Blog › December 2006 Archives

Our car game now has a car...
Thanks to Jason's work, we now have a vehicle in Torq2. It may turn out to just be a placeholder until we can find something better, but whichever way you look at it it's nicer than the cube I was using previously...

30 December, 2006 at 21:45 0 Comments
Vista - Failed to install ISKernel files
I've hit my first real snag with Vista - while trying to install Macromedia Contribute 3, I got this error: "1: Failed to install ISkernel files. Make sure you have appropriate privileges on this machine."



Apparently you can get that if you try to run a .msi directly, which I was. If you use a setup.exe bootstrapper, there's no problems, but I didn't have one.

The simple answer, I discovered, is to build yourself one. All you need to do is create an app, I did mine in VB (because I accidentally clicked that project type instead of C#, I hasten to point out) but you could use anything, that simply starts the .msi process. Then build your app, and right-click on your exe in Explorer and choose "Run this program as an administrator" on the Compatibility tab. Hey presto!
29 December, 2006 at 01:29 0 Comments
Things I wonder about
Some things I'm thinking about today:
  • What would it be like to "hear" colour instead of see it? I read something recently that suggested that bats may be able to recognise specific textures on objects, through their super-sensitive hearing; so this could be thought of as "hearing colour". Thinking about this reminds me of when I tried to get my head around non-base-10 number systems at school.
  • Nobody who has ever watched The Shawshank Redemption has gone on to become a suicide bomber. Prove me wrong!
  • Why is it that so often arguments end up being two-sided? Why is it so common that there are only two sides to an argument? I would have thought it's far more likely, for anything complex, that there would be more than two points of view. I suspect this is something to do with the attention span of the average TV viewer. Take a few examples: evolution / creation, Republican / Democrat, PC / Mac. The English political system is an example of where the public have managed to cope with three major political parties: Labour, Tory and LibDem. But even there, politician's views (and, correspondingly, the views of the people they represent) are probably more of a continuous, not discrete spectrum. My point is this: given any argument, why can't we as individual people have our own individual opinions, without feeling the need to give ourselves a label, such as "I'm an atheist". Labels aren't that interesting - complex individual opinion, on the other hand, is.
27 December, 2006 at 15:57 1 Comment
Vista: Clear, Connected, Clumsy
I've bitten the bullet and installed Windows Vista. I wasn't expecting much, after the fiasco of its lengthy development cycle, but I've been pleasantly surprised, amongst the irritations.

It feels much more responsive than XP; although User Account Control goes some way to offsetting this with its constant requests for permission. I'm hoping UAC will be less necessary once I've got everything setup.

The startup time of Vista is quicker on my machine than XP; applications start faster, and redraw quicker. The 3D-hardware-accelerated compositing engine appears to be working well. I'm not yet convinced about the Sidebar but I suppose it just needs its killer app.

I like that the self-obsessed plethora of "My ..." has been removed, and rationalised into a much nicer directory structure of "Pictures", "Music", "Documents", etc. However, I've unsuccessfully tried to access the "SendTo" folder under my user profile, because I like to add a shortcut to Notepad in there; this kind of thing reminds me that Vista is, in fact, a genuinely new version of Windows.

I've also installed Office 2007 and as you'd expect this works smoothly with Vista. For some odd reason it doesn't use the Vista theme though! Then again, Microsoft rarely follow their own UI guidelines.

I find Vista slightly clumsy and unpolished, which I would say is unusual for a Microsoft product. I can't put my finger on any one feature that I don't like, but as a whole it seems like it may have been rushed out a little too soon. Maybe it's just the little things like icon heights and padding in Windows Explorer.

Or maybe I'm just a dork.

