Ted Carnahan

Just got back from a nice cycling trip into downtown Columbia. Ever since I moved to northeastern Columbia (especially on the other side of I-70 & US-63) I’ve been very skeptical about the safety of riding over that way, but my fears were dispelled. I don’t recommend spending much time on Clark Ln west of the 63/Clark Ln intersection, but other than that, it’s okay.

I don’t normally write much about cycling (maybe I should) but I thought it’d be a good time to showcase the coolest thing ever: Bikely!

Bikely is great because it allows you to plot your routes free-form and get mileage and an elevation profile for the ride! So I climbed a total of 160 meters on that ride - not too shabby over 19km. You can share other maps categorized by region - here are some Columbia, MO bike routes. Best of all, Bikely is free.

I rode to Klunk Bicycles & Repair, a great, locally-owned bicycle shop, and picked up some reflective Velcro doohickeys for Jennifer and some $3 bar-ends from the bargain bin for me. Altogether, a great day!

Yesterday we came home to find Zeke sprawled helplessly on the floor of the aquarium we keep his crickets (mmm… crickets) in. We don’t normally store that aquarium directly underneath the plant he lives in, but that day it was there. Being the klutz he is, he fell out of the plant 6 feet to the glass aquarium floor, where he was trapped for who-knows-how-many hours in a small box with a few hungry crickets and a lot of dead crickets. Poor guy! As my grandmother says, “Getting older is not for the faint of heart!”

Thus, with a gleeful “I get to play with POWER TOOLS!” gleam in my eye, Jennifer and I hung our new, big, nylon mesh Explorarium cage. This way he can only fall 2 or 3 feet to a soft, spongy nylon floor - much less likely to break fragile Zekes.

To make this happen, I took a angled aluminum bracket my dad scavenged for me and attached it to the ceiling with two heavy toggle bolts. Then I drilled a hole for the S-hook that holds the cage to the bracket. The plant inside the cage hangs from a plant hanger clipped to a small carabiner. The plant hanger just had hooks at the ends of the ropes, so I drilled holes and routed the ropes through the pot and clipped the hooks into yet more holes drilled in the edge of the saucer. The lamps are too big and hot to put inside the cage (and Zeke would climb on them) so instead they clip to the bracket. The S-hook doubles as a convenient way to route the power cords for the lights. Total cost of hardware (excluding the cage and lights) was about $10.

The finished product looks really good - it just needs some more foliage to give him some cover when he’s feeling shy. The Exo-terra cage was a bit pricey (we found the largest one for about $50 online) but is collapsable and comes with a carrying case and a removable plastic liner. With some modification to the bracket you can see at the top to support the extra weight and some strategically placed holes in the new pot we bought, it works pretty well.

MeanDean of HealYourChurchWebsite posted about how wikis are great for content management on the cheap. I LOVE wikis!

At IdeaWorks, we use Trac, an open source wiki with bug tracker and source code viewer built in. Jennifer and I also use MediaWiki to organize information about daily life - projects, todo lists, grocery shopping, you-name-it. The free-form organization means that you can constantly re-factor your information, and since you can go back and look at pages’ revisions, you never lose any data.

I think I’m going to try to talk my church into using a wiki for projecty stuff here soon.

My ELCA Candidacy Interview went well on April 13; I received a “postive entrance decision” which means that I’m in the candidacy process now. I also found out a few days ago that I got into Wartburg Theological Seminary in Dubuque, IA. It looks like I’ll be moving around July 15, and Summer Greek will start on July 22. I’m nervous about all of the things that have to happen in the meantime: moving, wrapping up various projects at church, work stuff, etc. etc. ad nauseum, ad infinitum, but I’m excited to take this next step.

That’s two hurdles down, four years worth to go…

Nate and I dreamed up this list this morning:

Different programming languages’ approaches to “Do the simplest thing that could possibly work.“

perl: Do the simplest thing that no one can read.

C: Do the simplest thing that could possibly compile.

java: Just extend SimpleNamingSchemeWithAllNounsNameContainer.

C#: Do it in Java, only don’t suck as badly doing it.

python: Do it the only way that you can possibly write it.

