Ewan's Corner

Posts Tagged ‘blog’

(from John D Cook’s blog The Endeavour)

C. S. Lewis wrote that

Faith is holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.

When someone says “I can’t believe it’s Tuesday” he really means that he does believe it’s Tuesday, but it takes effort. His emotions are telling him that it is some other day, but he chooses to accept that it is Tuesday for other reasons.

It takes faith for me to believe that men walked on the moon in 1969. I’m convinced that it happened, but it doesn’t seem true to me. It doesn’t seem plausible that 1960’s technology could have accomplished this, even though I know that it did.

It takes faith for me to believe that Ernest Shackleton and his crew survived their exploration of the Antarctic. I don’t doubt the historical accounts, though they are hard to believe.

It takes faith for me to believe some mathematical theorems even though I have carefully gone through every line of their proofs. I am convinced that these theorems are true though they do not seem true. Other mathematicians have commented on the same experience. For example, Jerry Bona once joked that

The Axiom of Choice is obviously true; the Well Ordering Principle is obviously false; and who can tell about Zorn’s Lemma?

The three statements he mentions are logically equivalent, though the Axiom of Choice is the easiest to believe and the Well Ordering Principle is the hardest to believe.

It takes faith for me to believe in God. At times it doesn’t feel like God exists, though there are reasons to believe that He does. I have found these reasons convincing, and I hold on to my conclusions in spite of my changing moods.

I’ve moved from MovableType to WordPress, and so far the experience has (with one notable exception) been great. I feel dirty without Perl running the show (reliance on all this PHP code seems so… messy :-)

I’ve been a happy MovableType user since January 2005 (Blogger/Pyra before that, and hand-rolled HTML before then) but methinks it’s time for a change.

Favourite WP features:

1. Great admin console (especially when Google Gears integration is enabled – even better in Chrome – for blazing speed). Last time I looked at WP the admin console was terrible, but huge improvements have obviously been made and it is now generally faster/easier to navigate than MovableType’s equivalent.
2. Plugins galore. This highlights the power of a large and active community for the platform – you can quickly and easily find a plugin for almost every need (and installation is trivial, no need for FTP etc). The fact that MovableType still doesn’t include (or have a _free_ plugin) to allow commenters to subscribe to replies via email blows my mind.
3. Complete integration with Windows Live Writer, my favourite post writing tool for Windows (on a Linux box the admin console is perfectly acceptable). Live Writer could be used for MovableType, but support wasn’t complete (you couldn’t edit tags, upload images without configuring FTP, and a few other niggles)
4. WordPress for BlackBerry. Happiness.
5. Tons of themes. I’m don’t care too much about visuals, but they are important – and MT themes (at least free ones) are scarce.

My gripes:

1. The release of WordPress 2.9 (my first impression) seems to have been rushed for Christmas, and includes 3 potentially nasty bugs (main one for me was curl transport being broken which breaks WP cron, future posting, pings, plugins like LifeStream etc). Easily fixed (again, thumbs up to an active and proactive community), but caused me some frustration tracking down why my LifeStream wouldn’t update automatically for example.
2. Consistency is a pain at times – plugin writers can add menus in a variety of places, plugin quality varies, and even the admin console has some usability issues in places. I suppose I’ve been spoilt by MT’s attention to detail and consistency.
3. I don’t like condescending installers :-)

WordPress was also slightly easier to install locally for experimentation via XAMPP.

I’ll wait for the (twice postponed) release of MovableType 5 on Jan 5th and compare them then.

The Mail & Guardian online article SA Blogging bonanza talks about the relatively recent rapid growth of the South African blogosphere – more traditional media is taking notice :-)

Farrel Lifson, who started Politics.za (www.politics.za.net) in July 2003 to keep up to date with local politics, says that in the early days local blogs were few and far between. “I remember searching for South African blogs back in 2003, when I started mine, and having to sift through Google’s results trying to find one. I think at the time I managed to find two,” says Lifson.

I wonder if one of those was mine – I was using Blogger at the time (then run by Pyra before Google bought them out). My first post is dated September 2nd 2003, so it looks like I may have missed out being the first (at least still active) by a few months. This blog was never intended to be a business or attract readers, it is mainly an experimental way of record keeping and playing with new technology / software… looking back it seems my blogging premise was pretty accurate. Life was simpler then, but my reason for a fascination with online journals blogs is still the same.

When you read this journal–when you read any journal–keep in mind that there are a lot of people with something to offer you. I’ve come to believe that you can learn something from pretty much anyone who crosses your path.

Inspired by Kyknoord’s “You were looking for” post, I present a list of popular or just interesting search phrases / keywords people use before stumbling on this blog. Almost 80% from Google (more than half of those Google Images), 15% via Yahoo and the rest spread across miscellaneous engines (sorry Microsoft, only 1% via MSN).

My blog may have been around longer, but it’s far geekier and not nearly as interesting as the other side of the mountain – Kyknoord’s list is far more entertaining, as is he :)

• derivco (my provider of gainful employment, popular because the word is so unique)
• lesbian thumbs (*I* know why this hit my blog, but what were *they* looking for?)
• broken fingers (this is one of the most popular phases since the post, no idea why – the image is cool though)
• wikipedia astrology (I’m insulted, I would have hoped this would be astronomy instead)
• rabbits (lots of hits, comments and emails generated from this simple search keyword – rabbits are apparently more popular than I thought).
• unfortunate domain names (it’s funny, and linked from a few jokes sites)
• durban storm pictures (most recent term, huge spike in hits since the recent events – this kind of search has made a few local Durban bloggers famous)
• fallacy wikipedia (um…)
• proof that online poker is rigged (“online poker” makes this popular, and there are plenty of nutters who think any kind of online gambling is rigged, despite evidence to the contrary)
• aliens on pluto (I hope there are, maybe this was a vanity search :)
• gmail smiles (makes me smile, for sure)
• seti candidate signal (from Pluto perhaps… meantime I’ll carry on with seti@home)
• automatic cs paper generator (rats, i’ve been caught out! Lazy students?)
• interviewing at microsoft (never done that, never will unless all else fails :-)
• what spacecraft was the first human-made object to travel to an outer planet and take photos (via ask.com obviously)
• thank god for kids (except when you want to kill them)
• radioactive snails (someone worrying about snails that glow in the dark?)
• type of rocks (try be more specific… or do you come from Pretoria?)
• uranus is next (yikes, i’m afraid)
• goo theory
• www.nurse immunisation photo.com (how this lead here I have no idea)
• cement shoes (script writers looking for ideas for the Sopranos finale?)
• nothing to do with snowmobiles (global warming? dead skiers?)
• pronutro (proudly south african. How can there be no Wikipedia Pronutro entry? The best Wikipedia can do is List of breakfast cereals)
• i am lost (you truly are if you ended up here!)
• pooh biscuits (too scared to try this phrase myself)
• i gave my mom flowers blog (how sweet)
• killer washing machines (the stuff of nightmares. and crappy movies.)
• the empire of ice cream (a brilliant short story)
• choosing a new pope (I know Catholics are nuts, but turning to the web for advice?)

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