It is clearly ludicrous to treat “Intelligent design” as a serious theory of anything. It has no predictive nor explanatory power. It cannot be tested or falsified. Its only significance in scientific terms must be its role in the teaching of science. So its dissemination is an issue for social science (the history of ideas, the role of ideas as ideologies, the power relations involved in how it is being treated as a serious alternative to evolutionary science.) Even in religious terms it is impossible to see it as a genuine point of view. (Even the Catholic Church has recently dismissed it.) Continue reading →

The useability “guru” has turned his sights on search engines now:

Search engines extract too much of the Web’s value, leaving too little for the websites that actually create the content. Liberation from search dependency is a strategic imperative for both websites and software vendors.

Read the full article – http://www.useit.com/alertbox/search_engines.html

Quite an interesting article – Personally I think search engines (and things like del.icio.us, digg.com etc), while useful and interesting, do run the risk of “dumbing down” the web.

Popular sites get more hits / higher rankings and as a result get more visitors, which in turn generates more hits (more diggs, more tags etc). As people turn to “web 2.0” social networking to find sites, this has the definite risk of creating a situation where the less popular parts of the internet will turn into a no-mans-land with no visitors and no chance of getting itself out of the quagmire, because no one is “digg-ing” or taging or linking to the site. Its a shame really.

An additional, unwanted, side effect is the amount of effort some sites have to go to with SEO. A shame that so much time and effort is spent basically trying to trick people into visiting.

Well, after the mini rant over XAMPP I had a think. At the moment the set up here is: two machines running Windows XP, one Windows Server 2003, two with SuSE and Ubuntu – with a solaris machine any day now. Now, while XAMPP has been great in the past there is no real reason why I cant bite the bullet and remove all the webservers from all machines (there are lots of obscure ones running in the background – dont ask me why….) then actually install the servers I want, with the mods I want for the network as it is right now! Continue reading →

Now, everyone I know who designs web applications or online databases is a big fan of XAMPP and I am no exception. I think it is great. It has taken the old concept of PHPTriad (which was good in its day) and it allows people to download and install a simple bundle of Apache, PHP and MySQL. Fantastic.

For example, using their tool you can install the following on Windows with no effort at all:

Apache HTTPD 2.2.0, MySQL 5.0.18, PHP 5.1.1 + 4.4.1 pl1 + PEAR + Switch, MiniPerl 5.8.7, mod_ssl 2.0.55, Openssl 0.9.8a, PHPMyAdmin 2.7.0 pl1, XAMPP Control Panel 2.1, eAccelerator 0.9.4, Webalizer 2.01-10, Mercury Mail Transport System für Win32 und NetWare Systems v4.01a, FileZilla FTP Server 0.9.10a, SQLite 2.8.15, ADODB 4.65, Zend Optimizer 2.5.10a, XAMPP Security.

Over the last few months, I have been using the server environment XAMPP installs quite regularly and it always has been great. One thing I have never managed is to get the TOMCAT and COCOON addons working though. No idea why. Everytime I have tried it comes up with a complaint that I dont have Java, when I do have java.

Madness.

Anyway, today I decided it was time to do my disk housekeeping and clean out all the old files, uninstall all the useless junk a PC accumulates and so on. Part of this involved uninstalling the XAMPP set up I had and downloading / installing the new version (it now comes with Apache 2.2). I also figured this would be a good time to re-try TOMCAT / COCOON just to see.

Anyway, after getting rid of all my files I went to the XAMPP site and yes there is a new version of the basic package and the Perl add-on, but the rest (python, tomcat and cocoon) have all vanished – the links replaced by “Coming sson!” [sic].

Bah. I checked the file names and the old versions I had (eg 2.3.5 for python) are the same as the ones that are coming soon but no links. (Obviously I am stupid enough to have deleted my old copies BEFORE I checked to see if new ones were available.)

Well, what a load of ********.

Just for info – for the terminally curious – there have been a few minor tweaks made to this blog. Mainly some new plug ins have been installed (Gravatars for example) and the del.icio.us feed set up. All in all nothing major 🙂

If you can think of anything else we should try out, let us know.