Counterreformation.

This is very good news.

Turkey is preparing to publish a document that represents a revolutionary reinterpretation of Islam - and a controversial and radical modernisation of the religion.

....

Commentators say the very theology of Islam is being reinterpreted in order to effect a radical renewal of the religion.

Its supporters say the spirit of logic and reason inherent in Islam at its foundation 1,400 years ago are being rediscovered. Some believe it could represent the beginning of a reformation in the religion.

And not a moment too soon. Best of luck to the Turks with this one, and may it spread.

But a word about the BBC's coverage.

The argument is that Islamic tradition has been gradually hijacked by various - often conservative - cultures, seeking to use the religion for various forms of social control.

They have also taken an even bolder step - rejecting a long-established rule of Muslim scholars that later (and often more conservative) texts override earlier ones.

They just can't help themselves. Puerile, I call it.

Unsuitable for the job.

So there's been loads of fuss about the Archbishop of Canterbury's rather nasty comments about Sharia law. What particularly struck me was not so much the particularity of his argument with regard to Islam as his almost condescending attitude towards that quaint old British "equality before the law" thing:

Dr Williams said the argument that "there's one law for everybody" was "a bit of a danger"

Hmm.

But, at the end of the day, I'm an atheist. Williams doesn't speak for me and, let's face it, there are many matters over which he really ought to disagree with me if he's to do his job properly, starting with the existence of God and working up from there. His post is not a democratic one, and quite right too: it is often the job of religious leaders to take unpopular positions like this one. He'd have generated a controversy if he'd proposed a total ban on abortion, but that wouldn't mean he was wrong to do so. It's his job to advocate what he thinks God thinks is right, not what's popular. They are rarely the same thing.

But his job is also a political one: he's not just any old Christian, he's kind of in charge of the Church of England. So this is just totally unacceptable:

The Archbishop of Canterbury received the backing of the prime minister today as a "man of great integrity" as he prepared to address the Church of England's 550-strong national assembly and counter the furore prompted by his comments on sharia law.

Rowan Williams has torn up his original address, choosing instead to respond to the criticism he has faced since raising the questions of the possible adoption of some aspects of Islamic law in Britain. Originally he was expected to speak about the political turmoil in Zimbabwe and the ordeal of Christians living under Robert Mugabe's regime. But officials advised last night that the intense media interest prompted by his speech last week should now be challenged head-on at the opening of the synod this afternoon.

Last night Williams was still working on the revised speech.

This man gave a speech in which he claimed that the imposition of Sharia law in the UK is inevitable and probably quite a good idea, and he honestly had no idea that it would generate much of a controversy. Only days afterwards did he realise he was going to have to talk a little more about it. This is nothing but sheer bloody incompetence.

In which I am thoroughly a geek.

This post is about how to run Mac OS9 on an Intel Mac. If that sentence didn't interest you, I can't advise you strongly enough not to read the rest. Really, life's too short. Go play tennis.

But maybe you're as much of a geek as I am and want to find out how to do this. Maybe, like me, you've been looking for instructions for this for days and have found a fragment here, a fragment there, but nowhere a simple list of start-to-finish instructions. Well, here they are. Plus some rambling, but hey.

First off, you might well ask why, when OSX is probably the best operating system ever, I would want to run OS9, which, for all its good points, wasn't. Well, there is a rather nice granular synthesis application called thOnk. It's a tiny little app by audio standards — about half a meg — but it is utterly brilliant. And its makers have no intention whatsoever of ever recoding it for OSX. Shame. There are other granular synthesis programs out there, and they're pish. None of them come even remotely close to thOnk.

So my ongoing project to rebuild me recording studio is, well, going on, and it dawned on me that I've got a bloody great G3 iMac — they're the original ones that look like the front of an aeroplane but weigh a little more — taking up a huge amount of useful and valuable space just so I can run this one tiny app. Surely, I think to myself, there must be some way of running it on me new MacBook and getting that great lump of a spare computer off me desk. Apple switched to Intel chips a few years ago now. Someone must have come up with an OS9 emulator.

