CodeSushi

Some technical wishes for Roller… I wish there were a generic way to pass values provided through the admin UI to the themes. For instance, analytics, adsense and google reader stuff.. I could then make this theme available to others with all those features ready to go out of the box. Not that this theme is particularly good.. but I think there are some cool technical aspects to it that could make life easier for people less technically inclined…



I wish I didn't have to restart Roller to apply theme changes. It seems like there should be at least an option to use the theme resources directly. Maybe that's just me wanting Roller to be a content management system when it's not.

I wish I had time to dig into the Roller source code.

All in all, I like it.. it's a cool system that's relatively easy to maintain and I have full control.

I've been working on this theme a little..

I added a tag cloud on the right and a list of old posts. I'll try to tag each post pretty well so that maintains good utility.

Each post now has a few social bookmarking links under it. You most likely know what they are, and if you don't, they probably won't make your life any better. Leave a comment if there's some service you really like.

I have also added a widget from my RSS reader. I'm subscribed to dozens of RSS feeds from a pretty wide variety of topics. Any I flag as “shared” will appear in that box on the right. I don't flag very many… but I think they're usually pretty good

admin blog, bookmarks, roller, rss, social, wish

Check out this TED talk by Johnny Lee about how he has used the Nintendo Wii controller (just the $40 controller) to create really cheap projection touchscreens and more.

I just found out about TED fairly recently, and I’ve been watching the videos voraciously ever since. If you’re not familiar with TED it’s a yearly conference where some of the worlds most innovative and intelligent people give talks from 5 to 40 minutes in length. It’s been going on for 20+ years, and has featured household names in science, politics, entertainment and just about any field you can think of. Most amazing are the people who most of us have never heard of, like Johnny Lee, with some incredible new invention, idea, insight or even just a great story.

Here are some good ones

• Alan Russell on regenerative medicine
• Hans Rosling shows some amazing graphical visualizations of global historic data
• Larry Brilliant eradicating the last case of Small Pox, personally

I could go on.. there are very few that I would say are not worth seeing, and there are hundreds out there, with more published all the time. The full podcast feed is here.

admin education, podcast, ted, wii

DonorsChoose.org is the type of service that would replace most of the functions of government in my perfect world. Match people who want to give charity with people and organizations in need. This particular effort is focused on private funding of various school programs at all levels of primary education. Here are over 100 Maine programs you can support. There are opportunities in every state.



We could apply this approach to just about anything! Schools, libraries, small business grants, victim support organizations, environmental research, scientific studies. Big charitable organizations can break out budget needs at a more regional and micro scale. The red cross could put out a call for marketing funds for an upcoming blood drive in a specific region or to provide shelter for a family faced with leaving their home due to fire or flood. A regional library could have specific micro funds for expanding specific collections allowing you to donate to fill out the computer science stack without supporting the purchase of religious texts or some other range of the Dewey Decimal System. The possibilities are endless.



Donors Choose is also using technology to its advantage, with region and keyword based RSS feeds! If there were more organizations like this I'd be tempted to create a MaineDonors site which would aggregate all the local charitable RSS feeds into a one stop shop for local giving.



How fun would it be to give away some percentage of the thousands of dollars the government takes from me each year to local causes that actually have an impact on my life and those around me directly? Direct giving inspires community involvement and could contribute to a feeling of responsibility for our neighbors, without forcing it on us or disconnecting the distribution of money from the act of giving as our current tax system does.



I digress, as usual… The point is: this is a really cool organization and concept that deserves our support.



Check out this video where Steven Colbert uses the election to raise money for Donors Choose programs… how cool is that?

admin charity, colbert, donorschoose, rss

It was only a matter of time, really.. Google introduces app engine.

Google App Engine gives you access to the same building blocks that Google uses for its own applications, making it easier to build an application that runs reliably, even under heavy load and with large amounts of data.

It's a pretty interesting platform… user authentication, load balancing, database all for “free”. It's not tempting enough to learn Python yet, but they say there will be more supported languages in the future. It's certainly compelling enough to finally learn PHP. This would be a home run if it supported Java (unlikely).

admin appengine, google, python, systems

Did you know John Cleese has a podcast? I don't care what my girlfriend says, Monty Python is comic genius. John tells some great stories.



Skeptoid is a really good skeptical podcast, the episodes are short and highly entertaining.



I used to be a fan of ZDtv, then it became TechTV, then it was G4TechTV and I stopped liking most of the programs, and now not at all as G4… but, if like me… you like the old ZDtv/TechTV days you might be happy to know about Revision 3. They have quite a diverse lineup of shows featuring quite a few folks from those early days of ZD.

admin cleese, g4, john, podcast, skeptoid, techtv

I enjoy the weekly I, Cringly podcast. It's almost never longer than 10 minutes, usually shorter.

I am not saying schools will disappear. I AM saying that new modes of instruction will emerge and they will inevitably involve processing power and context.

