Chris Worfolk's Blog

it’s going on 3am. I have to be up reasonably early tommorow so I was hoping to be in bed by midnight. Why am I still up at this time then? Trying to get my new computer working, that’s why. Yet it seems no matter what I do, it refuses to work.

As soon as I enable RAID then it refuses to boot as it just hangs at “verifying DMI pool data.” Yet if I turn it off, it boots fine I think. I managed to narrow down the problem as when I removed my RAID-1 and just had all the disks as non-raid entities though still controlled by the RAID controller it booted. Fully and everything, it normally hangs at GRUB when RAID is disabled but this booted Ubuntu and everything.

However when I tried to stick my DVD-ROM back in it refused to verify the DMI pool data again so basically I cannot re-create the problem with any degree of certainty, it just won’t work no matter what I do.

What is more annoying is that I shouldn’t be troubleshooting this pile of crap. Because I have a pile of crap laptop on the desk next to me that I need to back up all the data on before it goes back because it’s packed in working. Not that it will be going back any time soon because my pile of crap phone refuses to call DHL. It just ends the call as soon as a dial. Erm, WTF?

Basically I hope the people who made all this technology burn in the fiery depths of hell. I hate computers.

Having recently read Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion I followed it up by reading one of Alister McGrath’s responses to the book, The Dawkins Delusion. McGrath opens the book saying he mainly intended it to be read by Christians wanting to be able to respond to the questions of friends who had recently read The God Delusion though also hoped that the odd open minded atheist would read it too.

After reading the critical response though I can’t help questioning whether McGrath actually read The God Delusion. For example he claims that Dawkins suggests that removing religion would end all violence. An idea Dawkins of course dismisses. He also seems to suggest Dawkins believes natural selection by evolution happens by chance. While most of The God Delusion is about God and religion, a hefty sum of it is Dawkins explaining how people misunderstand that evolution works by chance and indeed in reality, is the complete opposite of chance.

Also his critism of Dawkins’ discussion of the meme is interesting because he almost seems to go beyond the idea that the meme cannot be applied like this (which is perhaps a fair critism) to suggest the meme simply doesn’t exst. He seems to think of it as a hypothesis rather than a phenomenon that has simply been named. Perhaps he has never experianced a catchy tune, but if I was to take a while guess I would probably bet against that.

In the end, the book is simply a character attack. The criticisms that Dawkins insists rather than suggests things is far more overpowered by McGrath’s own convictions, insisting Dawkins is unquestionably a fundamentalist without any real argument to back up the claim while acusing Dawkins of doing the same thing. He goes to great lengths to call Dawkins a variety of names and insist his writing is unscientific without let up or discussion of anything else.

The book fails to provide any kind of counter arguments as McGrath set out to do. His constant repetition of the idea that Dawkins is a dogmatist doesn’t leave much room for answering the questions raised in The God Delusion or provide answers provide the generic theist argument of “because I know you’re wrong.” The unscientific methods of Dawkins are not disected, simply asserted as being wrong.

There is a constant repetition of the idea of Atheist fundamentalism, an idea that can’t really exist because there isn’t really such a thing as Atheism as that implies it is a belief and it isn’t, it is simply a lack of a belief. Therefore how you can be fundamental about not believing in God or gods is beyond me. Secondly, McGrath does what most moderates do in demonising fundamentalism. Even if this was an example of fundamentalism (which it isn’t) why is this obviously a bad thing? Fundamentalism means following one’s beliefs strictly, surely if you have a holy book written or inspired by God you should follow it? That is fundamentalism. It is obviously not a corruption of religion, the corruption is religious moderation, the picking and choosing (or as it could be described, secularising) of God’s holy word. This apparent attack on Dawkins actually turns out to be a complement (albeit unintentionally) that Dawkins has the convictions to stick by his beliefs (or lack of them) when analysed for what it really is.

Anyone who has read Dawkins writing I believe will see he is not as anti-religion as theists would have us belief. He isn’t interested in politics, in making people feel better or worse, in what impact things have on society – he is only interested in one thing, the truth. All other concerns are irrelevant, you only have to read one or two of his books to realise this is what he thinks and this surely shows he is the heart of a true scientist. He has no interest in being anti-religious, he is simply a scientist.

