A few Ofelia Pics

Ok, I wanted to post a few pictures of my kiddo:

She's just so friggin' cute!















She's trying to read like her daddy. Her mommy is also now reading too!















We had a little date to the library on Saturday--she was ready for the blustery weather:















Here she is, trying to distract her daddy while he's sick and working from home:

Musings on Palm Sunday

I had a thought this morning while at church.

Today's the day the Christian church remembers Christ's entrance into Jerusalem, the week before He was crucified by the Romans and rose again from the grave. His entrance into the city was marked by excitement, rejoicing, and (wait for it...) people waving palm branches ().

I remember past Palm Sundays in several churches, watching palm-branch-bearing children parade up and down the sanctuary aisles, while proud parents beamed from their pews, and music and songs rose up from the music team. All in all, they were somewhat emotionally-overcharged services ().

The situation in Jerusalem, however, is pretty hard to understand. During the Triumphal Entry (Palm Sunday), the crowds were ecstatic. They were energetic, excited, and generally overjoyed to welcome Jesus into their city. He entered the gates riding a donkey while they shouted praises (Mark 11).

Less than a week later, they chose a known murderer and insurrectionist over Christ, while shouting "Crucify Him!" (Mark 15). He was sentenced to death by the Romans in accordance with their collective will.

Why the difference?

From what I've learned in my short (and quite inadequate) studies, the nation of Israel (in Christ's day) were not looking for a Savior Who, in sacrificing Himself, would pay the penalty for the sins of God's chosen people. They were awaiting a conquering Messiah who would take his place on David's throne, cast out their Roman invaders, and set Israel in their rightful place. They wanted glorification for their nation-state, and freedom from the Roman government. Christ's entry into Jerusalem sparked off this "revolutionary" mentality. The people were, I believe, looking to Jesus as this Messiah, and their reaction, though ignorant, was based on a self-serving and inadequate understanding of His purpose.

So...with this in mind, why do churches have children parading up and down the aisles on this Sunday, waving palm branches in a [potentially] misguided remembrance of sinful ignorance? Is this a correct observance and remembrance of Christ fulfilling prophecy foretold hundreds of years before? Should we not, perhaps, spend this Sunday reflecting on how we, as fallen human beings, will try to change Christ's purpose into something other than the incredible, and most amazing gift we could ever be given? The nation of Israel wanted Him to free them from the Romans; He was sent to free us from our sin and bridge the chasm between us and the Holy Lord. Their purposes and the Will of the Lord were at odds, and it behoves us to remember this and reflect upon Who Christ IS, and not Who we want Him to be.

Edit: My good buddy Kyle brought up a few good points to consider. Here are some passages to think through as I further ponder the discussion (emphasis mine, obviously):

Luke 19:41-44: 'And when he drew near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, "Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. For the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation."'

This would, if nothing else, support the idea that the masses were praising out of expectation of something other than the truth. But...(again, emphasis mine)...

Luke 19:37-40: As he was drawing near—already on the way down the Mount of Olives—the whole multitude of his disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works that they had seen, saying, "Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!" And some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, "Teacher, rebuke your disciples." He answered, "I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out."

It seems, even though they were praising out of ignorance, they were still praising. This is certainly something to consider, and perhaps have a level of understanding for them. Heck, even the disciples didn't understand why Christ had come. They were likewise expecting Him to take His place on the throne of Israel as their conquering Messiah. But...

I think the primary concern I have is the re-enactment itself. I'm not questioning the act of worship itself, but rather the context in which it is taking place. We worship in truth because God has revealed it to us. They worshipped in ignorance because God had not yet revealed it to them.

Of course, I could be making a lot of nothing, and I certainly don't condemn those churches in the past... :-)

Flex, Emacs, Linux, and Irony

I don't like Adobe. Their software is overpriced, bloated, and often difficult to for me to use. I wouldn't be able to derive $999 of worth from Photoshop, though there are pieces in it I would enjoy working with. Flash has made a lot of bad websites worse, while helping the Browser community ignore some of their past glaring inadequacies in adhering to standardization.

This said, I love working with Flex.

This also said, I refuse to pay for Flex Builder. Though it's not a bad IDE (hey, it's built on Eclipse, my personal favorite), it has a few glaring flaws which I won't go into (for those curious, they lie mostly in the debugger and profiler). I also don't like how little support there is for Linux. I spend 95% of my time at home working in Linux, and I don't particularly appreciate their dumbed-down version of the IDE. It's lacking many of the features I do enjoy (e.g. their WYSIWYG for rapid prototyping), while making certain tasks harder. It took me several hours to get a project assembled, after which I still couldn't create anything but .as files (it kept complaining about the project association).

So, I decided to see if I could create a customized Emacs environment for Flex in Linux. I haven't been too worried about certain features (e.g. debugging, file browsing, and intense code-completion). My primary focus is on syntax-highlighting, template generation, and easy compilation. Obviously, I'm keeping my expectations low for now. Hey, it's either this or log into Windows and use FlashDevelop which is really good, but not good enough to log into Windows.

