Depending on where you are in the world, today is either the Winter Solstice (shortest day) or the Summer Solstice (longest day). Now a funny thing happens at this time every year, I usually start telling anyone who will listen that the celebration of Christmas on Dec 25th is a hijacking of much older pagan traditions. This is usually done to wind people up, to make a point when someone says something like “we should get back to the original meaning of Christmas”, or just for a bit of fun. I actually love Christmas and always get excited when we get within a few days of the day itself.

But anyway, this year I thought I’d simply blog about the pagan origins of Christmas and hit a wider audience

Dec 21st is an important time in the northern hemisphere; having experienced the harsh realities of winter, with the sun decreasing in strength and sunlight hours decreasing, Dec 21st marks the point where daylight hours start to increase again and the hope of spring and summer to come. With our ancient ancestors surviving on food stored for the winter months, it is welcome light at the end of the dark tunnel of winter.

The theory goes that leaders of these ancient peoples were clever enough to recognise a pattern and cyclic nature to the seasonal changes, and were able to work out ways of identifying when the shortest day occurred. Grand rituals performed at the time of the mid-winter solstice were carried out, to encourage the return or rebirth of the sun.

Lo and behold, a few days later the daylight hours were increasing noticeably, and the ritual was deemed to have been a success. With winter being such a harsh time for people to endure, this would have been cause for great celebration leading to feasting and festivities.

Scan the ancient cultures of the world and you will find many festivals around the time of the Winter Solstice, many of which follow a common death-rebirth theme. Some examples are listed on the Winter Solstice Wikipedia Page also some good solstice and festival information on ReligiousTolerance.org

It may be coincidence, but consider the phrases “birth of a sun” and “birth of a son”. Food for thought at least?

Now don’t get me wrong, I love Christmas, I love hearing Christmas carols, I even get a warm fuzzy feeling when I see a good quality nativity display. But if you’re looking for the “real meaning” of Christmas I would suggest considering ALL the traditions associated with mid-winter, and realise it is a celebration of hope at many different levels. Starting with hope of a return to warmer weather and plentiful food supplies!

Anyway, all that aside I hope you have a truly meaningful, enjoyable and memorable festive season. For me that includes spending time with family, getting in touch with family, going to a boxing day football match when I have had enough of family and one critical component I refuse to compromise on; watching the musical version of “A Christmas Carol” with Albert Finney on Christmas Eve!

Merry Christmas, Happy Saturnalia and Solstice Greetings to one and all!

p.s. you’ll notice that I didn’t even start on the whole issue of the southern hemisphere being in mid-summer, but maybe I’ll blog about that another time

Having spent the last few years running Ubuntu exclusively on my laptop, I had started to believe I would never go back to Windows. Then a couple of things happened; firstly I was evaluating Windows 7 on a laptop that would handle XP but not Vista. Once I’d switched off the eye candy, had things looking Windows 2003 Server-ish and installed Google Chrome for web browsing, things were running pretty well. I was reasonably impressed.

Then my wife pointed out that the lease period on my laptop was up, and suggested a trip to Harvey Normans to see what the options were in terms of upgrades etc. A couple of hours later, and quite unexpectedly, I was playing with my new toy; a Sony VAIO (my previous machine was a VAIO as well, I love them) VGN-FW55GF with 4GB RAM, ATI graphics and Windows 7 64 Bit (Home Premium).

With the extra resources, processing power, and improved graphics adapter I am allowing Windows 7 run in its full eye candy glory, and I have to admit Microsoft seem to have produced a good-looking system that performs well.

Obviously an Ubuntu 64 Bit Live CD will be in order at some point, just to make a comparison, but for the time being I’ve rejoined the Microsoft world. I never thought I would say this, but it seems MS have finally produced an operating system that beats Windows 2000 Professional.

Of course, I still need to remove all the trial software crap, install Chrome as the default browser (IE8 is crap no matter how you look at it)

So, Google have decided the world needs another programming language huh? They might have a point, if they had produced something radically different, but they didn’t.

Google’s “GO” is just another C-like language with object-oriented features, supposedly making software development really easy and helping you avoid all the nastiness. They claim all the simplicity of something like Python, while providing the “safety” of C and C++.

That last bit is hilarious – C is relatively safe in the hands of an experienced developer, C++ can tie you in knots before blowing your brains out.

They also claim part of the motivation is the lack of a new systems language in the past decade. Like I say, if this had been a different solution from everything else, they would have a point, but this is just another set of syntax and semantics performing the same old same old.

