Thu Feb 6 20:38:26 PST 2003

I’ve been looking into a number of blogger, groupware, Content Managment Systems packages for possible use both at home and potentially for use on the church’s website. I recently purchased a copy of ORA’s Slash book and have read about a quarter of it to try and get a feel for how Slash works and how it can be extended and such.

The one thing that really impressed me was that the developers have a very clear and complete understanding of both their workflow and dataflow. The tools (which they have gone through several revs of) then implement and support those flows in a very clean and clear manner. It’s a great example of software engineering where the problem was well understood, and then the solution was implemented to support that problem, making common activities simple and quick, and uncommon activities are proportionally more difficult.

Unfortunately, for my needs, I’m really like the ‘look and feel’ of the blogger solutions like Moveable Type. But in reality, the key to solving the problem is clearly defining the workflow and that dataflow. And I’m fairly certain that a ‘blog’ or ‘story’ metaphore is not the correct solution for all of the church’s data, although the slash workflow and framework still retains a lot of appeal. Slash is extendable, but at some substantial cost because that’s not a common activity :-)

Fri, 24 Jan 2003 21:27:32

OK, I thought this answer that I got was particularly good :-)

The Internet Oracle has pondered your question deeply. Your question was:

< Oracle most romantic, why are roses red?

And in response, thus spake the Oracle:

} Because if roses were transparent, then the reason men } give them to women wouldn’t be the only thing that was. } } You owe the Oracle an opaque diamond.

Fri Apr 18 09:02:30 PDT 2003

A couple of things. Last weekend we picked up about 20 pounds of buffalo meat from Aleta and Jon. Most of it is ground meat to use in burgers, and there are a few steaks and ribs too. I wanted to jot down Aleta’s mixture for buffalo burgers since buffalo meat is incredibly lean, it needs a little help to make good burgers, and they turn out incredibly good:

2 pounds ground lean buffalo 2 small eggs 2 tablespoons french dressing (other types work also) 1 teaspoon garlic powder some lemon pepper.

I also have been working some with importing even more photos into the photo gallery. I scanned in some of Laurie’s stuff and I’m trying to import all my old digital photos. I first tried doing it all in one big chunk, but that turned out to be a very bad idea ™ as it corrupted the database. I ended up having to quickly hack the .dat files back into shape and I’m now trying smaller chunks. I’ll hide the albums and slowly organize them into events and other sections.

I also tried out freevo again after realizing that the MythTV packages for RH8 were just too much of a pain to install and I’d have to recompile the whole thing again anyway. I actually got the music part working fine and the photos mostly work with the gallery directories, but all the thumbnail and sized photos show up as well, which is mildly annoying, but it shouldn’t be too hard to add a minor patch to fix that. The annoying thing that I didn’t realize until now is that it appears that my Hauppage TV tuner card did not get the /dev device entries created for it, or the modules aren’t being loaded correctly under RH8! It might be possible that my playing around with the webcam interfered with the loading of the drivers. I’m planning on rebooting soon anyway, that might clear it up, but I suspect that I’m going to have to do soem more serious work to get the tuner back up and working correctly again :-(

Sun Apr 14 22:47:56 PDT 2002

It’s been a pretty packed past few days. On Thursday I met with Eric (music & stuff director at SHCC) and we talked for a bit. He doesn’t want non-members on the music team, viewing it as a commitment issue. Which is understandable. and I can certainly understand his point. Honestly, I’m not real sure that I want to get involved with the primary Sunday morning worship. I would need to significantly improve my playing and my overall music comprehension. Which wouldn’t be a bad thing, but I’m not sure that I’m willing to commit to that kind of a learning curve. I should probably get down to 5-Star Guitars and start taking some lessions, regardless of what else I do, since I do want to do more things musically, and with the nifty little 4-track recorder I got earlier in the week.

