Blogging Ottinger (tim)

Actually, it’s better than it sounds. The phrase “Going to Des Moines for spring break” is seldom uttered, and rightfully so. This is not a big tourism town. I’m sure the juxtaposed phrase that does describe it (borrowed from Champaign/Urbana, IL) is “it’s a nice place to live, but I wouldn’t want to visit there.” The town has all the amenities, including a wide variety of shops and restaurants, a number of good Marriott hotels (important when you vacation with your Marriott Rewards points), and some small day-trip attractions. Sadly some of them like the living history farm and the train museum are not open during spring break, and of course most outdoor sports are not happening when it’s in the mid 30s to mid 50s.

We spent Tuesday just getting here, and having some food at Carlos O’Kelley’s Navaho/Mexican restaurant (a chain we miss). Tuesday was spent at the Blank Park Zoo (well, part of Tuesday… it’s pretty small). The zoo is nice. The kids had a great time running around, feeding koi and ducks, petting a donkey, etc. Their otters were particularly frisky and playful, and we spent a lot of time with them. We spent a lot of time with the lions and tigers. Libby enjoyed her camera quite a lot. We hope to put up a picture gallery later. Tuesday night was pool night.

I am one of those guys who wants to use vacation to see and do all the things that work would normally preclude. I like going to attractions, like monuments, museums, scenic overlooks, hikes, air museums, air shows, festivals, whatever happens to be going on. My wife finds that pretty exhausting. My boys love “adventure” vacations. As a result of a work arrangement, our “adventures” have to be in Des Moines.

There is an advantage to Des Moines. Because you aren’t rushing from attraction to attraction, that you really can relax. Surprisingly enough, it’s a good way to enjoy a spring break. On Thursday, our targets are the mall, a nice book store, a lunch restaurant, and back to the hotel for another pool night.

Friday I have the first iteration retrospective with a client, and then I’m headed home on Saturday. It’s really not so bad.

This is why I think Larry Carlton is so cool.

This exists other places, but I wanted to be sure I can find it years from now, so here is the magic incantation to get .NET FitNesse working:

!define COMMAND_PATTERN {%m %p}
!define TEST_RUNNER {dotnet\FitServer.exe}
!define PATH_SEPARATOR {;}

Some other places:

• fitnesse.org
• Cory Foy
• AbLog

Well, if P2P denies artists their income to some questionable extent, does the RIAA solve this problem with their lawsuits against music consumers? We don’t think so.

I am tired of the church as an institution and religion as a nice add-on to a fulfilling life.

I’m in the early part of Oayk Kiyus Netzger’s Consuming Jesus (which has its own web page; a fact that somehow bothers me), subtitled Beyond Race and Class Division in a Consumer Church.

I have also been listening to more of the RZIM podcasts that have been stacking up. In one Ravi Zacharias sermon, he said something to the effect that Christ didn’t come to make good people of bad ones, but living people of dead ones. He went on to explain “alive to God” and “dead to God.” I don’t do his word justice here.

Today I crack open Metzger’s book, and on page 28 he recalls Boice’s concerns that the evangelical movement somehow lost the plot and has become preoccupied with “success, wonderful marriages, and nice children” in addition to being fixated on “numerical growth and money.” Here again, one wonders what the Christ had in mind. There’s nothing wrong with being a good person, or having a nice marriage, raising good children, or being successful and influential. Better yet if all these are true of you at the same time. But none of these are primary concern of the church, nor of the Christ.

People talk about the church today as an institution, an organization, or a charity. The church is a political force. The church is involved in what adults can and cannot do. The church helps you have a happy family (note that Christ never married and had no children and no home), it helps you be successful at work, it helps you raise your children with good hobbies and habits, it does charity work in the inner cities and outer jungles. Religious belief may help you feel good about yourself and about those around you. It might help you feel more emotionally stable, and maybe make it through the day. But that is all nothing, and less than nothing.

The church properly understood is a mechanism for bringing people into a relationship with the God, through His son Jesus Christ. It rightfully will cause people to be concerned for their behaviors and to change many of them. It rightfully will turn the concerns of people toward helping others near and far. It rightfully will provide better examples and alternative ways for Children to express themselves and grow. Following the wisdom in Proverbs may help one be successful. But those are side-effects only. A church may grow or stagnate, and in either case be within the will of God and its higher calling. Success, influence, power, and popularity are not the fruit of the spirit nor listed among the spiritual gifts. Life is seasonal. Sin (the mindset and emotional tendency) and sins (particular bad choices) may still ravage individuals and families. There may still be rough times and financial setbacks.

I suppose my point is that the Church is not TM or EST or a self-help organization. Religion, including the Christian religion, is not the answer to our problems. A more affluent church with happy, wrinkle-free, conflict-avoiding members won’t transform the world or save itself. Church is not an add-on to make ones life more productive, successful, or happy. It may have the opposite effect at times.

Christian religion is not an add-on. It is a change to the underlying axiom of our lives, a change to the system of thought and activity so that we no longer live for success, productivity, success, or political power but to ever deepen the connection with our God and to reflect His values and compassion to the world. Instead, through this relationship we must learn to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God. We seek first His kingdom and all else will follow, whether to happy families or lonely service.

I wish that this were better understood inside the church and outside. It would not make us more popular, I think, but would at least let us be more truly understood and help us more truly understand each other.

I’m now measuring mine in “Irish Lottery Winner”s per day. Today I allegedly won ten of them. No UK lotteries or British Lotteries and very few “help me smuggle my money into your country” ads for a change. Several male products. I guess that’s progress. It’s been worse.

When starting the tracd server for trac you need to be careful how you read the basic-auth or auth command line. It says to give the root directory of the track environment as the first argument. It does not mean the path of the root directory. If you give the wrong value it will run, but logging in won’t work. You won’t even get a login popup window.

I learned this the hard way on Friday, and some nice #trac irc folks helped me get it right. Admittedly, most people are installing trac in earnest and will install in apache instead of playing with tracd, but if you’re evaluating or running it in fun this tip might be valuable to you.

Tim

I get that Trac has supported (been “tightly integrated” with) subversion from day one, but I’ve had trouble determining just what supported or tightly integrated means in this context. I’ve been poking around the trac website and found some information about subversion there, but the page only hints at the nature of the integration. It tells you how to install svn, but you can get that info elsewhere. It gives a version history, but doesn’t tell what trac does to/with subversion. What is it?

To try to find out, I installed trac and svn on a Ubuntu linux laptop. What I found is that there are tabs on the trac site that let you browse subversion. Following the menues and links, I’ve not seen anything more yet. That’s hardly tightly integrated. I’ve spent several hours googling around the web for any evidence of “tightly integrated” but I haven’t seen it yet. I’m supposing that either I have a different definition of tightly integrated than most, or else the documentation is not well-gathered, or the good documentation has managed to elude me. Maybe I have to buy the book

To me, tightly integrated means that the two work together in a synergistic way, not merely that one can navigate to the other. In the case of issues and version control, I expect the issues to have clear associations with versions checked in, checked out, and/or merged. I don’t see evidence of this yet.

Since this integration isn’t self-evident, the next trick is to find a trac/svn site on the web and see what they’re doing with it.

Resources found:

• There is a trac/svn/buildbot online book.
• Yolinux provides some setup instructions.
• Webfaction has some instructive videos.
• NSaunders has some useful information.