WordPress and Serendipity Compared

Which is the better blog platform, Serendipity (s9y) or WordPress (WP)? I’d been a confirmed s9y advocate for a long time, in fact since 2004, when I switched to it from WP because WP had eaten my database. I was happy with s9y for many years, but in the last year or so I got the impression that it was beginning to show its age. There seemed to be fewer posts on the forums and the promised upgrade was taking its time to appear (though it now has); there had been few if any new plugins or themes.

I decided to start a new blog on WP and see how I got on. This is now what I use for all new posts (although the previous blog is also available as well). I thought it would be worth while to summarise the main differences I’ve found between the two platforms.

Upgrades

As I already mentioned, upgrading is sluggish on s9y. On the other hand upgrades of WP (both the main software and plugins) happen quite frequently, which is reasonably reassuring from the security point of view.

Appearance

There is a huge number of plugins and themes for WP – far more than for s9y. Actually, I’m all for plainness and simplicity so I don’t need most of these things but it’s still good to have them available.

Adding and editing posts

Here WP definitely has the lead. In s9y either you are viewing the blog in the way that a visitor would or you are logged in as administrator. Admittedly you can see a preview of any post you are writing or editing, but once you save it and return to viewing mode, that’s it. If you belatedly spot a typo in what you’ve just saved you have to login again as administrator. This can be quite annoying.

In WP, in contrast, you can combine both modes quite easily. Once you have logged in you can both see the entries as a visitor would and also edit them via a number of buttons on the top line. These allow you, for example, to add a new post, edit an existing post, or edit a static page (e.g. the frontispiece). All these things, and others, can be done without logging in again. This is a more flexible arrangement and allows considerably faster working.

Getting help

There’s a vast amount of documentation for WP on the internet so it’s almost always easy and quick to solve problems or get answers to questions. For s9y there is practically nothing apart from the forums on the s9y website. In the past I’ve had good and quick responses here from helpful people, for which I’m grateful, but activity now seems to be declining steeply, which to me suggests a shrinking user base.

In conclusion

Regrettably (because, no doubt absurdly, I have a lingering sense of loyalty to s9y) I have to say that for me there’s really no contest; WP is now the way to go. If it were possible I’d migrate all my content from s9y to WP but it isn’t so I shall have to continue to run two blogs in parallel.

New feature in OpenBSD

OpenBSD has introduced a new utility in the most recent version (6.6 – now in -current). This is sysupgrade, which makes upgrading the system even more painless than it was previously.

sysupgrade downloads the necessary files to /home/_sysupgrade, verifies them with signify(1), and copies bsd.rd to /bsd.upgrade.

sysupgrade by default then reboots the system. The bootloader will automatically choose /bsd.upgrade, triggering a one-shot upgrade using the files in /home/_sysupgrade.

This is brilliant. I do upgrades to -current about once a week. Previously I had to reboot with a new bsd.rd and connect to a mirror to do the upgrade. Downloading the files took some time (more than 20 min) during which the computer was not available for work.  Now I just run sysupgrade and everything happens automatical. I can continue to use the computer while the files are being downloaded, after which the system reboots with the new upgrade. This is a major advance in ease of use – congratulations to OpenBSD!

Incidentally it also works for upgrading -release versions; it knows whether you are using -release or -current.

 

Vim – how to avoid hjkl confusion in Insert mode

 

 

Are you a Vim user? Do you like to use the hjkl keys to move the cursor in Normal mode, like me? If you do, perhaps you’ve experienced the annoyance of forgetting that you are in Insert mode, only to find something like hhhhh or kkkkk appearing on the screen instead of the expected cursor movement. I have to admit that this still happens to me, even after many years. How can it be avoided?

Vim experts advise that you should stay in Normal mode most of the time; it should be the default. I agree, and I do try to remember to do this.  Another idea, which I’ve tried in the past, is to make key mappings such as Alt+h and Alt+l  to move the cursor in both Insert and Normal modes and disable the defaults. But then you’ve lost the simplicity of the one-key hjkl which was the main reason to go down this route in the first place.

