Dear Mark Prisk
I sent this last night to my MP as a followup to his reply to my original letter.
Dear Mark Prisk,
Recently I wrote to you regarding the "homoeopathic hospitals" EDM, and your response included the following paragraph:
"All therapies should be considered equally, and decisions on whether or not to provide them on the NHS should be evidence-based, as is the case with all other conventional medicines and treatments."
I wholeheartedly agree that all therapies provided by the NHS should be judged on openly peer-reviewed evidence of their effectiveness, because otherwise we'd still be using leeches, performing exorcisms or practising blood letting. However, as far as I am aware there is no scientific evidence that homoeopathy is any better than placebo, so could you tell me where you saw the evidence for homoeopathy that you are using to justify homoeopathic hospitals because I'd like to see it myself. Indeed, evidence that it was in fact better than placebo would be welcomed with open arms by the scientific community, because this would open entirely new realms of both medicine and physics.
Yours sincerely,
Ross Burton
Another XICC Update
Another quick XICC update: Jon has just committed XICC support to Inkscape. Thanks Jon!
In other news there are patches floating around to clarify multihead usage, because my wording was pretty terrible. I'll merge these this week, honest.
My MP Is A Fool
My MP finally replied to my letter where I questioned his signing of the Early Day Motion regarding homoeopathic hospitals. Whilst defending homoeopathy he said that doctors should be allowed to prescribe homoeopatic treatments, which I expect many homoeopaths wouldn't like as the homoeopath/patient interaction is pretty much where the cure is. Whilst I was still laughing at that, I came across this.
All therapies should be considered equally, and decisions on whether or not to provide them on the NHS should be evidence-based, as is the case with all other conventional medicines and treatments.
I'm about to write to him, asking for this evidence. I haven't seen any, and I'm sure the medical profession would like to see it too.
NP: Burning Off Impurities, Grails
Ewan and Charley Hoaxed
Last night in the excellent Long Way Down, Ewan and Charley crossed the equator and were shown how water spins in different directions as it pours out of a bowl either side of the equator. Remember everyone, this is an urban legend, and the demonstration was faked.
NP: Oneiric, Boxcutter
Devil's Pie "Sweet Music, Soul Music?" 0.22
Devil's Pie (someones favourite window manipulation tool) 0.22 is out. Just one bug fix, which shows that my users all use OpenBox.
- Fix decorate/undecorate with OpenBox (thanks Rafał Mużyło)
- Fix typos in man page (Loïc Minier)
Downloads are in the usual place.
Eye of Gnome Bling
Last night I finally got around to having a play with Clutter. Considering I'd never used it before, I'm really impressed with just how easy the API is to use. Within half an hour I had images fading in and out, and this morning I built Eye of Gnome and rewrote my hack as a slideshow plugin. There is no point releasing the code just (patches required, and a nasty bug remaining), but I did make a screencast.
NP: Maxinquaye, Tricky
Flickr
Some interesting Flickr news today, first some old news I only just heard: the two billionth photo was uploaded this month. Impressively, whilst it took three and a half years for the first billion pictures to be uploaded, the second billion took only three months. (source).
Second, the Flickr team have just added some new features, specifically a world map with popular tags overlaid and a new Places interface, providing a summary of a particular location. The new map has temporarily lost the ability to zoom in straight away (press Search then Go to get the zoom bar), but the Places interface is amazing fun.
NP: People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, A Tribe Called Quest
Shell Magic
This is a nice little bit of shell magic I discovered today:
trap true TERM kill -- -$$
The first line means that when the shell receives a TERM signal, it executes true. The normal behaviour would be to kill the process, so this means that the shell is immune to people sending a TERM signal to it. The second line sends a TERM signal to the process group (- is the modifier to indicate a the process group of the PID, not just the PID) of the current process ($$).
The end result? Everything spawned by this script which hasn't gone and re-parented itself is killed: the ultimate in cleanup.
NP: Dedications, Klimek
XICC in UFRaw
I just got an email from Udi Fuchs of UFRaw fame. The latest version of UFRaw, 0.13, supports the XICC specification so it can adjust the image for correct display on your monitor. Great, thanks Udi!
NP: Milieu, Tape
The End Of Homeopathy?
Dr Ben Goldacre hits the jackpot, moving from a column on Saturday's Guardian to a cover story in Friday's Guardian. It's a very balanced and reasoned argument against homoeopathy for people who don't understand what a fair trial is, how placebo works, or just how stupid homoeopaths sound when they try and explain it. It's down to permeated nano-particles, apparently.
I recommend reading the article to anyone who thinks that homoeopathy is better than placebo or agrees that homoeopathy has a place in treating AIDS and malaria. Or people like me, who like watching homoeopathy get slapped down. For the medical geeks out there, there is the companion article in the Lancet too.
