Sam commented:

"Quality motion. This is exactly the point that I raise at just about every committee meeting I attend, but to have it formally supported by the wider membership is a good step. If things don't improve soon, we should try that line of attack in the Central and Eastern region."

One suggestion in the debate was to have a co-operatives fortnight, similar to the fairtrade fortnight, to promote the Co-operative Group (tCG) membership, other tCG businesses and other local cooperatives. Let's see whether SW can lead the way again! ;-) The question-and-answer session was pretty interesting. All of the questions were submitted in writing. Some of them were submitted in advance and others during the lunch break. No spoken questions were taken and most Insurance (CIS) and Bank questions were held back because no-one from financial services was there. The answers were grouped under a few headings.

Ethics, answersed by Catherine Staveley

1. CIS's voting record is public, but some details are buried under sustainabiliy on the group's corporate web site.
2. The panel were asked to define a few terms. By ethical, tCG means generally being "a good neighbour". Materiality is how much a business relates to tCG's aims and they think shelf penetration is how much space and promotion a product gets in the stores. The financial services profits aim to be all-ethical.
3. Members were asked to please take part in the consultations about the new food retail ethical policy.
4. tCG has a "triple bottom line" - in addition to looking at profits, we also consider our effects on our communities and sustainability.
5. tCG is leading the way on packaging minimisation: onion nets are already biodegradable, work continues on developing biodegradable fruit nets and a new light-weight (but still strong) whiskey bottle has just been launched. We'll see whether it's possible to give more dividend points for buying less packaged goods.

Food retail, answered by David Parker (regional food), Gary Metcalfe (operations), Clive Netherway (top 100 stores) and Nick Lowe (sales and support)

1. Local stores: Minehead Post Office contracts have been exchanged and planning permission granted in Budleigh Salterton - both sites should be ready in a couple of months.
2. There are new small stores at Amesbury, Ilfracombe, Perranport and Lyneham (where it's hurting Tesco Express more than anyone). tCG have also acquired 7 stores from Higgins, one from Savages and a petrol station with minimarket in Bath. Dawlish has just opened, giving a total of 14 new stores. In addition, 50 stores are being refitted in the south-west region.
3. The Falmouth store is a bit of a puzzle: whether to split the existing store or develop a nearby site.
4. tCG stores have outperformed the The Institute of Grocery Distribution index for 15 months in a row and is now seeing growth-on-growth.
5. Problems with product stocking should be taken up with store managers first.
6. Home delivery has been trialled and failed several times, but is being trialled again in the new OCO stores. (What does OCO mean? There's one at Portishead.)
7. Supply problems with RSPCA Freedom Foods meats will be investigated.
8. The Westbury-on-Trim Stoke Lane store will only be expanded if its turnover increases.
9. Suppliers are still letting some stores down on delivery times. This will be re-checked.
10. The best response to the crocodile community projects of other companies is to strengthen tCG's community project funding in areas before other supermarkets open new stores.
11. Local produce is rarely stocked because of problems with availability and meeting tCG technical standards (I could almost hear the hackles raise at this answer!). Organic is only usually stocked in areas where surveys suggest the target audience lives (which I guess is why my tatty 60s store has more sweets and sugar drinks than fresh food). Similar biases exist for other ranges.
12. Missing product complaints will get written answers: Clipper tea and sugar-free Mintoes.
13. There was a complaint about the lack of notices about the unique status of co-op milk. (In short, we own our farms so our milk had better not be getting abused.)

Corporate questions, answered by Frank Jones

1. Compensations of the merged tCG/United Co-op societies are shown on page 12 of Stronger Together.
2. There was a question about a 10% profit target which I didn't understand. The answer was on page 13 of the annual report.
3. Party politicians were in the hall.
4. The results of the merger meetings were unknown at the time.
5. The Co-operative Funerals are derecognising the GMB union, which has worried many members. The comment from the floor was "there's usually one motive for derecognising a union"!
6. There's a 16% pay increase for executives who don't join tCG's pension fund, which is what would have been paid into the fund for them. Whether it applies to all employees will be checked and a written reply given.

