In 2011 Forbes estimated Scrooge McDuck’s net worth to be $44.1 billion! He is the richest fictional character imagined, according to Forbes magazine. His favorite pastime is swimming in a giant vault of gold coins.

Scrooge McDuck - Net Worth $44.1 Billion

In contrast, Bill Gates net worth is estimated to be $56 billion!

Bill Gates - Net Worth $56 Billion

Bill Gates has more money than your childhood’s richest fictional character!

If you try installing PHPUnit-3.5.15 first, you’ll find PEAR forces you to install 3.6. The way around this is installing the old versions of all of the PHPUnit dependencies.

First you need to uninstall PHPUnit 3.6 and all of it’s dependencies.

sudo pear uninstall phpunit/PHPUnit
sudo pear uninstall phpunit/DbUnit
sudo pear uninstall phpunit/PHP_CodeCoverage
sudo pear uninstall phpunit/File_Iterator
sudo pear uninstall phpunit/Text_Template
sudo pear uninstall phpunit/PHP_Timer
sudo pear uninstall phpunit/PHPUnit_MockObject
sudo pear uninstall phpunit/PHPUnit_Selenium
sudo pear uninstall pear.symfony-project.com/YAML

Next install these specific versions of each dependency, in this order, installing PHPUnit-3.5.15 last.

sudo pear install pear.symfony-project.com/YAML-1.0.2
sudo pear install phpunit/PHPUnit_Selenium-1.0.1
sudo pear install phpunit/PHPUnit_MockObject-1.0.3
sudo pear install phpunit/PHP_Timer-1.0.0
sudo pear install phpunit/File_Iterator-1.2.3
sudo pear install phpunit/PHP_CodeCoverage-1.0.2
sudo pear install phpunit/Text_Template-1.0.0
sudo pear install phpunit/DbUnit-1.0.0
sudo pear install phpunit/PHPUnit-3.5.15

Now you should be good to go!

Jelly in Austin

Some of you may remember back in good ol’ 2007, a meetup in Austin I used to organize called Jelly. We met at coffee shops and coworked together for the whole day, once or twice per week. Jelly is a product of Amit’s mind, and it was a combination of my desire for a coworking space, a lack of money, and Amit’s genius free Jelly coworking meetups, that inspired me to start Jelly in Austin. These meetups later broke off and evolved into our city’s first coworking space Conjunctured, which uncovered a need, that has since set in motion many other coworking spaces in Austin. So, if you enjoy coworking in our fair city, you owe Amit a bit of thanks.

Amit posted about his diagnosis on his blog. He also posted several ways that we can help. I’ve reposted them below as a quote from his blog:

I have a couple more months of chemo to go, then the next step is a bone marrow transplant. As Jay and Tony describe below, minorities are severely underrepresented in the bone marrow pool, and I need help.

A few ways to help:

1. If you’re South Asian, get a free test by mail. You rub your cheeks with a cotton swab and mail it back. It’s easy.
2. If you’re in NYC, you can go to this event my friends are putting on.
3. If you know any South Asians(India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives, or Sri Lanka), please point ‘em to the links above.

*NEW* Organize a donor drive near you (the most helpful thing you could possibly do!) email 100kcheeks@gmail.com. They’ll send you kits, flyers, tell you what to say, and make the whole process easy cheesy.

Please help however you can. I mean come on, just look at this guy. How can you not love him and want to help?

Out of curiosity, I downloaded the app that uncovers this data, and sure enough, you can see nearly everywhere I’ve been for the last year or so.

The funny thing about this is I’m the type of person who would probably opt-in to a program that tracked my travels. I like being able to visualize the map above. However, the fact that Apple did this in secret, without my permission, clearly crosses into unethical behavior, whatever their intentions were/are.

The moral of this story is Steve Jobs is watching you!

There is something you can do though! You can join (or donate to) the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation). The EFF is the leading civil liberties group defending your rights in the information age.

Apple’s response should be pretty interesting.

