Sun Dec 30 15:56:15 PST 2001

So we attended Community of Christ Church. Improvement over last week. Better worship time (and more of it), not too bad of a ‘New Years’ message, and overall it felt a lot better for mix and things like that. They are a growing church, and are currently starting to look into buying property (currently they are meeting in a fairly nice warehouse). They were planted by Lutherans, but their second pastor is with the Friends, and they are billing themselves as a "community church". Need to be careful, as they don’t appear to have a established discipline and I’m certainly not very comfortable with some of the Lutheran’s recent theological decisions.

There are some potential downsides. The main pastor’s Lutheran background seemed to show through more than I was initially comfortable with. It wasn’t anything he said exactly, but some details like calling Paul "Saint Paul". And he used a unusual translation "The Message" which I find slightly annoying, since it’s a translation that tries to translate into vernacular. I really prefer an accurate translation even if I have to go look up a word or two every now and then. But I can also see the other side of the coin, where it’s beneficial to some people and some new believers to have a translation that’s easier to read. The other mildly concerning thing is that they didn’t seem to have solid and active midweek Bible studies going, but that may just be because we are still in the holidays.

We’ll check out another church or two in the area and see if we can find something a bit more to our liking. On the plus side, it’s been a real encouragement to see lots of people at these churches worshiping God and seeking his will.

Fri Dec 28 08:34:07 PST 2001

And then I remembered jpilot. And after installing it, the basic apps were there, and they were good. And then I remembered the conduits. And I built and installed the mail conduit, and it was good. Then I messed around and built the syncmal conduit, and installed AvantGo, and even remembered my old name and password for AvantGo, and it synced and worked. Then I set up some new channels, and ran out of memory on my pilot. So I deleted some less useful apps, synced again and now I have all kinds of good things on my pilot (well over half a meg).

I’m much happier with my pilot again. Now I need to see if he left in the database access programs so I can spread my data out even further :-)

Tue Dec 25 23:09:22 PST 2001

Yea! Christmas. Had a nice time with the parents and got some nifty stuff. New shaver, dremel rotary saw, and other less flashy, but not less usefull stuff :-)

I tried out the rotary saw, and while it might be nice for cutting drywall and other thin materials, it sucks for cutting 3/4in plywood, and it tops out at about 1 1/4in material. So I’ll take it back to Home Depot, apoligze profusely and trade it in for the nice saber saw and some killer carbide blades. It will work a lot better for plywood and medium weight material that needs a bit more precision than I can get with the big circular saw.

We then hung out and watched lots of DVDs: ‘O Brother Where Art Thou’, ‘Veggie Tales: Top 10 Silly Song Countdown’, ‘Labrinth’ and ‘The Hidden Fortress’. And we even snuck in a couple of games and a lot of food. Had the gumbo which was good, but I think I really miss having the sausage in it for extra flavor. Also, lots of cookies. Mom and Phebe cooked a lot of cookies this year, so we’ve got a lot of them left over. We’ll have to freeze many of them to prevent them from going stale. Anyway, nice Christmas, lots of fun presents given and gotten by all.

So in other news, I’m seriously considering buying a copy of Snapstream’s PVS software it’s a little spendy, but ATI’s included software "Guide Plus+" system isn’t well supported. For some weird reason, it takes hours (literally!) to update the weekly schedule. It also seems to have some recording/playback issues as well. While the Snapstream product currently lacks some of the nifty features (like searching for show names) and can’t seem to record at as high of bandwidths as the ATI product, it seems to be a bit more useable, and that’s what the game is about.

I am a bit disappointed that there only appears to be a single product out on the market to do PVR on a PC. Seems unusual, but hopefully the Snapstream stuff is really decent and they will fix the current issues that the product has.

Sun Dec 23 18:35:41 PST 2001

Well, attended a different church this week. It was an OK service, but it didn’t really feel quite right, a little on the light side. The worship was OK, but not really great. Very limited number of songs and the sermon seemed pretty short too. Part of that may just be that it was the Sunday before Christmas, but they started at 11:00, and I suspect that their normal finish time is pretty close to noon. A hour service just is a bit on the short side for me most Sundays. It really seemed like they were trying to cram stuff in to make the service just an hour. Anyway, we’ll keep looking around I think.

Got the MySQL database up and running on pooh. We picked up a copy of "PHP and MySQL web development" at Borders on Friday and it’s turning out to be a really nice book. I’ve read through the first couple of chapters and gotten a reasonable intro to PHP (more on that later) and I borrowed the back section to the the DB up and running. Mostly I just needed the syntax of the instrucitons. I’ve set up MySQL databases once or twice before.

