Oracle of ONE1

In my role as a Red Cross representative, I work with a number of Public Health agencies. At a recent meeting, I mentioned Twitter and stated my opinion — that all public health Public Information Officers should be using Twitter.  I got a bunch of blank stares and not because of disagreement or boredom but because out of about 30 representatives only one or two had any idea what Twitter was.

What follows is both a quick overview of Twitter and my reasons why I believe public health should be using twitter. The information is directed to public health agencies but others may find it useful as well.

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I have thrown together a simple proof of concept (POC) in cakePHP for displaying cloud words. What are cloud words? Word frequencies displayed in a cloud similar to a tag cloud. A tag cloud may be found on right column of this blog site. The POC may be tested here.

What does it do?

Cloud Words allows for the upload and analysis of plain text and MS Word files. MS Word files are converted to plain text for the analysis. The analysis simply does a count total for each word in the file. A simple word count is actually not very useful since the most common words will dominate the count list. The most common words are generally not very useful for understanding the contents of a document. “THE” is the single word found most often in documents.

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An excellent article on the reasons for using and how best to create hand written excerpts has been posted at http://op111.net/67.

Do I use hand-written excerpts? Well no but I really probably should. A bit lazy I guess.

Joomla uses a MooTools lightbox in the administrative backend, called SqueezeBox. By default, SqueezeBox is not available to frontend sections, categories, and articles. It is a relatively simple matter to include squeezebox onto the frontend and improve your visitors’ experiences.

It is not required to understand what MooTools and Squeezebox are nor how they work in order to successfully create a wonderful lightbox effect. A lightbox may be used to display a large picture from a thumbnail or any link. Additionally, any web page may be displayed within the lightbox (a great way to display a map or directions).

This article has three parts:

1. Template setup (not required for GGIS clients)
2. Using SqueezeBox

Update:

See comment #6 and #7 for a patch to modal.js that makes this work for multiple images on the same page. Without the patch clicking on the next image displays the first image in the lightbox.

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The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is a broadly written, extensive and secretly negotiated agreement currently being worked on by the US, European Community, Japan, and others. The stated goal of ACTA is to create a new standard of intellectual property enforcement beyond the existing standards and to increase international cooperation, including the sharing of information between signatory countries’ law enforcement agencies. Negotiations are expected to continue for much of 2009.

Based upon documents that have been leaked into the public domain, ACTA is expected to cover for more than just counterfeit products. In fact, one of the focuses seems to be upon copyright and intellectual property to the point of targeting “Internet distribution and information technology”. This is definitely something that should be publicly negotiated to involve the full range of philosophies on these issues.

Instead, it seems we need to be concerned about our privacy rights and civil liberties. The original hope of negotiation supporters was to seal the deal in 2008. Fortunately that has not happened. Now your opinion about the benefits or drawbacks of such a treaty may differ than mine. In fact, I urge you to look into the details and make up your own mind.

Oh, wait. You can’t. AND THAT IS THE POINT!

Please urge your elected representative to push for transparency on this issue.

References:

• http://www.eff.org/cases/eff-and-public-knowledge-v-ustr
• http://www.eff.org/issues/acta
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement

The smell of fresh ground coffee — ahh
a break between calls,
short conversations,
looking toward the coming day.
All deserve a sigh.

Too many sighs to share,
too many reasons to sigh.

Exasperated sighs
of errant child,
a drivers’ mistake
and mis-sent email.
The sigh finds relief.

And pleasure speaks;
joy in bed,
a friendly hug,
the team wins.
Multifaceted sighs abound.

Consider please,
your own repertoire of sighs.

Inspired by a barista.

A few weeks ago, I had a conversation with Chief Holton of the Milwaukee Fire Department. He noted that they were close to having under 10 fire fatalities for 2008. It had been a few years since that mark was reached. Chief Holton was a little concerned that the fatalities would rise over the last 2 weeks of the year. The holidays are a dangerous time for fires.

