Adam Jones

Avahi is a ZeroConf daemon for Linux - essentially a somewhat enhanced version of Apple's Bonjour protocol. With pretty much no setup I managed to have it advertising most of the services on my home machine around my LAN. tinyastronomer's Mac was able to see my CUPS printer and use it successfully on the first try with zero fiddling involved. Colour me suitably impressed. Even distcc now supports it, which is very handy when working from a laptop.

MPD is a network music server which seems to do almost exactly what I want: the machine with all the music and the decent speakers is my headless server, but I'd much prefer to be able to control it from my laptop rather than needing an SSH session open. With Avahi enabled, the client on my laptop detected the server straight away and even helpfully hooked in to the play/stop/volume buttons on my laptop's front panel. It even copes handily with my total lack of consistent metadata and vast array of file formats (and appears to handle UTF-8 sanely). There are plugins to hook it in to things like last.fm as well, which I may investigate in future if I want to embarrass myself by statistically logging my lack of taste in public. All in all, rather good.

Given recent news, I'd half expected this. Still, very sad news.

(Perhaps somebody will erect a statue at Mornington Crescent. I expect a Downing Street petition in 5... 4...)

In a further treat for London-based skeptics, it seems that James Randi and Phil Plait (the Bad Astronomer) will be talking at Skeptics in the Pub in The Penderel's Oak in Holborn at 7pm on Monday.

Rather frustratingly, I won't be able to be in London then, but I suspect it'll prove to be an entertaining evening for anyone who can make it.

As I was driving back home from work last week, I spotted a tiny sign lurking in the grass verge at the far end of the main road past my house, bearing the brightly-coloured question "Why are you here?".

Whilst I suspected (and later discovered) that it was a product of one of the local churches, I rather appreciated the initial ambiguity of it - a sort of aggressively existential guerrilla warding.

Then, on the way back from Basingstoke today I encountered another, also at the side of the a major road, reading "Where are you going?". Again, sufficiently well-placed to be pleasingly ambiguous in its interpretation.

Unfortunately, right behind it was yet another sign bearing the message "What is life all about?". I couldn't help but be bitterly disappointed; after the previous two it felt like something of a philosophical anvil, and even the wording is just unbearably clunky. They were doing so well until then. I find myself half-tempted to remove just that one sign, as a form of aesthetic direct action.

Spotted on one of the many Discovery channels this evening, a helpful overlaid title indicating that this is apparently "Hitler and the Nazi's Weekend".

(Of course, now I'm wondering which Nazi. Perhaps there was some kind of mythic ur-Nazi whom my history teachers somehow neglected to mention?)

Noted atheist blogger PZ Myers has a hilarious post about his efforts to see the all-new creationist propaganda film Expelled. Unfortunately for him, it seems the local police were clearly well-trained and attentive...

This is clearly the work of an evil genius:

Whilst out running this morning, I found this stuck in my head. As it has been, in one way or another, ever since I first saw it.

Juan Cole wins the "well-aimed understatement of the week" prize, commenting on Bush's illegal wiretapping scheme:

[T]he defense [Attorney General Michael] Mukasey suggests for telecom companies that illegally turned over consumer records to government officials who had no warrant to request them, is that they were "following orders." I think there were some trials where that excuse was disallowed.

It seems the live-action Mushishi movie will be getting a UK DVD release. I've no idea if it's actually any good, but since it seems to be an adaptation of the beautiful Sea of Brushes storyline, there's certainly some potential there.

A quango is to be established to regulate "alternative therapists". They can even be struck off the (voluntary) national register for incompetence.

I can't help but wonder how one could possibly be an incompetent homeopath. Actually giving people medicines? Still, now we need no longer fear that our ear-candlers will be unable to identify the correct orifices. All those aromatherapists who've been setting fire to bundles of hair will be sent packing. We may soon see the birth of an official quality standard for healing crystals. What a great day for humanity!

It seems that Linux on my laptop is asymptotically approaching complete usability.

Upgrading to a 2.6.24-rcX has finally gotten rid of the annoying Intel binary daemon previously required to use the wireless connection, which means that NetworkManager no longer requires annoying amounts of prodding. Hooray! The big scary i386/x86_64 merge also means that the 64-bit kernel can finally take advantage of the tickless mode and the rewritten timer system, which seems to have sorted some annoying video timing issues I was having before. Suspend-to-RAM works perfectly. Oddly, hibernation managed to break, but a quick bug report managed to turn up a patch inside half an hour; success!

