Back in the good old days of being a full time student I was pretty geeky/nerdy (which ever you feel works). I had my fingers in all sorts of random projects + I had a room of computer hardware that I could use to build something fun, cool, useful or random. Once I started working it became hard to be as dedicated so most of that stuff went away …

Now I’m finding that work leads me to implement solutions that, can be bought off the shelf, but often are WAY beyond our budget (like 10 times beyond considerable). I’ve also found that I miss having my Huawei E960 to “hack” – just for fun and because it looks like someone might finally have a working toolchain, maybe.

Which brings everything in full circle: what I wonder is whether I should re-take up some involvment in open source projects, building custom hardware products, etc… I am not overly good at business marketing; I just don’t have the salesman gene. So there is limited fiscal reward. Work needs some of it: but there is danger in having an entirely custom built with no community support product. I believe in open source so contributing back is a good thing in my opinion (i.e. that’s a positive).

Where do I start? Hmmm that question is one that drives me to get out of the technology field all together. Which leaves me thinking that perhaps I need to find project or product that I’m truly passionate about and start on it as opposed to asking an open ended question.

And then sometimes it would be nice to simply preach the gospel and see where life goes.

Watch this video.

Reading my feeds this evening I stumbled upon this which has two interesting parts.

1. The article talks about legally dividing by zero. Which is a bit of a in joke – but see: I told you so.

2. Discusses non-displayed human emotion.

Through out last year, in light of Prue’s departure among other things, I had several conversations about … my lack of emotion … I hate putting it that way but I don’t have anything better. Out of all that has been said and done two comments stick in my mind:

… you would do the same in any other situation …

It’s not that you don’t feel; but you control how you react to the feeling.

From the article:

Quite a few psychologists now think that the rational mind cannot exist without an underlying emotional mind. You have to be committed to being rational. Only then can you override your fervent desire for certain things to be true, and accept that they’re not.

While I wouldn’t go as far as to say: if you can’t override emotional desire you don’t have a rational mind. I would generally say I agree with the proposition. And could cite experiences from over the last 11 months that would lend weight to the argument.

However given the passage of time my grief has run it’s course. Well and truly run it’s course. I now have been sitting here for 15 minutes trying to find some form of emotional passion. I realise that this is not empirical but I can’t come up with anything. Which is not to say I’m dispassionate about everything. I can come up with lots of things I’m passionate about. But they’re all intellectual passion. I also know I have emotional passion … I have been in love; tangoed with lust* and constrained rage.

These things you feel in your heart. I mean literally in your chest. I don’t know how but I do know.

* By lust I mean desire for things to be the way you want them to be.

So what do I think the sum of human emotion is? 42.

Yes just like the Ultimate question of life, the universe and everything. Human emotion, when classified, has an equally meaningless answer. But not because the question isn’t a question. Continuing with the HGTG themes: Space is big… if you take everything that happens in the universe of someone’s life and then multiply and factor that out to include everybody’s life. Then the sum of human emotion is incomprehensibly random. It may very well be 42. Or 28372072857287213412120072341234. It doesn’t matter.

The point here is that a persons response to a situation, including how passionate that response is, will always be contingent on the sum of that persons experiences. Life is chaotic (or at least random). We have no control over what tomorrow brings. We get by through pretending our planning or easy going nature will keep the unexpected at bay. We respond instinctively: emotionally, intellectually, dispassionately whatever your experiences have, thus far, trained you to do.

When I felt rage I felt completely out of control because of it. Only for a few seconds and then the sum of my experiences, which have conditioned me to control passion, caught up. I felt out of control because it was new. My experiences hadn’t dealt with it before.

Aside from the tragedy involved, it was exhilarating experiencing something new, a change! Change is often something cited when discussing how people cope. Some are afraid, others are not. I view change optimistically. I think that lets me go into it with my eyes open. So far I’ve been lucky; others though have been burnt and well “once bitten, twice shy” is apt.

