42

Changing the World

If there is one thing I am passionate about it is this: 

The world needs to be changed. 

I hope that comes through clearly in the things I write here. I also hope that it is clear that my motivation for this passion is just as clear. 

I believe the world needs to be changed because I follow Jesus as my Lord and Saviour.

However, I also believe that many other people who do not have the same motivation also want to see the world changed and have many of the same goals as me. So

I will gladly work with people who have similar goals but do not share my faith in Jesus.

The changes that I want to see include:

• Utter destruction of Poverty everywhere
• Justice for all people
• Peace throughout the world
• All people to be valued, welcomed and included
• Protection of the planet and its resources for future generations
• Building of communities around these goals.

For me as a Christian these changes form part of what I understand as the need to be part of the building of the Kingdom of God and also preparing for the return of Jesus. However, I believe that many others would see these changes as desirable, certainly as worthwhile and maybe even as essential.

Does my life show commitment to changing the world?

I have been reflecting on how my commitment to these changes becomes real. In other words what aspects of my life make concrete contributions to these changes. Alternatively "what do I do?" and "what am I?" so that people can see and experience my commitment to these goals.

As I look at the very public side of myself in the contents of this blog I hope that my commitment can be seen in four main areas

• My lifestyle as a disciple of Jesus
• My work within the Methodist Church (and wider Christian Community) to encourage change and growth
• My support for and contributions to Free Software
• My commitment to cycling as transport

In some ways these may appear a mixed bag of general and specific, they may also leave you wondering if they are connected and even how they might support the changes I am committed to.

So I want to explore each of these four areas in a series of posts before then considering more generally how we can change/should the world. While I hope all my thinking is theological I also hope that it is still relevant to those interested in changing the world who do not share my faith perspective.

One of the reasons for this series was a post by a friend (Dave Faulkner) Seth Godin: Without Them « Big Circumstance and the comments that followed. In them I mentioned that I try to bring change in the way Seth Godin suggests and that I refer to it as "being easier to get forgiveness than permission". Dave asked me to expand on what I meant and in particular on the importance of motivation and process in doing this.

However, that is not the only reason. Through reflecting on these issues I also hope to find it helpful for me as a review of where I am and how well my life actually fits with what I believe is important. Therefore this is not fully planned and worked out so diversions and changes should be expected on this journey. Hopefully that taking stock will be of interest and perhaps help to others too.

Please feel free to challenge woolly thinking as we go and for that matter encourage anything good as well :-) Helping me be honest and thorough is good for me and should make this more generally useful as well.

#uksnow is useful

Try #uksnow Map 2.0 and add your own snow reports. Actually quite helpful in making a decision about whether to take our son into a General Studies A Level Mock this afternoon.

You can see my measly 1/10 for NN9 :-(

My next phone?

Well it might well not happen but it seems like the new Nexus One Phone - Web meets phone from Google would suit me really well as my next phone.

It would be especially great if I could use it on the 3 network that I am currently with. For me having high quality google calendar, gmail and integrated contacts for phone and email would be amazingly useful.

Looks like the best way of avoiding an iPhone (don't like the double monthly cost of the iPhone with less minutes and messages than I get now).

Results from installing Google ChromeUbuntu Chromium browser (Google Chrome for Linux on Ubuntu

It was only 6 days ago that I wrote 42: Install Ubuntu Chromium browser (Google Chrome for Linux) about how easy it was to install a pre-beta version of Google Chrome (the Web Browser from Google) on Ubuntu (both 9.10 and 8.04).

Well I have upgraded to the beta version. Installation is even easier (download, open, click install). get it from Google Chrome - Download a new browser.

The performance is wonderful, extensions are now appearing (eg I have installed xmarks so my bookmarks are in sync across all machines and browsers). I have stopped using Firefox entirely after many years of use.

So far totally stable and very quick (some of the benchmarks I tried were over 10x the speed of Firefox 3.1 for javascript, others did not even complete on Firefox [it reported that the script had stalled]).

I have not compared it to Windows Explorer as I have stopped booting into Windows now that I have Datasoul (Free Open Source Church Presentation Software) to use for worship services.

I'll finish with a summary of software recommendations just as a reminder if you are also thinking about leaving windows now that Google Chrome is available for other Operating Systems. For the main applications used by Churches & Ministers my recommendations would be:

Operating System: Ubuntu 9.10 (I use Ubuntu on netbooks, old laptops, new laptops, and a Sun Server with 5 thin clients). Very easy to install, very easy to use, looks great, extremely stable, fast, free and with huge amounts of easy to install software.