After updating everything else, it seems that Liferea (RSS reader) managed to speed itself up to a startling extent (I think they changed the backend to use SQLite). X is doing all the things it's supposed to do. Amazingly, display hotplugging even works - attaching an external monitor and/or an S-Video cable worked first time. The TV output also does not suffer from the hideous brightness/contrast issues of the current Windows drivers - it's possible to actually see what's going on in dark scenes, for example. There does seem to be a very intermittent flicker on the TV output, though - possibly xrandr is polling in a particularly stupid manner. It's noticeable but not quite bad enough to be truly annoying.

The only remaining showstopper is, I think, GNOME's annoying screensaver system. mplayer currently has no idea that it exists and is therefore unable to turn it off. There's a handy GNOME panel applet provided to let you disable the power manager manually, but it doesn't stop the screensaver. Argh! Xine (and thus Totem) still breaks nastily on some of my h264/Matroska files, so that's out. VLC plays things and even manages to kick GNOME properly, but seems to have the single most stupid video scaler in the entire known universe, so it makes things look utterly vile in full-screen mode. Drat and double drat!

Perhaps I should just try KDE...

From a letter written by Cardinal Cormack Murphy O'Connor, head of the Roman Catholic Church in England, to the director of the Hospital of St John and St Elizabeth, attempting to stop it offering abortions, IVF treatment and even contraception:

"There must be clarity that the hospital, being a Catholic hospital with a distinct vision of what is truly in the interests of human persons, cannot offer its patients, non-Catholic or Catholic, the whole range of services routinely accepted by many in modern secular society as being in a patient's best interest."

Indeed. And since it cannot, why exactly is it still open and (one would assume) receiving public money? If you don't want doctors to offer medical care, don't run a hospital. Let somebody else do it. Preferably somebody who isn't still stuck in the twelfth century.

It's not every day you get to see the Torygraph linking to 2chan.

"I confirm that it is Home Office policy to remove political dissidents to Uzbekistan"

Shipping opposition figures back to a country whose dictator likes to boil them alive. Clearly this is some new definition of the phrase "ethical foreign policy" with which I was heretofore unfamiliar.

More evidence, as if it were needed, as to why we need to disestablish the Church and repeal our blasphemy laws.

Dear Jeanette Winterson,

Much as I admire and enjoy your writing, I'm sorry to have to point out that there is no "defence of homeopathy". It doesn't matter how "holistic" it is, or how cold and male and unfeelingly oppressive you consider science to be by comparison, homeopathy simply does not work. It's not "homeophobia", it's that boring old thing we like to call "observable reality".

Maybe you should consider donating the fee from your article to some form of useful medical research instead. Something which might actually improve the net well-being of humanity instead of aiding the endarkenment.

Baccano!

Far and away one of the best shows of the previous season, this series has somehow seemed to slip below the radar of a majority of anime bloggers out there. They're missing out.

Baccano! is an adaptation from a series of light novels set primarily in prohibition-era America, involving a huge cast of characters in a convoluted chase after an alchemical serum which grants immortality to anyone who drinks it. The anime series features a number of overlapping plots, all intermixed and jumbled into an utterly anachronic order - to an extent that reminds me of nothing so much as Catch-22. It's a wonderfully entertaining mix of gangster-movie action, dappy Engrish naming and ludicrous comic relief. It's also quite staggeringly, blood-splatteringly violent - the first episode features a kid getting his head blown off with a shotgun, and later episodes make Tarantino look tame...

Definitely recommended viewing - don't let the somewhat slow and pretentious first episode put you off. I can pretty much guarantee you'll be a signed-up member of the Isaac and Miria fan club by half-way through (although it's safe to say that there are psychotics enough to suit every taste). Ayu are currently providing the fansubs; here's hoping it gets a western DVD release later on.

Oh, and the opening theme frankly rocks. Or possibly jives.

This article helpfully reminds me why I still read The Register these days. Every so often a bit of the old snark sneaks out.

(January? Gnyargh.)