part, a hint of gradient here and there, and a clean but bold design. I also quite enjoyed embedding one of Google's nice draggable, scrollable, zoomable maps into the contact page: admittedly it's not the most cutting-edge implementation of the Google Map API, but it does the job and looks nice. Anyway, if you want to take a look, it's here: Optikal Opticians and Contact Lens Centre, Finchley

Spamevenmore

2007-01-19T11:12:00.001Z

So it turns out that my problems with an "overzealous spam filter" in Gmail were actually due to my hosting company being considered a spam source by Google, so all email forwarded from my domains was automatically suspect. As soon as I switched hosting companies, the problem went away. Not that I haven't had any spam problems since. Oh no. Although this time it was really my fault.

About two weeks ago I started noticing that mail forwarded from my domains was taking a long time to come through. Days, sometimes. So I complained to the new hosting company. They wrote back, suggesting I look at the outgoing mail queue on my virtual server.

The web interface showed, all neatly lined up and waiting patiently for my poor overloaded server to churn through them, no fewer than 1,278 outgoing mails, each of them bcc'd to hundreds of recipients, all of them pure, unadulterated, spam.

Where did they come from? Nope, not an open relay. Turns out a contact form I had whipped up in PHP was vulnerable to header injection. This happens when a spammer types into a web form, extra information which is interpreted by PHP as being part of the message which is emailed when the form button is pressed. This extra info is the spam, plus the bcc'd addresses. The result is that a form that I intended to email only me, with contact info from the site, emailed thousands of people with information about worthless penny stocks. How did the spammer find my form? He used a robot which goes around trying to enter test messages into every form it finds; the test message tries to send to his email address, and contains info on the location of the form. If he receives an email, he knows the form is vulnerable, and also its location.

After taking the form down, and deleting the queue, I set about fixing the form. The trick relies on the newline character, a backslash followed by an "n" or an "r". This is because email relies on newlines to indicate different parts of the message. So a newline followed by "bcc:" and one or more email addresses, is interpreted as a command to bcc the message to those addresses. Since no-one typing information into a contact form would ever need to type such a sequence, you simply need to add a check to the PHP code that uses a regular expression to find such a sequence, and if it does, to reject the attempt.

So far, touch wood, things seem OK. And I'm only checking the mail queue every half hour or so. I should be down to once a day in about a year...

Obligatory iPhone comment

2007-01-19T10:51:00.001Z

For the record, I love the iPhone, am counting the days until I can
get one, and believe it will be an enormous success.

That is all.

Dershowitz on the world according to Carter

2006-11-27T13:34:00.000Z

This critique by Alan Dershowitz of the faults in Jimmy Carter's recent book is notable not only for the content of his argument, delivered with its usual clarity, but also for the unbelievable antisemitism of the commenters: Dershowitz on the world according to Jimmy Carter

Been getting a lot of spam lately? Thank Microsoft

2006-11-27T12:56:00.000Z

According to this article, the huge increase in spam over the last couple of months is due to a massive botnet controlled by a group of Russian hackers. So the inevitable has happened. As sysadmins and ISPs around the world have made it all but impossible to send spam from legitimate domains, so the spammers have gone for the weakest link: computers that are connected to the Internet but are hopelessly compromised by kludgy and poorly designed security. In other words, the Windows machines used by your parents, your spouse, your kids and your neighbours. Data obtained from reverse-engineering a botnet control client shows that many of the compromised computers are running XP Service Pack 2, the version of Windows that was supposed to represent a major tightening up of security. Guess that was more PR than substance, which is not, shall we say, unassociated with Microsoft. So even if you don't use Windows yourself, you still have to suffer the consequences of Microsoft's short-sighted design principles. Just wonderful.

Getting ripped off by something that's free

2006-11-27T09:54:00.001Z

I came across a disclaimer on a website recently, part of which read as follows:

"This Agreement shall all be governed and construed in accordance with
the laws of United Kingdom applicable to agreements made and to be
performed in United Kingdom. You agree that any legal action or
proceeding between [site name removed].com and you for any purpose
concerning this Agreement or the parties' obligations hereunder shall
be brought exclusively in a federal or state court of competent
jurisdiction sitting in United Kingdom."

According to the footer, it was generated free by a company called
PriorityDigital.com. They have an invitation on the bottom to get your
own free disclaimer.

PriorityDigital have obviously taken a boilerplate disclaimer written
by a lawyer in the United States, and replaced every reference to a
state or a country with the country supplied by the person who wants
the disclaimer. In this case, the phrase "United Kingdom" was
supplied.

Now here's the problem. There are no laws applying to the United
Kingdom as a whole. There is a legal system that applies in England
and Wales. There is another legal system that applies in Scotland.
Businesses that operate in England or Wales (or both) normally opt for
their agreements to be governed by the laws of England and Wales.
Opting for a legal system that doesn't actually exist, and that
betrays your ignorance of the laws applicable in your own country, is
probably not a good way of achieving legal certainty in your affairs.

There's another problem as well. There are no "federal or state
courts" of any jurisdiction, competent or otherwise, sitting anywhere
in the United Kingdom. In England and Wales there are county courts,
crown courts, high courts, courts of chancery, and probably others,
but no federal or state courts. England is a monarchy, not a
federation, nor a member of one, and is not a state in that sense. So
where exactly are you asking for your action to be heard?

This is an example of getting ripped off by free: using a free service
like this could end up being very expensive indeed. And I am sure that
the disclaimer that PriorityDigital had drawn up to protect themselves
from liability for use of their free service, has been very carefully
and very specifically drafted to protect them.

The new Million Dollar Page?

2006-11-21T15:53:00.000Z

Here's another of those "why didn't I think of that?" sites: whether the guy will get to the million, who knows, but I then I doubted Alex Tew would, so what do I know: Link Experiment

Alder Hey on Child's Play

2006-11-19T22:12:00.000Z

Just a quick reminder that Child's Play, the excellent charity initiative from the amzing Tycho and Gabe of Penny Arcade is up and running again, and this year, one of the hospitals is Alder Hey in Liverpool.

The idea behind Child's Play is for gaming enthusiasts to give toys, games and books to children's hospitals for the sick kids to use, especially those unfortunate enough to be in hospital over the festive season. To this end there are a number of Amazon wishlists, each set up by one of the hospitals, and to contribute you just go to the wish list and buy something. Amazon sends the goodies direct to the hospital. That's it!

In the three years that Child's Play has been in operation, they've raised more than a million dollars, and so far this year we're up to $50k, so if you need to make up a bit of ground on your charitable giving this year, please consider buying a toy or two for sick kids.

Kids and technology

2006-11-12T11:42:00.000Z

technology
Originally uploaded by zinkwazi.

I love this picture: I think it shows how kids effortlessly take command of technology, without any doubts or fears, and how much fun it can be. (Of course, it helps that they're using a PowerBook!)

Spamalot

2006-11-11T18:13:00.000Z

Is it just me or is the Gmail spam filter suddenly a lot more
agressive? I used to have no false positives and one or two spams
getting through a day, but over the last week I've noticed a lot more
of the wanted stuff getting stuck in the spam folder. Anyway, while
retrieving the good stuff I came across some spam that made me laugh:

"You won't forget your eyes after you finally gave her the long-lasting love."

That sounds really good, because, you know, it's so embarrassing when
you forget your eyes and have to go back the next morning to get them.
I can really relate to that. Not.

"Zero percent of Cubans are connected to the Internet"

2006-11-02T22:52:00.000Z

Bill Woodcock at the U.N. Internet Governance Forum, responding to the
Cuban delegate's evasion of the question:

"Let me answer the question about what percentage of Cubans are
connected to the Internet. ... Zero percent of Cubans are connected to
the Internet. The Cuban government operates an incumbent phone
company, which maintains a Web cache. Cubans who wish to use the
Internet browse the government Web cache. They do not have
unrestricted access to the Internet."

The violence in Iraq is an Iraqi problem

2006-11-02T11:18:00.000Z

An interesting article by Daniel Pipes argues that just because
America invaded Iraq to protect its interests doesn't mean it is
obliged to rehabilitate it. He suggests redeploying the coalition
forces to the uninhabited areas, where they can protect the borders,
ensure no new dictators take over, etc, but leave the policing and the
ground-level security to the Iraqis. It's certainly time the Iraqis
took some responsibility for their own fate. Saddam is gone: there's
no excuse now for not taking action. Let's see some.

In Iraq, Stay the Course - but Change It

Bush and Blair and interfering in peoples' lives

2006-10-31T12:10:00.000Z

So you've got Tony Blair: a man to be greatly admired for his
principled stand on spreading democracy in the Middle East and getting
rid of loathsome tyrants, yet a man (the moaning of the hardcore
Labourites notwithstanding) overly enamoured of the idea of the State
as a positive force in the lives of its citizens, and a force which
should consequently be made larger over time: the latter is of course
a Bad Idea and the person holding it is not to be admired on that
account.

