Monthly Archives: July 2003

One People

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One Planet, One People, Under GodHumanity is fortunate to have a God of love, willing and eager to forgive us every time we stumble. Sometimes, on days when we aren’t walking the right path, relationships can crumble, even with other Christians.

My hope is that this patch on Rachel’s quilt* will be a reminder to you, and to me, that it’s important to humble yourself and serve others, especially other Christians. It’s sad that Christians can be responsible for so much hurting, but it’s expected because we are still pressing on to reach Christ.

Ask for God’s help in cultivating your friendships. The believers around you – even the ones you don’t like – will be worshiping God beside you when we leave this planet, and He will mend our love for each other. We will truly be one people under God.

It’s a day I look forward to.

(Earth photo courtesy NASA.)

* LINK TENDING 1/11 – Relinked cre8d entry to the new location.

Grid Computing

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I’m back! The week or two off was good for me. Hopefully, it’ll help me focus and write more effectively. Please be patient with me; it’s likely you’ll see these mysterious, unexplained absences from time to time. I think in spurts.

Grid computing is the buzzword quickly circulating throughout the technology industry and the media. Basically, grid computing is the process of setting up a lot of small computers in a way that they can calculate a big problem by dividing it in smaller parts. This way, you can build a powerful supercomputer with inexpensive components. You can even use existing company computers or enlist the public for help, lowering the cost even more.

The possibilities are profound. The first public grid, SETI@home, was designed to search for radio signals that might be indicative for extraterrestrial life. I had participated in this a few weeks, until I stumbled on this convincing article from ChristianAnswers.net. Even so, the technology itself was fascinating. Because you could potentially get thousands of computers to donate their unused clock cycles, the potential for total processing power is astonishing. It could easily surpass my local supercomputer, the Maui High Performance Computing Center.

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We’ve Got Blog – But Who Cares?

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Over at cre8d*, Rachel talks briefly about We’ve Got Blog, a compilation of blog posts by the pioneers of the blogging revolution. The editors did a fairly good job of assembling disparate opinions into a cohesive book.

The one thing I notice repeated again and again (and again in Jordon’s responses to Rachel) is that you shouldn’t blog if you’re expecting fame, fortune, or even recognition. Blogging is a good way to store links and journal ideas, but it’s unlikely that you’ll attract a significantly large audience.

Newspapers are often paralleled with blogs, and there’s yet another parallel that comes to mind – while a newspaper’s name is well known, the name of individual writers often is ignored. Think about it – do you know who wrote any of the news articles in your local paper? (Sorry Irene and Bene Diction, you don’t count.)

Parts of the book talked about the future profitability of blogs. I think unless a very well-known celebrity starts blogging, and writes very well, individual blogs shouldn’t expect to live off their writing (or even to break even). Blogging is supposed to be a joy on its own, not a job.

* LINK TENDING 1/11 – Relinked cre8d entry to the new location.

Automating Winamp

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I, like many others, am of the opinion that Winamp 2.x is simply the best media player out there. A quick Task Manager check shows it using 9 MB of memory and about 1% of CPU time. Try firing up QuickTime or Media Player (or the other player I won’t name because of its hideous privacy practices) and see if the resources used are anywhere near the small footprint of Winamp. It’s so fast, it runs as comfortably on a 486 as a Pentium III.

Being a techie, I also am of the opinion that Winamp, along with its documented API, is the best media playback library out there. Unfortunately, most of the attempts I’ve seen to write a Visual Basic wrapper for it have been lacking in some way – typically in the quality of the object model (it was often limiting). I therefore decided to begin writing my own.

I’ve made good progress today. The ActiveX DLL supports read/write Balance, Repeat, Volume, and Shuffle properties, as well as some early transport methods (currently, PausePlayback and StopPlayback). When instances of the class initialize, they automatically start copies of Winamp; if a copy should be closed for some reason, the wrapper will silently re-open it. With the assistance of many helpful posters at Nullsoft’s developer forums and a great example of working with process memory at AllAPI, I managed to get filenames from the playlist by reading Winamp’s process memory – something the API docs say can’t be done except with a plug-in.

I wish Nullsoft wrote documentation of the same caliber as their software. (Sigh.)

Hawai’i Today

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(Note: This is the final installment of a three-part series discussing recent legal and political challenges to the Kamehameha Schools and other institutions designed to benefit the native Hawaiian people. Read parts 1 and 2.)

With all the challenges to the Hawaiian community, is there any hope for its survival? I think the answer is a definite yes. The solution, which is currently being debated in both houses of Congress, is Senate Bill 344, introduced by Senator Daniel Akaka and co-sponsored by the other representatives of Hawai’i’s congressional delegation, Senator Inouye (as well as senators from Nevada and Alaska), and Representatives Abercrombie and Case* (plus a representative from Virginia).

The bill is an effective compromise between the Native Hawaiians who have been defrauded of their rightful land for so long, as well as for people who have legitimate reasons to be concerned. It does not immediately create a new Hawaiian government; rather, it defines a structure to begin doing so. Most importantly (for the attorneys defending the state of Hawai’i in lawsuits) is that it firmly establishes that the Hawaiian people are an ancestral group. By doing so, it provides a strong legal basis in the assertion that institutions that support Hawaiians are not engaging in discrimination by race.

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