Fine fine wine.

[reddragdiva]

• Email your MP to repeal the offence of blasphemy (courtesy valkyriekaren).

• LiveJournal may suck, but GreatestJournal just collapsed under its own crapness.

• Vista will fuck you over. Like, duh.

• Babydoll T-shirt transformation.

• Everyone needs a musical taser!

Stuck at home on call, ending 9am Friday. I am greatly enjoying playing with the Freda, noisy as she may be while her front teeth try to come through. We are utterly, utterly broke. Visitors welcomed, days or evenings.

I'm quite pleased with managing to patch simple table conversion into a MoinMoin wikitext to MediaWiki converter. This is not something you need to care about for a second ... until you're the poor bastard faced with the task.

I'm currently running Minefield, the nightly test versions of Firefox 3. Cute feature: the automatic software update gets you the latest version every two or three days. It's a bit rough, not all your extensions will work yet and some days' versions crash more than they run, but they've done lots of slick little things that make it really worth a try. Nice icon too.

Comments

[lovelybug.livejournal.com]

I love how Greatestjournal don't even bother to proof read their message!

[secretlondon.livejournal.com]

DRM is teh evil, I've never seen evidence to the contrary.

The i-tazer is a hoax (I hope..)

[aidan-skinner.livejournal.com]

Wow, I thought LJ was full of prissy, whiney little bitches who shouldn't be allowed near a computer..

[olethros.livejournal.com]

Reading the comments on that post makes me wonder just what the hell went on there. Any idea? It's hard to discern the story through the filter of angry recollection.

[secretlondon.livejournal.com]

It looks like a drama magnet..

[reddragdiva]

You could have twice the icons, photo space, etc., etc that LJ allowed you ... when the server was up.

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

Ah yes... GreatestJournal. I remember taking a look (http://hairyears.livejournal.com/131331.html) during the LJ 'Flag Day' drama:

...Consider this: other 'free' journal hosts who are taking 'refugees' from previous attempts to appease attacks on LiveJournal are actually far less free, because the smaller providers are living on a financial knife-edge

So I was wrong: instead of being smothered by litigation, or simply failing because they are too small to develop the network 'critical mass' necessary for a social site, they failed through being too small to have the technical resources to operate at all.

As for the quality of the comments, I will point out that GJ's most important user constituency consists of those who left LiveJournal because they don't play well with other children. "Hurrah for the differently-socialised", as people say on Wikipedia.

Don't laugh, they're all coming back here.

That piece of halibut was good enough for Jehovah

[emarkienna.livejournal.com]

I saw that about the Blasphemy law too - whilst we can at least name our teddy bears "Jehovah", it's still time for the law to go (though just as a small point, I was under the impression that MPs prefer letters in your own words rather than a copy-and-paste campaign...)

The National Secular Society published a letter with more information and arguments.

Stephen Green recently lost his battle to prosecute the BBC for blasphemy over Jerry Springer: the Opera - although it might have been better if he was allowed to proceed (the law might have been finally struck down by the courts - or if not, opposition to it would be strengthened).

[poggs.livejournal.com]

Debian has the best FirefoxIceweasel icon

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

What, me? Yes.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Gaah, now I have to find another one, Insanjournal or something. Don't make me go to Deadjournal!

[sbp.livejournal.com]

Is MediaWiki better than MoinMoin then? We're deciding between the two at the moment for some inhouse stuff.

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

The bastards deleted HairyEars@GreatestJournal without telling me: inactive or 'squatted' journals were purged a few weeks ago. Not that I actually need a bolt-hole if there's another LJ outage.

[reddragdiva]

The original in-house choice of MoinMoin was because it didn't require MySQL (it's all flat files) and it was only for ten people. This is still the case, but MediaWiki is just SO MUCH NICER for the users that the others clamoured to move our tiny wiki to MediaWiki.

Basically, MediaWiki looks and works just like Wikipedia, so users feel like it's a Wikipedia of their own. The syntax sucks, like all wiki syntaxes, but it's one they may have used. And MW looks slicker to the user out the box (the default Monobook skin). So MediaWiki has more chance of convincing suits (particularly the sort of suit who thinks he isn't one) to actually use the damn thing, thus giving the efficiencies office wikis do.

Re: That piece of halibut was good enough for Jehovah

[reddragdiva]

I think the arguments really start at "dude, wtf. Srsly, wtf."

Re: That piece of halibut was good enough for Jehovah

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

Indeed - and looking at Government documents from a few years ago, it was generally felt then that it would only take a test case like this to render the law completely obsolete and therefore ripe for abolition. I'm just pleased at the turnaround time.

More on this on the British Humanist Association site too:
http://www.humanism.org.uk/site/cms/newsarticleview.asp?article=2408

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

I would be more than happy to see the repeal of the blasphemy laws, but frankly they're very low down on the list of importance for me. This has bugger-all to do with my beliefs (except for my unswerving belief in the right to free speech) and everything to do with the fact that they're now functionally useless. They might even be regarded as having fallen into desuetude, because (as valkyriekaren mentions) no recent attempts to use them have met with any success.

Frankly, when we have *already* lost our rights to protest freely, publish freely, speak freely, write freely, avoid detention when found innocent or never charged, avoid extradition without there being a prima facie case to answer put forward and avoid torture in foreign countries, and these losses of freedom are being felt every day, I honestly feel we ought to put our efforts into fighting against restrictions which are causing real damage. But that would be a lot more work, and with a lot more risk, of the sticking-head-above-parapet variety.

More links to form letters about house arrest, extradition or prosecuting the government for being in breach of its own laws, ta!

[reddragdiva]

Stupider parts of the present government have already spoken of extending the blasphemy laws to help avoid offence against other religions (i.e., Islam), so I don't share your lack of concern.

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

Yes, but that's not currently the case. All the other things I've mentioned are reality already. They are part of the law HERE, NOW, TODAY.

"We are dying by the sword already".

[reddragdiva]

This hardly keeps people from fighting those. Parallelism, it's all good.

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

I agree, but really, that's quite a *lot* of parallelism to be getting on with already!

Mind you, I'd certainly agree that it'll probably be a piece of cake to get blasphemy laws repealed compared to, say, getting the Terrorism Act 2000 (esp s.44!) repealed. They're simply not of much direct benefit at the moment, so I can easily envisage them being repealed for good PR, while any benefit which could be derived from extended blasphemy laws could be found elsewhere instead.