Friday and most of Saturday we were Lan gaming. NFS 5 , Army Men RTS, Serious Sam the Second Encouter, Unreal Tournament CTF. We tried the latest Dune since it is a better RTS than Army Men, but it was radically unstable. We also played a little NFS 3, but at this point Ryan, Jason and I know the maps and cars a little too well so we were stomping poor Ed. Brian made if for Friday, but not Saturday, and Ed and Dad joined us for both days, but Dad left a little early on Saturday. Jason, Ryan, Ed and I finally figured out that to get a 4 on 4 game of Army Men competitive for us, we had to build no offensive units. So we took over the map by building guard towers and pillboxes! It was certainly the most interesting challenge of the night. The other weird thing is that in NFS 5, damage and handling problems are only applied to the car hitting another car, not to the car being hit. Which we were a bit bummed out by, because we wanted to do a ‘stop the other car from finishing’ destructive race. Maybe we just need to find the right settings…

Phebe’s parents were in town, so she ended up spending most of the weekend with them. They brought Lydia’s piano, which is now in the front room. Which is really starting to collect musical instruments and gear at a somewhat alarming rate. Two guitars, a bass, cello, piano, hand-drums, a 4-track recorder and a lots of music papers. We do need to get some shelves or something for all the little bits and papers, and a microphone or two for the recording deck. We did play one board game all together: Captain Jack’s Imaginary Polar Expedition. It’s an interesting cross between several other Cheepass games. It has a few nifty aspects and seems like it will scale fairly well. But it doesn’t really feel like a challenging game to me for some reason.

On Saturday morning I went over to the church and met with James to practice for Tuesday night Bible study. We picked out some songs and went through them. It should go OK, but the last song is going to be a little hard to play quietly like James wants during the prayer time. I mentioned to him the membership thing and he said that I could just do it on ‘any Sunday’ or he needed to put together a new membership class sometime in the near future anyway, so I could just join in with that. The latter option appeals more to me, but that may just be because I don’t like standing out too much. Overall, I’m OK with SHCC, but I do have some nagging issues here and there, so maybe the membership class will force me to drag those out into the open and deal with them.

Sunday service was long but really good. Baby dedication, good music and some testimonies from people who went on the mission trip to Mexico a few weeks ago. People seemd really impressed by people who by our standards are extremely poor being willing to help others and really be happy despite their harsh situation. I keep thinking about what can be done to really help resolve the issues of poverty in places like that. Fundamentally, while delivering food and other supplies does help them short-term, it seems like there needs to be some foundational or infrastructure changes that need to take place to make a permant change in the society. And considering that there are groups of people here that have similar problems, they might hae the same fundamental problems that could be addressed in similar ways.

So after service, most of the usual crew were heading out to visit the tulip farms south of here, but since we had scheduled our AD&D session for 2:30, that wasn’t going to work out for me. So I went home, and then went out plant shopping with Phebe, who wanted to pick up some plants for the side yard that she and her Mom had cleared out on Saturday. She really likes shopping for plants. I wasn’t really getting into it, but I did find some intersting Bonasi plants, and one of the tags even had a website, www.cascadebonsai.com on it. They are out in Sweet Home, and I’ll probably scope out their website more later. It might be good to take a workshop or short class on starting bonsai instead of guessing at the basics.

The D&D session was a bit long, and we ended up fighing our way through a ton of stuff, but we found some nifty stuff along the way (loot!) and have enough experience to level up, but it takes a week of gametime to actually level up, and we are on a ‘rescue & recovery’ mission, so we are trying to keep the gametime to a minimum, but we seem to keep going back to town every ‘day’ to recover and get new spells. I practiced my guitar after that. Shadow was being a bit of a brat, as he saw a cat out on the porch and was pawing at the window to try and get out. Overall he was pretty cranky anyway, what with lots of people being around for most of the weekend.

Wed Apr 10 17:54:07 PDT 2002

It’s been a fairly busy week. Sunday evening I went with a group to the Steven Curtis Chapman concert and it was really good. Lots of great music, and he also had one of the missionaries who was the son of a group who were killed by a tribe of south american natives and his aunt and he went back and lead them to becoming Christians. Also, one of the tribesman who had killed his father was there too, and they had a really great testmony about how these people who were basically living as hunter-gatherers came to follow God and are actually now reaching out to other native groups in the area.

