Religion & Politics

This is bound to be a bit of a hot topic...

There are several churches in my area that have signs enabling them to post a short message which usually gets updated every week or so. Most of these messages are witty and usually have a religious undertone to them. For instance, a church around the corner from my house has been displaying "Some questions Google can't answer" for the past month. Witty and thought provoking, especially in the digital age.

While I was driving today, I passed a church that displayed a message that left me with a sour taste. The message was...

"Funny, you can't read a bible in school but you can in prison"

The reason this message bothered me was due to it's ignorance, which means "The condition of being uneducated, unaware, or uninformed", rather than any sort of religious tone or message.

There is no rule or law the prohibits someone from reading any religious text in any public school. If you want to read the bible during study hall or lunch, you are most certainly allowed to do so. It is your choice.

One of the major principles in the founding of this country was the right to religious freedom, and since the government helps fund the public school system, which was established to provide equal access to education for everyone, this holds true there as well. If public schools were to offer a class in Christianity, then, in the interest of fairness and equal treatment for all, they would be required to offer classes for all other religions, regardless of how many students in that school belonged to or were interested in it.

The simplest plan of action to take, one that does not offer bias to any religion, is to not offer any religious teaching at all in public schools. The responsibility for teaching any religion should belong solely to the followers of that religion, be it friends, family members, or religious leaders. Most organized religions already offer this teaching as part of their routine worship.

Peace is built on respect and appreciation of character, where religion is only a part of the whole. I may not personally like or agree with your beliefs, but I certainly respect and honor your right to them. I would also expect the same courtesy in return. The more people realize that our differences are far fewer than our similarities, the sooner the world will become a more pleasant place.

Safari for Windows

One of the headlines recently was Apple announcing the release of their Safari browser (version 3 beta) for the Windows platform. While this is mostly due to the fact that 3rd-party application development for the iPhone will be entirely based on Safari, ala web applications, it has the added bonus of allowing people without access to an Apple computer (a group to which I sadly belong) to see how their websites look to Apple users.

After installing it on a Windows XP Virtual PC image, I loaded Safari and performed a few of my normal web browsing tasks. You know, visited my daily news pages, opened a few favorite web sites, checked my email, etc. All-in-all, everything worked the way you would expect it to and the application had a nice, clean interface (even the preferences dialog was easy to navigate and understand). There were some rendering problems, particularly with some AJAX-styled sites I've written with the ASP.NET AJAX Extensions, but nothing that would really be considered a show-stopper. If anything, now that Safari is available to a LOT more developers (like myself), I would guess that the problems I've seen so far will be fixed in short order.

I was surprised that it responded and ran as well as it did (it is a beta after all). Having run the last few version of iTunes and seeing how much of a system/resource hog it was, I figured Safari would perform about the same. Hopefully this is a sign of things to come since Safari is utilizing the newer Cocoa libraries instead of the older Carbon libraries. If this is indeed the cause of the performance boost, I sincerely hope that Apple will rebuild iTunes (and Quicktime) using Cocoa.

As someone who writes software, I know it's not an easy task to undertake, but my only real complaint against iTunes is it's performance on Windows. If it performed at least as well as the competition (or as well as it does natively under Max OS X), it would probably be my default media player. I need something that can navigate 30+ GB of music files and countless video files easily and without getting in my way. Windows Media Player 11 is doing well, but the iTunes interface is usually a little easier to work with.

Time will tell.

Long ago...

I started this blog, wrote 2 posts, and then....

nothing.

I wasn't really about not having the time, although free time has been in short supply lately and is about to get even worse (but in a good way). It's mostly been out of a lack of direction. I did not know what I wanted to talk about. I could make it about everything, which I still want to do, but I also wanted to make it have an overall theme / purpose. So I've decided that I will post whenever I can, about almost anything that is currently holding my attention. This will usually focus on Technology (I am a Software Engineer afterall), but other times it may be my view on recent events/issues, etc.

Some people will find it boring (yet another geek blog) while others may find it interesting. I can't please everyone, so I will please myself. In the mean time, here is what has captured my attention lately... TED.com