And then you've got George W Bush, a man to be greatly admired for his
principled support of Tony Blair's stand on spreading democracy etc,
such support notable for going well beyond mere moral encouragement,
yet a man given to pork binges that would make a Democrat blush, were
they capable of blushing, and again not a particularly admirable
trait.

What to make of the parallels? Is there in fact no contradiction, that
the actions in the external and internal sphere are both of a piece?
Could it be that the principled stand is nothing more than the
overweening desire to interfere in the lives of other people, and that
we who find it admirable, do so chiefly because it is happening to
other people and not to us?

I ask this particularly in view of the fact that the situation in Iraq
seems to be rapidly moving towards a resemblance with the situation of
the Palestinian Arabs, where leaders promise to crack down on
militants who carry out atrocities, yet these same militants form a
significant part of the leader's support, and everyone knows the
promise is as much action as will ever be forthcoming. So as things
degenerate into Business As Usual in Arabland, it's hard to escape the
conclusion that the outside interference of the Iraq war was as
pointless and counterproductive as any other state intervention. The
fact that all the usual suspects who have in the past urged more state
intervention in the domestic sphere, were in this case against this
particular state intervention, should not have blinded us to the
truth: that, whatever the moral reasons for doing so, interfering in
the lives of ordinary Iraqis was a profoundly Big Government thing to
do.

Now there certainly was a moral case for the removal of Saddam: of
that there is no doubt. And there is a moral case for staying the
course and finishing what has been started. But I just find it
interesting to think about whether there really is a contradiction at
the heart of Bush and Blair, or whether they are actually the True
Prophets of universal interference in peoples' lives, at home and
abroad.

Pigs flying and all that

2006-10-22T15:46:00.000+01:00

Don't look now but there's some (gasp!) non-doctrinal thinking posted on the Guardian's Comment is Free blog from time to time. For example, this eloquent puncturing of the earnest arguments in favour of doing something about global warming: A Convenient Truth

Inconsistency, thy name is Microsoft

2006-10-19T21:57:00.000+01:00

So I just found out yesterday that the universal window-focus-rotation method on a Mac is the Command-~ combination. That's to rotate the focus on the windows within a single app, whereas of course Command-Tab rotates through your apps. (Yes, I have had a Mac for nearly two years now. What's your point??) So I'm happily rotating through my windows in Firefox, and Photoshop, and then today, I have Excel open, so I'm happily rotating through the... WTF! It doesn't work!

Turns out that window-rotating in Excel for Mac works exactly the way it does in the Windows world: Ctrl-Tab. Now what you need to understand about Microsoft Office for the Mac is that it's not a straight port of Office for Windows. Hell no. It's a completely fookin different application (although it can share docs with the Windows one). But virtually everything is different, including all of the fargin keyboard shortcuts in Excel. Now when you've been using Excel in Windows since the friggin thing was invented, you get certain keyboard shortcuts more or less burned into your brain. Alt-= for the sum command, for example. F2 to edit the cell. And just hitting return to paste. Does that work in Excel for Mac? Fark no. Why would it? The famously hard-core Mac team at Microsoft have completely rewritten Excel for the Mac, dude! None of that Windows crap here!

Except for... the one thing where it makes SENSE to change, to fit in with the system-wide Mac way of doing things... oh, maybe we'll leave that in.

FUCKWITS!!!

If it's not OK at home, it's not OK here

2006-10-03T14:42:00.000+01:00

Just thinking about Mugabe's promise to continue to meet protest with violence:

Addressing a rented crowd bussed to Harare Airport, on his recent return from addressing the United Nations General Assembly in New York, Mugabe said he would continue to sanction the beating of labour leaders who disregard police orders.

Here we have the perfect example of why the UN is a failure. You can have thuggish dictators like Mugabe and Chavez stand up in New York and hand out the most outrageous abuse of their hosts, while no-one in their own countries is permitted a whisper of free speech. Refusing to look into the way in which the representatives of states achieve their status makes a mockery of the democratic procedures of the UN. What is the point of allowing a gangster free speech and a vote at the UN, when the people he supposedly represents did not vote for him and do not trust him to advance their aims? No representative of a government should be allowed to speak at the UN unless his government allows free speech at home. No representative should be allowed to take his seat at the UN unless his appointment is made by a government duly elected in free and fair elections.

Hacks and Cracks

2006-09-29T10:10:00.000+01:00

Ok, enough politics for awhile; I found a couple of interesting nuggets on Bruce Schneier's blog. The first concerns Microsoft's reaction to vulnerabilities, which depends on whether they actually lose money because of the vulnerability, or not.

If you really want to see Microsoft scramble to patch a hole in its software, don't look to vulnerabilities that impact countless Internet Explorer users or give intruders control of thousands of Windows machines. Just crack Redmond's DRM.

Schneier makes the good point that Microsoft doesn't really stand to lose money from vulnerabilities in IE or Windows. So it takes its time issuing patches- unless those patches are for vulnerabilities in DRM software. Then, unsurprisingly, the patch is out there in record time, because that hole could cost it money. - Microsoft and FairUse4WM

The second bit is about hacking ATMs:

Last month, a man reprogrammed an automated teller machine at a gas station on Lynnhaven Parkway to spit out four times as much money as it should.

He then made off with an undisclosed amount of cash.

The weird thing about this is how easy it is. The manuals for the machine can be found after a couple of Google searches. The manuals include the default passwords, which seem to be rarely changed. - Programming ATMs to Believe $20 Bills Are $5 Bills

The Jew of the nations

2006-08-11T13:37:00.000+01:00

Mark Steyn, writing about a fictionalised account of what was bitter reality for millions of Europe's Jews, restrictions on property ownership, makes the following point:

Israel is, in effect, subject to a geopolitical version of the same conditions endured by Lazarus the Jew in Anthony Hope's Strelsau. The Zionist Entity is for the moment permitted to remain in business but, like Aaron Lazarus, it's not entitled to the enforceable property rights of every other nation state. No other country -- not Canada, not Slovenia, not Thailand -- would be expected to forego the traditional rights of nations subjected to kidnappings of its citizens, random rocket attacks into residential areas, and other infringements of its sovereignty.

Which is true. Just for a laugh, I rewrote some of the current reporting on the war that Israel is fighting, as if it were Britain resisting attacks from terrorists in Ireland:

BBC BELFAST - 10 August 2006

IN WHAT HAS BECOME A familiar sight to the beleagured citizens of Belfast, RAF warplanes swept in over the horizon this morning to deal more death and destruction to a city in ruins. "This is a totally disproportionate response" said one. "They're waging war on women and children!" Meanwhile militants aligned with the IRA have promised swift retaliation, vowing to launch new long-range "Guinness" rockets that are said to be capable of reaching Manchester.

Three weeks into the war, despite devastating attacks that have left hundreds of thousands of innocent Irish as homeless refugees, and killed hundreds more, the British Armed Forces seem no closer to stopping the daily hail of rockets that has led to the virtual evacuation of Scotland and the North of England. Prime Minister Tony Blair has defended his country's actions, saying that the IRA's strategy of using civilians has "human shields" has unfortunately increased the civilian death toll, despite the best efforts of the British to encourage evacuation by dropping leaflets on cities and towns affected by the IRA's rocket campaign.

Meanwhile the UN has called for an immediate ceasefire, and an international force to ensure that the IRA does not threaten British civilians: the call was rejected by Blair, who reiterated his country's determination to destroy the IRA militant infrastructure. This has led to international condemnation, and even America, traditionally a strong supporter of the British state, has come under pressure from its Irish-American citizens, who are outraged that laser-guided bombs are being sent to Britian to aid in the war effort.

It seems the death knell of hopes for a resolution of the cycle of violence that has plagued these Atlantic islands for nearly a century. The withdrawal of the British forces from Ireland six years ago, and the unilateral handing over of Northern Ireland last year, had led some observers to speculate that the road map was on track for a peaceful resolution. The present conflict was sparked by the kidnapping of two British soldiers from a border post on the Scottish island of Islay, by militants aligned with the IRA. Holding two seats in the Irish parliament, the IRA has a militia which controls much of the eastern part of the island, contrary to a UN resolution requiring the Irish government to disarm all militias. It's not clear what the IRA hoped to achieve by doing this, since their nominal goal, a united Ireland, seems to have been achieved; but there are those who believe that nothing less than the total destruction of the Anglo-Saxon state, and a restoration of the Celtic dominion over all of Britain, will satisfy them. But whatever the truth, Britain seems to have been embarked on a venture it cannot win, and meantime the casualties mount up.