Which begs the question, what is going to happen when someone who is actually anti-religious moves against the lumbering giant of religion?

It’s often not until you loose something that you actually realise the value of what you have. That seems to be true of Windows. Having got Ubuntu running on my new server it really makes me appreciate just how well Windows works straight out of the box.

The stability as well. Ubuntu keeps crashing on boot up. It’s also very slow compared to Windows, it needs time to think to do everything and this is a brand new machine. It’s configuration also leaves a lot to be desired, not only is it simply missing the resolution I want (it’s not a problem with the monitor as I’m running the resolution on my Windows box, could be the graphics card though so I don’t want to point the finger too sharply at Ubuntu) but it has also misaligned the screen so that it’s too far to the right leaving me with a black strip down the left hand side and my shut down button missing off the right side of the screen.

As for configuration, I’m not taking to the Linux file structure. It wasn’t really a problem in my test box when I only had one hard drive but this whole unified file system doesn’t make much logical sense to me. I can see why it would be good but I much prefer having my hard drives and optical drives are separate entities. Not that it’s much of a problem as Ubuntu is blissfully unaware of my other two hard drives. I know I have to mount them but the point is, Windows would just do this for me. Ubuntu doesn’t even seem to have any kind of device manager to let me set these things up.

In my quest to get RAID working I re-install a DVD drive into the machine and stick the Ubuntu install CD in. It takes a good 10 minutes to boot LiveCD up because of the endless string of Buffer I/O errors that appear. Once it finally loads I decided GParted might do what I need. I’m wrong of course, it can’t detect any devices. Any. So I decided to try a re-install. Same thing.

Giving up on that I decide to play around with the BIOS some more. I eventually manage to find the option to enable RAID (it’s disabled by default) and now there is a RAID screen that appears for literally no more than a second with instructions on how to set up RAID. My manual for my motherboard hasn’t heard of any of this btw. In fact I’m not even sure what does it as I changed two settings from SATA mode to RAID mode (apparently if you use RAID you aren’t using SATA).

Out of interest when I first got back in after my break the machine wouldn’t do anything. I would turn it on but no output to the monitor or beeping. Now when I try to boot it stops at verifying DMI data pool. This is after the JMicro stuff spends a minute or two detecting my DVD-ROM every time I turn it on. So I insert the Edgy release and see if that will work. That takes me to the boot screen which locked the first time. Second time lucky maybe?

It spends a bit of time loading using the progress bar that goes back and forth. This then goes mental, throws a load of random characters accross the screen, freezes for 30 seconds, goes black with a blinking cursor, goes totally black then loads a blank orange desktop. Oh and guess what, yes, it’s misaligned the screen again. Edgy can’t work out the correct time like version 7 can do apparently. Having entered the settings the partion manager loads. It sees all 3 hard drives despite the fact two are now supposed to be configured in RAID.

I try to boot up the fresh install only for it to hang on the verifying DMI pool data. I go back into the BIOS and set everything back from RAID mode to SATA mode. This time it passes the DMI pool data verification and prints the words GRUB (the boot launcher) underneith before hanging.

I hate computers.

I think I might be tipsy. I still appear to be able to write coherantly (ha, I guess I’ll find out when I read this tomorrow) and I seemed unaffected on the walk home though I’m getting that kind of delayed feeling type thing where everything seems to take a little longer to reach the brain.

It’s been a while since I hit Bondi and so having got exams out of the way it was time to pay another visit. Which worked out quite well with Rachael’s current visit to see Michelle. We hit Bourbon at 8 and then after stopping off at The D (at which Claire ate some food, mu ha, even if it was only 2 chunky fries) we hit Bondi and danced the night away. Well, for a bit, we left at like 2.

All in all the day made a bit of a recovery after this morning’s not so great start. I either slept through my alarm or turned it off in my sleep or something because I woke up at 1:03, having been supposed to start work at 1. My mum kindly gave me a lift so that I could make it in for 1:30 though.

