American culture is sick, and secularism is the cause. Such is the contention of religious conservatives such as Rick Santorum, who insist that feminism, sexual freedom and gay rights have undermined traditional morality. The argument has “the virtues of clarity, simplicity and plausibility”, says Steve Chapman, but it has one big flaw: it is refuted by pretty much all the evidence. As America has grown more secular over the past 20 years, “most indicators of moral and social health have got better, not worse”. Crime levels, for instance, have plummeted, while teen pregnancy has fallen by 39%. What’s more, the parts of the US with the worst social problems today are the Bible Belt states, not the supposedly sin-ridden blue states, with their dangerous “moral relativism”. Mississippi has the nation’s highest rate of church attendance, with 63% of people saying they go “weekly or almost weekly”, but its residents are also “far more likely to be murdered than other Americans”. Liberal Vermont’s murder rate, by contrast, is a quarter of the national average. Meanwhile, Massachusetts, the first state to legalise gay marriage, has the nation’s lowest divorce rate. So much for the theory that religiosity promotes virtue and the decline of religious faith “goes hand-in-hand with vice”.

Here’s a simple piece of coding – almost too simple – it uses the JQUERY library (not shown) to simplify cross-browser coding.

<script language=”javascript”>
function alertMsg()
{
    var gm=”/admin/ajax_keepalive.asp”;
    $.get( gm, function(data) { $(“#myTimer”).html(data); } );
    var t=setTimeout(alertMsg,10000);

}
alertMsg();
</script>

This simple piece of code works as follows…

The purpose of the code is to put an incrementing number into my web page… that’s all – but the number is coming from another page.. and the purpose of this is to stop session timeouts by making sure that even when the user is idle – something is happening.

The function alertMsg() sets up the address of a web page which returns nothing more than an incrementing number. Every time you call the page, it returns  an incremented number – and the jQuery then forces that number into a SPAN on my web page.  You’ll note that the following line sets a 10 second timeout to call the same routine, over and over.

Finally the routine is called – which puts up the display and sets the timer to call the routine in 10 seconds – ad-infinitum.

Except that it works a treat in Firefox – and doesn’t work at ALL in Internet Explorer. 

There are TWO unrelated issues here – showing the differences between the browsers.

Firstly in Internet Explorer, the routine is never called (alertMsg()) in the first place – because the DOM is not ready when the routine runs – so the timer never gets set.  It would not matter anyway because Internet Explorer CACHES the call to ajax_keepalive() – and so it would  return the same value instead of an incrementing value – EVEN THOUGH calling this page directly in either browser WORKS a TREAT.

Here’s a version that works for both (differences show in orange)…

<script language=”javascript”>
function alertMsg()
{
var gm=”/admin/ajax_keepalive.asp?r=” + Math.random();
$.get( gm, function(data) { $(“#myTimer”).html(data); } );
var t=setTimeout(alertMsg,10000);

}
$(document).ready(function()
{
alertMsg();
});
</script>

Note that I’ve added a random number onto the end of the page call – as a parameter which never gets used – but it prevents cacheing… also I’ve wrapped the function call in a jQuery document ready function that makes sure this code (AlertMsg()) does not run until the DOM is ready.

Firefox does not need any of this stuff – Internet Explorer does – and we’re not talking old rubbish here – we’re looking at Firefox 7.01 and IE 9 !!!

That’s all history now, Orange have been kicked into touch in favour of the vastly superior THREE company and I now share unlimited 3G with my various devices.. When I moved up to the iPhone 4 I really could not see the point of jailbreaking the phone – but the Apple TV2 is different.  One of the biggest uses for Apple TV is to watch movies and guess what – you’re stuck with iTunes on your PC and Apple format movies.

Neither of the above is a problem for me – but converting movies to Apple format is not something your average person has much time for (couple of hours per video)… and so I took the plunge and had the thing jailbroken using the latest Sn0wbreeze (yup, that is spelled correctly).

The process is easy enough and takes a matter of half an hour including setup but the results are spectacular. Now I can watch movies and listen to music in a variety of formats. Not only that but I also have access to a NetGear ReadyNas Duo, an inexpensive and rather neat network backup device which just happens to be able to stream to the Apple TV – which means no more need to leave a computer on to access movies, pictures and music on the Apple TV. Between the low cost of Apple TV2 (sub-£100) and the Duo ~(sub-£100 excluding disks) – and the nature of the Duo which means with 2 disks you have redundancy (both store identical content – so if one disk goes down you continue on as normal) I now have a reliable solution for handling media at home without using a PC and without lengthy media conversion to suit Apple. It just so happens that software is available for both iPad and iPhone to handle this scenario also.

So is it worth jailbreaking the Apple TV2?  Most definitely – but if it turns your box into a stone – you are of course on your own – follow the Sn0wbreeze instructions carefully.

The image above is not doctored AT ALL – it is merely a panorama – several shots stitched together. This was taken early evening in Galera in Andalucía near the end of August this year – the weather was changing from the normal super hot summer to a brief storm. I don’t think I’ve ever seen colours like this in the sky before!

To put this in perspective here is a panorama from roughly the same spot, somewhat different angle the day before…both are taken from around 3,000ft above sea level.  More imagery at www.facebook.com/cavehome  and www.bedrock.es

On Friday we set off from Galera to see friends Angie and Dennis down to the area around Cuevas Del Almanzora, near VERA, in Almeria. One of the problems with Spain is… it’s big and in rural areas there are simply not that many main routes – so you might be looking at the map on the right and thinking “surely there’s a straight line from A to B – well, no.

