The Best Question Ever Pt. 2

See part 1.

How is care, quality, or value pivotal to the new and old covenants? Stick with me, I’ll get to that. For now I’d like to expound a bit more on quality.

The Best Question Ever is actually, "what is the wise thing to do?" Oops, I hope I didn’t spoil it for you. It fits the admonition to carefully live by making wise decisions. Andy Stanley tells us we should ask this question in nearly every situation.

OK, that sounds a little boring given how much we’ve hyped it up. That’s all?

Yes, but it really is revolutionary.

The whole idea comes down to aiming for high
quality (i.e. caring about what you do) vs. aiming for low quality
(i.e. not caring about what you do). Making the wise choice is nearly synonymous with striving for excellence. Asking that question in all situations continually reminds us to make high quality decisions.

B.C. (Before Christ) there was law. The old covenant simply required the following of the law, which was a
finite, static target. it was similar to always looking for how close
you can get without actually sinning. It’s like trying to mow the lawn while looking down at the line you made on your last pass.

The new covenant is a striving after Christ-likeness. It is a dynamic,
infinitely greater target to strive for. It is true excellence. It is like mowing the lawn while looking toward the goal. The line is always straigher when you watch the goal, not the ground.

It’s a paradigm shift.

To be continued…

OOo on OSX

Pete and I installed OpenOffice.org on a Mac last night.

Pete has been using OpenOffice for a while now, but this was our first Tiger install. We had some difficulty. It turns out that the version of X11 that installs from OpenOffice, or that you can download from the Apple website does not work correctly in Tiger.

After some Googling, I discovered that Apple is now including X11 on the install DVD. If only I had known that a few hours earlier! After a very simple install of X11 from the DVD, OpenOffice was up and running.

The Best Question Ever

Our usual thinking about the universe is based on subject-object metaphysics. Everything is either a subject or an object. The subject observes or acts upon the objects. Thus we get the terms subjective and objective, methodological and substantive, or mind and matter. This concept is based in Greek philosophy – primarily Aristotle.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance changed that view for me. The author, Robert Pirsig, posits that the foundation of the universe is not subjects and objects but quality. Quality brings about the relationship between subjects and objects. Quality is more fundamental than substance or method. Values (i.e. quality) are the relationships between subjects and objects and are the basic building blocks of the universe.

Care is the flip side of quality. Care is a measure of how much we value something or how high its quality is.

At Crossroads, we are currently doing a series on The Best Question Ever by Andy Stanley. In it he declares that we should take care to live good lives by making wise decisions. The key here is the word care.

I believe this concept is a fulcrum between the old and new covenants.

To be continued…

Computer Language Shootout

Link: The Computer Language Shootout Benchmarks.

This is a really fun site to play with. I was of course interested in how Perl stacks up against other languages in terms of performance. In general, Perl performed better than other popular dynamic scripting languages including PHP, Python, and Ruby. However, it loses to the static languages such as C# (in Mono) and Java. C# and Java likewise lose to binary compiled languages like C and C++.

Unfortunately there were no benchmarks for IronPython running on the .Net CLR. IronPython is known to perform better than standard Python. It will also be interesting to see how these dynamic languages will perform using Parrot, which is a virtual machine specifically designed for dynamic languages.

One must also take into account the fact that developing in Perl, Python, Ruby or PHP is easier than in the more rigid static languages. You are trading off developer time for performance. Like it or not, developer time is usually more expensive than new hardware.

Fellowship One Live

Technically we have been live with Fellowship One (F1) now for about a week. I say "technically" because it is actually a gradual process. Our official church database is now F1, but we are still using my old check-in system, and I am still working on converting ministry information from our old system.

I actually sent my first email from F1 this week to my team. I’ve been exploring some of the more sophisticated features of F1 and see that there is a lot of power and flexibility there. I haven’t even started to look at interfacing with our website yet.

While I’ve said this before, I can see more and more that F1 is going to revolutionize how Crossroads operates.

Building a New Machine Pt. 3

I finally got my second processor working. I ended up installing 32-bit Ubuntu with the K7 SMP kernel. This machine rocks!

I re-rendered the city scene from our Kid Crossing themes as a rough benchmark. On my previous system with an Athlon XP 2100+ and 1GB of memory, it took 11-12 hours to render. I started the render at home at 5:45am and it was done by the time I got to work at 7:50am.

Yowsers!

