Blogging Ottinger (tim)

This is an interesting (I can’t say “pretty”) guitar being re-released by VOX:

This was a little too thin and a little too spicy, so I’ll be improving on it in future versions, but here you go:

7 peppers (I used 5 Jalapeno, 2 serrano)
2 small onions
1 tsp minced garlic
cilantro
1/8 c oil (olive or grape seed)
1/4 c flour
2 Avocados
1 qt chicken stock
1 qt heavy cream
Salt, Pepper to taste

What I did was to chop and seed the peppers and chop the onion. These went into the bottom of the pot under low to medium flame. As they softened and sweated, I added the garlic. Be careful, pre-minced garlic can burn pretty easily and if not for Libby, I’d have burned it. I added it too early and let it sit a little while. We saved it, but it might have been close. At this point, though, the house definitely smells like you’re making something nice.

When the veggies soften, add the oil and flour to make a nice roux. My roux was a little thin, so I could have added more flour. If the roux is thicker, the soup is thicker. Mine was just a bit thin, and some of the oil floated to to top. I would suggest more flour rather than less oil.

Once the roux is ready, add the chicken stock. I also added a few cups of water to mine, but I think I went too far with the liquids. Next time I may wait until the last minute so that I don’t ruin the thickness. Bring it to a boil to activate the flour for thickening.

This is a good time to add some cilantro. I didn’t measure mine, so it’s a matter of preference and judgment.

At this point, I wanted to add a couple of Avocados, but sadly mine had been sitting in my house for a day or so too long. I think that the avocado would have improved the flavor and would have thickened the soup nicely, but I won’t know until next time. Be careful with your ingredients! Next time I’m buying them same-day. No more waiting.

The final ingredient is the cream. I stirred it in a little at a time so that it didn’t just kill the heat in the pot.

I used an immersion blender next, and I think I will do that again. It chopped up the solid ingredients just enough so that there was evidence of the veggies (green dots all through), but the soup was really very smooth.

I let the soup sit on low heat and simmer a bit. I wanted it to thicken up the rest of the way, and to marry with the cream a bit.

Salt and pepper finish out the list of ingredients.

We found it was a bit too hot for the family. Next time I drop two peppers from the mix.

Serving a blended soup always requires a little love. Libby added salsa to the center of each bowl of soup, and that was genius. The color and flavor were excellent. Of course, the pepper and onion and cilantro in the salsa was not really necessary. Next time I will just drop in a dollop of diced tomatoes and garnish with cilantro leaves. It’s attractive and tasty.

Alternatively, this would be a good thermos filler. Then presentation doesn’t so much matter.

I think this would be good with a sandwich, preferably a seafood sandwich of some sort.

As always, comments are welcome.

I love my SX GG5, but I can’t find a case to fit it. The reason is the fairly extreme angle where the neck meets the body. Most hollowbody cases aren’t deep enough, and the guitar ‘bottoms out’ at the end of the headstock and the heel of the body, and then the guitar at the neck joint is still too tall to allow the case to close.

I am going to have to go visiting a number of guitar shops and try out all their cases to find one that works. What other guitars have this profile and this problem?

This remains a common theme: windows needs help to keep running. This week, Ron posted in a news group that he was having some severe performance problems, and a number of us offered various kinds of help, including ditching Murkysoft for greener pastures (Mac or Linux).

Conventional wisdom includes antivirus, firewalls, and the occasional re-imaging (reformat and re-install the machine).
I’ve long relied on Ad-Aware, PageDefrag and Grisoft tools.

Mr. J says that his machine was greatly improved using Registry Booster.

Michael suggest using Spybot Search & Destroy and Hijack This.

In general, avoid IE and Outlook because those are just ways to suck virii into your machine. Use Thunderbird or Incredimail and Firefox or Opera instead.

Of course, there are some other recommendations floating about the net. You may find them useful.

Imagine that you have three visitors come to your door. The first is from the Biography channel, where they’ve suddenly run out of celebrities and want to run stories on normal, workaday people. He’s trying to determine the overall feel and timbre of the story according to three profiles they frequently use. He needs to know whether to interview you as a hero, a tragedy, or a criminal. He’s clearly judging your life, even if there is a chance he will be sympathetic with you story. He asks which of your faults and sins you want to have exposed.