And a handful of people have. There's something called OS9exec, which, as far as I can tell, is probably brilliantly expertly programmed and probably works, but can only be installed by unbelievably clever people who can sing four-part harmonies in Unix, and there's another one called, fantastically, SheepShaver, which has virtually no documentation at all. I tried both, and have finally, after much struggle, got SheepShaver working.

And it's brilliant, it really is. It runs OS9 pretty much perfectly in its own window in OSX. I love it.

It's actually quite simple to install, once you know how. There are three complications. Firstly, like I said, there's sod all documentation. You have to spend hours with Google, tracking down the various conversations users have had about it, picking out useful bits and trying things that might work. And all these users are dead knowledgable about Mac operating systems and assume quite a bit of expertise on everyone else's part. It's hell. Secondly, although Apple have fully abandoned OS9 and have no intention of ever having anything to do with it ever again, they still haven't (unlike OS7 and OS8) made it a free download. In fact, they still assert their copyright over it and crack down on anyone who does make it — or crucial bits of it — available. So no-one can put together a simple click-here-to-install all-in-one SheepShaver package that just works. Installing it simply cannot be user-friendly, for legal reasons. Tsk. That's alright, you might be thinking; I have an OS9 disk. Well, thirdly, SheepShaver requires a retail copy of OS9 — not a machine-specific install disk, which is almost certainly what you have. It's what I have. This was a real sticking point until I stumbled across some genius called EVWeb who's figured out how to install from a machine-specific restore disk. If you've got an install disk, you've probably got a restore disk too. I have. Happy days.

Oh, by the way, SheepShaver only supports up to OS 9.04. 9.1 and 9.2 won't work.

So, here we go. I wasn't taking notes as I went, so some bits might be slightly vague. Not all Macs and Apple disks are the same, of course, so some of the filenames might be slightly different for you in places, but they should be similar. Just use your common sense. Oh, and one thing I've definitely discovered over the last few days is that what works on one person's system may not work on another's, so this might not work for you, in which case my apologies. But I'm still confident that these instructions are better than any others I could find out there. I hope they're easy enough for laymen to follow.

First, download SheepShaver. When you uncompress the package, you'll get a folder called "SheepShaver-2.3". Put the whole folder in your Applications folder or your Utilities folder. Or wherever you like, I suppose, but it is an application, after all.

Now, you need to get hold of an old Mac ROM. SheepShaver will not work without it, but doesn't come with one because this is one of those bits that Apple won't let anyone else supply. So you need to get it yourself. First, download it from Apple's site here. There are a lot of ROMs around, but quite a few people claim that that one is the only one that will allow SheepShaver to work. Secondly, download TomeViewer. TomeViewer will allow you to extract the single ROM file that you need from the ROM update file that you've downloaded from Apple. It's pretty straightforward, but there's a catch: it's an OS9 app, so you need access to a machine already running OS9 in order to use it. This is a total pain, obviously, but I've been unable to find any way around it: before you can run this OS9 emulator, you need to be able to use OS9. Or get the ROM file from elsewhere, illegally.

Anyway, once you've done this stuff with TomeViewer, you should have a file called "Mac_OS_ROM". Place it in your SheepShaver folder.

Now you need to create a folder for transferring files — including applications that you wish to install — between OSX and OS9. So start up Disk Utility — it's in your Utilities folder. Click "New Image". Call this disk image "FileTransfer" and place it wherever you like — in your Documents folder makes sense. Choose the size you need — if in doubt, just go for 500MB. Memory's cheap. Encryption: none. Format: read/write disk image. Click "Create".

When Disk Utility has finished creating this disk image, it will mount it on the desktop for you. Make sure you eject it before attempting to run SheepShaver. You must never have SheepShaver and OSX trying to access the same disk image at the same time. It could screw up your system, apparently.

