SMH today has one of those lists that get thrown together from a bunch of old columns to make a summer/holiday/everyone-else-is-on-leave article.

This one is the ‘10 propheices for the digital millennium‘. Never mind that it’s about the next 10 years - ‘millennium’ sounds much cooler. Much grander.

Some of the thoughts are pretty spot on, in my opinion. Point 7 (Increased importance of technology for the aged) is bang on. I’ve worked a little on projects going on at UNSW along these lines, of remote monitoring and alert systems for elderly and infirm patients who live at home, rather than at an institution. The use technology can help prevent injury, or get a rapid response when something does go wrong. This sort of thing will become increasingly important as the cost of such devices goes down, and technology becomes more and more prevalent.

Other ‘predictions’ are bollocks, to varying degrees.

2. The decline of the PC

This is a consequence of the first prediction [the internet will become the 'supernet']. PCs will not die - indeed, they will become massively more powerful, but they will become only one of many types of computing device. Mobile phones and “thin clients” will be much more popular ways of connecting to the supernet.

Phones, sure. “Thin clients”, however, will not take off. Their utility has been touted for years, but no-one wants to use a computer that isn’t all there. They’re just not very useful.

4. The decline of copyright

Regular readers of this column will know this is a hobbyhorse of mine. Copyright and most intellectual property laws are now an anachronism. Attempts by record companies and film studios and book publishers to stop people copying digital media are doomed to failure.

Technology is forcing big changes to business models.

Not convinced about this one. There’s a difference between copyright, fair-use provisions, and business models. Widely available does not necessarily imply freely available. The laws, and their implementation, might well be anachronistic, but the concepts of protecting the creator’s rights inherent to them are not.

8. The decline of IT as a speciality

A hundred years ago it seems someone predicted that if telephony job opportunities continued to grow at the same rate, within a generation everybody in the world would be a telephone operator. Well, with automatic dialling, everyone is. Somebody else once predicted a similar thing about computer programmers. Today we all program computers, by the very act of using them. There are fewer specialists, but many more generalists.

Such rot. We are not telephone operators. Telstra is. We do not program computers by the very act of using them. Not true, and incredibly so. Programmers are the people who code the programs, not use them. I also like the ’somebody else once predicted’. Top notch journalism.

The biggest bit of rubbish in this column, however, comes just over half-way through. I guess ‘9 predictions about the digital millennium’ isn’t as catchy as ‘10 predictions’.

6. The threat from intelligent machines

Look up “The Singularity” in Wikipedia or somewhere. The term, invented by American writers Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil, refers to the time in the near future when machines become more intelligent than humans and start replicating themselves. Who then will be the dominant life form on the planet?

You’ve got to be kidding. AI is not a slippery slope.

Looking this term up in ‘Wikipedia or somewhere’, it’s quite easy to see that Kurzweil did not invent the term, Vinge did. And he wrote about it in science fiction. Kurzweil has done a bunch of statistical extrapolation of technological growth to come up with pinpointing the ’singularity’ at 2045 (outside the purview of this column, it would seem), but he’s not without his critics. Specifically, it’s argued that his analysis is a case of ’static analysis’, where current trends are simplistically extended into the future… like, for example, telephone operators, or IT specialists.

I’m not sure why I keep expecting the Herald to not print stuff like this, given it comes out with such regularity, and the focus of the online site is so clearly trashy and tabloid.

Bah humbug.

SMH today:

So that makes it about a dollar for everyone, right?

Just for Freney

Sweet.

This post is in response to a couple of people asking me how to set up Unicode input on a Mac. If it’s more broadly useful, excellent.

If you’re someone who uses languages with character sets other than Roman (i.e. what this post is written with) with any frequency, then you need to do this. Stop stuffing around with fonts that pretend to show other languages, start writing properly with the right characters.

If you need more convincing, or if you want a brief overview of what the heck Unicode is and why it matters, Joe Weaks has an excellent overview aimed at those who work with the original Biblical languages.

Note: The following instructions are for the Mac. If you use Windows, then you’ll have to look further afield (actually, just in the Control Panel/Language settings).

Step 1:

Go get the Tyndale House Font Kit for Mac. It includes a couple of keyboard maps plus the Cardo Font, which is pretty good (not perfect, but useful nonetheless).

Step 2:

Unzip it.
Drag the Hebrew keyboard layout to Library/Keyboard Layouts.
You don’t need the Greek layout.

Step 3:

Open up System Preferences, select ‘International’, then ‘Input Menu’.

Find the Greek Polytonic Layout, and the HebrewTH layout you just installed. Select them.