UPDATE: a friend wondered if maybe the speed difference was due to insufficient memory in the older machine. I'm quite certain that 1GB memory was more than adequate for that particular render.

Fellowship One Blog

Fellowship Tech now has a blog.

Also, Stuart Cowen has started Adventures with Fellowship One.

Chris Tomlin

I got a strange email yesterday from Shari. It said, meet me at Busch’s (a grocery store) in Clinton at 4:30. No Questions.

Wow, what could this be all about?

Later that afternoon I was filling out my weekly reports and looking at my calendar and saw an item on Shari’s ical calendar (she uses Scheduleworld) that clued me in. It said "Chris Tomlin." Poor Shari, she had worked very hard to keep it all a secret and I had inadvertently discovered it. It was still a very nice surprise.

At any rate, we stopped at Ruby Tuesday’s on the way to the concert at Northridge Church. The concert was unbelievable, perhaps even Indescribable. One of the best Christian concerts I have ever been to.

Building a New Machine Pt. 2

Here's my son Micah with my previous system all ready for surgery. In front you'll see my trusty anti-static bag from ICC. I new the moment I walked into Granger Community Church and got handed my bag of materials that the bag would come in handy someday. You'll also notice my trusty Leatherman tool next to it.

This was better than Christmas!

Micah was pretty fascinated with the whole procedure and while he did not stay for the whole operation, he kept popping in from time to time to see how things were going and offer his assistance. He particularly wanted to see how the processor went onto the motherboard and how the motherboard went into the case.

Next you'll see the emptied case with the new motherboard and processor ready to be inserted. The new power-supply has really nice cabling and I ordered some really long IDE cables for my optical drives so I could move them to the top of the case.

It was amazingly easy to put everything together. I loved the new fan/heatsink/CPU interface. I am always afraid I'm going to damage something when I install that assembly and this new mechanism made things easy. Everything clips into place and then you simply move a little lever and everything smoothly clamps down and latches. Very nice.

Finally, everything was put together. I plugged in the monitor, keyboard, and mouse and booted it up into the BIOS flash disk I mentioned previously. The flash worked wonderfully (I'm always afraid to do this) and all was well. I then proceeded to install Ubuntu Linux. That went amazingly fast. I then tried to install the SMP (symmetric multi-processing) kernel and I had a kernel panic upon boot. I had to move back to the default kernel.

At this point everything is operational except the 2^nd processor. I've heard several successful tales of 64-bit Linux working on an X2 processor with this very motherboard, but it is apparently not to be for me. I don't know if it is a BIOS problem or a Linux kernel compilation issue (the working stories referred to Fedora not Ubuntu). I'm planning to re-install with the 32-bit version of Ubuntu and see if this solves the problem. If it doesn't I'll blame DFI. It is a fairly new board after all.

In addition, Ubuntu 64-bit doesn't really seem to be ready for desktop use. Macromedia has no 64-bit version of Flash player, and the software repositories seem to be a bit slimmer than what I'm used to. I think I'll stick with 32-bits for another 6 months. I'll partition the drive with a separate system partition and user partition so a later upgrade will be easy.

I took my old 60GB Western Digital drive and put it into an external USB case. This seemed to work quite well for a while. After I tried re-formatting it, it is not working so well – reads are OK but writes are painfully slow. I'm not impressed with the quality of the case (including circuitry) and so I may end up sending that back. Of course it was only $25. I'll try reformatting while directly connected to the motherboard and see if that solves the problem. I also tried formatting it from my son's WinXP machine and it had the same problem.

Building a new Machine

Pete suggested I should take pictures and blog about this. So here I go… no pictures yet.

I’m gutting my current home system and upgrading it. It was originally only going to be an upgrade, but it’s turning into a nearly complete system build. I’m reusing the case and CD, DVD, and floppy drives. That’s it.

I ordered the following parts from Newegg. Their service is fast and their prices are good. They have EVERYTHING.

• AOpen NVidia 6600 w/128MB
• Maxtor 300GB SATA drive
• DFI NF4-DAGF motherboard
• AMD Athlon64 X2 3800+ dual-core processor
• Patriot 2G (2*1GB) with CAS2
• OPTI 980W UPS
• misc cords and stuff

The first order of business was to download Ubuntu 5.10 for AMD64. BitTorrent rules. I figured that on release day downloading it would be a nightmare, but with BitTorrent it took about 1 hour.

