Homeopathy is an alternative "remedy" system from the 18th century based on the bizarre conjecture that to dilute something to virtually nothing will increase its effectiveness. It relies on such nonsense as water having a "memory" so that it can "remember" what has been added to it even after it has been diluted so many times that it can no longer have any trace of the intentional ingredient.

Until recently, if you mentioned homeopathy to me, my mind would have conjured up an image of a dusty old shop with small windows in lonely back street. I certainly did not imagine that homeopathy was on sale bright and cheerful in every high street in the country!

Homeopathy for sale at Boots

Thanks to the 10:23 campaign i have learnt a lot more about homeopathy. This saturday, 30th january, at 10:23 hundreds of demonstrators will "overdose" on homeopathy remedies outside branches of Boots across England. This is in order to show that homeopathy does not work, and to raise awareness of what it really is.

I hope that the demonstration will put pressure on Boots to stop selling this nonsense. Homeopathy is not something that a reputable chemist should be indulging in. Paul Bennett, the professional standards director at Boots has even admitted that there is no evidence that homeopathy works. Paul Bennett cites "consumer choice" as an appropriate reason to sell and profit from the little pills.

Interestingly enough, some homeopaths are in support of the 10:23 campaign. They say that homeopathy needs to treat the person as a whole, and is to be given with consultation of a "trained" homeopath! Either way, we're in agreement that this stuff should not be available over the counter on the high street!

If you want to add your support to the cause, whichever side you're on, go to www.1023.org.uk where you'll find plenty of resources and more information.

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The King Blues – Save The World Get The Girl – a catchy tune, nice London accents, and the memorable political message to Gordon Brown: "Going to war to prevent war is the most stupid thing I ever heard".

Regina Spektor – Fidelity – This is the year that i really became a fan of Regina Spektor. It's hard to choose my favourite song; they are all so good, but this one has an especially adorable video. Eet and Samson have also been played many times. Regina has such a beautiful pure voice which i never tire of hearing.

David Bowie – Life On Mars – features in this year's favourites simply because i got into watching the television series Life On Mars early this year, and it reminds me of happy sunday afternoons curled up on the sofa watching the show.

La Roux – Bulletproof – Actually, basically anything by La Roux. I love their quirky style, both musically and visually. And i have to admit, i find Elly Jackson insanely attractive!

In October i heard about amazingtunes and amazingradio which have completely transformed my music listening habits. Amazingtunes is an ethical music site where any unsigned artist can upload their own music for the world to hear and buy. The great thing is: artists receive 70% of the download revenue, which is unheard of in the music industry. The best tunes get selected to be aired on amazingradio, where the listeners vote for them to be added to the general playlist.

Amazingradio is available in the UK on DAB digital radio, and online via iTunes or Windows Media Player. Our radio player has pretty much stayed constantly tuned to amazingradio for the last 2 months. It's a great place to hear new music and support emerging artists. Here is a selection of my favourite music from amazingtunes:

Belle Humble – Try – a most excellent pop track which never fails to get me dancing whenever i hear it!

This Love Affair – Ifs, Buts and Maybes – guitar driven light rock, with a vocalist reminiscent of the Manic Street Preachers.

The Last Tycoons – The Dry Law – i have no idea what this song is about, and the country style is by no means my usual style of music, but i find it intriguing. I particularly like the line, "Everybody's begging for forgiveness from the Lord, well i ain't begging for a thing".

Johan Lundgren – To Friends and Followers – another song with a country feel. A nice simple song, nothing fancy about it whatsoever, with a bittersweet message about the fact that we change friends and aquaintances over time. Some people we wish to stay in touch with, others we just "lost along the way".

Richard Walker – Look At Yourself – I call this anti-emo music! It's like: alright, this is your life, stop moping about it, you could blame everybody else, or you could take responsibility for the choices you've made. "If you're looking for someone to ease your pain, take a look at yourself". I don't know if this would really help me if i was actually feeling miserable, though!

stornoway – Zorbing – quite a unique sound: a simple tune with an unusual accompaniment, nice harmonies. Zorbing is rolling down a hill in a giant inflatable ball. Something i want to try one day! :)

Well that's about it. I hope you find something in there that you like. I do encourage you to listen to some songs on amazingtunes, and tune into amazingradio too. There's a lot of talent in there waiting to be discovered.

