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A friend of mine was having trouble loosing weight, yep the same old story. Count the calories, reduce the plate size, do more exercise and still nothing really happening.

So we looked at how it was done in the olden days. And that was very different. It basically boiled down to reducing certain food types, namely sugar, bread, biscuits, cake, chocolate etc. We saw the connection, sugar and carbohydrates. My friend hunted out some books from the library, on of which was the Real Food Revolution by Prof Tim Noakes, which is based on the finding of Dr Banting.

She starting on this lifestyle choice and lost 20kg in 9 months without extra exercise or plate size reduction!

I will be going into more detail in another post and referencing some science to back this up.

If you want to feed you body the propper stuff for healthy living, my suggestion is to go onto the Banting diet, do your research and enjoy life. The minimum you could do is to cut out all the processed food that’s on the market and reduce/stop your sugar intake.

More later – eat well 🙂

 

I first found GNU/Linux on the front cover of a magazine way back in 2000 I think. It was a product called Red Hat 7.1. I proptly installed it onto my then one and only laptop, a Toshiba Satellite 3 with a P3 700MHz and 192M RAM. I wiped off Windows ME and took 3 days to get Red Hat up and running. This took all of 1.5G of a 10G disk!
Fedora 15 takes over 3G of disk and I doubt that it could run on a P3 with 192 M RAM. One of the main reasons I liked Linux and still do is its lightness compared to MS Windows, or even OSX. But it is increasingly getting bigger (more bloat) as hardware becomes more powerful. The problem I have is that like with windows before, if I wanted to upgrade my software, I had to upgrade my hardware first, and now this is becoming more so with Linux. There are not many distros that will run happily on a P3 and 192M RAM, which is a shame, not even the Ubuntu!
So, back to fedora 15 beta. The first one I tried was the live CD to see how it looked and performed. As I like light weight stuff I opted for the LXDE version.

I’ve been blogging (albeit on irregular intervals) for a while, here and on blogspot and sometimes on LiveJournal. I moved here because I consider wordpress to be better for several reasons. It is open source, a good reason, and it is standards compliant. I have installed wordpress on my server and it is easy to use and modify because it is standards compliant and well written. Another reason is that I do a fair amount of writing ‘off-line’ and have found that there are off-line blogging clients which work better with wordpress than with blogspot. Blogspot seem to change their system every so often which creates hassles for the clients and their developers (good ol’ Google!). So, on to the clients. I used to have a mac, a G4 iBook. A good machine but I gave it away to a friend as I collecting to many laptops and my wife suggested I ‘loose’ some. Also I found being ‘locked’ into a system was too restrictive. On the mac I used Ecto, which was and is a great blogging client. But, it only runs on mac, although there was a windows version which I think isn’t being developed anymore. As I don’t use a mac anymaore, and I don’t like using windows (too full of bugs to be paying money for), I use linux (as you might of guessed from my previous post) and finding a blogging client to work on linux is difficult. There are some good ones that work on windows which wont work on Linux even with wine (www.winehq.com) but linux does have a few, most of which are fairly simple. There are two that I came across that work and have some good features and both require java. One is petrus-blogger. It is good but it seems a little unstable and for some reason wouldn’t work on my system with wordpress, no matter what I tried. The other is bleezer, which I am using now. It seems to work well, but doesn’t like it when I am off-line with wordpress because it can’t access the list of posts, but other than that it works well. It isn’t the prettiest to look at, as it seems with most java applications, but is functional. It has a full array of formatting options along the adding hyperlinks and posting images, although here it didn’t seem to work and I had to manually upload this screenshot.

It also seems stable so far.

For looking at these applications, it seems a shame that so much effort has gone into producing something useful, and then nothing, almost like,”Ok, I’ve made a product, see, it works, now I’m going to stop and do something else”, a bit like a “3-day wonder”. Its satisfied a need, scratched the itch, served a purpose, an now discarded with no thought given to those who’ve pick up the tool and now feel rejected and cast aside, floundering and not knowing where to go or what to do… There come a responsibility when producing a product that people come to rely upon. Is this software still under development or has it run its course? In most cases, most developers act responsibly but there are the odd few who put something really good together, release it into the wild and thats it, leaving it there hanging. Shame.