OddThoughts

What it is:

Simple Blog is a framework for both PHP/ASP that allows the “once-in-awhile” blogger to maintain an ongoing list of entries on a regular basis.

Background:

Many people are interesting in blogging, but don’t have the time to devote to it on a regular basis, it is just a small hobby, something to pass the time.

The problem with this is simply it is hard to get people interested and addicted to your blog when you write on a semi-regular basis.  Most people like to be able to count on regular entries that they can ‘count’ on. Would you subscribe to a newspaper if it only arrived once in a while at random times?

The Solution:

The simple blog solves this problem by keeping regular posts to your site from other contributors. So you are free to write whenever you feel like it, meanwhile you blog continues to grow from others content (who also are probably writing only on a semi-casual basis)

I had this interesting idea. Wouldn’t it be nice, if my cellphone knew my location and could respond accordingly.

So I was hacking around with some bluetooth settings and stuff, so then when I arrive at
work, or at home, my computers recognize my presence and run various interesting little scripts.

I then further postulated, what an interesting idea this would combined with other locations. Stores could
have software with bluetooth keys, or using the phone’s internal GPS to tell the phone it’s location and respond accordingly.

Now, I just heard all about this today on TWIT 151, basically discussing the exact same idea ! I see a lot of potential.

Concept:

A simple java J2ME App that would execute various scripts/send SMS/update your twitter, or send your reminders based on the phone’s location.

Basically, the app would have 2 modes. (MAP MODE, and SCAN MODE).

MAP MODE:

Functions: Load a MAP, Save a MAP, Create an Entry

Create an Entry -> An Entry is a grid (basic shape co-ordinates, squares or
rectangle). You enter the GPS co-ordinates of area) and define a custom
name \”Eg: The Mall\”. If you don’t know the GPS co-ordinates, you could
simply walk to the corners of the area and click ‘get sample’ which
would grab the co-ordinates from the GPS and input them automatically.

Entry would contain 2  scripts which would execute, “ON_ENTER” and “ON_EXIT”.
These would be run when the phone enters and leaves the grid area respectively while in SCAN MODE.

Load A MAP/Save a MAP -> Simply saves the map location, names, and execution scripts to a file
(probably XML File). The idea would be people could upload these maps or send them to one other to share their areas with others.

SCAN MODE:

Scan mode mode would be pretty simple. A background process, would
periodically (say every 2-3 minutes) get the GPS location, and compare
to each item in the grid of maps stored on the mobile device. When the
phone moves into one or more of the grids, the ON scripts is executed,
and when it leaves the GRIDS the off script is execulted.

Possible Uses:

1) Could be implemented with your TASK list. So if you have an item “Pick
up milk” you would get a reminder when you arrive at the store

2) Smart Devices: When you arrive at home, your computer could log you in, or send a twitter message. When you at work, it could start your messenger etc.

3) Location based advertising: Your device could get “advert” reminders when you arrive in a location. Good for
advertisers, maybe bad for cell phone users. UNLESS perhaps this makes the cell phone usage cheaper to recieve adverts !

Now Wait!

Before you get all high and mightily telling me how those magazine selling businesses are a \”waste of time\”. Just please give me 2 minutes of your time.

I’m not suggesting that you sign up for Avon, or Tupperware, and try to sell their products.

I’m suggesting you create your own product line and have others do the selling for you!

Why be at the bottom of the pole, when you can start at the top?

First you create a simple website, that lists all of the products you want to sell, perhaps it’s a custom T-Shirt business, or eccentric geek gadgets, or even a book club. Decide what your buisness will be, (once you get it up and running you can then lauch others!)

Create a set of instructions and marketing materials to give to people explaining on how to sell your product. This should include

a) A catalog of items available for purchase

b) A price list containing prices for your sellers to “sell at”. Give you sellers the ability to customize this list and include their own customized ‘mark up’ to their situation.

c) Instructions for hosting a “party\ for your sellers to sell the wares.

You don’t have to actually have your own product list.  Instead you create a special site that lists the items in your catalogs and uses affiliate links to other products.

You seller buys the items from your affiliate pages (which are made to look like your catelog) and you get the commission. They then buy the items from the items collected and keep the difference (or pay you a %age of the sale as well).

Yep, it should be obvious right?..Well not always, especially if you’re trying to start a new business, or part-time business.

