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[Feb. 25th, 2006|02:12 pm] |
Okay, so a few things that I have been thinking about recently:
The smoking thing that went through parliament recently is a *bad* way of getting people to quit smoking. I believe that it should be the *community* that makes decisions about "acceptable behaviour". Allowing 24 hour drinking reduced drinking related problems by delegating responsibility to the community, and there are many other examples of this kind of thing working surprisingly well. In many Mediterranean countries, alcohol has less strict laws governing it, and children are taught how to drink wine responsibly by their parents. As a result, there's less of a culture of "let's see how drunk we can get our mates". Making things illegal destroys any (gentle, but powerful and constructive) influences the community can have on the individual.
If I wanted to push something through to stop people smoking in "public enclosed spaces" or whatever it was, I would make sure all votes/announcements happened during summer, when people think "this won't affect me because I'm in the beer garden anyway" and forget about it. If you want to make something a law, it's much smoother if you can *avoid* public outrage when things are announced. In their credit, they're going to wait until summer 2007 before making it law, so it's at least possible for people to enforce it for the first 3 months.
Jabber/chat.cam.ac.uk/PyMSNt web registration form/Google Talk/libjingle have all been a bit stagnant recently. Apart from the fact that I saw the Gmail Jabber client the other day (and it's pretty damned swish), everything is a bit slow. The thing I really want to see is the patch to the web registration form[vague mention of it on this page] that lets you use Google Talk to talk to your MSN contacts. It's possible to do at the moment, but requires Psi and a decent connection to talk.google.com:5223 (which means ssh/PuTTY).
What we *really* need is a transport that will let you log onto one jabber account from another. That way, you could use the Google Talk client to log onto chat.cam.ac.uk when it comes online, or use your Google talk account like an AIM transport when they get that working. Second thoughts: If Google allow GT users to add AIM users natively, but they don't allow other jabber users to do so, they'd look a bit shit. Meh. I might see if I can write me a jabber-jabber transport that works on my home box over Easter after I get my Gig of RAM installed and work out what the hell's going on with ssh/dyndns that stops me being able to log on. |
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