Strategic questions, answered by David Doyle

1. Travel offers will be promoted in the food stores. tCG wants to avoid "silo" businesses which don't cross-promote with other businesses where appropriate.
2. Leaflets of other tCG and other co-ops should be stocked, particularly at festive times.
3. Offsetting CO2 is not a complete answer to climate change, but it was the only one of five suggested actions which was approved. Is the Co-operative Travel chain underperforming because it doesn't offer enough ethical choices? Some shouting from the floor about them still not offering European rail tickets.
4. The regional view of the United merger... This was nicely controversial, as it bloody well ought to be... There's no requirement for a tCG membership vote, so there will be no tCG membership vote. There was a hierarchical vote: very few of the Cornwall area turned up at the regional meeting in Bristol, but Devon and Somerset turned out in numbers and the south-west's delegates to the national meeting voted against 5 of the 6 merger resolutions, which were passed anyway. The chair stepped in and cut short the debate, stating that everyone knows the south-west is unhappy about certain aspects, like not having a choice on the first merged chief executive, but what's done is done.

Finally, a list of questions being sent for written answers were given by Andrew North and the chair (was it Colin House? It's annoying to find one name and lose another).

It's been a long time since I last wrote, mostly because we've been pulling out all the stops for XTech. Next week is set to be stimulating and challenging. I'm amazed at the collection of thinkers and innovators we've drawn together, and am looking forward to getting a boost of energy and inspiration from the conference.
Browser summit On Tuesday next week, Molly Holzschlag and I are sponsoring a Web Browser, Standards and Interop Summit. This is an opportunity for browser vendors, standards advocates, W3C and related standards supporters to talk in a vendor (and standards-body) neutral atmosphere about tackling the problem of browser interoperability. As the full announcement mentions, we're also throwing open the doors to interested bloggers and journalists to get involved in and cover the discussion. The summit came about after Molly and I got talking about our desire to provide a forum for effective exchange between the people shaping the future of HTML. This is something that spawned the vision of the Browser Track and XTech in the first place three years ago. I don't know how much we'll solve at the first summit, but it puts down a marker and a challenge for participation. I am not the only one concerned at the increasing fragmentation of the HTML landscape, the breakdown in communication, and the ultimate ill-effects for web developers and users. Personal scheduler and evaluations As my conference software Expectnation nears its public launch, we'll be using some of its fun features at XTech. Normally, the bulk of the work is done behind the scenes, so it's nice to have a feature to show off to attendees and the wider public. The personal scheduling feature lets you compose your own timetable for the conference, just by clicking on the stars throughout the schedule. As a bonus, you can subscribe to your personal schedule as iCal, allowing you to take it with you on your phone or PDA. In addition, we'll be allowing attendees to submit evaluations of sessions online. If you're using the personal scheduler, it gets even neater as you can quickly find links to submit your evaluations, and review ones you've already submitted. Behind the scenes, I can see which sessions are the most popular and get advance warning if we're likely to need to move rooms to avoid overcrowding. I'm pretty excited about this. Features like this aren't exactly new, but now we've made them a standard feature for every conference. We're looking forward to adding more social software facilities to enhance the conference experience. 

I'm not convinced. It looks to me like they're aiming at something a bit more dynamic/higher level than Java, in more or less the space that Javascript, Ruby and Python operate in. The declarative GUI stuff looks pretty good, but I don't know if the rest will make that worth it. The language itself seems neither here nor there. It's a lot like Javascript - but not quite. It doesn't have real hash tables, something I don't care for in JS, and I didn't see an eval() method in the documentation, which means that their aim is to make something that you compile, and that doesn't carry around an interpreter with it like most dynamic languages with eval have to. I wonder what kind of support it will get from Sun and the open source community? Will the internal Java group view this as some sort of competitor? I wonder what sort of discussions went on during the creation of this system at Sun. They can't have take the decision to make a new, incompatible language very lightly. A new language has to have a killer app to drive acceptance, and I don't quite see one for this. The FAQ sheds some light on where they'd like to go:

Why did you create another scripting language? JavaFX Script is specifically designed to optimize the creative process of building rich and compelling UIs leveraging Java Swing, Java 2D and Java 3D for developers and content authors. Why isn't Groovy enough? Groovy and other languages have two specific traits which don't precisely meet these needs, namely that they are generic in nature and don't provide the appropriate abstractions necessary to optimize the UI design process and similarly are designed specifically for programmers other than content authors.

