A Day in Paradise

ShelleyTheRepublican.com: Linux: A European threat to our computers (by Tristan)

What a great troll!

I remember the WTF moment I had a couple years ago when Frozen Bubble was released. The game was nice but the awesome bit was the it was based on PERL, which was my programming language of choice at the time.

I had that moment again this morning when an email arrived in my mail box from Rubem Pechansky (The WinBinder Guy) where he announced his Worldcup 2006 card game which is based entirely on PHP5 and Winbinder.

The graphics are great, and on my machine there is no noticable speed hit, in my opinion it is right up there with any other desktop game around.

It’s been a while since I was playing with winbinder, but looking at this application and the possibilites for simple client side deployment makes me want to take another look at it. That is if I can find time now that I’m trying to beat the (exceptionally smart) computer. Check it out yourself.

Use Your Computer To Retire Rich

Funny thing… I thought that’s what I was doing. I guess they aren’t talking about coding for food

Financial management used to be the select skill of specialists available for hire, making it out of reach for people who couldn’t afford time with consultants or who didn’t want to employ a money manager, tax guru, or accountant. But financial-management software has done more than put advice within reach. It has made consumers their own financial advisers, giving them the power to tweak their portfolios, manage their funds, and, ultimately, build their wealth.

If you have just started on the path to wealth in retirement, the number of software packages for tracking budgets or analyzing account transactions is dizzying. These tools include everything from software that targets mortgages and personal finance to loan-servicing software designed to follow commercial or consumer loans. There also are packages that focus on bonds, derivatives, hedge funds, and equities.

One of the things that I want to get going is a collaborative journalism platform. The system will have a couple of primary features.

Article Collaboration

1. You create a “Article Stub”
2. You add reference material
3. You collaborate on the article
4. You maintain a workflow (data gathering, writing, draft, published, revision1, revision2)

RSS Aggregator

1. You can add however many RSS feeds to the Aggregator
2. You can tag specific articles in the aggregator with keywords which could pertain to upcoming stories.
3. You can select a specific quote from the article and tag it for future use in an article

In a previous post I made a list of a bunch of “getting organized” tools, I’ve looked through most of them, but none of them really do what I want.

However, the best I could find was backpackit. The things I like the best are writeboards and price ($5/month). I could have just used a regular wiki, but since I was colaborating with a couple other people the inteface is VERY easy to understand and use.

This is how I’m using backpackit.

1. Create a page for the project
2. Share the page with people who will be collaborating on the project
3. For each article we’re going to write I create a writeboard and add it to that page.
4. Everyone colaborates on the article by adding data, wikipedia style.

Obviously this doesn’t really work the way I need it to, and there are always “stop editing I’ve got an update” messages flying around IM, but for now it seems to work.

If anyone has the time/energy/skills to create my collaborative journalism platform PLEASE let me know. I’d be VERY interested in working with you or sponsoring your work.

Yes, and I’ve got referral links so if you decide to sign up with the paid for version I get 3 free weeks of service!!! Woot!

Gmail was down, Tagworld was down, and my stock simulator was down… these also happened to be the first 3 sites I surfed to this morning.

I guess Monday night is “scheduled maintanance night”.

This is an email that I sent to someone who needed something to manage a small mailing list. I have used Worldcast in the past so I wrote up this simple how-to.

Worldcast is a free (for non-profit use) or cheap for business use mail sending program.

How to maintain a mailing list using WorldCast

1. Create New Project
To create a new Worldcast project, start Worldcast and go through the Configuration Wizard. To complete the configuration wizard, you’ll need your name, email address, the format of email you want to send out (HTML is recommended), transport protocol (SMTP recommended), and SMTP Server.

The final question is whether you want to send the emails or just validate the email addresses. You most probably will want to send only.

At the end of the wizard, once you have entered all the information you have the option to import contacts from a file or type them in yourself. You can import or add addresses at any time.

Worldcast imports files in the comma seperated value file, or another worldcast file.

Before you import your first batch of users, you should check your settings by manually adding your own email address and sending an email to yourself.

2. Sending an Update to your Mailing list
When you have your list prepared you can enter your subject and body message in the supplied area. If you chose to send an HTML message then you will be able to use HTML message formatting.

You can insert any of the feilds (Firstname, Lastname, Email) into your email by clicking on “Message->Insert Field” and selecting the data that you want to insert into the email.

Once you have sent your email, or created your project, save your project for future use.

3. Managing Unsubscriptions
If a user chooses to unsubscribe from your list, open your project click on the status column for the email address which you want to unsubscribe and change the status to Unsubscribed.

4. Merging Lists
When you are ready to send a new Mailing, export a new version of your contact list and import it into Worldcast by clicking on “File->Import Recipients”.

The users will be imported into your system and then the system will ask if you want to check for duplicates. It is important that you remove the duplicate email addresses, this will maintain your unsubscription lists.

Fifty Ways to Take Notes � Solution Watch

Need to read and try all the options.

You might as well signup for the Podcast Poker Challenge yourself.

Danko Jones

Danko Jones ROCKS! Did the German leg of their European tour this year… too bad I missed it. Well, they didn’t come near enough to me to catch them. Good stuff.

I always knew there was something weird about wired!

Now I know I shouldn’t be doing this, but I wonder what will happen to this list if everyone who visits my blog clicks on this link. If anyone sees this term appear on the list, send me a screen shot

I know that’s very juvenile of me!

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