The next step was to download the updated BIOS for this motherboard to support the dual-core Athlon. Creating a BIOS flash CD without a copy of DOS or something was not exactly intuitive. I found some handy dandy instructions on how to do it. I booted it up on my son’s WinXP machine and it works. I was actually running DOS.

After I got my old machine all apart I realized that my power supply was not going to work out. For some reason I had thought it was a 400W supply, but it was only 300W with a 20-pin connector. I need a minimum of 400W and 24-pins. Showstopper!!! I’m going to pop into a local store this afternoon and grab an Antec Truepower II 480W power supply. My poor machine is lying home on the floor naked and alone… well, I did cover it up so it’s not naked.

I’m really anxious to try rendering the city scene from our Kid Crossing Themes. It’ll be an interesting benchmark.

More to come…

When to use Open Source

I recently read the cover article in the September/October issue of Enterprise Open Source Journal (I get the paper copy). This article had the best explanation I’ve ever read of when to choose open source (OS) vs when to choose commercial software. It goes something like…

OS software quality is semi-proportional to the number of developers on a project. The number of developers is semi-proportional to the number of people who want to use a given piece of software.

Most high quality OS software is software that a lot of people use. Examples of this are operating systems, web servers, databases, office tools, and browsers. Because there are many companies and individuals using this software, there will be a relatively large number of contributions to the software and it will tend to exceed the quality of similar commercial software.

The converse holds as well. On very specialized projects, there are far fewer developers and so the quality lacks. Prime examples of commercial products that have no OS competition are church management software like FellowshipOne and church presentation software like Mediashout.

The lessons to be learned are:

• Open source is a good foundation upon which to build. It provides a good infrastructure and base.
• There will always be a need for commercial software to provide specialized tools.

Apt

I just upgraded my system. No need for a CD. I started up a simple application, let it run, and went back to work.

When it was done I was running the next version of Ubuntu Linux. I could have kept working, but I rebooted so I would get the updated kernel. It came up cleanly and I logged in.

All that is thanks to a great little tool called apt.

With very little work all my installed applications have been updated, including OpenOffice2, Gnome 2.12.1, and numerous others.

Giant Mushroom

What you see here is the biggest mushroom I have ever seen in my life. A co-worker brought it in to work and had found it in her neighbor's yard. She said that there were 4 of them but this was the largest. She said it is a puff-ball.

According to another co-worker, this is not abnormal. They are all over the place. Wow! My friend Matt looked it up in the Guinness Book of World Records and the worlds largest mushroom is:

A fungus growing in the Malheur National Forest in the Blue Mountains of Eastern Oregon covers an area equivalent to around 1,220 soccer fields. The species of fungus (Armillaria ostoyae) is usually known as the honey mushroom.

UPDATE: a co-worker who is knowledgable about these things sliced, breaded, and fried one of these things up for all to try. She said they were essentially tasteless, but with the breading, oil, salt, and bread, it was great!

Church Management Tools

Jason Mattson has some good things to say about Church Community Builder. I’m glad to see there is competition for FellowshipOne in the area of web-based church management. At the time we were shopping, CCB did not have a child check-in system, which we required, so our only choice was FellowshipOne.

I also recently heard some good things about EzRA at ICC.

Just out of curiosity, I googled for other web based church management tools and discovered 2 more I wasn’t aware of and weren’t easily findable when we were shopping.

At this point I will give FellowshipOne 2 thumbs up (since I’ve only got 2). But I certainly won’t complain about cost-lowering competition! It is my opinion that the market for web-based church management tools has a lot of room for growth.

MS Office 12

Microsoft has radically changed the user interface for Office in version 12.

I won’t debate whether this UI is better or worse than the previous interface. What I will observe is that many people have argued against OpenOffice.org because of the fact that it is different than MS Office. The argument goes something like, "it would cost more to train people on OpenOffice than you would save in licensing costs."

Well, that very argument now applies in the other direction. It will cost more to train people on MS Office 12 than OpenOffice. OpenOffice is much closer to what people are used to than is MS Office 12.

Sounds like a no-brainer to me.

F1 Check-in

We’ve been having difficulty deciding how to implement check-in. As regular readers know, we’re transitioning from a home-grown check-in system with bar-coded photo-ids. The original design was established by the Kid Crossing leadership team and myself based on what we thought would be most secure and parent-friendly. There was some reluctance to move to a different way of doing things.