So it does look like they're aiming for a language that makes it easy to quickly create GUI's for people who perhaps aren't expert enough (or patient enough) to deal with Java itself. Pity they didn't just stick with Tcl and Tk, which have had a more or less declarative syntax for specifying layout for something like 10 years, and in any case have a flexible enough syntax to "run DSL circles" around most languages that are currently popular. As the author of Hecl, I'm particularly curious about their mobile strategy. If I may be permitted a bit of hubris, it's nice that they see things my way, that mobile apps need a good scripting language in order to make them more accessible to the masses, but it wasn't too hard to see that coming, with the ever increasing capabilities of higher end phones, and the "scaling down" that scripting languages bring to programming (making it easier for people to get started even if they aren't experts). I wonder what sort of diffusion they'll get with their phone system, and how fast, and how easy it will actually be to program the phones. For many people it's probably not as important, but by creating a real interpreter, rather than something that's compiled and doesn't have an eval function, Hecl lets you download and execute code, which makes for some very interesting possibilities (as well as some risks, of course). That's probably not important though, if they can actually make a system that's widely used, and easier to create applications for than J2ME currently is. I wonder if they'll allow J2ME on the phone platform, or close that down in favor of JavaFX? Even for Big Companies, launching a new language is a difficult endeavour[1], and it will be a number of years before we see where this ends up, but I'm not convinced. [1] The Economics of Programming Languages

I went to the Co-operative Group's South-west region Annual General Meeting in Taunton last Saturday (5 May) and I'll be writing this up over the next few days. It's taken me that long to find time to reread my notes. I'll try to blog the two bits that I think are interesting to other regions today, because more AGMs are happening tomorrow.

"The AGM is one of only two [formal decision-making] meetings open to members each year, when they can recieve information on the performance of their Society, and hold their elected representatives to account. Afternoon sessions will again be less formal, and include topics such as food retail, ethics, our banking and insurance businesses, and healthy eating."

(from A Cambridge Co-operator). There are other meetings for members during the year, of course, but they tend to be consultations and workshops and so on. The meeting was opened by the Woodcraft Folk, who I didn't know much about, but they seem to be like an outdoorsy co-operative youth club. Then there were introductions by the chair, a presentation by Catherine Staveley from group head office about ethics, environment and community, the annual reports and then a motion:

"This meeting is disappointed that we fail to declare our distinctive, mutual, consumer ownership and ethical values in our trading outlets. In our large outlets, wall space is left vacant and little attempt is made to promote what we stand for. We undersell ourselves as an alternative form of business enterprise which has principles. Therefore, we request the Regional Board to pursue the prominent display of messages to proclaim our ownership structure and promote the causes fundamental to our unique consumer appeal."

After many speakers in support and one against, the regional board came out in support and the motion was passed overwhelmingly. Finally, there were the questions and the report of the Party. More on that soon.

My new employer pays for an ADSL line for me. A second line, adding a ADSL connection on another copper pair I was told. Perfect I though, let's order it. Little did I know what problems I would get into.

Two days ago our ADSL went dead. No messages, no calls, no nothing. I call the provider (mobistar) who tell me we cancelled the contract and then hang up on me! The day after I contacted the company that does the ADSL stuff for $employer, asking them if this was their doing. Their reply: "search, search... no we have no documents on you, it must be something internal to $employer, we know nothing". Two hours later I get an email from them asking for dates for the installation of the ADSL modem. On the 21st at the earliest.

Coincidence, right? I send an "un-fuck this right now!" email shortly after. 24h later I still have no reply.

No looking forward to 2 weeks without internet we started searching. So after some hacking and a good idea from my wife it turns out skynet "just" re-enabled my account of 2 years ago, same userid, same password. As if I never left.

