CompuSkills web design service has put together a “customer service” blog which will provide advice, information and responses to frequently asked questions.

Definitely worth checking out over the coming weeks and months. If you have any questions you would like to have answers please get in touch with CompuSkills and see what can be done.

It might just be me, but my recent surf through technorati philosophy blogs (mentioned here first and then here) turned up some interesting results. In addition to the topical ones I have already mentioned, there seems a massively disproportionate number of MySpace blogs on the topic.

Seriously, pretty much nine out of ten links I have followed (the list was sorted by “freshness”) have been to MySpace blogs. Some are serious and relevant (for example this one about law and freedom – valid points even though I support banning smoking!) but by and large they are the “philosopical musings” of bored teenagers (even when written by apparent adults like this Wonder Woman religion post….).

I wonder if that pretty much sums up MySpace….

On a technological note, Technorati is still annoying. It is taking 20 minutes to index posts here, which ensures that when they do arrive in the index they are very, very far down the list in a busy topic like Philosophy. What are the other (generally MySpace) sites doing to get indexed within a minute or two?

Just to clarify the second paragraph above, out of the first fifty links tagged “Philosophy” on Technorati, only ONE was not a MySpace blog… Blimey.

It seems I posted the last article in haste as there is a new contender for the most “off the wall” philosophy tagged blog.

Take a look at this blinder (from Enigma, another MySpace user…)

As a Buddhist, I practice Nichiren Daishonin’s buddhism. I’ve been quite open about it up until a few months ago. Where I work, there are a few other people who I recently found out practic the same type of buddhism. However, there is one person – who I don’t know at all who has been imposing what I can only describe as anonymous guerrilla tactics to get other people to become aware of this practice. They have been posting magazines to the work place, which has annoyed some members of staff and leaving books around to people with messages like ‘lord knows, you bloody need it!’ That sort of shit. Not necessary. I have tried to find out who it is but to no avail.In this practice, it is through forging genuine friendships with people and showing some sort of example yourself as a human being that you introduce others, not by force or by some underhand tactics or other. It annoyed me…

ps – Anyone have any questions about Nichiren Buddhism, just ask me….:)

That is it. The wonders of MySpace seem to prevent me from looking at any other posts made to try and put this into context.

It really has left me stumped as to what “she” is going on about.

Well, there seems to be a continuing trend for my blogs now, innocently I click on a Technorati tag search and see what happens. When the results surprise me, I end up blogging about them. I wonder when it will cease to surprise me.

Anyway, the most recent one is the Technorati Philosophy blogs. Now this is busy. When I looked at it just now there were over 370,000 blog posts with the tag and the last 30 days have added around 1500 a day.

Obviously this means a lot to someone…

Strangely, most of the ones Technorati took me to today were much more biased towards “religion” than philosophy per se, but I assume most people have the two concepts closely linked. (It is not a requirement though).

Also a massive proportion of the blog posts seem to be the musings of religious-“spiritual” people in their late teens. Again, this panders to a few stereotypes and is a shame, as Philosophy is really a legitimate, serious subject with ramifications across lots of subject areas. An example of the slightly off the rails religious approach and an example of the late teen approach (Ok, she is 20 but my point remains) are available! It is worth noting that both sites have “Religion and Philosophy” as a single category.

Throwing a contrast, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science presents a very different perspective and is well worth visiting for the free content if nothing else. It is not “easy reading” of the manner of the previous two, but if you are interested in science, it is certainly worth working through.

Now, after the “sane” examples we are left with the rest of the bunch. This is always an entertaining stage of blog surfing. The word Philosophy seems to drag them out of the woodwork – I may try “Religion” when I have more spare time….

This is a priceless one. In a post titled “Saddam Hussein & Feast of Sacrifice (Muslim Holiday)” (this alone should highlight the potential crank content) we get such gems as:

Dont be fooled by Western Propaganda and Middle Eastern “Statesmen” that kiss the United States Ass!! Saddam Hussein is Christ Manifest. In The Bible It Tells You That Christ Will Return As A King of Terror. The Reason Why I Say This Is Because I Am Saddam Hussein!! Saddam Hussein is Zeus!! Saddam Hussein is Me!!

