Of God, love, hate, and apparently Oprah April 15, 2008

Last night I stumbled upon a post on this dear-god website and found the conversation interesting.

The gist of the post is that everything in the world is going so wrong so where in the world is God? It’s very obviously talking to the Christian God, even though it is addressed to Buddha and even Oprah. I know all the typical Christian responses to her questions/complaints, since I was a Christian and even went to a tiny Christian college for 3 years of my life. It’s not so much her complaints that I found interesting, but the responses.

All the Christians are responding with the same basic response: “that’s not God’s fault, that’s sin’s fault. We sin because of free will. Free will is a good thing. God is love, not hate.” Here’s one quote in particular: ‘god’s will is never hatred. in fact the scriptures say that “god is love”.’

It’s that part that caught me: ‘god’s will is NEVER hatred.’ And I think that has a lot to do with the whole losing faith, becoming agnostic, drifting closer and closer every day to atheist. The statement is clearly false. The Old Testament in particular is pretty damning evidence that God’s will does involve hatred.

Instead of looking for examples, I googled some. Now I know, this website is clearly biased and full of crazy anti-christian loonyness, but just use it for the scripture references. Please again, just use it for the references to scripture and what God did in that scripture. Warnings over, here’s the link.

Anyway… those are my late night thoughts while I waited for my oven to finish self-cleaning so I could sleep without worrying about the apartment burning down. As random and jumbled as they may be, my point last night was that God is not just love. God is pretty damn mean and cruel at times and the Bible has plenty of examples of him being mean and cruel.

phpitter beta release.

Well, I switched from GtkTextView’s to GtkHTML’s for the tweets and popup. This way it’ll handle hyperlinks for me. I was getting close to figuring out how to figure out which word someone clicked on in a GtkTextView, but this was way easier.

Since now hyper linking works, sending updates works, the reply/retweet/direct buttons work, and the libnotify plugin works… I’ve stuck it out on code.google.

Check out the project and download it to give it a try.

phpitter shapping up April 14, 2008

Last night I hacked at it some more. Here’s what it looks like now:

Ok, now see that message from @jimctc that says “@micah pic from the breeder. she arrives first weekend in may.” Check out what happens if I hover over @jimctc’s avatar for that message:

Also, here’s what the simpleLibNotifyNotice plugin does (note, this requires libnotify and the cmd line tool notify-send):

I really need to get hyperlinks working in GtkTextViews… but that scares me.

I don’t get along well with CSS, will try to get the blog formatting to work right…

More fun with php-gtk. April 13, 2008

Can’t stop fooling with this.  GTK is a funny funny system.  You have to know all the tricks to get things to layout right and capture the right events.  Wish it was more intuitive.

This new cut of phpitter is much cooler.  It looks better, updates the timeline every so often, saves/loads timeline data, will keep a history of 40 tweets deep (configurable actually), and has a couple of plugin hooks.

There are two plugins with it to show how the plugin hooks can work.  One will turn the tweet entry text red if you go over 140 characters.  The other is a sample notification plugin.  All it does is output to the cmd line who tweeted what to you.  Would be really easy to hook it in to a gtk window pop up, or the libnotify system.

Here’s the code.  And the screenshot:

php + gtk + twitter April 12, 2008

So… yeah. This was a fun Saturday morning. I wrote a gtk twitter client in php. Well… I wrote a proof of concept gtk twitter client in php.

The code is ugly and I’m sure has tons of issues, but it pulls your timeline and allows you to send updates. Check out the horrid screenshot, and here’s the rough code..

Earth Hour 2008 March 30, 2008

We participated in Earth Hour last night here in Denver. The kids (Janelle is 5 and Kincaid turned 4 yesterday) were very excited about it, way more than I expected them to be. It was amazing the quiet and that darkness that first hit our apartment after I shutdown all computers, t.v.’s, fans and lights.

We didn’t think ahead and get candles or flashlights.

Normally I shut all the lights out in the apartment and it’s not big deal… but I never realized how much light even an idle T.V., and the leds on the front a computer give off. So we made our way through our apartment using my blackberry as a flashlight. It was an amazing Spring day here so we went outside for a walk. My kids immediately asked several questions:

Where’s everyone else?

I guess they thought of it like Halloween. They expected everyone to stop their electronic lives around us and enjoy the night.

Why does everyone have their lights and t.v.’s on?

This was a harder one to answer. It seems that here in Denver, and many other places in America, the word of Earth Hour didn’t really spread. We had fun with it though, walked down to the courtyard of our complex and the kids ran around in the dark in a huge field. After about 30 minutes we got cold and headed back to the dark apartment. There we searched for jammies with my blackberry flashlight again, then we read Horton Hears a Who by the light of the phone. In the end we tucked the kids in just before the hour was over. They really seemed to like it, almost as much as a holiday.

I wondered what other experiences people had with Earth Hour and my wife found this great photo set. I was especially amazed at the pic of the baby in the NICU.

Anyway… I hope to see more American cities participate next year. It was a nice hour to get away from the Internets and the constant hum of electronics. And those pictures of major cities going dark are just surreal.

Starting with git in a team of one March 19, 2008

I became a git fanatic quickly after hearing Linus speak. I had been using Subversion for only a few weeks when I saw the video — after using CVS for years. Not being all that impressed with Subversion, I was thirsty for something more. Git has basically become the way I version any project I start, track changes to system configurations, or even keep revisions of websites I host.

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IT and Ethics. March 18, 2008

Call it what you will: Black hat, bad, abusive, evil, wrong, illegal. There are many things that are greatly looked down upon in the online world of the internets. Some things are outright illegal, and others just annoying. In my 10 or so years of being in IT I’ve only had to outright refuse one request from an employer. I was fortunate in that the combination of my prior performance/attitude outweighed the importance of the requested action. On many other occasions I’ve won at talking the company out of the action or modifying the request so that it met my standards.

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Bash Tip #2 March 13, 2008

Getting around

Sure… there’s “cd” to change directories and tab completion. But there’s more than that.  Here’s some other tips for getting around quickly in a Bash shell.

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Can I use your phone?

There was no hidden camera as far as I could tell. Normally when something like this happens you expect some host of a show to jump out from behind a bush and say some cheesy catch line. Well.. I don’t know, maybe “normally” is the wrong word, since that has never actually happened to me.

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