Not good...

While cleaning up the infinite mess that is my home directory, I found the following:

ACHTUNG! ALLES LOOKENSPEEPERS! Das Internet is nicht fuer gefingerclicken und giffengrabben. Ist easy droppenpacket der routers und overloaden der backbone mit der spammen unt der me-tooen. Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfen. Das musclicken sichtseeren keepen das bandwit-spewin hans in das pockets muss; relaxen und watchen das cursorblinken.

This is, obviously, a play on the old blinkenlite thing, which I also found:

A C H T U N G ! ! ! --Alles Touristen und Non Technischen Lookens Peepers-- Das maschine control is nicht fur Gefingerpoken und Mittengrabben. Oderwise is easy schnappen der Schpriggenwerk, Blownfuse, und Poppencorken mit Spitzensparken. Der Maschine is Diggen by Experten only. Is nicht fur Geverken by das Dummkopfen. Das Rubbernecken und Sightseeren keepen das Cottonpicken Hands in das Pockets. So Relaxen und Watsch das Blinkenlite.

If I ever have an actual machine room, these will go on the wall.

We did it again! The GRML Team proudly presents the first release candidates for the GRML 1.0 branch. This includes the brand new GRML64 and also the GRML-Small Live CD. This release includes several new features, here a small selection:

• updated to X.org 7.3
• updated to libc6 2.5
• use of UTF-8 as default encoding
• ?LaTeX: switch from tetex to texlive
• grml-x: use of evdev (dropped options -nousb and -nops2, added -ps2 and -usb instead), improved error handling and execution
• grml-autoconfig: dropped userspace/powernowd stuff in cpufrequeny scaling in favour of the ondemand-governor
• integrated grml-quickconfig within zsh-login
• got rid of grml-sysvinit, using plain sysvinit from Debian without any hacks now
• support basic rescanning in live-cd initrd
• grml-debootstrap (install plain Debian fast and easy)
• grml-quickconfig: get fast access to some basic grml-scripts
• Kernel 2.6.20

And much more. Please help us testing and get your copy from our development mirror:

Release	Codename
grml 1.0-rc1	Meilenschwein
grml-small 0.4-rc1	Release Codename: Springginkerl
grml64 0.1-rc1	LiveShell

• Please report any issues via our bts.
• If you have any feedback join us via IRC in #grml@freenode

It finally happened. I installed Debian Etch on my last Woody box, a 400 MHz Pentium II with 576 MB RAM named gsa which is my home desktop since I bought it at LinuxTag 2003 in Karlsruhe. And no I didn’t do a dist-upgrade, neither direct no via Sarge. As already planned I removed some no more necessary operating systems from that box and installed Etch on the freed disk space. Woody is still installed on that box in parallel and was recognized perfectly by Etch’s installer. I took a few hours but also was big fun to go through Etch package list and to decide what to install. Overall the installation of 5 GB of software took about half a day. In general everything went fine, the only thing I’m yet missing is sound. Etch didn’t seem to recognize my soundcard at all although it’s a well-known brand and defacto standard for many other soundcards: a Creative Labs Soundblaster. Well, the 16-Bit ISA version, needing the full length of the slot. Worked fine under Woody. Well, I hope I’ll get it working again manually. What on the other hand is really nice with udev hell —eh— hal and all those new automatic bells and whistles: The desktop (well, at least GNOME Nautilus as well as XFCE, but probably also KDE) recognises when I insert a 3.5” floppy into the drive and shows me a nice floppy icon on the desktop. You think, that’s impossible? Floppy drives don’t inform the rest of the system when a floppy has been inserted without you polling the drive every few seconds? Well, USB floppy drives can. And they do. :-) I still need time to migrate all the old settings from Woody to Etch. I’ll probably stick with FVWM, but perhaps will use the GNOME enabled version. What’s already done is the migration from tcsh to zsh. On all new or dist-upgraded systems after Etch I’ve chosen zsh so with my last Woody installation retiring I’ve also fully migrated to zsh. So I’ve got now most of my active private boxes running Etch. Only the noone.org web and mail server “sym” (an amd64 box) as well as my 133 MHz ThinkPad “bijou” are still running Sarge, both with 2.6 kernels. So with switching to Etch on gsa, I also got no more Debian box running a 2.4 kernel. The only 2.4 kernel I run is on my FreeWRT WLAN router named pluriel, which runs 2.4.33.3. But I expect that 2.6.18 will be as stable and long lasting as the famous and rock-solid 2.4.18 from Woody. 18 seems to be Debian’s favourite kernel minor version recently. ;-)

