Updating my blogroll

As part of introducing my new blog template, I decided to do some tidying up. Among the new features on the side bar, you’ll see a dramatically reduced “Blogroll”. In the early days of this blog (particularly when many of my colleagues at Sun were also starting their blogs) it was common for two bloggers to add entries to their blogrolls as a reciprocal courtesy, just to increase each others Technorati rankings. Just because a blog was on one’s blogroll didn’t mean you were actually reading it. But after a while it gets unmanageable, and the blogroll becomes several times longer than the average posting. Several attempts to adopt a new template failed because the combined blogroll, category list, and archives sections were just too big.
So today I decided to do something radical. First, I replaced the category list and archives with drop-down menus. Then I revised my blogroll to correspond to what I actually read, based on the list of RSS feeds that I scan each morning through NetNewsWire. (There are many other RSS feeds that I track, mostly from news organizations, but they don’t belong here.)
So if you were on my blogroll and have disappeared, my apologies. It’s nothing personal.

Misc. stuff

The last few days here have been unrelentingly wet, and so I’ve been oscillating between work and the apartment without getting up to much else. Among the minor stuff:
I received and assembled the penultimate bit of furniture, the TV stand. I was able to go from:
old setup to TV stand
The 19″ Samsung monitor looks rather lost in all that space…. The sound is great, though. I finally wired up all the speakers and tested the 5.1 audio with a wonderful new DVD, Arriving Somewhere by Porcupine Tree. Highly recommended.
Other things I’ve been watching, reading and listening:

  • Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq by Thomas Ricks (A relentless, devastating account of “pounding the square peg of the U.S. Army into the round hole of Iraq”.)
  • The Tragic Treasury: Songs from a Series of Unfortunate Events by The Gothic Archies (Stephin Merrit and Lemony Snicket) (My first Stephin Merrit recording: I have a feeling that in time I’m going to acquire quite a few, including 69 Love Songs.)
  • BEEP: The Definitive Guide by Marshall Rose (A geek’s book about a networking technology that, like Jini, is sadly underused.)
  • Learning the World: a Scientific Romance by Ken MacLeod (A thought-provoking first-encounter science fiction story.)
  • Woman of the Year with Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy (Purchased as part of this collection. (Their first joint venture, and a wonderful, sparkling, and brave film. Even though the revised ending lets it down it’s still a powerful statement. In the original, which Louis B. Mayer objected to, Spencer Tracy’s character tells Hepburn to “just be yourself”; the revised version has her cooking her husband’s breakfast…)

And finally my Washington State driver’s license has arrived. The photo is classic “deer in the headlights”, but I wasn’t looking for a work of art.

Thank goodness

Dan Dennett recently had emergency surgery for a dissection of the aorta. As Boing Boing reports, his friends were anxious to see what effect, if any, this experience had on his atheism. Dan’s response (which you should read in its entirety) included this:

Yes, I did have an epiphany. I saw with greater clarity than ever before in my life that when I say “Thank goodness!” this is not merely a euphemism for “Thank God!” (We atheists don’t believe that there is any God to thank.) I really do mean thank goodness! There is a lot of goodness in this world, and more goodness every day, and this fantastic human-made fabric of excellence is genuinely responsible for the fact that I am alive today. It is a worthy recipient of the gratitude I feel today, and I want to celebrate that fact here and now.

Beautifully put. Get well soon, Dan.

UPDATE: In a comment, Chris questioned what he called Dan’s “anthropological optimism”. I asked Dan about this; here’s his reply:

Actually, I’ve been thinking a lot about goodness during the last two weeks since surgery. In one sense it is just obvious: in every human activity there is some measure of quality control, and practically everybody takes this for granted. In the lowliest marketplace, the good food sells before the bad unless the bad is priced lower. People always care. That’s not moral goodness, just the multitudinous excellences of all things we touch and care about. Is there more goodness every day? In this sense, sure. There’s lots of junk, too, of course, but our standards for what is acceptable keep rising, and we keep taking more and more excellence for granted. What about moral excellence? This depends a lot on infrastructure: no matter how heroic you are personally, you can’t save many lives, or help many people, unless you are part of a huge system of design, manufacture and delivery of whatever you rely on in your good works. But that’s easier and easier every year. See my piece “Information, Technology and the Virtues of Ignorance” (last chapter in Brainchildren) about how we are now actually oppressed by all the can-do that science and technology has imposed on us.

