Lawn Ornaments

Somebody (2 somebodies actually) decorated our Senior Pastor's yard while he was at the C3 conference.

Gee, I wonder who that could have been? I know at least one of them has a blog…

Checkin Live!

Today was Crossroads first day with Fellowship One (F1) check-in live.

Doug Miller and his wife Kay built these fabulous enclosures after looking at photos of kiosks at Granger Community Church. He built 5 of these units and Kay did the finish work. We're very proud of these kiosks and blown away with the quality of work this couple is capable of. A big thanks to Doug and Kay.

We started our first Sunday with two units and only checked in people who had already been using our previous check-in system. F1 was very responsive and easy to use. Our volunteers learned the system on the job. Jason (the guy in red) and I were there to train people and make sure everything ran smoothly.

Next week we will roll out two more of these stations and the fifth the following week.

Home Speaker Repair

My son Micah is a very fine fellow, but as all kids, has a knack for causing frustration in a parent. I’m fairly picky about my speakers and while the kids were downstairs watching a movie, Micah managed to push in one of the driver domes (which is pretty delicate). I asked him why he did it and he said, "because I wanted to." Arrrgggh!

Well, I tried pulling it back out with masking tape and then duct tape to no avail. I was considering opening the cabinet to see if I could pop it out from behind, but had one last idea – the vacuum. I was afraid that it would pop out too violently and damage the paper, but didn’t have much other hope. Sure enough, it worked. There is now a very small bulge in the dome in one spot, but it’s mostly back to normal.

A listening test revealed that the sound quality is not noticeably reduced. In a way this is too bad because I’ve been eyeing a pair Magnepans. Now I don’t have an excuse…

Installing Web Servers

My latest Sound and Video Contractor article
- IT Trends: Web Servers – is now available online.

2D Animation

I just came across Synfig. It appears to be a fairly complete open source 2D animation tool. I’d love to try it, but my time would be better spent developing my Blender skills. It might be a good thing for another Crossroads artist to investigate though…

Fellowship One Firefox Extension

At my day job I’ve recently been learning how to make Firefox extensions. So… I thought I would try my hand at making an extension for Fellowship One.

I have only tested this extension in Firefox 1.5. At present, all it does is make the address in the Individual View into a link to Google Maps. If people find this type of thing useful, I may consider further development and additional features.

Feedback is appreciated.

Install F1 Firefox Extension

Fellowship One Check-in

This Sunday we are planning to begin using Fellowship One (F1) check-in in production. We’ve been using my homegrown check-in system for over a year now.

There was a lot of work to be done before this could happen. A super volunteer – Doug Miller – has built some cabinets based on the design Granger Community Church used. Pictures to come later.

We’ve also been waiting for our wireless network. Since we rent our facility, the network guy for the facility had to do the wiring. We’re all crossing our fingers that it will be ready for this weekend.

We’ve been using F1 as our official church management tool now for several months. This will be another step in our transition to F1. Changing church management systems is a very large task (through no fault of Fellowship Technologies). There is still a lot of work to be done in getting ministry information current and getting people to use the system. No matter how good the tool is, it is of no use if you don’t use it properly – and that takes time and effort.

We had hoped to have self-service kiosks as we had before. After doing some more work with the check-in system, we have decided to man our kiosks with volunteers. The software is simply not designed with self-service in mind. There is a bar-code rapid check-in feature that would make self-service possible, but it is not capable of doing family check-in. It is useful only in cases of individual check-in. Maybe this is something Fellowship Tech will consider adding in the future.

I also noticed that the Fellowship One portal seemed to be very slow on Sunday morning. I don’t know if 1. this is normal, 2. they were having problems, or 3. the network between here and there was slow. Time will tell.

WMF Vulnerability a Deliberate Backdoor?

The folks over at Gibson Research (the people who make SpinRight) have a regular podcast called Security Now! Episode 22 has an interesting article on the WMF vulnerability. Here’s a snippet:

…So it sounds like – and I really want to be careful here
because this is a very serious accusation. It sounds like this was done
on purpose by Microsoft or somebody at Microsoft. It sounds like it was
accidentally discovered. Microsoft reacted and has pulled it out now.

Friday Night

 

It's Friday night and Shari has a herd of scrapbookers in the living room. The kids have friends over and so are occupied. I'm sitting at my computer with my new Sennheiser's listening to Missy Higgins. What a perfect time to play with Blender.

