Preferably looking for a desktop application (multi-platform) like Rescuetime that reports application usage to our own centralised server. Desktop client would have prompting and automated features like CaptureWorks and Allnetic to minimise discrepancies and increase workflow.
Any comments, please leave them below. Would love to hear of others.
Yesterday, I was searching around for a Critique of Neale Donald Walsch after watching the DVD “Conversations with God” – I have already read all three books of his Conversations with God series and whilst it didn’t present to me any new and revealing ideas about life, god and living in general, it did act as a reminder of the ones I already have. I have known about Book 1 for almost as long as it’s been out but never picked it up as I considered it would be too light reading for my tastes at the time. I was into ‘hardcore’ spiritual stuff but these days, I don’t have as much time to sit and read, so I am choosing books <400 pages in length for the time bein as a general rule of thumb. I will say that I found book three to be most interesting to me as it presented some ideas on economic and financial systems that could be used as micro and macro economical models. It also drove home to me for some reason what it can be like when you live on ‘the outside’, which makes me always think of Charles Bukowski’s semi-biographical novel “Postoffice” when he leaves the Postal Service and suddenly he’s on ‘the outside’.
So back to being ‘on the outside’ – The issue of homeless people has really been sticking in my mind lately. Once you are on the streets, and you have no phone, no address, no clean clothes etc and worst of all, once you have it in your mind “this is what I am” and you begin to look invisible to the thousands of people who walk past you each day without a thought (or maybe we do??), how do you get out of it? How do you change your mind about who and what you are, first of all because that is the biggest challenge of them all.
I had an experience on Friday night where I did ‘a bit more’ than usual for a homeless guy and I saw the look in the guys eyes and he reached out to shake my hand. He wasn’t an alcoholic, a drug user or visibly mentally ill. It was raining in Sydney, it was about 10pm and he had no shoes and was probably mid to late 30’s. All I have thought since then is that I didn’t do enough, that I could have done more. I have told myself, it’s a start. I’m sure Mother Theresa even questioned her own efforts at times.
If this kind of thing interests you, be sure to check out these links:
Street Kids in India run their own Bank 54 Ways you can help the homeless Homeless.org.au and forums.homeless.org.au – A Sydney based home for the homeless run by a 31yo guy from Brisbane, which seems to have been originally self-funded. Some great stuff there. The Homeless Guy Blog GrandCentral – Project Care program – A phone number for everyone – I can think of a mini way of doing this in Australia using Oztell’s WebPABX or using Asterisk and using extension numbers with mailboxes where people can give out their phone number and their extension. They can collect their voicemail via a phone or have the messages emailed to them. You would just need one DID.
Obviously, a man living on the street in Australia has an experience far different to a child living on the street of South America, India or Africa. Here’s an NGO organisation in Peru started by a husband and wife in 2001 called BrucePeru – youtube video below. You can volunteer there starting at $395 US per month, including all your meals and accommodation. Prices decline depending on your length of stay.
I have read quite a bit about Lisp before and most of it, frankly went over my head as a non-programmer except bar a few articles of Paul Graham’s on Lisp. Paul is one of the brainchild(ren??) behind ViaWeb which is now Yahoo Shopping and the author of a number of books: ANSI Common Lisp, Hackers & Painters and On Lisp, which you can download here
Today, I happened to come across this link and the guy in the picture just happens to be John McCarthy, the man who designed Lisp, which I discovered only after reading up on a few of the lesser known, yet interesting languages: OCaml, Haskell, Smalltalk, Lua, Lisp et. al. later in the day on reddit.com
Of those languages, the only ones that really interests me after reading a bit about each are Smalltalk and Lisp – that’s just me. I’ve also previously read a bit about Smalltalk, especially it’s IDE, the ‘doit’ concept and Seaside, a Smalltalk web framework which I discovered from this post onsmalltalk.com which is an interesting read. Seaside itself is quite interesting. Anyway, to get a bit of a feel for smalltalk I downloaded bottomfeeder an RSS/Atom reader. It was a bit ugly and consume 80mb of memory on startup, not good impressions there, but that’s only important if you want to do GUI desktop stuff, so Smalltalk and seaside will get a look-in one day.