Now you can actually start SheepShaver.

Double-click the "SheepShaverGUI.app" icon. This is simply a graphical interface for SheepShaver's settings. It's pretty easy to use.

Click on the "Memory/Misc" tab. Type in your preferred RAM size — I used 256. Then click on the "Browse" button and locate your ROM file. "Don't Use CPU When Idle" should be ticked; "Ignore Illegal Memory Accesses" shouldn't.

Click on the "Volumes" tab. Click "Create". This is where you create your OS9 volume — the virtual disk that SheepShaver will treat as OS9's hard drive. Navigate to your SheepShaver folder, type "Mac_OS_Volume" under "Selection", choose a size for your volume — 250MB is big enough for the basic operating system; use more if you're planning to install lots of applications in OS9 (though don't worry if there's not enough room to install them, as you can simply create more of these virtual volumes later) — and click "OK". Wait a little while while SheepShaver constructs the virtual disk.

Now click "Add". Navigate to the "FileTransfer.dmg" file you created with Disk Utility and select it. You should now have two volumes in your list.

Leave "Boot From" as "Any".

The other tabs in SheepShaverGUI are optional. You can set the size of the window OS9 will appear in under "Graphics/Sound". I've seen some people say that trying to use "Fullscreen" mode crashes their systems; others can use it no problem. I've seen it recommended that the window refresh rate be set as low as possible, and mine is set to 60Hz.

Under the "Keyboard/Mouse" tab, you can set what your mouse's scrollwheel should be doing. OS9 doesn't support scrollwheels naturally, apparently, so SheepShaver uses your settings here to trick OS9 into supporting them. Cool.

Apparently, you should enter "slirp" under "Ethernet Interface" on the "Serial/Network" tab. I have no intention of using networky stuff in my OS9, so can't confirm whether this works. Sorry.

Now put your OS9 disk into the drive and click SheepShaver's "Start" button.

OS9 will want to format what it thinks is its hard drive: the "Mac_OS_Volume" virtual drive you just created using SheepShaverGUI. It will ask if you want to format the drive and warn you that doing so will delete everything on it. The reason you can be sure that this is safe and not about to destroy your system is that it tells you the drive's size, and it's exactly the same as the size you typed in when creating the virtual drive — in my case, 250MB. Go ahead and format it. You have a choice between Standard and Extended format. I believe Extended should work, but I used Standard.

Once the virtual drive is formatted, SheepShaver will boot OS9 from whichever disk you've put in the drive. If your disk is a retail non-machine-specific OS9 install disk, the rest should be easy. Just install as normal, you lucky sod.

If it's a machine-specific install disk, there are instructions here which I have not attempted to follow. Good luck if you do.

If it's a machine-specific restore disk, have a look inside it and open the folder called "Configurations". In there is a disk image — on my disk, it's called "iMac HD.img". Open it. Now drag its contents into your "Mac_OS_Volume" virtual hard drive, which you will see appears on the desktop like a normal hard drive. You don't really need to copy all these files. I just copied the System Folder and the "Apple Extras" folder; I'm pretty sure that only the System Folder is really necessary. Pick and choose whichever bits you want. If in doubt, just copy the whole lot.

When the system's finished copying all these files, open the "Startup Disk" control panel. Select "Mac_OS_Volume" and click "Restart".

Assuming all that worked, from now on, you will not need to use SheepShaverGUI. Just double-click on SheepShaver.app to run OS9.

By the way, that "FileTransfer" disk image will also appear on the OS9 desktop like a hard drive. Use it to transfer files between the two operating systems. In OSX, open the disk image and place your files into it. Then start SheepShaver, and when OS9 has booted up you'll be able to access those files in the "FileTransfer" hard drive on the desktop. But do remember never to open the disk image in OSX while OS9 is running.