Anyway, I found two great .el files for integration with Emacs, providing some level of syntax-highlighting and code-completion. Both can be found here: EmacsWiki. The two files are as follows:
1. actionscript-mode: provides a custom ActionScript mode (as it says)
2. nxml-mode: a bundle of files which provide extensive XML support (including MXML)

I was also able to integrate a third .el file which provides customizable templates using hotkey-esque strings: snippet.el.

All of these are searchable on the Emacs Wiki.

Anyway, I got these libraries integrated into Emacs (I also setup ECB, but I haven't used it much yet) and used this great tutorial for creating a "Makefile" for a project: . After this, the coding was pretty easy.

I attached a few screenshots for the basic view of the Bible verse memorization tool I'm developing. It's rudimentary at best, but this mock-up should show a decent view.


This first shot is a simple login screen:


The second is the main GUI with a left-side Accordion control for displaying verse references associated with different Leitner piles (I call them "buckets").


Interestingly, I wrote a similar GUI using PyQT4, which took me about 3 days. The Flex GUI shown in the screenshots took about 20 minutes. I wrote it while watching a movie on TV with my wife, and I bet her I could have it pounded out before a commercial break.

Anyway, I have the data-retrieval code written in Python. I'd like to use the ESV Web Service site as the data-source. I haven't heard back from them on licensing. We'll see how that goes.

So, here's the irony. As I mentioned before, I'm terrible at memorizing verses. Hence, I'm writing this app. Unfortunately, the application is taking more of my time away from memorizing verses...

Go figure...

New Project in the Making

I'm starting a new project based on some concepts I learned in the flashcard program.

That program is still in beta testing. The basic feature set is ready, but I'm trying to decide if I should delay the 1.0 release to move everything into a database (rather than files).

Anyway, this one will be a memorization tool for Bible verses. I'm terrible at memorizing Scripture, and I really want to improve. Therefore, I'm working on a new utility which will help with my ability to remember.

Instead of randomization and probabilistic weighting for short-term learning (like the previous flashcard system), this one will feature a long-term memorization technique, much closer to the original Leitner algorithm. A GUI (web-based Flex, or desktop AIR, or desktop QT) will be used to select and display verses in a list, associated with a user. The verses being displayed will be weighted according to the user's ability to remember and repeat them. As users are better able to remember, they'll see them less often every day. I have some investigation to do regarding how to do the time calculations (e.g. I guessed a verse right, when should I be asked again), but that's another post altogether.

Anyway, it will be interesting to see how it goes.

Flex and RIA development

I had a project at work to complete. Our automated testing infrastructure has aged beyond the point of usability, and no money has existed for upgrading to a more recent version, or investing in a different system for automated and manual test deployment, tracking, and maintaining.

One of my coworkers began (several years ago) piecing together a web-based automation utility which would allow us to quickly configure and execute test servers with automated tests. The solution was, conceptually, a combination of Javascript, CSS, and Ajax, in which users could add machines to a table, drag&drop test configurations to each machine, edit the test configurations (e.g. modify the command-line parameters passed to each test), and execute the overall config by sending it to the test automation system as a single CSV string.

His work lasted about 3 months, and resulted in the drag&drop interface.

Shortly after this, another coworker extended upon this work by adding the test config storage and retrieval via Ajax. Users could [in theory] add tests to each machine, edit their respective parameters, and execute said tests. They could also quickly create test configurations which would map directly to their respective automated tests in the version control repository.

The result was pretty good, but fell short in several ways: Ajax calls only worked 70% of the time, resulting in failures to execute tests, save configurations, and retrieve various pieces of information. Each test config was stored as a Javascript file on the web server, which required users to understand Javascript syntax if they wanted to manually add or edit existing configs. It also refused to work in IE.

His work lasted several months as well before he moved on to bigger and better things. I inherited it and took on the work to make it work more consistently with our test infrastructure. This lasted for about 3 months on the system before I decided to investigate other solutions.

Enter Flex.

The original interface put together was quite sound: dragging and dropping test configs to various machines is a great idea, though difficult to implement. I wanted to keep the use model of the system, but move away from pure Javascript.

After hearing some buzz regarding Flex around the office, I decided to take a look and see if it could offer a better solution.

Frankly, I was amazed. Within 3 weeks of starting, and without any prior exposure to Flex and ActionScript, I had completely reproduced all interface functionality, and even added several extensions. Rather than relying on Javascript for test configurations, I was able to introduce XML (a more logical choice, in my opinion) for configuration storage and retrieval. Relying on the Flash player resolved the issues between IE and Firefox (and other browsers which support the issues with storing and retrieving information from the web server.

In short, Flex is a fantastic solution for developing "Rich Internet Applications." The presence of a standardized API (*cough -- javascript!*) and a full-fledged object-oriented language quickly and easily resolved all issues I had with prior implementations.

