marramgrass

It’s a while since I last did one of these, so the links have built up a bit. They’re quite an eclectic lot, too. Here goes:

• Science and Religion are Not Compatible. I disagree completely with the main point of this piece (the one hinted at in its title), but it’s well-written and worth reading. It also makes a pleasant change to read a contribution in the tiring [atheist|naturalist] v. [theist|religious] debate that is written in a reasonable, sensible, even friendly tone, rather than, “You’re stupid!” “You’re damned!” — and that goes for both ‘sides’.
• Learn to Fly is a silly wee Flash game. Play it once, have a laugh, move on. Via Jason Kottke.
• I’ve made it to the cinema twice since Reuben was born. Once to see Star Trek, which was tremendous, and once to see Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen which was… not tremendous. This FAQ on Topless Robot identifies everything I thought was wrong with the film. The original review is also an entertaining read. (They both contain some pretty salty language, if that bothers you.)
• Everyone was linking this last month: 78 Photography Rules For Complete Idiots.
• Since I posted a couple of weeks ago on Mercurial, here’s a bit more: Five Features From Mercurial That Would Make git Suck Less.
• After yesterday’s rant about the pig-death-’flu, there are still some things need thought about: The Pandemic & the Eucharist.
• I’ve had a couple of interesting conversations recently about the impact of social media (I had to stop myself putting scare-quotes around that horrid phrase) on and for worshipping communities. Andrew Jones has a thoughtful and interesting post entitled The Virtual Church: Keeping It Real.
• Mark Jaquith educates on Words you probably pronounce incorrectly. Interesting. In the UK, a gyro is something different. I have always said ‘zoo’ in ‘zoology’, but am frequently annoyed (pedantically) by mispronounciation of ‘bruschetta’, ‘espresso’ and ‘et cetera’.
• Dan Benjamin explains Why isn’t that Buddha statue fat?

Okay. Back to it.

Yesterday morning I tweeted that I was “A bit disappointed at BBC Radio Ulster breathlessly cranking the #swineflu paranoia this morning.”

I love the BBC, but there seems to be more and more tabloid creeping into their news reporting.

Yesterday morning, as I was driving into Belfast for an early meeting, I caught a report on Good Morning Ulster. Marie-Louise Connolly was reporting on preparations for the expected swine ‘flu outbreak.

The piece didn’t do much more than play with maybes and ignorance to whip up fear and doubt.

The main point of the report was that while the Department of Health, the BMA and Unison all say that we are well-prepared — and as well-prepared as we can be — for what might happen when a third of the workforce goes down with the pig-death-’flu, we can’t know for sure because their contingency plans ‘only exist on paper’ and have never been proved for real.

I don’t know much about disaster planning, but I do know that the only way you can really, with certainty, tell if your planning and preparation is good enough is to see what happens when they’re really needed. Before then, the best option you have is to run simulations and exercises — which the report said have been run. What more can be done?

It does get better: the report ended with Ms Conolly talking about some more of the “unknowns” that we should be worried about. “Will the virus mutate into something more serious once winter-time comes?” It might. It also might mutate into something that has no ill effects on humans. “Why younger people and middle-aged people are coming down with the virus?” Because that’s what happens in a ‘flu outbreak, and we know it. Younger people and middle-aged people tend to mix more and with larger groups, so they catch more bugs.

I’m not sure what this report was trying to achieve. There was no flaw in the planning that was being brought to light. Instead, without saying as much, it showed that as much planning as can be done is being done. All that we’re left with from this piece is a bit more paranoia.

Face mask, anyone?

(If you get there before next Wednesday, you can hear the report on iPlayer. It starts at 1:05.37.)

Blame an exchange on Twitter last night. Richard Burton, with extra menace:

No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space.

No one could have dreamed we were being scrutinized, as someone with a microscope studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. Few men even considered the possibility of life on other planets and yet, across the gulf of space, minds immeasurably superior to ours regarded this Earth with envious eyes and slowly, surely, they drew their plans against us.

When I was a kid, one of the records I found among my dad’s small collection of vinyl was the comprehensively named Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of “The War of the Worlds”. I listened to it enough that the eery cry of “Ulla!” gave me some pretty vivid nightmares.

The War of the Worlds has had some very high-profile adaptations: Orson Welles’s famous 1938 radio play, the brilliant 1952 film, the not-so-brilliant 2005 Spielberg/Cruise blockbuster. Jeff Wayne’s is my favourite (maybe because it was my first).

“Thunder Child” is the tiny moment of hope — maybe we can beat the Martians — that’s quickly dashed. Tom Cruise isn’t around to thrust explosives into the belly of the machine, unfortunately.

Stirring.