Office Software: OpenOffice (over 100,000,000 downloads of version 3 in just over a year!!!). I come across MS Office on other machines all the time and keep coming away wondering why anyone is using it. The huge changes in user interface that require learning each release so put me off! This is a no brainer way to save a lot of money (and yes Ubuntu installs it for you) while gaining something that works so well.

Web Browser: Now got to be Google Chrome for speed, looks and speed. Only negative at the moment is support for pdf's (at least on Linux, have not tried Windows).

Worship Presentations: Datasoul Not just because it works so well on Linux and is free but because it is so fast to prepare worship and is getting better all the time and the price plus freedom is just what is needed for Churches.

Install Ubuntu Chromium browser (Google Chrome for Linux)

Oh yes! Excellent!

I have been wanting the Google Chrome browser on Linux for ages. If you don't know anything about it then there is the Google Chrome Comic to explain everything.

Anyway this is how to install it on Ubuntu (I have installed on 2 machines so far using Ubuntu 9.10 and 8.04):

[Update 2]: Chromium is now in beta see Chromium Blog: Google Chrome for Linux goes beta! for installation! The stuff below is out of date!

[Update: See comment 1 from Dan for an even better way]

Install Ubuntu Chromium browser (Google Chrome for Linux) - Linux * Screw.

Just to point out to anyone not using Linux how easy this is:

1. Add 2 lines to /etc/apt/sources.list eg use:
     sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list
   The 2 lines are:
     deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
  deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
   (Obviously change jaunty to your version of Ubuntu)
2. Then update and install using:
     sudo apt-get update
  sudo apt-get install chromium-browser

Obviously you could do all that with the gui in the Ubuntu package manager but it just takes longer to describe and you can't copy and paste gui instructions.

If you don't like chromium then you can always remove it completely using the Ubuntu package manager.

Compuserve shuts down

Compuserve shuts down - Boing Boing.

Sad news. I was very active on Compuserve back in the mid 80's through to mid 90's.

The forums such as DACCESS (Data Access, developers of DataFlex) were the best support mechanism of the time and a real community.

We also used it as a way of getting email in the Bible Societies in remote parts of the former Soviet Union eg the Asian Republics. I had over a dozen accounts in my name at one time, used to get emails from people interested in family trees who were amazed that there were so many Dave Warnock's in the world.

There were a lot of 3rd party software applications to help minimise online time. eg they would connect, get a list of new messages and then allow you to tag the ones you were interested in offline before re-connecting to grab the actual messages.

In the early days we were using big chunky 2400 baud modems (240 characters per second). At times you could read as fast as the text came in (no error correction or compression built-in).

It took a long time for access to the internet to match Compuserve and the www seemed very poor for interactive support.

Netbook upgrades

Yesterday I upgraded two Netbook computers. The first is my Asus Eee PC 900 which I have had for about a year. The second is an HP 2133 Mini Note (KX872AA) which a good friend donated to us as they found they could not get on with the included Suse Enterprise Linux.

Our plan is to give one to our youngest son who has been told that due to dyslexia he will be able to use a laptop at school for some lessons.

After a spot of googling I was a bit worried about the HP, Ubuntu only offers tier 3 support for it. On the other hand there plenty of options for the Eee PC. In the end I decided to try The Ubuntu Netbook Remix (abbreviated to UNR). Second runner was EasyPeasy Linux, but as that is based on Ubuntu 8.04 rather than 9.04 I decided to try UNR first.

WOW!

An incredibly easy install. It is a while since I have installed a desktop operating system and so much has changed. It was incredibly easy and straightforward. Absolutely fantastic, almost no questions to ask and everything worked out of the box. I installed from a memory stick prepared on a windows XP laptop and it just worked.

On both Netbooks the screen was correctly identified and worked at full resolution from the start.

On both the wireless network adaptor was detedcted and worked immediately, the home wireless was found, I just had to type in the passphrase and I was away (well I did have to add the MAC address to the list of allowed computers on the firewall and WiFi hub, but that is true for any machine running any operating system).

Then I got another nice surprise when I plugged in my USB mobile internet dongle (from 3), it found it, asked if I wanted to connect and then got a connection first time. What is more I pulled it out and then put it back in and it worked again. No settings, no magic just worked.

