Recently Carter, a friend of mine was diagnosed with Leukemia. I’ve put a bounty on my head to help raise funds for his ongoing treatment. You can read the details at http://bounty.evanmclean.com/

“Your son has Leukemia.”

I’ve known Carter for the whole of his seven years, and I’ve known his parents, Kim and Maria for over half our lives. Six weeks after they moved from Melbourne to Chicago for Kim to fulfil a life-long dream, working with mission focused communities in the USA, their world got reduced to the four words above when a doctor told them this news…

I’ve already blogged about a cat named Murray so for today, a simple note to observe that Murray is no longer with us. From his unexpected reappearance in late August, we are grateful to have had the opportunity to share another four months of life with him before arthritis and other maladies of old age finally caught up to him.

We spent our last evening together the same way we spent our first: lying on the couch watching movies with him asleep, purring away on my chest.

Bye Murray.

“Play tricks?” laughed the cat.
“Oh my my! No, no, no!
I just want to go in
To get out of the snow.
Keep your mind on your work.
You just stay there, you two.
I will go in the house
And find something to do.”
Then that cat went right in!
    — The Cat In The Hat Comes Back, Dr. Seuss

I’ve been working on my little wallpaper management bash shell script that handles changing wallpapers on my desktop. The image to the right shows the system information that is displayed down the right edge of my screen. From the top you have:

Click for larger view

• Local weather forecast for the next four days.
• The current and next calendar months.
• List of the last twelve incoming phone calls.
• Various system info such as cpu usage, disk space and top five processes.

(The image contains bogus phone numbers, don’t bother trying to ring ‘em.)

Ever since I upgraded my desktop to two monitors this background information has been a lot more visible off to the side, and so I decided to give it a bit of an update.

Originally I was using conky to display all that information, but all the info aside from the system info is fairly static, and could easily be updated when the wallpaper changes every five minutes, instead of being a set of conky processes, so I’ve been playing a lot with ImageMagick and sharpening up my bash scripting skills to actually write the information onto the wallpaper image. So far I have the phone log and calendar being written, and plan to do the weather forecast next, so then I will only be running one conky process.

Got roped into playing Santa again this year. At this rate I’m gonna have to buy my own suit!

“Sorry I’m late, one of the reindeer had a flat…” Read more »

Follow the link below to see my photos from the Aiko Gateway Build Day #1:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/44717797@N06/sets/72157622810971412/detail/

Having lived in Papua New Guinea twice while growing up, I have a certain fondness for the language Tok Pisin (to you Inglis speakers, just pronounce it the same as “pidgeon”). I can’t really speak much of it, but I can understand a fair bit when my Dad gets started (incidentally, he went back to PNG for a visit in June, and after 30 years he could still hold his own when talking with the locals).

You’ve got to love a language where “gras” means “hair”, “bagarap” means pretty much the same thing if you say it out loud in English, and while expressing how full your tummy is after a good meal you accidentally say you’re pregnant.

So it was with great delight that I discovered that there is an edition of Wikipedia in Tok Pisin, it can be found here:

http://tpi.wikipedia.org/

It has about 850 articles (compared to over three million in English) but it is wonderful stuff. I can’t understand any of it, but wonderful all the same. Read more »

Inspired by projects such as the tweeting cat door and CATaLOG [sic] I’m wanting to add some form of automated access control to our pet door to control who can go in and out, when. Read more »

If you’ve ever watched a Pixar movie, you’ll know they often have humorous ‘out-takes’ during the end credits. The last couple of days one of the out-takes from Monsters, Inc. has been running through my mind. It’s the one with the two janitors, Smitty and Needleman, and Smitty flubs a line and tries to save the scene. It goes something like this:

Smitty:    Go get ‘em Mr. Solomon.
Needleman: You idiot! It’s ‘Sullivan’ not ‘Solomon’.

Today I mentioned that I’d started posting my micro-blog messages to Identi.ca, which pushed to Twitter, which pushed to Facebook. A non-techie asked me what I was talking about, so here is the explanation I sent:

Identi.ca is a microblogging service like Twitter, but based on open source software.

The pickings are pretty slim. I want something that can:

• At least lay out messages in columns. Being able to have columns of tabs would be a bonus.

• Be able to resize the columns. Tweetdeck is limited as to the number of columns you can have in practise by with width of your screen. Seesmic Desktop is almost there, but not quite.