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27 December, 2006 at 10:11 0 Comments
12 Days of Christmas
Lest I be accused of not sharing some Christmas cheer, I thought I'd make up for my previous grumpy posts by singing "The 12 Days of Christmas" to all you lovely folks. Because I try not to stick with tradition, I'm going to sing it in the key of C#:
List<string> pGiftsReceived = new List<string>();
for (int nDay = 1; nDay <= 12; nDay++)
{
  Console.WriteLine("On the " + ToOrdinal(nDay) + " day of Christmas,");
  Console.WriteLine("my true love sent to me");

  switch (nDay)
  {
    case 1 : pGiftsReceived.Add("And a partridge in a pair tree."); break;
    case 2 : pGiftsReceived.Add("Two turtle doves,"); break;
    case 3 : pGiftsReceived.Add("Three French hens,"); break;
    case 4 : pGiftsReceived.Add("Four calling birds,"); break;
    case 5 : pGiftsReceived.Add("Five golden rings,"); break;
    case 6 : pGiftsReceived.Add("Six geese a-laying,"); break;
    case 7 : pGiftsReceived.Add("Seven swans a-swimming,"); break;
    case 8 : pGiftsReceived.Add("Eight maids a-milking,"); break;
    case 9 : pGiftsReceived.Add("Nine ladies dancing,"); break;
    case 10 : pGiftsReceived.Add("Ten lords a-leaping,"); break;
    case 11 : pGiftsReceived.Add("Eleven pipers piping,"); break;
    case 12 : pGiftsReceived.Add("Twelve drummers drumming,"); break;
  }

  for (int j = pGiftsReceived.Count - 1; j >= 0; j--)
  {
    string sGift = pGiftsReceived[j];
    if (nDay == 1 && j == 0) sGift = sGift.Substring(4);
    Console.WriteLine(sGift);
  }

  Console.WriteLine();
}

[Although I'm slightly embarassed to admit it (and I run a serious risk of receiving accusations of being a "dork" from certain quarters") I have actually compiled and run this code.]

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22 December, 2006 at 00:15 2 Comments
Why I Am Not A Christian
I'm finally getting round to reading the text of a lecture by Bertrand Russell, titled "Why I Am Not A Christian." I was sent the link a while ago by a friend, but I guess now that it's Christmas, and the shops are filled with brussel sprouts and the sound of Cliff Richards' voice (look here for a song that's not by Cliff Richards), I feel compelled to find some sanity.

To summarise very briefly, here are his main points. First, he covers some arguments often used for the existence of God:
  • The First-cause Argument. Everything we see in this world has a cause, and if you go back in the chain of causes, eventually you must come to a First Cause, and we call that First Cause "God". Russell points out that this is circular; the question "Who made me?" cannot be answered , since it immediately suggests the next question "Who made God?" If everything has a cause, then God must have a cause. So this argument doesn't really help.
  • The Natural-law Argument. I don't think this argument is used very much anymore, but it used to be held that because there is a natural order to everything in the universe, it must have been God that made it that way. In other words God, the Lawgiver, laid down natural laws for His universe. This is a confusion of the difference between human and natural laws. Human laws are created to control the behaviour of humans; natural laws simply describe the behaviour how things work. Most of those so-called natural laws have since been shown to be chance.
  • The Argument from Design. Russell was speaking in 1927, and so didn't have all the latest arguments that we have today, but his gist is that the world merely *looks* designed because that is the natural result of Darwinian evolution. He also remarks that, if this world really is the best that an omnipotent, omniscient Creator can come up with, then it's astonishing.
  • The Moral Arguments for Deity. Immanuel Kant's moral argument for the existence of God, at least in one of its forms, is this: There would be no right or wrong unless God existed. Russell says he is not concerned with whether there is a difference between right and wrong, but rather, if you are quite sure that there is a difference, is that due to God's decree? If it is, then for God Himself there is no difference, and it doesn't mean anything to say that God is good. In order to say that, you would need an independent means of deciding goodness, outside of God, which again takes you on a circular path. I would add that it's doubtful whether morality came from religion at all, given the often violent history of religion, and the fact that all across the world there is a general consensus on morality that spans religions, and many other reasons too.
  • The Argument for the Remedying of Injustice. Since there is great injustice in the world, and the good suffer and wicked prosper, if you are going to have justice in the universe as a whole you have to suppose a future life to redress the balance of life here on earth (so the argument goes). Therefore there must be a God, and a Heaven and Hell. But if you take this world as a statistical sample, and that's pretty much all we humans can do, then you'd have to suppose that the universe as a whole is unjust.
So far, these arguments have been intellectual, and of course most people are not moved by intellect. Some believe because they have been taught from infancy to do so, and some believe because they need to feel that they have a sort of big brother looking out for them.

