I suppose what I am aiming for here is to bring disparate bits of my online persona together. Flickr, del.icio.us, last.fm and dx13 all live in different corners of the web. Tools are beginning to appear which allow you to bring different aspects together into a single online display — a start page for the self. This site will be the start page for me; a place where I will attempt to bring my online aspects together.

The most abhorrent quality of the most zealous pro-life fanatics is their sheer devotion to life over and above quality of life. A child and its parents could be terribly unhappy because of some circumstance, perhaps the child was conceived due to rape or is severely disabled, but all that concerns the pro-lifer is the life of itself. It’s so un-wholistic you can’t help being shocked by it. What they espouse is essentially that you deserve to be unhappy if the alternative is the removal of the potential for a life — lets remember we’re talking about bundles of cells here.

Apple announced the final bits and bobs that will be in Leopard, the next release of OS X, at the Apple Developers’ Conference yesterday. I thought it would be interesting to note my thoughts on it down, amongst several thousand other people. I’m not sure whether I can re-publish screenshots from Apple’s site — I presume not — so you’ll have to follow the links for pictures and videos.

Before I begin, I can’t resist a slight moan. I was disappointed with the Safari 3 beta version for Windows. It’s simply woefully incomplete for a beta: it doesn’t support proxy servers yet. It also crashed when I tried to browse to our internal TWiki site. Somewhat uninspiring.

In an open letter to AQA a physics teacher bemoans the new Science curriculum in the UK. I read about the plans a few months ago in the Guardian and was appalled by what I read. I thought that things couldn’t possibly turn out as bad as the article made them sound; it was a comment piece. It turns out I was wrong.

The new science curriculum is based upon a plausibly laudable aim. There is a view that scientific understanding in the UK is low. Following from this, it is put forward that we need a change in science education. It appears one of the criticisms of science teaching was it is too, well, science-based. God forbid!

If you ever have the need to make a mini template engine, may I recommend Ruby as the language to make it in? I’ve just spent an hour re-writing the one I wrote a couple of weeks ago in a much nicer way. For those who are curious, here’s an outline of the steps:

1. Make a Templatable mixin with a single method, generate_from_template
2. Mix this into a class, populated with some methods and instance variables
3. In this method, use a regex to parse each # xx var from your template (get the template name from self.class.name, perhaps?)
4. Take the xx and eval(xx) and sub! back into your line. The eval will, of course, have access to all your variables and methods from your newly Templatable class, as we mixed-in. Make a note of the fact that you can put any ruby code in your eval play around.
5. Carry on doing this until you’ve run out of # xx to parse.
6. Write out your fully evaluated template!

Very simple and powerful.