Delphi only just sits outside the 10 year timeframe, C# falls within it. Both very similar in style and structure and both very easy for programmers with C/C++ backgrounds to pick up. Furthermore, options exist for compiling Python to native code.

My guess is that this is a student or work experience placement project that they thought they would put out in the wild and it’s full of meh-ness to be perfectly honest. The world needs another programming language like this, like a hole in the head.

Still, it’s more headlines for good ol’ Google eh?

And so the highly predictable, depressingly familiar pattern of a “right of centre” conservative regime continues, with Barnett’s mob now intent on privatisation of public services as a “solution”. As reported in The West Online, Colin Barnett and the blue-rinse set have plans to privatise public sector services, in an attempt to rein in spiralling costs.

What a complete and utter load of tosh. On the face of it, privatisation is a very tempting prospect and indeed, it is impossible to argue against the value of adopting private sector principles when contrasted with certain public sector methods. The danger, however, is that services get auctioned off to the lowest bidder, wrapped up in fluffy nonsense about achieving the best balance of service and cost.

Anybody who thinks that decisions will be made on any factor other than cost, quite frankly has rocks in their head.

As I said, the idea of adopting private sector practices is a good one, I myself have argued for more of a private sector style approach in certain situations, but you can bet your life on the fact that this is just another instance of problem avoidance by a conservative administration. You see, when faced with issues of balancing community service delivery and costs of such service provision, your average right-of-centre mob will reach for the “cure all” of privatisation. They spout ideological bullshit about how it will make things more efficient, yet the only thing that REALLY matters to them is that it becomes “someone else’s problem”.

What will follow, if this madness is allowed to go through, is a rapid deterioration in quality of service, and an exodus of staff who are ALREADY pretty pissed off with their lot. This then forms a negative feedback loop until a “white knight” arrives in the shape of a Labour government, they put it all back into public hands, except the bits they really don’t want, followed by 4 years of neglect and underspending from them as well.

Listen up you idiot politicians, keep the public sector in the hands of the state, dump the “nanny state” attitudes, the “let’s go back to the 1950s” attitudes, and instead of simply passing problems around, stand up and actually do something about it.

I predict, however, that all concerned will remain clueless, gutless wonders…

Vivendi can go stick this up their arse as far as I am concerned…

http://expressurl.net/ws/338

Like it or lump it, the Internet is a playground where people are still relatively free. Piracy of content has always gone on – tape recorders were never banned, so why should file sharing?

I can tell you right now IF you put out content that is worth paying for, then people WILL pay for it. Personally I’m much happier being able to download a book, movie or audio for free, and if it’s a sack of crap I delete it and move on. If it’s something that’s of value to me, I go buy a copy.

Not everyone will do this, but that’s always been the case – deal with it, get over it, and allow the deliciously anarchic nature of the Net to continue to exist. If you control the net too tightly, someone will simply build a new one.

In an environment where Western Australia’s prisons are overcrowded, the police are overstretched, and with no sign of any easing of the pressure, what would be the most obvious thing to do?

Apparently, according to our “esteemed” State Premier Colin Barnett, what you should do in this situation is insist on 3% “efficiency savings” across government, and then proceed to tighten every piece of “easy target” legislation that you can ensuring even more pressure on the justice system.

Cannabis for example. Colin, mate, get real! People have been using the stuff for as long as humans have been around, and it will take more than an alarmist dickhead or two to change that. What is it about right-wing numpties (I’m not biased incidentally, I also believe there are plenty of left-wing numpties as well) that they home in on soft targets like this instead of trying to effect REAL change?

I’m not going to get into all the details of why this is a bad move, and why cannabis is not the evil monster it is portrayed to be, you can find all that easily enough with a Google search or two. What annoys me more than anything is the way idiots make these decisions, pat themselves on the back for being “tough on crime”, and all that really happens is they criminalise something that doesn’t matter, while doing sweet f**k all about the not-so-easy targets.

The latest thing apparently is some new legislation that will, allegedly, bring in tough new restrictions on supplying controlled weapons to minors. I imagine that selling a machete to a kid is pretty illegal already? So how the hell does making it even more illegal do anything? I’m not advocating that people should be allowed to sell machetes to kids, far from it, but think about it – what IS this tough new legislation apart from a bunch of populist headlines that will make stuff all difference, except perhaps to make people a bit more sneaky in how they conduct this business?

Still, in an age where you can win a Nobel Peace Prize for /talking/ about peace, maybe Mr “I reversed my plans to retire so I could have a go at playing premier” should indeed be lauded for such positive changes to the WA justice system.