So The Kid is in Chile. Nope. He didn't rush there upon news of an earthquake. He went the day before. Yeah, take that Red Cross.  

Needless to say he was surprised by the earthquake (no, sarcasm-intolerant reader, he didn't know that the quake was going to happen, ignore that first paragraph). However, sine he and others were there, they started the outreach and relief efforts pretty quickly. 

Understandably there were plenty of people back here wanting to know what was going on. Since The Kid knows I dig this internet stuff, he called me looking for some help. (As an aside, he called when I was in New York City at the drop.io headquarters hanging out when them, twilio, and other developers - see, he knew who to call.) 

The basic need was to relay reports via e-mail to those interested in staying up to date. 

Years ago I rewrote an e-mail list server that I originally wrote even more years ago. It somehow limps along. If you ever wondered why there are Twitter clients for every language, platform, and device around, but barely 5 e-mail discussion servers -- don't. Email is horrific. It's like FTP. Only not as old.

So setup a list on my aging list server. Arg. Yeah, doable. But pretty? Not so much. Not if you want to send photos. Video? I 'lol' in your face. 

But there are services out there - right? Someone does this - I now they do.

Enter posterous. No, I don't know how to pronounce it either. They take your lowly e-mail and turn it into a well formatted blog. Well, the content is well formatted, if you don't know how to clearly express yourself you're still out in the cold. But trust me, there are plenty of blogs like that - you'll fit right in.

So now we have a nice e-mail to blog conversion. Important because firing up the AJAX html editor on a phone probably isn't going to streamline the process. Yes, we've found what e-mail excels at, many clients, many platforms, dead simple to use. 

No, I don't know what FTP excels at. 

Those who want to follow a RSS feed, or check a site for updates are now covered. But what of those that want the updates e-mailed to them? Is there a blog to e-mail conversion? 

Of course there is. There are a ton of services, and posterous offers one internally. But - from what I could find - all of them are daily updates. Not real time. Not cool.

But wait. I have that e-mail list server limping along. I also have an rss feed. And from time to time I've been know to do this thing called 'programming'. Seems like this problem should be solvable - just grab the feed, and send the content as an e-mail. Oh, and probably should keep track of what has been sent. Don't want to resend e-mail every time we check the feed.

So a little while later, with a few lines of code connecting Zend_Mail to a SimpleXMLElement and we have it. A simple RSS to e-mail relay that e-mails the listserver new blog posts. But why is this better than sending updates to the posterous e-mail and the list e-mail? For a few reasons:

• Blog posts can be added via the web interface and still be sent to the list.

• The post converts all attached images to links, so HTML e-mail readers show the images without any attachments.

• The e-mail's contain a link to the post online.

Not bad huh? If you're interested, here's the basic code. 

A more elegant solution would have been to setup a script to 'pose' as a blog, and use the posterous support of MetaWebLog to 'autopost' new content to the list. But that seems hard. And who wants hard?

So it's been busy. After declaring my intention to release something interesting every week, I'm stuck toiling away at my keyboard working on more things people will never see. Ah, it pays the bills.

But I haven't forgotten my pledge. So here's two things - one new and one old.

We'll start with the old. Arguably not as useful as when first released - because everyone has a smartphone now - I've updated the SMS 'ping' tool by moving it to Twilio. Sure, I'll bet your smart phone can already do this, but in case it can't - or you just don't want to find and install the 'ping' app, text an IP/domain to 215-703-7945. Don't worry, it's just a plain 'ol text message, it'll work with your iPhone

But what's the upgrade? Now you can text multiple ips/domains, just separate them with a space.

Now something new, tasked with finding a replacement for my grandmother's crossword puzzle solver, I entered the world of little handheld spell-checkers, dejumblers, and crossword solvers. And I failed. But we'll leave that for another time. It seemed to me that the functions of these little devices would fit nicely into an SMS app, so when Twilio announced SMS support I gave it a shot.

• Text a word to get it spellchecked.
• Text * and (currently) up to 7 characters to get them dejumbled.
• Text a word with underscores for missing letters to solve crosswords.

And the number for that: 484-748-0996

Saw this article mentioned today, and found this section very interesting:

The most hopeful thing that could happen is health-care reform. If insurers were not able to pick and choose their clients and were responsible for everybody’s health, they’d have a strong interest in preventing every new case of type 2 diabetes. It costs $174 billion annually in the U.S. to treat diabetes.

So what you're saying is if we take freedom away from people (who, believe it or not make up insurance companies) we can control what they do.

Brilliant, glad we're on the same page.

