A pungent mix of programming, philosophy, pedanticism, procrastination, perplexity, peripheral political polemic, and platters of preposterousness.
Firefox bug #324798 has been plaguing me. Please, please, please fix it. It is the only thing that’s stopping my newly set up two-computers-spread-across-three-monitors desk.
Marjolein Hoekstra has made a JavaScript to autodiscover OPML. I’m going to write a PHP API to do similarly on the server side - you provide a URL and it returns an OPML 2.0 file containing links to all the OPML and RSS feeds. It seems that Marjolein’s standard seems ‘more’ standard than the way I’m doing it. I’ll switch it over later. Unfortunately, the way that Marjolein’s script and Marc over at iJot are doing auto-discovery is different from how the OPML spec is doing it - but that doesn’t matter. As long as the tools recognise both “xml+opml” and “x-opml”, it’ll be fine.
Another cycle in the Tintinosphere.
Jeremy Stangroom has a thoughtful piece on punishment and retributivism.
For me, I find retributivism unconvincing. It stems from an ancient form of “blood lust”. That said, if you hold to a position of a specific utilitarian basis for punishment (such as a rehabilitative or preventative basis for punishment), you presume that the method of punishment is universally effective. Justice is served best if everyone is punished equivalently - the idea of “personalised” punishment leaves open too much wiggle room, and is often unfair (why should one murderer get life-means-life and another get 15 years?).
Retributivism seems to be a better fit for Kantians than any other method of punishment, but suffers because there doesn’t seem to be any rational basis for retributivism.
The problem is simple - we now live in a political scene dominated by a dismissal of ideology but dominated by a populist belief that whoever cries the loudest is right. Hence the idea of victims’ rights.
Except when I’m at home, every time I use my Intel Mac, I have a great problem if my machine crashes - I can’t turn it back on again.
Why? Because it makes a bloody great big chime noise. And if I’m in a library, classroom or crowded train carriage, it’s a nuisance. So I either have to interrupt everyone or try and find a way of restarting my machine without annoying anyone (by going outside in to a hallway or waiting for a break in class).
On my old iBook, if I had my headphones plugged in the chime noise would go through the headphones. This no longer happens. And it’s bloody annoying.
Google are going to be releasing a gOffice API soon.
Martin Newland has proved that he hasn’t read much Tertullian: “It is possible to be religious and rational”. Of course, you would say that, being a Catholic. The problem is that your belief is completely contradictory to science. ‘No problem’, say some of your co-religionists, ‘science and religion are compatible!’ How exactly? Well, that’s a divine mystery or something…
Wikipedia article of the day: Hardcore wrestling.
Martin Deutsch has an excellent set of photos on Flickr called Crap Headlines. My favourite has to be “Man Hurt In Fight Over Birthday Cake”.
