Archive - 2008
April 21st
The Twenty Percent
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 04/21/2008 - 20:44Go read Rafael Noboa's The Twenty Percent. Right now. I mean it.
(Hat tip: David Isen)
Talking about Erin Markes
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 04/21/2008 - 10:23Tomorrow afternoon at around 2:35, Eastern Time, I will be a guest on Rick Outzen’s radio show, "In Your Head Radio" coming at you from News Radio 1620 in Pensacola, FL. Rick has a blog where he has been writing about the Erin Markes case. Included on his blog is a link to his exclusive interview with Erin Markes. It is a great interview and I encourage everyone to listen to it.
In another entry, he points to various additional articles about Erin and her son. Last week, Erin spent the night with her son for the first time since she was arrested. New bedsores continue to develop, even though nurses are turning him every hour. However, a new formula has been found that he is managing gain a little weight again.
I know how these radio interviews go. You have so much to you want to say, and just a short period to say it in. My mind runs over different questions Rick might ask, and how I would respond. Then, when the interview is over, you kick yourself for not getting out some important point that you forgot while you were on the air.
So, I’ll probably put up a blog post afterwards talking about all those things I wanted to say, but didn’t. If you get a chance, listen in, then come back afterwards and read about what I wanted to say, but forgot.
April 20th
Offline Sunday
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 04/20/2008 - 14:29Allergies? Some sort of bug? I’m not sure, but I’m dragging today. There has been little email, and little on Twitter, so I’m staying abreast of most of that. Fiona is playing Club Penguin, and I’m helping her a little with that. I scan a few other blogs, social networks, and so on, but mostly, I’m too tired to think.
My traffic has been quite high over the past few days as people did searches on Victoria Lindsey. I hit 500 uniques in a single day and my monthly uniques has broken 4,300, but that traffic is dropping off, and traffic is returning to normal.
So, not a lot of content today. If it wasn’t for NaBloPoMo, the effort to post every day out of a month, I’d probably let this day pass. But, I haven’t missed a day yet this year, so I figure I should at least try to make it through April.
April 19th
Second Life Looses a Superhero: Hunter Talon, aka Joseph Button
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 04/19/2008 - 08:58I believe I can fly
I believe I can touch the sky
I think about it every night and day
Spread my wings and fly away
When my eldest daughters were in kindergarten, they learned this song. They would sing it with the hope and optimism that you only seem to find in healthy young children. They have grown and they have flown. They are living lives beyond our imaginations those many years ago.
But what about a child born with spinal muscular atrophy, a rare birth defect? Children born with spinal muscular atrophy rarely live beyond the first couple years of their lives. Do we believe these children can fly?
If you said no, I urge you to consider the case of Joseph Button, known in Second Life as Hunter Talon. Hunter Talon’s imagination soared and brought many people with it. He shared his imagination online and as a screenwriter and a graphic novelist. He passed away earlier this month.
I never knew Joe, so I think it is best to let other sources speak for themselves. First, I would encourage you to check out Joe’s MySpace page. His ‘About Me’ section starts off:
I slayed a hundred Nazis with a Swiss Army Knife and a standard issue PCL, or a Paper Clip Launcher to you civilians. It was slow, it was gruesome, it was a complete lie. But I need friends and killing Nazis always earns friends.
A local television station interviewed him here:
When, Joseph Button passed away. His sister added this comment on his MySpace page:
Joe defied the odds and lived nearly 25 years with Spinal Muscular Atrophy, a rare medical condition, when doctors predicted he wouldn't live past age 2. He lived each day with enthusiasm and accomplished so much in life, always with the desire to help others. In death he chose to donate his body for medical research with the hope that something might be learned about his disease. We would like to continue Joe's wish of helping others and have created a memorial fund for those that would like to contribute in
Joe's name.Joseph Button Memorial Fund
c/o The Button Family
2748 Sharon Road
Jarrettsville, MD 21084
So to any of you that don’t believe you can fly, take a lesson from Joe Button and spread your wings and fly away.
April 18th
Drupal and Graphviz – Working notes
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 04/18/2008 - 14:20The other day, I got a phone call from a person interested in creating some social network graphs similar to those that I did with MyBlogLog. Those graphs were created with Graphviz, a very graph visualization package.
For the images I created, I did them all from command line prompts. I gathered the data and then ran a program that created images from the data. I then uploaded the images to Flickr.
However, there are supposed to be packages to create the graphs on the fly. One is Webdot, which is based on TCL and a simplified version that is supposed to work in perl. Unfortunately, the webdot code comes in an RPM installer, which I haven’t figured out how to use on my Ubuntu machine and the perl looks like it probably needs a little bit of hacking to set up.
So, I was pleased to find that there is a Graphviz filter for Drupal. Currently, it is set for Drupal 5, but by adding a couple lines to the info files, you can get it to work in Drupal 6, or so it seems.
I installed the Graphviz filter on one of my machines. By poking around a little, I found that I needed to install the Graphviz PEAR package as well. The way the Drupal Filter is set up, it seems like the best approach is to install the Image directory as a subdirectory of the Drupal filter’s directory. With all this in place, I the filter started working, with one minor exception. It gave me the error message:
“There was an error rendering the Graphviz file using format svg.”
Well, it turns out that the host I was working on doesn’t have Graphviz setup. So, the filter and the PEAR package appear to work, but the call to Graphviz itself didn’t generate any images. Oh well. Next step, install Drupal 6 on a machine I have that does have Graphviz running and/or get Graphviz installed on the machine where I’ve setup Drupal 6, the filter and the PEAR package.
Meanwhile, I’m still spending time upgrading various sites to Drupal 6.2. Beyond that, it is a beautiful spring day. Kim’s brother and his family are in town visiting, so I’ll probably leave the rest of this for a bit later.
