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Animals who try to survive by striking a balance with their surroundings are easy victims to a predator who comes in and begins to change the environment to suit his needs. We humans have hunted several such animals to extinction by doing just this.

Lets apply this to today’s world, where have destroyed most other animals, and the real competition to man comes from man himself. Those who wish to survive, need to realize that adaption to your environment doesn’t work against other men. It will only grant a very lowly existence. Those who wish to rise to the top of the nature pyramid have to be efficient modifiers of their surroundings. Does this method work? If it didn’t I don’t think we would be the dominant species on the planet today.
Would you like to go extinct? Or would you like to bring about change? I for sure wouldn’t like going extinct. What to change is best decided by looking at what troubles you the most. If nothing troubles you too much… I think you are going the way of the dodos. What troubles me? Well, a lot of things, but that is matter for another blog post.

I always advocate changing your surroundings to suit yourself. The best way to survive is to change the world to suit you. It is the original human spirit that got us out of the dark ages. Be the change you want to see. It is the most human way to live.

Several of the spam originates from a UK based ISP.

I have marked this as spam in wordpress but the IP addresses keep changing… Does anyone know what else I could do to keep away these spammers? I don’t like capchas and don’t want normal readers to have to do that.

Scarcely anything material or established which I was brought up to believe was permanent and vital, has lasted. Everything I was sure or taught to be sure was impossible, has happened.

Winston Churchill

The modern world has a lot of marvels, if you look at it from the eyes of someone who lived a few decades ago.

I am almost always online. Most services I use frequently have RSS feeds, however problem with RSS always was that you had to poll it for data. Yes, there are readers that will do that for you. But I have always wished for a service that would do this for you.

I found chatterous, it however was a bit sluggish in sending messages and you could only have one feed for per group. Friendfeed on the other hand was fast, worked well, allowed me to aggregate feeds into one channel. With this support for instant messages friendfeed becomes really handy. I am a fan!

If you have not tried friendfeed, maybe you should give it a try.

Don’t count on donations is my advice.

Selling consumer software: very tough, but can be done by one individual.

Selling to businesses: very specialized, much easier to make your first $100K, but you can’t be a one-man shop.

I found this advice in a comment on hacker news. I would say, I do agree with it.

Let me give you an example: Say you want your computer to read out all the post from an RSS/atom feed. Just put together a few lines of code as follows:

import feedparser;
import speech;
import sys;

feed = "http://nunespascal.com/feed/";
if len(sys.argv)==2:
	feed = sys.argv[1];
d = feedparser.parse(feed);
for e in d.entries:
        print e.title;
        speech.say(e.title);
        print e.description;
        speech.say(e.description);

If you wish to download python you can get it from the official python download page. A lot of flavors of Linux would already have it installed.

You will need the libraries feedParser (To read RSS/atom feeds) and pyspeech(To read out the text). These are not part of python by default. You can download them, or install using easy_install. Here is some very good documentation on easy_intall.

I did try searching for a new theme, only to realize how much I love the simplicity of this theme. I did find a few bugs that creeped in when I was making changes and fixed those.

So I settled for a change of colors. Hope you like it.

If all your energies are dedicated to just completing a task, you will almost always decide to do it a way you know for sure will work. To innovate; to find better, simpler, faster, or more elegant solutions, one needs to have time to think about the problem at hand. Innovation needs you to experiment, have time to make mistakes and recover from them.

Naturally no one has infinite time to solve a problem. But if you are very hard pressed for time, processes will stagnate. Innovation will almost come to a stop. I believe that one should always be pursue innovation. That means that one should always have more time alloted for a task than strictly necessary.

The road to innovation is not by thinking out the best way. But by experimenting on several alternatives. Making the mistakes along the way. And learning the lessons forever.

Keep experimenting. Keep innovating.

It is just your very immediate boss that matters. How do you know if you are working under someone dumb? Well, I am sure most of you can tell, but still: someone who wastes you time in needless tasks, isn’t confident in the skills of their team, takes all credit for things that go right, and blames the team for everything that goes wrong. The easiest way to find someone unfit as a boss is if the person doesn’t take responsibility for his team.