Kiva: Loans to microbusinesses in the third world

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

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.

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)

Cabaret in Copenhagen: Livingstones Kabinet

Yesterday night, I was at the KafCaféen venue, where Livingstones Kabinet opened their new show “We love you too”, a political raunchy trip with the band’s trademark Weimar Republic feeling.

The dancers – a new addition to the troupe’s shows – were stunning.

Some rude discontent in the audience waved arms and was vocal about something. I presumed she was a mother of some participant in the show, and that she was outraged at artistic decisions made by the band. Turns out she’d pulled props from the stage and written on them – thereby making them unusable for the next night’s show – using the props as writing paper. Indicting that band of being without a political message is… truly a misguided attempt at righting a perceived wrong.

Holy Modal Rounders’s naming, and Jeff Minter in repose

In the Wikipedia article on the geniuses of Holy Modal Rounders they have something profound on naming, a subject dear to programmers:

> As regards the name, Peter Stampfel explained in Perfect Sound Forever: “We kept changing the name. First it was the Total Quintessence Stomach Pumpers. Then the Temporal Worth High Steppers. Then The Motherfucker Creek Babyrapers. That was just a joke name. He was Rinky-Dink Steve the Tin Horn and I was Fast Lightning Cumquat. He was Teddy Boy Forever and I was Wild Blue Yonder. It kept changing names. Then it was the Total Modal Rounders. Then when we were stoned on pot and someone else, Steve Close maybe, said Holy Modal Rounders by mistake. We kept putting out different names and wait until someone starts calling us that then. When we got to Holy Modal Rounders, everyone decided by acculumation that we were the Holy Modal Rounders. That’s the **practical way to get named**.”

My emphasis, man.

That picture is *priceless*.

For more lovely hippieness, check out Llamasoft’s website, with [this image of Jeff Minter](http://www.llamasoft.co.uk/jeff.php). Serenity, that’s what it is.

PEAR news: Validate_DK validates Danish numbers

Rejoice! A PEAR class for Danish numbers is now in alpha: Docs For Class Validate_DK are sparse, but you can see the four methods:

* carReg
* phoneNumber
* postalCode
* ssn

I like this. One person, in this case Jesper Veggerby Hansen, can make a significant contribution to the Open Source world. [An article](http://asay.blogspot.com/2005/09/analyst-nature-and-size-of-open-source.html) I read yesterday told the real story: most projects involve few minds. If you are able to add something (a fine bug report or a piece of documentation), you are golden.

Cheers to Jesper for this micro-project.