I believe that the comments about being non-human come about when our experiences are too narrow. And often will come from people who have vastly different experience to our own. They have no way to “put themselves in our shoes”. When our experience is narrow we always respond the same. No matter what. It is easy to fall into complacency. Life gets comfortable; the road while still unknown can usually be predicted; and we are always involved in the same scenarios. Some may refer to this as being stuck in a rut. I don’t like the negative connotation. It’s no better than implying someone is not human.

If only we could all experience something new everyday …

Geez that’s bad. But oh well. Happy new year to all. Etc… Etc… 2008 was pretty long in my opinion. It was definitely a full year; full of new experiences; and full of challenges personally and otherwise. But it’s gone now and we all have to start writing dates ending in 9 now.

I haven’t really, at least publicly, spoken much about some of the potentially bad things that happened this last year. And I don’t propose to now. I took opportunities that were presented to me in the past; quite some time ago now I guess; those opportunities furnished me with experiences that I am glad for. The long term strategy didn’t play out as planned: life is quick though; you can’t live for the long term strategy.

To quote Albert Einstein:

I never think of the future – it comes soon enough.

Spontaneity and diligence are the keys. And for me that’s what 2009 is all about.

Just in case you don’t know. December is going to be one second longer than usual.

I am a little bored; and very hot. In search of something to do: Something, productive, to do. I decided to come back to the blog. This will be my grand 7th post for the year. Wow going strong. Which has made me start to consider the foot print I have made, or has been made for me, in the vast interwebs. A few years back, circa 2001, a Google ego search was pretty pointless, but now it can be an interesting thing to do.

For example my name is used for page rank boosting. For those who care I realise that search algorithms are much more complex. My point is simple: the foot print is more like graffiti – all over the place – some good and, well… you get the point. And finally: impossible to eradicate. There is also a prominent GCC mailing list post that is totally misleading bordering on stupidly wrong. More generally, people have covered the web with information. And as my grand total of 7 posts would seem to indicate. Often interest in maintaining that information dies. Thus the information is left to it’s posterity. Whatever that may be.

What follows is just random things I remember. If you want the references look them up yourself.

2008 has been the year we’ve seem explosive growth in the micro-blog (i.e. Facebook / Twitter); the call for “death of blogs” / “long live the blog”; chrome; increased censorship debate; ongoing and expanding delivery of the OLPC; daily mashups helped along by hosted libraries and apis; the smart phone; and so on… We have sufficient disk space to store it all. Search will continue to develop as our gateway to the info. Eventually we may even get a semantic web.

However, what is the ongoing point of dead (i.e. unmaintained) information? What is it’s posterity? Some would argue, as evidenced by the NASA lost ability to read tapes farce, that the posterity is in the accessibility. Others perhaps would lean towards Catch-22: Why not?

Both are valid. But both ignore that it’s not 1300 anymore. You can’t know everything. So I wonder: Are we going to end up with billions of “Fermat’s Last Theorem”-esque pieces of information? Probably. Does it really matter? Probably not.

And so, finally, back to this blog: What is it’s posterity? Hopefully being relevant enough to keep useless information out of the way. But, just as in life, you live for the day, the information here was, is and future posts will continue to be, relevant for their publication date. If you’re reading this in December of 2108: Sorry but I probably can’t help you. Not unless I live to 124. And hey that’d be another piece of information. Because, at least officially, the oldest living person to date is 122. How ironic

I’ve just performed some WP maintenance (finally):

• Upgraded to WP 2.5.1
• Updated plugins and themes

This has been on my to do list for a month now so it feels good to have finally done it.

Ahh I have to shake my head, I really was confused by this story when I first read the headline.

According to The Register, residents in Hong Kong have been looking to have The Bible classified as restricted content, for ages 18+ only. As reported by Reuters, this request has been rejected.

Personally I feel this is a little silly. Crying wolf if you want. If a person chooses to participate in such actions as were decried, then they are responsible for their actions, nothing else can or should be held responsible.