That's it. Have fun.

If you have any questions, I'll probably be no good at answering them. But I'll try.

Ah, national stereotypes.

More on that rogue tradeur:

FRIENDS of rogue trader Jerome Kerviel last night blamed his $7 billion losses on unbearable levels of stress brought on by a punishing 30 hour week.

Kerviel was known to start work as early as nine in the morning and still be at his desk at five or even five-thirty, often with just an hour and a half for lunch.

One colleague said: "He was, how you say, une workaholique. I have a family and a mistress so I would leave the office at around 2pm at the latest, if I wasn't on strike."

....

As the losses mounted, Kerviel tried to conceal his bad trades by covering them with an intense red wine sauce.

 

Good question.

The great Megan McArdle:

Peace in Israel/Palestine. And a pony! Why does every American president with a grim-looking prognosis for their legacy try to salvage everything at the 11th hour by swashbuckling into Jerusalem with no political capital to spend and praying for a miraculous resolution of the least tractable conflict of the last 50 years?

 

Money at work.

Given this fiasco —

Fearful of the effects of air pollution on their performance, Olympic athletes are taking extreme measures to prepare for this summer's Games in Beijing.

Delegations from dozens of nations are setting up training bases in nearby countries and planning to fly into China at the last minute to minimize exposure to what they say is a hostile environment.

....

Situated in a basin where smoke from factories and construction and dust from desert storms gather and shroud the city for days, Beijing has struggled to control air pollution for several years.

....

Recent measurements show that on some days the amount of smoke and dust particles in the air exceeds by three to 12 times the maximum deemed safe by the World Health Organization.

....

"The magnitude of the pollution in Beijing is not something we know how to deal with. It's a foreign environment. It's like feeding an athlete poison," said David Martin, a respiratory expert who is helping train U.S. marathoners.

....

In November, [Frank Filiberto, a physician for the U.S. boxing team] accompanied 11 boxers to the Chinese capital for a competition. On their first morning there, Filiberto said, the men returned from their daily 20-minute training run complaining of burning eyes, coughing, congestion and breathing difficulties. Only six of the 11 boxers ended up feeling well enough to compete.

"In my opinion boxers are probably the finest athletes in the world," Filiberto said. "But they didn't think they could make it three rounds in Beijing." Filiberto and the coaches were so alarmed that they ordered the boxers to jog only in hotel hallways thereafter.

....

Jeremy Horgan-Kobelski, a Boulder, Colo., bicyclist who competed in the 2004 Olympics in Athens and is a contender for a spot on this year's U.S. mountain biking team, said that when he arrived in the Chinese capital, the sky was a crystal-clear blue and he thought that concerns about pollution had been overblown. But on the day he was to race, he said, the smog was so thick "you could barely see a few city blocks" from his hotel window.

About 20 minutes into the race, Horgan-Kobelski started having trouble breathing.

"I struggled with it for a while," he said in a phone interview. "You're breathing as hard as you can but you feel like your muscles don't want to work. You're filling your lungs but you don't know what's going in there."

About halfway through the roughly 30-mile race, Horgan-Kobelski said, "my body sort of shut down." He pulled over and vomited.

It wasn't until he got to the athletes' lounge that he learned that he wasn't unique. Only eight of 47 contestants in the men's race finished; the others, including the Chinese riders, also suffered from breathing problems and dropped out.

....

Haile Gebreselassie, who has won two gold medals in the 10,000 meters and holds the world record in the marathon, may not run in the Olympic marathon. In an interview with the Associated Press, the runner's manager, Jos Hermens, said: "What he says is: 'Great if I win, but if it means the end of my career, then I really don't feel like it.'"

Given that, what criteria, exactly, do the International Olympic Committee consider when they spend years travelling the world to decide which cities should host the Olympics? Think of all the fuss over the London bid — not just the successful 2012 bid, but the numerous unsuccessful ones in previous years. Think of the amounts of money involved. Make even just a rough guess at how much gets spent on entertaining, showing off to, and generally pampering the IOC. Their decisions cost billions.