Over the last week, based on their understanding of the F1 security system and the possibility of moving to the use of driver’s licenses (most of which have bar-codes) and/or pre-printed key-chain-style bar-code tags, the Kid Crossing team and myself decided to discontinue use of the plastic id cards we have been using.

In order to have continued with our current system I would have had to develop custom card printing software to interface with Fellowship One, extract user information, and print an id. I think it was doable, but I’m really glad I don’t have to do it. In addition we won’t have to take photos anymore or worry about the card printer getting jammed or hosed.

Given the security codes that F1 prints on child stickers, I feel confident that security will be as good or better than what we have now. things will be more convenient for me, my team, the parents, and everyone else.

My previously expressed frustration with F1 was in large part due to my attempt to ascertain the do-ability of this project and now that concern has been taken out of my hands. Yes, it would have been nice if F1 would have done exactly what we had wanted, but in the end, I think things actually turned out for the best. Our system has been simplified and I feel confident that F1 will be an improvement.

I will be extracting my data from the check-in system for the last time tonight and handing it over to FellowshipTech to do our final data conversion. As soon as that takes place we will be live with FellowshipOne. We’ll continue checking in with the old system until we move to F1 check-in in November. Until then all new registrations are closed. We’ll be using a paper process for those.

Pete Bishop

I have identified 3 key attributes of a leader. I’ve identified these because I work with a man who embodies these attributes. His name is Pete Bishop.

Pete is the pastor/director of technology at Crossroads. In that position, he is the person I most often work with in my role as an IT person at Crossroads. I can honestly say that I’ve never met anyone as Christian as Pete.

Pete is the most tactful person I know. He knows how to criticize something you’ve done without it sounding like criticism. When he’s done you’ll feel as though you’ve already done the greatest work in the world and be pumped to make the changes in it that will make it even better than the greatest work in the world.

Pete has a servant’s heart. He is the most selfless person I know. He’d give you the shirt off his back if he thought you needed it. He spends countless untold hours pouring himself into the mission of the church. He has a true heart to reach the thousands of people who don’t know Christ.

While I continually struggle with getting lost in the technology, Pete’s constant focus is the people we’re here to help reach. He’s a geek as much as the rest of us, but he never loses sight of our real purpose.

Pete is the best leader I’ve ever known.

Toon Shaders

I had a whole slew of blog post ideas after ICC, but got really busy with this project.

These graphics are banners for our new Kid Crossing themes. They're designed to fit in with the whole Cross"road"s theme – with life and your Christian walk being a journey. The younger kids are more rural while the older kids progress to a more urban setting. This will eventually become an environment in which KC the Cone and his pals live. The team effort in the project was cool. There was a lot of discussion and different ideas from several different teams that went into the whole concept.

The banners will be plotted on our large format plotter at about 5 feet high and 3 feet wide. The final tif images are 150dpi.

The beauty is that with Blender and toon shaders, I don't actually have to be able to draw to make these graphics. It's more like using a CAD program and then becoming a photographer. I build a scene and then decide where to put the camera. Blender draws the scene for you. The toon shaders give it the flat-shaded, cartoon-like look.

The city scene took about 12 hours to render on an Athlon XP 2100+. This was because the scene has many more polygons than the others and because I used ray-traced shadows. Without ray-tracing, it takes about 10 minutes, but ray-traced shadows just look way cooler.

F1’s Biggest Strength

At the Innovative Church Conference I was finally able to meet some Fellowship Tech (FT) people face to face and even got to talk to Jeff Hook, the company's president, on the phone. (picture Chris Wood, Bill Whitmore, Jeff Pelletier – our sales rep, myself and Pete Bishop – hopefully in the right order).

A while back I posted The Money is in the Talent in relation to open-source software. This principal applies to Fellowship One in a big way.

Every interaction I've ever had with an FT person has been enjoyable and productive. My hat also goes off to Lance Dacy (data conversion specialist) and Brad Merkle (our project manager) for doing an excellent job. Every FT person I've interacted with is truly dedicated and will bend over backward to make things happen for you. And a big thanks to Jeff Hook for being willing to participate on this blog.

No, the product is not perfect – but no product is. There will be things that don't work quite the way you want them to, but the important thing is the relationship with the people who develop and manage the software/service. At this point I feel confident that Crossroads and Fellowship Tech are building a quality relationship that will last into the foreseeable future.