Anyway, PHP is really pretty ugly. It looks like they took just about every syntax possible and instead of doing "pick and choose" they did "add it all" to an even larger degree than Perl did. On the plus side, it’s easy to write dense code… Anyway, we’ll hack together a small lib of functions and then drive the bulk of the content out of the database through PHP to keep things fairly simple and minimize data maintance costs.

Had chicken for lunch. Part one of making the gumbo. Right now the chicken carcases are cooking away with the shrimp shells and lots of other stuff to make the stock for the gumbo. We’ll have the gumbo on Christmas, but we needed to make the stock in advance since it takes several hours to simmer, and it’s adviseable to chill the stock so it’s easy to remove the fat from the top. This is one of those dishes that’s somewhat gross to make, but all the nasty stuff gets removed in the process (fat, chicken bones, etc) so it’s no big deal to eat when you get to the end.

Thu Dec 20 23:10:49 PST 2001

With a little typing it sure is easy to create PHP driven content. Just as easy to make a pretty big mess as well. I’m going to have to sit down and make some plans so the thing doesn’t snowball on me into a huge mess. It’s very clear that PHP is similar to perl. It has the same software maintance issues and "dark side of the force" that perl does:

EXTERIOR: DAGOBAH–DAY

With Yoda strapped to his back, Luke climbs up one of the
many thick vines that grow in the swamp until he reaches the
Dagobah statistics lab. Panting heavily, he continues his
exercises–grepping, installing new packages, logging in as
root, and writing replacements for two-year-old shell scripts
in Python.

YODA: Code! Yes. A programmer’s strength flows from code maintainability.

But beware of Perl. Terse syntax… more than one way to do it…
default variables. The dark side of code maintainability are they.
Easily they flow, quick to join you when code you write. If once you
start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny,
consume you it will.

LUKE: Is Perl better than Python?

YODA: No… no… no. Quicker, easier, more seductive.

LUKE: But how will I know why Python is better than Perl?

YODA: You will know. When your code you try to read six months from now.

I’ve always loved that because it’s so true. Perl is easier and quicker to code, but it truly suffers from maintance problems. I’ve had to look at my perl code over years, and it always seems to suffer the readiblity problems. Recently I’ve been using Python at work, and it is indeed better for producing code that can be read by at least the same person later on. It’s also a lot better for writing big programs.

Anyway, I’ve also been hacking at DC linux again, and a couple of CDRs later I’m getting pretty close. I’ve got a working kernel booting with the distro code, but init isn’t running correctly. I think it’s because the GDROM isn’t getting mounted correctly and so all I have is what’s on the initrd ramdisk image. So after hacking up the ramdisk image, I might have it working. The downside is that I’m going through my spindle of CDRs a bit fast :-P

Well, I though I’ve figured out what the problem is. The kernel wasn’t being passed any arguments on what to run once it launched. I though for a while that it was a problem with incorrectly mounting the ramdisk or the gdrom or something like that. But it appears that the distro with the kernel that I can compile was somehow passing arguments to his kernel to tell it what to run or something. But my attempts to compile the kernel with particular options just isn’t working out at all.

If I can just get this thing up and running with PPP, then I won’t have to be constantly jumping through all these hoops to compile a kernel, build ramdisks and go though the fun of building a DC-bootable disk which is a bit of a pain, but I’m getting used to it. I’m going to need to buy a few more CDRs real soon now, I’m down to 4 or 5…

Wed Dec 19 21:35:31 PST 2001

Well, RedHat 7.2 is a pretty nice distribution. Turns out that they did install PHP by default. My brother and I have been debating on and off what we want to run for a web server in terms of scripting languages and databases and content managment.

A while back I took a pretty serious look at Zope (zope.org) but because we are both experienced web programmers, it just didn’t feel quite right, and I was nervous about putting everything into a custom database since I’ve lived through enough changes to realize that you need a way out of whatever format you currently have to whatever the next format is, and with Zope it seemed like you would be more locked into it than with other solutions.

Since our host is a Linux box, ISS/VB was right out (would have been out anyway due to security and functional issues). I was thinking of maybe doing a pure XML/XSLT solution, but that doesn’t cover everything in terms of scripting. I thought of using eperl or some other form of perl based scripting combined with MySQL, but then it would be custom and it would be hard to port the site to a webhosting service later.

So finally I bothered to look into PHP. It’s standardized, common and fairly easy to use with a lot of functionality. It’s also uglier than perl in terms of syntax, but I’m not really going for readiblity with this code anyway. So PHP/MySQL/XML is the way to go for now, so I started with some their hello.php, and then moved on to generate an index for my plan files that I started a while back.

Actually, it turned out to be pretty easy. After about 20 minutes of tinkering I got it working. It reads the directory, filters the filenames with a regular expression and prints out a link to each one of them. All in all, rather straightforward and easy. So now, I’ve got to get info from Phebe on how she wants the site organized and branding and overall layout.