In essence, though I'm impressed with the usability and functionality of Javascript and CSS, for web apps I'm likely going to stick with Flex and potentially Cappuccino if it's as cool as it looks.

Flashcards Project Status

For those of you who don't know, I've been working on a new project for the past several months. My initial desire was to create a simple little app which would help me learn Python, and would also facilitate my learning of Classical Greek endings. Verb and noun endings in Greek are vitally important to understand, and there's so bloody many, I felt a learning application would be a fun project.

The last 4 months of coding have been some of the most fun I've had.

Though the project is still in its infancy, and though I'm struggling with massive amounts of scope creep, I have an "alpha" which is almost ready to be released.

Here are the initial requirements/specifications:
1. The system will provide "questions" and allow users to provide "answers"
2. The system will check the user's response and either accept it as a match, or reject it
3. The "questions" posted by the system will initially be in the form of Classical Greek verbs, nouns, or prepositions. Answers will be posted in English.
4. Verbs and Nouns can be put together by the system as a "cross product" of two sets: roots and endings. In other words, the system should be able to take a list of roots and apply endings to each one.
4a. In addition to this, the system should be able to discern the correct answer
5. The system will use Leitner's System (or a modified version) for "learning" which words the user knows and which ones they don't.
5a. The system will provide "questions" for those less-known words more often than those of well-known words
5bi. The system should have a means for accessing less-known words more often than well-known words (see point 8b)
6. The system will provide a means of "hinting" at the answer
6a. The hint system should be configurable
7. The system will provide statistics for the learner to gauge their progress
7b. The system should output information regarding the number of successes, failures, and hints posted or requested by the user
8. The system will allow the user to modify the underlying details of the Leitner Algorithm while currently engaged with the application
8a. The user should be able to modify the number of "piles" (called "buckets") in which the cards are distributed, within the range of '1' or '10' buckets
8b. The user should be able to modify the means in which the buckets are distributed (e.g. 30% of the time, the system will pull cards from the least-known bucket, 5% of the time it will pull from the well-known bucket)
9. The system should use a QT-based GUI for viewing
10. The system should be able to preserve the current state of user-execution
10a. The system should allow the user to save/restore the current state whenever they desire
11. The system should be configurable via XML configuration files, allowing users to "hot-swap" different card-input algorithms
12. The system will provide detailed documentation for use, administration, and flashcard development.
13. The system will host 'hotkeys' for easier navigation

These are the basic requirements. All but 10 and 11 are pretty much finished, though there are a number of defects and design issues which need to be addressed.

One requirement I'd really like to investigate and get working is #11. My buddy Bump suggested this: apparently, the current Flashcard systems don't have very well abstracted algorithms which can be swapped out. I'm not sure what this will mean, but it sounds interesting and fun.

In the meantime, here are some screenshots of the GUI in action. In order they are:
I. The main GUI and dialog for choosing the card "set"
II. The main flashcard GUI -- note the Unicode characters for the Greek words and the statistics in the lower left corner
III. Main flashcard GUI -- posted failure when user guess is incorrect
IV. Main flashcard GUI -- posted hint when user requests
V. Main flashcard GUI -- posted success when user guess is correct
VI. Main Algorithm Admin GUI -- note the Leitner and Hint system administration options

Brief Update

We just returned from SD yesterday. It was a great trip, albeit pretty short. We flew out from Denver on Tuesday morning and arrived in Sioux Falls (about 45 miles northeast of Freeman) around 1 in the afternoon. All in all, the flight was ok. Our departure was an hour late; apparently, the plane was falling apart and they needed to piece it back together. Such things do not instill massive amounts of reassurance in those of us who are a bit trepidatious when it comes to flying.

We stayed with Jenn's family over the duration. Her family on both sides visited over lunch on the 31st and 1st. I didn't spend much time with her mother's side: it was only the women, and I had the opportunity to have lunch with her younger brother and father. It was a worthy trade off.

We left yesterday morning at 11 and arrived here at 12:30pm. Ofelia did very well throughout the entire trip. The first time she fussed during travel since Tuesday was yesterday as the plane was descending. Other than that, we could tell she enjoyed the adventure immensely. She made friends with people all over the airport and in the plane, her smiles inspiring others everywhere she went. I'm amazed at how much happiness she seems to bring to those around her. She's very friendly, and has a way of endearing herself to everyone. While we were sitting on the plane waiting to take off, she kept peering through the gaps in between our seats, giggling, squeaking, and smiling at the elderly couple behind us. She did the same for several people behind and next to us as well. It was cute, and very fun to watch.

Of course, I was primarily focusing on not freaking out over being 30,000 feet in the air, but that's another tale for another time.

She was also baptized a week ago tomorrow. The ceremony was held in a local Confessional Lutheran Church (Missouri Synod) and we've established a nice relationship with the lead pastor. I don't think the liturgical service is for us, per se, and we have disagreements with Lutheran doctrine, but it was an interesting exposure to a historical side of the Christian church which we hadn't seen prior.

That's all for now.