It just doesn't work. There is no way such things would ever be written about a country like Britain. The rules are different. Arnold Roth, whose daughter Malki was murdered by Palestinian terrorists, is bemused by the British reaction to the averted terror plot yesterday:

If the plot was thwarted -- a word that is being endlessly repeated in the British television reports on our screens this morning -- why has the security alert level in the UK been pushed up just now to its highest possible setting? -- "critical" meaning an attack is expected imminently, according to the BBC.

Suggested interpretation: when it's being done to you and your family, you don't take chances. We absolutely agree that if there is an imminent threat of something awful, every possible security measure has to be taken. But then stop claiming it was thwarted. At best, it was discovered, and the real work is still ahead. You're at war.

On the other hand, there has not been a single victim at this stage. Not one person wounded unless the police 'inquiries' led to some bruises or breaks among the suspects. Not one person killed. So we sincerely hope the British don't over-react. Or, Heaven forfend, react disproportionately.

Yes, we wouldn't want to have to chide Britain for a "disproportionate" response, now would we? Oh, hang on: they're not Jews! The rules are different! Mark Steyn again:

This isn't about who's right and who's wrong: there are regional flare-ups all over the map -- Ivory Coast, Congo, Bosnia -- and, regardless of the rights and wrongs, for the most part the world just sits back and lets them get on with it. There are big population displacements -- as there were, contemporaneous to the founding of Israel, in Europe and the Indian subcontinent -- but one side wins and the dust settles. The energy expended by the world in denying this particular regional crisis the traditional settlement is unique and perverse, except insofar as by ensuring that the "Palestinian question" is never resolved one is also ensuring that Israel's sovereignty is also never really settled: it, too, is conditional -- and, to judge from recent columns in the Washington Post and the Times of London, it's increasingly seen that way in influential circles -- tolerated as a current leaseholder but, like Anthony Hope's Jew, it can never truly own the land. The Jews are once again rootless transients, though, in one of history's blacker jests, they're now bemoaned in the salons of London and Paris as an outrageous imposition of an alien European population on the Middle East. Which would have given Aaron Lazarus a laugh. The Jews spent millennia on the Continent without ever being accepted as European. But no sooner are the Continent's Jewry all but extinct than suddenly every Jew left on the planet is a European.

No choice? This time, no excuses

2006-08-10T22:55:00.000+01:00

Abbagav makes an excellent point:

How often have you heard the excuse that the suicide bombers and terrorist attackers go after Israeli civilians with 'Allahu Akbar' fury because they have no other choice, since they don't have advanced weapons and missiles like Israel does? But now on Israel's northern border, and coming from Gaza too, we see that the moment Jihadists do get their missiles, they don't use them to go after Israeli artillery pieces as the apologists would have you expect. Now that Jihad has a choice, it still prefers sending its explosives at hospitals and city centers, as if the missile is just a suicide bomber upgrade. Yesterdays missile strike on Israeli reserve soldiers gathered for a meeting is the exception that proves the rule: it was essentially a lucky shot, the first notable hit against a military target after the prior 3000 Katyusha's had landed on apartment buildings, schools and businesses from Haifa to Naharia to Tzfat, leaving Israel's uniformed combatants and equipment massed near the border all but ignored.

And Israelinsider talks about one of the Jewish martyrs, an incredibly selfless young man who gave his life to save his comrades (not to kill innocents):

It was that same high moral sense that led Major Roi Klein (H.y.d.) to volunteer to lead his unit in Lebanon. Roi, 31 years old and the father of two boys, was an accomplished musician, a superb commander and a Torah scholar. When his unit was attacked in Bint J'beil, he and his men were surrounded in an ambush. One of the terrorists lobbed a grenade towards the group. Roi yelled out "Sh'ma Yisrael" and jumped on the grenade. He took the brunt of the explosion and saved many of his men. This, too, was a different sort of morality.

While the world's media remains obsessed with Lebanese victims and Lebanese refugees, manipulated by blatantly twisted reporting by Arab stringers, as usual the Jewish victims and the Jewish refugees (one-third of the country has been pretty much evacuated!) struggle on, ignored, discounted, "only Jews, after all". Thank G-d for America, and for the millions of Jews around the world who are supporting their brothers and sisters in Israel in their fight for their lives, with solidarity, prayers, money, and material aid. We stand with you, we support you, we honour you, and we will continue to tell the truth in the face of the lies. Israel, we are so proud of you! A light unto the nations indeed.

Shangri-La followup

2006-07-27T12:07:00.000+01:00

Further to this post, I need to report that I have officially Given Up on this diet. It doesn't work for me. After weeks of losing absolutely zippo, the last straw was when I gained three kilograms on Monday. So I've stopped.

Reading the message boards at Seth's site, it seems that there isn't much success among those who only need to lose a few pounds: the big successes come from very overweight people or people who have a huge problem with food cravings. Allthough I did notice a reduction in appetite, I was obviously making up the calories I wasn't eating, from the oil. Since I notice a similar reduction in appetite if I exercise properly, and since exercising makes me feel good and a lot more energetic anyway, I'm just making sure I get up earlier in the mornings so that I get the exercise out of the way first thing: no more excuses or trying to find the time later in the day. And it feels great to sit down to work, already exercised and showered, and ready to hit the day hard.

More William 0rbit related news

2006-07-27T11:50:00.000+01:00

Laurie Mayer, who was one of the Torch Song trilogy, has released her first solo album. It features remixes by William, and some production work by him as well. There are also rumours of a new Strange Cargo album; if true, it would mean three new 0rbit albums in barely a year (although the follow-up to Hello Waveforms, which is called Stereo Odyssey, still has a "4th-6th May" estimated dispatch date from Amazon, I obviously don't have it yet, so perhaps we should see if we get the second one before getting excited about the third).

Gimme Shelter

2006-07-21T15:30:00.000+01:00

If a state allows a "non-state militia" (or bunch of terrorists) to operate without hindrance within its territory, it needs to think about the possible consequences of doing that. If France allowed Basque terrorists to operate freely on its southern borders, it wouldn't be surprised to be attacked by Spain if those terrorists crossed the border, killed Spanish troops, and then kidnapped a soldier to be traded for Basque terrorists held in Spanish jails.

But of course normal rules don't apply when you are talking about the Jew of the nations, Israel, who is expected to meekly accept this treatment from Hizbollah, and then hand over convicted criminals so that they can set about murdering more innocent civilians. If Israel does react as any other nation would, it is condemned for the fallout that hits "innocent Lebanese". Well, innocent of direct action against Israel they may be; but they gave Hizbollah seats in the Lebanese parliament, and they did nothing while Hizbollah set up shop following the withdrawal of the Israeli occupying forces- forces which were there because Lebanon was unable or unwilling to stop the PLO from using the southern border regions as a base. So the Lebanese had their chance. They made the same mistake again. They allowed murderous thugs to take up residence among them again. They are getting hurt again, when Israel takes action against those who are bombarding half of the country with nearly 2,000 rockets so far. It's hard to feel that they didn't know this would happen. Whether they deserve all of the blame for their plight, or whether they share it with Hizbollah*, is hard to say. That Israel is not to blame, isn't.

* Does it even make sense to expect some consideration for a host country, from a group that wants to destroy an entire nation, and which delights in killing civilians?

Bush as the Budweiser Beercan Shimstock

2006-07-20T12:53:00.000+01:00

There's this great bit in the Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance where Pirsig tries to assist a friend who has a problem with his shiny new BMW motorcycle. The problem, handlebars that move in the adjustment clamps no matter how tightly the clamps are tightened, is trivial to fix, he says. The handle bars are just a mite too narrow, and need to be shimmed out with some shimstock, or strips of thin metal. By wrapping the strips around the handlebars under the clamps, the handlebar thickness will be increased, and the clamps will be able to grip properly.

Great, says the friend. Shall I call BMW to get some shimstock?

No need, says the author. I happen to have an empty Budweiser beercan here in my workshop. I'll cut a few strips out of it with tinsnips, and you'll have your shimstock!

Oh, says the friend, clearly appalled at the idea. Um, well, actually, you know, the handlebars aren't that bad. I can live with it a bit longer. Maybe I'll take the bike to BMW next week. And he rides off.

So for a certain type of person, the aesthetic of a solution is far more important than whether the solution works. It has to look and feel right. It has to fit in with preconcieved ideas about appropriateness. If it doesn't, then it's as if the solution doesn't really exist. It's not really available: the fact that it works is of theoretical import only.

I think this may be one of the many reasons behind the strangely high level of loathing that many people have for George W Bush in the role of President of the United States of America. Mr Bush has clearly succeeded in being elected President not once, but twice. Yet to many he is not aesthetically appropriate for the role. He would never be cast as the President in a movie. He isn't polished, urbane, sophisticated, or particularly well-spoken. He doesn't have a commanding, magisterial, or regal manner.