The concert was also really visually stunning. Whoever is doing their lighting has a great sense of color, depth, texture and timing. Very impressive, and really helped contribute to the performance. They had large flat objects hung in the background at slightly different depths that were painted blue and yellow in a marbled texture so that they could shine different colored lights on different sets and get really fabulous effects. Also, they kept the singers in generally white light so that the colors on them weren’t all washed to one color, and that was nice.

Monday I worked a bit late and then mowed the lawn when I got home. It didn’t quite need it, but the weather was going to be bad for the rest of the week, so it was basically the last time I could do it for a considerable length of time. I then spent the rest of the evening practicing guitar with Jason (he played base of course). Later that evening I went to send James mail about which songs to play on Tuesday, and didn’t have an open VNC session on pooh, and I’ve disabled telnet connections for security reasons, so I went looking for a quick-n’-dirty SSH client for windows. Turns out that it’s a lot harder than it looked. I spent half an hour looking around without a lot of luck (downloaded two products that failed to install correctly or work). So I gave up a little after midnight and walked downstairs and started the VNC session on the console.

Tuesday night Bible study went OK. Turns out that they know a slightly different arrangement to ‘We Will Dance’ which turned into a big mess. Anyway, I’ll hopefully get to practice some on Tuesday with James and we’ll get it figured out so it won’t be so incredibly clumsy. Actually was a pretty small group this week which is kinda a bummer. Also found that the Xerox printer attached to pooh isn’t working. I’m not sure what went wrong. It’s still pingable, but it doesn’t seem to be accepting print jobs. It could be that some of the recent RH patches to the print drivers confused it, or that my pulling the mainboard out of the printer invoked some kind of problem. I’m not real sure what to do about it at this point. I may try using the parallel port to see if that helps the situation out some. But that means I’ll need to find a parallel port cable, since I don’t know if I’ve still got one.

Mon Apr 8 23:54:05 PDT 2002

Much to talk about but little time to do so…

First up, music plans for Bible Study for the next two weeks:

Almighty Shout to the North We Will Dance Oh lord you’re beautiful Holy, holy, holy Lord Create in me

Other set…

Ah, Lord God Shout To The North Behold The Lamb of God Sanctuary Create in me a clean heart Strength of my life

Which I’ve actually swiped from earlier. Although I’m not sure we should be doing Shout to the North two weeks in a row.

Sun Mar 24 00:35:36 PST 2002

A fairly quiet, but fun weekend do far. On Friday evening we contintued the Dungons and Dragons (D&D) game we started last week and overall it’s going pretty well. We ended up in a fairly large battle most of the night before withdrawing all the way back to town. We lost our "guide", but he wasn’t much help really. Jason thinks that has an idea about what is going on. He thinks that the goblin village we nearly invaded is there to guard a tower we saw in the room that likely leads down to the "outcast" who he think guards the tree with the nifty apples and is also the Druid with a large frog who pissed off the villagers. It seems pretty plausable to me, but our ability to wage successful combat against so many adversaries is somewhat limited, which might make gaining access to the tower difficult.

Also saw Blade II Saturday afternoon. It’s an OK movie, but e directing and the writing left somethin to be desired. It falls sort of the original in a lot of ways, but wasn’t too bad. Basically, the story and the director were key elements of Blade, and without them the style and smoothness of the first movie are gone.