One (of the seemingly many) things I do for, you know, work is web development. From time to time I'm asked for a portfolio of what I do. Here's a little sampling:

• Web Scraping/Data Mining (Technical sounding, it just means a computer program that collects data from websites by 'reading' the page.)
• eCommerce Order System (Did you know you can order from pizza hut online? I had nothing to do with that eCommerce site.)
• Product/Inventory Management Back-end (Let's say you had a site your company used to track costs, markup prices, and generate reports. And let's say I fixed it.)

You see the problem with that list? It's hard to show off that stuff. There are some clients I can't even say I worked for (gasp, maybe I can't even say I can't say that), other stuff is just never going to be publicly visible (yeah, you're not going to be able to play around with some in-house inventory control system, sorry).

So what's a developer to do?

Release something.

Call it a slightly late new year's resolution. Or don't.

Here's the deal. I'm gonna try to release some kind of technology thingy (usually some kind of internet technology thingy) every week.

So there.

No, it may not be something new each week. Maybe just rolling out a new feature to an existing thingy, but I'll try to make it at least interesting. And maybe even useful. And we'll just see how many weeks I miss. 'cause I will miss some. 

Beat you to that one Naysayers. Yeah, you know who you are.

So what's going to kick off this little party? If you'd been paying attention on Twitter you would know. But you were Facebooking weren't you? See, that's what happens.

Speaking of Twitter, you should check out GroupCall. Just a little app that lets you host a conference call with your friends. The host and unmute/mute people, so when someone gets out of hand... Really, it's setup as less of a mob conversation, and more of a 'broadcast' tool. One speaker many listeners. An ideal use would be Q&A or instructional sessions - questions asked via Twitter and answered over the call by one or two people.

It's still in the 'alpha' stages. Or is it 'preview'? Not sure anymore. Either way it's defintly not beta. Because beta just means "we haven't figured out how or if we're going to charge for this yet". And I've already figured that out. There will be a charge. 

But in the rush to release something I didn't have a chance to implement a payment system. So it's free now, until my money runs out. Or I start charging. We'll see which happens first.

Bet you can't wait until next week now.

While reading up on schema-less databases I ran across this example code:

$jack = Dbo::findOne('LostPerson', array('name' => 'Jack'));
$jack->{"skills.surgery"} = 8;
$jack->{"skills.leadership"} = 3;
echo "Jack is a " . $jack->{"skills.surgery"} . 
     " at surgery...\n";
echo "... but a " . $jack->skills['leadership'] . 
     " at leadership.\n";  

If my code were more like that, maybe some people would actually read the 'boring' posts.

Now that we've reached January, here's one look at three people central to the Christmas story, and how they responded to God's plan. Something to think about as a new year rolls around.

Reputation

Zacharias - Righteous Before God (Luke 1:5-6)

There was in the days of Herod, the king of Judaea, a certain priest named Zacharias, of the course of Abia: and his wife was of the daughters of Aaron, and her name was Elisabeth. And they were both righteous before God, walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless.

Mary - Highly Favoured (Luke 1:28)

To a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin's name was Mary. And the angel came in unto her, and said, Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.

Joseph - A Just Man (Matt 1:19)

Then Joseph her husband, being a just man, and not willing to make her a publick example, was minded to put her away privily

All three believe that God was able to save them from the eternal consequences of sin. The were righteous, favoured, and just - certainly they were Old Testament saints trusting in the promised Messiah for Salvation. But each had a different reaction to the message the Angel brought.

Reaction

Zacharias - Disbelief (Luke 1:18)

And Zacharias said unto the angel, Whereby shall I know this? for I am an old man, and my wife well stricken in years.

While Zacharias believed that God could save him in a miraculous way, he doubted God could use him in a miraculous way. He also doubted God could use those around him to accomplish His will.

Mary - Request (Luke 1:34)

Then said Mary unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?

Unlike Zacharias' response, Mary's question is 'how will this be' not 'how can I believe you'. She believed that God could use her in a miraculous way - she just wanted to be sure she understood it all correctly. 

Acceptance (Luke 1:38)

And Mary said, Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word. And the angel departed from her.

Once her question was answered, she shows her belief that God would use her to accomplish something great.

Joseph - Belief (Matt 1:38)

Then Joseph being raised from sleep did as the angel of the Lord had bidden him, and took unto him his wife:

Joseph's response was belief. Not just that God could use his life to accomplish His will, but that God could use the lives of those he knew closely, in spite of how things may appear, in a miraculous way.

As we face a new year, remember that the same God that saved us is most certainly able to use us. And that those around us - who we know so well, who do things differently then we would, with flaws we are so very aware of - can, and will, be used by God. Regardless of how the circumstances may seem to us.