The solution I’ve adopted is based on <https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7614546/vim-cursorline-color-change-in-insert-mode>. Here is the code I’m using in .gvimrc with a dark colour scheme (Murphy). (The last character in the bottom line is a zero.)

set cursorline
autocmd InsertEnter * highlight CursorLine guifg=white guibg=grey25
autocmd InsertLeave * highlight CursorLine guifg=white guibg=red
set guicursor+=n-v-c:blinkonO

This gives a light grey cursor line in Insert mode which stand out on the dark background but not too starkly.

Insert mode

In Normal mode the cursor line becomes red.

Normal mode

I use the default cursor, which is block in Normal mode and 25% in Insert mode. Both are white; I’ve set the Normal mode cursor not to blink.

I find that this set-up acts as an effective reminder of which mode I’m in.

New light on the origin of complex life?

The story of how the first complex nucleated cell (eukaryote) arose is a fascinating one – see Nick Lane’s Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of life. An article related to this has now appeared in New Scientist.

This describes the discovery of an archaeon (an organism that looks like a bacterium although it is really quite different) in deep water off the coast of Japan.  It lives in association with at least one and probably two other kinds of microbe.  The crucial event in eukaryote generation is thought to have been the swallowing of a bacterium by an archaeon, and the scenario described in the article looks like the kind of situation where this might occur. However, that doesn’t answer the really important question: was this a one-0ff extremely unlikely event or something that was more or less bound to happen sooner or later?

Given the fact that it eukaryotes appear only comparatively recently in the course of evolution, it still looks likely that it was a lucky fluke, in which case there is probably plenty of life in the universe but almost all of it is at the microbial level of complexity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

On not finishing reading books

I generally don’t like giving up on books once I start reading them. As a rule I only do so if I decide they are not worth reading, in which case I don’t feel bad about jumping ship. But it’s harder to explain what happens in other cases, when I think the book is worth reading but for one reason or another I just don’t continue. An example of this is Hilary Mantel’s novel about Thomas Cromwell, Wolf Hall. I got half-way through this several years ago and then started reading something else, though I can’t remember what. I always meant to go back to Wolf Hall but never did, and now probably never will.

A more humiliating kind of failure is giving up owing to a book’s sheer impenetrability. This happened to me in 2012, when I bought Terrence Deacon’s Incomplete Nature. I’d read his previous book, The Symbolic Species, which still seems to me to be one of the most impressive accounts of the biology of language that I’ve come across, so I started the new book with enthusiasm; but  I quickly found myself completely bogged down. It was some relief later to learn that the philosopher Colin McGinn found it all but unreadable so I’m not alone. I still haven’t given up completely and hope to come hack to it at some point in the future.

In the most recent case of giving up I can’t claim the excuse of obscurity. I’d started reading two books by Raymond Tallis, The Black Mirror and Of Time and Lamentation. Both are about time and mortality, which are themes that I think a lot about. They are written from a humanist standpoint that I find congenial. On the face of it, Tallis is exactly the kind of writer I’m looking for. His books have received widespread respect and praise from reviewers and I can understand why. So why did give up?

It isn’t that Tallis writes obscurely. In fact, the problem is almost the opposite. I’ve seen him described as a writer’s writer, which I think means he is a mannered stylist. He writes poetry as well as prose (and admits to a liking for ‘poetic prose’). Reading him is an aesthetic experience as well as an intellectual challenge. An added bonus, you might think.

I got these books from The London Library. I’d expected there would be a waiting list for them, but to my surprise there wasn’t; and when I received the books I saw, again with surprise, that they had only been taken out once or twice a year since their acquisition. So perhaps I’m not the only one to have given up.

Part of the reason for this may have been identified by Andrew Brown in a review in The Guardian. He wrote:

Raymond Tallis’s books are not often easy to summarise, and not always easy to finish. … Although he is capable of writing with great clarity and force about really important things, there is a sense that he is conducting an argument with the people he has read, rather than the people who might be reading him.

This is an astute observation, but there is something else as well.  Here is a passage from a section headed ‘The unknown future’ in Of Time and Lamentation, which illustrates one of the stylistic tropes Tallis uses (he has many others) and also indirectly helps me to see why I’m having difficulty in reading his books.