Well, there were many fires and a few notable fires over the Christmas – New Years week. The fatality count did not rise. Great! Every fatality has an impact on the family and community. See the JSOnline article.

Since coming to office, Doug Holton has worked hard to push information to the public on fire safety. Additionally, he has worked to increase the safety of his firefighters. It seems he has succeeded in both of these efforts.

Visit the Milwaukee Fire Department web site.

From an ASCE email newsletter.

“It is our responsibilities, not ourselves, that we should take seriously.”
–Peter Ustinov, British actor and writer

“When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened.”
–Alexander Graham Bell, American inventor

“In any moment of decision the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.”
–Theodore Roosevelt, 26th president of the U.S.

“The most successful people are those who are good at Plan B.”
–James Yorke, mathematics and physics professor

“Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.”
–Jonathan Kozol, American nonfiction writer and educator

“Most companies don’t exercise patience during the hiring process. There is no development system that is going to compensate for making a bad hire.”
–Eric Foss, CEO of Pepsi Bottling

“You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”
–Mahatma Gandhi, Indian political leader

“Service is the rent we pay for being. It is the very purpose of life, and not something you do in your spare time.”
–Marian Wright Edelman, children’s activist

“The first half of our lives is ruined by our parents, and the second half by our children.”
–Clarence Darrow, American lawyer

A very good summary of information from SANS Institute.

The Ten Dumbest Things People Do to Mess Up Their Computers

1. Plug into the Wall without Surge Protection
2. Surf the Internet without a Hardware Firewall and a Software Firewall
3. Turn off the Antivirus Because It Slows Down Your System
4. Install and Uninstall Lots of Programs, Especially Freeware
5. Keep Your Hard Drive Full and Fragmented
6. Open All Email Attachments
7. Click on Everything
8. Believe that Macs Don’t Get Viruses
9. Use Easy, Quick passwords
10. Don’t Bother with Backups

Now I’m certain that somebody will deliver a comedic version of this list but the ten items listed here are things to make certain YOU do not do.

Last week, I was working on updating some old PHP code from 1999 and 2000. Now this is working code in PHP4 but was not quite up to todays standards. As an example it used the PHP code start tag of <? instead of the much better <?php. Also needed to make certain that all of my variables were declared and that no global or unsanitized variables were used. Overall not a big deal just a good use for grep or sed.

A WinXP laptop is my where I write most of my code and the files are then uploaded to a FreeBSD server. I do not and have never owned a Mac. Usually for this type of action, I would run grep or sed on my FreeBSD server but instead decided to try Windows Grep. I ran Windows Grep with the proper regular expressions and voila, my PHP start tags were updated. Next, the files were uploaded to a new server for testing. ERRORS, errors everywhere.

About half of the updated files were kicking out errors or failing completely. The failed files were rather random and the code looked just fine in the editor. What was going on?

Comments not recognized by PHP

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This is my first post on Tae Kwon Do and the creation of a similarly named category. Tae Kwon Do is a Korean martial art. A google search would give you plenty of information on the subject. This is more about my personal journey in the art.

I started Tae Kwon Do (TKD) in June of 2008. So far, I have advanced 3 belt levels. Start as white; then yellow, purple, and now high purple. Before a medial collateral ligament (MCL) injury from volleyball, I intended to participate in a tournament. All in all, TKD has been a rewarding experience. It is an excellent workout and new knowledge and skills are learned.

What am I good at and where do I lag? I am good at power, endurance, and form. I suck at flexibility and my kicking needs a lot of work. For the time being, I am cautious with my kicking techniques due to the MCL. Rotation on my left knee makes it worse.

I have joined the JK Lee – Brookfield dojang and intend to continue there at least until I receive my black belt. Should have a black blet in about 3 years. Master Lee has asked that I post inside of their article system and I will do that. Of course, I will continue to post here as this is my main avenue of writing.

Picked this one up from Mariano.

My meme results

“Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me, Teo” – Belong to Me

Instructions

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open it to page 56.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.