Monthly Archive for January, 2006

Ruby On Rails is Sweet

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on January 27, 2006
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I’ve been messing around with Ruby on Rails on my webhost (Dreamhost, which is sweet), and I have to say it is excellent.

It was like someone said to me “Hey, you know most of the stuff you really hate about coding, well, I’m going to just do all that for you and let you get to work on the actual application.” And it does that much less annoyingly than VBA does…I hate VBA. (VBA is like someone said “Hey, lets take a good idea, and obsuficate it with legacy crap, and undocumented API’s, but try to make up for it with a good editor / debugger.”

I’ve talked briefly with some people about RoR, and I wanted to point out some links to help people get up and started with it really quickly. (most of these links are for you Seth)

Rad Rails is a text editor / framework manager that provides you with quick access to your database, controller files, and templates. This lets you run your webserver on your machine, and see the output right in the program.

Instant Rails is a quick pre-packaged setup to provide you with a very quick ruby on rails enviornment on your local pc to mess with. Nothing fancy, just pre-configured stuff, no installer, just unzip to a directory and run things out of there. It probably would work wonderfully with Rad Rails, but I haven’t explored the possiblities.

Here are some quick-reference cards on this site, the latest of which is for RoR. A great reference for CSS, Javascript, and all kinds of stuff, not just rails info.

Finally, there is a pretty good tutorial for some basic stuff on ONLamp which walks through setting things up on windows and creating a simple application. It also has some follow-up articles to get you using ajax really fast.

So, for now, I’m working on a few projects on a subdomain of my site, and they move pretty quickly. Maybe this weekend I’ll pick up a book to help me move into more advanced topics. Feel free to check out what I’m working on by adding /schedule or /helpers to to link above. (don’t want my projects referenced by search engines just yet….gotta install passworded logins first)

Connectedness for the sake of Information

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on January 26, 2006
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Some of you may have heard that a friend of mine from college committed suicide earlier this month. This wasn’t a guy I was particularly close to, but we were friends, and I’m very sad about this, and I’m trying to think up what the best way to offer my condolences to his family is.
( rant about connectedness and suicide )
Anyway, enough of this, I just needed to write a little about it. Also, any ideas about how to handle keeping in touch with a fairly large group of old friends would be welcome.

What’s the Point

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on January 23, 2006
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Sometimes I read through my old blog posts, especially around the beginning of the year because I like to recap the last year in my head.

Today, I found myself reading them and wondering “What’s the point?” Not the point of blogging, I fully understand that it is nothing more than a cathartic expression of my frustrations while I’m harrassed by life in general. (Fourth paragraph down to see the reference, Seth will appreciate that link)

But more to the problem of “What’s the point” of my life. I’ve listened to enough sermons to have a solid theology on it, but sometimes that theology feels so empty and dry.

Can I exist as a warm body forever? Does the Kingdom need another one? When do I get to find my place instead of just being a face in the crowd? What is worth fighting for this day in age? I wasn’t born to be a grunt, so why is it that I always end up one?

A Little Batch File Help

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on January 21, 2006
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I’m writing a batchfile, and I can’t seem to get it to do exactly what I want.

I’m taking a directory of files, and running all the .wav files through LAME and spitting out mp3’s with the correct encoding settings. I’m only writing the batch file because stupid winLame stopped giving me options to control all the bit-rate, and sample frequency settings.

Anyway, here is the stuff:

For %%a in (*.wav) DO lame -m m –cbr -b 32 -s 22.05 –add-id3v2 –tt “%%a” –ta “Jeff Heidkamp” –tl “Mercy Vineyard Church” “%%a” “%%a.mp3″

in this the %%a is the filename, and when I spit out a sermon in mp3 the filename ends up sermonName.wav.mp3 All I really need to know is how to strip the file extension from that variable name.

Anyone ever done something like this…I’m finding batch file programming scarce these days.

More Fun Stuff about Dating

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on January 18, 2006
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http://www.christianitytoday.com/singles/newsletter/mind60111.html

I read this article and enjoyed it’s breakdown of christian dating when it said:

A typical story I hear over and over goes like this: Boy meets girl. They hang out, and boy behaves in the typical “courting” style for a couple months. They grow close. After a time, one asks for a vocal commitment, and the other replies, “Ummm, we’re just friends.”

I hear this all the time from friends of mine, so I thought it would be worth sharing for those of you out there that have heard this one.

Some Recent Interests

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on January 18, 2006
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Here are some things I’ve been reading a little about here and there, and I thought maybe some of you would like to see them.
( Not Technical Nerd Stuff )

( Tech Nerd stuff )
That is all for now…just thought some of that was worth sharing.

MLK Day

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on January 16, 2006
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MLK Day is here, and I rarely notice it come and go.  But for some reason I’ve been more compelled to study a little of what the man said this year.  I’ve found myself going over the letter he wrote in Birmingham prison mostly, and I find his passion so compelling, that I wonder how southern white pastors could not be persuaded to his cause.

But to be fair, I am looking through the lense of history.

