The next life

Jim Holt in Eternity for Atheists:

Curiously, the doctrine of immortality is more a pagan legacy than a religious one. The notion that each of us is essentially an immortal soul goes back to Plato. Whereas the body is a compound thing that eventually falls apart, Plato argued, the soul is simple and therefore imperishable. [...]

If death is not extinction, what might it be like?

Word is out that it actually looks like King's Cross station. YMMV.

Shared links for 2007-07-30

• China fact of the day
• The Power of Java?
  Haha.

As expected ...

... Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows totally rocks. One day of my life I won't regret.

Shared links for 2007-07-25

• The Power of Potter
• Blue Hole in Belize
• The Loser Decision
• 'Remember you will die' watch

NewVC: Emacs VC with changesets

Eric S. Raymond has apparently begun work on a new version of Emacs' built-in version control (VC) mode which addresses one of VC's historical shortcomings: its file-centric model. VC was originally designed for RCS, which tracks each file individually.

"NewVC" now has the basic infrastructure to manipulate changesets for backends that support them (Subversion, Arch, Bazaar, Mercurial); there's no UI yet but it looks promising... This change was long overdue, committing several files in one go is a must-have nowadays even with less advanced tools like CVS and having a common framework can only be good. Over the years, a number of more advanced interfaces like PCL-CVS and psvn.el have been developed to compensate for VC's defects, all with subtly different keybindings, which makes for a rather annoying experience.

I bet the folks over at DVC aren't too pleased though, since NewVC will probably make DVC mostly irrelevant.

Shared links for 2007-07-18

• Xen (domU) hits Linus' tree.
  Finally!
• Who cares about Microsoft v. Red Hat?
• Harry Potter, St. Augustine, and the Confrontation with Evil
  Two days until the release of the seventh installment of the series...

Shared links for 2007-07-17

• What Does Peace Look Like?
• Giant Rubber Duck
• ATM Reprogramming Caper Hits Pennsylvania

Bastille Day fireworks

Still magical.

Shared links for 2007-07-12

• German Font Exercise Takes to the Sky
  Wish I had thought of that.
• The GPL and Software as a Service
• C++: A Cautionary Tale, or, 1 Hour Of Your Black Hat Trip is Spoken For
  See also this video, one of the slides says that (security-wise) "C++ is a bad choice in almost any case", which nicely sums up my experience as well...

OKX

Via ateaseweb, OKX: A Tribute to OK Computer: an album of song-by-song covers of Radiohead's OK Computer. My Brightest Diamond (mentioned here a few weeks back) magnificently covers Lucky. Free download!

Shared links for 2007-07-09

• The Origin of Everyday Punctuation Marks.
• Me, Myself and I
  "What I heart about Open Source is that personal freedom and expression has played a backseat for a long time to the freedom of ideas and the pursuit of common goals."
• Disputed Security Issue in Glibc

Shared links for 2007-07-07

• A Jardin de Tuileries sculpture loses dignity, Paris '07
  "To merde" isn't a verb.
• Fun loving Swedes fly a model plane through a 3.9km road tunnel.
  Crazy.
• Designing High-Security Systems: A Comparison of Programming Languages
  Good introduction to the Common Criteria in the first few slides.

Zeldman on why corporate websites suck

Jeffrey Zeldman: "Almost no one who makes websites works in their company or organization's web division—because almost no company or organization has a web division. That void on the org chart is one reason we have so many bloated, unusable websites."

Emacs 22 in Ubuntu Gutsy

News from the other side of the fence: Mike Olson has prepared Emacs 22 packages for Ubuntu Gutsy, based on my emacs-snapshot packages for Debian. Go Mike!