Prue had an interesting question for me last night: Do you believe life exists on another planet? Which, in the context of our conversation, really meant do I find the concept of true alien life to conflict with Christian beliefs. Prue’s motivation for asking this question comes from the discovery of Gliese 581c and its apparent habitable atmosphere. According to the article we will have to wait until 2020 before we get a chance to “discover” life on other planets, so in the mean time, I’ll speculate.

I feel this question has two components: a) Does a form of life exist? and b) Does a species exist which has a similar, or more advanced, consciousness / intelligence / thirst of knowledge?

A: Does a form of life exists?
In recent posts on the nature of life I discuss evolution as plausible, even likely. I’ve made evolution out to be a completely random algorithm, something that eventually reaches a result, if given enough time. So, regarding a general form of life, meaning plants, or basic organisms, or ants etc… Ignoring all God/Christian components: I feel it is certainly possible that life exists elsewhere in the Universe. However I should qualify that statement by saying: just because something is possible, doesn’t mean it actually exists.

However, the context of the question requires me to consider certain Christian components. In the articles where I discussed evolution, I stated:

While God may not have interfered with natures evolutionary course, [but] He certainly was their to start it.

Which basically requires me to say that God started life on Earth, and then told it to evolve. This, must also apply on another planet. In the end, God starting life on two different planets is entirely possible, so my answer remains the same.

B: Does an “intelligent” species exist?
I don’t want to get caught up in definitions of intelligence or consciousness; all I want is some life form that is akin to human thought levels (or more advanced). They can look like a Cockroach for all I care.

My answer is essentially the same: it’s certainly possible. But, as before, the possibility does not provide a guarantee. Also, belief in God does not stop the possibility intelligent life. But it does beg the question: Is Jesus’ sacrifice also required on that planet? Are they even part of God’s grand plan? Which, really is the point of part b. It opens a whole new thought process. To the best of my knowledge, the scriptures that discuss Gods relationship with mankind, and the purpose of Jesus’ sacrifice, do not preclude the possibility. I would like comments on this one, PLEASE!!!

I’m not going to be holding my breath waiting for little gray men to take me away to a Utopian paradise, or a dysfunctional hell. Nor do I ascribe to any conspiracies out of X-Files or similar. Simply given the size of the Universe, I feel it is entirely possible that life at some level, exists!!!

As stated above, I would really like some feedback on the concept of the scriptures precluding extraterrestrial life from a relationship with God. I do not believe God would allow life to form that would seek out repentance, only in the end to discover it was never on the cards for them.

As described in another post tonight I wanted XHTML1.1 compliance in my content management system. There was also a need for a map based location. Google Maps mashup time… Only one problem, XHTML1.1 compliance means using the application/xhtml+xml mime type. Google Maps uses the JavaScript function document.write(), and wouldn’t you know it, that function does not exist in the xml dom api.

Seems I’m not the only one with this issue: Google Maps API – No XHTML Support. I couldn’t actually find any such references on the Google Maps Help Group, I didn’t look to hard though. Why? Because I found lots of information in other areas. If you follow some links from the following you will have more than enough information.

• John Resig discusses the issue and presents a solution. AdSense related.
• Thread on Google Maps API Group.

I tried the solution presented by John Resig. No dice. I think this may be related to the differences in AdSense and Google Maps.

The CMS already used jQuery extensively, so perhaps jQuery could help. It’s funny this is extremely simple, but it works:
<script type="text/javascript" src="/js/jquery.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
//<![CDATA[
// Especially overwritten for xhtml+xml content type
document.write = function(str) { $("head").append(str); };
//]]>
</script>


Ok, claiming that works is silly:

• It works in Firefox, IE6+, Opera* and Konqueror.
• I have not tested it in Safari, it did work with Konqueror though.
• It depends on the jQuery library (it might work with Prototype).
• * You have to serve text/html to Opera. It appears Opera doesn’t support executing JavaScript added in this fashion, be it external files or inline code.

If anyone can test under Safari that would be excellent.

Andrew