What this means is that every little mistake and unpopular decision, and believe me, everyone in authority makes mistakes and/or unpopular decisions, will be magnified as much as possible.

Also keep in mind that now, as ever, the media is in the business of selling advertisements and therefore needs to pull out all the stops in order to get your eye-balls on their ads. The aforementioned unrest gives them a lot of opportunities to write tantalizing and alarmist headlines.

This can be quite discouraging to the general public. It will take effort on the part of readers to discern between real news and parading. It will require great self control not to fall into the trap of forwarding the latest ghastly headline or being outraged at the audacity of such events.

Definitely keep up on what’s happening, speak out against what is wrong, but remember to keep a cool head and don’t get too upset. If you find yourself getting a little discouraged, remember to always look at the bright side.

Unfortunately, to understand the flaw you have to decide where you stand. There are three responses to the claims,

1. You don’t really care
2. You believe that God cannot lie and everything he says is true
3. You think that it is possible for there to be encoded, hidden messages in the text of the Bible

Points 2 and 3 don’t sound like opposites but God says in Isaiah 45:19 “I publicly proclaim bold promises, I don’t whisper obscurities in some dark corner.” Therefore if you believe option #2 then you can safely assume that God’s word is plain and there are no hidden obscurities.

In Hebrews 6:18 it says that “it is impossible for God to lie.” Therefore I feel safe in the confidence that when Jesus said of God in Matthew 24:36 that “Regarding the [date and time] … only the Father knows,” and in Acts 1:7, regarding the date and time the world would end “…it is not for you to know,” he was speaking the plain and simple truth: there is no encoded message about the date the world would end.

The surest way to identify a cult is by the leader proclaiming to have some special, secret knowledge that is not easily found in the Bible. Again, referring back to Isaiah 45:19 “I would not have told [them] to seek me if I could not be found.” Again in Psalm 119:104-105 “Your commandments give understanding… your word is a lamp to guide my feet.” I could go on and on, you don’t need special revelation to comprehend God’s word.

Anytime someone says there’s a secret hidden in the bible that only a super-smart person (or a person with a special angel or revelation) can locate, they are lying.

So there’s nothing to fear, right?

The end of the world could be today or next week or next century. God has said there will be an end (cf Revelation 21:1) and no one but Him knows when it is. Or you very likely could die before the end of the world. In either case, when the time comes you will fall into one of two camps:

1. Those that know Jesus as the son of God
2. Those that don’t

There is no division for people who were really nice or had good intentions or didn’t commit any horrible crimes. There’s not even a special category for people who don’t believe in God. Either you will stand in front of the throne of glory and be declared righteous because of the great thing that Jesus did, able to offer your good deeds as a gift to lay at God’s feet, or you will stand in front of the throne of judgement and will be shown unworthy to be in the presence of God.

When your life has ended there is no more that can be done for you, either by yourself or others on your behalf. Follow the example of the thief on the cross next to Jesus. He realized who Jesus was, felt shame for living a life in opposition to God and asked Jesus to remember him. Jesus assured him that he would join Jesus in heaven. That is all it takes. Don’t wait until the day of your death though.

Remember basic electricity concepts? You can dim a light bulb by adding some additional resistance. This is of course the worst way to dim a bulb because it doesn’t actually use any less energy. The power that would have gone to make the bulb bright is instead going to the resistance and being turned into heat. There’s a much better way.

Imagine that you could switch the bulb on and off very fast. If you turned it on for 1/100′th of a second and then back off for 1/100th of a second constantly then it would effectively be on half the time and off half the time. Therefore it would only receive half as much power and would be half as bright. If you turned it on for 1/100th of a second and off for 3/100th’s of a second it would only get 25% of the power and would be 1/4th as bright.

This is called pulse width modulation and is in fact how dimmers work (basically). This is also the proper way to slow down motors.

So this is my principle. If you work just 6 seconds out of every minute for 8 hours a day over the course of a 40 hour week you’ll work the equivalent of only 4 hours per week. (6 out of 60 seconds is 10% duty cycle and 10% of 40 hours is 4) Maybe you can get 10 jobs at once using this technique and retire in only 3.5 years.

