If you follow through on your commitment, the service is free. But, if you fail, they’ll charge your card and give the money to either charity or a person of your choosing.

Simple, and most of all, effective, highly effective. A friend used the system last year to great effect, and I’m acting as the referee to another friend this year. It’s a highly effective system, If you’re serious about making change happen, take out a commitment contract on yourself this year.

• Partners in Health $2’760 USD, £1’763
• Friendly Water for the World $1’420 USD, £892
• El Paso de la Danta, Costa Rica, $200 USD, £128.13
• Amnesty International, £240
• Water Aid, £240
• Movember South Africa, 13’000 ZAR matched 1:1, £2’060.36
• Movember UK, £100
• Opportunity International UK, £620 matched 1:1, £1’240
• Help for Heroes £89.46 matched 1:1, £178.92
• Macmillan Cancer Support £59.37 matched 1:1, £118.74
• Spina Bifida £10
• Total £6’971.15

Matched donations

Of that total, £5’172.14 was either money due to me or my own personal cash, £1’799.01 was donations by others in order to match my donations.

When I made the pledge I was about to get £10k of investment. I was in the UK for the first time in 3 years and I was finding it very hard to reconcile the wealth, excess and waste of the first world with the developing world where I had been living. I was about to be flush, was trying to make sense of the world around me, and the pledge seemed like a sensible way to do that.

Then reality set in. The investment never came, I pissed about for a good six months before generating any income. It was a tough year. I was feeling serious financial pressure from the pledge. In November an opportunity arose. Mark Shuttleworth was offering to match Movember donations. The year was drawing to a close, I was well behind with my donations, and here was a chance to half the cost of donating.

I gave over £1’000 on 24 November. Not because I thought Movember was a great charity to support, but because I was feeling the serious financial strain of giving half my money to charity. I was barely generating enough cash flow to stay afloat, and at the same time facing a huge charity bill. I caved and took a soft option.

That sparked a lot of thinking about matched donations. Is it reasonable to count the whole amount towards my giving total? After reconciling it back and forth, yes, I think it is. To be clearer then, my commitment is not so much to give to charity, but to generate charitable contributions. I was directly responsible for generating those donations, even if they weren’t with  my own money. If money were no object, I’d ignore the matched donations just because I could, but I think it’s “fair” (whatever that means) to count them.

Giving to Movember was still a cop out. I gave to ease the financial pressure, not because I wanted to support the cause. I’m trying to learn from the experience.

Response

People’s responses have been interesting. The negative response far outnumber the positive. Stop and think about that for a second. Somebody says they’re going to give money away, and people criticise, condemn, and complain. Sad.

From here on, if you have something constructive to say, please do share it. If you want to bitch, whine or moan, keep it to yourself, I’m not interested. You all know who you are.

Spread

I aimed to split my giving into 3 parts. One part give a man a fish, one part teach a man to fish, one part part first world philosophical nonsense I think is important. The first two thirds were to focus on the world’s poorest people, those who genuinely are in need. I reckon 39% of my chosen organisations were in the third category. That number was mostly skewed by my donation to Movember. It soaked up all of the third part and more.

I hope to keep better within my aims in future giving.

Going forward

While writing this post, for the first time, I’m considering that I might not continue the pledge fully in 2012. It was a demanding commitment last year. I simple assumed I’d continue on the same basis, but maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll find a different way. I’m going to take a week or two to think about it and then make a decision.

I believe that people dying through lack of food is simply unacceptable and we each have an obligation to take action. Over the next few weeks I’ll consider how I want to honour that responsibility in 2012.

Opportunity International UK

From my research, Opportunity UK International is an organisation worth of support. For any UK citizens reading this, the government is matching all donations to the Opportunity 2011 Christmas Appeal until 21 February 2012. If you’re considering a charitable donation, I recommend supporting their work. Your donation will go twice as far if you support this campaign now. You can read more and donate online here. Think about it.

Happy new year. Do something worthwhile in 2012.

My biggest hassle was getting skype working. I documented the steps in the hope that it might save somebody else some hassle. This worked for me today, 8 Jan 2012, it might get out of date fast, and should be totally obsolete soon.