I need to make a decision about the couches soon. Phebe has people coming to clean the downstairs carpets, and they can also do the couches when they are here, but at $12 a linear foot, and 12-13 feet of couches, that’s around $150 to clean them and it’s unclear if they will last long enough to justify the cost of cleaning them. On the other hand they are over 15 years old and as far as I know have never been cleaned, so cleaning them might be a good thing to do on principle alone. Even if I get new couches fo rthe living room we would likely hand the old couches off to somebody, and it would be really nice if we cleaned them up a little first…

Sun Mar 24 22:57:02 PST 2002

Fun day. Church was a little odd since many people were off on a mission trip to Mexico. Speaker was from the church planting organization. Found out that "Our Place" is one of their plants, which explains why it hit the ground running and with such a good PR organization. Had lunch (well technically breakfast) with Caroline and Laurie after church which was nice and they invited me to a Oscars Award party later in the evening at Dana’s place. I dropped by home and the Jason, Phebe and I went down to Home Depot. I got the rotary saw that Mom got me for Christmas finally returned and picked up a rake to try and clean some of the dead junk in the lawn out with. Won’t happen untill much later this week since I need at least decent weather and Monday I’ll be busy moving furnature to for the Tuesday carpet cleaning and there’s Bible study on Tuesday evening, plus putting everything back together sometime Wednesday or so.

Anyway, the Oscars party at Dana’s was fun. Lots of people I didn’t know there, but it wasn’t a big deal. Didn’t really expect ‘A Beautiful Mind’ to do quite as well as it did, and while ‘Lord of the Rings’ didn’t do too bad in terms of number of Oscars, it missed some big ones, but it could be that they are waiting for all three to be released so they don’t jinx the other two and also don’t end up giving them Oscars multiple years in a row for different movies that are all done by the same group, and basically the same project, just released in three parts.

Wed Mar 20 07:13:16 PST 2002

Bible study went pretty well last night. I got a call from Pastor James late yesterday saying that he wasn’t going to make it because he had too much other stuff going on (he’s leading a mission trip to Mexico later this week) so I would have to lead the music without him for the next two weeks. Not a big deal, just not entirely expected. So last night we ditched the list of songs that I had prepared and just did requests, mostly ones that we hadn’t done before there, so I was a little rough, but not too bad.

Also yesterday we got a postcard in the mail from AT&T Broadband claiming that they were actually now ready to sell us "lightning fast" internet service after a year and a half of snubbing us. On one hand I’m tempted to just ignore it because they weren’t willing to work with us before, and their acceptable use policy had some issues with both hosting servers and VPN, both of which we do on a regular basis. But on the other hand the increased bandwidth for what is probably a substantially reduced price would be pretty nice. I’m considering if we could actually get both and effectively use two at once.

In theory it’s possible to use a pair of WAN lines, and just route traffic based on where it’s going. We could route incoming web and mail traffic to the IDSL, and run the VPN connections (.intel.com) over that and then let general surfing/game traffic run over the cablemodem. On the downside, it wouldn’t significantly improve our 2-person VPN solution any, which is one of our weak points, but it would improve performance when we had more than 2 people online or doing non-VPN activities.

Of course doing a dual-link network would involve somehow cramming yet another ethernet card in pooh, or putting both the outbound links on the same server port, but in theory that could work as long as both of them don’t confuse pooh too much about his own identity in terms of DNS and those other issues. Maybe I should look into those 4-port network cards again.

There’s one available from D-Link, a DFE-570TX, but there’s not a lot of information about using it with linux. One user claims that he can only get it to run in 100MBit mode if he uses the de4x5 driver explicitly. which might be an option, but some of my network devices that I’d want to hang off of it are 10MBit interfaces, like the printer and I think the 802.11b WAP is a well.

And I also found this rather disturbing conversation between Matthew Callaway and Jeremy Jackson on the linux-kernel list:

<> This is a reproducible oops, and my guess is that it’s related to <> the tulip driver included in the 2.2.18 source tree. We’re using <> a D-Link 4 port NIC, and it appears that it doesn’t work well with <> IPV6 interfaces. < <I have had problems with this NIC as well… Redhat’s installer/kudzu <tries to use de4x5 (sp?) module … bad news. But it works fine using <old_tulip module with only IPv4. Same with 2.2 series and 2.4 series <kernels. FYI

But maybe this message in early 2001 from Avi Green is cause for hope:

<I’m using 2.4 with DFE-570TX cards in a bunch of routers and other <machines and I’ve never had any problems with the cards. I use the tulip <driver in 2.4 in some machines (not routers) and in the routers I use an <optimized version <(ftp://robur.slu.se/pub/Linux/net-development/tulip-ss010111.tar.gz is the <latest stable version)

It might just work, although I’d like to try it out in a spare machine for a while before risking pooh’s stability.