Now none of this is in any practical sense, important. It makes no difference to his effectiveness as President. But none of this matters to those who are offended by him, because to them he should never even have been considered. They shout at the red-staters: what were you thinking? He wasn't even an option! He had no business even presenting himself, such is his manifest unsuitability. His candidacy, in practical terms, did not exist! And you idiots went and voted for him! Twice!

It's like they're forced to look at that Budweiser beercan shimstock every time they take the motorcycle out for a spin, and it reminds them that the machine has now been completely degraded and contaminated, its beautiful aesthetics ruined by a bit of inappropriately sourced metal. And the fact that it now works as it was designed to, is just salt in the wound.

Ehud Olmert's address of the Knesset

2006-07-19T17:37:00.000+01:00

Speech by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to the Knesset on July 17, 2006:

At the outset, I offer condolences, on my behalf and on behalf of the government, the Knesset and the entire nation, to the families of the victims - both civilian and IDF.

I also send best wishes for recovery to the wounded, and a huge embrace for the families of those kidnapped and the boys themselves.

Over the past few weeks, our enemies have challenged the sovereignty of the State of Israel and the safety of its residents - first in the southern sector, then on the northern border, and deeper into the home front.

Israel did not seek these confrontations. On the contrary. We have done a lot to prevent them.

We returned to the borders of the State of Israel, recognized by the entire international community. There were those who misconstrued our desire for peace - for us and our neighbors - as a sign of frailty.

Our enemies misinterpreted our willingness to exercise restraint as a sign of weakness. They were wrong! The State of Israel has no territorial conflict, neither on our southern border nor on our northern one.

In these two areas, we are sitting on the recognized international border - both vis-à-vis the Palestinian Authority in the Gaza Strip, and in Lebanon.

We have no intention of interfering in their internal affairs. On the contrary, stability and tranquility in Lebanon, free of the rule of foreign powers, and in the Palestinian Authority, are in Israel’s interest.

We yearn for the day when peace will prevail between us, for the mutual benefit of our peoples from both sides of our common border.

The campaign we are engaged in these days is against the terror organizations operating from Lebanon and Gaza.

These organizations are nothing but “sub-contractors” operating under the inspiration, permission, instigation and financing of the terror-sponsoring and peace-rejecting regimes, on the Axis of Evil which stretches from Tehran to Damascus.

Lebanon has suffered heavily in the past, when it allowed foreign powers to gamble on its fate.

Iran and Syria still continue to meddle, from afar, in the affairs of Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority, through Hezbollah and the Hamas.

Even if last Wednesday’s criminal attack against an IDF patrol was carried out without the consent of the Lebanese government and without the assistance of its military, this does not absolve it of full responsibility for the attack which emanated from its sovereign territory.

Just as the fact that the Chairman of the Palestinian Authority opposes terrorism against Israel does not relieve him and the Palestinian Authority of their responsibility for the attack carried out from their territory against our soldiers in Kerem Shalom.

They are both fully responsible for the safety of our soldiers who were taken hostage.

Radical, terrorist and violent elements are sabotaging the life of the entire region and placing its stability at risk.

The region in which we live is threatened by these murderous terror groups. It is a regional - as well as global - interest to take control and terminate their activity.

We can all see how the majority of the international community supports our battle against the terror organizations and our efforts to remove this threat of the Middle East.

We intend to do this. We will continue to operate in full force until we achieve this.

On the Palestinian front, we will conduct a tireless battle until terror ceases, Gilad Shalit is returned home safely and the shooting of Qassam missiles stops.

And in Lebanon, we will insist on compliance with the terms stipulated long ago by the international community, as unequivocally expressed only yesterday in the resolution of the 8 leading countries of the world:

The return of the hostages, Ehud (Udi) Goldwasser and Eldad Regev; A complete cease fire; Deployment of the Lebanese army in all of Southern Lebanon; Expulsion of Hizballah from the area, and fulfilment of United Nations Resolution 1559.

We will not suspend our actions. On both fronts we are exercising self-defence in the most basic and essential sense.

In both cases, it is a matter whose importance and significance go far beyond the size of the military units involved. We are at a national moment of truth.

Will we consent to living under the threat of this Axis of Evil or will we mobilize our inner strength and show determination and equanimity?

Our answer is clear to every Israeli, and it echoes today throughout the entire region. We will search every compound, target every terrorist who assists in attacking the citizens of Israel, and destroy every terrorist infrastructure, everywhere.

We will persist until Hizballah and Hamas comply with those basic and decent things required of them by every civilized person.

Israel will not agree to live in the shadow of missiles or rockets against its residents.

Citizens of Israel, There are moments in the life of a nation, when it is compelled to look directly into the face of reality and say: no more! And I say to everyone: no more!

Israel will not be held hostage - not by terror gangs or by a terrorist authority or by any sovereign state.

In the life of a nation there are moments of transcendence, of purification, when political and sectarian disputes which separate us are replaced by a sense of mutual responsibility.

I highly value and appreciate the way the Opposition has been conducting itself in the Knesset these days. The human competition and personal rivalries are dissolved and instead our feeling of mutual responsibility arises, our sense of partnership, and primarily, our eternal love for our people and our land.

This is such a moment! All of us - Jews, Muslims, Christians, Druze and Circassians - now stand as one person, as one nation, subject together to the same hatred and malice, and fighting against it in consensus and partnership.

When missiles are launched at our residents and cities, our answer will be war with all the strength, determination, valor, sacrifice and dedication which characterize this nation.

There is nothing we want more than peace and good neighborly relations - in the east, north and south. We seek peace, we pursue peace and we yearn for peace.

At the same time, there is nothing we reject more than an attempt to harm us and make us give up our right to live here, in our land, in security and peace.

On behalf of the people of Israel, on behalf of all the residents of the country, I came here today to announce to the world: we seek neither war nor direct confrontation, but we will not be deterred from them when the need arises.

Only a nation that can defend its freedom truly deserves it. We are entitled to our freedom, and when necessary, we know how to fight for it and defend it.

My fellow Members of Knesset, The strength of the State of Israel relies on the strength and capability of the IDF. This strength is the main guarantee to preserving and defending our lives on this land.

The best economic and human resources of Israeli society were invested in building this strength.

I want to extend from here my heartfelt gratitude - and that of the Government and the people of Israel - to the IDF soldiers and commanders, the security services, the Israel Police, the rescue forces, the firefighters and the other security forces. I wish to read from the “Prayer for the Welfare of Soldiers in the Israel Defence Forces”.

Millions of Jews - in Israel and the world - pray for the safety and success of those who defend our nation, from the Lebanese border to the desert, and from the Great Sea unto the approach of the Arava, on the land, in the air and on the sea.

“May the Almighty cause the enemies who rise up against us to be struck down before them. May the Holy One, blessed be He, preserve and rescue our fighters from every
trouble and distress and from every plague and illness, and may He send blessing and success in their every endeavour. May He lead our enemies under our soldiers’ sway and may He grant them salvation and crown them with victory”.

The strength of a nation is measured not only by its military capabilities. The strength of a nation is measured by its welfare and morality, its strong and solid economy, its modern and developing market, its export of technologies and products for the most advanced world markets and its ground-breaking academic research.

In all these, each and every one of us has good reason to be proud. But above all, the strength of a nation is measured in times of trial, when the home front becomes the front, when the citizens of the country show admirable fortitude, patience and stamina and allow it to operate against its enemies.

I had the privilege of witnessing these inner strengths in the years when I was Mayor of Jerusalem. For years, our capital was subject to the most murderous terror attacks.

The resilience, patience and restraint of the residents of Jerusalem and the entire citizens of Israel are exemplary.

I recall a conversation with Rudy Giuliani, who was Mayor of New York during the terror attacks of September 2001. I called to offer encouragement to him and the residents of New York following the collapse of the Twin Towers, and he replied: “Ehud, if the New Yorkers can withstand it like the Jerusalemites do, then we will defeat terrorism”.

Even in these days, hundreds of thousands of Israelis stand at the front line of fire, like soldiers in the battlefield, fighting for our life and honor.

It is clear to us that the circumstances imposed upon the residents compel us to address their special needs, in all aspects.

The government will lend immediate assistance, everywhere. The government of Israel, under my leadership, derives strength from the stamina of the Israeli public. We are a brave and determined nation.

I am proud today - perhaps more than ever before - to be an Israeli citizen. Thanks to you, our enemies come up against a united nation, which fights together, shoulder to shoulder.

We do not surrender and we do not panic. We believe in the justice of our cause, because there is no battle more just or moral than ours - a battle for the right to a peaceful and normal life, like any other human being, any other nation and any other state.

We fight for the right of children like Omer Pisachov, may his memory be blessed, a 7 year old from Nahariya, who wanted to visit his grandmother Yehudit Itzkovich, may her memory be blessed, and enjoy the Sabbath dinner she prepared.