It’s been quite a long weekend as we didn’t get out until 4am on Saturday and then 3am on Sunday. Indeed, we were still outside on Saturday when the openers turned up.

I also want to briefly discuss Bondi’s sound system. They seem to have plenty of speakers although their bass is disappointing. It sounds kind of over driven and while seems to handle the higher frequency of bass well, and the very low frequency that makes the floor shake, the low audible level seems fairly non-existant. I’m not sure whether this is just the quality of the audio they are using though as it all seems to come through a computer so they may just be playing MP3s as some songs sounded better than others. It was also interesting that they seemed to have floor monitors mounted to the ceiling.

As for the lighting rigs, they had two rigs of mainly par lamps which just had a coloured filter and turned on and off as well as one or two moving heads on one of them. They also had two rigs of scanners one of which had a large but disappointing strobe light on as far as I could tell. They also had two normal lights just shining onto disco balls. The point is, I recon we can match this system next year ;).

While most blogs contained this post like a week ago I unfortunately did not have that luxury. I finished my final exam yesterday, Principles of Corporate Strategy. I was annoyed by the exam, I got everything except one question which was really basic stuff that I should have known. Unfortunately I was missing a lecture or two worth of slides (I don’t know why I was missing the week 3 one was I turned up to that, the Rationalist Week one I genuinely missed) but even so, I’ve done SWOT analysis before, prior to my arrival at uni.

I’m a bit disappointed I don’t really feel any relief though, it’s not a “oh it feels so good for them to be over and done with.” I just feel like I always do. I suppose it’s because I know it’s not going to get any better. I am working in labs next week then at The D with double the amount of shifts (probably) the week after, then after that it’s back to full time so I’m not really having a break between exams finishing and working. Indeed, having finished my exams yesterday I am going to work later today),

Overall it’s been an alright exam period I guess. I’ve done well on 5 out of 6 exams but I’ve almost certainly failed one of them. While I scored highly on the coursework I need to mass the module because I need it for my third year program and also I got a 38 and a 44 last semester so I really can’t get any bad module marks as they need to drag everything up.

It’s been a while since I used to walk into a lab and it would be totally empty. The last time I can really remember it happening (though it’s probably happened since) was last summer when I would walk into Eniac in like the middle of July. While summer has once again returned it’s still June, term time June in fact. Having just walked into DEC-10 though I find I’m the only person here. These freshers are just rubbish :p.

Ok so I unpack everything. I get the case out and take the thumb screws out of the back. After 10 minutes of fiddling I finally get the panels out. My understanding was the motherboard tray came out. It apparently doesn’t. This is after I had, had to unscrew two fans or whatever to get it to. Anyway, time to put the motherboard in.

I screw in my risers (once I’ve found them), and pull out the original back ports plate that came with the case and put my motherboard one in. It doesn’t fit. After 20 minutes of forcing it and bending my brand new case out of shape it goes in. I screw my motherboard in place as best I can with the few screws they provide for said purpose. Next I come to put the power supply in. Except, it won’t go in while the motherboard is on. So I unscrew the motherboard, put the PSU in, put the motherboard back on, screw it back on.

The second set of screws I try are long enough to actually screw in the PSU. Two of the four holes on the back of the case line up with the four screw holes in the PSU. Next for the CPU. I have to tear my way in as the box doesn’t open. I find a CPU fan inside making the one I bought rather redundant. Nice of them to tell me. After working out which bits are supposed to unclip I drop my CPU in place. Thanks to the clever design it doesn’t feel like it’s in right no matter which way you put it in. I eventually decide on a way and lock it into place.

Anyway I come to put my CPU fan in. Guess what? That’s right, the motherboard needs to come out again! I get the backplate in and put the motherboard back in. Now for the thermal paste. I’m a little confused as to why the cap is just metal with no hole for the paste to come out of. Eventually after a phone call with Maths Chris I get it sorted and manage to get the cooler on.

The memory goes in without much problems even though the slots and different styles for no apparent reason. The hard drives also slot in ok although they do move around a little. This seems standard with modern computers though.