Also check the ’show input menu in menu bar’. This will put a flag up in the menu bar. You can click this flag to select your input source:

I prefer a keyboard shortcut to cycle through these. I’ve set it to be option-space (since I have cmd-space as spotlight, and ctrl-space for quicksilver). Repeatedly hitting this shortcut toggles back and forth between the previously selected keyboard and the current one. Hitting option-shift-space cycles through the list.

This is what my preference window looks like (it might only group the selected layouts together when you open it up next):

Note the Greek Polytonic and HebrewTH keyboard layouts selected along with the Australian one.

How do I use it?

When you’re typing, hit ⌥-space, ανδ σταρτ τυπινγ ιν Γρεεκ. Hit it again, and back to Latin characters. Hit ⇧⌥-space, and you get Hebrew: ברא אדמ. It works pretty well.

Cardo is a nice font that covers the full set of Hebrew and Greek characters, along with the Latin characters. It’s Latin stuff is pretty awful though, so if you want a font that covers everything without needing to toggle between languages, stick to either Times or Helvetica.

Hebrew Vowel and Accent points

The HebrewTH layout, whilst being quite sensibly laid out and easy to use, fails to cover certain oft-used marks, such as composite vowels. To get to these, open up the Character Palette, which is one of the options in the menu when you click on that flag in the menu bar.

If you navigate to the Hebrew section, you’ll be able to insert all manner of accents, vowels, and cantillation marks. Below is an example, with the best approximation to the ‘accent’ marker used by many Hebrew grammars, the ‘ole’ cantillation point:

Voila (Olé!).

Lots of words, apparently.

From the SMH today:

A British teenager has changed his name to Captain Fantastic Faster Than Superman Spiderman Batman Wolverine Hulk And The Flash Combined. Or Captain to his mates.

…

Explaining his decision to change his name, the formerly mild-mannered 19-year-old music student George Garratt, from Glastonbury, told the London Telegraph last week: “I wanted to be unique.”

Awesome.

An awesome, awesome idiot.

Practice makes… well, better, anyway. The last few coffees: three from three.

If this whole theology thing doesn’t work out with the exams over the next two weeks, I won’t quite be putting in an application to Campos, but maybe somewhere more third-rate might take me on.

Not beer. Software.

Head on over to Code Weavers and take advantage of a free software offer. It’s due to some slightly cheaper petrol prices in the US - which doesn’t concern me at all, but that’s ok - and to celebrate, they’re giving away their CrossOver Pro software for free.

Crossover is a way of running Windows apps and games on the Mac (or Linux), without having to run the whole operating system. If you don’t want to run VMWare, Parallels or BootCamp, or if you want another solution kicking around give it a shot.

It’s for either Mac or Linux. 1 per customer, and is for today only.

After my last post, I noticed this interesting bit of information about how people have found this site:

I might be turning up in people’s Covenant Eyes reports sometime soon.

[NB: 'Spotlight' here refers to a segment we run at church, and has nothing to do with a certain Apple search technology.]

At church recently we’ve been hearing from Jesus (from his Sermon on the Mount) about all manner of human behaviour. In relation to lust, he says this:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Do not commit adultery.’ 
But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell.

So what do we do with this? In regard to internet pornography (which as I’m sure you’re aware, is everywhere), how can we ensure we are pure in what we look at? Should I cut off my internet connection (or my eye/hand)?

I want to suggest 2 things that can help out with those who have problems with pornography, even addictions.

The first is an online book written by Mark Driscoll, the pastor of Mars Hill Church. It’s called Porn-Again Christian, and is currently a work in progress - most of the chapters are posted at this point in time, but the rest will be up soon. When it’s complete, you’ll be able to download the whole thing as a pdf document.

This is written for the blokes. Girls, by all means read it, but it’s a (very) frank discussion, and may be something that isn’t all that helpful for you. You can make that assessment though. Guys, go read it. Seriously.

He deals with all the relevant things relating to pornography, masturbation, marriage, and prostitution. Go read.

The other thing is software called Covenant Eyes. The name comes from Job 31:1,

“I made a covenant with my eyes not to look lustfully at a girl.“

The way it works is that you sign up for an account (it costs money, but it’s worth it), and get the software. Once installed on your system it tracks all your internet activity. I mean all - web searches, downloads, ftp, everything.

You nominate one or more ‘accountability partners’, who once a week will get an email listing your internet activity, highlighting anything that it thinks might be a bit suspect. The idea is that these people will then sit down and talk through with you what you’ve been doing online. It essentially makes your private browsing activity (somewhat) public, creating some sort of barrier when you’re feeling weak.

It helps. I’ve got it on my machine. It works for both PC and Mac.

We need to get serious with sin. Internet pornography is a serious thing, a real addiction for many people. Let’s get it out in the open, talk about it, and deal with it properly, so we can be free.