- April 4, 2008

He has some interesting ideas and predictions in the technology arena. He was also the guy behind the amazing PBS series Triumph of the Nerds.

admin cringly, education, podcast

Happy Fool's day… I only wish this was a joke:






Thanks, Senator Harry Reid… so… what you're saying is that as long as we do exactly what we're told to do, whatever “choice” we make is voluntary? That's great logic. I can see why you're a Senator! I'll be sure to remember that I'm voluntarily signing over 30% of my income on the 15th.. that should make it easier.



“Humor” aside… It's important to remember that every government mandate of every flavor is backed up with force AND violence….. BY DEFINITION! This is by necessity, obviously. No government can function if you can just say “no” and they have no recourse… It's patently false and utterly insulting for a government official to state that our tax system is voluntary. A quick google search yields plenty of counter evidence.. here's a good one.

It is true that the IRS frequently states that it relies on the “voluntary compliance” of taxpayers. But anyone who relies on that to say that the income tax is voluntary is confusing two different things: the duty to pay the tax and the method of enforcing that duty relied upon by the IRS.

It seems like this aught to be common knowledge to one of the 100 US Senators… maybe we should have a test or something… No Senator Left Behind.

via

admin gov, politics, sad, senator, taxes, video

I combined a couple projects I've been working on, added some features, bought a domain and created GovRake.com.

This site indexes 8+ years of Maine state legislative records from the 119th congress to the 123rd (this session). Each day's session has a detail page with all the bills mentioned as well as a public comment area. GovRake keeps an updated pubic hearing schedule and links to bill details on each hearing. Bill detail pages have public comment areas and link to sessions in which they were mentioned. The front page also contains the public hearing schedule with links to the bill to be discussed and the audio stream for that hearing.

There is a wealth of data available from the state, some of it easier to get at than others. Now that I have a pretty good framework in place, it's just a matter of prying the data from the cold dead hands of the state web services which hold it hostage, and providing some modern services on top of that. My intent is to provide RSS and email updates for hearings, bills and anything else that is updated from time to time as well as a platform for community discussion and research.

This project is in ACTIVE development and there should be new features and improvements every few days.

I'd like to thank my representative, Seth Berry, for helping to fill me in on various state processes and putting up with my extreme political rants. If your government reps don't believe in transparency and accountability, like mine do… keep that in mind when November rolls around.

Leave a comment or email me ( dan-AT-codesushi-DOT-com ) with your question, comments or suggestions.

admin gov, government, govrake, maine, transparency

Ahh.. the
things you find when you're using unknown data…

Under suspension of the rules, the presiding officer was allowed to wear a sweater.

- House Record 2001-03-31

admin funny, govrake, maine, quote

I decided to add syntaxhighlighter to this blog's theme, so it's always available when I feel like pooping some code into a post. It's a pretty cool little deal that does a great job on fairly short code chunks. You can specify that you want the code to start out collapsed when the page loads so your readers have to click to expand the code.. I think this is a cool way to roll… sometimes I want to read about the idea before I start ogling the code. However I find it pretty annoying that once you expand the code, there is no way to collapse it again short of reloading the page… so I hacked in some code to shCore.js.



my changes only effect lines 10-18 and 27-45 in the following code fragment:

//
// Toolbar functions
//
dp.sh.Toolbar.Commands = {
	ExpandSource: {
		label: '+ expand source',
		check: function(highlighter) { return highlighter.collapse; },
		func: function(sender, highlighter)
		{
            // dan's hack for expand collapse toggle.
            var a = document.createElement("a");
            a.setAttribute('href', '#');
            a.onclick = function() {
                dp.sh.Toolbar.Command('CollapseSource',this);
                return false;
            }
            a.appendChild(document.createTextNode("- collapse source"));
            // end hack section

            sender.parentNode.insertBefore(a, sender);
			sender.parentNode.removeChild(sender);

            highlighter.div.className = highlighter.div.className.replace('collapsed', '');
		}
	},

    // dan's hack for expand collapse toggle.
    CollapseSource: {
		label: '- collapse source',
		check: function(highlighter) { return false; },
		func: function(sender, highlighter)
		{
            var a = document.createElement("a");
            a.setAttribute('href', '#');
            a.onclick = function() {
                dp.sh.Toolbar.Command('ExpandSource',this);
                return false;
            }
            a.appendChild(document.createTextNode("+ expand source"));
            sender.parentNode.insertBefore(a, sender);
			sender.parentNode.removeChild(sender);
			highlighter.div.className = highlighter.div.className + ' collapsed';
		}
	},
    // end dan's hack

there might be a better way to do this.. but I didn't see one after a brief look at the tool bar stuff… and this change suited my needs perfectly.

I also added a couple key words (def, it) to the Java “brush” so I could use it more effectively for Groovy code, which I'll be needing for my next post.

admin javascript, syntaxhighlighter