Now I need to attach all the power cables. The ATX cable goes in fine. The case fans don’t match the motherboard though. Neither does the speaker / power LED / hhd LED / etc, there is like 10 of them, none of them match what is on the motherboard. Ironically enough, the instructions for the motherboard give something different to both what the case has and what the motherboard has! Not that I can really read much of the motherboard instructions as the writing is almost all in Chinese but it has a few English words to table the components as well as a diagram that doesn’t match up to what they offer.

I also begin to unpack the graphics card. The box has no simple way of opening. I manage to get a flap out only to find the box is divided into two and that everything is in the other seemingly unreachable compartment when keeping the box intact. Not that the card fits anyway.

So currently I need some taller screws because the ones supplied with the case aren’t tall enough to actually screw anything in, I need to work out how to wire my front side USB ports in because there is no English information in the manual and I need to solve the problem that the power LED wire takes 3 pins (even though it only has two wires and the middle pin doesn’t do anything) when there is only 2 on the motherboard as there should be.

This is why our industry has such a high failure rate.

It worried me how much my life resembles Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Ok so I went to place the order for my new computer with CCL last night. However it still had my invoice address set as Bodington Hall and you can’t change it online. So this morning I rang customer services. They updated it to my home address for me but because my card is registered to my university address they told me that I would have to phone sales up and order it manually.

So I phoned sales up and went through all the components over the phone. They told me they were having credit card problems and passed me through to accounts (as expected) who went through a few details with me and told me that my credit card was being declined and I had to phone Egg up.

I phoned Egg up who told me the reason it had been declined was the order was more than my available balance. Indeed the amount of the purchase was more than it was showing on my shopping cart.

Now I had a problem. I didn’t have enough money on my Egg card to make the purchase. I didn’t have enough money left in my bank account because I had moved it all over to my Egg card to pay for the computer though. It’s my sound system all over again. At least I didn’t think I had enough money in the account, I couldn’t check my bank account because my laptop is dead. At least it would allow me to take a photo of the error – or it would if my camera would let me take any photos but it won’t.

I phone CCL back and explain the problem and they eventually realise that it is because the over the phone orders use trade counter prices rather than internet prices and I have to order via the internet to get the discount price.

I eventually make it on to my bank account to find I have some money spare which allows me to make the purchase on my Lloyds TSB credit card but will need to move some more funds into my bank account as soon as possible to make sure it covers it. Also I was trying not to use my Llyods TSB card as I’m not sure the direct debit is setup yet and it means I will probably have too much money on my Egg card as they will probably take a direct debit payment anyway and there is no easy slash free way to transfer money back to my bank account from my Egg card.

After them declining my Llyods TSB credit card once they finally accept it and I reach the confirm your order screen which informs me that my invoice address hasn’t changed and still says Bodington Hall. I’m back on the phone with CCL customer services.

After 10 minutes on hold I decide to put my phone on speaker phone disrupting my speaker system so I have to turn it off. 19 minutes on hold and someone finally answers. They explain that whoever updated my billing address when I called before actually messed it up so it didn’t update properly. He sorts it for me and tells me to give it 5 minutes for it to update and then go through the checkout again.

So I give it 5 minutes and head to the checkout system again. At which point I come accross a server error preventing me from going any further. On the upside it’s now displayed on the rogues gallery on Server Problems Maybe?

Giving it 10 minutes to fix itself, I’m still getting. I take a closer look at the error and it seems to be a database fault. My suspicion is that when they cancelled my phone order they either also cancelled my basket order online or just wiped all the pending orders on my account or something. I log in using Internet Explorer, choose a new product in my empty basket and try to go through the checkout – it works.

So I go back to Firefox, open up all the product pages, empty my basket and begin adding everything again. I then refresh my basket. It’s empty again. I work out it’s because it has logged me out so I logged back in and it all re-appears. Finally it lets me go to the checkout. You have to appreciate that each step is taking quite a while because CCL is going strangly slow in recent times.

I finally click confirm, it should finally be all done!

