People speak of Darwinism as removing the “meaning of life”. I contend this is wrong by presenting an alternate meaning of life which is entirely compatible with Darwinian thinking. I also put forward a somewhat satirical ‘proof’ for my thesis, for those who believe God exists.

The first argument to discuss, however, is why people are of the opinion that Darwinism takes away the possibility of a meaning of life in the first place. This view rests on the fact evolution by natural selection is a thoughtless, algorithmic process with no aims or desires, either for itself or its products such as humans. The reasoning supporting this view is essentially that, as we are produced by a thoughtless process, so our existence is just as meaningless.

This view seems to me predicated upon the belief that a meaning of life must be provided from outside the system; that it must be handed to us from on high. The most likely source for this particular intellectual stumbling block is religion, with its so-called the meaning of life being provided by a deity. The meaning of life being to live one’s life according to the deity’s prescription. In Christianity, for example, the meaning of life is to prepare for the next life.

It is often asked of Darwinists— and atheists for that matter —how they see any point to their lives if there is no external agent to provide one. It is true, we do not believe in an externally provided meaning or function for life. Just because none is ‘pre-programmed’, however, doesn’t mean we cannot generate one for ourselves which are as valid as any provided from outside. We need to remove the stumbling block to enable us to create our own meanings. Darwin has allowed us to do this.

Some people may decide the meaning of life is to be happy, to create works of art or to serve others. These meanings come from within themselves, but this makes them no less a meaning of life than any other. Each individual lives their own life and controls their own destiny, so for them to be able have their own meaning of life obviously follows.

This is a relativist stance, which I suppose is why so many have a problem with it: it supposes no absolute the meaning of life, but instead the view that everyone may have their own meaning for life; there are many meanings. I personally find this view much more fulfilling than some prescribed single meaning, which can account for no individual variants. There is no black and white, which some find unsettling.

I don’t believe in a universal meaning of life, but I have many things I regard as important to have a fulfilling life; these for the basis of my very own meaning of life and such things will form the basis of yours. Step away from the meaningless question of the meaning, and embrace a more fulfilling life by finding yours.

Interestingly, this view can be ‘proven’ in ways analogous to outmoded theist ‘proofs’ of God; given the axiom they presume: that God is perfect. I will leave you with this, which goes as follows:

1. Society today places high value on free will, freedom of action and speech and all the other freedoms we value highly;
2. Therefore, one can put forward the proposition that more advanced societies promote more freedom than less advanced, more dictatorial societies;
3. From this follows that freedom to chose one’s destiny and meaning of life is more advanced, and so perfect, than being straight-jacketed by some prescribed meaning;
4. As a deity is perfect, they must therefore allow this freedom rather than being a dictator of meaning.

Update: I’ve been told to make it more obvious the above ‘proof’ is a satire of the ontological argument for the existance of God. Job done.

A couple of weeks ago Rose and I did some gardening. Well, Rose gardened whilst I sat out in the sunshine and took a photo every now and then. We bought some plants from a garden centre, a couple of which are below.

One of my favourites was a chilli plant; it’s so curious looking and wonderfully colourful. Here it is, attempting to hide behind some lavender:

Speaking of the lavender, it is doing well outside the front door. It’s a nice restrained contrast to the chilli plant.

I took these with my new camera, a Canon Ixus 90IS. I think it did well, especially at capturing the colours in the sunlight. In fact, the main downside to the camera is the increase in mega-pixels: as my photos have gone from five to ten, they now take far longer to upload to flicker!

This makeover focuses on bringing both the look and behaviour of Google Chrome to Mozilla Firefox. Using a few extensions, a couple of about:config hacks and a theme, you can produce a remarkably similar experience to Chrome within Firefox. It’s not identical, but it brings over most of Chrome’s features I value. Here’s the final result:

Options

The only change to Firefox’s default options is to enable the “Always show tab bar” in the Tabs tab of the Options dialog.

Extensions

This modification relies heavily on several Firefox extensions. I’ve bookmarked them all in delicious to allow easy finding. It’s safe to install all the addons in one go. Most of the extensions add more features than Chrome; I’ve noted changes required to the default configurations to make their behaviour more Chrome-like.

Here’s a quick list of the extensions and what feature of Chrome the approximate.

• Locationbar^2 enables greying out of all but the domain;
• Stylish allows you to apply several little tweaks to the browser to complete the look;
• Download Statusbar puts your downloads in a bar at the base of your browser window, rather than in a separate window;
• New Tab Button on Tab Right adds a button to open a new tab just to the right of your existing tabs;
• Tiny Menu allows you to neatly hide away the Firefox menubar (not required for OS X);
• Stop or Reload Button is not strictly accurate, as Chrome puts stop in the address bar, but allows you to collapse the Stop and Reload buttons into a single button to imitate Chrome’s layout. Plus it’s just a cool extension;
• Show Go! shows the Go button in the address bar at all times;
• autoHideStatusbar hides the status bar when it’s not needed;
• Tabs Open Relative opens new tabs next to the currently active tab, rather than to the right of all tabs.

