Specifically,  I’ve most recently been involved in building service provisioning systems for a wide range of Internet-related services and automation platforms. Specialties:

I’m writing a customised command-line task manager in Python using the Cmd module. I’ve decided, for practice, to use nice test-driven development so I’ve kicked it off with a very simple Cmd-derived class and a corresponding test class. I’ve added a few very simple methods kicked off by the cmdloop() method but of course in my test class I’d like to create an instance of my cmd-derived class , invoke the cmdloop() and send it some input.

How do I send my object some input from my test method?

After reviewing the eBook landscape I plumped for the Sony. The Kindle was still pricey and didn’t have a separate UK store; The Nook hadn’t been released; Sony used ePub, an open XML-based standard. The touch screen Sony PRS-700 had just been released but was getting somewhat mixed reviews, with some users pointing out that pushing greasy fingers over a surface you’re supposed to read was bound to cause a few problems, so I opted for the Sony PRS505 which had had very good reviews when it first came out.

Since then I’ve been disappointed with it for the following reasons:

• Speed
• Display
• Lack of integration with store

Taking them in turns:

Speed

The page turn isn’t fantastically quick but it’s quick enough not to be a problem. However. My PRS-505 can be unbelievably slow to display the index of books when it first starts up after being switched off and it can also be very, very slow when loading a book. It didn’t take quite as long as the time needed to make a coffee but it was getting on for that. If you change the font size of the display then the book would be repaginated and I would experience that very long wait again.

Display

The e-ink display was supposed to be about the best around when I bought the device but it is still disappointingly grey. I don’t suppose this irritation is confined to Sony eReaders

Lack of integration with store

I buy my books from Amazon. But Amazon was competing with Sony and had the Kindle so I couldn’t buy books from Amazon to read on the PRS-505. I didn’t want to open another book-buying account with another seller; and then, Google announced the availability of thousands of freely downloadable ePub books which Sony made accessible but only through their US store, at least to begin with. That was frustrating. I reinstalled the Sony software and claimed to live in the US just to be able to access the free classics Google was making available.

And now the new Kindle is out. It’s significantly reduced in price. It has WhisperSync, which allows you to pick up reading where you left off on different devices; it has free 3G and WiFi to allow you to contact the Amazon store wherever you happen to be, whenever you want to buy a book. It’s Amazon – and that’s where I buy my books. It’s a smaller device, it looks smarter, it has better battery life, the display is better…and Amazon will allow non-DRMd eBooks to be sold in their store if that’s what the publisher wishesl Sony won’t. And it uses Amazon as a permanent store for all your books.

So it’s the new Kindle for me. I might be just as disappointed by Christmas with the Kindle as I was with the Sony; but I think this iteration of the device might be the the one that tips me over into buying the bulk of my books as eBooks in future. I hope so.

Gource is a version control visualisation tool that supports Git, Mercurial and Bazaar – but you can use it with Subversion with a bit of additional messing about. Here’s a visualisation of activity on the Ruby on Rails repository.

Must get this working with our SVN repositories at work…how can I pass that off as a worthwhile activity…?

Now, when it’s possible to accurately identify where Charles was, I’ll be adding latitude and longitude information so that you can follow his progress on a map.
to

If you click on the ‘from here’ with the little icon, you’ll see a map showing you where Darwin was at the time of the Tweet.

Happy following.

This particular Romantic Shirt painting by Friedrich is used on the front cover of my battered old copy of ‘Ecce Homo‘, Nietzsche’s collection of engagingly barmy essays published shortly before his permanent breakdown and the final 10 or 11 years of silence from him, which I bought and tried to read long ago in a bout of moody teenage autodidacticism. I understood … not very much of Nietzsche’s excited ranting but I was quite taken with his little aphorisms and strange snippets of advice. I very much concur with his recommendation about walking in the open air, in the mountains:

Remain seated as little as possible … put no trust in any thought that is not born in the open to the accompaniment of free bodily movement..all truly great thoughts are conceived by walking

A while ago, for example, walking on the fells (the hills) of the Cumbrian Lake District, Helen and I got into a conversation about the Mind and Brain, during which she produced the best knock-down case against epiphenomenalism I’ve ever heard.

Every year, Helen teaches a new intake of more-or-less interested pupils a little about the philosophy of consciousness and the Mind, taking them on a quick tour of dualism, monism, eliminative materialism, qualia and the other members of the exotic bestiary. Although the course module, Freewill and Determinism, contributes relatively little to the final grade, the cleverer students, who will almost never have come across the debates and ideas before, find it fascinating.

One of the supposed explanations of Mind, mental states, and mental events is Epiphenomenalism, the position that mental events are not causal. Although this is a rather improbable claim on the face of it, it has attracted some support because it tries to get around the problem of dualism by denying mental events the capacity to effect behaviour. The commonest brief analogy to help people think about the idea is to liken mental events’ relationship with behavior to the froth on waves. The notion has received a little fillip in recent years following the experiments by Libet which have been taken by some to imply that unconscious neuronal activity precedes apparently volitional acts that experimental subjects believed had been consciously inititiated.

Helen’s objection points out, quite simply, that we are the products of evolution and although there might well exist several, or many, human characteristics that are spandrels, in the accidental, circumstantial, contingent sense that Stephen Jay Gould argued for, and against which Dan Dennet took issue, it would be nonsensical to suggest that consciousness could be such a non-adaptation, needing no explanation. Yet if consciousness – Mind – the sense of volition – is purely epiphenomenal then it could never have been selected for through Natural Selection because its existence or otherwise would have no phenotypic effect which could be operated upon by the forces of evolution.

It seems a very clear and irrefutable argument.