So back to Lisp, it is known as ‘the programmable programming language’ and reading the introduction of Paul Graham’s “On Lisp” book and throughout his articles, he really puts this as THE killer reason why to use Lisp. Frankly, I have only enough of an idea that it sounds cool and I don’t pretend to know anything else but being able to write macros as a foundation as a base around how you write your application is, well cool. So, this post really mostly serves as a note to future self – learn lisp and when you do, check out the status of the weblocks framework and probably has little meaning for anyone with half a clue. The cool title just helps me remember what to look for when I grow up.
I’m in two minds here about this one. I don’t really want to put down Christianity because I know some wonderful people who are christians and writing on the web now is a little like getting a tattoo – with Google and the way back machine, what you say kind of sticks around with you for.?? At least getting a tattoo, you know it’s going to turn into a big blue blurry blob on your old wrinkled skin when you’re 90.
I spent much of my schoolhood attending a nice, good ol’ Baptist School – we had a “non-contact” rule, or a “2 inch rule” ie: males and females who attended the same school were not supposed to go within 2 inches of each other and here’s the best part. This was in Australia in the late 80’s / early 90’s – we had been using the metric system for some 20-30 years already?
Anyway – here’s why Christianity needs to have a good rethink about it’s current situation.
Adopt a Nun – I just don’t get the whole idea of priests, nuns etc retiring? What do they retire from? Serving God? Did Mother Theresa ever retire? What about Saint Francis of Assisi? I’ve never heard of an Indian Yogi or Buddhist Monk retire, though maybe they do and I don’t know it.
The Christian version of ‘eternal life’ – let’s just get a ‘reference point’ – a few definitions of ‘eternity’
Time without beginning or end; infinite time.
infinite time; duration without beginning or end.
This one really gets me and I really understand Lewis Black’s frustration here because a common phrase in Christian rhetoric is “will have eternal life…” – now, I may be one for semantics but considering that eternity is without beginning or end, does it not stand to reason that I have always existed, am existing and will exist forever more into the ‘future’ ie: that I already have eternal life? The normal Christian dialogue here is that I only get eternal ‘life’ when I ‘die’ and it’s just a matter of which direction I go – up or down, to the nice guy or the bad guy, the hot place or the one with eternal air conditioning. Eternity is simply not eternity if it had a beginning ie: I only came into existence when I entered this physical body.
Now, let’s talk about ‘idolatry‘ – ooh, this one get’s me going. A friend of mine was once advised by his christian lady friend that she did not want to have a certain object in their house that was gifted to him by his Buddhist uncle because it was an idol. Seriously, I just love the little representations that we give atom and neutrons spinning around each other. When does something become an idol? Those familiar with ‘A Course in Miracles’ may remember one of the first lessons – “I have given everything I see all the meaning it has for me”. If I were to sit and pray under a tree, is that tree now an idol? If I stand in awe of a tall mountain, is that an idol? And what’s the whole issue with idols anyway? Here’s the lowdown
“I am the LORD your God…You shall have no other gods before Me. You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth. You shall not worship them or serve them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God” (Exodus 2:2-5).
Backup there because I somehow think that either Mr Author of Exodus has made a bit of an error, something got lost in translation or the God that Mr. Author of Exodus is talking about is just not the kind of God I think worth of listening to. Jealousy huh? How many Christians would stand up and say “jealousy is a Godly trait” – hey, I bitch-slapped my woman because I was jealous of her talking to that guy at church.. and the congregation says “amen”, yea right.
Seriously idolators, we put our work first, our ipod first, our relationship’s first, our mum and dad first, our family first, our blog first, our tv first.. so, that little buddhist statue thing is no worse than your little photo of Jesus now, isn’t it? Here’s one to ask your Christian friend who is offended about your little ‘idol’ – “Show me somewhere where God isn’t”
Another one of my favourites – Harry Potter is the work of the devil. You know, these Christians really belittle their God. Here’s the devil – he makes movies, he writes books, he’s out making fossils – I mean the guy’s really a bit of a happening dude and seems to be the omnipresent / omnipotent one here. Where’s God? Oh, he’s the quiet pacifist, who sits back and let’s the devil do his business.
It doesn’t stop there. The devil was apparently a fallen angel who want’s to usurp God’s position.. what’s that position? I mean, according to the Christian’s about the only useful purpose God has is to heal sick people (through human prayer – because until someone prayed, he just didn’t care right?) and his other purpose is to sit on some cool, golden throne with 24 elders passing judgement on those people who didn’t ‘believe Jesus died on the cross for them’ – nice guy..it kind of reminds me of the film “Baraka” where the baby chicks are getting sorted and debeaked. Now, the Christian version of God is definitely the kind of guy you’d want to be ‘your’ father right?