Then Russell discusses the character of Christ. Christ said
"Resist not evil, but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also."
Lao-tse and Budda said the same thing some 500 or 600 years before Christ. In Russell's opinion, Christians today do not actually follow this, for the most part. My own opinion, as the son of believing parents, is that some Christians really do follow this, although certainly not all. Either way, Christ was certainly not alone in these kind of moral exhortations.

Another of Christ's sayings does not appear to be popular in the law courts of any country:
"Judge not lest ye be judged."
Russell says he is not so concerned with the historical question - Christ may or may not have existed; if He did we don't know anything about Him. So, taking the Gospel narrative on its own merit, there are some things that do not seem very wise. For example, Jesus clearly believed that His second coming would occur within the lifetimes of those living at that time:
"Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel till the Son of Man be come."

"There are some standing here which shall not taste death till the Son of Man comes into His kingdom."
These do not seem superlatively wise things to say, given that as near as we can tell, we're still here.

Then Russell covers the vindictive nature of Christ's response to those who did not like to His preaching:
"Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of Hell."
It's perhaps not the best tone, and some of Christ's other remarks ("Whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost it shall not be forgiven him neither in this World nor in the world to come") have caused untold misery to people who believed they commited that sin and would never be forgiven.

Jesus repeats again and again that hell-fire is a punishment for sin: this sounds like a doctrine of cruelty. In fact, some of the actual quotations have been taken and (mis-)used to cause literal cruel torture.

Now we come to the emotional argument: people would not be virtuous without religion; we would all be wicked if we did not hold to the Christian faith. As Russell points out, the people who have held to it have been for the most part extremely wicked. In the so-called ages of faith, when men really did believe 100% of the Christian faith, there was the Inquisition; millions of women were burned as witches; every kind of cruelty was practiced upon all sorts of people in the name of religion.

Here Russell makes a strong statement and I'd like to reproduce it here verbatim:
"Every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the coloured races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organised churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organised in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world."
I have little choice but to offer a hearty "Amen brother!" Since Russell's time the churches of the world have perhaps mellowed, and do not offer the obstruction to progress that they once did. But between their arguments about whether women should be "allowed" (how patronising!) to be priests, or whether gay men can get above a certain rank in the clergy, it doesn't seem to me that they have helped much, either.

I'll finish with a wonderful quote from, of course, Bertrand Russell:
"A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time toward a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create."

You can read the lecture text yourself here.

Sorry for the lengthy post!
21 December, 2006 at 22:31 0 Comments
Zooomr
This is a slightly pointless post, but apparently it's going to allow me to sign up for a free Zooomr Pro account.

DSC_3039
21 December, 2006 at 13:22 0 Comments
Packing
This is a little like those painful moments when a relative gets back from a long holiday, and you know you're in for a spell of sitting on the sofa listening to them droning on and on while showing you their endless rolls of film, or more unfortunately these days, endless memory cards of photos.

Well, welcome to Tim's equivalent: snippets of holiday video carefully timed such that you think I've forgotten about it, but then here comes another one!

16 December, 2006 at 00:39 0 Comments
XMLSpy irritations
For a project at work, I need to automate Altova XMLSpy using its API. I want to "flatten" an XSD, which includes other XSDs, into a single XSD that includes all the element definitions inline, without any duplications.

It looked like a simple job - Altova have documented their API pretty well, and it's quite clean and easy to use. However, I spent 3 hours yesterday wondering why, when I added or removed nodes, nothing happened.

It turns out - as helpfully documented in a rather hidden place - that you must switch to the Grid view before you can use XMLData objects to programmatically alter the document tree. So when you open a document, you must do this (assuming you're writing in C#):
Document lMyNewXsd = lApp.Documents.NewFile("test.xsd", "xsd");
lMyNewXsd.SwitchViewMode(SPYViewModes.spyViewGrid);
Grr - I do wish gotcha's like this were documented more clearly!
13 December, 2006 at 12:47 0 Comments