The second visitor is a life coach. He isn’t here to pass judgment but he does want to hear a list of your failings and weaknesses so that he can provide a program and hold you accountable for improvements in various areas. He’s reputable and discrete, but you know that he’s going to make you work to get better. He wants to know which of your faults and sins to start on first.

The third visitor is Jesus Christ, and he only asks what sins you would like to have forgiven.

If you’re involved in a church in the past few decades, you have been touched by Willow Creek Community Church in one way or another. They have been the church growth experts, and churches seeking growth have been following this large and influential thought leader. There is a new development in the Willow Creek story. Apparently, their growth plan worked very well, but with unintended consequences.

I have never been to Willow Creek. I hear it’s quite nice, and certainly a mega-mega-church. They managed to grow not only a very large congregation for the Chicago church, but also a very large reputation as experts in how to “do church” in current times. WCCC has been a mecca for pastors who want to reach out to a population, a generation, a community and do good for their communities. Sadly, there is a foundation problem with the approach.

I don’t want to kick Willow Creek for having succeeded in ways they really didn’t plan to succeed. I want to applaud their leaders for a truly significant and heart-rending act of leadership: they publically stated that their plan was not working for them. Tell me that didn’t take grace and heart. I might suggest the term “heroic.” Given influence and reputation, they could have tried to keep it quiet. Instead, they lay it out where you can see it. That’s guts.

An act of humility and leadership deserves grace and forgiveness and perhaps some hearty applause. In this one public statement WCCC has moved into a realm we call “the dying church” (in a positive way, read the site to get the jist of it).

Good on you, gentlemen and ladies.
God bless.

If I were to re-title this book, it would be “Christians: Are We Playing The Right Game?” Telford Work is tearing down and rebuilding the church right before my very eyes.

I have long had a cognitive dissonance about the church (the little-c church on earth, as opposed to the Church with a capital C), especially how it seems to be continually pulled into the ways and means of the world. It is not that I understood it well enough to cast it in words, but there was something nibbling at the corner of my consciousness in church participation and church business.

In the first half of his book, Work spent time dissecting the creeping Constantinianism in the church, and his words resonated with my experience.

Today, in a chapter titled The Mercy of God I find this interesting bit:

Wherever the Messiah journeys, things around him simply cannot go on as before. […] Hostility inevitably results, from both the “good” who respect our world’s consructed boundaries and the “wicked” who violate them.

It struck me (finally, after all Telford W’s hard work) that they’re both playing the wrong game. They’re both caught up in the rules, on one side or another. Suddenly Romans 8 (which we’re also exploring in morning worship and also adult Sunday school) is visible in sharper resolution.

Again, I’m reminded that perhaps we’re playing the wrong game. We shouldn’t necessarily be growing through marketing and media blitz and measuring ourselves on attendance and building programs and seeker-friendly social clubs. While we need to be seen, and we need to be friendly, and we need to be social, and we need a certain amount of income to maintain the physical manifestation of the church, these are not the things that matter. They aren’t the things that the Christ taught, and they’re not the things he did.

This is a different world, a different game, and a different end-game. Our power plays are from Micah 6:8, not from popular business models. Our is to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God. Ours is not to counter the culture, nor to own it, nor to invest in it. Our tools are mercy and grace, for “where there is bitter envy and selfish ambition, there is disorder and every evil practice” (James 6:8). We’re not about competition, coercion, or assimilation. We’re not about accrual of income, land, membership, or influence. Ultimately, we need to be about good news for the broken people all around us, and including ourselves.

Not that we’re not to do well. I also remember Wesley’s words to “Make all you can, save all you can, and give all you can.” It’s okay for us to be participants in the world’s systems, but we need to remember that ultimately that is a means to an end, and not an end. We don’t want our church to grow so that it will be bigger and have more money. The little-c church is a means to an end also. It is a means for fellowship, instruction, aid, kindness, and support: primarily to give them, but also to receive. Somehow, I don’t think the question we’ll answer at judgement is “how many square feet in your sanctuary?” but rather we’ll give an account for our faith and character, who we were and what we did for those who needed us in our lifetimes.

I have a lot to think about. Perhaps we need to quit winning (or losing) the wrong game.

Congratulate me. I’m now a Django novice. I started playing with it on Saturday, and I already like the transparency and simplicity I’ve seen so far. Note: “so far” isn’t very far at all. I have a web page and urls configured to do basic date math. I’m just working through the Django Book so far.