My Fancy Wallet

For about 4 years now I’ve been rocking the Hipster PDA.  I carry a stack of blank 3 by 5 index cards in my wallet (see the pic to the right on exactly how that works) and use them for to-do lists and discardable notes. I also cary a full-size hardback Moleskine for notes I intend to keep, though not necessarily for journaling. I typically only write jornal entries when I need to dig myself out of a rut. But I digress.

Benjamin Franklin's Daily Schedule

I recently started listening to Benjamin Franklin‘s autobiography. I admire Franklin and I’d like to imitate certain aspects of his character. One thing that really struck me was his outline for a perfect daily routine. He mentioned that he himself was terrible at sticking to the routine as he must “mix with the world” and ”often receive people of business at their own hours”, but one idea I really liked was the first thing he had on the schedule: ask yourself “what good shall I do this day?”

This is basically the creation of a to-do list for the day. Big deal. I’ve been writing to-do lists constantly for 4 years. But what I really liked about this notion was the phrasing and the ritual. I typically write a to-do list only when I feel overwhelmed, to help add order to my life. But Franklin’s outlook is not “make a to-do list when you feel overwhelmed” it is, every day consider what good you will do. In addition he sugests every night evaluate the good you’ve done that day.

Small Moleskine Journal

So, in an effort to be more like one of my role models, I’m moving my to-do list from index cards, that I quickly discard, to a more permanent small paperback Moleskine, that I’ll cary in my pocket. By keeping my daily to-dos together in a book, I’ll be able to flip back on previous days to find items I’ve forgotten about or neglected. And, at the beginning of everyday, instead of writing “to-do,” I will write “what good shall I do this day?” I hope that by writing this it will put me in the frame of mind to not only consider my daily minutiae, but also what I can do that is truly good.

I prefer to donate to classes in Austin, but I also like to search for projects that are only a few bucks from completion and finish them. To aid my effort in finding projects that are near completion I created a Twitter account, called @AlmostCompleted, that tweets when it finds a project that needs less than $20. I have Twitter send these tweet to my phone via SMS so I know about it immediately. Why? Just for fun. I can’t afford to complete every project that needs less than $20, but you have to be fast if you find a project near completion that you want to donate to.

Creating this Twitter account was very simple. I’ll detail the steps here so you can create an account with your own search criteria. For example, you could create an account that only tweets project in your state that need less than $20. Here’s how it’s done.

1. Create a new Twitter account.
2. Go to the DonorsChoose.org projects listing page and use the filters on the right hand sidebar to find the projects you’d like to tweet about.
3. Once you’ve got your search criteria figured out, look at bottom of the project listings. On the left hand side you’ll see a drop down menu that says “Add to your website or feedreader.” Click on that drop down menu and select “RSS 2.0.”
4. A new tab will open up with an RSS feed of projects that meet your search criteria. Copy the URL of this RSS feed found in your browser’s address bar.
5. Next you must create a FeedBurner.com account.
6. After you have a FeedBurner account, login and where it says “Burn a feed right this instant. Type your blog or feed address here:” put your RSS feed you copied in step 4.
7. Next, in FeedBurner, go to the “Publicize” tab and select “Socialize” found in the left hand column.
8. In the “Socialize” section you can connect the Twitter account you created in step 1. In the options, for “Post content,” you’ll probably want to select “Title and Body,” and you’ll definitely want to make sure you checkmark “Include link.” Other than that, you’ll can play with the other options however you’d like.
9. Finally click the “Save” button in the bottom left hand of “Socialize” section.
10. That’s it! You’re Twitter account should Tweet every 30 minutes or so if there are new projects that meet your search criteria on DonorsChoose.org.

In FeedBurner you might also want to turn activate “PingShot.” I understand that should make your Tweets update faster, but I’m not sure how well it actually works. To activate “PingShot” under the “Publicize” tab, select “PingShot” found in the left hand column, then click “Activate.” That’s it! Enjoy!

Please give @AlmostCompleted a shout out on the Twitter!

Not only is remembering that you’re gonna’ die (and possibly soon) a good productivity tip, it’s also great for work life balance. When you think about the fact that you will die, you suddenly have a good sense of priority. Naturally family and friends come to mind first, but work is important too if you love what you do. For example, I’m a programmer and entrepreneur. I make stuff. How does this tip help me? I release my products early and often. Why? Because I might die tomorrow.

