(A sleepless night explains the rash of weblog posts, bear with me...)

So the US is about to approve the use of cloned meat; the current system of meat production seems to be increasingly obviously flawed well past the point of being inhumane; and our understanding of animals seems to show that the line dividing us from them is more blurred than we've thought, or allowed ourselves to think.

I'm not a vegetarian myself (of which I'm slightly ashamed, if truth be told), but doesn't this point to an upcoming resolution of the whole way we treat the creatures with whom we share our DirtGlobe?

Lots of noise recently about Google and Orange hooking up. I'd heard rumours of this (without anything solid actually being talked about), but a lot of the hype sounds iffy to me (and in my experience the Observer tend to be a bit grotty when it comes to sensibly covering technology issues).

"Google are software experts and are doing some amazing work compressing data so that the mobile user gets a much better experience" eh? They have some bright folks, no doubt, but compression doesn't necessarily equate to a better user experience (didn't Pogo make some amazing claims in this area yonks back?), and I've not seen fantastic user experiences characterise Google's mobile offerings so far.

Location-based searches are inevitable dredged up as the strength of Google (despite LBS failing to get much real traction so far), but launching a handset just to enable these seems a pretty extreme way of getting them out there - particularly when they're likely to rely on location data shared by network operator. That is, until GPS kit is cheap enough to stick into every handset - and I've personally been shocked this year to discover just how cheap a Bluetooth GPS unit is.

My money would be on a mobilisation of AdSense, particularly at a time when we're starting to see others hint about new ad models for mobile that may impact on operators.

There's a review of "Extreme Programming Refactored" here. I read it last year (in the midst reading a whole load of other XP stuff - it didn't seem sensible to listen to the cheerleaders without getting views of their detractors), and found it interesting... though the tone of the book (wacky to the point of near-hysteria) hampered my taking it too seriously, I found.

But this comment from the reviewer doesn't fit with our experience of introducing selected XP practices at Future Platforms: "All practices of XP are highly dependent on each other and each one requires the other ones to be in place. For example, remove unit testing and the continuous integration turns a nightmare. Remove pair-programming and the design knowledge doesn’t spread in the team. "

We've been pragmatically taking individual practices from XP, testing them on projects, and adopting them where they work. And our experience is that whilst some of them complement each other (unit testing builds beautifully on continuous integration, for instance), they can certainly work well independently. Most of the problems that CI+Unit testing catches, for instance, are compilation errors, not failed tests: they tend to be the result of code that someone forgot to check in (as we routinely run unit tests on developer workstations before checking in). So CI without unit testing certainly isn't a waste of time.

Incidentally, on the subject of our adoption of Agile-ish methods I should credit Joh, who's helping us work through this stuff after doing an academic study on us in late 2004/early 2005. /me waves ...

Joel writes about blogging and PR here: "Lately Microsoft, working through their PR agency, Edelman, has been getting rather aggressive about trying to buy good coverage from bloggers."

Whilst I've had similar doubts myself recently, I disagree when he says that "These gifts reduce the public trust in blogs", because I don't believe there is such a public trust, or that there necessarily should be. To me, one aspect of weblogs is that they're one-to-many conversations; as such they're implicitly untrustworthy - do you automatically believe the first thing a stranger says to you? No, they earn your trust by trusted by others or by building a relationship with you over time.

Anything you read here is certainly flawed: I wrote it here for entirely personal reasons and it's full of my own idiosyncrasies, contradictions and biases. But that's kinda why you're here, no?

phew!: "Tomorrow I'm going to pick up the joint of wild boar ready for marianading. I will do this for approx 48 hours with red wine, ginger, chilli, bay leaves, garlic and onion and will also use this mix as a baste whilst I slow roast it on Monday. I'm then going to make the Biscuit Tortoni for the dessert, a frozen mixture of sherry, cream and biscuit that was my favourite for a number of years."

Wow. It's going to be a good Christmas I think. See you in 2006, if I survive this culinary onslaught :)