I've been curious about how hair would animate, so this is an experiment I'll try before doing something more sophisticated. I'm generating about 2000 hair strands, and using one curve guide with soft-body dynamics applied to the single curve guide. The initial bounce is due to gravity forcing the hair into a stable state. The following sway is due to the rotation of the curve guide (kinda like turning your head).

I set it to render and put the kids to bed. Then I go downstairs and watch Hero.

What a great Friday evening.

UPDATE (5-3-2006): I've had repeated requests for more information on how I did this. The easiest way to answer that is to provide the hairAnim.blend file for your amusement. More information can be had on the Blenderartists thread on this topic.

Kid Crossing Banner

We're developing a new banner for the preschool area of Kid Crossing. We're basing it on the previous theme, but going with a wide 6ft by 3ft banner. This was created in Blender by simply moving some of the existing objects around in the scene and repositioning the camera. There are a couple additions such as the school and zoo. Here's the latest prototype.

Headphones

This seems a little off topic, but most of us IT dudes like to listen to music, so appropriate.

My wife bought me a pair of Sony wireless headphones for Christmas. After using them for about 2 days, I took them back. The reception was terrible. I would walk from my computer room to my living room (about 15ft) and would get horrible hiss. I ended up buying a pair of Sennheiser RS120’s. The price is within a few dollars of the Sonys, but the reception and sound quality is night and day different.

I’ve been a big fan of the Grado SR60’s since I bought them 5 or 6 years ago but I like the freedom of wireless. I’m using the Grado’s at work and the Sennheisers at home now. Sound-wise, I’ll still have to give the nod to the Grados, but the Sennheisers are no slouch. The Grados have a stronger low-end and a warmer quality, which makes them a little less tiring to listen to over long periods of time. The Sennheisers are more analytical and up-front, maybe even a little bright, but acurate and spacious.

Both are very nice. If you’re tied to a desk then I’d say go with the Grados, but if you need to move around, the Sennheisers are a great alternative.

Gimp

I’ve been a Gimp user for over 5 years now and it has gone through many major changes in those 5 years.

I’m forever hearing complaints about the Gimp’s user interface. I can’t count how many Slashdot (and no, I’m not a regular Slashdot reader) threads I’ve read bashing Gimp’s user interface. The funny thing is I actually like Gimp’s interface. Maybe it’s just because I’ve been using it for 5 years and know it really well, but I liked it when I first tried it. Or is it because it has Unix/Linux roots and doesn’t feel Windows-like to the Windows users?

Have you tried the Gimp? If you didn’t like it, why?

Look-ahead Assertions

I just discovered a cool thing called look-ahead assertions.

In a Perl regular expression (the Perl programmer’s bread and butter), it is possible to look ahead without actually including the sought value in the pattern match. This makes parsing tagged files that do not have end delimiters for records much easier.

Example: If I have a file with records delimited by "foo:". I can do the following:

my $file = get ‘http://www.foo.com/file’;
while( my ($record) = $file =~ /(foo:.*?)(?=foo:)/gs ){
    # process each $record here…
}

So (?=foo) does the look-ahead assertion.

Very cool.

Digital Lighting and Rendering

I’m currently reading Digital Light and Rendering by Jeremy Birn. While the book is targeted at CG artists, it is full of great information for anyone doing any kind media work. I would recommend it to anyone doing work in video production, stage lighting, or photography. While everything is looked at from the perspective of a CG artist who has complete control over everything, all will benefit.

The book is well written and organized. Earlier chapters will be more useful to non-CG artists as they cover more general things such as 3-point lighting, light colors, throw patterns (including such things as gobos and cookies), attenuation, image composition, etc. Later chapters get into more CG oriented information such as global illumination, ray-tracing, etc. The book is full of beautiful full-color renderings and illustrations.

The book is written to be useful for people using a variety of 3D applications, not for a specific program such as Lightwave or Maya. It requires you to have a basic understanding of whatever application you are using. This is foundational knowledge that is indispensable to any 3D artist.