Maybe it’s because I’m trying now, but web frameworks are starting to make more sense to me. The first non-cgi I saw was Java, and was just short of inscrutible to me. The C#.NET looks more reasonable, but it’s still pretty long on setup and configuration it seems. Django just makes sense so far.

I may find something tomorrow or tonight that invalidates all the good things I just said, but we’ll see. For now, I know a little bit about .NET and I know a little bit about Django. That’s not a bad starting place.

I have a laptop that a family friend gave me to work on, and which I sadly procrastinated for quite a while. I’ve been all-Linux for a while, so I’m not used to dealing with all the vagaries of XP infections. I would have gotten to this sooner but it keeps getting moved around the house (yeah, I have a family). I finally found it sitting in its bag on the guest room bed this weekend and started squaring it away on Sunday evening.

It was extremely slow, and is running windows, so you know what that means. Yes, it had rootkits and trojans and virii and you-name-it. I tried to download some programs to clean it, but that was a waste of time. I also couldn’t get it to read from USB, so I ended up burning a CD of my favorite rescue tools.

I started with Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware which has been an old standby for removing certain kinds of spyware. It was useful again.

It is a personal family laptop, so I loaded it up with the personal versions of the AVG suite of tools from Grisoft. I’ve had really good success with Grisoft back when i was a Windows user. This time was no different. It wiped out a bunch of problems right away. I installed the anti-rootkit, the anti-virus, and the anti-spyware. All of them helped.

Suddenly blessed with somewhat improved performance, I changed the virtual memory system to be a fixed size. This is one of the best fragmentation-prevention tips I’ve gotten over the years. I then got a copy of PageDefrag, which used to be from SysInternals, but now is a product of Microsoft. I ran this on the next boot, along with a similar product that does registry cleaning.

Of course, the next step was defragging. This ran overnight and by 10:00 the next day it was 13% done. The disk is only 1/2 full, but there you have it. I personally suspect that overnight the laptop suspended, because that’s too ridiculous. Defragging with the microsoft defrag program is incredibly slow. It’s a shame that it has to be done so often. When I was last had a fulltime windows job, I installed Diskeeper and scheduled the defragging so I didn’t have to mess with it. Diskeeper is a great program for Windows, but it is a for-pay program too. I don’t obligate my friends by installing payware on their computers. I showed my son the screen with the defragger running, and he just rolled his eyes and groaned. I feel the same way. I thought an operating system was supposed to manage the computer’s resources. Maybe I ask too much from the world wealthiest and most successful operating system manufacturer. Maybe only a handful of unpaid volunteers can make a file system that really works, and corporations with thousands of expert developers and a self-imposed timeline cannot do the same.

After defragging, I will want to recreate the page file again, in a larger size. This will hopefully cause it to be allocated in one place near the middle of the disk. That will help considerably if it works. Of course, I’ll want to defrag again after that, but it will happen much more quickly.

I really forgot how good I have it as a non-Windows guy. I don’t deal with all these nightmares on a daily, weekly, or yearly basis. I just use my computer. I may have the occasional eventful OS upgrade, but so do Microsoft users. I upgrade less painfully and more often. I also don’t have the ongoing need to shore up my OS with security and performance tools from all over the web. I have it easy. I have it good. So I can’t play some PC games, and use Mono rather than Visual Studio. It’s a good trade.

The anti-rootkit and anti-virus ended up disabling the wireless driver, so I’ll have to locate one and reinstall it. Windows is clearly not the wrinkle-free life some suppose it to be. Otherwise, things are going as well as can be expected. It should be finished by some time today or tomorrow. I would have been able to completely wipe it and install Linux (Debian or Ubuntu) in about an hour. I almost feel guilty returning it with Windows still on it. I know it’s going to have trouble again as the virus nuts outrace the antivirus nuts yet again in the future. But it’s not my machine, and it would seem a cruel joke to swap operating systems. Heh, “I fixed your windows machine for you; I installed Linux on it.”

Larry Carlton explains how he does it. It’s a little over my head, but I have reasons to do the prerequisites now. I would love to sound a little like that guy. It’s a bit too much to hope for right now, but a guy’s gotta dream.

Last Revision: 8 Nov 2007.
Status: Ongoing

I’m trying now to get into web stuff. I am interested in three platforms: Django (because it’s what the cool kids are using), Rails (because that’s what the cool non-python kids are using) , and C# .NET (because that’s what businesses want to pay for). I figure the formula is 2 parts cool to one part commercial. I could also chase down some C++ web programming stuff, but who wants to do that?