We fight for the right of citizens like Shmuel Ben-Shimon, may his memory be blessed, a 41 year old from Yokne’am who left every morning for work in the railway garage in Haifa to support his wife Natalie and their small children.

We fight for the right of citizens like Monica Lerer, may her memory be blessed, a 50 year old from Nahariya, to drink coffee on the terrace in the country to which she immigrated from Argentina.

We fight for the right of girls like Ella Abukasis, may her memory be blessed, a 13 year old from Sderot, to play the flute and read books, as Ella enjoyed doing.

We fight for everything that everyone in the enlightened world takes for granted and never imagined that they would have to fight for - the right to a normal life. It is a difficult battle! It may become even more difficult.

It is a painful test, and we may have to bear more suffering. Such a battle is never easy. It is strewn with pain and suffering, sacrifice, and casualties. But, we have no intention of giving up our desire to live a normal life.

We will not apologize for this desire, and we do not need anyone’s approval to defend ourselves. Citizens of Israel, This is a difficult time of trial for all of us. The State of Israel has withstood much more complex trials - and triumphed.

We have always known how to mobilize our inner strength, equanimity, wisdom and patience, in order to overcome our enemies.

Finally, I wish to speak on a more personal note to the families of Shalit, Goldwasser and Regev, the families of the soldiers who are held hostage by the Hamas and Hezbollah.

You, and mainly your children - our children - are always on my mind. Last Wednesday, only five days ago, at 10am, Aviva and Noam Shalit sat in my office.

They, and I, want Gilad home more than anything. While we were discussing the situation, I - and Aviva and Noam - received the painful news that Ehud (Udi) Goldwasser and Eldad Regev had been kidnapped.

On their departure, Noam and Aviva left a picture of Gilad, taken close to the date of his kidnapping.

Unfortunately, pictures of three boys now stand in my room. Many times during the day I look in their faces, into their eyes, and embrace them in my heart. I do not forget them for one minute.

They were there on our behalf and for our sake. We will do everything and make every effort to bring them home.

We will do this, but not in a pattern that will encourage more kidnappings. There is almost no one who can understand the place you are in.

Even when we do not talk directly, I feel and hear what you want to say to me, and I embrace you with love, understanding and agreement. The place I am in compels me, ultimately, to make fateful decisions, for life, and sometimes even for death.

I have no strength other than that which you have bestowed upon me. I have no courage other than that which G-d, my faith in the justice of our cause and my sense of supreme responsibility, have instilled in me and have prepared me for these fateful moments.

I see before me the kidnapped boys, those standing in the front line and in the line of fire, those brave and determined ones who are fighting today and who could - G-d forbid - be the target of tomorrow’s kidnapping.

We will defend all of them, on behalf of all of them we will fight, and with all of them before our eyes - the civilians in the line of fire, the kidnapped fighters and their families - we will continue, without hesitating, without capitulating and without fretting, until our goals are achieved.

I wish to conclude by reading an extract from Prophet Jeremiah: “Thus said Hashem: a voice is heard on high, wailing, bitter weeping, Rachel weeps for her children; she refuses to be consoled for her children, for they are gone.

“Thus said Hashem: restrain your voice from weeping and your eyes from tears; for there is reward for your accomplishment - the word of Hashem - and they will return from the enemy’s land. There is hope for your future - the word of Hashem; And your children will return to their land”.

We will triumph!

ISPs are idiots

2006-07-19T10:30:00.000+01:00

Well, the ones in America, anyway. They argue that big sites like Google get a "free ride" on the networks, making money from users that they don't share with the ISPs. Some free ride. I'd hate to have Google's monthly bandwidth bill. But as Vint Cerf points out, the real issue is with the users: the ISPs have contracted with the users to provide Internet access to the whole internet, ie any website the user chooses to go to. Now they want to say "Well actually, you can only go to Google and Yahoo if they pay us money to let you." They are breaking the basis of the deal.

And best of all, they are doing it because they fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the internet: all this talk about "prioritising streaming video" means they are trying to re-create a video network on the Internet. But that's now how people use video on the Internet:

[I]f you’re paying any attention at all to Tivo and iPod and other fairly modern communication services, you’ll find people downloading things and then listening to or watching them later. And if you are no longer watching the video as its being delivered to your hard drive, then you no longer need for it to be delivered in realtime in a viewable form. The broadband providers seem to be reinventing the cable and satellite television service model for the Internet. What mystifies me about this is that they are therefore going after an already hotly competing-for market with a finite revenue stream. So the best they can do is a share of that market. Their entry is not going to increase the market, in my view.

So they're breaking the contract with their users to go into competition with satellite TV. What a good business decision. Must be a few MBAs involved there.

I tawt I taw a puddy-tat!

2006-07-11T14:35:00.000+01:00

John Gruber on the "canaries in the (Mac) coalmine".

I certainly agree with his analysis, and on a personal level, having come back to Mac via Linux, there is no freakin' way I would go back now, not even if Ubuntu is the best Linux install ever. It's not just about the OS (although I still don't see how any PC OS can ever achieve the level of hardware integration that OS X has); it's also about the software. Only those who have never used Photoshop seriously can say that the Gimp is equivalent with a straight face. And what about BBEdit? Plus all those really cool Apple apps, like Garageband, iMovie and iDVD. I'll take Mark Pilgrim's word that iMovie doesn't let you export your edit points; but so what? It's virtually a free app! What do you expect? If you want to be able to re-create your edit from the raw footage on another machine, you're likely to be way above the target audience here. Apple sells real applications (for serious money) that do this; they've been used to edit feature films, so they must be in the ballpark. So pay for them, or put up with the limitations of the free apps that come with your Mac. Don't whine about "closed formats". It's nothing of the sort.

In fact, the more I read of what Mark Pilgrim and Corey Doctorow have written, the more convinced I am that these people are the most atypical Mac users (probably the most atypical anything, to be honest) I know of. They're not canaries. They're the weird birds who were hanging around the canaries when the miners caught them, and they flew away because they got bored. Or neurotic. The mine is safe.

Tony's new job

2006-07-04T19:20:00.000+01:00

It would appear from this email that was sent to me by Lloyds TSB, that our esteemed PM has already lined up his post-Gordon job:

Dear Customers,

Lloyds TSB Online Bank always look forward for the high security of our clients. Some customers have been receiving an email claiming to be from Lloyds TSB advising them to follow a link to what appear to be a Lloyds TSB web site, where they are prompted to enter their personal Online Banking details. Lloyds TSB is in no way involved with this email and the web site does not belong to us.

Lloyds TSB is proud to announce about our new updated secure system. We updated our new SSL servers to give our customers a better, fast and secure online banking service.

Due to the recent update of the servers, you are requested to please update your account info at the following link.

*Important*
Please provide all these info completely and correctly otherwise due to security reasons we may have to close your account temporarily.

A. J. Blair
Online Security Admin
Lloyds TSB Online Bank .

I don't really know why I got this, because I don't have a Lloyds account. So I'm not even a single "customer", never mind being "customers". But no doubt Tony knows best.

The next white rap star?

2006-07-04T13:22:00.000+01:00

"A Geordie stroke victim woke from a coma speaking like a Jamaican islander.

Lynda Walker spent all 60 years of her life with a thick Geordie accent - but she now suffers from "foreign accent syndrome".

...when she regained consciousness after a stroke in March last year, her family and friends were convinced she sounded like she was speaking Jamaican patois."

Foreign Accent Syndrome

The "spoiled brat" theory of Islamism

2006-06-23T17:14:00.000+01:00

David S Landes:

I have always thought that no one can really understand the economic performance of Moslem nations without studying Islam as religion and culture. The best indicator of the potential of growth and development of a nation is the status and role of women. Their exclusion means depriving the country of an important volume of workforce and talent. Moreover, their exclusion also undermines the desire of men to achieve success; spoiled from their childhood and treated as princes, men don't feel the need to prove themselves.

Theodore Dalrymple:

However secular the tastes of the young Muslim men, they strongly wish to maintain the male dominance they have inherited from their parents. A sister who has the temerity to choose a boyfriend for herself, or who even expresses a desire for an independent social life, is likely to suffer a beating, followed by surveillance of Stasi-like thoroughness. The young men instinctively understand that their inherited system of male domination—which provides them, by means of forced marriage, with sexual gratification at home while simultaneously freeing them from domestic chores and allowing them to live completely Westernized lives outside the home, including further sexual adventures into which their wives cannot inquire—is strong but brittle, rather as communism was: it is an all or nothing phenomenon, and every breach must meet swift punishment.

The Guardian:

Public opinion in Britain is mostly favourable towards Muslims, but the feeling is not requited by British Muslims, who are among the most embittered in the western world, according to a global poll published yesterday.