“Thunder Child” [YouTube]

“Thunder Child” [Spotify]

(PAW2009 30/52)

Still with the country-ish music, I’m afraid.

My wife and my parents got together and bought me a mandolin for my birthday some years ago. It’s a fantastic wee instrument, and there’s nothing that sounds quite like it. The thing about the mandolin is that you expect the music to be either something Mediterranean-sounding, or bluegrass. (If you don’t know bluegrass, think country with more energy but even less credibility. I’m pretty sure we’ll come back to it on a future Tuesday.)

When I first picked up the mandolin, one of the names I came across was a young guy (of an age with me, roughly, which at the time made him much younger than the average well-known mandolin player) called Chris Thile. He’s kind of like a guitar hero of the mandolin world, but with as much melody as shredding — more Satriani than Vai, if that means anything to you.

Where Thile isn’t quite your typical mandolin player, the band he played with at the time weren’t your typical bluegrass/folk/country band. Nickel Creek did things a little differently, showing off their bluegrass roots but combining them with much more indie, rock influences.

It sounds good, doesn’t it? It does to me.

The title track of their 2002 album is “This Side”, which I first noticed for the great mandolin solo in the middle (once a guitar nut, always a guitar nut — even with eight strings instead of six), but it drew me in to a great track on a really excellent album.

There are songs, many of them, that make me stop whatever I’m doing and listen. Then there are the ones that I can feel, that do something in me. Sometimes it’s in the lyric, sometimes something in the music. “This Side” is a tune that makes me stop, close my eyes, and aspire to making music that sounds like that.

“This Side” [YouTube]

(PAW2009 29/52)

I had a potter around Belfast at lunchtime, today. Coming in, I noticed how much construction is going on again. In the past month or so, the Obel Tower has started to shoot up again, and is moving quickly. It’s not the only one, either.

I took a walk through Victoria Square. Even though it’s been open for more than a year, today was the first time I went up to the dome and actually had a look out. The views are good enough, but they’re dominated by the roofs of the shopping centre around. It was on the dander back down the spiralling stairs that I looked down and noticed the lines made by the escalators and the walls.

We were there last week, as well. Paperchase was deemed a suitable supplier of birthday cards, so we decided to brave a visit to Belfast’s premier under-occupied premium and luxury shopping centre with a pram and small child in tow. It turns out that the lifts in Victoria Square don’t seem to work to any noticeable pattern. I’m used to lifts where you push the button to indicate whether you’re going up or down, and when a car arrives a helpful light tells you if it’s going your way. Apparently not in Victoria Square.

Rather, the lift arrives and offers no indication of whether it will go up or down. On the ‘Lower Ground’ floor we pushed the down button, to get down one level to the car park. A lift came down, the doors opened and we got in. We pushed the button for ‘B1’ or somesuch, and the lift started to rise. We made it all the way up to the dome before it started back down, stopping at each floor on the way. We got to the car eventually.

I had tried to get the pram up and down the escalators earlier in the day. Up’s okay, but down isn’t as easy as it looks. Next time, the child goes in the sling-carrier-thing.

My current job is my first one since I left school where I haven’t spent most of my time working with ‘children and/or vulnerable adults’, but I do still volunteer in youth work. Because of this, I have a folder full of official-looking pieces of paper from various authorities confirming that no, I don’t have a criminal record and yes, I am deemed safe to work with children, young people and vulnerable adults.

I have, I don’t know how many times, explained to volunteers why it’s necessary for them to fill in the form — and a new form for every organisation — and get their ID signed off on so that someone in an office somewhere can find out if they’ve ever been noticed by the police and might present a danger to children. I’ve also explained that it depends on exactly what’s on record, and a few penalty points won’t be a problem.

I have accepted complaints that volunteers have felt insulted or accused, especially when their organisations have known them for years. I’ve apologised that even though they have a form from somewhere else, this place over here needs one, too.

I’ve even been heard to say that if someone isn’t keen enough on the role to fill in the form, then they may not be keen enough on the role.

I’ve had long conversations with volunteer managers and with other staff in organisations who are worried about the impact of the new regulations and Vetting and Barring Scheme, both on their time and effort and on the recruitment of new volunteers.

I have become way too familiar with a host of acronyms and titles: PoCVA, Taking Care, Safe From Harm, Access NI, Disclosure, CRB, ISA, VBS…

And while I have had the occasional moan, I haven’t complained too much. Because it’s important. It’s an important system, and an important precaution, to do what we can to keep people safe.

All of which is to say that I’m reasonably familiar with the issues. Onward, then, to today’s news. (more…)

If the title of this post doesn’t mean anything to you, you’re pretty safe to skip it.