Also, I got to thinking about what my passion will be.  It has been said that our generation will have had no great war, and lived in relative comfort compared to all that have come before us.  Makes me think that I could go through most of my life without a call to any great action, nothing truely worthy to be passionate about.  That generally depresses me.

Of course there is always stuff to be passionate about, great injustices are taking place all over the world, I just wonder if I’m called to leave the US ever.  I don’t really feel like I am right now, but who knows what the future holds.
It also makes me think about whether or not I would have been interested in the civil rights movement if I was alive at the time.  When faced with an opportunity to participate in something great, would I have declined for comfort reasons?  Who knows, I couldn’t say what it would have been like then.  I know my parents were too young to be very involved, but they remember it, and I know my whole family (at least on my Dad’s side) has always been vocal about similar issues during my life.

Well, enough of my meandering.  If you feel like reading something interesting, here is the online version of that letter.

Turning over to the Darkside

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on January 12, 2006
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Yes, With the annoucement of the MacBook Pro I am contimplating turning over to the dark side of the PC Universe.

I’m mean, it is just so sexy, and I can dual-boot windows or OS X or any flavor of X86 linux I want.

On a more serious note, I just want to run down some technical reasons on why this is probably the best laptop announced over the last two weeks (and there were many many laptops announced).

Intel’s new Core Duo is a great processor. Two cores, so essentially two processors, running on one system, which means you can process about twice as much information at one time. There are limitations on how effective this is at improving your preception of the performance increase, but for the most part, it is definitely going to improve your speed vs. other single-core processors. Also, this thing gets amazing battery life out of laptops for how much horsepower it packs.

EFI instead of BIOS…this is technical, but I think it is an important step. BIOS is what is called a ‘legacy’ technology. BIOS is your Basic Input-Output System, which lets the hardware talk to the software. It is what loads when your screen is black and runs that memory check. EFI, or Extensible Firmware Interface replaces that for something much more flexible, and up-to-date.
This means you could build in a media player that ran without booting the whole computer more simply than they do it currently. Also, something to note, Windows Vista supports booting from EFI, while XP does not (XP 64 bit edition does, but core duo is not eAMD64 compatible)….fortunately, I’m a beta tester for Vista, so if I buy a MacBook I can easily set up a dual-boot enviornment…..mwahahah

But, why dual boot (which means pick one opperating system or another during boot-up) when I can have BOTH AT THE SAME TIME!!!!!

Thats right kiddies, Microsoft, Intel, and AMD are all working together to provide us with what is called Virtualization Technology (VT). This VT stuff allows us to seperate our hardware into individual ‘Virtual’ systems with no loss of speed. That means if you have a dual core processor, you could virtually seperate one core from the other to be running one OS on once core, and the other OS on another. The only hiccup is that the OS has to support this. Windows Vista does (or will), but I don’t know if OS X is going to. I”m sure some Linux’s will, but honestly I’m only interested in OS X because it is essentially a version of BSD that has a working DVD player and laptop power-saving modes.

Now, I have one other thing to point out about VT that some of my tech friends probably don’t know about since I found out at an MS seminar and haven’t heard of it before or since.

VT allows even more seperation of hardware, to the point that the OS can detect failures of components in systems, and shut down just those parts without messing up the rest of the system.

The example I found the most interesting that MS told me about was this. You have a server with multiple processors. One processor blows. The OS detects it, stops using it, and informs you it is fried. You tell the OS to electrically turn it off. Then, while the system is still running you take off the heatsink, remove the processor, replace it, and tell the OS there is a new one in and to start using it again. It takes off without a hitch…no shutting down or rebooting. (This scenario scares the piss out of me because I drop screws a lot while working on computers, but it is cool)

My understanding is that this can work with PCIe, PCI, AGP, RAM, and all kinds of other stuff, and the MacBook supports it.

Also, the Macbook has a widescreen, is under 6lbs, and uses expresscard (replacement for PCMCIA…but not backwards compatible), has wireless….hopefully mini-pci based so I can upgrade when 802.11n comes out in 2007… and it has bluetooth, built-in camera for video chat, dvd/rw and all that jazz.

Now, when the memron core version of core duo comes out, and they add firewire 800, I think you will have the best laptop in existance. I may have to purchase a new laptop in 2006…and it might not be one I put together myself.

I’m a traitor…it is OK to tell me so.

I Finally think I have a little direction

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on January 11, 2006
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I think God has spoken to me about some things relating to my passions outside of church as well as in. And I want to say some of them out-loud, so I 1) don’t forget them, or forget that I said them 2) try to hide away from the tasks needed to start things going because they will be hard and 3) Schmelzer suggested speaking your dreams and goals out loud in a sermon so that you have to think about them and grow your faith after you get all the funny looks from people who think you are crazy.
( Dreams / Goals / and Comitments )
Well, anyway, that is what I’ve been thinking about for the last couple of months. I would love to openly debate how much of an idealist I am, and every other aspect of what you agree or disagree with me about in this area, but, I would ask you to wait. I have a proposal that I wrote for our church (and my wife edited to make it readable for normal people) and I sent it to Jeff to look at, and I want to wait until after we have talked about it to discuss any of this stuff in depth publicaly, because some of my ideas may change after I hear his feedback.