First, I installed a bunch of packages from oneiric. I don’t think these are available in precise yet. They are:

They can be downloaded in one go with this command (I believe, I haven’t actually tested, I downloaded them one by one). That command makes a new directory “skype-downloads” then downloads all the packages into it. From there, I ran:

dpkg -i *.deb
sudo apt-get -f install
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install libxss1:i386 libqtcore4:i386 libqt4-dbus:i386 libasound2:i386 libxv1:i386 libsm6:i386 libxi6:i386 libXrender1:i386 libxrandr2:i386 libfreetype6:i386 libfontconfig1:i386 libqtgui4:i386


This installs all the downloaded files, upgrades / fixes some of them, then installs a whole load more i386 dependencies. Finally, after all that, I was able to install the skype .deb I downloaded from skype.com. After downloading the file, I’d suggest using dpkg to install it like this:

dpkg -i /path/to/downloaded/skype-ubuntu_2.2.0.35-1_amd64.deb

Then I was able to start skype. However, it wouldn’t show in the systray. To solve that, I used this command:

gsettings set com.canonical.Unity.Panel systray-whitelist "['Skype']"

This command sets the value found in dconf-editor at desktop > unit > panel, called systra-whitelist. This value sets which programs can appear in the old fashioned system tray (now that we’re onto bigger and better things with unity and indicators). There’s a bug which means setting “all” in this value doesn’t work. So you need to add each program you want, in single quotes, separated by a comma. See this for more.

I don’t really understand what all of this does, I copied various bits and pieces from a few places and pieced it altogether through trial and error. This forum post talks about installing from oeneric, and this blog post listed the extra requirements.

I’m on skype video now, so this all worked!

The upgrade from 3.3.0 to 3.3.1 was in the file wordpress-3.3.1-partial-0.zip. I’ll try to remember to update this post as future versions come out. I’m not sure of the exact file format. I think it’s -partial-0/1/2 to mark how many minor versions back the upgrade goes.

Personally, I use these files for minor upgrades because it’s faster, but I use the full download file for a full version upgrade.

Everything in these photos must go including the three quarter height fridge, lamps, hoover (broken), dartboard, guide books, toaster, toastie maker, aluminium pot, bowls, candle holder, coffee tables, mirror, cutlery racks, picture with frame, bed linen, blankets, and more associated gubbins.

There are some interesting tools in this space. The easiest, at least in principle, appears to be Email Yak. They expose a JSON API which will trigger a POST or GET request for incoming messages, and can send message likewise. However, upon signup I got a 500 error and likewise after logging in. So I can’t currently test the service. In principle though, it looks interesting. 500 emails a month on their domain for free, 1000 on any domain for $5/month. Then it kicks up to $40 or $150 for 20k or 100k emails.

Another interesting tool is Context.IO. This is essentially a web friendly API in front of IMAP mailboxes. Their pricing model is also interesting, starting at $1.50 per mailbox per month, with a $15 minimum. Currently the service is read-only, but the option to move messages around is coming in api v2. They also have a free account which includes 3 mailboxes, and they charge 85c/GB for attachment transfer over 100MB.

This is really about extracting knowledge from email inboxes and focuses Google’s mail hosting (gmail/google apps), but will work with others. There seems to be a strong focus on attachments and conversations. Could be a useful component in quickly building another service, but I’d guess I’d want to build my own version eventually.

Google App Engine provides a mechanism to handle incoming emails and pipe them to a script. Sounds very sensible, and it would probably be possible to build a mail routing system on top of this by having the python script send the mail onwards via an API call or POST request.

I also read a few articles about having postfix send mail to a script. This one is useful. This article talks about configuring custom reply-to addresses to know which emails bounce, something called VERP apparently.

Conclusion

It seems to me like Yak Mail (I’ve had a reply from them about the 500 error while typing this blog post, impressed!) and Context.IO are useful pieces. Google’s mail API is also smart, and Amazon will probably add something similar to AWS before too long. If this was core to an application, I’d probably set up postfix to forward mail to a script eventually. But in the early days, I think Yak Mail is probably the way to go.

Mailgun

In my roundup, appeared to have completely missed the best offering of all, mailgun. Free tier includes 200 messages a day on a shared IP, pro tier is $19 minimum per month on a shared ip, $59 minimum on a dedicated IP. APIs to send and receive mail, mailboxes accessible via IMAP and POP3, charges only for storage and message counts, not mailoxes. Plus open source helper libraries available. Looks like the slickest of the lot.