Rebuilding/Renewing Social Norms

Published
by
Simon
on 10/7/2008
in General
. 0 Comments

I’ve just been reading about the nanny state over at skepticlawyer[1]. In her post, Helen (who I’ve just discovered has a Wikipedia entry) included a video by Drew Carey about how the US Government, or it’s many state Governments, have a particular penchant for banning things. Much like the Australian Governments of recent times. Although I wouldn’t agree with everything in the Drew Carey video being ‘un-banned’, it does make a great point. Helen has made the even better point that the law entering the fray where social norms used to do the job quite nicely is not the best solution or a good use of public resources.

I love the idea that the social fabric could be renewed[2] in line with more modern social ideologies. But how? What needs to change, and who’s going to start changing it? I suspect the key is education, but I’ve nothing to back that up and no idea how to convince the powers that be to work hard(er) at improving educational outcomes[3].

The following is a little off topic for the post at SL, and why I decided to make this into a post rather than a comment over there. The UK (and London in particular) seems to be going through somewhat of a knife crime epidemic of late. Having been here only a short time I’m still not sure if this is something new or rapidly escalating as the papers make it out to be, or if that’s just the media doing its thing. However, I do suspect it’s escalating. For those unfamiliar with the situation, there have been 18 teenage murders (mostly stabbings and mostly perpetrated by young people as well) this year. That’s more than one per fortnight. The cause of the escalation doesn’t seem to be clear. Some, though seemingly not the majority, are probably gang related. I’m sure I’ve got no real capability to understand their motive, but some of the perpetrators seem to be committing these horrible crimes at a whim. As though it’s just what people do.

These are horrible crimes which require and deserve the full force of the law (as opposed to a ban on break-dancing in Trafalgar Square[4] or a ban on annoying behaviour[5], neither of which should require the law at all). However, the escalation in these crimes is in part, I suspect, the extreme end of the loss of ’social glue’ touched on by scepticlawyer. What I don’t understand, and maybe someone can explain it to me, is why these kids don’t understand that if you kill someone it will ruin your life. Even if you’re not caught (which you almost certainly will be in this kind of murder), there will be other consequences which will change you forever.

  1. Run by Helen Dale and Legal Eagle, skepticlawyer is an Australia/UK based legal/political/social type blog well worth following. [↩]
  2. As opposed to ‘re-built’ because I don’t want to sound stupidly conservative, which I’m not. [↩]
  3. Let’s hope Andrew Leigh is able to exert some of his influence during his secondment to the Australian Treasury. [↩]
  4. Yep, I made that up. [↩]
  5. Nope, I didn’t make that one up. [↩]

WP-Footnotes 3.2: Release Notes

Published
by
Simon
on 10/7/2008
in Geek and web development
. 3 Comments

This week saw the long awaited release of an update to the WP-Footnotes plugin for WordPress. WP-Footnotes is to easily add footnotes or sidenotes or a bibliograpy, etc. to any post using a simple mark-up which degrades (kind of) gracefully in the event that for some horrifying reason this plugin no longer works.

These notes actually cover releases 3.0, 3.1 and 3.2 which all happened in quick succession.

What’s been fixed

  • Some invalid mark up was being generated. Hopefully not anymore.
  • The notorious ‘a’ bug (I really hope).

What’s been improved

  • Add two new styles of footnotes:
    • Repeated symbol, and
    • Leading zero decimal.
  • Reorganisation to encapsulate fully in a class.
  • Security. I’ve hopefully addressed all know security issues for the plugin[1].

One further improvement is that you are now able to change the footnote style on an individual post basis by adding a custom field[2] to your post. If you add a field with the key ‘footnote_style’ and one of the following as the value:

  • decimal
  • decimal-leading-zero
  • lower-alpha
  • upper-alpha
  • lower-roman
  • upper-roman
  • symbol

What’s been changed

I removed the ’smooth scroll’ feature. If you want smooth scroll I suggest you add it to your theme. Instructions for doing so using jQuery (which is built into WP) are here.

  1. There were a few XSS vulnerability allegations floating around, which were founded if your host is stupid enough to have register globals turned on. [↩]
  2. Custom fields can be added on the write post screen down the bottom under ‘Advanced Options’. [↩]

Using Quicksilver to start or stop internet sharing in OS X Tiger

Published
by
Simon
on 2/7/2008
in General
. 0 Comments

skip to the interesting bit

At work I connect my laptop to the network using old-school cat5 cables because there is no wireless available. However, at home I use wireless. Every morning when I get to work I open my MacBook Pro and go to the System Preferences -> Sharing -> Internet to start sharing the internet using AirPort because I like to scrobble the morning’s tracks from my iPod Touch before I open iTunes and tuck into the rest of the day’s music. It’s just part of my morning routine.

This only has to happen because when I get home again and I want to upload some of the day’s photos to Flickr[1] I have to turn internet sharing off so I can connect to my home wireless. This is a process I’ve streamlined (using Quicksilver) down to seven keystrokes and six mouse clicks (starting internet sharing) or seven keystrokes and two clicks (stopping it again). But it was still too much. In fact, I found it a total pain. For a while now I’ve been looking for a solution to make things faster. Today I finally cobbled one together using tips from few different places, and here’s how to do it.

To get the process down to nine keystrokes (plus your system password) for starting and ten keystrokes for stopping internet sharing we’re going to use three of Apple’s goodies[2]:

  1. AppleScript
  2. Shell scripting
  3. Quicksilver

Let’s get started.

