~bma's journal

We recently received our annual spamming by Plymouth On Course, who apparently are some sort of umbrella group for the various places in the city that do adult learning courses. Last year I considered signing up for one, but didn't have the money; this year, I have the time and the money (at least, compared to next year), so I've just requested a place on a Beginner's German course. (I considered French, as they have courses all the way up to A-level, but German seems more interesting, and they may have more advanced courses by the time I'm ready to do them anyway).

It starts at the end of September, every Tuesday evening until May.

From an ad in Computing magazine: "BT and the NHS are teaming up to improve the quality of London's community healthcare blah blah blah."

What for? Since when does London have a lack of adequate healthcare? The NHS site for Cornwall lists three hospitals with A&E departments --- two of which aren't even in Cornwall (Barnstaple and Plymouth). The only one actually in Cornwall is the Royal Cornwall Hospital in Truro. Devon's not much better: apart from Barnstaple and Plymouth, there's Exeter and Torquay --- and another listed which is in Taunton. I didn't check Somerset, but I doubt they're much better off.

There's plenty of places in Devon and Cornwall that are thirty or forty miles from an A&E department, yet London needs better healthcare. Hmm...

It's not often you see something that manages to perpetuate stupid beliefs about gender at the same time as demonstrating yet another way to invade someone's privacy with Javascript, but this article manages it. Apparently, it looks at your browser history and guesses whether you're male or female based on the sites you've visited. Now, I'm not convinced that there's a significant gender bias for most sites, and looking at the results it looks like a sizable proportion of them were wrong ("oh noes ur site thinkz im a gurl!!!!111"). It bugs me that people even bother, though.

What's more concerning, as Simon points out, is that apparently any site that can use javascript (i.e., any site you don't disable it for) can find out what sites you've been to just by creating a link and checking whether the CSS style is :visited. I think I'm going to have to install NoScript again, despite having to use Javascript for work...

The problem: I have files that are shared by more than one repository. Specifically, the TermiSoc constitution and security policy both contain a logo and LaTeX style, which should be identical.

The solution: remote branches.

This is probably really obvious to anyone who already knows Git, but I had trouble working it out from the available documentation, so I'll record it for posterity. I was somewhat hampered by the fact that my previous experience has been with Darcs, where you can pull from any repository to any repository, and expect everything to work just fine.

First, you'll need to set up the repositories: one for the shared files, and however many to share these files amongst:

cd style
git init
git add *; git commit -m "import."

cd ../document
git init
git add *; git commit -m "import."

Then, add the remote branch:

git remote add style ../style
git fetch style
git branch style style/master
git merge style

Simple.

To update:

cd ../style
vi termisoc.sty
git commit -m "blah" termisoc.sty
cd ../document
git checkout style; git pull style
git checkout master; git merge style

This can probably be improved upon, but that's the way that worked for me. You can probably also edit on the style branch in the document repository, and push from the style branch to the style repository, but it's late and I couldn't get it to work properly. I shall have to experiment at some point.

Ed writes that he finds atheists depressing when they throw away the "real message" of religion.

As an atheist, I have to agree --- though it depends what "the real message" is. I grew up believing that Christianity taught that being a good person was what got you into heaven; it was only when I started university that I learned that actually, it's believing in Jesus that gets you into heaven (or, more accurately, they redefine "good" to mean "believing in Jesus"). This is what put me off religion, long before I ever read The God Delusion.

You can't even, unfortunately, argue that that's an issue with the Church and not the religion, since it has its roots in a verse from the Bible, where Jesus is quoted as saying "nobody gets into heaven except through me" (more or less). The problem is, though, that despite the reasonable moral guidance provided by religious figures such as Jesus, they get overshadowed by the bits that give the Church power to control people, and that is why I object to religion.

Sure, you may say that the crappy church is not a good reason to avoid religion as a whole --- but what other reason is there to pay any attention to it? Morality doesn't require some Israeli carpenter/hippy to make it moral, or a Saudi merchant, Nepalese prince, or Prussian writer, and it's perfectly possible to live a moral life without paying attention to some cosmic Jewish zombie and his imaginary friend.

So, serious question: what, exactly, is religion needed for? Answers on a postcard.

Okay, usually I ignore Student Union politics, since it rarely gets anywhere useful. However, one poster in the union caught my eye---Darren Jones, Presidential candidate, you are a pillock.

The policy of his to which I am referring is "Cheaper Membership to Clubs and Societies". Now, I'm not going to say that there are no societies which are overcharging for membership. I do know, though, that many societies get a substantial amount of their annual income from membership fees; TermiSoc, certainly, is always trying to find the balance between charging as little as possible for membership, and charging enough that we have money for maintenance and hardware repairs. I suspect that other societies have similar---or, likely, greater---problems, and mandating a maximum membership fee is just going to make things worse unless societies are provided with a reasonable income from the union (all societies, that is, not just the ones who bring prestige to the union---i.e., a couple of the sports teams).

This is yet another case, I suspect, of someone proposing changes that are bound to be popular with the majority of students, without actually looking into the situation and considering the consequences.

I have a new plant; it's a spider plant that sprouted from one we're looking after for a friend. It needs a name; any suggestions?

Update: danbjorn suggested Tolstoy, which I like the sound of.

Today was the first day of my second week at PML, and I appear to have survived so far. The work's pretty interesting; I spent the first couple of days writing Perl, and seem to have won; the last few days have been spent getting to grips with one of the major projects I'll be working on. It's a bit of PHP and a lot of Javascript, and my first task has been adding session support, rather than passing dozens of parameters in the URL (which will lead, hopefully, to being able to make the whole thing a lot more user-friendly, or at least developer-friendly).

This afternoon, I also started the second part of my role there --- I'll be doing some sysadmin-type stuff, on a rather more serious level than I've had the opportunity to do before. I'm setting up a brand-new (had to unpack it and everything) server to act as a master for a cluster, and then experiment with SystemImager so that we can easily roll out upgrades.

It's a pretty cool place to work, too; there's various sport and social groups (including cycling and running, helpfully), and there's also apparently an agreement with a gym nearby to allow PML staff to use their facilities.

Looking forward to the rest of the year. (Hopefully not famous last words...)

http://www.badscience.net/2008/06/all-time-classic-creationist-pwnage/

Biologist Richard Lenski recently published a paper describing the emergence of new traits in bacteria (they evolved the ability to metabolise new food sources when kept in an environment without food they could already metabolise). Andrew Schlafly, founder of that paragon of scientific endeavour Conservapedia [1] [2], got very upset by this and demanded to see the evidence. Lenski responded quite politely, but after further demands, threats, and insults, replies with an impressively snotty letter.

I'm a little amazed that, after eight years of Bush, there's actually the possibility that the USA will have a presidential candidate who doesn't suck. I'm still not convinced that Obama would be a better president than Clinton, but either one of them is fine by me (or, even better, either one of them with the other as vice-president).