un Jan 13 23:23:23 PST 2002

Attended a different church today. Vally Hope, or something like that. We mostly picked it since it had ‘hope’ in the title and had a close address. Turned out to not be such a good idea. Nice building, well equipped (they even had bars for hanging theater lights). The service was a bit awkward in some respects. They were trying to have a more modern worship time, but were playing the music for the modern songs off of tape/CD, and the few hymn songs they had both a piano and an organ for. The preacher was an elderly man (the bulk of the congreation was elderly as well) and seemed to be well in tune with the needs of his congreation. But their needs and ours seem to differ substantially.

Also, he claimed to be preaching from a specific passage in 2 Cor., but he used NLT (New Living Translation, I presume) and we kept double checking and it was way off from NKJV and doesn’t quite match the intent that is in NASB either. And what he was preaching didn’t really come from the scripture anyway. He spent the bulk of the time on ‘Therefore from now on we recognize no one according to the flesh’ (2 Cor, 5:16a NASB) and talking about how we shouldn’t complain about our physical condition or compare our bodies to those of others. I’m not saying that isn’t supported by scripture, but I strongly believe that’s not what Paul was talking about here.

Paul is talking about the old self and the new self (see verse 17) a theme common in his writings and that as a Christian, a new person, we need to not look upon people with the eyes of the world, or fleshly eyes, but with our new eyes, our spiritual eyes.

The church overall seemed a little underattended for the space available. I got the impression that this church had been much stronger 5-10 years ago and was currently slipping due to member loss due to older members passing on. There were a few younger families, but I would guess about 40% or more of those in attendance were over 55. There were some signs that there was action to turn the church around. The worship leader appeared to be pushing forward with the songs, and was also very friendly and encouraged us to return. I got the strange feeling that they don’t get too many visitors, and probably even less return visitors.

So the lesson to take away from this is that we should investigate these churches a bit more before showing up on Sunday morning and spending 90 minutes. I won’t say that I didn’t enjoy some parts of it, but it’s not the right place for us in so many ways.

I’m thinking that maybe we can call them and ask for average attendance numbers and if they tape their sermons, if they could send us a sample or maybe we could drop by and pick one up. That would enable us to get a rough feel without having to spend a Sunday morning at a church that we could have otherwise filtered out. I’m growing impatient with wanting to find a new church home. Hope Community Church was a very good church for us despite it’s location, and replacing it is going to be very difficult. I now know why I was so hesitant to go. Finding a good church home is not a easy or short task, and it’s going to take a lot more effort than I orignally thought.

In other news, I got some more info about requirements for the ATI video stuff. Turns out that you need to have the ati.2 drivers in place along with km and drm-kernel to get it all working without crashing everything. I’m a bit nervous about applying the ati.2 drivers over my perfectly good copy of /usr/X11R6, but it should be OK if I make a .tgz backup of the directory beforehand as a safety precaution.

Sat Jan 12 23:58:34 PST 2002

Sadly, no luck with the ATI card under Linux. Not for lack of trying. I even managed to reboot the machine (probably by pissing off the video card to invoke some kind of system error). I’ll read up and see if I can use the GATOS stuff to get a VideoForLinux driver working, but I’m not real confident at this point, since my first attempt at it did end up rebooting the machine. Sadly, I didn’t get much else done today.

On the plus side Girl Genius 3-5 showed up today and 4 and 5 are now in color and do look very nice. The story is progressing nicely, but the downside is that it looks like it will take at least another year or maybe two before we really have full story arcs getting resolved. I’m just too impatient! In the meantime, I’ll see about collecting the rest of the Usagi Yojimbo books. Also got ahold of Stephanie from nethersphere.com and the two prints that I wanted are available, and so I sent her the money via paypal and she’s gonna mail them to me. I’m pretty happy about that. They are a bit on the spendy side, but I think they will frame well, and we certainly need more art and stuff.

Fri Jan 11 23:53:18 PST 2002

It sure looks like getting the ATI TV features will be a little trickier than I thought. I’m having to recompile X to get the new drivers built. So far it isn’t too bad, I just follow the instructions closely and make sure to back up stuff before I overwrite anything. I’m working on a cvs d/l of the XFree86 code, and hopefully that will go reasonably well and I can see if this stuff really works. If so, writing the rest of the user interface code is actually fairly easy. A bit of XML, cron, and maybe a simple graphical interface in Python or PHP.

Also read most of a very interesting article on changes that one of the Linux kernel developers has for 2.5 that changes the scheduling algorithms to be O(1). Very intersting stuff. I’m thinking I should go read it again to try and fully understand the changes that he’s proposing.

http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0201.0/0810.html

Hopefully tommorow I can get the basic TV stuff working and clean up the house some. It’s a bit of a mess. I also need to get a longer crossover cable to move the WAP over and up on the wall so it is better positioned in the house. Maybe I can pick up a hard drive at the same time :-)

Mon Jan 7 22:19:34 PST 2002

Somewhat uneventful day. Work… Doing laundry. Stuff. I need to try and get to bed at a decent hour. I’m still a bit tired. Didn’t help that Shadow came and woke me up about half an hour early this morning wanting to get fed. I’ve got to hold off feeding him until just before I go to bed. He’s only good for just under 8 hours before he gets hungry and tries to wake me up to feed him.

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.