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Browse Happy - Online. Worry-free.

Posted 07/01/2005 under other stuff •

Browse Happy is a site devoted to the comparison of Internet browsers, or to put it more bluntly, it is devoted to explaining why we should not be using Internet Explorer as our browser of choice.

Until the recent release of Firefox I was using Opera as my main browser. I stress the word “main” at this point because there are things that I.E. does better and I now find myself switching between Firefox (better security, tabbed browsing, very fast) and I.E. (preview pane for Internet e-mail, accessing my bank in Australia [they only accept I.E.]) depending on the use to which I am putting it.

My students have just discovered the dilemma inherent in trying to produce cross-browser compatible Web sites for their final project. Yesterday in class each student presented their site on the large screen to the rest of the class, and without exception there were problems of one sort or another in most of the browsers. It was an interesting exercise to have the students display their sites in three different browsers to see the differences in presentation caused by the way in which each browser interprets the HTML and CSS coding. Not to mention the fact that in our computer labs the students are mainly using I.E. 5.5 while I have I.E. 6 installed on my computer and many of them had problems presenting their sites through my laptop using I.E. 6.

This is no news to those of us who have been struggling for many years to design Web sites that can be viewed by end users no matter what “user agent” they are employing. But it still remains a total pain in the posterior.

http://browsehappy.com/

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unconditional love

Posted 05/01/2005 under other stuff •

Why is it that as children we demand and expect unconditional love from our parents and are hurt and seemingly scarred for life if we perceive that we haven’t received it, and yet often we do not consider that our parents deserve the same sort of love?

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This from Rotarian Mohanakannan in India

Posted 05/01/2005 under other stuff •

Dear Rotarians,

Wishing you a new year with beautiful moments, treasured memories, and all the happiness your heart can hold.

Happy New Year!

Chennai and other districts in our Tamil Nadu State, India had suffered from the Tsunami waves killing thousands in a flash and rendered 100 thousands homeless last week. I take this opportunity to invite you to visit the following link and help our District in Tsunami Relief Work.

http://www.ri3230.org/lidc_tsunamirelieffund.html

Yours in Rotary,

Rtn. Mohanakannan,
Jt.WebMaster,
Rotary International
Dist: 3230
TEl: +91-9840818050

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Tsunami relief effort

Posted 05/01/2005 under other stuff •

This is from Gehan from Sri Lanka whom I met through the International RYLA convention in Brisbane last year. I got it via betseybee

Dear RYLArians,

As you must all be aware, Sri Lanka was very badly affected with over 5000 people dead (Still rising) and over 1 million people affected by Sunday’s un-expected Tsunami’s that struck our island.

We, through our Rotary Club is trying to organize relief efforts; however, the magnitude of the disaster is so high that we, even as a country put together cannot handle all the medical, clothing, shelter, dry rations etc., requirements by our selves. Thus, I’m asking you to help us help the people affected by this tragic incident in any way possible. If you are un-able to assist, passing this message to someone who you think is able to help is as useful.

As an idea of what can be done - Printing out fliers and distributing it amongst the local community etc. setting and informing a Date and Venue for the collection of Clothes, Dry Rations, Medicines, Tents/ Camps, etc. etc. and thereafter, contacting a local freight forwarder to help Ship/ Air freight the items to Colombo, Sri Lanka (Preferably FOC as their contribution to the relief effort). We through our Rotary Club can speak to local Customs and get all costs waived off from this end.

If you have any queries, please contact me on the following:

Name : Gehan de Alwis
Rotary Club : ROTARY CLUB OF COLOMBO REGENCY, RI 3220, SRI LANKA.
Office : C/o Omega Technologies (Private) Limited
Address : # 618 Galle Road, Colombo 3, SRI LANKA (Office)
Mobile/ Text : 94 77 7368820
Email : gehan@omega-tec.com
MSN ID : gehan77@hotmail.com

If you are donating funds, please use the following Account:

Attention - Gehan de Alwis
Account Name - ROTARY CLUB OF COLOMBO REGENCY
Account No. - 001-003771-002
Bank - HSBC
Bank Address - # 24, Sir Baron Jayatilaka Mawatha, Colombo 1, Sri Lanka
SWIFT Code - HSBC LK LX

Thanking you once again in-advance for all your support.

Gehan de Alwis
Colombo, Sri Lanka

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Sorry about this but…

Posted 10/12/2004 under other stuff •

...due to a sudden spate of comment spam I have had to resort to the tactic of asking people who wish to leave a comment to first register as a member. A pain in the butt I know and I’m sure that many people who wish to comment will not do so because of the time it will take. But I’ve just spent the first two hours of my birthday deleting comment spam and until version 2.4 of pMachine is released the status quo will have to remain.