Let’s start with the basics:

A Job -> You make money

A Hobby -> Costs you money

Makes sense right?

Here’s what happens when someone tries to start their own business for the first time (ie: it happens to me and I’m sure I’m not alone)

You have an idea - it’s a great idea, you’re motiviated to work on it, and your all gung-ho so you start working hours on end, you put your blood sweat and tears into it - hopeing, waiting for others to pick it up and for it to be the huge success that you just know it’s going to be.

The problem — In this heightened state of \”busy-ness\”, you don’t really think about measuring the effectivness of your work. In particular, you spend what you think you need, probably go over your initial budget, and you have yet to actually get any earnings.

In this initial state - you simply have an expensive hobby - until you start actually making money (profit) it is not a business. Perhaps you have loans, and investors, perhaps it’s not your money that you are spending, never-the-less, if you not making money it’s a hobby. Most (if not all startups) begin simply as hobbies.

This is not too big a deal, except when several years have gone by and you have convinced yourself you have a good business but you are still not making any money at it. You caontinue to justify all of you hard work as \”fruitfull\” and \”valuable\”, you take time away from family in friends and convince yourself that it is because you are working at trying to make some money, all the while you are really just working on your hobby.

So am I suggesting that you quit when you reach a dip in the road? - Not at all - but I do have a few suggestions to keep you on the right track and learning the right thing to quit and keep from getting trapped/confused during this process.

1) Set your Goals Upfront ->

Be honest with yourself about what you are trying to do, and actively plan where you would like to be in the future. Set Metrics/Mesurables that you can compare to and be sure your keeping yourself on track

2) Watch your Spending ->

It can be easy to get trapped in (I’ll buy everything now, and get paid back later when the money rolls in). Especially if you have some angel startup investor giving your the intial capital to get yourself rolling. But, it’s better to invest only what you need and add funds slowely while keeping in the black (or at least close to it), and continuing to re-invest your profits into biulding your business, otherwise you can find yourself in a mountain of debt and worrying about this could ultimately lead to the demise of your business

3) Decide your “end-point-if” and re-evaluate as necessary ->

Are you willing to loose hundreds of thousands of dollars year after year, on your business? If so, you’ve simply picked a really expensive hobby. If your already a millionaire then you can probably even afford this hobby.

Ask yourself - at what point will I admit to myself that it’s just a hobby and not a business. If you don’t think about this upfront, you may continually tell yourself that “it’s going to get better, it’s going to get better”. But unlike the movies, you can’t just click your heals three times and everything will turn out alright!

Good Luck !

Here’s the idea.

In the best of worlds, people would go about their daily lives, and the economy would be good and strong for everyone in society. People would work hard, make money, buy goods and services, and we would be all “happy go lucky”

However, we watch the news, listen to the radio, read the paper. All these things tells us about something called the “economy”. It’s in a downturn, people are losing money, the sky is falling, etc. etc.

This “economy” to which you hear in the news. It’s not real!!.

The truth is if the thing called the “Dow Jones” drops 500 points, your life still goes on and continues the way it always did.

Maybe I’m being too critical, the problem is not with the economy. The problem is a very common error people make in analysis and creating self fulfilling prophecies.

You go through life, you encounter problems, you try to figure out the cause of your problems, you try to define an action plan to solve these problems. (at least that’s what I do)

Whether you are an analyst or the average ‘joe plumber’. You still do these things. Some of us maybe more conscious/aware of it, but we all do it on some level.

Certain “events” in life happen, to society in general. “The Economy” is one of those events.

As humans, it is a natural (intrinsic) human trait to point to one of your problems and attach one of these “socieity events” as the cause. We all do it; and this doesn’t mean we are right, but it’s very easy to do. Although it might make us ‘feel good’ it doesn’t really solve the problem.

So let’s say you are the “typical” person, you probaby have lots of credit cards and “consumer” debt. If the economy takes a downturn perhaps you start experiancing pain. The debt collectors get ansy and want their money back; and you don’t have it to give to them. Perhaps you start to panic? Perhaps everyone in the society starts to panic, and everyone just stops spending and the economy slows down even more; and the news/media reports the problem is getting worse, and you get more scared, and the cycle continues…

You start to feel powerless, nervous, and you don’t know what to do. You see the problem is not with the economy. “The economy” is a simply reflection of the actions of people re-acting to what they see/hear in the news. As hard as it sounds; stopping listening to this trash and focus instead on what you can control, what you are responsible for. And things will get better..PROMISE !