You need to go into the options for a couple of the extensions to change their defaults.

• Locationbar2 requires you to uncheck “Gray Subdomains”;
• Download Status Bar needs the statistics shown to be changed: remove Download Speed and add Progress Percent;
• Finally, you need to follow the instructions on the tiny menu homepage to fully minify the meny bar.

I don’t use Chrome’s Incognito Mode very much, but the Steather extension has been recommended as an equivalent; I haven’t tried it, however.

Chromifox Theme and User Styles

I’ve put the userstyles you require as bookmarks in delicious as well, along with a link to the Chromifox theme. Both the theme and userstyles were created by falconer, who has done an excellent job.

Install the Chromifox theme followed by several userstyles to enable a few of the more unusual Chrome features:

• http://userstyles.org/styles/10470 moves tabs to the top of Firefox’s window;
• http://userstyles.org/styles/10474 enlarges the location bar’s text;
• http://userstyles.org/styles/10560 alters Chromifox’s behavior to use system colours for dialogs (by default Chromifox makes everything blue).

There is a bug with the userstyle to move Firefox’s tabs to the top of the Window: on OS X and Linux, the New Tab button is cropped and so doesn’t display correctly.

And Finally, about:config Hacks

Finally, a couple of about:config hacks are required to tweak a couple of Firefox’s default behaviours. Enter about:config in the address bar and click “I’ll be careful, I promise!”, then edit the following values.

• browser.urlbar.autoFill = true
• keyword.URL = http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&q=

The first option changes Firefox’s behaviour when autocompleting in the location bar. The second changes the behaviour of Firefox when you type multiple words into the location bar. By default, Firefox will perform an I’m Feeling Lucky search when you do this. The hack changes it to a normal Google search. Note this only works when you use more than one word in the address bar.

Hope you like the result!

Google Chrome’s copyright notice implies the browser has been under development for two years. The long gestation period shows, as Chrome exhibits significant polish.

Chrome has a long list of sound technological choices beneath its polished exterior— I’ve yet to decide how many are truly new ideas —but the exterior is what has really caught my attention. The attention to detail would impress an Apple engineer; subtle animations and great pieces of UI detailing are present throughout the product.

These types of details are those that warm me to a product, they show above average care and impart a sense of craftsmanship. It’s hard to care for a product whose designers obviously didn’t.

I present a few I find especially endearing.

1. Find-in-page highlights locations of results in the scroll bar

Chrome tells you not just how many results there are, but where they are in the page. Programming IDEs have had this handy feature for a few years, but I’ve not seen it in a mainstream program before. If we’re lucky, Chrome will popularize the feature and we’ll see it in Word by, say, 2015.

2. Searching history includes page content

Calls for this feature have been heard in the halls of Firefox for years; hopefully it will come now Chrome has the feature. As to be expected from a Google product, search through history is lightening fast and available directly from Chrome’s homepage.

Rose and I were using a website to look for houses which didn’t put each houses address in the web page title. Chrome’s search inside the page made it super-easy to find houses via their street name when we wanted to look them up again, whether as Firefox was all at sea.

3. The status bar appears only when required

Most of the time the status bar sits superfluously at the base of one’s browser window, blank as the day it was born. Chrome displays its status bar only when there is something there to tell you about, the rest of the time remaining politely out of sight. One of my favourite details is the way the status bar shifts out of the way when you move the mouse toward it.

Firefox has an extension which approximates this behavior.

4. When you search a site, like Wikipedia, Chrome saves it to the omnibar and new tab page.

Chrome works hard to learn your habits and adapt itself to them. One of the less obvious ways this happens is when Chrome notices you’ve searched a site a few times.

5. Active textboxes are highlighted.

Chrome joins Firefox 3 and Safari by highlighting the active textbox. Even on Windows where this helpful behaviour is not customary; bravo.

Bonus Detail: Tab spinner indicates when it’s resolving the location of a page, then changes direction to indicate the page is loading. Probably the most subtle feature, but really helps when you’ve a slow proxy server to contend with.

Ganglia is a monitoring framework for clusters of servers. It records many statistics and can record custom defined ones too. It works in a distributed manner, with each machine you wish to collect statistics for running the Ganglia monitor deamon, gmond. Each monitoring deamon’s statistics are collected by a metadata daemon, gmetad, running on either one of the monitored hosts or a separate machine. Ganglia provides a PHP frontend which displays the data from gmetad in the form of pretty graphs.

The steps required to install Ganglia, as with many pieces of distributed software, are not immediately obvious. This is a guide to getting it up and running on Ubuntu. As I install it from source, it should be portable to other distributions, although the package names for dependencies are Ubuntu specific.

The guide is quite long, so I published it on Google Docs rather than making a huge post here.