And Slaters Go Plop

Ever accidentally hit ’send’ when composing an email before you’ve attached whatever file you were intending to send? And then you have to send a quick “DOH!” follow-up email with the forgotten attachment.

I do this all the time and it makes me look like a flaming eejit.

Well, a couple of weeks ago I upgraded from Ubuntu 7.04 to 7.10 and with it came an updated version of Evolution (the Linux equivalent of Outlook). They’ve added a feature that detects if you’ve typed the word ‘attached’ but not attached any files and gives you a warning. Brilliant!

Well, the waiting is over – here are the results of the Primary Perception Experiment:

Over the last six days I have been regularly standing in front of six envelopes containing a leaf each and focussing positive thoughts on just one of the envelopes that was chosen at random by the throw of a dice.

I got Sally to open the envelopes and place the leaves on top of their corresponding envelope. I then asked her to pick which one she thought looked the healthiest and whether it was markedly healthier than the others. She picked leaf number six (which appeared only slightly healthier probably due to the fact that it was the biggest leaf of the range) and stated that it wasn’t markedly healthier than the others. She then opened the envelope with the number of the leaf I was focussing my attention on and confirmed that the leaf corresponding to that number was not noticeably different to the others.

Here are the leaves after six days.

Leaves 1, 2 and 3. Number three was the randomly selected leaf that I lavished positive thoughts on for six days.

Leaves (3), 4, 5 and 6. Leaf number 6 was the one picked as being the healthiest by a very slim margin.

Conclusion:

There was no noticeable difference between the leaf that was the focus of positive thoughts and the others. I remained optimistic throughout the experiment and even began to suspect that it was actually working about half way through due to the observation that the envelope that the leaf was in that I was focussing on appeared to be warping less than the others. I have to admit that I was a little disappointed when it came to the ‘reveal’.

The friend who initially suggested this experiment mentioned in response to my request for thoughts on the setup that publishing photos of the leaves at the first step may have tainted the outcome by allowing any people who saw the photo to have interfered. I suspect that even if this were the case you would have to have at least six people projecting their positive thoughts to each of the leaves for the experiment to have turned out so evenly. And surely proximity would have an effect?

From this experiment I would have to say that the theory that projecting positive thoughts at a detached leaf keeps it from deteriorating faster than other, similar leaves was a failure.

If anyone knows of a reason why this experiment may have been flawed I would suggest that you try the experiment yourself (minus the flaws) and, if you have success, rerun the experiment a couple of times. If you consistently get positive results please let me know – I would love to give it a try.

Until then I’ll avoid the embarrassment of standing in front of dead leaves and thinking positive thoughts.

For the last few months I have spent countless hours battling with the proprietary (and open source) drivers for my ATI Radeon X700 card under Ubuntu. Yesterday I upgraded to Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon and spent a good four hours trying to get my dual screen setup working again but without any luck.

So, this morning I decided to give NVidia a go and went and purchased a new Asus EN7200GS card for a miserly NZ$80. Success! Straight off the bat too. Well, almost. I plugged it in, enabled the restricted driver, restarted and enabled the second monitor and it’s all working perfectly apart from the fact that I can’t run the ge-whiz Compiz Fusion fancy interface. Everything else is nice though – I’m finally running Google Earth and Stellarium smoothly too.

ATI have been making noises for a while now that they are going to release open source drivers but I say too little too late. I won’t be going back to ATI for a loooooong time.

If you’re running Ubuntu, have two screens and don’t want to ever have to type sudo vim /etc/X11/xorg.conf again then I recommend NVidia.

Recently I received a double-up of eight books I ordered. I’ve decided to give them away one by one (depending on interest) to whoever can give me the best reason as to why they should have it.

The first up is Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. It’s a hardcover and has a whole lot of old-timey illustrations. Despite the fact that it was written 150 years ago it’s still very readable and every bit as relevant as it was when it was first published. If ever there was a book that could be said to have changed the world this would be it.

Leave a comment below (or on richarddawkins.net or skepticsguide) stating why you should have this book. Your email address won’t show up in the comment and it won’t be used for anything other than to contact the winner. I’ll pay for postage anywhere in the world.

