Kevin Basil

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Sheesh. You give an inch, and they take a mile. I pointed out the FOLDOC entry on the UNIX Chimera only as an aside. Clearly, it is not in any way related to the Gecko-based Chimera. Any more than Tim Powell is related to Tim Powell, or Chris Davis to Chris Davis. The UNIX Chimera is a red herring, my friend. It has nothing to do with Gecko. (Although, one has to wonder at the genius of taking a word as a name for your product, when there is already a completely unrelated product with the same name and the exact same function! It’s not surprising, though. After all, a dictionary description of a Chimera sounds a lot like a fire-breathing lizard.)

BTW, my guess, confirmed by a real-world conversation earlier today, is that the Gecko code itself has the name Navigator hard-coded as the browser name. Since Chimera is only at 0.2.8, they probably haven’t worried too much about removing all references to the word in their code-base. I’d say other things are tops on their minds, like speed, stability, and clean display. All of which Chimera excels at, so far.

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The FBI has been given broad new powers. “Apparently, Attorney General Ashcroft wants to get the FBI back in the business of spying on religious and political organizations. That alone would be unconstitutional but history suggests the FBI won’t stop at passive information gathering.” The Russian Orthodox Church can tell you about letting your intelligence agencies have too much leeway in organizations where they have no business. At what point can we expect undercover agents as clerics? Time will only tell.

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As I mentioned earlier, there’s some confusion about the name of the Mac OS X browser based on Gecko. I pointed out that Hyatt uses Chimera exclusively. Chris Davis notes, “…the coders hacking on the project have seen fit to label it Navigator in more that one place and if the OS views it as such, then for me at least it is.” Well, it seems that Matt Judy uses Navigator to refer to the product. He says, “Navigator [is] (the fruit of the chimera project).”

This only makes matters worse.

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Chris Nelson was watching Bill Bennett take on Noam Chomsky on CNN. Evidently, Bill must have done very well against the intellectual mountain that is Chomsky. All Chris was able to do was resort to namecalling. Too bad; I would have liked to see what they said.

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I found this while reading mpt’s blog. System 26 is trying to host themes for Linux desktops. Themes are generally a Bad Thing for usability, but that’s not what upsets me the most here. “And no, we won’t be supporting GNOME. Its time for the Linux community to rally around one standard, and KDE team has proven their right to be that standard.” This is a steaming pile if I ever saw one. KDE has proven nothing to me except that they are too fond of eye-candy and visual bloat. Simplicity is important in usability. Any gains the KDE usability engineers (=cough!=) have made are lost in the barrage of gooey thingies.

I avoid KDE like the plague, and so should you. Ximian GNOME has far better usability in my book.

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Chris and I were having quite a discussion yesterday about Chimera, a port of the Mozilla Gecko engine to Mac OS X that uses native widgets. The crux of our discussion was, what is its name? Chris seemed to think it was Navigator, which is silly. Hyatt doesn’t call it that anywhere; either on his blog, or on the project’s Mozdev page.

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As expected, Chris has noticed my little tirade before. But when he links back to me, he links to my boring main site, not my blog! He could have at least linked to the actual article. Well, I guess I should just be happy that I have a friend. Which I am, BTW. But I hope Chris knows that whether I link to him or not.

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Chris Davis, not to be confused with Chris Naughton, complains that I do not link to his site. There, are you happy now?

He is using the b2 blogging scripts, albeit a version a bit more hacked. He has designed a very nice layout.

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Congratulations to Timothy and Lisa Marie Powell on the birth of their first daughter, Teresa Marie. Many years! Teresa came home yesterday from the hospital to join her three older brothers.

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David Coursey evidently forgot to enable his lameness filter. In a review of Netscape 7.0pr1 on ZDNet, he repeats the same mistake that Hyatt complains about in C|Net’s review. Opera took tabbed browsing from Mozilla, not the other way around. How is it possible that so many people who are charged with informing us could have missed the Clue Train?

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Hyatt complains that Netscape 7.0pr1 resets his home page to Netscape.com. Oh, yeah. Mozilla never does that, Hyatt. Does this page look familiar?

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A friend and I were discussing the relative a priori equivalence of all world religions last night. How does one argue for the truth of Christ to someone who is not a Christian? Or, more accurately, to a disillusioned Christian who mistakenly believes that an intellectual tabula rasa is possible? This is quite a conundrum, but it is one I have encountered several times. This is especially true because being a philosophy major who was outside the evangelical, pietist mainstream of Asbury College meant that my circle of friends was mostly composed of disillusioned Christians.

Fr. Thomas Hopko has published a paper that will form the keynote of the upcoming Thirteenth All-American Council of the Orthodox Church in America. In it, he summarizes the Orthodox doctrine on the church, “Theologically speaking, there are not many Orthodox Churches; there is only one. An Orthodox parish is this one Church or it is not an Orthodox church at all. Each parish, therefore, must be the one and only Church of Christ.” In this, he echoes patristic teaching with roots in Ss. Ignatius and Irenaeus, which has eloquently been restated by Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) in Being as Communion.

Each parish, then, is called to enflesh, or incarnate, the Body of Christ in a specific place. The very existence of the parish is the best argument for the truth of Christ that I know. It is only in a community of believing Christians, who are learning how to personally manifest Christ to each other and to corporately manifest Christ to a bewildered world, that Christ can truly be experienced as a reality. It is only there that Christ becomes real and not an abstract possibilty.

When you break a parish down into its constituent parts, it makes no sense that the whole should manifest Christ in the flesh. Hurt, anger, misunderstandings: human weakness abounds. And yet, somehow, in our weakness the strength of Christ is revealed.

Of course, some will find this totally unconvincing—incoherent, even. But to those who have met Christ in the flesh, nothing will convince them otherwise.

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Everyone has their little eccentricities. Mine is ice in soda. Jules doesn’t dig on swine. I don’t dig on watered-down Coke. Ice cubes are time-release water capsules. You wouldn’t walk over to the tap and put some water in your drink, would you? Well, maybe you would; that’s another kind of eccentricity. Anyway, I wouldn’t, unless I was cutting a good bourbon, and only then when I’m in a certain mood.

People sometimes say, “Oh, but it’s warm,” as if this was supposed to make me want ice. No; that makes me want it less. Heat, we learned in physical science class, just speeds up the clock on the time-release water capsules.

So, when I go to a fast-food joint and ask for a “Coke, no ice,” it strikes me as a fairly simple request. I realize that the monkeys who take my orders must not get that one very often, but why should I return to an establishment if they cannot even get that right? Some people are allergic to tomatoes; are you going to screw that up, too?

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Rob Walker spent three weeks studying the evening news spectacles of the Big Three. His conclusion? “When I started my three-week project, I was interested in how the evening news might save itself. By the end, I was asking a different question: Why bother?”

His scathing critique rings so true for me; it made me wonder why and when I stopped watching the evening news. I realized that it is because six pm is such a horrible time for me. For the last two and a half years, I have gotten off work at six. That pretty much kills that time-slot for me. I have weaved in and out of touch with national and world events.

Currently, I get the majority of my news by listening to NPR while I drive to and from work. Though perhaps not as good as getting the Washington Times on my radio, it at least keeps me relatively informed.

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I find it really amusing that CBS uses their slogan, “It’s All Here!” with an image of David Letterman for their 404 (Page not found) error.

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