This book was a challenging read (for me) but well worth the effort. It consisted of lots of fascinating questions and answers for believers and non-believers. "The dilemma, then, is this: If God cannot suffer, how can He really love us? But if He can suffer, how is He God?
Present Condition:
"First, body is form. Even now what makes our bodies our bodies is not atoms but structure. The atoms change every seven years; yet it is the same body because of its continuity of form. ("Continuity" does not mean "unchangingness", of course.) It is like a river. A river is not its water, which is always moving on, but its riverbed, which forms the formless water into this river."
Post Modernism:
"Religion claims to deal with things as they really are, to tell us what is true, not just comforting. So when different religions tell us contradictory things, both simply cannot be true. No one believes in the equality of all scientific theories or historical accounts or common sense hunches or newspaper stories. We test them to find out which are false and which are true, and no one thinks this is narrow-mined, bigoted, or illiberal. Why do we think differently about religion?"
Mandy recommended this book and I found it to be a pleasant and informing read. Given the book's title I would not have otherwise read it. It wisely sums up how to keep relationships strong and happy.
Why doesn't PHP have a quoting function similar to qq() in Perl? PHP is a web scripting language used to build dynamic HTML and output it to a brower. Why shouldn't it be easy to output HTML strings that contain double quotes?
Firstly, I don't want to escape every double quote (\") which results in:
$html .= "<table border=\"$color\" background=\"ccccff\">\n";
Secondly, I don't want to use PHP's heredoc syntax (<<<):
$html = <<< ENDHTML
<table border="$color" background="ccccff">
ENDHTML;
This is overkill for single lines of HTML.
I want to do something like this in PHP:
$html = qq | <table border="$color" background="ccccff"> |;
Any ideas?
I determined that I needed to upgrade emacs since I was using an out-of-date version. I downloaded the latest (fully precompiled win32 binary) gnu emacs (which was version 21.3). However, my severely hacked .emacs configuration file didn't seem to play nice with the new version. Many of the extensions I added via my .emacs file were now included within the base installation and were no longer needed.
Therefore, it was time to prune the .emacs beast I created. However, I couldn't seem to find documentation to get tramp / plink remote editing magic to work within the new version. I spent some time looking back at the items I blogged for earlier versions of emacs and realized that I didn't really want to go down that road. I know at the end of that road I would feel like an enlightened emacs guru, however the magic happens here documentation and tedium of working out a solution didn't appeal to me.
I found from reading some documentation that XEmacs included Tramp out of the box. I used the XEmacs setup executable to download and install all the listed packages. Then I dropped the plink.exe into the C:\Program Files\XEmacs\XEmacs-21.4.13\i586-pc-win32 folder (since I was planning on using plink instead of ssh inside Cygwin). I opened XEmacs, hit ctrl-x and ctrl-f, and typed /[plink/user@host]/home/user/file ... and it worked perfectly! (I plan to do a little .emacs configuring to set the default connection type to plink to simplify things.) However, I am very happy that XEmacs was so easy to use out of the box. Great job!
I just have to rant about one more result of the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act. Publicly traded companies that fall under the regulatory weight (of SOX) must have a third party auditor sign off that the books are properly accounted (before they can be closed at the end of the fiscal year). However, this same third party auditor determines the level of due diligence (or rigor) they require before they will sign off on a company's books. Therefore, it is in the best interest of the third party auditor to take the most ridiculously strict interpretation of SOX before they will sign off on a company's books (and pile up solid earnings for their auditing company). This is a huge conflict of interest. Many companies are strong armed into draconian implementations of SOX which severely impact worker productivity. The spirit of the SOX Act is to make sure proper controls are in place and a solid paper trail is present to follow in the case of accounting irregularities. It seems to me that the auditors are the party most guilty of conflicts of interest and not properly segregating their duties.
Accountants and lawyers are running high tech companies and the IT departments of non-high tech industries. The culprit is businesses are now trying to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (which is a law to legislate corporate morality). Basically the SOX Act defines procedures to insure the sanctity of systems and their corresponding data. SOX was supposed to prevent corporate management's raiding of the corporate cookie jar via a plethora of shenanigans. Enron, Global Crossing, WorldCom, Quest, PhamMor... all readily come to mind.
While it would be easy for me to describe how SOX misses the mark for prevention of corporate fraud and adds huge overhead similar to the edicts for red tape from a psycho-communist pointy hair boss. Instead, I ask the question of what will the impact of accountants and lawyers running high tech companies and the IT departments of non-high tech industries be? I personally find it disturbing that accountants and laywers are driving and managing IT. Especially, since most within these groups don't have a clue about technology and control the assessment, implementation, and procurement of it.
Due to lack of understanding within these groups, IT is generally undervalued and consequently looked at as a cost center rather than a value center. Hence, the outsourcing philosophy of contracting with the lowest bidder for IT services. IT's new management needs to wise up and realize that success in the marketplace is due to technological improvement and advantage.
When a software vendor tells you that they stored data within XML format (which is easily accessible) you should ask them how they define XML. My favorite software vendor created XML that was *not* valid, *not* well-formed, and contained binary characters. The sad thing is that this instance isn't even one of their greatest sins. My conclusion is that this software vendor defined XML to be a crappy proprietary storage mechanism and overloaded the useful XML definition with their own. Software vendors are guilty of this and turn almost everything nice and useful into a worthless buzz word defined by nothing or even worse a bastardized meaning. Grrr!
Mandy and I went to Edmonds Washington (which is just north of Seattle) for my cousin Chris' wedding. The wedding and reception were very enjoyable and allowed us to visit family I haven't seen in a long time. Next we ventured around Seattle and Victoria enjoying scenic views and the noteworthy sights. It was a wonderful vacation.
Flickr photo set of Seattle and Victoria