Wed Mar 20 23:20:01 PST 2002

Fun stuff, the fans from www.pcmods.com showed up. 4 low-volume (and very low noise) panaflow 80mm fans. I put 2 in my P4P system which should help out the overall thermal performance without increasing the noise. Another went into the backside of Pooh to try and increase his airflow some since it had just the power supply fan and felt a little warm. I do have the case basically maxed out, so increasing the airflow seemed like a pretty good idea. The last one I used to replace the front fan in Ryan’s machine which made a huge difference in how loud that machine is. It was annoyingly loud, and now it’s acceptable.

Cat’s bugging me for dinner. Constantly trying to get my attention in the hopes that I’ll feed him. I don’t want to feed him until I actually go to bed or he’ll try and get me to feed him again when I do head for the sack.

Mon Mar 18 22:59:28 PST 2002

Been quite a while since the last update. Been pretty busy with work, but that’s no real excuse. Anyway, been spending some time practicing guitar and getting song lists ready for Tuesday night Bible studies. This week:

Ah, Lord God Shout To The North Behold The Lamb of God Sanctuary Create in me a clean heart Strength of my life

It’s also been nice having a laser printer to dump out hard copies of all the songs and words on a semi-weekly basis. Fortunately, we’ve gone through enough of the songs (most in a 2-hour practice last Wednesday that nearly killed my poor little fingers) that we can build a more stable list to use for a couple of months, instead of printing out new stuff each week.

In other unrelated news, I haven’t done much with setting up PVR stuff under either windows or Linux. Maybe that’s a good thing as I’m doing a bit less TV watching and spending more time practicing my guitar and other activities.

I’m also looking more seriously about getting some kind of new PDA/MP3 player and/or phone. Maybe it’s just toy-itis, but I’m starting to think that I do want an MP3 player, and a PDA with a keyboard (even a thumbboard) would be nice. The Sharp Zarus looks pretty nifty. I can see that as a viable solution if I can get an 802.11b wireless network card in it so I can access all the .mp3 files on the Linux server anywhere in the house. I may need to get a new phone in the near future (not too near I hope) since my nice Nokia 6160 has a weird issue where if it gets bumped wrong it turns off. Maybe a phone with better sync and organizer features will cover the bulk of my needs and then I can just get a cheep mp3 player…

Wed Jan 30 23:14:52 PST 2002

So after running to a review on O’Reilly’s latest bio book "Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics" that claimed that it also covered basic organic chem for the programmer types, I figured it was worth a shot. I’m intersted in looking at new problems, and ‘big strange data’ problems like the biology people have seems pretty interesting. So time to take a quick trip to Barnes and Noble to see if they have a copy to look at. Also to see if they have another book on managing open source projects that also sounded interesting to me.

So after poking around in the stacks under ‘programming’ and ‘biology’ and several areas, I give up and go ask where the book is located. Turns out that "Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics" is under "Web programming" and that "Managing Open Source Projects" is under "Linux". Not exactly what I expected in either case, but that’s starting to be the norm for looking for books at BandN these days. After looking both the books over the both seem to be decent, so a credit card swipe later I’m out a pretty big chunk of change, but with two more books to read. I’ve started in on the bioinformatics book and at least the writing is good and fairly clear. The author did stumble when writing about computability and implied that intractable was the same as NP-complete, and that both were doomed to never be solveable by computers, which is certainly not right. I’ve written programs to solve NP-complete problems, and for that matter, most cryptography relies on some form of asymetric algorithms, sometimes NP-complete ones. Anyway, best not to rant about fairly minor points.

Maybe I’ll read another chapter before I go to sleep. My cat is sleeping on my leg under the covers and moving him isn’t likely to be real easy…