It is a well believed myth that we live in 3 Dimensions. If you want to know the location of any object you can give things such as Latitude, Longitude, and Elevation which should pinpoint the object(at least on the earth; there are equivlent names for the universe as well)

Of course this is a false assumption.  We live in a word of 4-Dimensions, the 4th being, of course time. We don’t often consider time as a dimension. If I ask my wife “Where did I put my wallet?”, she doesn’t have to tell me the location (X, Y, and Z)  and the time, since the time is assumed to be “now”

If I could time travel though, It mike make sense ask, where was my wallet yesterday? or where will my wallet be tommorow?

4 Dimensions can be a tricky thing to get your mind around and first glance to some it sounds paradoxical. It can also cause questions of free will. Is the future already determined? Are we not able to change it?  What keeps me from killing my parents in hte past and thus prevening myself from being born, but then how could I have time travelled in the first place?

The best analogy for understanding 4 Dimensions is actually a simple computer game cartridge/DVD game. Think of you favorite computer/console game.

If you hold the game in your hands, you can see it look at it touch it. Now imagine you are a being existing outside of hte normal 3 Dimensions.  Although you are unaware of the “outcome” of the game. This is the 4th Dimension, all that is needed for all the possible outcomes is present within that cartridge. There is no ‘magic’ to it. It’s all just a bunch of bits and bytes, that when played (when experianced) flow in time.

You see once you decide to play the game you switch your point of view. Now longer are you looking in 4 Dimensions, you now “experiance time” and there fore switch from a 4 Dimensional view to a 3 Dimensional view.

This is related, in a similar manner to the idea that the “observer” effects the expirement simply by watching it. (see: The Plausibility Agrument )

Do you remember back in high school, the debate, is light a particle or a wave? Why does it seem to have both properties?  Same problem, and it is no coincidence, for things that can move at the speed of light. Sub-atomic particles for instance essentially “exist” in 4 Dimensions, and therefore when observed, we are only observing from a 3 Dimensional point of view so they don’t exactly “behave” normally.

A dangerous post title to be sure. Hackers can’t back down from a challenge. I suppose it is part of the OCD or ADHD that causes them to try. When you put something out ther like “You can’t … crash, you can’t break in, etc. you just know your asking for trouble !

I however am not asking for someone to try and crash this post (or this server), as it would probably make the nice folks that host this blog for me very angry.

What I am wondering about is crashing simply by getting a lot of traffic. Blogs want traffic, lots of visitors reading what they have to say.

Bloggers may try techniques such as Digg, Technorati, or StumbleUpon. But it’s a 2 edged sword. If you get a lot of traffic, it’s great, lots of people are reading your content, perhaps you are actually making some money at it !

But what happens if you get too much? For example there is something called the “Digg Effect “. If one of you articles happens to make it to the front page of Digg, you may get so much traffic, the server that hosts your wonderfull content won’t be able to keep up and it will crash.

I am curious as to which sites/people have this “magic power” . Digg of course being one such site. But what if your site is spoken on various podcasts such as “TWIT “, or “Daily Source Code “. Can they crash their servers.

It’s somewhat like when Oprah brings a new book into her bookclub. The poor lady (or man) who wrote the book is probably blown out of his seats. It’s an immediate best seller, all because she spoke the name.

Who, then are the “oprah’s” of the internet. What are the people/blogs that can crash this post (or any post)? You’re suggestions of who can do this are recommened.

Some call them ‘crackberries’. Blackberries were one of the first mobile phones out there that had a) a keyboard and b) email through a mobile phone; as simple as text messaging.

This doesn’t make them the best. And for my fellow Canadians. I’m sorry that I’m not supporting the Canadian “RIM”.

I actually have nothing against Blackberries. I just don’t think they are the “best” device for mobile phone and messaging. I’m a swiss army knife kinda person and Blackberries just don’t cut it for me.

What tends to happen is a) a company releases a “new thing”. That new thing becomes a buzz word (eg: in business) and everyone buys one.

This company then gets the largest share of the market (you can call it ‘first to market popularity).

