Monthly Archives: October 2005

Kiva: Loans to microbusinesses in the third world

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Today I read some Seth Godin, and it turns out he is a great person.

(Who’s Seth? A marketing guru. (Read more at Wikipedia.)

He explains the service Kiva, which is a “microlending system”.

> Kiva lets you connect with and loan money to unique small businesses in the developing world.

Read more about Kiva’s concept.

A list of active Kiva-funded businesses can be seen online. Take a look at the figures: ridiculously low amounts get these people started, and paying back. Yes, it’s financing. These microcompanies pay the lender back.

Some of the businesses have awesome names: Riwirok Ber – “Unity is Strength”, or God helps sound like something from Puritan England. A name like Blessings puts a tear in me eye.

And the Mot Mot piggery is a distant name-relative of my own company olleolleolle.

This is good stuff. Tell this story.

Cake PHP framework in alpha

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Release announcement for “cake_0.10.0.1217_alpha”, which is more stable than any other release.

Most of all, this release is about making the developer experience more cohesive, and “orthogonal”. Method calls and return values look more or less the same everywhere, and when you grok how Cake hangs together, it becomes easier to make web apps.

I am becoming a bit more expressive with it.

I looked at Perl yesterday, using my Linux laptop. Without perldoc or man pages, it’s difficult broaching a new programming language. When there’s no editor with emacs keybindings, it gets harder. Vi is hard for me. Playing Nethack’s been making it easier lately. I know how to navigate, and the modefulness is becoming less of an enigma. But still, it ain’t like emacs yet. I’m used to jed, a lightweight editor with emacs bindings. (It’s a Debian package, so just apt-get it. That’s what I should do, when I get that laptop online again.)

Now, see you. Been nice writing for you.

Update: just installed the Windows binary for jed. It’s cute, and it’s a lot faster to work with than a terminal window on a remote computer. I don’t know yet if I’ll use it locally.

The end of the world is nigh. Newspeak is rife.

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I heard the news today. That’s because I get up earlier. Part of a program of working smarter.

On the news was a single Reuters story, just spoken from the telegram, no commentary or anything, this was “the news”. It was a note on that the Defense Ministry of the United States of America are developing new weapons called “bunker busters.” Piercing atomic bombs, to take out deep targets.

Tac-nukes are not called that anymore.

The idea of having “little nukes” is like being a little pregnant: there is no such thing.

Newspeak for tactical nuclear weapons is the unsavoury “bunker buster” – a reference to the dam busters of WW2. Everything from World War II is fine to make heroic computer games out of, and the intended train of thought this piece of newspeak has might be:

> We had dam busters during the war and took out dams. What if we had been able to take out the Führer bunker, too? We woulda needed a bunker buster.

Tac-nukes to pave the road to peace?

A Google Image Search for “bunker buster” turns up a lot of fighter bomber porn.

BBC graphic of how the thinking goes:

![BBC graphic of how the thinking goes](http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/1590000/images/_1593734_bunker_buster2_300.gif)