Calibrated At Last
Today I finally got a Spyder2 Express monitor calibration kit, and calibrated my ThinkPad's laptop. I've known it to be shockingly badly calibrated (although it is an improvement over the X20), but was curious as to how much it can be corrected.
One word: wow. Thanks to Graeme Gill et al of ArgyllCMS fame for reverse-engineering how the Spyder2 works, and making calibrating displays reasonably easy to do. I'll probably write up what I did at some point, because if you are like me and don't read the documentation there are a number of stumbling points.
I also blame Jakub entirely for making me think ArgyllCMS was broken by picking slightly warm grey tones for Darkilouche. My freshly calibrated screen looked a little warm instead of the usual very cool, and it took me a good ten minutes to think about checking that the theme is actually pure grey.
NP: Blue Skied An' Clear - A Morr Music Compilation
Poky on Android
God, Richard is such a hero. The day after Android is released, he has Poky building and booting on their emulator. There are a number of caveats, such as starting DBus causes their emulator to crash, but it is the first step towards being able to boot Poky on any future Android phones.
Full-size images and more available on Richard's blog. Note that the non-existent theming is due to the XSettings not being set, because DBus won't start.
NP: Tiger, My Friend, Psapp
Gypsy Packages
So now that Iain has finally released his baby to the world, I should release my Debian packages too. Now, they work for me, but there is a huge disclaimer around them. gypsy-daemon runs as root. I plan on fixing this shortly and it should be fairly simple, but I wanted to get these packages out there for early testers quickly. Brave Debian Sid and Ubuntu Feisty users can grab them from my repository. Gutsy users who moan about me not building packages and can't rebuild them on their own are not hardcore enough for this, so don't bother asking.
NP: Untrue, Burial
Best Epiphany Extension Ever
Confirm Window Close. Potentially the best Epiphany extension ever (well, second best after my Post To Delicious extension)
NP: Trouser Jazz, Mr Scruff
Daily Mail Smack Down
There are many reasons to love the blog Five Chinese Crackers, and printing the letter sent to The Daily Mail from the author of an immigration report which was drastically misrepresented certainly is one of them:
Unfortunately, your piece is a mixture of ignorance, misinterpretation and speculation. I couldn't care less about your intellectual capacity to absorb the data, but you have included my name in an article that conveys a false impression of what the study was about.
In other news, today I discovered that the epitome of British retailing, Marks and Spencer, was co-founded by a foreigner! Michael Marks was born in Belarus, and came to England to avoid the persecution of Jews. The warehouse in Leeds where they started up has a blue plaque commemorating the event. What would the Express or Mail say to this?
Perils Of Commerical Software
daniels: lightroom makes me so unbelievably content daniels: if i were a doe-eyed schoolgirl daniels: and you were showing me this in the back of your car daniels: i'd let you take me, there and then
I knew showing Daniel Adobe Lightroom was a bad idea... It is a truly majestic application though, with that killer combination of a very clean interface and incredibly well thought-out features.
I Worry
I phoned Camelot and they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher — not lower — than -8 but I'm not having it.
As much as I admire your determination Tina, I really do think that you should give in on this (from Manchester Evening News via Good Math, Bad Math).
NP: Groove Salad, Soma.fm
Today's Hot Hack
Today I got fed up of writing yet another GQueue and idle function to perform tasks incrementally in the background, with all of the bookkeeping that needs to be done. So, I wrote taku_idle_queue_add.
Using it is simple, create a GQueue and then call taku_idle_queue_add, passing the queue and a callback function. When the queue has items in it, the callback gets called. Easy! Just remember not to return FALSE from the callback unless you are sure the queue will never be used again.
I'd appreciate anyone who knows GSource programming in detail to review the code. Maybe I should even try and get this into Glib?
NP: Cliqhop IDM, Soma.fm
GUADEC 2008?
I don't suppose anyone knows when GUADEC 2008 will be, or who I can ask? I'm planning a holiday in July, and obviously don't want to clash...
Shame
(wow, three blog posts — albeit short ones — in one day)
Some people appear to believe that having a letter in the Granuiad is sad and I should be shamed or something. Honestly, I thought the email was going to be in some online forum thingy, not actually printed, but can I help it if even my brief flippant replies are insightful? Anyway, you can't shame me with newspaper clippings, I've had a like-cures-like homeopathic treatment against that.
Satire Is Dead
I should be doing useful things like having a bath and getting dressed, instead of blogging in my pants, but this is just too funny.
Foreign workers have taken every new job in Britain for the past four years, astonishing figures show.
Is this from The Daily Mash? NewsBiscuit? No, it is the real genuine Express article. More evidence that the Express has been covertly taken over by satirists.
Really?
Continuing my series of one-word blog posts, really?
Vicky got a new job in September, and I'm pretty certain she isn't a migrant.