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I am very excited at this new development in my career. It's going to be hard work because i have a lot to learn, but i am pleased to have made the commitment and to know that i have someone who is playing a very active part in my personal and professional development. Funnily enough, the more i learn, the more i realise how little i really know. The first task that i have been set as part of my apprenticeship is really showing me that.

Eden Development has given me a blog to talk about my progress during my apprenticeship. So i have decided that my apprenticeship blog will become the place that i talk about my technical and coding interests, leaving this blog to be more personal. So if you are interested in me from a technical point of view, please follow edendevelopment.co.uk/blogs/aimee.

There are actually now five apprentices at Eden Development. If you are interested in software craftsmanship it is well worth looking at the Eden staff blogs aggregation to read all our thoughts and experiences on our own journeys.

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My first try was GC1NAE3 – Time At The Bar – The Market Inn. I think i know approximately where it is, but i couldn't find it without attracting unwanted attention from the many passers by. I think i'll have to go back in the middle of the night to check whether my suspicions are correct on that hiding place!

Next i tried for GC1P23E – Close Cathedral Close and succeeded! It took me a while to find it, mainly because of nerves. Anyone who finds this one will understand what i mean when i say you have to be a bit brave! But i did find it, and i took it to the nearby bookstall of the cathedral to have a look at the contents:

There was recently a geocoin in this one, but although i found a few foreign coins, the geocoin was not there. It must have already moved on. I added my name to the visitor log (with some difficulty due to the tiny pencils!) and added a little Kinder egg toy:

If i go again i'll probably take a pencil and a pencil sharpener. Actually, that could be a good thing to take to all geocaches; they would often be useful.

It was quite fun to put it back in its hiding place and walk on knowing that i'd found something that not many people know about!

Already i am immensely enjoying geocaching. Unlike geohashing, it's something you can do at any time, and it's equally enjoyable by yourself as it is with friends. There are some geocaches on St Catherine's Hill and the Hockley Viaduct which i'm really looking forward to finding. I've been saying for a long time that i'd like to see those places … and the added possibility of finding a geocache gives me just enough reason to make it soon!

I'm going to want to create my own geocache at some point. I'm just trying to think of a good hiding place! :)

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1. My first geocaching experience

Geocaching (geocaching.com) is another GPS game where you have to find a 'cache' which has been hidden by someone else. The cache stays there indefinitely and over the course of time several people will follow clues to find it. The cache may be large or small, and may contain various items. People sometimes take an item out and replace it with another item for the next visitor to find.

Today i got my chance to go geocaching for the first time. All the geohash locations were uninteresting or hard to reach this weekend, so my geohashing friend Mike came to Winchester for the afternoon. We initially planned to spend an afternoon juggling, but it was a bit wet and the ground too dirty for that. We went for lunch in the Bridge Patisserie and then decided to look whether there were any geocaches nearby.

It turned out there was one just around the corner! GC1N2M9 – Winchester Chesil Station which is part of a series of geocaches along the route of the former Didcot, Newbury and Southampton Railway. I became interested in this railway line since my geohash in Bar End where i noticed the railway line going past St Catherine's Hill on a map from 50 years ago. So i was curious to go anyway, to see whether i could spot any clues of the former railway and the station.

The first clue made me laugh to myself that i'd never noticed it before!

Old Station Approach. The clue is in the name!

The second clue is even bigger! This is the entrance to the tunnel that went straight through St Giles' Hill and out the other side in Winnall before it carried on towards Kings Worthy. I wonder whether the tunnel is still intact?

This is a contribution to the Flickr group Guess Where Winchester? so [shhh] on the location! ;)

The footbridge near the multi-storey car park has a definite 'railway feel' about it, don't you think?

That car park is built exactly where the old station used to be. It was called Winchester Cheesehill, the old name for the area we now call Chesil.