Continue reading ‘Using Quicksilver to start or stop internet sharing in OS X Tiger’

  1. Or any number of other evening type tasks. [↩]
  2. You might think that sounds like more, rather than less. But for me, one mouse click is about equal to ten keystrokes (possibly more) and crucially there is now no mouse involved. [↩]

Hi from London

Published
by
Simon
on 1/7/2008
in General
. 0 Comments

Greetings everyone! Happy holidays to all my teacher friends (remember I’m not one of you anymore, so you’d better enjoy.) How are the rest of you? I know the weather has been quite mild, except for Toowoomba of course.

We have obviously had some excitement in our lives this past week, although it’s certainly resulted in a desperate bout of homesickness. It seems everyone but us has met my lovely new nephew Charlie. Simon and I were absolutely thrilled with his arrival. After seemingly taking so long to get around to being born, he was suddenly in a tremendous hurry. I received a quick call and a text at work, and then a couple of hours later, he was born! I don’t know how long skype will sustain us (Charlie bawled on first sight of me – brilliant), but we are certainly grateful for it and all the photos we have received so far. I’m afraid to say Haddons and Dowricks, but I think Charlie detoured us and looks like every member of Tony’s family that I know. And he is gorgeous and healthy and has made his mum and dad so happy and proud.

Nothing compares with that, but there have been some other highlights during the last fortnight that will make for lovely memories for us both. Our good friend Miriam celebrated her 29^th birthday with dinner and then a trip to an 80s roller disco. As I watched hundreds of fluoro-clad Londoners glide/shuffle past, I was reminded of Toowoomba Skatehaven Saturday session (2pm til 4pm – no pass outs.) Remember the Skittles and the giant pythons? The speed skate? The outfits in Battersea were just as outrageous, but admittedly there were a few differences. The $30 cover charge would be one. The surlies on the door who confiscated packets of chewing gum (“you’ll throw it on the floor and people will hurt themselves.” No I won’t.) and bottles of water (no reason.) Guns and knives fine, but absolutely no hubba bubba.

On Saturday we went to our long awaited performance of King Lear at the Globe. I had never seen my favourite Shakespeare play performed and was so excited to see how it could be done. Our seats were excellent. There are 700 seats for groundlings at only five quid, but the idea of standing for three hours didn’t appeal. We had front row balcony seats in the middle gallery with a perfect view of the stage. The performance was hilarious in parts, incredibly bloody in others and just so moving. I pretty much cried the whole final scene. Loved it.

On the Sunday we finally made a trip to the Victoria and Albert museum. The exhibition I went to see was disappointing and we got through that in about twenty minutes. But the rest of the museum is exquisite. I loved the historical fashion, the jewellery room and the cast court, where there are enormous, yet intricate, replicas of famous columns and buildings from all over the world. As usual Simon was mesmerised with the sculpture section and plans on creating a bronze statue in the future. How long would that take? Five, six days?

A few weeks ago, my friend Bec and I decided that a surprise was in order for our husbands. There is a famous cabaret club in Chancery Lane called the Volupte Lounge. The boys were told to don suits, Bec and I glammed it up a little and we tottered down a dark alley (it wasn’t really that dark.) The boys were suitably surprised and very impressed with their introduction to a burlesque house. It was such a fun night; we drank classic cocktails painstakingly made by the bartender, were shown to our seats by a Russian with feathers in her hair and enjoyed a delicious three course meal. There was also singing, dancing and lots of sequinned flesh. All brilliant and in such good fun.

If you’ve considered queuing in the sun for four hours, but didn’t know how it would turn out, you could ask us. Wimbledon makes crazies out of a lot of people and we are delighted to be part of that group. We dragged ourselves out of bed to meet Bec and Aaron on Saturday morning and began lining up at 8am. It was actually quite fun; it’s on a big oval, with people playing games and picnicking. A couple of people I know, Jason and Sarah M, camped the night before and were 135 and 700 in the queue respectively. Stewards come round to give you a queue card with a number (we were 6677 and 6678) and if you’re not there to get a queue card, no one can get it for you and you’re on your own (I seem to remember this creating a problem for aunty Pat and uncle Ken.) Painfully the ticket booths didn’t even look at our queue cards; they just took our general ground fee of twenty quid and we were in!

These tickets gave us access to either standing or unreserved seating at courts two to nineteen. It’s a beautiful venue, so green and bright and I’d seen it so many times it felt familiar. We parked ourselves on Henman Hill with Pimms and strawberries and cream (simply too complicated to make at home) and enjoyed the sweltering heat and the big screen. The atmosphere is relaxed and fun, with drunken Scotsmen in eighties wigs providing entertainment in the form of huge Mexican waves. In the afternoon, for charity, people from centre court and court one can hand in their tickets to be re-sold. We were very fortunate to pick up two great seats on court one and saw James Murray (Andy’s brother) play men’s doubles and Molik versus Stubbs in mixed doubles. A strange thing (bit too quaint for my liking) about Wimbledon is that the male players are referred to by their first and last names only, but all women players are referred to as Miss this and Miss that. Overall, Wimbledon was one of the best days of the year and worth every second of the four hour queue.

Cannot wait to see the Elverys in only eleven days now! We’ll meet them and Hannah in Norway on the 11th. Best wishes to you all. Hope you’re all well. Stay in touch!

Laura and Simon.