When I began this book, I estimated that I had an actuarial advantage of about 7,000 or 8,000 tomorrows compared with my 22,000 yesterdays. Quite a few todays later, the number of the former is significantly less and of the latter rather more. I have of course a clearer idea of the number of my yesterdays than tomorrows and can calculate their number precisely because there is a precise number to calculate. This highlights a more general point, in addition to the mathematical one that I am more than three-quarters through the time that Raymond Tallis is a walking, talking, thinking enterprise; namely, that the uncertainty in “over three-quarters” comes from my tomorrows rather than my yesterdays; I know what is on the numerator but not on the denominator. While I can be certain that I have just under 3,500 fewer tomorrows than lay before me when I began this book a decade or so ago, I do not know which tomorrow will be the tomorrow after which there will be no more tomorrows.

I apologise for this lengthy quotation (it could have been even longer; the theme continues for several more lines, which I haven’t cited), but it’s needed just because length is important to Tallis. Passages like this demand to be read slowly and savoured. The meaning could have been conveyed more succinctly, but that isn’t how Tallis writes. One reads him, perhaps, as much for the style as for the meaning. At the same time, the meaning does matter. The books are full of ideas, and each one is put through its paces to the maximum possible extent.

As a result, this is a long book – over 600 pages of small print. And it isn’t Tallis’s only book, far from it. He’s been astonishingly prolific. Until his retirement in 2006 he was a professor of geriatrics with an interest in neuroscience. While he was a clinician, we are told, he used to write every morning between 5 and 7 o’clock before setting off to the hospital; since his retirement he has been a full-time author, now with over thirty books to his name. To do his ideas anything like justice would demand a huge investment of one’s own time and thought.

Without doing the calculation, based on the passage I quoted just now I expect that I have fewer tomorrows left than Tallis is likely to have. Do I want to devote them to a study of his work, when there is so much else out there to read for as long as my eyes hold out? The answer, perhaps regrettably, has to be no.

The scholar and critic F.L. Lucas, who wrote the best book on writing style that I know, was relaxed about not reading books to the end. ‘There are many, no doubt, that it is a pity not to; but many more where he that runs and skips, reads quite enough.’ I have decided to follow his advice in this instance. (Incidentally, I’d love to know what Lucas would have said about Tallis’s writing – he was a strong advocate of brevity.)

Antony Flew’s impenetrable sentence

In a paper titled “Parapsychology, Miracles, and Repeatability” Antony Flew writes as follows about David Hume’s view of miracles.

Since a miracle must essentially involve an overriding of the ordinary order of Nature, presumably by some supernatural power, there is bound to be an irresolvable conflict of evidence. Since all evidence for insisting that some conceivable occurrence (were it, in fact, to have occurred) constituted such an overriding of the natural order must at the same time and by the same token be evidence against the contention that the particular princple precluding occurrences of this particular kind is in fact an element in that order and, of course, also the other way about.

The sentence I have italicised must have a fair claim to be the most opaque I have ever encountered in a professional piece of writing.

[Source: The Hundredth Monkey, edited by Kendrick Frazie (Prometheus Books, 1991]

 

Derek Parfit – Biographical Article

As noted on my Personal Choice page, Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons is a book that has a particular resonance for me, as indeed it does for many people. Thanks to a link in Parfit’s Wikipedia page I found this detailed biograhical article, How to Be Good, from the New Yorker. You can download or print it for free and it’s excellent, so I’m linking to it here for anyone who shares my fascination with this extraordinary philosopher.

Book review: The Last Neanderthal, by Claire Cameron

Rose is a Canadian archaeologist working in France who finds two skeletons in the floor of a cave. One is of a female Neanderthal, the other of a male modern human. They are lying face to face, as if looking into each other’s eyes. The temptation to interpret the find as a burial of two friends or lovers is strong, of course, and Rose has to struggle to maintain her scientific objectivity in the face of this. Like Cameron herself, she holds the view that the Neanderthals were in no way inferior to ourselves, and her discovery seems to support this. Continue reading.