COBOL: Do the simplest thing that no one alive today can maintain.

lua: Let’s take our application and embed Lua in it, then write an interpreter for a new domain-specific language in Lua and write our new feature in *that* language. Simple!

Got any others? Feel free to add them here!

Just found out that the Copyright Royalty Board, the federal board appointed by Congress to set royalty rates on music (among other things), has decided to change how Internet radio broadcasters are charged for broadcasting copyrighted music. Instead of the current percentage-of-profit approach, broadcasters will now be charged per-listener, per-song. This will destroy Internet radio for several reasons:

1. Rates will skyrocket more than 30% year over year for several years under the new plan.
2. For most Internet radio stations, the fee schedule will represent over 100% of their revenues.
3. The change is retroactively effective to the beginning of 2006.

It’s also worth noting that by charging retroactively to the beginning of 2006, this could be considered an unconstitutional ex post facto law.

This may also have implications for terrestrial radio stations that broadcast online, like Christian radio giant Air1. I’ve contacted them for more details.

In the meantime, I encourage everyone to visit Save Our Internet Radio for more information and then sign the petition to protect Internet radio.

I know I’m not the only person who has to deal with difficult people on occasion. I stumbled across this article on 8 Ways to Deal with Detractors. The one I’m holding on to right now: Be secure in the knowledge that you’re doing the right thing.

Sometimes there’s nothing you can do. You can’t win them over, you can’t avoid them, you can’t laugh with them. So you have to just ignore them, and keep telling yourself that when you do achieve your goal, that will be your reward for enduring this detractor.

Out in the hallway, there was a tremendous crash. As quickly as they had arrived, his attackers plunged through the door to investigate. As the white-hot pain temporarily eased, Jack’s head lolled to the right, and he eyed the shotgun just within reach.

“Hunting elephants?” the outfitter had asked when he was buying this particular piece of equipment.

“Something like that,” had been his response. If his torn and bleeding face could have smiled, he would have. Elephants would have been quite a lot safer, he thought to himself.

He assessed his situation. He’d knew he’d never again stand on his own two feet to face down his shadowy assailants. There were two shells left in the shotgun – slug shells, for hunting big game. He reached out his right hand, grabbed the butt of the shotgun, and pulled it in towards himself. Then, laboriously lifting it across his body, he loaded a shell into the chamber.

From the hallway, he heard more crashing and screaming. He had to distract them. No, he had to attract them. Give the others time to escape. He squeezed the trigger, and the tiny room shook with the blast. The crashing stopped, and Jack knew that he wouldn’t have much time.

He chambered his final round. As the creature peered into the room, Jack slowly lifted the muzzle of the weapon. It spotted him. He fired, and the wicked bird-like figure slumped to the floor. Who on earth would want to clone velociraptors? he thought. One down, four to… Then the second raptor leaped into the room. Darkness.

I really enjoy the web cartoon/commentary/drawing blog/idunno called Indexed. I find it appealing because I also often think in terms of sets and Venn diagrams and graphs between relationships. When I saw this commentary on “Easter” in America, I just couldn’t help but link to it.

There’s also a link to this YouTube video which puts together several Indexed posts into a very interesting animation. And we come full circle to Easter because, as the video briefly touches on, the Easter Bunny, despite parents’ best intentions, is likely an unnecessary source of religious doubt. Young children need to learn and develop in the trust/no trust domain, and when we tell them about the Easter Bunny and then yank it away, that really can’t help.

My company generates our website using Template Toolkit’s ttree tool. We want our site to be built with absolute paths in the HTML, so we need to be able to accomodate that with file:// URLs when we test it. We use code like this:

The script to invoke ttree in our testing environment:

#!/bin/bash
cd `dirname $0`
rm -r ./out_test/*
ttree -a --relative --pre_process=./lib/config.test \\
         --pre_process=./lib/config.common \\
         --define basedir=`pwd` \\
         -f ./lib/ttree_test.cfg

In lib/config.test:

[% root = 'file://' _ basedir _ '/out_test' %]

In lib/config.deploy (when we build for production):

[% root = 'http://www.ideaworks.com/' %]

This way, rather than hard-coding the testing path in lib/config.test, it Just Works^TM.