Time to renew my server contract- maybe it's time to move to Appengine.

Spent a couple hours trying to figure out why my code didn't read a binary file format properly. The answer? Structs are aligned, of course! Swapping out sizeof() for the correct size did the trick.

There's a lesson here, somewhere, about checking assumptions. I'm going to try and ignore it.

Everything always comes in twos.

I am excited to see the announcement of Glide. Doing presentations on Linux has long been depressing. There's OpenOffice Impress, which is... the most popular, but it's slow, ugly, and awkward. Some people use LaTeX Beamer, but... I don't really have the TeX chops. I've seen Linux users hand-write HTML and run their presentations on a browser. I've seen two or three hacked up custom presentation programs (hell, I made one, with a little Clutter for transitions). But it looks like someone is really all the way this time, with a real UI and everything.

There is a git repository, the code is pretty clean looking, too. The file save format is json. It's possible to build it on the latest Ubuntu Lucid beta, but you need to hack up configure.ac and manually install gobject-introspection (the one in the repositories doesn't get found by autoconf).

I am so excited.

The recent hubbub over magnets influencing moral judgement is bothering me. We live in a society that puts a lot of stock in the idea of the soul, of each human being as an independent entity.

This isn't actually true, of course. Law and society recognizes that you can be compelled to do things against your will, that the circumstances of childhood can shape a person, that it's possible for human beings to not be whole- the retarded and the insane. Even the idea of the soul is now more of a linguistic construct, a verbal tic that has been drained of meaning.

Those exceptions aside, we still think of people as independent, and in control. "Free will" is the proper term. The march of science is slowly dropping a wrench into the works though: as we understand more about the brain, we get closer to being able to model it accurately. When that happens, everything breaks down.

The murder trial is my favorite example. A murder conviction requires malicious intent- otherwise it's manslaughter. Malicious intent is wrong because it is a thing entirely under the control of the soul who generated it, and so we punish it more severely. In some brave new world where we could turn a crank and model a human brain, you could prove that the malicious intent was not entirely under the control of the killer, that given those set of circumstances, any soul in that place would have broken the law and taken a life.

Now what? Does murder lose all meaning, because the murderer lacks responsibility? Maybe on a long enough timeline, this could all get sorted out, but as a pessimist who believes in broken and incomplete models, all I can think of is a twenty first (or twenty second) century mental eugenics, the malicious leading the credulous.