I’ve not actually tried this yet, since I believe I should actually be working the full time I’m getting paid to work. Therefore I’m tossing this idea out into the public domain. Feel free to use it to get rich and famous.

When life knocks you down, get back up and keep going.

Yes, a cliché, I know, but it is always more meaningful when you see it in real life. One day, when she was 12 years old, the oldest of a big family, the parents left for a bit. While playing outside in a tree, her 8 year old brother fell and fatally broke his neck. It was very hard on her, but she kept going. Later in life, as the mother of 5 kids, her husband had an affair and left her and the kids. She was forced to raise them on her own. And somehow, she did. For many years she lived in the country and drove into the city to work the night shift as a nurse. Somehow, she found the strength to keep going.

I don’t think it would be hard to despair and yield to the temptation to give up. But she did not give up.

Work with what you have

Raised during the depression, spending many years on a farm later in life, raising 5 kids on her own, she learned to waste nothing and to get by with what she had. She took great pride in how well she could stretch a dollar. Her heirs are left with an ample supply of recycled wrapping paper, gently used aluminum foil and countless other treasures that have plenty of life left in them. I would not call her stingy, I would just say she got as much use as humanly possible out of everything that she had. Before “living green” was a buzz word, she had over 50 years experience doing it.

Her accountant paid her the best compliment she could hope for when he told her he was afraid the government would doubt her tax statements because they would not think she could live on the small amount she was reporting.

You can do better than just “get by”

She did get by, despite the challenges in life that she faced. But she went beyond that, she enjoyed life and she worked to make the world a better place. I remember a time as a child when we walked by the river near where she lived. We found a place where someone had a picnic and left their litter covering the ground. She suggested we clean up the trash (she always carried a plastic grocery bag for that purpose). After we were done, we discovered on the ground 5 wadded $1 bills. That was more than enough for us to enjoy a trip to Burger King. For fun crafts, we’d assemble broken bits of jewelry into new, sometimes unusual, pieces to give as gifts. She volunteered to help at hospice and facilities for the disabled, doing laundry, keeping people company and helping out however she could.

She discovered many ways to enjoy life and to make the world a better place.

Growing old is hard, and it was especially tough to see her frail and painfully ill in the final months. We saw the end coming with plenty of advanced notice and when she had passed it was sad, but at the same time a relief. In once sense, I will miss her, but in another, she is so much a part of me that I don’t feel like she’s really gone. And even though my son hardly knew her, he’s already inheriting her influence through me. I would not be surprised to see her continue on for generations to come.

The trick to finding the middle is to realize that the button “Random” is centered in the column and that the downward stroke of the letter D is the center of that button. Therefore just visually follow the downward stroke of the D in Random and that is the center of the strip. Here’s an example:

I don’t yet know a trick for finding the visual center of an image but I’ve never really felt compelled to do so, and I could always use a screen ruler if I did.

In each of the cases below, the underlying premise is that God is the source of all wisdom and distancing ourselves from His council increases the chances of big mistakes. As a bonus, I’m including the notes from the follow-up class where we covered a few good examples to compliment the bad.

Israel and the Gibeonites – Joshua 9:3-6,14-16

³ However, when the people of Gibeon heard what Joshua had done to Jericho and Ai, ⁴ they resorted to a ruse: They went as a delegation whose donkeys were loaded with worn-out sacks and old wineskins, cracked and mended. ⁵ The men put worn and patched sandals on their feet and wore old clothes. All the bread of their food supply was dry and moldy. ⁶ Then they went to Joshua in the camp at Gilgal and said to him and the men of Israel, “We have come from a distant country; make a treaty with us.”

¹⁴ The men of Israel sampled their provisions but did not inquire of the LORD. ¹⁵ Then Joshua made a treaty of peace with them to let them live, and the leaders of the assembly ratified it by oath.

¹⁶ Three days after they made the treaty with the Gibeonites, the Israelites heard that they were neighbors, living near them.

What went wrong? They did not seek God’s council. (see below for how to get God’s council)

Beheading of John the Baptist – Mark 6:18-26

Just to be clear, it was not John that made the mistake, but Herod.