Yet we now discover that at no point do they take into account the question of whether a venue is suitable for athletes.

This is why we need the UN.

Thanks as ever to Rob for drawing my attention to the funniest unintentionally funny thing I've seen in quite some time. Yes, 2008 is the United Nations International Year of the Potato.

The site's fantastic: there's a potato calendar and a potato quiz (you know, for kids!) and loads of fascinating facts and a video of a potato harvest in action and... well, let's be fair, it actually is a pretty good site. I'm far too much of a fan of pointless trivia to plausibly claim that sites like this are crap. It's better than the (sadly no longer with us) Pylon of the Month site, and I loved that.

But what gets me is the efficiency. You might think there'd be a trade association of potato farmers and greengrocers and such, and they could have a marketing budget, and they could hire someone to bung a site like this together. In fact, it's clear from the UN's potato calendar that such organisations do exist and do do things. But someone decided that it would be quicker and easier to lobby the politicians of God knows how many different countries to in turn lobby the UN to give an entire UN-sponsored year over to the potato. How many other things were in the running to have 2008 as their special year? Centipedes? Socks? Mint Imperials? And how many meetings did lots of highly-paid UN delegates go to to discuss the candidates until the potato finally won? Just what absurdly colossal sum of money was spent on promoting this tuber?

And for what? Are we really facing an international lack-of-potato-awareness crisis?

I can't be the first to think this.

A student called Laura McLaughlin is claiming to be pregnant with Pete Doherty's baby. But

A spokesman for Doherty said: "Pete says he doesn't know who this girl is."

This is Pete Doherty. Most days, he doesn't know who anyone is. Himself included.

Reasoning.

I was always puzzled over why the failed Tube bombers pled non guilty. They were willing to blow themselves to bloody smithereens but years in a British jail was a sacrifice too far? Can't say they're using the same reasoning as I would.

And now this one. John Hogan tried to kill himself in the act for which he's on trial, he's tried to kill himself numerous times since, but he's pleading not guilty so that he won't have to spend the rest of his life in a Greek jail. Just how bad are Greek jails?

I am reminded of Jerry Seinfeld's line about people who attempt suicide once but then don't try again. "Why not? It's not like your life's got any better. In fact, now it's even worse, because there's one more thing you suck at." John Hogan must really suck at this. Shame he couldn't have passed this inability on to his son.

It's hard to think of a more appropriate time to use the phrase "It's a fair cop" than when you're found lying in a bloody heap on the ground with your victims all of a second after you've arrived there, but Hogan wants the psychological upside of claiming contrition without the practical downside that comes from admitting guilt.

And as for his claim that he didn't plan to kill his children... I assume that he means he didn't plan it a long time in advance with flow charts and detailed diagrams, but, really, when he grabbed them and jumped off the fourth floor, what was his plan? To annoy them?

Anecdotal evidence.

Windows Vista doesn't seem to be getting an awful lot of good press — various firms, such as Lenovo, offering free upgrades from Vista to XP is hardly the best PR. My own experience of Vista is that... well, I'd take the free upgrade.

My best friend Alun has a Vista laptop. A few months ago, its DVD drive stopped working when he plugged his Sony phone into it. I had to repair it by editing the registry. To be fair, this is really Sony's fault — and they've got form, of course — but Microsoft's latest flagship operating system shouldn't be quite that unstable.

More recently, Alun, quite out of the blue, got some on-screen message saying that Vista was repairing vital files and that his personal files and settings would be unaffected. And then the laptop reverted to factory settings. He's lost a lot of stuff, including family photos.

Now, yeah, he should have backed up. But the fact that not backing up was his mistake doesn't change the fact that his need to back up was created by Microsoft's shoddy yet expensive operating system.