Don't boycott Palestine

2006-06-16T19:18:00.000+01:00

Eric Lee writes:

Both the Canadian and British unions alike compared Palestine to South Africa, which has triggered some criticism. Obviously, the comparison will not be exact, but I can see where they are coming from.

After all, the central belief of the white racists in South Africa was that the races must live apart, and that one had greater rights than the other. This does describe Hamas' view of things fairly accurately. In societies where Islamic fundamentalist parties -- the sister movements to Hamas -- have come to power, they have imposed racist laws and suppressed ethnic and religious minorities. Imagining a Hamas military victory over Israel, I can see where one would expect the rise of a Palestinian-dominated apartheid state.

Of course it is equally likely that a Hamas military victory would result in a simple genocide directed against the Jews, in which case accusing Hamas of proposing apartheid is actually being generous.

I couldn't agree more.

Not losing weight? Try drinking more

2006-06-06T17:31:00.000+01:00

You may have heard of this new diet, the Shangri-La diet. I read about it on the Web and was intrigued. I've successfully used the Atkins diet in the past, but found it too difficult to maintain, so the weight has crept back on...

Anyway, this one sounded like a cool hack of the body's appetite system. I read the author's research and found myself impressed. So I started it a couple of weeks ago. The idea is that you take either a tablespoon of sugar dissolved in water, or a tablespoon of oil, twice a day, with at least an hour between it and any food or drink (except water) on both sides. That's it. I started off with the sugar water in the morning and oil in the evening, but now I just take oil twice a day, it's much easier and quicker.

Does it work? Absolutely no doubt. Most of the time I feel no hunger, and no interest in food. I used to constantly snack at home, but now, after a few trips to the fridge out of habit, I look at food, shrug, and carry on. I only eat lunch now, no breakfast, no dinner, except the odd yoghurt or piece of fruit. And it's hard to explain, but you actually see food objectively. Last night I had a few spoons of Ben & Jerry's Cherry Garcia, and then put the tub back. Before, if I managed not to eat the entire tub after dinner, I felt I was doing well. I just wanted the taste, and that was enough. The craving for food is just gone.

The one slight hitch was the oil. The theory depends on using oil that is tasteless. In the US, it seems that extra-light olive oil (not extra-virgin) is entirely processed and has no taste. After a long search I found extra-light oil here, but it has a slight taste. The label says it has some virgin oil; apparently EU regs require this. But then I tried Floro sunflower oil. Perfect; virtually no taste.

Update: I'm not doing this diet any more; it doesn't work for me.

Piracy BAD! BAD Pirate! Bad, BAD Pirate!!

2006-06-04T11:45:00.000+01:00

So I watched Diva again last night, courtesy of my Amazon DVD Rental by post subscription. It's perhaps one of the coolest films ever made, and holds up pretty well after 25 years. If you're not familiar with it, the plot revolves around young Jules, who makes a bootleg tape recording of a concert of his favourite diva, Cynthia Hawkins, purely for his own enjoyment, as she refuses to make any records (the film marginally predates the CD). He ends up with two sets of villains on his tail, both trying to get the recording (one for the wrong reason).

Now I could imagine the director facing a few problems if he tried to make the movie today:

JEAN-JACQUES BENEIX: Good morning, gentlemen.

FIRST MOVIE EXEC: Hi there Jacques, may I call you Jacques? I just wanted you to know how excited we are about doing your movie.

SECOND MOVIE EXEC: Oh, totally, totally excited. I mean, we're thinking, Orlando for the lead, and Walken for the police chief. Am I right?

FIRST MOVIE EXEC: Oh yeah. But, ah, Jacques, just before we get to that... about the opening scene....

JEAN-JACQUES BENEIX: Yes?

SECOND MOVIE EXEC: Well, we've got this young guy, right, and he's sitting in the Paris Opera, and he's got a mini-disk recorder on his lap, right...

JEAN-JACQUES BENEIX: Yes?

FIRST MOVIE EXEC: Well, he's recording the performance.

SECOND MOVIE EXEC: I mean, he's a fucking pirate, for God's sake. Little bastards just like him are sitting in movie theatres all across America, right now, taking bread from our mouths! (Wipes spittle from lower lip.)

JEAN-JACQUES BENEIX: But zis is ze central conflict zat drives ze story: as Jules is making love to Cynthia, he knows if she knew he was ze pirate who is causing her all zis trouble...

FIRST MOVIE EXEC: But Jacques, baby, we can't have the hero doing that! No-one will want to play him, I guarantee you! Forget Orlando, baby!

JEAN-JACQUES BENEIX: Actually, I was zinking of Johnny Depp...

SECOND MOVIE EXEC: Oh, fucking GREAT!! The Pirate of the Caribbean himself!

FIRST MOVIE EXEC: You know, I'm starting to think maybe this wasn't such a good idea...

SECOND MOVIE EXEC: Yeah, I mean, opera?? What were those guys thinking?

FIRST MOVIE EXEC: You know what I'm thinking? I'm thinking Da Vinci Code...

SECOND MOVIE EXEC: ...meets Pretty Woman!

FIRST MOVIE EXEC: No, you moron! Were you dropped on your head as a child? Listen to me...

EXECS walk off, arguing, leaving JEAN-JACQUES BENEIX alone. Very alone.

Not that it's any great surprise, but still...

2006-05-25T16:41:00.000+01:00

You know that moderate, peace-loving group that was overwhelmingly elected by the moderate, peace-loving Palestinians? Hamas, yes, that's them. Well, it seems they think they've found a way to get over the "wall", the security fence which Israel was forced to build to prevent them from coming to Israel and murdering innocent people. Only took them five years to think of it:

Hamas looking to fly planes into buildings

(I suppose it's the American media that transliterates Hamas in that way, but since the English seem to cope with "loch" why don't you call them "Chamas"?)

Sombre statistics

2006-05-12T11:44:00.000+01:00

At work today we were asked to donate money to the British Red Cross, as part of a dress-down day fundraising activity. I have a problem with supporting the Red Cross, since the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) refuses to accept the Israeli emergency response service, Magen David Adom (MDA), because it uses a red star of David as its symbol. This is despite the fact that emergency services in Arab countries are allowed to be members of the ICRC despite using a red crescent instead of the cross.

Anyway, I decided to donate money to MDA instead. They could surely use it more than the British Red Cross anyway: I found the following statistics on terror attacks in Israel. They make chilling reading.

The Rodney Dangerfields of religion

2006-05-08T12:35:00.000+01:00

The poor old Catholic Church. It just can't get no respect. Publish a few cartoons portraying Muhammed, and the world goes into an uproar. Newspapers are banned, editors are fired, the media fall over themselves to "protect Muslim sensitivities" (and their own backs. Or chests. Remember Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh?).

But make a film that denies the basic premise of Christianity, and accuses the Catholic Church of engaging in a millenia-long coverup of the true nature of the central divinity, and editorials excoriating Sony Pictures for its "insensitivity" towards Catholics and their beliefs are pretty thin on the ground. Couldn't be because the threats of violence were also missing, could it?

Lacking any disturbingly violent followers, the Catholic Church is having to exercise its censorship envy in the courts, where, one imagines, the brave judges will have no problem upholding freedom of speech against the law-abiding. You see, having rules about freedom of speech that you're only prepared to uphold if no-one behaves threateningly are kind of like laws against guns: the people who are the problem don't care about the rules and the laws, so you end up with a warm fuzzy feeling of having the right intentions, without anything resembling a good result. Which is what seems to be important these days.

The real inconvenient truth

2006-04-28T13:19:00.000+01:00

As Al Gore (you remember him, he invented the Internet) prepares to release his new movie, An Inconvenient Truth, the guys at JunkScience have put together a page that summarises (it's a complex issue, so the summary is pretty long) the issues around climate change, "global warming", the greenhouse effect, etc. In talking with friends and colleagues it's pretty clear that most people confuse carbon-reducing measures with anti-pollution laws, think that C02 is an unmitigated negative that is entirely produced by humans, and that the atmosphere has warmed by at least 3 degrees this century. (The real figure is about 0.6 degrees). Anyway, definitely worth a read if you are concerned about this issue.

The Real Inconvenient Truth.

Never forget

2006-04-25T14:23:00.000+01:00

Today is Yom Hashoah: the day on which we remember the 6 million martyrs. At my shul this morning, the rabbi read out a list of the names of all of the people lost by members of the shul. A terrible list of brothers and sisters lost, parents, grandparents and great-grandparents who do not share in the lives of their children. A gap that will never be filled, and will never be forgotten.

Today is also the day of the brit milah of the first-born son of a dear friend of mine. As we all, family, friends, and community, joined to celebrate the entry of this precious child into the family of Israel, we paid ultimate tribute to the failure of the Nazis, and of all who would destroy us: we survived, our sons and our daughters are Jews still, and we continue in the faith of our forefathers, Avraham, Yitschak, and Yaakov. May it always be so, amen.