I did it.
We did it.
The whole lot of us did it.
And we liked it.
In fact, we loved it.
Today, Spencer Tunick held his long awaited session in Mexico City. I signed up a long time ago, yet could not believe this was really going to happen - And man, did it happen!
For those still wondering who is Tunick (lazy you, as with the first link, it becomes just obvious), he is an artist who enjoys gathering large crowds, getting them all naked, and photographing them. Some people (including me, until this morning) erroneously categorize him as a photographer - No way! Out of Tunick's own words, out of many comments I heard and read today (i.e. at El Universal's forum), I can assure you only a participant can feel Tunick's art - A sensation of togetherness, of freedom, of clean enjoyment, throwing out the denial and repression we have regarding ourselves and our society. I was quite skeptical. The Mexican society is well known for being conservative on many issues. Nudism in Mexico is basically something not even talked about. There are a couple of nudist beaches, but they are closely associated with relaxed morals and drug abuse, and are just not safe for, say, women on their own. Nudists are seen as sex-maniacs... And, yes, this is as far as it gets from truth.
As I said, not only did it happen here, but how! We were between 18,000 and 20,000 naked people in the Z calo, Mexico City's main square, the third largest square in the world. The previous attendance record for Tunick's works was at Barcelona, Spain, with 7,000 people. And the surprise is not just the number - I insist, it fills me with joy to recognize a positive change in my country, to recognize we are not that retrograde anymore.
Nadezhda and I were there, as many couples, groups of friends, even families (although, yes, people under 18 were requested not to come - they would be expelled if found). I think the main age group was people in their late 20s, but there were many people from every age group. We met people who travelled from Jalapa, Veracruz (5 hr away), to be here today. I read reports of people coming from Guanajuato (5 hr), Oaxaca (6-7 hr), even Durango (14 hr)! We met near the Z calo at 4:30 AM, as Tunick likes making his work with the early morning light. As you can imagine, and after quite a busy and tiring day, I feel like minced meat... So I'll leave this for now. I expect to come back to the topic in the next couple of days - But anyway: This was amazing. Incredible.

Quirks when overriding SQLObject setters Let's suppose you have a User that is, optionally, a member of a Company. In SQLObject you model it somehow like this:

    class Company(SQLObject):
        name = UnicodeCol(length=16, alternateID=True, alternateMethodName="by_name")
        display_name = UnicodeCol(length=255)
    class User(InheritableSQLObject):
        company = ForeignKey("Company", notNull=False, cascade='null')

Then you want to implement a user settings interface that uses a Select box to choose the company of the user. For the Select widget to properly handle the validator for your data, you need to put a number in the first option. As my first option, I want to have the "None" entry, so I decided to use -1 to mean "None". Now, to make it all blend nicely, I overrode the company setter to accept -1 and silently convert it to a None:

    class User(InheritableSQLObject):
        company = ForeignKey("Company", notNull=False, cascade='null')
        def _set_company(self, id):
            "Set the company id, using None if -1 is given"
            if id == -1: id = None
            self._SO_set_company(id)

In the controller, after parsing and validating all the various keyword arguments, I do something like this:

            user.set(**kw)

Now, the overridden method didn't get called. After some investigation, and with the help of NandoFlorestan on IRC, we figured out the following things:

1. That method needs to be rewritten as _set_companyID:

           def _set_companyID(self, id):
               "Set the company id, using None if -1 is given"
               if id == -1: id = None
               self._SO_set_companyID(id)
   

2. Methods overridden in that way are alsop called by user.set(**kw), but not by the User(**kw) constructor, so using, for example, a similar override to transparently encrypt passwords would give you plaintext passwords for new users and encrypted passwords after they changed it.

