January 2, 2010 – 1:54 am
Has anyone else noticed a large amount of ping backs to link farms from Planet Ubuntu feeds over the last few days? I’m getting a fair few. I’d give an example but if I link to a site that takes my posts from a syndicated site and creates posts that are syndicated on other sites I might create some sort of perpetual motion blog post and consume the Internet (it might seem far fetched but what if Robert Morris had stopped to think).
I find these objectionable though – they appear to be Wordpress and I guess are using a plugin to pull feeds in and publish as articles. They’re not as bad as flat out plagiarism – which I’ve experienced. Mind you even that isn’t the worst, I once wrote a howto which was CC licensed and I realised it had been ripped off when someone posted a comment on it suggesting (quite strongly) that I had taken it from the thief!
So it occurs to me that maybe this is a Wordpress thing. Then again maybe not. Like so many of us I get stuck in my ways and Wordpress is like a pair of comfy shoes. Maybe I should try a new platform, so I wondered what was popular out there in Ubuntu-land.
I’ve tried Drupal (I don’t like it, sorry Emma), Serendipity and Pixie (I quite liked that but baulked at the theming system). Mind you I also have quite a lot of time to myself over the next four months, maybe I should roll my own, I’ve hacked around in PHP but have never developed a large project using it.
So let me know, suggestions on a postcard. Maybe just a comment here will suffice.
January 2, 2010 – 1:19 am
After writing documentation for many years, once in a while I come across a post on the Internet that makes me wonder why I bother. So I thought we could turn it into a game.
Basically it’s like spot the difference, see how many things you can spot that are wrong with it and post them here.
Here is the post in question and it is a cracker. I can think of several things that are wrong with it but see what you can come up with. Here’s a starting hint – man visudo.
January 1, 2010 – 9:12 pm
It’s another year and I’m deploying next week. One of the few perks that entails is VAT exemption at PC World. I had decided some time ago to retire my Acer Aspire One A110L, this seems a sensible opportunity. I need the following:
- Very good battery life
- No solid state disk (SSD) – they’re too small and were a bottleneck on the Aspire One
- Under £300
- Must have a microphone, web-cam and reasonable speakers – Skype is an essential
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December 24, 2009 – 5:11 pm
Whatever your faith, perspective or particular outlook on life I wish everyone well over the Christmas holidays!
December 23, 2009 – 8:56 pm
So yeah, religion.
Recently I met a creationist and very keen to promote his beliefs he was. I could spend many hours on this post but I’m not going to because the first argument he presented is so misinformed. When your argument is “the bible says so” you need to make sure it actually does.
The statement was that the Earth is 6000 years old. This is based on the James Ussher’s chronology in the 17th century. Considerable scholarship was required in this endeavour and chronology was considered an important question at the time. Indeed Sir Isaac Newton addresses much the same question in The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms. Ussher proposes a date of 4004 BC. He derived this value by considering three ages – the early times (which the bible gives lineage and ages for each male descendent); the early age of kings (the bible only gives reign of kings); and the late age of kings (which is derived by comparing events in the bible with other culture’s records).
Fifty years later, in annotated versions of the King James bible, Usher’s date began to be added to Genesis as the age of the Earth. It isn’t actually in the book of Genesis.
The early age is based on the Hebrew bible’s description of the lineage of Adam which differs from the Septuagint by 1500 years. That’s a considerable potential margin of error.
Regardless of its accuracy – if the statement is “the bible says so” that cannot extend to annotations.
