A Few Thoughts…

Okay, I set up duality to go into power save mode when idle for an hour when I was still using another server for, well, server tasks. But I moved 90% of those tasks to duality and so turned the server off. The power save mode didn’t seem to be working until today apparently, and now my mp3 server is down and I can’t listen to all my music I guess I’ll need to change those power settings when I get home. Too bad no one is there to kick it for me! I guess I will listen to more of the music I have locally…I wonder if Mike brought any music into work…

Well, at least 10,000 years: The cover story of the November 2005 issue of Discover magazine talks about a clock designed to run for 10,000 years, and be accurate to within one day! This is pretty accurate for something that is 100% mechanical, if you think about it. It uses a series of ringed 28-bit serial adders made out of metal pins to drive the displays. That’s right, there’s more than one. It tracks the motion of the inner planets, the moon cycle, the tilt & wobble of earth, leap-years, leap-centuries, and a whole lot of other things. And this is just a prototype. The final version is going to be housed inside of a mountain, ready to run for the duration in rooms built to be visited – albeit, quite a ways away from civilization (it sits on land adjoining the Great Basin National Park in Nevada, my guess is on the south side, since they say it is a day’s hike from the nearest thing that approximates a road).

My initial thought was “why?” And that’s not to say the thought has necessarily gone away, but I hope that I’m not too old to go visit it once it gets completed. Since they plan to have it finished before the inventor dies (and he’s probably in his late fifties), I think I have a pretty good chance. So, anyone want to join me on a road trip to see a giant clock, of which parts of it only move every 260 years? Okay, so maybe we’ll do some other hiking/climbing while we’re in the area too…

So I’ve been playing around with Ruby on Rails a bit recently. It seems like the presentation of the language is much nicer than I remember it. I looked at Ruby a while back when I was working on a project for Lunar Linux – but it never panned out. The Rails framework is quite slick – it does a lot of the startup work for you, and lets you go modify and update things as you can get to them. I started on a ruby tutorial, but like any programmer quickly found myself asking questions that the tutorial didn’t cover, and so decided to start off on my own little quick project.
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I was intrigued by a post over at Tim’s Blog, and I thought I would write a little about it here as well. Tim found and used the term “Godcasting”, which I don’t particularly like, I think because it reminds me of the term typecasting more than podcasting, and I don’t like the thouht of typecasting God. Anyway, the term I came up with is On Demand Services. Now, this would in no way be a substitute for going to a real service at church, but for those times when you’re traveling and can’t make it to church, or are maybe wanting to introduce someone to a service without going to one (keeping the comfort level up, as some people are really nervous about going to church for some reason), or just to hear a really good service or sermone once again – I think the idea has some promise. At my church right now, we have CD sales, DVD sales, and some videos on our website, but it would be nice to have a podcasting style feed that updated after every service for those that are away for extended periods of time, or just want to see what’s going on at First Apostolic. I think I’ll look into the possibility a bit closer, storing things on my machines at first to see what kind of space requirements we need to do what we want, and see how many hits we get!

Okay, so the forthcoming post I promised a few people is finally here. I did it, I broke down and bought a mac. I have been playing with it for the past few days, and I’m liking things so far. Final Cut express has been installed, but is yet to be put to the test, though I did play with soundtrack a bit today which seems pretty cool! I need to get more words for my computer box though, as it only has 512Mb right now. That will do until I can get some more in, as I don’t have any immediate video projects to be done.

I still need to play around with the coding environment – I would like to work on my NURBS library and see what I can do with a UI for it. I didn’t like the windows UI stuff that I looked at a while back (not even the MFC stuff), and I did’t do enough work in qt or gtk+ to form a strong opinion, but we’ll see how the OS X UI programming goes.

I’m still trying to get used to some of the different key actions – and some I want to find a way to make work. Like the home and end keys moving to the start and end of a line. They do it in some programs, and in others they do something else, or nothing at all! I feel like I keep coming up with questions on simple things, and I don’t want to annoy my friends who work at apple with menial questions, but I fear sometimes it will just come to that.

Oh, and I named the computer duality because it has 2 processors. And in other coincidences, Duality is the most recent recording by the band Ra – check them out! Well, that’s all for now, I’m going to spend the remainder of my evening reading and relaxing – I have to be at church at 8:00 tomorrow for puppet practice. Night all!

Last week I picked up a copy of the late William Rehnquist’s book “The Supreme Court” (0-375-70861-8). I haven’t made it too far into the book yet, but so far it has been quite enjoyable. It has been written for the “informed layperson” and the lawyer alike, so most of the legalese has been removed. Anyway, since I purchased the book to get a better idea of what the Supreme Court does, I thought I’d use my newly created blog as a place to recap some of the parts that I found quite interesting.

The first case the book focuses on is that of Marbury vs. Madison. The wikisource entry is quite extensive, and gives the full text of the opinion as written by Chief Justice Marshall. I don’t know about you, but I remembered hearing about this case in junior high, and again in high school, however I couldn’t have told you who Marbury and Madison were, let alone what the significance of the case was!

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Since I have gone through setting one of these suckers up in the past for a good friend of mine (www.adventuresinelsalvador.com), I became well aware of the need for a few plugins for anything that becomes remotely popular. The most important has become the spam karma plugin. Think of it as spamassassin for the wordpress world. Lots of configuration options, and it works quite well as I recall. I’m also trying out a spell-checking plugin, which works a lot like gmail’s spell checker -WORD OF WARNING – it uses gmail’s web service apparently, but makes separate calls for each word, which makes it quite slow for long posts. The author says he’s looking into how to make one call for the whole post, but hasn’t figured it out yet. So, use with caution and copy you post before you click that “Check Spelling” link, in case you lose patience. I’m going to leave it activated, but use at your own risks.

Okay – so I’ve joined the growing list of people out there with a blog. Or, as I heard recently on NPR (I think) – I’ve joned the ‘blogosphere’ – which I think is a dumb term. Anyway – this will most likely become a place for my rants, but I’ll probably have good news here too. I can really put whatever I want right? I might even upgrade this at some point to be my main page – though that will take some work to get the rest of my out-of-date site into this style. Later