¹⁸For John had been saying to Herod, “It is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife.” ¹⁹So Herodias (Herod’s wife) nursed a grudge against John and wanted to kill him. But she was not able to, ²⁰because Herod feared John and protected him, knowing him to be a righteous and holy man. When Herod heard John, he was greatly puzzled; yet he liked to listen to him.

²¹Finally the opportune time came. On his birthday Herod gave a banquet for his high officials and military commanders and the leading men of Galilee. ²²When the daughter of Herodias came in and danced, she pleased Herod and his dinner guests.

The king said to the girl, “Ask me for anything you want, and I’ll give it to you.” ²³And he promised her with an oath, “Whatever you ask I will give you, up to half my kingdom.”

²⁴She went out and said to her mother, “What shall I ask for?”
“The head of John the Baptist,” she answered.

²⁵At once the girl hurried in to the king with the request: “I want you to give me right now the head of John the Baptist on a platter.”

²⁶The king was greatly distressed, but because of his oaths and his dinner guests, he did not want to refuse her.

We see here that John was beguiled into doing something he would not normally have done.

What went wrong? two things: The influence of an ungodly spouse and having a higher regard for the opinion of his peers than for God.

Johoshaphat and King Ahab – 2 Chronicles 18 (select verses)

¹ Jehoshaphat enjoyed great riches and high esteem, and he made an alliance with Ahab of Israel by having his son marry Ahab’s daughter. ² A few years later he went to Samaria to visit Ahab, who prepared a great banquet for him and his officials. They butchered great numbers of sheep, goats, and cattle for the feast. Then Ahab enticed Jehoshaphat to join forces with him to recover Ramoth-gilead.

³ “Will you go with me to Ramoth-gilead?” King Ahab of Israel asked King Jehoshaphat of Judah.

Jehoshaphat replied, “Why, of course! You and I are as one, and my troops are your troops. We will certainly join you in battle.” ⁴ Then Jehoshaphat added, “But first let’s find out what the Lord says.”

⁵ So the king of Israel summoned the prophets, 400 of them, and asked them, “Should we go to war against Ramoth-gilead, or should I hold back?”

They all replied, “Yes, go right ahead! God will give the king victory.”

⁶ But Jehoshaphat asked, “Is there not also a prophet of the Lord here? We should ask him the same question.”

⁸ So the king of Israel called one of his officials and said, “Quick! Bring Micaiah son of Imlah.”

¹⁴ When Micaiah arrived before the king, Ahab asked him, “Micaiah, should we go to war against Ramoth-gilead, or should I hold back?”

Micaiah replied sarcastically, “Yes, go up and be victorious, for you will have victory over them!”

¹⁵ But the king replied sharply, “How many times must I demand that you speak only the truth to me when you speak for the Lord?”

¹⁶ Then Micaiah told him, “In a vision I saw all Israel scattered on the mountains, like sheep without a shepherd. And the Lord said, ‘Their master has been killed. Send them home in peace.’”

If you read on after this you find that Ahab and Jehoshaphat go on into battle despite the warning against doing so. As foretold, Ahab is killed – the only causality – but not in battle, an errant arrow pierces his armour.

What went wrong? Ahab and Jehoshaphat went through the effort to learn what God’s directions were and then promptly ignored them.

To summarize the mistakes:

1. Pray to seek God’s council
2. Avoid the influence of the ungodly
3. Seek the approval of God instead of those of your peers
4. Don’t ignore God’s advice

Counterpoint: Examples of good decision makers

Gideon and the fleece – Judges 6:33-40

³³ Soon afterward the armies of Midian, Amalek, and the people of the east formed an alliance against Israel and crossed the Jordan, camping in the valley of Jezreel. ³⁴ Then the Spirit of the Lord took possession of Gideon. He blew a ram’s horn as a call to arms, and the men of the clan of Abiezer came to him. ³⁵ He also sent messengers throughout Manasseh, Asher, Zebulun, and Naphtali, summoning their warriors, and all of them responded.

³⁶ Then Gideon said to God, “If you are truly going to use me to rescue Israel as you promised, ³⁷ prove it to me in this way. I will put a wool fleece on the threshing floor tonight. If the fleece is wet with dew in the morning but the ground is dry, then I will know that you are going to help me rescue Israel as you promised.” ³⁸ And that is just what happened. When Gideon got up early the next morning, he squeezed the fleece and wrung out a whole bowlful of water.