It’s not. I get some ClickSafe registration from Llyods TSB. It’s non-optional. I go through this and open up my email client because it told me it needed email activation. No email came. However, I did get an order confirmation email from CCL so hopefully it’s finally gone through! And all it took me was 2 hours on the phone to people.

Having had a few interesting conversations over the past week I felt it important that I note down my recent thoughts on the subjects we had discussed. I then promptly forgot what I wanted to say. This post then forms the jigsaw pieces that I can still remember from the original post I had envisaged.

The debates, at least the ones I want to discuss revolved around the idea of the scope of science. This is something that has also just crept up in the book I am currently reading, The Dawkins Delusion. While the debate on the meaning of life itself is not the same debate as whether science has a scope or not but is often hauled up as an example of a question that is best left to philosophy because it is outside of the scope of science.

This proposal relies on how you define the meaning of life however. Do you take the scientific meaning of life (why we exist from a Darwinian perspective) or do we look for something, and I use the term loosely, deeper, something that cannot be found in science but requires us to look somewhere else, for example philosophy.

If you take the former approach then the question is fairly simple to answer. Life seems to be created to reproduce and continue it’s own existence, this is certainly true on a genetic level. The purpose of life is to create more life. Of course it would be, otherwise life would not be so successful and would eventually die off.

If you take the latter approach to the question then perhaps it would be out the scope of science. How can what most people would describe as the cold touch of empiricism and rationalism provide an answer to such question as what is the purpose of my life? Therefore if this is true, a case can easily be made to suggest such questions are indeed outside of the scope of science.

However, this position has a problem. Because of course, there is no meaning of life. Such questions cannot stand up to attacks from common sense because there clearly isn’t a universal meaning of life. We’re not going to get to the end of the game and find out that we achieved or failed to achieve the stated goals (unless you expect your death to consist of you waking up in some kind of Back to Reality senario to find you only scored 4%).

After all, how could such a universal constant be applied? Any such meaning of life must be subjective, even if on a society level it would still be human created. After all, if not it would have to be applied to all living things. How is a plant supposed to achieve it’s full potential? How are dophins with their conscious minds but lack of schools of philosophy supposed to work out what it is?

If it is subjective then obviously it has to real meaning because we can change it as we see fit and has only the significance we grant it (and may choose to grant it none).

There is of course one exception to the rule here, and that concerns theology. If indeed a religion is right (or even the idea of theism is right even if all major religions are wrong in their own special way) and there is a God who created human beings for a purpose then there could well be an objective, universal, meaning of life.

Such an idea however is purely a theological question and not a philosophical one. Therefore it would seem unjust to have such a connection develop between philosophy and the meaning of life. It would also seem a waste. Surely the time of philosophers could be used to develop our knowledge about, and I again use the term slightly loosely, real things. Then again, perhaps they do, and like most of society I have simply been impressioned with a pattern of philosophy trying to answer the meaning of life when in fact no philosopher is actually concerning themself with such a question. I suspect however that this is not the case.

I also suspect that this is the area that has made me feel a gap between philsophy and the real world. I have always felt the two are somewhat detached and this is a senario that demonstraits why fairly well. Presuming that the theologians are wrong, there is no meaning of life, it has no connection to the real world, no practical applications and ultimately no meaning.

But of course this is not true of philosophy of as a whole. It has great value in the subjects of how we reason and the trust we place in our methodologies (though I would be reluctant to add metaphysics to this list as most questions arising in this subject seem to be, like the meaning of life, either a question that is actually under the domain of a different subject or simply a non-existent topic).

To summarise what I think I’ve said in this post, the question of the meaning of life is either a question for theology or a question for science. Presuming the latter is true, it’s importance is greately over-valued in that the answer only serves to aid our understanding of biology slightly better.

It’s been a long week. I had IS23 on Tuesday morning which went quite well, followed by GI21 yesterday which I probably failed (ha, probably, I almost certainly failed the exam which is worth 60% of the module so I’m screwed) then I had SE24 today which was a breeze. I found it slightly harder than expected but I think most people found it harder than expected (probably more so than I did) which is probably a positive sign. Just one more exam to go now!