The gentle folk at pMachine ensure all that the release is not too far away and it will have better filtering techniques to block spammers. But until then, please register and send me a comment (happy birthday would do ).

Cheers

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Oops…

Posted 02/12/2004 under other stuff •

For a minute there the account for this site was suspended. Slight stuff up in the billing and payment area, no harm done.

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Diminished Responsibility

Posted 08/11/2004 under other stuff •

So, the perpetrator of all of those e-mails from Nigeria asking us to take their millions in cash has been given “at least” four years in jail. That sounds good to me, he no doubt deserves it.

But wait one!

I’ve just finished reading Helen Garner’s book “Joe Cinque’s Consolation” where the girlfiend of Joe Cinque, Anu Singh, received ten years for his murder but had to serve “at least” four years. Singh was released from prison after four years. Four years for drugging her boyfriend with Rohypnol and then administering a lethal dose of heroin while he was out cold. The first times she tried it she failed, so over a period of a week she continued until Joe Cinque was dead. Anu Singh was not quite right in the head, everybody could see that. The judge could see it because he ruled that she had “diminished responsibilty” and sentenced her accordingly.

So let me see, four years for spam and fraud and four years for murder (reduced to manslaughter of course). Seems fair - not.

Nigerian scammer jailed
Correspondents in Sydney
NOVEMBER 08, 2004

THE Australian mastermind of a global internet scam was today sentenced to at least four years behind bars.

Nick Marinellis pleaded guilty in the NSW District Court to 10 counts of fraud and one count of perverting the course of justice over the so-called Nigerian or West African scam.

The ruse fleeced victims of $5 million.

Judge Barry Mahoney sentenced Marinellis to five years and three months jail with a non-parole period of four years and four months.

The sentence will be backdated to October last year when the 40-year-old was first jailed.

Judge Mahoney said a significant sentence was needed to deter others from committing similar offences.

“None of the matters are trivial and the modus operandi was complicated and devious,” he said.

Marinellis will be eligible for release on February 28, 2008.

AAP

read article here

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Love Actually Is…

Posted 07/11/2004 under other stuff •

We are spending a quiet Sunday at home recovering from two very late nights in a row and just finished watching the movie “Love Actually Is” on DVD.

It reminded me very much of how much I miss giving and receiving hugs to and from those I love who are far away.

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Silence of the intellectuals is modern society’s loss - OCT 15, 2004

Posted 17/10/2004 under other stuff •

The death in Paris of the renowned thinker Jacques Derrida last Friday the 8th brings to an end a generation of French thinkers from the 1960’s and will further serve to exacerbate the points that Riding makes in this timely article.

As societies dumb down and reality shows take over, facile pundits now overrule true intellectuals

By Alan Riding - Sourced from The Singapore Straits Times

PARIS - Among the striking cultural differences between France and Britain is the way their intellectuals operate in the public arena.

While the French expect their thinkers to speak out on matters of conscience and state, Britons view the very idea of an ‘intellectual’ with suspicion, preferring their ‘scholars’ to work quietly in elitist circles. But both have added weight to the political debate. And now both, it seems, are becoming endangered species.

The waning of the power and status of the intelligentsia is hardly exclusive to France and Britain. Yet it is an alarming trend for countries that once boasted imperial and military might and now rely on the ‘soft power’ of their culture and brains.

Go direct to the article from here. Or read it below in ‘more’...

And this is where the long-divergent paths of France and Britain meet: In both countries, governments, media and opinion are learning to live without the input of the critical intellectual.

The change is most apparent in France, because probably nowhere in Europe has the intellectuel engage been more accepted as a political actor. Specifically, Emile Zola’s J’Accuse in 1898 - his denunciation of institutionalised anti-Semitism in the Dreyfus affair - set an example that encouraged Catholic, fascist, communist, Trotskyite, anti-communist and liberal intellectuals to hold forth and claim the moral high ground.

But since the end of the Cold War, the ideological combat that once spawned major figures like Jean-Paul Sartre and Raymond Aron has become largely irrelevant.

The French government seems less interested in courting intellectuals, newspapers that serve as their vehicles are losing circulation, and even students have switched their attention from politics to job-hunting. Once an end unto itself, knowledge is becoming a means.

A handful of intellectuals - most theatrically Bernard-Henri Levy - have become media and literary celebrities. But cries of lamentation are heard more often.