³⁹ Then Gideon said to God, “Please don’t be angry with me, but let me make one more request. Let me use the fleece for one more test. This time let the fleece remain dry while the ground around it is wet with dew.” ⁴⁰ So that night God did as Gideon asked. The fleece was dry in the morning, but the ground was covered with dew.

Gideon highly valued the direction of God and, as we see in chapter 7, obeyed him. But he didn’t trust himself and searched deeper to ensure he was acting in accordance with God’s desires.

What we learned: Understand God’s desires before you act.

Esther prepares to meet the king – Esther 4:10-17, 5:1-3

¹⁰ Then Esther told [her servant] to go back and relay this message to Mordecai: ¹¹ “All the king’s officials and even the people in the provinces know that anyone who appears before the king in his inner court without being invited is doomed to die unless the king holds out his gold scepter. And the king has not called for me to come to him for thirty days.” ¹² So [the servant] gave Esther’s message to Mordecai.

¹³ Mordecai sent this reply to Esther: “Don’t think for a moment that because you’re in the palace you will escape when all other Jews are killed. ¹⁴ If you keep quiet at a time like this, deliverance and relief for the Jews will arise from some other place, but you and your relatives will die. Who knows if perhaps you were made queen for just such a time as this?”

¹⁵ Then Esther sent this reply to Mordecai: ¹⁶ “Go and gather together all the Jews of Susa and fast for me. Do not eat or drink for three days, night or day. My maids and I will do the same. And then, though it is against the law, I will go in to see the king. If I must die, I must die.” ¹⁷ So Mordecai went away and did everything as Esther had ordered him.

¹ On the third day of the fast, Esther put on her royal robes and entered the inner court of the palace, just across from the king’s hall. The king was sitting on his royal throne, facing the entrance. ² When he saw Queen Esther standing there in the inner court, he welcomed her and held out the gold scepter to her. So Esther approached and touched the end of the scepter.

³ Then the king asked her, “What do you want, Queen Esther? What is your request? I will give it to you, even if it is half the kingdom!”

What we learned: Earnestly seek God’s will

The Bereans – Acts 17:10-12

¹⁰ That very night the believers sent Paul and Silas to Berea. When they arrived there, they went to the Jewish synagogue. ¹¹ And the people of Berea were more open-minded than those in Thessalonica, and they listened eagerly to Paul’s message. They searched the Scriptures day after day to see if Paul and Silas were teaching the truth. ¹² As a result, many Jews believed, as did many of the prominent Greek women and men.

What we learned: God’s plan never contradicts the scriptures, therefore always check to ensure your actions are in line with the Bible.

I hope this is helpful to you, the list of good and bad examples is short, share your favourite in the comment area below.

When I started at Canonical there was under 50 employees and the webmaster job description was quite broad. Over time as the company has grown and more people came on to help in various aspects my role became more of a marketing job, making content changes and running web reports. I was spending less of my time doing tasks where I excelled.

It’s kind of a lateral move. I’ll be switching to the team of developers responsible for managing our internal apps. I’ll continue to work on the Ubuntu.com infrastructure including Drupal, WordPress and Moin Moin as before. However this job is explicitly about developing custom application solutions. Someone else will be hired to take on the roles of managing the content and reporting for the website.

For those of you who are my colleagues in the Ubuntu community (i.e. not Canonical staff) our relationship will not change – I’m still the contact. As a matter of fact, there is a lot about my job that isn’t changing. I mostly get to focus on the parts I love.

This suits my tastes perfectly. I’m much more comfortable thinking about HTTP headers, reducing code duplication, CSS and the likes than I am hunting for typos, ensuring headlines are sentence case and keeping on top of web reports.

There will be a job post to fill the role of webmaster. If you’re interested in it, let me know and I’ll send you the details when they’re finalized by management. If you know me you know how to contact me privately and I think that would be the best method to express interest in the job.