The view from the bridge:

The silver car driving away is following the route of the old railway line. There is no sign of it now, but a photo on wikipedia proves the history. Winchester Chesil Station

We looked for a long time before we found the geocache. It was very small and very well hidden. I don't believe anyone would find it unless they were specifically looking for it. Eventually Mike pulled it up. It was really nicely labelled:

The barrel reads: GEOCACHE – CONTENTS SAFE – DO NOT MOVE – GEOCACHING.ORG

Look what was inside!

A list of people and dates when they have found the cache. The list was actually full: somebody needs to go back and put in a new sheet of paper.

I really enjoyed my first geocaching experience. There are loads of geocaches all over Winchester so i'll definitely be going to find more. There are another 4 in this series on the Didcot, Newbury and Southampton Railway which i am keen to find, whilst learning more about the old railway line.

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Quite appropriate, since the team have a big project to deliver today, which has been months in the making. I have worked on the project but i've been busy doing other things more recently.


Today i was safely out of the way pair programming with @edentodd at the Coffee House in Winchester:

We projected the code on the projector downstairs, it worked really well!

Coffee shop coding, ftw! :D

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@heaven = Heaven.instance
@father = God.trinity[0]
@earth = Universe.galaxies.find_by_name("Milky Way").solar_system.planets[2]
 
@father.open_connection do
  @father.current_location.should == @heaven
  @father.name.should be_hallowed
 
  kingdom = mock_model(Kingdom)
  Kingdom.stub!(:new_for).with(@father).and_return(kingdom)
  kingdom.should_receive(:come!).and_return(true)
  @earth.should be_like(@heaven)
 
  @earth.current_population.each do |person|
    person.should_receive(:bread).daily
    @father.should_forgive(person) && person.should_forgive(:others)
    @father.should_not lead(person).into(:temptation)
    @father.should deliver(person).from(:evil)
  end
 
  while true do
    [Kingdom, Power, Glory].collect do |klass|
      klass.all.should be_attributed_to(@father)
    end
  end
end

Shame i haven't updated for such a long time. I was unable to log into my blog for a while, and even when i fixed it i couldn't think of anything to write to make a suitable come-back! Hopefully this satisfies! :)

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The book has pointed out the one glaring exception to the "principle of mediocrity" that says the universe is pretty much the same wherever you look: the exception being that we are here and we have never yet observed intelligent life elsewhere! Why should that be? It continued by covering in detail the theory of multiple pocket universes, perhaps an infinite number of them, creating a collective multiverse. I am just coming on to the part about simulated universes and whether we would even know if we were in a simulation. All this i find very fascinating.

One thing made me stop and think this morning. It was just a little aside to another point the author was making. I'll quote the context and bold up the bit that interested me the most.

While the simulation argument was restricted to a single universe, it was always possible to wriggle out of the uncomfortable conclusion that this might be a simulation by arguing that no civilizations are likely to reach the point of achieving such stupendous computational power. For example, there are many reasons why humanity may not survive for more than a few centuries beyond the present, and that may not be long enough for conscious computers to be developed. If a similar fate were to befall any other intelligent beings who might be located elsewhere in the universe, then simulations, while still a possibility in principle, might never be achieved in practice.

Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma, page 208.

There it is. Just a little snippet with no elaboration. Just a cold hint that our species might not be around for very much longer. A footnote references "Our Final Century" by Martin Rees. I think i should read that book soon!

The reason it caught my attention is that i have been thinking for a while that we might be heading for an early demise. A point made in "Conversations With God" is that our technological advances have now exceeded our sociological development. We have the ability to annihilate our entire species (and many of the others) if we misuse our technology. The scary thing is, all it takes is a few wrong decisions by a minority of people with great influence. Look at the Iraq war. I was one of 36 million people^[citation] who protested against it before the war began. It did no good. We couldn't change the minds of the people who decided it would happen.

If it's not a devestating war it'll be run-away climate change, or over-population leading to world hunger, or an asteroid will hit the planet and wipe us out. In the long-term i think the only way to ensure the prolonged survival of our species is to spread ourselves out across other planets in the galaxy. Of course, eventually we would have to do that anyway: in 5 billion years time the sun will run out of fuel. But how soon can we start migrating to different planets? Current estimates suggest not very soon at all!

