Chris Worfolk's Blog

It seems the uncultured masses are taking over these days. Even traditional heavens such as university campuses and (if you can consider anything that is less than 4 years old, traditional) Facebook are now awash with quote unquote riff raff communicating with each other in text speak and showing each other pointless videos on their £10,000 phones which have everything but the ability to do voice chat.

Whether I myself fall into the category of Philistinism is a whole different debate. I’m not one for the material you would find in an art gallery though my love for art is passionate when you switch the specific area to for example motion pictures or CSS.

What I want to talk about here is the positive side effects we experience from the prevalence of Philistines in our society. I often comment on how much I like the fact that brainless movies from Hollywood sit on Tesco’s shelf for £10+ a piece while I recently acquired 2001 for the delightful price of £3 while Donnie Darko and American Beauty were also available for £2.

It occurs to me though that this applies to a wider social context. For example, while I was down in London I spent a day looking around the British Museum which was a fascinating experience. How much did I pay for it? Nothing. It’s free. Like almost all museums in the UK (much to Owen Johnson’s annoyance having just successfully integrated the entry payment system into every other system at the Royal Armories in Leeds :D).

The question then is this – would all these museums be free if people were arriving on mass at them all? I somehow doubt it. The cinemas are opening up massive multiplexes to deal with the load of customers waiting to pay £6 a ticket and an extra £10 for a popcorn bigger than their body mass while one of the most famous museums in Britain has no queues to be seen.

As I said, my guess is that if museums were as popular as say cinemas or sports events, there would probably be an entry fee. Maybe I’m wrong and the government would continue to fund it which would be nice but I think the principle is more important. After all, you pay what, £30-40 to go see a sporting event? The same for a music concert with a famous artist. Which such prices, charging the same for entry to the British Museum doesn’t seem unreasonable. But of course, due to the general attitudes we have, if they did, few people would go.

It’s a similar situation with public libraries. They’re completely free to use. Would this be the case if everyone uses them? There is an even stronger case for rebutting my answer of no here as this is case of public education but that’s not to rule it out – DVD rental companies be it instore at Blockbuster or online with Love Film charge what, £5 a movie or £15 a month.

Of course there are exceptions to the rule – for example, the theatre is no cheap excursion but then I’m not sure how popular demand would affect prices there. They generally play to full houses anyway so unless we’re going to get stadium-sized theatres (which I would think would somewhat ruin the experience) the laws of supply and demand may drive up prices.

So there you have it. The case of allowing the uncultured to continue to wallow in their Sky TV and chav’ed up Corsas.

As we all know, Facebook is on the way down. It’s bad enough that they now allow non-university students to use the sites but now with all these pointless applications (as well as now having the types of users that will use and spread them) which people constantly send you requests for and putting a million different boxes on a user’s profile so you have to scroll for 30 minutes to reach their wall, how much better is Facebook than MySpace?

Well, still quite a lot better. But the gap is closing. I was using MySpace today (viral marketing, it’s still the biggest social network in the world) and they have really been working on it. The layout is good, the functionality works. It’s a huge improvement on what it would have been like a year ago.

I was uploading some videos to Revver today to find that they now review every video manually! Every single video is apparently now moderated by a Revver staff member to ensure that it doesn’t violate copyright (among other reasons).

Meanwhile in YouTube‘s fight against copyright they had now banned any videos longer than 10 minutes long, no matter what account you have (previous you could sign up for a director’s account which required a few extra contact details to get the limits increased).

An email recently arrived in the inbox of registered users of Pandora from the UK informing them that Pandora will be switching off to UK users on January 15th.

It’s a real shame as Pandora is a fantastic service. For those who haven’t discovered it yet (and I wouldn’t advice trying it now as you’re only going to get into it as they start blocking us), basically you put in your favourite song or artist and it goes away and finds new music that is similar so you can discover new cool stuff. It also takes your feedback on songs so it can improve what it picks out. It’s a customised radio station for you much like Launch Cast on Yahoo Music.

Unfortunately however, after blocking almost everyone else last year, Pandora have finally given up on trying to secure rights to play music in the UK having been unable to agree on a price with the music industry for licencing broadcast rights and so will only be available in the US after next week.

I’m currently in the process of testing out the new Worfolk Online Backup System which will automatically back up the sites in the network. It’s taken quite a bit of development but hopefully it should all come together now and it’s reasonable swish.

It supports daily, weekly and monthly backups all of which is done automatically. The system goes through the lists of sites and sends a request to cPanel to package everything up nicely so it can be easily restored in case of emergency. It also sends cPanel details of my off-site FTP server (the one I have here at Burchett Place) so cPanel can directly upload the backup via FTP.