After i wrote this entry, I received few comments on my blog from people asking me to send laptops to different parts of the world. Unfortunately I cannot do that. I have one spare laptop which will be taken to Edinburgh for Debconf7 and will be given away to a fellow Debian developer (or prospective developer) in need of such piece of hardware, but it will not be sent by post. My initial call was for a similar action from people with spare hardware which can be given away. Maybe one day I could start my own NGO to send laptops around the world for the needy, but right now that is not the case.

...like this one today, where you feel like just waking up is a bad idea. Reading about the so-called "triumph" of Sarkozy (53.06%), seeing the right-wing and capitalist newspapers "celebrate" it makes me sick and sad. Hearing about the french socialist "elephants" (Strauss-Kahn and the Laurent "just naming him makes me sick" Fabius) trying to place themselves in position to lead the French left makes me even more sick. The worst is probably hearing Sarkozy claim that he will "renovate" the French politics. He is president of the UMP party since 2004, UMP being the party of the former president (Chirac), the former two prime ministers and having the absolute majority in the parliament. He is Nr. 2 of the french government since two years. So, in short, he and his party had all opportunities to "renovate" since they are in power. Since 2002, UMP has the largest majority one has ever seen since 1968 in France. And of course, nothing was "renovated" in French politics and way of government since then. France just slowly turned towards hard-core liberalism and the power of money and stock exchange market. So, noone will make me believe one single second that anything will change. The opportunity to change things was clearly in the hands of Mrs Royal, not in the dirty hands of Sarkozy. This is why I'm sad today.....hopefully, I'll be able to share this with my friends in Free Software. I just hope that the french ones are prepared for very hard days.

I upgraded my little file & print server and firewall (in UML) VIA C3 box on the weekend.

Everything went perfectly smooth, it even worked to upgrade via the apt-proxy that's running on the box. Super cool!

The only issue I had was non-working HTTP connections via my Telstra Bigpond cable connection after the upgrade of the firewall UML. In the end I fixed it by forcing the same MTU on the cable-facing as on the LAN-facing interface. It may be related to NAT, but it worked with the same 2.6.18 kernel before the upgrade, so maybe it is an iptables thing.

Open Tuesday is an attempt to build a regular meeting place for people interested in free software (open source), both technical and business people. The goal is to have an event the first Tuesday every month, and some company or another sponsors it by picking up the bar tab. It's fun. You meet people, and can chat about various things. Unfortunately, it isn't quite regular enough, and the website and mailing list aren't updated reliably enough, or early enough, that an event is happening. It is now Sunday evening, and I still don't know there's an event the day after tomorrow. There doesn't seem to have been one last Tuesday, which is sensible, since the first of May is a big hangover day in Finland; it's also an official holiday. Since it's fun to meet people like that, I am going to see if I can't get a "Free Thursday" event going. This is partly in competition with Open Tuesday, but a friendly kind of competition. I hope Open Tuesday will continue, since it's a different kind of event from Free Thursday. Free Thursday is simply people who want to have a drink with each other. No sponsors, no organization, no prepared talks, no web forums, no web site, just show up and have a good time. You'll have to pay for your own drinks. Free Thursday will happen the second Thursday each month at 18:00. The first event will be Thusday, May 10, at the Teerenpeli bar in Kamppi, Helsinki. In case people want to discuss or announce anything related to Free Thursday, I've set up a mailing list. E-mail free-thursday-subscribe@liw.iki.fi to subscribe, and check the archives if you're not a subscriber. Posting is free to subscribers, everyone else gets moderated; this is for preventing spam, all non-spam will be allowed through. Please come, and please spread the word. Now, if someone will start a "Net Wednesday" event, all will be perfect.

According to The Irish Times Weekend Supplement, todays recommended viewing includes We Love the Sky at Night, BBC1, 4.45pm

A celebration of the 50-year old astrology program, presented by the peerlesss star-gazer Patrick Moore, and featuring contributions from Jon Culshaw, Richard Branson, Myleene Klass, Charles Kennedy, Brian Blessed, Alex James, Dame Evelyn Glennie, Tim Rice and Arthur C Clarke.