Thinking about death can be dark, and if you think about it too much you’ll make yourself depressed, or possibly find yourself in a religious frenzy. But by remembering your mortality, you’ll have the motivation to really “get things done,” the things that are most important to you.

To quote William Shatner, “Live life like you’re gonna’ die, because you’re gonna’.”

Strategic goals should not be confused with tactical goals. Tactical goals are things like “climb a mountain” whereas a strategic goal might be “experience nature to the fullest.” The tactic and act of climbing a mountain helps you achieve your broader strategic goal of experiencing nature to the fullest.

Everyones life goals will be different because we all have different world views, but here are some examples of broad strategic goals to get you thinking.

• Feed the world’s hungry
• Become exceedingly wealthy
• Affect peoples lives with art
• Entertain people
• Help people
• Rule the world
• Be happy

You can probably think of much better examples than me, but you get the point.

Take the time to write down your life’s strategic goals, and reflect often on how you are achieving them. It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day grind and to-do lists and forget what you’re really trying to achieve.

In my attempt to measure my progress towards my strategic life goals, I’ve created a dashboard that attempts to mimic the behavior of unlocking achievements and leveling up in a video game. It’s certainly a work in progress, but you’re welcome to check it out on my Strategic Life Goals page.

What are your goals? How do you measure your success in achieving them?

Here is a list of seven famous women programmers and their pictures to illustrate their style of fashion.

Ada Lovelace

Ada Lovelace

The only child of Lord Byron, Ada Lovelace was born in London in 1815. She wrote an algorithm to compute Bernoulli numbers using Charles Babbage‘s mechanical computer, the analytical engine. This makes her the world’s first computer programmer. The programming language Ada is named after her.

Adele Goldberg

Adele Goldberg wrote several books on Smalltalk-80. In the 70′s Adele worked on the Xerox Alto, the first computers to have a GUI and use a desktop metaphor.

Steve Jobs requested to see a demo of the Xerox Alto and Adele refused to show him. Her superiors at Xerox ordered her to show Jobs a demo, and naturally Apple copied all of their best ideas.

Erna Hoover

Erna invented the computerized telephone traffic switching system at Bell Labs in the 70s. It was one of the first software patents ever.

Mary Lou Jepsen

Mary was the founding CTO of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. She invented the laptop’s sunlight-readable display technology and co-invented its ultra-low power management system.

She left OLPC in 2008 to found her for profit company Pixel Qi which focuses on display technologies.

Mary is in the 2008 “TIME 100.”

Shafi Goldwasser

Shafi is a professor at MIT and the Weizmann Institute of Science where she researches computational complexity theory, cryptography and computational number theory. She’s won two prestigeous Gödel Prize awards on her work in theoretical computer science. I can’t even begin to understand what this means in English, but it sounds impressive doesn’t it? :p

Jeri Ellsworth

Jeri is a self taught chip designer and hacker extraordinaire. Remember Christmas 2004 when all the shopping malls had those joysticks that plugged directly into your TV loaded with tons of Commodore 64 games? You can thank Jeri for that. The C64 Direct-to-TV is her creation.

Grace Hopper

I saved my favorite for last.

Rear Admiral Grace Hopper (nicknamed “Amazing Grace”) served in the United States Navy for over 40 years and was awarded the highest non-combat award possible when she retired. With a masters in mathematics and physics from Yale university, Grace developed the first compiler, and conceptualized machine-independent programming languages, ala COBOL. Grace is sometimes called “the mother of COBOL.”

You’ve probably heard the old story of how a moth got caught in one of those old massive computers, causing it to crash. Grace remembers that story, she was there! She’s the one that popularized the phrase “debugging.”

Grace Hopper

Grace Hooper is also responsible for one of my most frequently used quotes, “It’s easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.”

And if you’re still not impressed, the US Navy named the destroyer ship USS Hopper (DDG-70) after her.

The majority of Grace’s retirement was spent speaking and lecturing about technology at computer events, where she always wore her full military dress.

Grace is kind of my hero.

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function transport($person, $newLocation)
{
   return new Person($person->attributes, $person->experiences, $newLocation);
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