However, the route is pretty much motorway except for a short stretch at either end.

Arriving mid-afternoon Friday we all promptly went off to the beach and then after coming back to their place for a chat and a dip in the pool (remember we’re talking upper 30s temperature here – water’s pretty much part of the day’s entertainment) ended up in a nice little nightspot area nearby for drinks.

The following day we went back to the beach and after a battle with the (not insignificant) waves in which I ended up peddle-dashing my knee on the rocks – after fighting to get back on my feet without getting a mouth-full of salt water, I discovered I’d lost my specs in the sea – hardly a good start to the weekend as you can imagine.

Thinking about it, writing this blog isn’t much fun without specs – so guess where we’re going tomorrow – well today as it’s 1.45am already Monday morning. Anyway, we ended up in a really nice restaurant Saturday night to finish off a very pleasant weekend break. We spent most of Sunday morning driving back up to Galera, but managed on the way to find a great market near Vera (and temporary sunglasses for me – I normally wear reactolite varifocals). Spanish rural markets are much of a much-ness – you see the same Indian guys selling fake watches and fake sunglasses, but the quantity and variety of fruit and veg is worth seeing and in this case there was quite a large covered-over area selling plants, much to Maureen’s delight.

We got home mid-Sunday afternoon and as it was too hot to do anything outside, I finally got my two new remote cameras working…lots of improvements over earlier models – these allow 2-way audio as well as quite decent imagery, though being cheap Chinese IP cameras the audio is nothing to write home about…. at least now I’ll be able to keep an eye on both the UK and Spain on the iPhone… handy given the increasing unemployment rate in both countries!!

Oh, so there’s this puppy who seems to have adopted ourselves and our neighbours…he’s cute as well until he craps in the garden and starts barking at 1.30am – just after some “caller unknown” has rang twice on Skype and THREE have left YET ANOTHER stupid message saying how cheap calls are in Spain (despite being instructed verbally 3 times not to ever send me a text again). It’s going to be a long night…

Don’t forget you can see larger versions of most images by clicking on these smaller ones. More pics here on Google Albums or keep up with our Bedrock Facebook page

Now why did I put the date in there – because every time I went looking for help about Facebook APPS – it was out of date!  All I have to do now is get the number of LIKES up so I can have a decent name for the page.

If you follow our Bedrock pages and you’re on Facebook- here’s an easier way! Just press the LIKE button below. Sometime I’ll do a write-up on how I did this. Click on the mess below and you’ll get a Facebook LIKE button.

Essentially what you’re looking at on the Facebook page is an embedded blog. This is hosted separately, not on Facebook – and I used a pretty standard PHP APP framework to start the ball rolling and get it on my site – from there on it’s just a specially adapted template to fit into the rather restrictive Facebook page space.

If you want to know more, try the contact page on the App.

With any luck his god has struck him down – more likely he’s worried that some of his former supporters are going to strike him down.  Perhaps some authorities somewhere might like to charge him with incitement to riot?

The only thing he has achieved, sadly is to further challenge young people to ignore the older generation! As for Keith Bauer who travelled thousands of miles to California because “I was hoping for it because I think heaven would be a lot better than this earth” – should this guy be watched as a potential terrorist if he has so little regard for his own life?

How many times are the claims of those who believe in imaginary deities going to be given this kind of credibility before the world wakes up.  All of these people would be far better employed working for our common future instead of sitting there waiting for the end that is highly unlikely to come. Far more likely we kill ourselves in civil breakdowns when we run out of fuel if we don’t get our act together.

Upgrading the iPhone 3GS was simple – a matter of a few minutes download and off we go. Despite some issues with a cheap Chinese cable I bought, the upgrade went quite smoothly – all sorts of drivers being loaded and resets being done completely automatically in the background… I just went off for coffee and let it get on with it.

The software upgrade allows you (at last) to play videos and imagery on Apple TV directly from the iPhone. The setup is amazing – once upgraded, all your videos, pics and tunes on your iTunes computer are immediately available on your iPad or iPhone etc… and typically Apple – it just WORKS…

The browser has been speeded up thanks to the new “Nitro Javascript Engine” and it’s claimed that this alone doubles browser speeds –though that of course will all depends on whether your target website is making heavy use of Javascript – many do. The hated change to the mute button now allows users to select whether they want to use that button for muting or rotation control…  and apparently iPhone 4 can now serve up WIFI to other devices-  though no mention of  the 3GS – BUT this DOES APPEAR TO WORK over Bluetooth and USB on the iPhone 3GS which is interesting. No idea why you can’t do this over WIFI on the 3GS as that facility was built in from day one but Orange wanted to charge extra for it!

Similarly iPad – the upgrade just works…  video quality from videos on your PC iTunes setup is amazing.  So – for free, faster iPhones and iPads – can’t be bad!

Peter Scargill

p.s. I don’t recommend this but I didn’t go through any lengthy backup procedures and all worked well regardless. Upgrading the phone and iPad each took all of 15 minutes from start to finish with virtually no interaction required. So why are you waiting.. go get IOS 4.3 now!

Never really taken that much notice of Stephen Fry before – apart from his tours around the States – but this is very, very good. I can think of many arguments I’ve had in my time that I could have done with his verbal skills.