First, to summarize what I’m referring to, Apple recently changed the wording in the contract developers have to agree to in order to develop apps for the iPhone. The wording prohibits developers from using tools other than Apple’s own sanctioned set which strongly steer developers towards creating apps that will only run on Apple’s products. This was done just a couple days before Adobe was scheduled to announce a product that allowed developers to create apps that run on a variety of devices, not just Apple’s. Developers, especially those at Adobe, got very upset and alarmed.

John Gruber is a die-hard Apple fan. He will tell it like he sees it but has a tendency to defend Apple. He certainly did in this case. I don’t know John btw, but if you read this article you’ll see that he berates app developers who create cross-platform apps because they’re inherently lower quality and feel non-native but completely side-steps the fact that Apple creates cross-platform apps such as iTunes, Safari and Quick Time. Therefore I’m going to say that he’s not an objective reporter of facts, but instead is editorializing to support a group he likes.

Adobe (or it’s influential supporters and employees) has said some mean things about Apple on this subject. There is a clear division between the groups that are supporting either Adobe or Apple. It’s ugly.

There is a third group that is not getting talked about. This group doesn’t care about Flash and instead wants to create apps for the widest number of devices. Many think this #section331 change was aimed squarely at Adobe, but if so it hit this third group too. I’ll disclose that as a user of Appcelerator Titanium I’m in this group.

Considering Gruber’s support for Apple in the past I was quite surprised to find him writing an article that directly supported the view of this third group and certainly overlapped with the views of Adobe.

Either way, something terrible is going on. But worse than anything related to this specific case is the bigger picture: we don’t know.

…what Apple is losing are iPhone OS apps that aren’t being made in the first place by developers who aren’t willing to take their chances … violating one of Apple’s unpublished and heretofore unknown rules.

Keeping the rules secret may make things easier for Apple, but it’s weakening the platform.

This is a good piece and there’s no way a brief summary can get the full meaning, but you can see here the gist.

Adobe’s employee Mike Chambers has a similar feeling, though a bit more strongly worded:

Essentially, this has the effect of restricting applications built with a number of technologies, including Unity, Titanium, MonoTouch, and Flash CS5.

To be clear, during the entire development cycle of Flash CS5, the feature complied with Apple’s licensing terms. However, as developers for the iPhone have learned, if you want to develop for the iPhone you have to be prepared for Apple to reject or restrict your development at anytime, and for seemingly any reason. In just the past week Apple also changed its licensing terms to essentially prohibit ad networks other than its own on the iPhone.

Again, this is only a brief summary, the two articles each take you to different conclusions, but where they agree is that developers, especially those unwilling to invest themselves into a single platform, are afraid to target Apple’s iPhone OS.

There is fear that if we use platform agnostic development tools we’ll be suddenly kicked out of Apple’s app store. How would you like to spend months of time working on an app only to be prevented from sharing it with others?

A friend of mine made a snarky remark that we can still use HTML5. He’s right, of course. But right now there’s currently no marketplace for HTML5 mobile apps. I’ll be writing about this further soon but for now, if you want to commercialize or promote an app on most of the mobile devices you have to go through the Apple AppStore or the Android Market. And that means using a tool to create a native app.

I was in the process of developing an app that would be part of an article for a developer magazine and had to put everything on hold when this issue blew through. It appears Phone Gap has been given amnesty so I will proceed cautiously, hoping that Apple’s whim doesn’t change.

When you purchase a certificate you must perform some additional steps besides those to create a self-signed certificate. These steps help you demonstrate who you are. For example, it may require that you prove you can receive email at the domain you’re security, prove that you own the domain, talk to a person or use an automated system that calls you to verify your phone number and identity or even fax business verification documents.

Once you’ve performed the steps necessary to show that you are who you say you are you receive an SSL certificate. Of course you also have to pay money.

I’m not really in agreement that the fees associated with an SSL certificate are justified. The cost of verifying an organization that is purchasing a certificate are pretty much static and don’t vary depending on the number of servers they have. Yet you buy the certificates by the server. If it costs $50 to verify an organization and that’s how much they charge for one certificate and a businesses purchases 10 then you’ve got yourself a pretty good margin. If you don’t believe me, ask Mark Shuttleworth. I shouldn’t complain because his success at selling SSL certificates pays my salary.