In February, 40,000 members of the educated elite signed a petition accusing the right-of-centre government of waging ‘war on intelligence’ by cutting scientific and other research budgets. One minister retorted: ‘Being an intellectual should not be considered a protected species.’

France’s top thinkers are gloomy. The headline of a recent article in Le Figaro’s literary supplement asked: ‘Why don’t intellectuals of left and right occupy a more prominent place in the public arena?’

Britain’s experience also suggests that a ‘thinking deficit’ has become a fact of political life. Notwithstanding the Cambridge Communists and Oswald Mosley’s Brown Shirts in the 1930s, political extremism has never flourished in Britain.

But the Fabian Society demonstrated that intellectuals could affect politics. Founded in the 1880s to advance democratic socialism, it shaped the trade union movement and the Labour Party. A few individuals also stood out: In the 1950s and 1960s, Bertrand Russell was as influential in Britain as Sartre was in France.

But in the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher broke the power of the unions, and in the mid-1990s, Tony Blair’s New Labour abandoned the old left.

In Britain too, then, with socialism seemingly defeated, ideological debate evaporated.

If British Cabinets of the 1960s and 1970s included intellectuals like Richard Crossman, Michael Joseph and Roy Jenkins, their places were taken by pragmatists more obsessed with opinion polls than ideas.

So, outside the chattering classes, does any of this matter?

Yes, in the view of British sociologist Frank Furedi, who addresses the issue in a new book, Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone? Confronting 21st Century Philistinism.

His focus is on Britain where, he argues, people with genuine learning, breadth of vision and a concern for public issues have been replaced by facile pundits, think-tank apologists and spin doctors.

As societies have dumbed down, with television crowded with reality shows and newspapers with gossip, so has the public debate.

Politics - without policies - is even marketed by the media as soap opera: Can Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown outsmart Mr Blair?

Still, if politicians are unwilling to examine their societies in depth, can intellectuals do any better? In France, intellectuals do raise their voices, but mainly to defend their own interests.

In Britain, by seeking a new audience through the media, they have gained notoriety but lost clout. One interesting spinoff is that political theatre in Britain is now tackling issues that newspapers skim over.

Mr Furedi argues that ‘massification’ of higher education has conspired with political correctness to lower standards of learning and reward mediocrity. He sees a culture of ‘low expectations’ fuelled by the credo of social inclusion as infantilising the way both government and media address public issues.

And one result is a new generation of intellectuals who fear being thought elitist.

‘The heroic image of the classical intellectual has given way to a more down-to-earth pragmatic person, whose job is not a particularly important one,’ Mr Furedi writes.

He adds: ‘In such circumstances, knowledge and art are not likely to be valued for themselves, but because of their usefulness to society.’

Certainly, the British government increasingly promotes education as a job tool and culture as an entertainment industry.

‘There is a new breed of university managers, museum and gallery directors and ‘knowledge’ entrepreneurs who regard the content of culture and ideas with indifference,’ Mr Furedi notes, recalling that Britain’s education minister recently expressed contempt for the notion of ‘scholars seeking truth’.

These are difficult times for intellectuals. Governments feel safe in ignoring them; politicians and the media, in Mr Furedi’s words, ‘spoon-feed the public with sound bites’; and the public shows little interest in political debate.

More alarming, the worlds of art and education are going along with this ‘philistine social engineering agenda’ in the guise of promoting equality. But society may pay a price if intellectual elitism is written off as anti-democratic.

Critical intellectuals once represented an independent voice outside the ruling establishment and enhanced democratic pluralism. Today, with political debate increasingly orchestrated by government and media, the silence of the intellectuals risks undermining one of democracy’s crucial checks and balances.—New York Times
Copyright @ 2004 Singapore Press Holdings. All rights reserved.

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apophenia: milgram’s subway experiment

Posted 16/09/2004 under other stuff •

This from zephoria

milgram’s subway experiment

The NYTimes has a revisiting of Milgram’s subway experiment. This is a classic experiment where grad students were told to go onto NY subways and ask passengers to give up their seats. A surprising number of them agreed to do so, but what was shocking was just how traumatic it was on the students to even ask this question, to break the social contract.

Stanley Milgram came up with the experiment that showed each of us (human beings) are removed from each other only slightly over 6 degrees on average. This 6 degrees of separation led to a game titled “6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon”. You see, Kevin Bacon has acted in so many movies that there are many fellow actors who have either acted with him directly or are up 6 degrees removed from an actor who has by way of movie association.

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