Blimey. Is this meant to be satirical? After a bit more ranting and incoherent babble, the post finishes with this:

Shiites and Sunnis Dont Believe In Allah, Kurds Dont Believe In Allah; Dont Believe In God That Is Why They Got Their Asses Tortured By Saddam Hussein. Why Is It That The Devil Wants To Divide Heaven, Be A False Provider Of Freedom. Human Beings Dont Need A Petty Constitution To Tell Them That They Are Free…..That Is Why God Created The Sun.

Now, I suppose the randomness of this page served a purpose as it encouraged me to read through more of his site and look at the MySpace profile he has – mainly to see if he was actually insane. Sadly reading the profile has not convinced me this is a nut case, so I can only assume the page is there as a joke. The brunt of the profile seems like a normal person (although choice of books is: “Bible, Quran, Tao Te Ching, Confucious, Ayn Rand, Karl Marx, Immanuel Kant, Nietzsche, Plato, Aristotle, William Shakespear,Saving Socrates, Call of the Wild, Political Thrillers & Military Thrillers, Romantic Novels, Steven King, Michael Chrichton, Science Fictions, Biographies” which is certainly unusual for a 25 year old male). He also has a picture of GW Bush (Captioned “The Devil without Make Up) and the words “I WANT TO MAKE THE WORLD FALSELY BELIEVE THAT DEMOCRACY IS GREATER THAN GOD’S PROVIDENCE” attached (as if this is Bush’s motive). A similar picture of Adolph Hitler is labled “I WANT TO MAKE THE WORLD FALSELY BELIEVE THAT NAZISM IS GREATER THAN GOD’S PROVIDENCE” so you can only assume some link between Democracy and Nazism, which is certainly a different philosophical point of view…

Just goes to show, no matter how much Technorati annoys me and how bad its set up is and how much it polarises the blogosphere – there remains the facility for it to provide hours of meaningless, pointless but still interesting distraction. 🙂

As lots of people will be aware, Linux is a fully functional, open source, operating system which runs on a massive variety of hardware platforms (from embedded devices to high end servers), comes with all the source code, comes with a massive variety of application packages (massive is an understatement) and generally costs nothing.

One of the other “wonders” of Linux, is the different variations you can have (often called Distro’s or Distributions). Vendors such as Novell (SuSE), Mandrake, RedHat (etc) all make versions. The sheer scale of the different distros is hard to appreciate but take a look at the DistroWatch website to see what is out there, or for a smaller sample, Wikipedia has a shorter list.

Despite this great variety, there is a common theme in that all the distros are – broadly speaking – the same. You execute commands in the same manner, you have a root account in the same manner etc. Add to this the similarity to Unix and you can see why linux is great and this spread of distros is not something to be scared of.

Now, not all that long ago a new distro appeared which while being good was hardly “better” than the others. In fact, this new distro changed some of the fundamental ways Linux used to do things (no root account for example) and created a “learning curve” for people moving from one distro to another. One thing this distro did do which was good, was to ship hundreds of installation disks for free. This distro was Ubuntu.

Since Ubuntu managed to flood the market, it has grown in popularity at an astonishing rate. This is not exactly something I was initially over the moon about (for examples, look at these search results) but it is good to see Linux get more mass market publicity.

However, as time progresses I now think it may not be such a good thing. Months ago, I gave up on PCW because it was becoming morbidly repetetive and the Unix column mentioned nothing but Ubuntu. If this was kept to generic “Unix ways of doingt things” it might not be a bad thing, but it isn’t. It is almost invariably Ubuntu specific things.

Recently I had the chance to read through back issues and the current issue of PCW – including the Unix column – and this trend has remained. The current one should be ashamed to call itself a “Unix” article. The whole section is now Ubuntu articles. Each month the author waxes lyrical about how great the latest distro is and how to work round the weird way Ubuntu does things.

As far as I can see it, this trend carries over to pretty much all the general PC publications, and worryingly is present (in smaller doses) on the more specialist magazines. As more and more people get locked into the Ubuntu way of doing things, Linux as it used to be will cease to exist and the day where Linux is a single OS in the manner of Windows will be upon us.

This is not a good thing.