Time to turn off the alarmists

2006-04-25T14:00:00.000+01:00

Mark Steyn has a brilliant piece on the climate change scaremongers. One bit that interested me:

Remember what they used to call "climate change"? "Global warming." And what did they call it before that? "Global cooling." That was the big worry in the '70s: the forthcoming ice age. Back then, Lowell Ponte had a huge best seller called The Cooling: Has the new ice age already begun? Can we survive?

As I grew up in the '70s, interested in science and environmentalism, I well remember worrying about the coming ice age. Also the world running out of food. And of course nuclear armageddon.

Funny how nobody's said "Sorry about that. We were all idiots." Funny nobody's stopped to say "Hang on, you know the last time we went on about this kind of stuff, we were dead wrong. Maybe we should rethink things a bit." Funny how it's turned out that anti-nuke was actually anti-American-and-British-nuke. Wonder why CND want America to stop giving Iraq a hard time about wanting nukes.

Wonder why anyone ever listens to these idiots.

Pixar's Cars

2006-04-24T13:33:00.000+01:00

I went to the Pixar exhibit at the Science Museum yesterday. It was a bit disappointing in that it wasn't nearly as extensive as the Lord of the Rings exhibit a couple of years ago, but I still found a couple of things of interest. For one thing, it made it completely obvious that Pixar is dominated by artists. Most of the exhibition was made up of incredible drawings, paintings, even collages, executed by the artists during the design phase, as well as incredibly detailed clay sculptures which were digitized to create the "in-computer" character. The level of skill exhibited in almost all of these works was pretty impressive.

Another really cool thing was the "21st Century Zoetrope", which was a 3-D zoetrope, made up of models mounted on a turntable, which, when spun and then illuminated by strobe lighting, brought a multitude of Pixar characters to seeming 3-D life! Great fun.

I also enjoyed the movie made for the exhibition. In keeping with its theme, all of the art in the movie was painted by hand, although computers were used to animate these static drawings in a quite evocative way.

Finally, the exhibition really made me want to see Cars, the next Pixar release. I found this poster on the web, and it's got all kinds of cool jokes in it. (Look now if you want to see what you can spot yourself.)

Back already? OK, what I saw was the petrol-cap-shaped rock in the foreground: the tall rocks in the background shaped like the fins of '50s cars: the contrails in the sky which look like tyre tracks: the helicopter with the Dinoco logo (the gas station in Toy Story was a Dinoco): the LightYear blimp. If you spot any others, let me know!

Single-payer health systems: poaching off America

2006-02-23T18:56:00.000Z

One of my favourite current authors, the very insightful and well-researched Malcom Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, in debate about the relative merits of the American and Canadian healthcare systems:

If you look at the level of medical innovation in the world in the last 25 years, virtually everything comes from America. Absent America, medicine in the world is in the dark; it is retarded; it is at a level that all of us would find unacceptable. What is happening right now is that all these cheap single-payer systems are essentially poaching. They are cherry-picking off the American system. The American system is pumping money into research, has got this free market system which is incredibly dynamic and incredibly innovative. Everyone else just sits back and cherry picks all of the things we come up with. What happens if there's no America tomorrow? What happens if we junk our system? Where does medical progress come from?

Which is something I've often thought myself. The day the Democrats get their NHS in the US of A, G-d forbid, will be a dark day for medicine.

A glimpse of the future

2006-02-13T12:52:00.000Z

Following the introduction of the new "timewarp" protocol (the hypertext timewarp protocol, or httwp) I have discovered some pretty interesting websites from the near and far future. Since your browser may not be able to handle httwp yet, I've arranged a little mirror of the Republic World News site: it gives "Breaking News for the Islamic States of America".

Inevitable, I suppose

2006-02-10T13:09:00.000Z

The funny T-shirt industry has caught up with the Muhammed cartoon craze. Soon we'll be seeing people everywhere standing up to the gunmen and defying the crazies.

Go on. You know you want one.

The discreet charm of the Polish policeman

2006-02-08T15:54:00.000Z

I quite enjoyed this tale of an encounter with thugs in Warsaw, and the aftermath:

If you are ever, ever in Warsaw, I highly recommend you flag down a passing cop car and tell them you've been assaulted. You will meet with a kind of unconditional acceptance and emotional support that I didn't know could be found outside one's immediate family. The police will also go apeshit and run around with guns and screaming sirens in a way that very few families do, and for the police it's perfectly legal.

Cartoon protestors guilty of idolatry?

2006-02-08T14:26:00.000Z

Some pretty incisive thinking going on here:

So the objection to the cartoons cannot really be founded in the Islamic image-ban. They are clearly neither idolatry nor invitations to it. On the contrary, the insistence that a mocking representation amounts to a gross insult to the prophet is much more like idolatry in that sense: a demand that the man be revered as incapable of representation as God is.

But then truly religious people wouldn't go around burning down buildings and threatening to kill people, now would they?

Drink milk, defeat fascist morons

2006-02-02T15:34:00.000Z

Via Harry's Place, a list of Danish products that you can buy to support the brave stand of the Danish nation in the face of Muslim intimidation.

Interestingly, all milk is Danish! I had naively assumed that all the cows one can see on the train to Devon were producing milk for English consumption, but it seems I was wrong! After all, no lesser authority than the Muslim Public Affairs Committee of the UK has pronounced it so; who are we infidels to disagree?

Mark Steyn on Hamas

2006-02-01T16:12:00.000Z

Mark Steyn in usual top form on the recent victory of Hamas in the competition for all the Palestinian aid:

The media have long been reluctant to damn the excitable lads as terrorists. In 2002 the New York Times published a photograph of Palestinian suicide bombers all dressed up and ready to blow, and captioned it "Hamas activists." Take my advice and try not to be standing too near the Hamas activist when he activates himself.

...I'd like to believe this was a vote for getting rid of corruption rather than getting rid of Jews. But that's hard to square with some of the newly elected legislators. For example, Mariam Farahat, a mother of three, was elected in Gaza. She used to be a mother of six but three of her sons self-detonated on suicide missions against Israel. She's a household name to Palestinians, known as Um Nidal -- Mother of the Struggle -- and, at the rate she's getting through her kids, the Struggle's all she'll be Mother of.

Certainly sounds like a mother, anyway.

Alito confirmed: Reuters unhappy

2006-01-31T17:24:00.000Z

This is the first paragraph of a news report from Reuters:

A sharply divided U.S. Senate on Tuesday confirmed Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, backing a second conservative nominated by President George W. Bush in his effort to move the nation's highest court to the right.

While Reuters starts to sound more like the official mouthpiece of the Democratic Party, it's worthwhile remembering how the Republicans treated Clinton's two nominees. Despite one explicitly declaring her belief that abortion is a woman's right, and another firmly avowing that he believed there should be a wall between church and state, Republicans voted overwhelmingly to confirm the two nominees. This was despite serious concerns raised over Stephen Breyer's failure to recuse himself from a case where he had a financial interest in the outcome.

In fact the only precedent for the shameful behaviour of Senate Democrats over the Bush nominees is... the shameful behaviour of Senate Democrats over the Reagan nominee Robert Bork.

Source: Did Republicans Apply an Ideological Test to Bill Clinton's Supreme Court Nominees?

A cheat?

2006-01-27T09:58:00.000Z

Why does The Sun have a picture of a cheetah on top of a Jaguar in this article? I'm used to their very high standards of journalism, so I find it hard to believe it's an error. Perhaps it's an ironic comment of sorts, or a knowing in-joke? Can anyone help?

Land of the (almost) free.

2006-01-25T17:31:00.000Z

From that bastion of free expression and human rights, Cuba, comes news of the latest act of tolerance and openness:

Bulldozers dug up a street in front of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Havana on Wednesday apparently preparing to block the view of an electronic billboard carrying human rights messages that has angered President Fidel Castro.

U.S. diplomats said Cuba's communist authorities were building a concrete wall or screen to obstruct view of the ticker, which displays messages to the Cuban people, news headlines and quotes from Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi and Lech Walesa.

But the important thing is that Cubans have free healthcare, right?

Galloway a "lying, manipulative bully"

2006-01-25T14:21:00.000Z

According to one of the other Big Brother contestants, that is.

Asked how she felt when the respect MP nominated her for eviction from the Channel 4 show, she said: "Of course I felt betrayed.

"It's just that he's lied a lot before and I've seen him lie since. He's just a manipulative bully."

Asked if an MP should have agreed to go on the show, Lenska said: "I think he was trying to swell his popular appeal.

"But sadly I think he has done completely the opposite. People have been turned against him quite rightly.

"He should have been out looking after his constituents instead of being in the Big Brother house."