No wonder we have so many choosing aetheism these days. I see it more as a revolt against Christianity than anything else.
Anyway, on with my debeaking of Christianity – check this out.
The evil of any kind of ‘extra sensory’ powers like clairvoyance, clairsentience, psychics and the like. All of that stuff is from the devil also and yet, these are traits that Jesus displayed – notice any kind of contradiction when you read Mar 8? Ol’ Jesus was out there healing people, asking about reincarnation and predicting his death. His own people would call him the work of the devil, even today.
The Healing of a Blind Man at Bethsaida 22They came to Bethsaida, and some people brought a blind man and begged Jesus to touch him. 23He took the blind man by the hand and led him outside the village. When he had spit on the man’s eyes and put his hands on him, Jesus asked, “Do you see anything?”
24He looked up and said, “I see people; they look like trees walking around.”
25Once more Jesus put his hands on the man’s eyes. Then his eyes were opened, his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly. 26Jesus sent him home, saying, “Don’t go into the village.[a]” Peter’s Confession of Christ 27Jesus and his disciples went on to the villages around Caesarea Philippi. On the way he asked them, “Who do people say I am?”
28They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.”
29″But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?” Peter answered, “You are the Christ.[b]”
30Jesus warned them not to tell anyone about him.
Jesus Predicts His Death 31He then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again. 32He spoke plainly about this, and Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.
33But when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked Peter. “Get behind me, Satan!” he said. “You do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men.”
34Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. 35For whoever wants to save his life[c] will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it. 36What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul? 37Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul? 38If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when he comes in his Father’s glory with the holy angels.”
I specifically like this part: Jesus warned them not to tell anyone about him and they went and told the whole world! They obviously can’t be trusted now, can they.
And here’s where Lewis Black wraps it all up into one well said piece.
Visual WebGui looks very interesting from a perspective that it allows you to develop a winforms application as you normally would and deploy it as a webapp (also).
As per some previous posts, I like to be able to jump seamlessly between platforms. I don’t want to be tied down to anything if I can help it. This is why I wouldn’t buy an Ipod and like Mark Pilgrim, I don’t get the iphone phenomena. I want to use my application online, offline seamlessly. I want to have the same experience, no matter where I am, what I am doing etc. Software like NoMachine’s NX server give me this ability. I have a ultra-portable laptop I bought for $280 on ebay, I have Three wireless, which means I can be a passenger in a car / train / ferry / bus nearly anywhere in metro-Sydney and still have access to my Ubuntu desktop.. that’s frikkin’ cool.
But what about when I don’t have internet access? Well, I previously used Ifolder to keep all my files in sync (which uses mono btw) but ifolder has to be the worst managed open source project I have ever used. Trying to keep a client / server combination that worked together proved to be a feat for me too many times and finally I went in search of something else. I then switched over to Mindquarry (I could have just used svn with some python scripts that watched folders and syncs when it sees a change, I guess) but Mindquarry actually offers a few more features than svn or Ifolder alone ie: Tasks, timeline, wiki and teams.
So, now we have our files synchronised and I use imap, so we have mail synchronised and I have used sitebar for bookmarks for a very long time but there’s something more. What about my feeds in opera? all my vim settings? my bash_profile alias? This is where I think Conduit will be able to help me out eventually (one of the reasons I looked forward to moving to Gnome)
Now, I am really raising two separate issues here. On one hand, I am talking about syncronising two separate computers and on the other, I am talking about a seamless experience between online and offline applications. I think the first is mostly being taken care of. The second issue has some solutions becoming available also. This is where I see stuff like Google Gears, Adobe Air and db4o especially their db4o replication systemproving to show their usefulness.
Sidenote: In the Enterprise Data Centre, Lefthandnetworks has some very similar concepts happening for data virtualisation for online / offline drs solutions as db4o has for persistance – and more importanly for me, their new VMware product looks very promising for high availability + drs soutions using vmware.