Windows WMF exploit

Link: The Windows WMF exploit could be the last wake up call Microsoft and others get

An ill wind is blowing near Microsoft right now. It’s come and
passed before, but this time seems different. I’m starting to get a lot
of clients asking about this "Linux stuff." And I’m not even talking
about the corporations trying to save money on software; I’m talking
about individuals trying to save their home computers…

Blender 2.40

Over the Christmas break I got to play around a bit with the new Blender 2.40. In addition to the new hair rendering features I've been playing with, it also has a ton of other really cool new stuff including solid body physics improvements. I watched a demo of a domino trail and marbles falling through a system of funnels. This is very cool.

I managed to do a bit more work on my female head (and even got a Christmas present addressed to me from "the heads"). Here's the latest and greatest. It's not photo-realistic yet, but maybe someday. And to think, I remember when she was just a cube.

Foundations

I guess I must be old school.

When I was in school getting my Computer Science degree, I learned all the layers of the stack. While I started out programming in C, I also managed to wire up circuits, write machine code, assembly code, implement data structures, tweak operating system code, write shell scripts, administer systems, etc.

While I don’t use much of the stuff on the lower levels anymore, I still understand the basic architecture of a computer from the ground all the way up to the top. I may be specialized, but the foundation is there. Knowing what happens underneath often makes dealing with the stuff on top easier, more efficient, and more understandable.

It seems to me that students coming out of school these days are missing some of the bottom layers. While it can be argued that a web developer doesn’t need to know what an AND gate does, I believe that it actually does have an indirect benefit to have a bird’s eye, whole picture view from top to bottom.

Likewise, I’m concerned about the teaching of new Christians. New Christians are always introduced to the Gospel – which is definitely key – but often that is it. At the most they are given an introduction to the New Testament and told to read their Bibles. All too often the Old Testament is neglected.

Being a former Seventh-day Adventist, I learned more than the average church goer about the Old Testament – just as my Computer Science teachers made sure I had a good foundational knowledge of computer architecture. While I have much to complain about in regard to the Seventh-day Adventist Church, this is one area where I believe mainstream churches can learn from the SDAs. While understanding the Old Testament is not a requirement for salvation, it is fundamental to seeing the big picture of God’s plan.

Neglect of foundational knowledge is an increasing trend in America. It is all part of the dumbing down of America.

Christmas and the Sabbath

Did you have church on Christmas Sunday 2005?

I am a former Seventh-day Adventist (SDA), so I believe I have a unique perspective on the "appropriate" day on which to worship.

A cornerstone of Seventh-day Adventist doctrine is the teaching that the correct day on which to worship is the seventh day – in other words Saturday (actually from Sun-set Friday to Sun-set Saturday). This is based on the belief that the 10 commandments of Exodus 20 not only still apply today, but apply to gentiles as well as Jews. A study of scripture will reveal that:

• The 10 commandments were given to Israel and no-one else.
• The old law and everything it included was fulfilled at the cross.
• We are not under the old covenant, but the new covenant.

A detailed analysis of these issues is beyond the scope of this blog. Those who disagree with these points are setting themselves up to be easily conquered by the Seventh-day Adventist’s arguments in regard to the Sabbath. If one is to strictly follow the 10 commandments, then one must keep the Sabbath on Saturday – the 7th day – in strict accordance with the Old Covenant law. If one insists upon adhering to the 10 commandments, then one must eventually admit that worshiping on Sunday is against the 4^th commandment.

Legalism is a slippery slope. One thing leads to another and before you know it you’re not eating meat, not wearing jewelry and looking down upon the rest of the world that does. And it progresses further from there. I speak from experience.

One of the main reasons I left the Seventh-day Adventist church was this type of legalism and inflexibility. If my exodus from the Seventh-day Adventist church tought me nothing else, it is that there is no "one true day of worship."

Hebrews 4:4-7 says:

For He has said
somewhere concerning the seventh {day:} "AND GOD RESTED ON THE
SEVENTH DAY FROM ALL HIS WORKS "; and again in this {passage,}
"THEY SHALL NOT ENTER MY REST." Therefore, since it remains
for some to enter it, and those who formerly had good news preached
to them failed to enter because of disobedience, He again fixes a
certain day, "Today," saying through David after so long a
time just as has been said before, "TODAY IF YOU HEAR HIS VOICE,
DO NOT HARDEN YOUR HEARTS."

The Sabbath is TODAY. It’s not Wednesday. It’s not Sunday. It’s not even Saturday. It is TODAY. I pray that we will use this TODAY and every other TODAY to reach people for Christ.