I really don’t have much experience with web programming, other than creating a web interface in CGI and Python to get stats from an industrial balance machine several years ago. I gave java a miss, and didn’t learn any of those frameworks. It was primitive and didn’t have separation between logic and database and form, because each web page was (all told) maybe 50 lines of code. It was a simpler world, and less implicit. Now we have to know frameworks, and Javascript, and flash, AJAX and all that stuff. I hope to learn a little about all of these in time. It’s a long road, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be fun.

I’ve also decided to focus mainly on Unix and Linux development. I want to work in BSDs (including Mac OS X) and Linux for the rest of my programming time if possible. Working in Windows is just too ugly and the tools are weak. I would rather have bash or better for the command line, a software installer/unstaller that works, and an OS that doesn’t have to be rebooted several times a week. Being in Linx 100% of my personal time and most of my professional time is handy this way. I will use only open tools during my personal training.

I’m starting with C#, because making serving my customers trumps having fun. I’ve got some history with the language: about 7 months of exposure, which ended almost a full year ago. I am not a .NET person but have worked with the tools. In those days, I used VS .NET (which kinda sucked) and Resharper (which has my full endorsement). I wish I had a JetBrains development kit for Linux, but alas I do not. I do have MonoDevelop, though.

By the way, I did find a nice C# web tutorial at O’Reilly that suited my learning style and personal tastes as well as my newness to things .NET.

I installed via apt-get install monodevelop, collecting just about anything that apt-cache said was MonoDevelop-related. Apt rocks. I don’t have to chase down software on a dozen different sites, I don’t have to run a dozen custom compilers, I don’t have to waste time swapping CDs or the like. I don’t have to track down upgrades on a dozen mailing lists or web sites. It’s all so automatic, so easy, and so pleasant that it’s almost embarassing. The last time I had to set up a windows box, it was a good half-day or more just finding the pieces, swapping CDs, and other administrivia to do with licensing. For upgrades, it was the same hassle over again. Open source and APT are a combination that needs a better publicist. It’s amazing what other people have already done for you.

That done, I fired up MonoDevelop (the only C# available at my windows-free house) and started plugging.

The reader should realize that my version of MonoDevelop is 0.14, which is very pre-1.0. Everything is new and experimental, though it was actually pretty stable. I did have a couple of crashes but overall most of the features worked. The guys at MonoDevelop are doing a good job of building an IDE that may someday compete with Eclipse (of which I have version 3.2, clearly further developed).

I have found that there are some nice features in MonoDevelop, but it clearly needs further development. On the other hand, VisualStudio needs development and I could only tolerate it as a C# development environment because I’d installed Resharper. Giving a choice between raw Visual Studio and MonoDevelop, the superior ideology of MonoDevelop pulls me more than the click-n-code-behind features in VisualStudio.

Nunit

The integration isn’t excellent like Eclipse’s JUnit support, but it’s usable and even nice in some ways. Getting some unit tests up is a prerequisite activity for doing anything you might want to keep or write about, so getting NUnit up was a no-brainer first step.

It should have been. Actually, I created the test source via the menu and got a source file as one would expect. I had to check a box to have it added to the project, which violated the principle of least surprise.

Of course, adding an NUnit source file to your project doesn’t mean you get the NUnit library reference for free. I had to add that next. Then, having NUnit tests and a reference to NUnit.Framework wasn’t enough, when I told the test to run, they seemed to run but did nothing.

To get the tests to run, I had to go rebuild the whole application and then try to run them again. Monodevelop does not run the tests when it builds the application, though that would be really nice. I also didn’t see a hot key combo. I need to keep looking for that. I have to do mouse navigation with multiple selections to run the tests. That’s not the way to handle something you want people to do as often as possible.

I did like the results pad, with its little graph. It’s cute. Still, in either of the two views of test results, clicking on a failed test doesn’t navigate to the code with the failed assertion. That’s a little tedious.

Oh, ugliness. If I build and the build fails, focus doesn’t move from the UnitTests view to the build errors. You may not know why your test results haven’t cleared, but this is why. More mouse travel to select the tab for builds, then click on the error, then fix, then click on the unit test tab and two more clicks to run the tests. Sigh.