Tags astronomy, spelling

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins is an 'Atheism Consciousness-raising book', according to the author. It makes the case for Atheism, saying Atheists should stand up and be counted, and stand against the growing tide (in the U.S. in particular) of irrationality and belief. Although as one of Atheisms most visible proponents Dawkins has 'make converts' to the cause, in this book he is mostly speaking to the converted, presenting the evidence. The book documents the main arguments in favour of God. These are dismissed fairly abruptly; while a lot of pages are taken up going into them, they are probably not a comprehensive list. A book by a theologian or believer would probably be a better source for such a list. Nevertheless, Dawkins as a scientist does consider and list the opposing arguments. As presented however, they are extremely threadbare and easily dismissed. Mostly they are backed up by a willingness for people to take God (and Theology!) seriously: since so many people believe in God, it must be taken seriously, or so the reasoning goes. Not so: the proofs of Gods existence don't stand up and should be dismissed. Dawkins makes the case that we should instead of investigating God, investigate why people believe in God, given the lack of evidence. He gives some good hypotheses in terms of Darwinian thinking: reasons why faith, accepting what your parents said without evidence, has survival benefits, that in other circumstances lead people to believe nonsense stories with faith. Another under-estimated problem is the different definitions people have for 'God' and 'religion'. Most people from a Christian / Judaic background have a habit of framing belief and Religion in terms of the religion they grew up in. They may accept that you have a different God(s), but still view God(s) as something you pray to, that intercede on your behalf, etc. By confusing all the different aspects given to 'God' in the Christian tradition, they think that if you have 'proved' one of them, all the rest follow. If you prove / claim that something created the Universe, and label that God, then, they imply, there must be one overall, kind, monotheistic God, Jesus died on the Cross for your sins, that God will change the laws of physics to suit you (miracles), etc. Not so: all you have done is label something, not proved your religion. Dawkins (rightly) dismisses Buddhism, etc. as 'principles for living' rather than religions for the purposes of this book, and we need to be careful what we call religion, too. Dawkins also makes a good case against Agnosticism. He argues we should be more forthright and say we are Strongly Atheistic rather than Agnostic. Agnosticism was created by Thomas Huxley to explain his beliefs. He defined Athiesm is a positive belief in the lack of God, a proposition for which there is no evidence. He argued that, until we have proof that God does not exist, scientifically correct to consider ourselves 'sceptics' on this matter, and neither believe nor disbelieve in God. This sounds good, however in Science there are huge numbers of theories that in practice we have no evidence for either way that Occams razor mows down for us. We don't claim to be agnostic about them, we simply ignore them until they are actually needed to explain something. Which, given modern science and Darwins explanation of evolution in particular, God no longer is. The later chapters of the book cover whether, despite the lack of evidence, belief in God or Religion is a good thing, whether religion gives a moral purpose and direction to life, and defines a sense of "Good" that Atheists cannot have. For this he goes through the Bible with a disbelieving eye, pointing to the horrors of genocide that it promotes in the Old Testament, etc. He points out that we don't actually use the bible for moral guidance, but instead decide our own morality: we pick examples from the Bible a la carte to defend our choices. We don't decide, as an Old Testament interpretation would put it, that murder of an non-Jew is acceptable; that rape of an enemy is acceptable, that killing non-believers and witches necessary. Instead we pick examples to back up what we've decided already. If you're going to do that, stop pretending the Bible is giving you moral guidance and instead accept that we decide. Dawkins underestimates the social and ethnic aspects of religion. He is overly critical of religion, blaming it for much of the worlds violence, genocides, etc. It would be truer to say that Northern Ireland, etc. are examples of ethic rather than religious strife. "God says so" is just the ultimate argument. But conversely religion is a cohesive element in most societies. I suspect that a cause of the growth of christianity in the U.S. is that its proselytising nature goes out to be inclusive in Americas highly mobile society. When work, etc. causes people and families to move across the continent, they will find a church to welcome them into the community. Its against this background that atheists are the most distrusted minority. Shared beliefs, whatever those beliefs, bring neighbours closer. James Lovelock, (co-creator with Lynn Margulis of the Gaia Hypothesis) proposes that atheists can treat Gaia as an alternative religion, something to celebrate and to give moral direction to life. This I have sympathy with, that life is important, and to be celebrated, but not to be confused with something to be prayed to, or imagine that it is biased towards towards our existence. In these times when people are again using religion as a justification for war, claiming a "clash of civilisations", this is a book worth reading, but beyond deciding whether gods exist we need to understand why people believe. The Darwinian arguments are as Richard Dawkins points out, just a start, but I think more is needed to explain religion. Tags review, religion, atheism