And in other news, the Pope is said to be Catholic, and a dog has bitten a man.

Those Zionists are at it again...

2006-01-24T14:27:00.000Z

I must say that the actions of the Zionists are sometimes quite hard to understand. It's not clear to me how rescuing people from a collapsed building in Nairobi serves the interests of world domination. But I'm sure some racist bastard will enlighten me in due course.

What to do with the UN?

2006-01-20T12:32:00.000Z

Jeff Goldstein at Normblog:

Nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

For those of you who missed one of the greatest movies of all time, it's one of the best quotes in Aliens.

The power of logic

2006-01-19T15:29:00.000Z

Elder of Ziyon has a great post up; it has clarified for me a lot of the internal conflict I often feel about Israel:

When it comes down to it, from a purely rational perspective, Jerusalem is just a piece of real estate, no more or less important than Gaza or Madagascar. Logical, rational Jews can look through the superstitious nonsense of tradition and coldly calculate the cost of keeping the eastern half versus the benefit of giving it up.

No, I haven't lost my mind: read the whole thing.

Pre-order William 0rbit's Hello Waveforms

2006-01-19T15:12:00.000Z

Amazon have listed Hello Waveformsfor pre-order: release date is February 20th. For more on this new release by William 0rbit, see here.

According to rumour on the fan list (actually it's a bit more than rumour) there will be another album this year, something a bit faster than Hello Waveforms. (How do I know HW isn't fast? Let's just say some Internet radio streams have been, ah, archived for posterity. And distributed to some, er, quality control assurers.)

State of Fear

2006-01-18T10:22:00.000Z

I recently read Michael Crichton's latest, State of Fear, which is well up to his usual standard in terms of compelling reading (I confess to finishing it in a few hours, its 736 pages notwithstanding). But what's really great about it is a very well-researched, impeccably dramatised devastation of the climate change industry, the fear merchants who are trying to create the state mentioned in the title. And there are some delicious sideswipes at airheaded Hollywood celebrities who jump on the bandwagon du jour.

In this speech Michael gives an interesting account of how he came to write the book:

The book really began in 1998, when I set out to write a novel about a global disaster. In the course of my preparation, I rather casually reviewed what had happened in Chernobyl, since that was the worst manmade disaster in recent times that I knew about.

What I discovered stunned me. Chernobyl was a tragic event, but nothing remotely close to the global catastrophe I imagined. About 50 people had died in Chernobyl, roughly the number of Americans that die every day in traffic accidents. I don’t mean to be gruesome, but it was a setback for me. You can’t write a novel about a global disaster in which only 50 people die.

Undaunted, I began to research other kinds of disasters that might fulfill my novelistic requirements. That’s when I began to realize how big our planet really is, and how resilient its systems seem to be. Even though I wanted to create a fictional catastrophe of global proportions, I found it hard to come up with a credible example. In the end, I set the book aside, and wrote Prey instead.

The fact that his impression of what had happened at Chernobyl, moulded by the media, was so strikingly and incredibly at odds with the reality, made him think about the value of disaster prediction in general, and the particular disaster that we are being asked to believe we face today. Could it be that these predictions may be just as wrong, and will go the way of the predictions of every other "disaster", from the new ice age to global famine, that have been given (ahem) some prominence over the last forty years?

Another pointless online test

2006-01-17T18:08:00.000Z

DVD rentals by post

2006-01-15T16:39:00.000Z

I've been using Amazon's DVD rental by post service for a while now, and it's really been great to catch up on some of the classic movies I've enjoyed before, plus ones I never got round to seeing before for some reason or another (like The Usual Suspects and The Sixth Sense).

Usually when I go to a rental store I wander around for ages, trying to remember movies that I might like, but with the Amazon rental list, anytime I think of a movie I just add it to my list. The web interface lets me change the order of the DVDs at any time, and for less than ten quid I get four DVDs a month, two out at any time (as soon as I send one back, they send the next one on the list, unless the monthly limit has been reached). Plus you get a discount if you buy any DVD from Amazon.

If you'd like to check it out for yourself, just click on the banner:

Gorgeous imagination

2006-01-14T20:22:00.000Z

Oliver Kamm on the latest antics of the Honourable Member for Bethnal Green:

After George travelled to Damascus last July to tell the Syrian people, who had had no say in the matter, how fortunate they were to have Bashar al-Assad as their leader, there were few ways open to him to lose his dignity further, and he at least showed imagination in finding one of them.

Forests and trees

2006-01-13T11:14:00.000Z

Mark Steyn makes his bid to reduce global warming:

Here's a headline from the National Post of Canada last Friday: "Forests may contribute to global warming: study." This was at Stanford University. They developed a model that covered most of the Northern Hemisphere in forest and found that global temperature increased three degrees, which is several times more than the alleged CO2 emissions. Heat-wise, a forest is like a woman in a black burka in the middle of the Iraqi desert. In my state of New Hampshire, we've got far more forest than we did a century or two ago. Could reforestation be causing more global warming than my 700m-per-litre Chevrolet Resource-Depleter? Clearly I need several million dollars to investigate further.

I think he should get it. It would be better spent than more money going to people who engage in outright fraud:

Question: Why do most global warming advocates begin their scare statistics with "since 1970"?

As in, "since 1970" there's been global surface warming of half a degree or so.

Because from 1940 to 1970, temperatures fell.

Now why would that be?

Who knows? Maybe it was Hitler. Maybe world wars are good for the planet.

Or maybe we should all take a deep breath of CO2 and calm down.

Sign of the times

2006-01-12T12:03:00.000Z

Nikon will only make digital cameras in the future. Can't see how there is any kind of market for film 35mm cameras, which is their focus, so it's not unexpected.

Climate change roundup

2006-01-04T15:11:00.000Z

Quick roundup of climate change links of note:

Scientific journals accused of censoring those who don't toe the party line

Michael Crichton on complexity and the "crises" of the past

Interesting article by two German scientists:

Other scientists are succumbing to a form of fanaticism almost reminiscent of the McCarthy era. In their minds, criticism of methodology is nothing but the monstrous product of "conservative think-tanks and misinformation campaigns by the oil and coal lobby," which they believe is their duty to expose. In contrast, dramatization of climate shift is defended as being useful from the standpoint of educating the public.
Silencing dissent and uncertainty for the benefit of a politically worthy cause reduces credibility, because the public is more well-informed than generally assumed. In the long term, the supposedly useful dramatizations achieve exactly the opposite of what they are intended to achieve. If this happens, both science and society will have missed an opportunity.
How Global Warming Research is Creating a Climate of Fear

Unintended consequences

2005-11-28T17:31:00.000Z

You can ignore markets, but that doesn't mean that markets will ignore you. It seems that green legislation in the developed world, enacted in a misguided attempt to force consumers to use more "environment-friendly" energy, is encouraging the destruction of the rain-forests so beloved by the greenies.

Heh.

Sub-standard medicine - doctors fail to kill babies before abortion

2005-11-28T16:56:00.000Z

A former professor of OB-GYN at a London hospital has admitted that a number of aborted babies survive the drug-induced labour that constitutes late-term abortion, because doctors fail to follow guidelines that require their hearts to be stopped while still in the womb:

"They can be born breathing and crying at 19 weeks' gestation," he said. "I am not anti-abortion, but as far as I am concerned this is sub-standard medicine."

God forbid anyone should be anti-abortion, of course, but am I alone in finding it a tad - just a tad, mind - disturbing that in one operating theatre, doctors could be fighting to save the life of a premature infant, while in an adjoining one, a breathing, crying baby results from a deliberate inducement of premature delivery? And one must wonder how the staff manage to instantly switch from trying to end the baby's life, to trying to save it, as they are required to do. Does it even happen?

Naysayers, doom & gloomers wrong. Again.

2005-11-26T21:09:00.000Z

Early indications are that bringing British licensing laws into the 21st century have not resulted in the breakdown of civilisation.

How surprising.

Hello Waveforms

2005-11-20T14:31:00.000Z

Great news for William 0rbit fans: a new album, entitled Hello Waveforms is slated for release 6th February 2006, on the Sanctuary label. It's been a long time coming, and eagerly awaited by us die-hard fans: the last solo outing was Pieces in a Modern Style, released in 2000. You may remember it as an eclectic set of classical pieces, given the distinctive 0rbit treatment, to some critical acclaim. Barber's Adagio for Strings got some airplay at the time.

Although William does most of his work for major recording stars like Madonna, Pink, Oasis and U2, he has managed to release a few (too few!) entirely original works, most notably the Strange Cargo series. The last of the four was Strange Cargo Hinterland: it was released in 1995! So Hello Waveforms has to satisfy some major expectations. Is it any good? I haven't heard it yet, but it is getting some airplay on KCRW, where it is one of the most requested albums, which bodes well.