So, in the meantime, and before you ask me too many questions on these topics check out this paper. (the last 11 pages are just references, and the print is huge, so don’t be alarmed by its size)
http://matheteuo.org/downloads/Penguin-in-the-Pew.pdf
It isn’t a great paper, but it covers a lot of issues I want to eventually address and debate on my blog.

Jeff, that is the paper I said I was going to ask you to read…hopefully posting it here will save me an email.

Thanks for reading my rambling dreams, I’ll return in a few weeks with more on this topic.

I Feel Totally Weird

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on January 10, 2006
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I hate when I feel bad and find myself lacking in words to describe the bad.

Weird
Crappy
Cynical
Depressed even?

I don’t know…whatever it is, it generally bothers me a lot when I feel like this that I can’t express how I feel or why I feel it.

In other sort-of related news, I’ve determined I should have been into CS. I’m sure I would have been bored with it (or maybe not ‘bored’ but more like sick of it) by the end, but just from a point of talent, I think I’m better at programming and thinking in terms of code than I am in thinking of terms of voltages, capacitance, inductance, current, and resistance….that is not to even make mention of exactly how completely terrible I am at thinking in terms of the movement of electrons through dielectric materials.

I’ve produced more things at work that actually create exponential time savings through researching available tools provided by our suppliers, and through writing code (web stuff…programing in PHP and such, as well as VB -based things, mostly in excel) than I have by doing any other stuff.

Speaking of code…does anyone know how to change the size of an array that recieves information in excel (an array in this case, being a range of cells) based on the size of an array (in this case being an generally abstract programing thing for holding data) returned from a function.

I’m creating a spreadsheet that can access our database for all the stuff our company does, and it returns the part numbers for each job with corresponding serial numbers. The problem is that sometimes I need the array to expand when the returned data overflows the bounds, instead of just truncating the data returned. And, other I need it to shrink in order to not create a bunch of white-space in some other drop-down menus I created which access the data from the database.

That is all now, I must go home.

LCD Screen Fun

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on January 5, 2006
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Aaron gave me two old laptop LCD screens while I was home, one was an extra that someone shipped him and wouldn’t take back (he tried to give it back, but they guy didn’t want to waste the time or shipping), the other is the one I was replacing with the new one he bought.

Now these aren’t amazing, they both have some flaws, but those are mostly minor IMO.

So, I’m looking for projects to do. I was thinking of making something like a home-brew Panel PC kinda like the ones I sell at work (here is a link to our panel pc page), and then use that as a control center for some media / communication things. Like making it into an astericks server for handling voice mail and call forwarding, and maybe a nice user interface to go with it, touch-scren based perhaps?

The other I was thinking of doing some DIY home projector kind of thing. There is a neat guide on toms hardware on how to set something like that up.

Anyway, I would like to hear any ideas people have for what fun things I could try to do with two free LCD screens.

Updates from the Braincell’s adventure to MN

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on January 4, 2006
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Dirk, Val, Seth, and Rob all came up to visit last weekend.
that is , , , and . was a loser and bailed without calling us about it….you are so in the Braincell doghouse Dink.

They arrived at roughly the same time on Friday. We had lots of fun going to the Town Hall Brewery that night, and then chilling out and bitching at eachother…like normal. Then saturday we checked out the mall after Lauren made some pancakes, and we went to famous daves. The mall was devoide of any cool looking bears hats, and while it is a freaking huge mall, it is still a mall, so we left after not very long. We then rented “40 year old virgin” which was much much funnier than I thought. Then we went to Caleb and Jenny’s for some partying.
Sunday was church and bears day. We went to church (Seth and Rob opted for a Catholic mass, and ended up not finding the place), and then we watched a little of the Program until we left for the game.

The game was weak sauce. They played the starters for all of the first quarter, and then put in the super-bad scrubs. Even the guys that might be back-ups in the playoffs didn’t hardly play.

For the record…Jerry Azhuma still sucks…whenever he is on the field bad things happen…they should draft someone in the fourth or fifth round to replace him.

We bailed at the end of the third quarter, and went to get some light food at Grandma’s bar and saloon. Everyone was tired, and didn’t want to sleep in my cramped appartment for another nights, so they took off after that, and Lauren and I hung out with Glynn and Dave watching Serenity.

Monday I finished an outline I’m jokingly calling ‘me manifesto’ which details out how I think our church could utilize technology to promote long term improvements in our community and the world at large. Lauren helped me turn it into normal-people speak so it wouldn’t freak Jeff out, it was a lot of fun working together on a project. The rest of the day we just hung around being lazy and enjoying one-anothers company. That evening Lauren went out to hang out with some girls since she had been in contact with the braincell for too long without room to breath, and I upgraded my beta site for the church to Wordpress 2.0. (I’m holding off on the main site because LivePress doesn’t work with the new version). The upgrade went pretty smooth, I only have to fix the photo-album (gallery2) plugin, which should be patched in a few weeks by the original author anyway.

That is the update of the moment…I’ll leave Rob to fill in anything I forgot, and some funny stuff that happened, most of which starts with the words “You know how I know you’re gay….”