[edit: I've given it to Johnny_eh over on the skepticsguide forum]

I have a couple of good friends who believe that there is some kind of interconnection between living things – commonly called Primary Perception.

I had lunch with one of them yesterday and he said he’d tried an experiment many years ago where he had placed a number of leaves in separate envelopes and focussed positive thoughts on one of them over a period of time and when he removed them from their envelopes the one that had been the focus was noticeably more healthy than the others.

So, I decided that it would be a fairly easy experiment to replicate with a fairly simple claim to test. Rather than dismissing it out of hand, and in the name of true scepticism, I am going to perform the following experiment and record the results regardless of the outcome:

The claim:

If you think positive thoughts toward a pruned leaf over a period of time the leaf will respond by remaining healthier than the control leaves that don’t receive the same positive focus.

The setup:

I have selected six similar-sized new-growth leaves from a single area of a hedge and cut the stems at the same location.

I numbered six identical envelopes and got Sally (my lovely assistant) to randomly place a leaf in each envelope and seal the envelopes.

I then threw a dice to choose which envelope I will focus my attention on, wrote the number on a piece of paper and sealed it in an envelope in the drawer beneath the leaves. No one else knows which number was thrown.

In Progress:

I will continue to send positive thoughts toward the leaf in the selected envelope over the next week or so without opening any of the envelopes. The thoughts will be a mixture of happiness and goodwill toward the leaf as well as thoughts of nourishment and growth.

When the time is up I will get Sally to take the leaves out of their envelopes and have her determine if any of them look noticeably healthier than the others and which one/s they are. Without knowing the results I will then tell her which one I was focussing on and she will tell me whether there was any correlation. I will then take photos of the results and update this blog posting (probably on Wednesday 24th October).

If the results are that the one I was focussing on is noticeably healthier than the others it will be counted as a probable success and I will repeat the test to see if I can replicate the results. If I can replicate the results I will probably commit a significant portion of my life to researching the phenomenon.

If anyone has any issues with the methodology or any suggestions please let me know.

[edit: I've published the results in a new post]

“Man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the sport of every wind. With such persons, gullibility, which they call faith, takes the helm of reason, and the mind becomes a wreck.” – Thomas Jefferson 1822

After experimenting with CakePHP, Zend, Ruby on Rails, Django, Turbogears, Pylons and DotNetNuke I have given up on lumbering MVC frameworks. The kind of work I do is either too small or too specialised and using a MVC framework is either massive overkill or I have to spend days trying to hack the code to join a database table in just the way I want it or connect to a webservice.

This kind of sweeping statement is not going to earn me a lot of friends. The people who are into these frameworks are devout to say the least.

Probably my biggest gripe is that the whole idea of a MVC framework is to have separation of Model, View and Controller but if you ever build a site using one of these frameworks and attempt to uncouple these components you’ll quickly see that the touted separation is not all it’s cracked up to be.

The idea of having a templating language is inspiring but the fact that there is no defined standard for templating means that Smarty only works with PHP, Kid only works with Python and so on. I take it back; XSLT is a standard but it’s got to be the ugliest, most convoluted language out there.

Defining your model is exciting when you’re starting a Hello World project from scratch but can be pretty tiring when you’ve had to make it fit an existing database that doesn’t conform to the pluralised, *_id-ised requirements of your particular framework. And on top of that you have to relearn your particular framework’s substitutions for the SQL you’ve already had to learn. “DRY” anyone?

Don’t get me wrong, the MVC way of working makes a lot of sense. I use mod_rewrite call a Controller file which in turn feeds data from my Model class to my View class. But I don’t make my Model speak anything other than SQL if I’m accessing a MySQL database and I use <?php ?> blocks in my templates if I’ve chosen PHP as my language du jour. Why learn two additional, less powerful languages?

I agree that there are many situations where you would be better off developing a large website using a traditional MVC framework but I would be under any illusion that it’ll be any more flexible a year down the track.

For me, redemption would come in the form of a standardised templating language and a standardised set of classes for models that easily integrate into existing databases as well as being able to generate new ones.

If you’re creating a small or a fiddly website then I would advise you separate your data from your logic from your presentation but steer clear of the lumbering behemoths that occupy the MVC space at the moment.