We might actually get quite a ways on it since the weather is cold wet and windy so working on stuff like shelves and workbenches is out since we need to do all the cutting and sanding outside since Phebe is using the garage for lots of clay stuff and the sawdust probably wouldn’t be the best thing to have spread all over the place.

Wed Dec 19 22:45:07 PST 2001

Well, I got a DC kernel compiling and burnt onto a CD such that it boots, but it didn’t have an initrc file, so it didn’t start any consoles. I’ll need to make some mods to merge the recompiled kernel and the new boot process with the rest of a working DC distribution. But sleep is a tad bit more important right now.

Tue Dec 18 23:28:26 PST 2001

So I like small toys. The kind of junk that people put on or around their monitors. Stuff like that. A couple of days ago, I got my package of stikfas (www.stikfas.com) from Singapore. They are a very new item, and so while they were a bit spendy with S&H, it’s worth it to me because they are pretty unique. Basically, they are little 3 inch (1:18 for those keeping track at home) action figures. The cool thing is that they are ultra-generic and are highly posable. The plastic is actually black instead of grey like I originally thought.

After about 5-10 minutes of breaking all the bits out (they come packaged like a kit model) I had my little guy put together and was playing around with him. While they are highly poseable, he was pretty stiff at first and it took a while before I got the hang of posing him more easily. A little bit of cleanup work with a knife while watching some TV (and the knife) and the majority of the little plastic nubs left from freeing him from the plastic rails were removed.

There are some slightly unusual things though. There are four torsos in the kit, but no additional body parts other than extra thighs (needed for the optional plug in ammo pockets). And there is a ladder and a riot shield and like 10 guns. While the wide variety in arsenal is nice, it would have been nicer to get two guys out of an entire pack instead of one guy and a lot of extra ‘accessories’. Still, he’s fun and looks pretty nifty on top of my monitor. Maybe I’ll take him into work and let him hang out in my office plants.

Tue Dec 11 00:22:44 PST 2001

I really should get to bed earlier, but here are the cheat codes that I found online for re-volt:

Set the following to your name:

cartoon: all cars traction: all tracks yoy: weapon cycle press l/r to cycle yuefo : unlock ufo (whatever that is) flyboy: hi-fi mode maggot: mini mode (all cars small) goaty: allows you to edit progress tables chancer: switch cars

Fun stuff :-)

Tue Dec 11 23:22:44 PST 2001

Finally got home. The set for the Christmas play looks much better now that we have trim and the door painted and lots of the misc stuff done. Rehersal also went fairly well considering that I had to fill in for one of our actors who couldn’t make it. He’ll be there tommorow, and hopefully we can work out the last of the minor details and polish up the timing. The play is actually coming along quite well in comparison to previous years. The set and props are in decent shape, the costumes are nearly finished and the actors have their lines mostly down except for a few minor rough points.

Mon Dec 10 22:46:42 PST 2001

Well, it’s nice to be on vacation this week (more or less, I logged in to check mail and ended up doing a couple hours work). Went over to the church and got the door and area between the flats painted with primer. The paint isn’t an exact match, but hopefully once it is dry and the stage lights are used it won’t look too bad. A trip over to home depot yielded a nice looking wallpaper strip for the set, the only annoying thing was that it comes in lengths of 15ft, and I need 34ft.

On the plus side, re-volt came in the mail. It’s a really great dreamcast game where you race around little RC cars as if they were real cars through really great courses and even have some fun weapons. The only downside is that they lock out a lot of the levels and cars until you’ve won a bunch of races. I’m going to try and find some cheat codes to unlock the levels.

Sun Dec 9 22:43:50 PST 2001

Well, spent the afternoon over at the church setting up for the Christmas play. We got the set structure built: walls, doors, etc. Actually, we are doing really good. I’ve got the week basically off from work, so I’ve got plenty of time to do touchup painting and adding trim and other stuff like that. Tommorow I’ll take my white primer over and paint the door and over the seams to try and hide all the staples and other imperfections. The door will be fairly tricky as it’s very dark and we need to change it to be a much lighter yellow color.

I’ll need to drop by Home Depot on the way over and get some wallpaper trim to go around the top and hopefully some trim for the baseboards and around about 3 feet up on the wall to break up the wall a little visually. I’ll also pick up Mom and have lunch with her and take her into work since her minivan has been having issues and dad’s working on it right now. The van is pretty old, so it’s not suprising that it’s having some problems, but it is a bit inconvient for her.

Also, I printed out a few more of the Lisa Loeb tabs from one of the fan websites and have been trying to play them. I’ve actually had a lot of luck with ‘Falling in Love’ and a bit with ‘Snow Day’. It’s nice to be able to play something that actually resembles the original song.