Blog update time

Earlier this evening Kate told me that my blog was getting mangled in Internet Explorer. The last time I switched themes I tested it carefully under all the browsers I could find, including IE. I retested, and although most of the pages were OK, the main page was unreadable. So I decided that it was time for a change. I went looking for a really up-to-date WordPress theme that supported all of the recent 2.0 features.

Here you are. It’s the wide version of Marco Vlieg’s Lush, ported to WP by Christoph Boecken. It includes a nice touch that I know some readers will appreciate: the ability to change the font size using the palette at the top right.

While I was installing and customizing the theme, I added some extra features. The most obvious one is that if you leave a comment you can subscribe to receive notification of new comments. You’ll see other new capabilities over the next few days.

Please let me know of any problems, particularly related to browser compatibility or readability.

UPDATE: Steve and others pointed out that some of the fonts were oddly sized and hard to read (probably because they weren’t anti-aliased). There are two probable explanations: frequest use of fractional scaling, and PC-centric font preferences. I’ve fixed some of the scaling (though not all), and I’ve backed off to simple “sans-serif” for most of the fonts, so you’ll see whatever your browser is configured for. If you choose an ugly font, don’t blame me….

Finally! "Oh! What a Lovely War" on DVD

I was actually planning to go to bed early tonight… and then while scanning the TV listings I saw that Joan Littlewood’s “Oh! What a Lovely War” was being shown at 10:20. I’m not sure why, but this film has always been extraordinarily important to me. It’s hard to refer to it as a “favourite” when it evokes such a mixture of emotions, but I always watch it whenever I can… which has been rarely. For some reason it was never released on VHS or DVD, and so I had to catch it whenever I could, usually in the middle of the night.
So I stayed up and watched it, singing along quietly with some of the songs, smiling with anticipation at “They were only playing leapfrog…”, grimacing with rage at the callous stupidity of Haig, spotting celebrities (the cast list is amazing), and unashamedly weeping at the finale.
As I watched, I noticed that the film seemed brighter and crisper than I remembered, and there were a couple of scenes that felt longer. I wondered if someone had finally got around to replacing the tired prints from 1969(!) with a newly restored (and uncut) version. I guess they must have, because I just checked at Amazon.com and the DVD is being released next Tuesday! Hallelujah!!
Now if only someone would give a copy of the DVD to Bush and Rumsfeld. Unfortunately I suspect that they’d fail to see the connection. (The BBC already did a short piece entitled “Oh! What a Lovely Blair!”, skewering the Prime Minister over Iraq.) But never mind: get yourself a copy of one of the best anti-war satires ever produced. You may not enjoy all of it (the poison gas, for instance), but you’ll certainly be glad you did.

Linux WiFi… snarl…

Amazon uses Red Hat Linux for almost all of its servers and developer desktops – some lingering RH7.2, lots of RHEL3, an increasing amount of RHEL4 – and so I decided to play with the new Fedora Core 6 on my usually-WinXP laptop. Since my apartment network is entirely WiFi, I downloaded the 3.8GB ISO image to my PowerBook last night, burned it onto a DVD this morning, and tried installing it this evening.
So far, not so good.
As I mentioned, it’s WiFi only here, and I made the mistake of telling the installer to leave the Ethernet adaptor enabled. This caused the installer to hang, probably waiting for me to plug in a cable, and I had to power-cycle. Unchecking the Ethernet option allowed the installation to complete. However I wasn’t able to get the WiFi to work: I’m going to have to try again in the morning. The standard network configuration tool seems pretty lame: it doesn’t allow you to search for available networks, for example. A quick search just now suggests that there are some better tools out there; if so, I hope that they’re bundled, because I’m getting tired of sneakernet with CD-Rs.
Once it’s all working, I plan to install J2SE 1.5, NetBeans, and the full Spring distribution, and play with the sample Spring apps. I’m starting with NetBeans because it’s what I’m used to. Eclipse is more widely used at Amazon, but NetBeans is starting to get a little traction, mostly because of the profiler.