Many of you probably know what this means. That was what I saw early this morning when the weather woke me up. I went downstairs and checked the weather on the Internet. And sure enough, a line of thunderstorms was slowly moving across pretty much all of Kansas.

This morning, when we woke up, our driveway looked like this:



It was a calm, still, pleasant scene. Birds were chatting, rabbits were hopping, and there were soft rumbles of thunder in the distance. This must be why Terah says she likes thunderstorms.

On the other hand, thunderstorms make me nervous. Given the right conditions, severe thunderstorms can spawn tornadoes with little warning.

Friday night, most of Greensburg, KS was destroyed. So far, 9 people have been confirmed dead. Estimates are that 90% of the town's structures are lost. You can see the damage in aerial and land pictures. I know that Greensburg will rebuild, better than before. Tornadoes don't seem to ever scare people off. They seem to just make them more determined than ever to stay where they are because it's home.

A few days ago, I went to fetch the hardware that I'd ordered. I don't think I've ever ordered as much in one go ever before. Well -- at least not when it wasn't for a customer. My brother's girlfriend needed a new hard disk for her laptop, since her old one had broken (and of course she didn't have no backups, so now I'll have to find my 2,5" ATA -> desktop ATA converter and try to rescue what's there to rescue). Now since I had been planning to buy me some hardware before, and since my supplier implements an ordering fee for every order (no, they're not an end-user store), I decided to batch them up together in an effort to share the ordering fee over slightly more hardware. I am now the proud owner of:

• A Linksys SPA921 VoIP deskphone.
• A Linksys something router with two builtin ATA ports (one FXS and one FXO). Since they didn't have an affordable ATA without the router stuff (the only ones they had without router were some 24-ish port 2000+ corporate boxes, but I don't need those), I had to pick this one. Not that I'll ever use the router bits.
• A 3Com 8port 1000BASE-T switch. As a result, I just retired my aging and flaky 5port 10BASE-T/10BASE-2 hub, and with it the single last 10BASE-2 segment in my network. After that, I moved the 100BASE-T switch to where the 10BASE-T one stood previously, and now the network is 100BASE-T at least everywhere. Not that I have the hardware to match on the other end of the connection everywhere (I don't have any Gbit NICs, and only a few 100BASE-T NICs; most of my NICs are 10BASE-T, though), but that doesn't matter.
• A Belkin 802.11g access point to replace the old and unsafe 802.11b one. Funny bit about that is that the old access point could talk 802.11x (aka the WPA variant that requires to set up a Radius server), but no WPA-PSK, whereas the new box supports WPA-PSK, but not 802.11x. Oh well.
• Two 500G SATA disks.

I also ordered a Thecus N2100, aka a "Yes box", to put the two 500G disks in — but those haven't arrived yet (still a few more days). Not that I'm even remotely interested in such an "external hard disk" type of thing, but there is some interesting stuff to be done with that hardware. Stay tuned. Apart from the computer hardware, today I also went to Lemca in Deurne, and bought me a YFL 311 as an early birthday present to myself. I'd been in doubt between the 311 and the YFL 411, so tried both at the shop before deciding to go with the 311. While there is a difference in sound between the two (most notable in the lower octave), I didn't think the result was stunning enough to justify the 700+ extra for the 411. YMMV, of course. I think I'll be playing a lot of music tomorrow.