Umm Zaid has asked me five of her own questions, which she promised to do even before I saw LH’s set. So let’s see:<\/p>\n
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(L-H asked one of my questions which is how your blog got its name…)<\/em><\/p>\n Well, the name of the blog is a pun on “Joe Bloggs” which kind of means “any old Joe”, sort of thing. I like it as a sort of health warning, not to take anything on here as authoritative, particularly on Islam.<\/p>\n What’s the best part of driving a truck?<\/em><\/p>\n Sometimes, there isn’t one. Particularly if you get a real old heap of a wagon, with a load of someone else’s junk in it, a radio which doesn’t work properly or which you can’t figure out how to work properly (by turning off irritating “features” like the one that interrupts your Radio 4 news programme to bring you the traffic news you don’t want to hear), and a run which takes you somewhere like Brixton. As for when you get a nice clean truck which works decently and a trip through the South Downs<\/a> or the Hampshire countryside, or to Birmingham, and you’ve got time to stop and look around you and not too much pressure … well, I’d say that the best bit is what you get to see on the way. However many times you’ve seen it before.<\/p>\n What is it about computers and technology that interests you the most?<\/em><\/p>\n Graphical user interface programming. Particularly Qt, which as a way of programming is simply the best out there.<\/p>\n Then again, it’s always depressing to see the industry reject decent technology in favour of rubbish, which seems to be happening quite a bit. But then, this is often the fault of the people who designed what could have been the better technology – the most notorious incident being one in which Gary Kildall, who ran a company called Digital Research, passed up the opportunity to meet IBM’s bosses to promote his operating system, Control Program for Microcomputers (CP\/M), for petty personal reasons. IBM instead used MS-DOS, which according to Eric Raymond<\/a> was “a clone of CP\/M for the 8088 [early PC processor] crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle Computer Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since”. It looks increasingly likely that Linux will never see widespread use on the desktop, again, largely because of its own inadequacies despite its clear superiority for running servers.<\/p>\n