Dec 28, 2009 Posted by john

The Death Of Software & Media

Here’s an announcement, for all you geeky types out there: I’m finished posting geeky stuff like mathematics, programming and social media on Positively Glorious! and phasing out the Software & Media category here. I will henceforth only post those topics on Mettadore.com. Why? Because I have a large number of people who read Positively Glorious! because of my writings on topics non-geek... read more

Dec 24, 2009 Posted by john

Making Sociable More… Sociable

I’ve been using the Sociable WordPress plugin for a while now. It’s a plugin that gives instant links to various social media sites, to help you spread your bloggy goodness around the world. One thing that I love about this plugin is the fact that it shows a tagline before the list of links (just look to the end of this post for what I’m talking about). For me, this tagline has become... read more

Dec 23, 2009 Posted by john

Giving as… Listening

Because it’s Christmas, and because this time of gift-giving is so difficult in so many ways, I wanted to take a moment to detail more about what gift-giving is to me. The focus of it being that gifts have meaning. And, more importantly, the act of giving itself has meaning. Deep meaning. When I give a gift, the responsibility of that gift lies with me, the giver. It is my responsibility to know this... read more

Dec 23, 2009 Posted by john

The Responsibility Of Giving

You all know them. The people who give gifts of toilet brushes, or gifts of a steak dinner to a vegetarian. As I sit in the house of my wife’s parents during this Christmas holiday, it comes that I have a few spare moments to contemplate bad gifts, culture, and the phenomenon of gift-giving.1 There is kind of cultural nuance that intrigues me about gift-giving. It is a nuance that I feel every... read more

Dec 15, 2009 Posted by john

Head Smacking In Scala: XML Parsing

I program in a lot of different languages, everything from C and C++ to Awk and Sed, Visual Basic and ASP to PHP and Javascript. I’m a bit of a jack-of-all-trades when it comes to languages, but the main one for the past 10 or so years has been Python. Python is the language that I automatically turn to when I say “I need to do ${X},” where X is any given task that does not require a UML... read more