Programmer Aids

If you do a new project for .NET, it will create an .asp and an .asp.cs for you, but the app won’t run. You have to go change some project settings first. That struck me as sloppy. Luckily google (my smart friend) knew what to do. You have to go to Project/Options/Configuration/*/ASP.NET Options and turn on “Autogenerate CodeBehind members before compilation.” That seems to get the raw package running. This may indicate that professionals don’t use this option, and I should maybe not have turned it on. Being new at this, I don’t really know.

Completion works nicely. I was very comfortable with the way the program responded to the . (dot) command and control-space. It was all that I expected. Well, most of the time.

Code Templates (snippets) work. It doesn’t always seem to place the cursor as directed, but it works.

Oddly, no “create class” right-click option in the solution viewer. Why not? I don’t know. It’s a small thing, but handy. The File/New/General/EmptyClass menu navigation worked fine, and gave me what I expected. I just wish it had been a bit easier to reach, along the lines of Resharper or Eclipse. Actually, I wanted to instantiate a class in the test, and let the tool create the class for me as a remedy for the compile error, but that’s expecting MonoDevelop to be a refactoring tool again.

If you type a name that isn’t recognized, don’t expect MonoDevelop to know what to include like Eclipse does. You need to know where all your stuff comes from. If I were a C# pro, I probably wouldn’t mind. As-is, I spend too much time in google and in my C# book trying to recall where C# keeps its arrays and lists and regex and what-not. I mostly have spent time in other languages this year, and C# is just different enough in enough ways to keep me having to refer to materials. Sigh. I suppose Eclipse is a better coping mechanism for casual Java use than MonoDevelop is for casual C# experimentation.

Refactoring? What refactoring? After some poking around, I found a “rename” refactoring. That’s better than nothing, but only barely. This may be the biggest impediment to MonoDevelop adoption. Fortunately, Ben Motmans, Jeffry Stedfast, and some other developers are working on this even as I’m typing the words. Sadly, I was unable to find a repository that would allow me to install the work in progress. In Debian, frequently developers maintain their own versions in a repo so that you can point your package manager at them. I guess if there is such a thing for MonoDevelop, I’ve not found it with google.

Philosophy

There is a strong temptation to start with HTML coding when all you see is the .asp file. This is where you start the app process, and I suppose plenty of tag-slingers would do just that. I personally am not very good with the whole .html asthetics thing, and so I’m more comfortable creating an app and putting an HTML hat on it. Still, I’ll go with the flow.

Plugins

The plug-in thing seems broken both socially and technically. I can’t find more than a very few MonoDevelop add-in repos through google, so I don’t know if they really exist. Where do they come from? I also couldn’t put any of them into the repo manager. I understand the feature is kinda new, but still.

Conclusion

With all the little problems with programming in the small (lack of programmer aids and hints, excessive mouse travel, lack of shortcuts, scant refactoring tools, limited browsing, funky wizards) I think that MonoDevelop 0.14 is just not ready for serious use in commercial or open-source projects. I will continue to piddle with it, but I really hope that they can address some of these shortcoming soon. Otherwise, I’m likely to revert to gvim and make for C# development in Linux.

If you are a monoDeveloper proggie, why not look into making the whole NUnit thing work better, and maybe add a feature to search the libraries for referenced types. Perhaps you can reduce the amount of mouse travel a guy has to endure in a normal hour of programming. I think that this project is a good idea, and it should continue and become great some day. Most of my complaints seem to me to be small matters of programming to fix. Hopefully you all can have a very solid 0.16.

I have talked a bit about the Dell/Ubuntu thing in the past. We finally decided to put up or shut up.

When my wife started talking about stepping away from the work world, we decided she’d need a computer. She didn’t want to put up with me fighting to get the network and video and sound all working, and complaining about X problems and printer nightmares. We decided to go with a preinstalled Dell machine. We didn’t get the complete kit. We already had printers and keyboards and mice and monitors we could use. I should get rid of some of the junk.

I set the box up, booted, and it came to life as a happy Ubuntu box. I did the upgrade (using upgrade manager) and added apps using synaptic, and we’ve yet to have our first real problem. I do need to look up the vitals on our old glass-screen monitor so I can get it set up optimally, but the machine works great. I have no problems with it. This has been a really smooth setup.

All I can say is that Dell and Ubuntu made this work quite well. I’m so far very happy with the purchase.