Like many others, I’ve been using Subversion for source code management and version control. I have mostly been happy, but over the weekend I’d had enough of some of the foibles by which Subversion shows its age. After playing about with it for a while, I decided to move to Mercurial.

Distributed VCS is all the rage right now. All the cool kids seem to be using Git, but Mercurial appealed to me more. There are other options, as well.

Migrating from Subversion to Mercurial should be easy. Mercurial includes the hg convert extension, which takes your Subversion repository and converts it to Mercurial while maintaining all your branches and tags as well — if you can get it to work. I tried for an afternoon and couldn’t get it to fire. (I was working with a remote repository. You may have better luck working locally.)

I decided to try hgsvn, which I installed from MacPorts as py25-hgsvn. It aims to allow you to use Mercurial to manage a repository and then push and pull from a Subversion repository. I didn’t take it that far, though if you try it please let me know how it works. I was mainly interested in making the switch completely, which I managed reasonably well.

Before we go through the process, here’s one thing to bear in mind: if your Subversion repository contains tags and branches, these will appear in your new mercurial repository as directories containing a bunch more source code, with the whole directory structure making up one big working copy. This makes sense if you think about it, as branching and tagging in Subversion is nothing more than making copies of your files and promising yourself (and your collaborators) that you’ll treat them a certain way.

Because of this, I found that this will work best if you select a certain branch (maybe your trunk, maybe not) and convert it only. So this process will work best for you if you’re working on your trunk, or only want to bring over one branch with its revision history.

With that in mind, here’s what you do. (I’m on Mac OS X, but this should follow for most *nix-type systems. On Windows, it may well be a bit different.)

Set up the conversion using, for example

$ hgimportsvn http://yourrepo.com/trunk/

In this example, the new Mercurial repository will be in a folder called ‘trunk’, so you may want to rename it by

$ mv trunk MyProject

Move into that directory and grab the contents of the repository with

$ cd MyProject
$ hgpullsvn

At this point, you will be able to run this as a Mercurial repository without any trouble. However, there is a little cleanup we can do to make everything neater.

First, because hgsvn is designed to allow Mercurial and Subversion to coexist, but that’s not what we want, you can get rid of the .svn cruft and the file that tells Mercurial to ignore that cruft, using

$ find . -name .svn | xargs rm -frv
$ find . -name .hgignore | xargs rm -frv

(By the by, if you’re planning to pipe find into rm, especially with the -f switch, it’s best to run the find first to check you’re only going to delete what you want to, and only then run it with the pipe in place. Man, am I glad I checked it first!)

Second, if you run

$ hg branches

You’ll see that your main branch is currently called ‘trunk’ instead of ‘default’ — which is what a new mercurial repository would have. You can correct this by running

$ hg branch default

By now, you’ll have made a few changes to the contents of your working copy, so commit them with

$ hg commit -m “Cleaning up after migration to Mercurial”

And that’s that. It’s easy when you know how.

(I found useful clarification on a little of the cleanup from samhart.com.)

It’s coming up on three years since we moved from Edinburgh back to Northern Ireland. Part of me still misses what is a fantastic place to live, although we are, by now, very happily settled back home. One of the things I miss (and I have mentioned this before) is BBC Radio Scotland, which has some brilliant programming. Two of the DJs who were on Radio Scotland while we were there — Iain Anderson and Tom Morton — became some of my main sources of new music.

Both shows, at the time, tended to occupy the space between easily accessible rock, folk and country, which explains much of the music I picked up during the six years I was in Scotland. One of the artists I enjoyed was Josh Ritter, and my first conscious encounter with his music was with this song.

“Girl In The War” is the first track on Ritter’s Spring 2006 album, The Animal Years. It sets the tone for the album: it sounds pretty sweet, and pretty gentle, but the whole thing has bite. There’s politics in there, and protest and bitterness. “Girl In The War”, so far as I can figure, is about the seduction, and the frequent foolishness and hypocrisy, of war — aimed squarely at the war in Iraq and the ‘War on Terror’. It’s also proof that a politically charged song can be beautiful, too, and can have a seductive quality of its own.

The rest of the album is worth listening to, also. The other key track, I think, is “Thin Blue Flame”, which picks up some of the imagery from “Girl In The War”. It’s the penultimate track on the album, but is the climax and the companion to the opener.

Ritter’s music has appeared on a few soundtracks. (If I remember correctly, another song off this album featured in an episode of House a while back.) He deserves a listen, especially if you like American, slightly country, slightly folky rock.

“Girl In The War” [YouTube]

“Girl In The War” [Spotify]

And a freebie:

“Thin Blue Flame” [Spotify]

(PAW2009 28/52)