So, now I bring up my original point in my posting. Let’s say we develop a desktop applications using db4o (mono bindings available) and I think we could even do that using the .Net python-like language called Boo – the developer of said language happens to also be a developer of db4o. Now, we take said winForms application and deploy it to the web using Visual WebGui. Now, I know the web purists might find this all very freakish as I haven’t done a W3C Validation on it, but I am half-certain something will be wrong and it’s not the sort of thing you are going to be delivering to blind people. I am talking about applications with a specific user base, something like a Mobile Lender, Mobile Salesperson, Microfinancing in remote areas etc.
In my post A Case for Learning Python I put forth my reasoning for deciding to spend all energy learning a language in Python – I don’t think any other language can offer the same access to so much for so little (time investment) as Python.
I will add something to the original list: Windmill is a web testing framework intended for complete automation of user interface testing, with strong test debugging capabilities and of course, it’s written in Python and uses CherryPy.
Also, in the same vein are WebUnit and Twill (both written in Python)
I remember the first time I saw George W. Bush’s face on TV and he had the pathetic face that he was there to protect America or some rubbish. I didn’t hear a word he spoke but his face was enough to tell me the man was a liar.
I am not one to normally be involved in politics but I think this man has put the peace of the world at stake. U.S foreign and economic policies leave no country out of site. Good ól GWB has dragged Australia (and others) into a war that is illegal at best and at worst.. well who knows what’s to come yet.
Why do our leaders follow Señor GWB into his crazy schemes? Without fully scoping out Johnny Howard’s brain cells on this one, maybe he is like the little child who is afraid to lose the love of his daddy. You know what they call John Howard here? Bonzai (ie: Little Bush). Whilst I am not going to articulate some words of honour for our Australian prime minister – we get the choice of two here – that is.. slightly left and far right and neither candidate or party show any real outstanding credentials, humour, wit or intelligence. We once had a party popup called “One Nation” that’s big claim to fame was a kind of “xenophobian” attitude to migrants but like I said, I don’t really follow Australian politics, frankly because the way I see it here is that nothing much really changes. This is very much unlike the situations of the Ukraine, East Timor, Venezuela, Peru, Bolivia etc.. where a change in government can bring a massive change in the day to day situation of the people.
The point is, that Señor George W. has demonstrated, distributed the mass hysteria of destruction, a completely twisted take on “christian values” or maybe he’s just following tradition of these examples of the warped interpretations of men doing things in the name of religion. Hitler also made claim to many a Christian value.
So all complaining aside, I think there is hope for the American people today. I truly wish we had a politician in this country who has the humane, thoughtful intelligence of this man.
**Edit: I did blatanly miss something, which was pointed out to me on django irc#, which is that you can’t call binary data into a template. You create a view and then call the view from your template. I will leave the below for prosterity and in case it trips someone else up. It was my blonde moment.
Forgive me if I am blatantly missinged something (which is very likelyobviously), but since the unicode integration into django, I can’t seem to generate non-text images from a view, into a template ie: then django books says:
UnicodeDecodeError at /somewhere/ ‘ascii’ codec can’t decode byte 0xff in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)Request Method: GET Request URL: http://www.somewhere.com/somewhere/ Exception Type: UnicodeDecodeError Exception Value: ‘ascii’ codec can’t decode byte 0xff in position 0: ordinal not in range(128) Exception Location: /home/moneyman/lib/python2.4/site-packages/django/template/context.py in __getitem__, line 38 Python Executable: /home/moneyman/bin/python Python Version: 2.4.3
Traceback (most recent call last): File “/home/moneyman/lib/python2.4/site-packages/django/template/__init__.py” in render_node 810. result = node.render(context) File “/home/moneyman/lib/python2.4/site-packages/django/template/__init__.py” in render 846. return self.filter_expression.resolve(context) File “/home/moneyman/lib/python2.4/site-packages/django/template/__init__.py” in resolve 577. obj = self.var.resolve(context) File “/home/moneyman/lib/python2.4/site-packages/django/template/__init__.py” in resolve 704. return self._resolve_lookup(context) File “/home/moneyman/lib/python2.4/site-packages/django/template/__init__.py” in _resolve_lookup 727. current = current[bit] File “/home/moneyman/lib/python2.4/site-packages/django/template/context.py” in __getitem__ 38. if key in d:
UnicodeDecodeError at /somewhere/ ‘ascii’ codec can’t decode byte 0xff in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)
I don’t know if it’s me or a bug. I haven’t been able to get any decent feedback from #django IRC channel as yet
