Interesting article in the Guardian on religion and politics brought to my attention by Jonny Baker: act justly. Nice to get an alternative point of view from the typical argument I’ve frequently encountered that if your’re Christian in NZ you should vote for a centre-right (neo-con) type party rather than the centre-left (neo-lib) ones. At the end of the day though both are “slaves” to the market. See Guardian Unlimited | Guardian daily comment | Don’t hand religion to the right.

For a related political posts see: Harbinger’s recent Evangelicalism & politics and Postmodernbible’s Abortion and All. As always read the comments.

Open-source programmer alleges Linux misuse | Tech News on ZDNet is an article that notes one man’s crusade for the GPL covering Linux to be upheld by those embedding it in consumer products.

Following up from Somethings wrong somewhere and the laser printer/consumable issue the old inkjet printer (~1996) Kim uses ran out of a colour (yellow?). Now new cartridge costs $75 – new printer with cartridge costs $70-80. The cost is replacing the whole cartridge even if most of the other colours are still not depleted – too wasteful in my reckoning.
So looking for a new printer that has individual replaceable colours, MacOSX/WinXP compatible and won’t break the bank. So far the Epson Stylus C65 comes close but when one colour runs out it won’t print at all until that cartridge is replaced. There are some old Canon S520′s floating around cheap too, as well as the Brother MFC210c multifunction thing that seems to do that same thing with ink. The old printer still works and I have several unopened black ink cartridges so it may end up going to a student for essay printing.

Pondering upgrading MT to a later version for a variety of reasons – nested categories being one of them and fixing the CSS Windows IE problems being another. Given AKMA’s problems doing this (see here) I’m thinking a clean install might be the best thing after doing an export and full backup. The CSS might look plain for a while before being “greenified”. If you have comments about the readability of the site (fonts, size etc.) now would be a good time to make them (That means you, Stu).

STUFF : TECHNOLOGY : DIGITAL LIVING – STORY : Blogs of our lives has a survey of new blogging technologies that will increase the amount of personal information that needs to be managed.

While the multimedia diary will continue to be stored across a number of devices, the real challenge, says the CSIRO’s Science Industry manager, Dr Ross Wilkinson, will be how we organise and access it.

“In some sense where it is stored and how it is stored is going to be less important than ‘Can we find the stuff?’. It is hard finding things on a messy desk just as it is hard finding things on a messy computer. How do we get support for that?”

Wilkinson points to the likelihood of an artificially intelligent electronic helper that will learn from our digital habits and favourites, decide what to record in our digital cache and then organise the information into our life story.

Like the messy desk image. I’m always looking for stuff on mine.

Some thoughts and reflections by Brian McLaren on Stanley Grenz. See Brian McLaren Remembers Stan Grenz.

Some statistics on the growth of Red Hat’s Fedora community-driven Linux distribution for web serving. Of interest to me as I used to administer and use some Red Hat web servers, though with Mac OS X on the desktop now I tend to use that for testing web stuff (e.g. various flavours of Movable Type are installed locally for testing and potentially to maintain a personal blog/database of research information).

Anyway, see Netcraft: Fedora makes rapid progress

For a breakdown of web servers by server type see March 2005 Web Server Survey Finds 60 Million Sites.

AKMA : You want this points to the free CityULike service for organising references and citations online, as well as forming virtual communities around research interests. The experimental import from BibTex format looks helpful as does the ability to set up watch lists on various journals.

Progressive evangelical theologian Stanley Grenz died of a massive brain aneurism about 4am 12th March. I first encountered Grenz’s work in the class “Gospel in Post-Christian Society” when his primer on postmodermism was prescribed reading. Over the years I’ve picked up various of his books, and have used bits of his understanding of the imago Dei in my own research. His book co-authored with Roger Olson “Who needs theology? An invitation to the study of God” is recommended to my students as a good example of someone who holds that theology is essentially linked with pastoral ministry. Much of my own theological journey has been accompanied by his writing – challenging me and getting me thinking about theology.

I’d always wanted to meet him. Praying for his family, friends, colleagues and students.

Disturbing. Very disturbing. Oh well, all those Amazon affiliate/associate links on people’s blogs probably aren’t contributing to the evil empire, are they? The irony of a blog pushing gender-equity having links to Amazon products that might suggest gender stereotyped gift-wrapping.

Amazon patent thinks pink | CNET News.com