As other companies come out with perhaps even better products, the first product continues to hold the share. Usually because of popularity/loyality.

And hence the blackberry remains popular, though there are several other products that can do a better job

The Opportunity

Often, you want to have users submit a form with specific data and have that data emailed to you.

However, you might be on a host that does not support emailing automatically, or perhaps you can only write html pages for the website your have.

A simple script can be created that will allow you to give others the ability to email all form data they create to an email address of their choosing.

This program should incorporate specific security to prevent against attacks and spam, as well as not reveal confidential email addresses to users.

Read More…

I hear this said all the time by people. Joe got diabetes because he was overweight. If he wasn’t overweight he would not have gotten it.

It causes a dangerous stigma amongst fellow diabetes like myself and is a mis-conception that I would like to clear up.

The facts:

There are 2 types of diabetes (aka Diabetes Mellitus - Sugar Diabetes)

TYPE 1 DIABETES

This is the ‘uncommon’ form (and happens to be the kind that I have). We have to take daily injections of insulin because our body is no longer producing insulin. Type I usually occurs at birth or when very young and is sometimes known as juvenile diabetes. Although it doesn’t always. In my case I was diagnosed with Type I at age 18

Type II Diabetes

This is the more common well known one that is often associated with obesity. For type II Diabetes their body does make insulin, but it does not use it effectively. So they usually need to take medication (pills) or sometimes insulin injections as well to control it.

Type I diabetics have no relationship to obesity at all. The pancreas is broke and doesn’t work (there are various theories why this is). You can’t control it without insulin . You are dependant upon insulin injections to survive.

For the Type II diabetic the more weight you have; the harder it is to control your diabetes because the effectiveness of insulin is highly related to your body weight. Some Type II diabetics can even have a normal life without any medication simply by keeping your weight low.

So if you have diabetes then keep your weight low is very important to your overall health

The effectiveness of insulin in your body is dependant upon your weight. The more you weigh, the less effective the insulin is. This is true regardless of weather or not you are diagnosed as diabetic or not.

Just like every other organ in your body; everyone’s pancreas is a bit different, some do a better job then others. If you have a weak pancreas as you gain weight your body cannot use the insulin effectively, and your pancreas is unable to keep up with the demand.

If you are born with a weak heart and you try to run a marathon, you might have the same problem.

So now imagine that floating over everyone’s head in the world is a is a number. Everyone’s number is different and no one knows what the number is. If a person gains more weight then this number, their pancreas will not be able to keep up, the level of sugar in the blood will rise and if the go to the doctor they will get a diagnosis of diabetes.

So gaining wait did not cause diabetes as much as it allowed you to ‘discover’ your diabetes. The problem was always present; you just didn’t know it until you gained too much weight.

Statistically speaking, if we were to graph everyone’s number it would probably form a normal distribution, there will be a few people with very low numbers (who will show diabetes at low weights), and a few people with high numbers (who would have to gain like 5,000 pounds before they had a problem). But most of us fall somewhere in the middle, such that somewhere around say 350-400 pounds we would start to see the problem.

As we get older the pancreas (just like other organs) don’t work as well, so your “number” decreases with age. So you may have been fine at 250 pounds at 25 years old, but this weight may become a problem at 50.

So in conclusion, obesity does not cause diabetes, it is not even a risk factor for diabetes. It simply allows you to ‘discover’ the problem and learn what your ‘number is’. That’s why you may heard it said that it is suspected that over 1 million people may have diabetes but half of them don’t know it yet, because they have not yeat reached their number.

And when the statistics show that an increase in obesity co-relates to in increase in diabetes. It just means that more and more people as they gain wait are learning what their own ‘personal’ numbers are.

Don’t agree with me?

Okay, here’s your challenge! Find me some documented scientific evidence (not some half brained theory) that proves obesity causes damage to your pancreas, and only then will I change my mind.

As an example, we know that as you gain weight by eating high cholesterol foods, a substance known as plaque builds up in your veins and arteries, which eventually causes blockages and leads to heart attacks and strokes; and therefore obesity is a causal factor for heat disease.

If you don’t brush your teeth, plaque will also build up there, which will cause tooth decay.

There is no known substance or condition that occurs when you are obese that causes damage to your pancreas!!!! If you think you can find one please let me know.

Hope this helps clarify things once and for all !!