This is the first hint i've come across that says our time left could be measured in centuries. In "Stardust", Stephen Welch says that the average life-span of a land-based species is 5 million years. We humans have only been around for the last 200,000 years. It's a terribly young age for a species to die!

But if we are wiped out, what happens next? I believe that life will go on in some form. Life is very resilient, once started, it's very hard to kill it. No matter what happens to the planet, even if we can't survive, something will. But then what of all our culture, our literature, our art, our technology? Everything that we've produced will eventually fade and crumble without us here to preserve it. Does that matter? Wouldn't it be a shame if another intelligent species were to come to our planet in a million years' time and find no trace of our existence?

What are we really trying to achieve here, anyway? I mean really long-term. Eventually our entire universe will freeze out as the last stars extinguish all the available fuel. We know that the human race cannot survive indefinitely, at least, not unless we can figure out a way to jump to a different universe, all of which (if they exist at all) are probably receding from us faster than the speed of light! Even if we put our consciousness into a simulated reality, it cannot outlast the life of the universe. Everything needs energy, and the second law of thermodynamics will be our ultimate downfall. "The Last Question" by Isaac Asimov, written in 1956, makes this point profoundly. It's a good read; i enjoyed it recently.

Ah, where am i going with this? I know we as a species won't last forever, I don't want our entire existence to be meaningless in the end but i can't work out what it would take to make it meaningful on a cosmic scale. I think that a few hundred years is not a long time for homo sapiens to have left, and i hope we can get past our selfishness and childishness. I hope that our final end isn't caused by our own silly fault.

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The star of the show has to be Lauren Lopez who plays Draco Malfoy and spends most of the time rolling around seductively on the floor/bench/harry/hermione! Lauren's sense of comic timing is incredible, and the voice and facial expressions are just adorable!

Voldemort and Quirrel are beautifully played with some very touching moments together. Snape is hilarious, like all the characters, much exaggerated!

I think the best songs are near the end. "Not Alone" (Act 2 Scene 5) is a beautifully composed piece of music, and "Voldemort Is Goin' Down" (Act 2 Scene 8) is magnificently performed by the cast.

I've enjoyed it so much that i'm making myself a dvd to take to show friends and family. I love it that the whole thing is freely available. By the fans, for the fans, and yep, the fans are loving it!

I also love how linux gives me free tools to be able to create a dvd. This morning i did not know how to do it, but using todisc and tovid i've been able to combine all the scenes into a sequence, with a menu. I used mplayer to extract the audio of one song, and audacity to split out the song that i wanted to use as an introduction when the menu is shown. I used kino to look at the frames one by one and export a frame to use as the background for the menu. I used the gimp to darken the image and reduce the contrast.

The menu for my dvd is hopefully going to look something like this:

I'll update again if it works! Currently it is encoding each of the scenes into dvd format, which seems to take a very long time … and creates files 5 times bigger than the originals!

Update: it worked!! From youtube to my television!!

Thank you to StarKidPotter, youtube, keepvid.com and to free open source software and the ubuntu community! Now i can take A Very Potter Musical with me to show anyone who has a dvd player! :D

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I admit it: i'm a Google addict! I've previously said that Google products are like chocolate bars: i always have to try the new ones! I used to be cautious, not wanting Google to follow me all over the internet, so i always logged out quickly. But recently i've thrown caution to the wind! I have fully immersed myself into Google Mail, Chat, Calendar, Docs, Maps and Reader. We use Google apps at work for all our communication needs. I'm considering getting an Android phone and writing apps for it. I basically love Google!

Chrome OS will be a super-speedy operating system (based on the Linux kernel) that will do one thing and do it really well: the web! With a great lightweight browser, the push towards HTML 5, Google Wave, and Google Gears for offline access, everything is pointing to the gap between desktop applications and web apps narrowing, and web apps taking over.

Haha, i just realised, they're finally going to have to write Chrome (the browser) for Linux! Awesome! It's been 9 months i've been waiting for that!

Update – things have moved on since i last checked – you can now download a development version of Chrome as a deb file for Debian and Ubuntu. The install was quick and easy, and it seems to be working pretty well, apart from keyboard shortcuts.

This is a Google world we're living in, and i fully embrace it! :D

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