Then later on the system logs in to my FTP servers and validates that the backup has been generated and logs the filename that has been generated. It then logs said status. You can then access the web based control panel, check to make sure everything is working via the log and see what backups are available for each site and download them if you wish.

I was reading a topic on Cozy Campus (an adult webmaster forum) earlier today about the gossip blog PerezHilton.com.

Standard ad (150×200):

One week: $9,000
One month: $30,000

Hi rise (150×600)

One week: $16,000
One month: $44.000

And before you say, “Yeah, but how many of those ads is the selling at those prices?”, take a look at his site and count them.

I count 15 standard size ads and 5 hi rise.

That’s over half a million dollars a month. I always said there was qood money in gossip blogs.

Ok, so I’m sat in The Old Bar.

Ignoring the flashing games machine and table football to my left which is permissable in a pub I have two plasma screens showing different things, a large screen showing something else on my right, a bright neon air hockey table further to my right and music blaring out behind me.

Does anyone else miss the times you could have a quiet drink in The Old Bar?

So are you.

We’re all Humanists really.

These days it seems the atheist community has more labels than members. Atheists, rationalists, secularists, Humanists, secular humanists, naturalists, Darwinists, nontheists, agnostics, week atheists, strong atheists, secular believers, free-thinkers, skeptics. I agree a lot of these are very different terms but they are all terms in which someone showing up to an A-Soc meeting may well describe themselves as.

Watching the Life of Brian to check everything is in order before the upcoming screening this term it got me thinking.

“People, don’t fight! We are all here together! We must join up against the common enemy!”
“The Judean’s People Front?!”
“The Romans!”

I’ve been wondering recently if we spent too much time worrying about the semantics, squabbling over names and labels when we should actually be doing some productive. Is it really that bad if someone mistakenly calls us a Humanist? I could think of a lot worse labels.

I got watching The Four Horsemen to which Rich posted the link on the Atheist Society Facebook group which consists of a roundtable between Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett (how amazing is that!) which is well worth a watch to get an insight into the minds of these people.

One of the questions they asked I thought was particularly interesting, the issue of whether as atheists we actually can make a difference.

There is often a general feeling within the community that we can’t, that we are never going to manage to convince anyone to give up superstitious beliefs. I disagree with this attitude though, it has always felt to me like if that is what we honestly believe then we are really just wasting our time. Luckily, I don’t feel like this.

As Dawkins says, he runs into people all the time who have seen the light after having seen one of Dawkins’ lectures or reading one of his books. People who until this point fully believed their faith have it shaken and give it up to rationality and science.

Of course, at least for the moment, I don’t have the reach of someone like Dawkins and Hitchens but I’m sure this demonstrates the principles and indeed I see it working at the local level too. While I’ve yet to have one of the Christian Union come up to me and say “wow, you’re right, this whole faith thing is just silly” (to be clear we haven’t lost a member either ;)), I have a small list of people forming of reformed fence sitters now proclaiming the lack of a god thanks to my evangelism.

Dawkins puts it right when he says there is a huge pool of people who haven’t really made up your mind yet who can be shown the light. And I’m not just talking about people who describe themselves as agnostics, indeed I probably don’t include these people – I leave them for Gijsbert’s preaching. But people who describe themselves as beliving in god without really doing much about it – the 75% of whatever of people who put Christian down on their census form really are still up for grabs.

And just remember – it’s a million points if you convert Carl ;).

I’m currently trying to report an issue with my VPS. I can’t though because ServInt’s support site is down.

Seriously, why is it so hard to find a reliable host?

I was moving away from PowerVPS as I’ve had a few problems with them recently including hostnames and root passwords mysteriously changing in the middle of my trying to set up my new VPS. But I’m not getting any further with ServInt. Bare in mind that these are the two most well respected VPS companies in existence. So it’s hard to draw any conclusion other than than I am cursed.

Consider some of the fun problems we’re currently tackling. Most of the websites in the network use nsx.mazedev.com as their nameservers. These are registered with the domain registrar and so are seperate to the server which hosts mazedev.com itself. Yet if you take that server offline, all domains that are not .com or .net (such as .co.uk, .info and .org) stop resolving. Yep, get your head around that one.

Meanwhile I still can’t get any work on my project done, run my website backups or generally access anything at Burchett Place because of our connectivity issues. The replacement modem was supposed to arrive today, after all I ordered it middle of last week and payed for next day delivery. It hasn’t turned up. I can’t phone City Link because eBuyer haven’t given me a consignment number and I can’t phone eBuyer because they are closed for new year.

This results in me not being able to go home and do some revision because I need to be here with internet access to resolve these issues I am having with all the websites which is now starting to cost me lots of money, money which I don’t have. Still, who really wanted a degree anyway?