A pungent mix of programming, philosophy, pedanticism, procrastination, perplexity, peripheral political polemic, and platters of preposterousness.
I’m still trying to get around to using Linux as my primary OS. If it wasn’t for circumstances, I’d still be using OS X as my primary OS. This gives me good reason not to go back.
Good news from the GitHub folks - EGit, the Eclipse Git plugin, now works with GitHub, and when it all goes wrong, you can blame straight from the Web. Awesomeness.
Not to gloat at the misfortune of others, but, what the heck - the BNP membership details leak is providing endless amounts of amusement, for two reasons primarily: first, nationalists have been using this kind of thing against their opponents for long enough, and secondly because it demonstrates that the BNP are at least right about one aspect of their claim to be ready for governance: they have the ability to misplace the sensitive data of thousands of people, destroying what little privacy they already have. If this type of leak doesn’t put you off ID cards and the database state, I’m not totally sure what will.
John Resig has written up what the W3C are doing about cross-site scripting, namely a new specification called Access Control. Sounds good.
Joshua Rosenau has the best graphical mocking of the Discovery Institute around.
Don Paskini at Liberal Conspiracy has some interesting things to say about the government’s Community Empowerment White Paper, which, it need to be said, is about communities communifying the community through lots of community projects to benefit the community. It’s for the benefit of so-called communities that they are fucking with our libraries. Community is code for anything - it’s the ultimate political wildcard. Politicians should be dealing in reality, not perceptions of ‘community’. If I go into my library and there’s no books in there, I couldn’t give a stuff about whether or not it serves my local community. It means that I’ll have to get the book I want from somewhere else. If it takes four months to have a wisdom tooth extracted, what the community thinks is irrelevant.
It’s like choice really, another stupid buzzword that is now being pushed. Choice is fine, but what’s more important is that the things one has to choose between aren’t shit. What would you rather have - a good hospital and a bad hospital and the coice of which to go to, or two good hospitals? In education, what bloody choice is there anyway? In my local area, there are no non-religious primary schools. You can have Church of England or Roman Catholic or some variation thereof. No option for “I think all this stuff is bollocks and don’t want my child subjected to it”. We should get rid of all faith schools and instead spend our time and money making good schools instead.
Community and choice are the ‘family values’ and ‘patriotism’ of the left: bullshit.