However, I did find the fancy netbook desktop interface very sow on both machines but switching to the classic Ubuntu interface (which everyone here is used to) solved the speed problem completely.

I have also installed the just released FireFox 3.5 to benefit from the speed increase.

So if you have a netbook I personally recommend Ubuntu Netbook Remix - fantastic!!!

Looks like our son will have the Asus - no hard disk (more robust) and smaller/lighter (especially the power supply).

Meanwhile I am using the MiniNote to write this and it is very nice (like the keyboard and screen especially).

Mindblowing #IranElection Stats: 221,744 Tweets Per Hour at Peak

I said there were a lot of tweets on twitter about Iran (in 42: Reflections on Twitter part 1) but this Mindblowing #IranElection Stats: 221,744 Tweets Per Hour at Peak shows just how amazing the numbers of tweets, blog posts, videos etc are.

Approaching one million tweets! Wow!

Reflections on Twitter part 1

So I, @dave42w, am now a twitter old hand as I have now had my twitter stats counted for 5 days. I thought it would be good to reflect on it a little.

Size and Impact

It is hard to grasp the size of social networking sites. Last night I got a new understanding of just how big and busy twitter is. I have seen a number of tweets (the name for the short, maximum 140 character messages on twitter) mentioning the Iraq elections. People writing on a topic like this use hashtags to mark their tweets so that they can be tracked. Last night people were using #iranelection on all their tweets relating to the election.

Anyway one of the tweets also mentioned that people in Iran were using TwitterFall to get around attempts to restrict access to twitter. So I took a look. Incredible! You can select a popular tag of the moment and then the messages just appear continuously and scroll down the screen. There is a count of how many messages are queued for display. The messages appear faster than you can read them and yet after just a few seconds there were 800 queued for display. They are still coming in at about 2 per second and this is just one topic, although the hottest of the moment.

I guess it will be a while before we can really work out the impact of Twitter on the Iranian situation. Big claims are being made for the way it has allowed people to get news out and the way it's open architecture and numerous supporting sites have helped people avoid attempts to block communication. The fact the BBC are now reporting that there will be a recount may be down at least in part to twitter.

Following, followers and friends.

On twitter you follow people. When you follow people you see all the tweets they write. All the tweets from all the people you follow (including yourself) are then displayed on your home page in chronological order (most recent at the top).

So everyone gets a list of the people they follow (the list is called following) and the people who in turn follow them (followers). If someone is on both lists (you follow each other) then they are considered a friend (and then you can send them direct messages which are private to the two of you, I would not bet your job on that privacy though).

As with all these social networks there ends up being a competition to have more followers than anyone else. That results in a lot of "spam" where you find "people" following you simply in the hope you will follow them. I put people in quotes as many of these followers are actually automated software "bots".

I very quickly discovered that I wanted to keep an eye on who is following me. You can block anyone that you don't like so that they can no longer follow you. I have simple rules for this.

1. If the thumbnail image is of a pretty, semi naked young woman with a name like Monica1722 then you get blocked immediately.
2. If I click on your name to see your profile (which shows me your tweets and how many followers/following you have) and my internet firewall does not let me view the content then you get blocked immediately.
3. If when I view your profile you have no tweets, lots of following (1,000's) and only a few following then you get blocked immediately.
4. If all your tweets are advertising something then I will not block you (unless I particularly don't like what you are selling) but I won't follow you.

This means I have blocked about 1/2 of the people who started to follow me.

Ok that will do as a first set of reflections. Next will be some of the tools and websites that I have explored to make twitter eassier/more powerful/...

Tiscali 404 sucks

I hate what Tiscali do when I type an invalid domain name. 99.99999% of the time it is a simple, silly typo. But I get a useless error page back:

tiscali Sorry, the page you were looking for cannot be found The page you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable. Error: (DNS), click the back back button to try another link. Search the web for Suggested Searches Dating News Movies Ringtones Shopping Sport Chat Travel Finance Games Music Cars

OK it is formatted more nicely than that. But still useless.

What makes it worse is what they do to the url. I just typed

http://www.voteforachange.co.ukj

notice how my fat finger just added the j to the end. If the url stayed the same it would be nano seconds to correct. Instead the url changes to:

http://results.ispconnect.co.uk/main?AddInType=Bdns&Version=1.4.11&FailureMode=1&ParticipantID=abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz&ClientLocation=uk&Referer=&FailedURI=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.voteforachange.co.ukj%2F&SearchQuery

Isn't that friendly! try finding and correcting that in your address bar.